I was benchmarking systems back when 4mhz Z80s were fast. I'm not "fooled" by mhz ratings. That's why I just used a generic term of "ghz class" rather than getting into pissing contests about whether a 1.66ghz Athlon XP was faster than a 2.0ghz Pentium 4.
But, no reputable benchmark in the world, whether MFLOPS, SPECmarks, Whetstones, Dhrystones, or something else, is going to show the new 800mhz iMac or a 700mhz PIII to be in the same class as a 1.4ghz Athlon XP.
And that's why I used a fairly generic term that everyone would understand rather than saying "the average user does not need a 2500 Dhrystone class machine."
The "average user" is someone who surfs the web, sends the occasional e-mail, and writes letters. And that user does not significantly benefit from a ghz-class machine. Put them on an "old" 700mhz machine from a couple of years ago, and they do just fine. More and more individuals and businesses are realizing that the computers that they already own work fine for what they do. People no longer drum their fingers waiting for programs to load, files to compress, and spreadsheets to recalculate.
Sure, there are a handful of people who really do need fast machines, but, as Apple has realized, you don't need to have ghz+ machines to satisfy the average user.
Athlons may be only $5 more for the same speed, but Athlon XPs are not. The older T-Bird Athlons are slower than the new Durons. And the new Athlons run MUCH cooler. So you can pay $5 more for a 1.2ghz T-bird and get a slower CPU that runs a lot hotter.
While I hope that some people get some good deals on the remainder of Be's assets, it's still a darn shame. Be was an elegant OS that really showed how much CPU horsepower Windows was wasting. And it was not a rehashed version of some OS from the 1970s with a hundred layers of legacy code piled on it.
I think that much of Be's failure can be traced to their lack of loyalty to their customers. They abandoned customers that bought the BeBox, orphaning it with no support. They abandoned users who ran Be on Mac hardware. They abandoned people who purchased BeOS for the PC. Their web pages urged people to check back often for updates to BeOS 5, yet they made none for over a year. They even abandoned the developers that were making commercial and non-commercial software for BeOS, switching to an exorbitant pay-for-support arrangement that pretty much killed development.
When they announced that they were going into the Internet appliance market, that was the end for them. After abandoning every customer that they had ever had, they wondered why Internet appliance makers didn't flock to them. A major player in that industry (when it existed;-) probably had little desire to be allied with a company as fickle as Be.
The idiot that posted it didn't even do his homework. Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947. Therefore, he is 54 and he will not turn 55 until September 21, 2002.
You people generally want to be able to do whatever you want on the net, yet at the same time you want to restrict what someone else can do. Tread carefully, or else you may find yourself being restricted next.
[sarcasm]The next thing you know, denial of service attacks, sending viruses, and defacing web sites will be illegal.[/sarcasm]
This kind of paranoid, anti-government sentiment is really silly. Telemarketers are legally barred from calling people after 9:00PM and there's no laws being considered to limit when you can make private phone calls. It's illegal to send junk faxes to people, yet the government doesn't limit your sending of "normal" faxes.
Anti-spam legislation is just a specific type of anti-theft legislation, just as are laws prohibiting shoplifting.
Yeah, the 7k Deltas are loud. Those aren't necessary for normal uses though
From a heatsink review on hardcoreware.net:
The 5000 rpm fan, though a lot quieter than the stock fan, could not keep the heat down to an acceptable range. After just 15 minutes of Prime95 and the NOLF mega mix demo online, Hardware Monitors warning alarms were going off like crazy. Here we have the noise/performance tradeoff illustrated.
That was a bruiser Vantec aluminum heatsink on a 900mhz Athlon. Bump up to a 1.4ghz Athlon and you could be in a world of hurt.
OTOH, if you don't use your box for 3D gaming, ray tracing/rendering, heavy number crunching, and so forth, you might find that it runs plenty cool enough with a lighter duty heatsink/fan.
Have you had your hearing checked lately? Maybe there's a reason that the noise from your PC doesnt seem like much of a problem to you. When overclocking sites are complaining about the noise level from 7K fans on heatsinks, you might start worrying if the sound doesn't bother you.
O.k., let me get this straight. I'm supposed to spend $350 bucks on a specialist possibly overly-complicated (and therefore prone to failure) water-cooled case so that I can clock my CPU at a higher frequency than what it was built for.
No, you're supposed to spend $350 for a case that will allow you to run a modern CPU without sustaining permanent hearing damage. The average performance PC is getting scary loud. A 7,000 RPM fan on the CPU, a fan on the video card, a fan on the motherboard chipset, one to two fans on the power supply, and one or more case fans add up to a PC that makes a lot of noise.
I predict that liquid cooling will become the norm in a few years -- after OSHA (Occupation Safety & Health Administration - a U.S. government agency) or a European equivalent passes regulations limiting the acceptable noise level from PCs. When that happens, the cases will be $99 rather than $350.
Microsoft's refusal to release a version of Office (or Internet Explorer or Outlook) for Linux has nothing to do with technical difficulty. Microsoft views Linux as a threat. Linux is typically run on the same platforms targeted by Microsoft's Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP operating systems. Apple is just Microsoft's token competition and, when it looked like Apple was going to die, it was Microsoft that gave them a big cash infusion to keep them on life support.
The biggest reason that Linux has not been widely adapted by business is that it does not run Office. Microsoft's stranglehold on businesses isn't Windows. It's Office -- and Office sells Windows, not vice-versa. If the average business could equip employees with Linux rather than Windows, many would do so for the cost savings, but the lack of Office for Linux presents too big a hurdle for most businesses. Microsoft loves the fact that StarOffice, 602 PC Suite, and the other alterna-Offices are, at best, only partially compatible. If they start to get too close, Microsoft just starts morphing the Office file formats.
If Microsoft had been broken up into an applications company and an operating systems company, the applications company would probably be working on a version of Office for Linux as I write this. But since they are all under the same corporate umbrella, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have simply issued an edict prohibiting the release of Linux software, whether free, like I.E., or for purchase, like Office. You can get Internet Explorer 5.01 for HP-UX and Solaris, so it's clear that the lack of a Linux version is not due to a technical inability to produce one.
Are you really that dense? The moderator who gave it a +1 Insightful got it. Why didn't you?
Okay, for the short bus crowd, I present a simplified explanation: The article was about large corporations controlling the net with lawyers, legal actions, and money. Then the Associated Press, a large corporation that published the story, cited copyright law and implied legal threats to prevent people from putting copies of the story on their own web sites.
Did you even read the article before posting? It's times like this that I wish Slashdot had a sign at the entrance saying "Your IQ must be at least this high to go on this ride."
As the Internet becomes more commercialized, companies are able to use the courts, trademarks and copyrights, proprietary technology and deep corporate pockets to control what Internet users do and say, threatening the openness that made the Net unique.
And at the end of the article, we find this gem:
Copyright 2001 Associated Press. All right reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
It's like reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about how commercialism is ruining Christmas.
You all seem to have either forgotten, or been unaware of, the fact that there have been numerous cases of security cameras pointed into dressing rooms at department stores. A department store's desire to prevent theft does not outweigh someone's to privacy while trying on clothes in a dressing room. A person should not have to worry about whether some security guard is getting his rocks off watching them dress/undress.
Every one of us has, at one time or another, scratched our a** or privates when we thought no one was looking. We've all had a finger up our nose at some point in our lives. Well, if I scratch my butt, it's not for the amusement of some Walmart rent-a-cop staring at monitors.
What happens when some law enforcement agency subsidizes the cameras at a local shopping mall in exchange for copies of all videos produced from them?
Stores should display privacy policies just like web sites do. Are the cameras manned or recorded? If they are recorded, how long are tapes stored and who maintains control of the tapes? Does the store guarantee that there are no cameras that can be pointed into dressing rooms and lavatories? Does the store have a policy that prohibits their employees from revealing non-criminal activity revealed by the cameras (e.g., public figure discreetly kissing someone other than spouse, man adjusting toupee, etc.)?
I'm an old-fashioned liberal. I think that people's rights are more important than businesses' profits. I'd rather see *mart make a few million dollars less this year than to have them invade the privacy of people who are doing nothing more criminal than adjusting their underwear.
Dickboy just created a link through go.com to hide the fact that he linked to goatse.cx. I can only assume that the inflamed, stretched a$$hole shown at goatse.cx is his own.
I mean, I don't mean to insult you, but some people do seem to believe it.
I think you, like so many, were taken in by the three county "limited" recount that the AP reported on. In full (unofficial) recounts of the whole state of Florida, Gore was shown to be the victor.
Besides, it has been conclusively shown that voter error due to confusing butterfly ballots and misleading instructions cost Gore 15,000-25,000 votes (source: USA Today, 06/18/2001, Florida voter errors cost Gore the election) Even Pat Buchanon conceded that most of the 3,600 votes that he got in Palm Beach County were intended for Gore (more than enough to give Gore the win).
More facts that you may not have known:
20 Florida counties NEVER did the machine recount required by Florida law when an election is that close. That's 1.8 million votes.
Katherine Harris listed 4,000 voters as felons when they weren't. And example is Leon County where she gave the Supervisor of Elections 590 names of "felons", of which only 33 were actual felons.
In a National review poll published in November of 2001, 32 percent polled say Bush won on a technicality, while 15 percent say he stole the election.
Don't be too quick to claim that Bush won outright. The whole thing stinks and none of us will ever know the whole truth. The only thing that we know for certain is that substantially more Americans across the country voted for Gore than did for Bush.
As a counter point.... I can't recall how many times I've wished I could FTP or Telnet into my Windows NT (Win2K) boxes.
Okay, then why can't you? Win2K has a telnet server built into it. There are many FTP servers available for both NT and 2K. I've got both Telnet and FTP Serv-U running on my machine at home so that I can get to it from work.
Agreed that it's a gamer card, but it's high-end when compared to the various motherboard AC97 implementations, junk from Crystal Audio, and so forth. I realize that it's not a professional or semi-pro sound card, but I reserve those terms for that level of card.
If Audigy is a Windows-only product, then some people will want to know that in a product-review.
But not that many. Linux and the *BSD families have great penetration in the server marketplace (where high-end audio cards are not needed) but they are an insignificant force as primary desktop OSs. I don't care how many/. users run Linux or how many self-serving polls have been done by Linux advocate organization. If Linux had enough market penetration to make it a viable market for sound cards, manufacturers like Creative Labs would eagerly support it. They are in business to make money and would not just ignore a lucrative market for their products.
It is actually a bad point about the product in itself, that it isn't supported under Linux.
No, it is not a "bad point" about the product. That's analogous to saying that a "bad point" about Victoria's Secret panties is that they don't come in plus sizes. Victoria's Secret chose their market. So did Creative.
So you think that a product review should explicitly state all of the operating systems under which the product does not run?
"This product does not run under Linux, QNX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, Solaris, BeOS, OpenBSD, OSX, DR-DOS, VRTX, AtheOS, Oberon, Sky OS, OS/2, VxWorks, NetBSD, HURD,..."
The review doesn't mention how the Audigy works under any open source operating systems, though.
That might have something to do with the fact that the Audigy is a hardware product for Windows. If someone adapts it to *BSD, Linux, etc., the quality of their device driver code should not affect the reviews that the product gets.
I'd love to help you out, but I don't live in the UK. I'm glad that you might buy games that were not FPS games, but statistics just don't look good for Linux games. Several major titles have been released for Linux and most have lost money, sold poorly, and been support nightmares (due to the plethora of releases and versions of Linux).
Slashdot has really gone downhill lately. Far too many posters complain about the Linux bias of Slashdot, when, they could just go to another site and leave us obsessive zealots to it.
Slashdot is far to valuable a resource to simply give up to Linux zealots. I am not anti-Linux. I have a Linux system (Mandrake) and enjoy using it -- but I try to be objective. The Linux community has screwed over commercial game developers. Despite all of the loud complaints about the the lack of quality Linux software, when high-quality commercial games are released, they sit on the store shelves and gather dust. The Linux community has demonstrated that it prefers a mediocre open-source (read "free") game to a polished, professional commercial one that they have to pay for.
Re:How dare you?!
on
Uplink
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How is this flamebait? It's insightful into the banality of the/. community.
Thanks for the support, but I knew it would be modded down when I wrote it (so now I'm down to 49 karma points -- oh no!).
The whole runs-on-Linux idiocy on Slashdot is incredibly annoying.
Software publishers can't win. If they don't release a Linux version of their software, they are lambasted and portrayed as dullards. If they invest months of time to release a Linux version, they are almost always "rewarded" with almost non-existent sales and a tech support nightmare (since there are umpteen different releases and kernels for Linux). When they finally throw in the towel after months of losing money, they are treated as traitors to the Linux community.
Want to see what happens when a manufacturer does a Linux version of a popular game? Look at Quake 3 Arena. They released a Linux version in a special tin box -- much classier packaging than the Windows version. My local store (Microcenter) had these on the shelves for months. They finally put a sticker on them saying that you could, with a download, use them for Windows and marked them down to $9.99.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be fooled by mhz ratings, pure and simple.
I was benchmarking systems back when 4mhz Z80s were fast. I'm not "fooled" by mhz ratings. That's why I just used a generic term of "ghz class" rather than getting into pissing contests about whether a 1.66ghz Athlon XP was faster than a 2.0ghz Pentium 4.
But, no reputable benchmark in the world, whether MFLOPS, SPECmarks, Whetstones, Dhrystones, or something else, is going to show the new 800mhz iMac or a 700mhz PIII to be in the same class as a 1.4ghz Athlon XP.
And that's why I used a fairly generic term that everyone would understand rather than saying "the average user does not need a 2500 Dhrystone class machine."
The "average user" is someone who surfs the web, sends the occasional e-mail, and writes letters. And that user does not significantly benefit from a ghz-class machine. Put them on an "old" 700mhz machine from a couple of years ago, and they do just fine. More and more individuals and businesses are realizing that the computers that they already own work fine for what they do. People no longer drum their fingers waiting for programs to load, files to compress, and spreadsheets to recalculate.
Sure, there are a handful of people who really do need fast machines, but, as Apple has realized, you don't need to have ghz+ machines to satisfy the average user.
Athlons may be only $5 more for the same speed, but Athlon XPs are not. The older T-Bird Athlons are slower than the new Durons. And the new Athlons run MUCH cooler. So you can pay $5 more for a 1.2ghz T-bird and get a slower CPU that runs a lot hotter.
While I hope that some people get some good deals on the remainder of Be's assets, it's still a darn shame. Be was an elegant OS that really showed how much CPU horsepower Windows was wasting. And it was not a rehashed version of some OS from the 1970s with a hundred layers of legacy code piled on it.
;-) probably had little desire to be allied with a company as fickle as Be.
I think that much of Be's failure can be traced to their lack of loyalty to their customers. They abandoned customers that bought the BeBox, orphaning it with no support. They abandoned users who ran Be on Mac hardware. They abandoned people who purchased BeOS for the PC. Their web pages urged people to check back often for updates to BeOS 5, yet they made none for over a year. They even abandoned the developers that were making commercial and non-commercial software for BeOS, switching to an exorbitant pay-for-support arrangement that pretty much killed development.
When they announced that they were going into the Internet appliance market, that was the end for them. After abandoning every customer that they had ever had, they wondered why Internet appliance makers didn't flock to them. A major player in that industry (when it existed
It's not a joke, it's just a hoax.
The idiot that posted it didn't even do his homework. Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947. Therefore, he is 54 and he will not turn 55 until September 21, 2002.
You people generally want to be able to do whatever you want on the net, yet at the same time you want to restrict what someone else can do. Tread carefully, or else you may find yourself being restricted next.
[sarcasm]The next thing you know, denial of service attacks, sending viruses, and defacing web sites will be illegal.[/sarcasm]
This kind of paranoid, anti-government sentiment is really silly. Telemarketers are legally barred from calling people after 9:00PM and there's no laws being considered to limit when you can make private phone calls. It's illegal to send junk faxes to people, yet the government doesn't limit your sending of "normal" faxes.
Anti-spam legislation is just a specific type of anti-theft legislation, just as are laws prohibiting shoplifting.
I wish that I had mod points right now because you're entitled to some for that post. Good going!
Yeah, the 7k Deltas are loud. Those aren't necessary for normal uses though
From a heatsink review on hardcoreware.net:
The 5000 rpm fan, though a lot quieter than the stock fan, could not keep the heat down to an acceptable range. After just 15 minutes of Prime95 and the NOLF mega mix demo online, Hardware Monitors warning alarms were going off like crazy. Here we have the noise/performance tradeoff illustrated.
That was a bruiser Vantec aluminum heatsink on a 900mhz Athlon. Bump up to a 1.4ghz Athlon and you could be in a world of hurt.
OTOH, if you don't use your box for 3D gaming, ray tracing/rendering, heavy number crunching, and so forth, you might find that it runs plenty cool enough with a lighter duty heatsink/fan.
Sorry, it's just really not a problem.
Have you had your hearing checked lately? Maybe there's a reason that the noise from your PC doesnt seem like much of a problem to you. When overclocking sites are complaining about the noise level from 7K fans on heatsinks, you might start worrying if the sound doesn't bother you.
O.k., let me get this straight. I'm supposed to spend $350 bucks on a specialist possibly overly-complicated (and therefore prone to failure) water-cooled case so that I can clock my CPU at a higher frequency than what it was built for.
No, you're supposed to spend $350 for a case that will allow you to run a modern CPU without sustaining permanent hearing damage. The average performance PC is getting scary loud. A 7,000 RPM fan on the CPU, a fan on the video card, a fan on the motherboard chipset, one to two fans on the power supply, and one or more case fans add up to a PC that makes a lot of noise.
I predict that liquid cooling will become the norm in a few years -- after OSHA (Occupation Safety & Health Administration - a U.S. government agency) or a European equivalent passes regulations limiting the acceptable noise level from PCs. When that happens, the cases will be $99 rather than $350.
Microsoft's refusal to release a version of Office (or Internet Explorer or Outlook) for Linux has nothing to do with technical difficulty. Microsoft views Linux as a threat. Linux is typically run on the same platforms targeted by Microsoft's Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP operating systems. Apple is just Microsoft's token competition and, when it looked like Apple was going to die, it was Microsoft that gave them a big cash infusion to keep them on life support.
The biggest reason that Linux has not been widely adapted by business is that it does not run Office. Microsoft's stranglehold on businesses isn't Windows. It's Office -- and Office sells Windows, not vice-versa. If the average business could equip employees with Linux rather than Windows, many would do so for the cost savings, but the lack of Office for Linux presents too big a hurdle for most businesses. Microsoft loves the fact that StarOffice, 602 PC Suite, and the other alterna-Offices are, at best, only partially compatible. If they start to get too close, Microsoft just starts morphing the Office file formats.
If Microsoft had been broken up into an applications company and an operating systems company, the applications company would probably be working on a version of Office for Linux as I write this. But since they are all under the same corporate umbrella, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have simply issued an edict prohibiting the release of Linux software, whether free, like I.E., or for purchase, like Office. You can get Internet Explorer 5.01 for HP-UX and Solaris, so it's clear that the lack of a Linux version is not due to a technical inability to produce one.
What does that have to do with anything?
Are you really that dense? The moderator who gave it a +1 Insightful got it. Why didn't you?
Okay, for the short bus crowd, I present a simplified explanation: The article was about large corporations controlling the net with lawyers, legal actions, and money. Then the Associated Press, a large corporation that published the story, cited copyright law and implied legal threats to prevent people from putting copies of the story on their own web sites.
Did you even read the article before posting? It's times like this that I wish Slashdot had a sign at the entrance saying "Your IQ must be at least this high to go on this ride."
And at the end of the article, we find this gem:
It's like reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about how commercialism is ruining Christmas.
You all seem to have either forgotten, or been unaware of, the fact that there have been numerous cases of security cameras pointed into dressing rooms at department stores. A department store's desire to prevent theft does not outweigh someone's to privacy while trying on clothes in a dressing room. A person should not have to worry about whether some security guard is getting his rocks off watching them dress/undress.
Every one of us has, at one time or another, scratched our a** or privates when we thought no one was looking. We've all had a finger up our nose at some point in our lives. Well, if I scratch my butt, it's not for the amusement of some Walmart rent-a-cop staring at monitors.
What happens when some law enforcement agency subsidizes the cameras at a local shopping mall in exchange for copies of all videos produced from them?
Stores should display privacy policies just like web sites do. Are the cameras manned or recorded? If they are recorded, how long are tapes stored and who maintains control of the tapes? Does the store guarantee that there are no cameras that can be pointed into dressing rooms and lavatories? Does the store have a policy that prohibits their employees from revealing non-criminal activity revealed by the cameras (e.g., public figure discreetly kissing someone other than spouse, man adjusting toupee, etc.)?
I'm an old-fashioned liberal. I think that people's rights are more important than businesses' profits. I'd rather see *mart make a few million dollars less this year than to have them invade the privacy of people who are doing nothing more criminal than adjusting their underwear.
Dickboy just created a link through go.com to hide the fact that he linked to goatse.cx. I can only assume that the inflamed, stretched a$$hole shown at goatse.cx is his own.
p :/ /www.goatse.cx/
By the way, here's what he embedded in the link:
http://transfer.go.com/cgi/transfer.pl?goto=htt
I mean, I don't mean to insult you, but some people do seem to believe it.
I think you, like so many, were taken in by the three county "limited" recount that the AP reported on. In full (unofficial) recounts of the whole state of Florida, Gore was shown to be the victor.
Besides, it has been conclusively shown that voter error due to confusing butterfly ballots and misleading instructions cost Gore 15,000-25,000 votes (source: USA Today, 06/18/2001, Florida voter errors cost Gore the election) Even Pat Buchanon conceded that most of the 3,600 votes that he got in Palm Beach County were intended for Gore (more than enough to give Gore the win).
More facts that you may not have known:
20 Florida counties NEVER did the machine recount required by Florida law when an election is that close. That's 1.8 million votes.
Katherine Harris listed 4,000 voters as felons when they weren't. And example is Leon County where she gave the Supervisor of Elections 590 names of "felons", of which only 33 were actual felons.
In a National review poll published in November of 2001, 32 percent polled say Bush won on a technicality, while 15 percent say he stole the election.
Don't be too quick to claim that Bush won outright. The whole thing stinks and none of us will ever know the whole truth. The only thing that we know for certain is that substantially more Americans across the country voted for Gore than did for Bush.
You wouldn't see anyone 'appointed' -- because they're not appointed. They president nominates someone
The Supreme Court justices appoint the President, not the other way around. People didn't learn anything from the last election.
As a counter point.... I can't recall how many times I've wished I could FTP or Telnet into my Windows NT (Win2K) boxes.
Okay, then why can't you? Win2K has a telnet server built into it. There are many FTP servers available for both NT and 2K. I've got both Telnet and FTP Serv-U running on my machine at home so that I can get to it from work.
Agreed that it's a gamer card, but it's high-end when compared to the various motherboard AC97 implementations, junk from Crystal Audio, and so forth. I realize that it's not a professional or semi-pro sound card, but I reserve those terms for that level of card.
But not that many. Linux and the *BSD families have great penetration in the server marketplace (where high-end audio cards are not needed) but they are an insignificant force as primary desktop OSs. I don't care how many
It is actually a bad point about the product in itself, that it isn't supported under Linux.
No, it is not a "bad point" about the product. That's analogous to saying that a "bad point" about Victoria's Secret panties is that they don't come in plus sizes. Victoria's Secret chose their market. So did Creative.
So you think that a product review should explicitly state all of the operating systems under which the product does not run?
Ridiculous.
The review doesn't mention how the Audigy works under any open source operating systems, though.
That might have something to do with the fact that the Audigy is a hardware product for Windows. If someone adapts it to *BSD, Linux, etc., the quality of their device driver code should not affect the reviews that the product gets.
I'd love to help you out, but I don't live in the UK. I'm glad that you might buy games that were not FPS games, but statistics just don't look good for Linux games. Several major titles have been released for Linux and most have lost money, sold poorly, and been support nightmares (due to the plethora of releases and versions of Linux).
If i can touch the "live" wires and not get shocked, its low voltage.
Then it's not low voltage when it's ringing because you'll definitely get shocked. I know. I've been working on phone lines when calls came in.
Slashdot has really gone downhill lately. Far too many posters complain about the Linux bias of Slashdot, when, they could just go to another site and leave us obsessive zealots to it.
Slashdot is far to valuable a resource to simply give up to Linux zealots. I am not anti-Linux. I have a Linux system (Mandrake) and enjoy using it -- but I try to be objective. The Linux community has screwed over commercial game developers. Despite all of the loud complaints about the the lack of quality Linux software, when high-quality commercial games are released, they sit on the store shelves and gather dust. The Linux community has demonstrated that it prefers a mediocre open-source (read "free") game to a polished, professional commercial one that they have to pay for.
How is this flamebait? It's insightful into the banality of the /. community.
Thanks for the support, but I knew it would be modded down when I wrote it (so now I'm down to 49 karma points -- oh no!).
The whole runs-on-Linux idiocy on Slashdot is incredibly annoying.
Software publishers can't win. If they don't release a Linux version of their software, they are lambasted and portrayed as dullards. If they invest months of time to release a Linux version, they are almost always "rewarded" with almost non-existent sales and a tech support nightmare (since there are umpteen different releases and kernels for Linux). When they finally throw in the towel after months of losing money, they are treated as traitors to the Linux community.
Want to see what happens when a manufacturer does a Linux version of a popular game? Look at Quake 3 Arena. They released a Linux version in a special tin box -- much classier packaging than the Windows version. My local store (Microcenter) had these on the shelves for months. They finally put a sticker on them saying that you could, with a download, use them for Windows and marked them down to $9.99.