The first "Aliens versus Predator" wasn't a perfect game (the AI, for example, was... iffy), but when you play as a Marine you can really get creeped out. The aliens aren't particularly subtle but they are fast - you can't outrun them and you can't take many hits from them when they reach you. The environments are dark and you have to pick between night-vision or the motion detector - and either way the facehuggers are really tough to spot. More like the movie than the movie was, if you follow.
Playing as an alien is fun in an entirely different way. You can climb on any surface, hide on the ceiling and pounce, etc. More like Spider-Man than any of the Spider-Man games.
Well, okay, but then the whole soul issue is not relevant to the question I asked... "Is something moral because God says it's moral, or does God say it's moral because it is moral?" I mean, okay, let's assume there's a God handing out the souls necessary for consciousness (and therefore morality). What does that have to do with what's moral or not?
If, in fact, there were no mind/soul, my present state of belief is that what we perceive as consciousness, to the point of proclaiming self-awareness and philosophizing about it, is rote behaviour cultivated to protect the valuable adaptation of believing oneself and one's species to be a higher animal.
Um... if there's no consciousness, then there's no belief. Rocks may exhibit 'rote falling behavior' if they are dropped, but they don't have any beliefs about falling. The latter state you propose is inherently self-contradictory and impossible.
Of course, even if a divinely-granted soul were vital to consciousness, that wouldn't imply anything about morality, either of humans or of God(s). As an example, what if God were exactly like a shepherd... down to the shearing and slaughtering, as well? Such a God could provide us with souls and so forth, but would it be a good or evil god?
I understand, mind you, that treating the mind/soul as an emergent property of the brain is functionally simpler. Nonetheless, I believe that the soul exists, so I must reconcile its operation and relation to its physical manifestation.
Of course, this is... rather different from the contention that consciousness is an 'illusion' in the absence of a soul. To return to where we started, the existence of consciousness is demonstrable. (As I said, I personally know at least one conscious entity exists: myself. I can't absolutely disprove solipsism, of course, but I'm pretty sure everyone else is conscious, too.) So, we're back to Euthyphro. Is something good just because God says so, or are some things just inherently moral and other things not? Could God decree (or have at one point decreed) that killing children is a good thing?
If you say God could, then you're notalone, I guess, but you might understand why I wouldn't want you around me or my kids. How can I be sure you're not going to get a sudden revelation?
If you say God couldn't, then I guess you agree that something besides God gives content to morality.
It is not that a person's identity changes or ceases to be when the brain is damaged but that the physical capacity of that person's brain to express his or her identity has changed.
You sound just like my Religion teacher in (Catholic) high school. That's a superficially plausible model... but the problem is that it doesn't match up with what you actually see when you start looking into neurology. I prescribe some books by Oliver Sacks (a neurologist who writes like he swallowed a poet) - e.g. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" or "An Anthropologist on Mars" or "A Leg To Stand On". Fascinating and deeply moving as well as informative. You might also read some Daniel Dennett. For a book that will expand any mind, read "Goedel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. (That book has the highest 'deep idea per page' quotient of any book I've encountered.)
(And as I've said elsewhere... I've seen what Alzheimer's does. If there's anything left after my brain's gone, I can't see how it could really be called me in any substantive sense.)
I attribute consciousness and will to the influence of God. In the absence of a deific source of these qualities, I believe them to be illusory traits that happen to be beneficial to the survival of the species.
Consciousness can't be illusory, by definition. (Descartes and all that.) However consciousness arises, there it is. I'm not telepathic, but I'm pretty sure other people are conscious, too. Saying they're 'illusions' is nonsensical. Consciousness is a lot more complicated than many people naively suppose, but that doesn't mean it's an 'illusion'.
Now, I personally think that consciousness arises from the operation of the brain. At the absolute bare minimum, we know that a brain is vitally necessary for human consciousness (see above link), and it may be (I think probably is) sufficient. We don't have to know everything about automotive engineering to be able to tell that if the engine is pulled out, the car won't run.
In the absence of God, I perceive the universe as intrinsically amoral.
The universe isn't conscious, and thus isn't a moral agent, so in that sense it's amoral. But you should read the links I provided if you don't think the interaction between conscious agents and the universe has moral implications. If nothing else, take a look at this one, it addresses that specifically.
You haven't taken Philosophy 101, right? Let me hip you to the Euthyphro Dilemma. In one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates encounters Euthyphro and they discuss "piety". They both agree that the gods love pious stuff.
But then Socrates asks, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
Can you see how that applies to morality? "Is something moral simply and only because God says so, or does God say so because it's moral?"
If you choose the former, it's just the ultimate case of "Might Makes Right". There's no difference at all between "Keep Off The Grass" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill" except that one has a bigger cop behind it. It also means that the people who collaborated with the Nazis had the right principle in mind, they just picked the wrong bully to suck up to.
If you choose the latter, then hey, there's something about morality that exists apart from God. To give you some hints if you don't follow my previous links, let's set up a thought experiment. Could God have created a universe exactly like this one in every physical detail, except that harming innocents was good and righteous?
The only reason why I question this correlation is because I have heard that we only get 5% of our oil from the middle east.
I've seen numbers ranging from 12% to 20%, but since oil is a fungible commodity the political situation in the Middle East affects the price of oil worldwide.
The problem isn't primarily a military issue. It's a technological and political one, and military actions will not solve the problem. The key problem is that our country is helplessly dependent on oil. If we were not critically dependent on the oil, we would not care what happened in the Middle East. (Consider - Darfour is at least as screwed up as the Persian Gulf area, but that's a humanitarian problem and not a political/military one - for us - because we are not critically dependent on any resources there.) But, because we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on the resources there... we meddle, supporting thugocracies so long as they keep the oil flowing, etc. This gives motivation to the Islamist fanatics there. (Note: motive is not the same thing as justification. Homicide investigators look for motive when solving a murder, they don't look for justification. The Islamist lunatics are not justified in attacking innocents by our actions, but they are in part motivated by them.)
Since the problem isn't a military one, a military solution alone will not work. Military action is certainly justified as part of the overall strategy (e.g. in Afghanistan, now sadly neglected) but can't be the only means we use. The ultimate solution is to greatly reduce our dependency on oil.
This doesn't have to involve austerity programs and such. We could go nuclear - not just nuclear power plants, but nuclear rockets - e.g. this one (the good tech stuff starts in section 7). With that, we can lift a thousand tons into orbit in a completely reusable and non-polluting craft that even eliminates not only its own nuclear waste but also waste generated on Earth. Using those, we can put up solar-power satellites that send their energy down to Earth in the form of microwaves. (If you've ever played Sim City... forget it. It doesn't work that way, it can be done very safely with large margins of safety. See here especially the section on "Safety".) With the lower launch costs of nuclear rockets, we can make the U.S. a net energy exporter, in time. This has plenty of military applications, as well. Space is the ultimate "high ground" and a dominant U.S. presence in space should have obvious strategic benefits.
Of course, at the same time we can work on more efficient techniques for utilizing the oil we do need. Cars with better mileage (improving our overall fuel efficiency by less than 3mpg would eliminate our need to import oil from the Persian Gulf), more efficient means of generating and using fertilizers, a bit of thought about how we use plastics, etc. Even better, we can sell the technology we develop to other parts of the world - further reducing world demand for oil, driving the price down. The lower the price of oil, the less funds the Islamist fanatics have to work with, and the less of a threat they pose. (Reducing oil prices also impacts people like Hugo Chavez, as a bonus.)
(Not that, realistically, Islamist fanatics pose an existential threat to the United States. They can harm us, certainly, and even cause a relatively large amount of damage, sometimes. That's not the same thing as posing a threat to the existence of the United States. For perspective, more than 30 times as many American citizens have died in traffic accidents since 9/11 than have died in 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined.)
My methodology is a lot less "poor me" and more "what can be done here".>
And, gee, I actually pointed out things that can be, and are, being "done here". But I can see how you'd miss it. I mean, look at me say "It'll happen eventually. Open standards are in the interest of the consumers, and eventually they spread. Consider how many networking models there were in the 80's, and then by the late 90's it was all TCP/IP, despite vendors attempts at lock-in. The same will happen with open-source software and general computing, it'll just take a while." That just reeks of "poor me" despair.
And I didn't 'blame the competition' any more than "to an extent". IBM owned computing until the late 80s, early 90s, but they made mistakes that MS took advantage of. It's not like IBM couldn't have stopped MS if they'd recognized the situation, but they were wedded to their mainframe business. Now MS is wedded to (a really ill-advised level of) backward compatibility (see the "Raymond Chen" stuff in that link) and the Windows codebase, which has grown to a size that it's unmanageable by the techniques they use. This leads to security issues (sure, it's possible to secure windows, but look how many people have trouble getting a regular oil change and ask yourself if they can keep a computer secure) and huge shipping delays and massive feature dumps so they can ship at all. Those are mistakes, and Linux is capitalizing on them.
You're just filing me away as another Linux zealot, even though I explicitly recognize the problem you point out and have listed specific strategies that are being pursued to deal with it. If that's your bag, well, okay, have a nice life and all.
...you're yet another Linux zealot who takes everything as an attack.
If I may diffidently suggest, the common participant in every argument you've ever had is... you. If you keep having the same arguments, it's at least conceivable that you have something to do with that.
it was refreshing to find one user who didn't have his head so far up his ass that he couldn't have an honest conversation. I even mentioned to him how he may be able to help spread Linux.
But let's see what you say in that comment: "I guess that's the catch-22. Linux needs big software to get the user base that it take to make it worth big software's investments to support Linux." And let's see what I had to say: "But there really is a chicken-and-egg problem in the desktop arena, and just saying 'Y'all need to try harder' isn't going to cut it... there still aren't many commercial games for Linux, because there isn't a big market for Linux games, in part because... there aren't many commercial games for Linux. That's a real problem, and that's what I and others are referring to when talking about the trouble of invading a monopoly market."
I guess I will keep thinking that. You certainly seem to, though you don't appear to recognize it when it's not stated in precisely your wording...
I quoted a hell of a lot more of your post then you quoted of mine and I backed up my points.
Well, you reiterated your points, but that's not quite the same thing as backing them up. You can't really accuse 'Linux in general' of just sitting around waiting for the competition to fail. (First off, there isn't a 'Linux in general' anyway, but again, others made that point, too.) I pointed out four markets that Linux companies are actively competing in and doing quite well at. It's worth noting that none of those markets had any one company owning around 90% market share before Linux came along.
I further pointed out that it's only in the last couple of years that Linux companies have been seriously targeting the desktop, and I stated they've done well from a technical standpoint. But there really is a chicken-and-egg problem in the desktop arena, and just saying "Y'all need to try harder" isn't going to cut it.
Loki Games made some poor business decisions (though, actually, not all of them were poor) but one technical thing they did very right was SDL. That plus OpenGL plus OpenAL is really a very nice setup for making games, and it easily rivals DirectX (yes, DirectX is more than Direct3D, that's why I pointed out the other two libraries which cover the other stuff). Several top game engines (including a very biggie, Id's) support Linux. From a technical perspective, it's hard to be more welcoming. But there still aren't many commercial games for Linux, because there isn't a big market for Linux games, in part because... there aren't many commercial games for Linux. That's a real problem, and that's what I and others are referring to when talking about the trouble of invading a monopoly market. (Of course, the PC games market isn't showing all that healthy growth anyway... I'm not sure games will continue to be such a sticking point for Windows retention in the future.) Fortunately, it's not the only factor.
Linux companies like SUSE and Red Hat and Canonical are targeting corporate desktops first, because it's an easier market to break into. A smaller collection of necessary apps for the majority, and the features (lower price, lower hardware requirements, mature management features (like remote admin), and mature privilege separation, etc.) are a very good fit, enough to to drive some switching.
I rather think once people are exposed to Linux where they work they'll use it at home, too. (That's one of the ways Windows got to where it is now.) The underlying OS matters less and less these days anyway; 80% of the things average people do involve the web. The more cross-platform apps people use, the lower the 'potential barrier' is to switching. (Witness how fanatically MS is fighting Office interoperability...) There won't be a "year of desktop Linux" any more than there was a "year of server Linux". There wasn't a "year of Mozilla/Firefox", either; it just grew until... y'know, I can't remember the last time I ran into an IE-only site...
It'll happen eventually. Open standards are in the interest of the consumers, and eventually they spread. Consider how many networking models there were in the 80's, and then by the late 90's it was all TCP/IP, despite vendors attempts at lock-in. The same will happen with open-source software and general computing, it'll just take a while. (Note: I'm not predicting the demise of commercial software. In many areas, e.g. games, it makes a lot of sense. But I figure most companies will eventually go the Id model.)
Anyway, that's enough for now. Maybe you can respond to more than one point next time, or at least a single point in context.
Ah yes, another "we need MS to fail because they're keeping us down" excuse.
Yup, that's the only thing I wrote in my whole response. I certainly didn't point out plenty of areas where Linux is winning big in business on its merits or anything like that. Of course I didn't refer to greatly improved Linux desktop support in the last couple years. I didn't even point out, like others have, that Linux does have support if you want to pay for it.
This is one of my big problems with the Linux community: You guys keep waiting for MS to fuck up.
Um... not exactly. Linux has, fair and square, won a major (and growing) chunk of the server business, against competition not only from Microsoft but other Unix vendors. Linux has also grabbed a significant chunk of the embedded business, and aside from PDAs Microsoft hasn't done terribly well there. Linux is pretty much the dominant platform for high-end (and a lot of medium-end) scientific computing - MS wants to compete there, but none of their efforts have gained any traction that I'm aware of. Thanks to IBM, Linux is even doing well in mainframes.
Microsoft makes money in only about three areas - desktop OS, Office, and servers. Everything else is pretty much a loss leader from what I've seen. MS has to work hard for server dollars, but the real cash cows are desktop and office. That's by far their biggest cash source, and it reflects monopoly pricing.
Busting into that market is tough. When dealing with an effective monopoly, to an extent you do have to capitalize on the mistakes of the competition. But you have to have a good product, too, and only in the last few years have distributions really been focusing on that. And they've done very well.
I switched my parents to Ubuntu a year and a half ago and they've been quite happy. They can surf the web, do their email, write letters, even make greeting cards, etc. I do their tech support, sure - but I was doing that when they were running Windows, too. (Come on - in the home desktop market, how many people call up their tech-savvy cousin rather than sitting on hold with some company? My wife got me a t-shirt, "No, I will not fix your computer.", to wear to family functions.) And now I don't have to worry about malware. I spend a couple minutes installing updates when I walk in the door (click on the icon, give their password, click on 'install updates') and I have time to actually talk instead of cleaning up crap.
For corporate desktops, yeah there's tech support available. I'm having a hard time coming up with a way to say, "For f&ck's sake, haven't you ever used Google?" without sounding snide, and I'm failing.
This DRM Vista crap has to truly stop at some point. 99% of it is myth.
We got a cheap-ass Dell, no hope of playing HD stuff. No worries there. The amusing thing is it won't play regular, non-HD DVDs anymore. Says something about the 'rights being incompatible' or something like that. I only got it so my wife could have her MS office, so I don't really care, but it's funny that I never had that problem with XP.
C++ isn't just "too complex". It's "so overly complex that it becomes a real problem." From The Art Of Unix Programming: "Compactness is the property that a design can fit inside a human being's head. A good practical test for compactness is this: Does an experienced user normally need a manual? If not, then the design (or at least the subset of it that covers normal use) is compact... C++ is anti-compact -- the language's designer has admitted that he doesn't expect any one programmer to ever understand it all."
With all the libraries and the plethora of features, it also has a large measure of Perl's problem: "Some designs that are not compact have enough internal redundancy of features that individual programmers end up carving out compact dialects sufficient for that 80% of common tasks by choosing a working subset of the language. Perl has this kind of pseudo-compactness, for example. Such designs have a built-in trap; when two programmers try to communicate about a project, they may find that differences in their working subsets are a significant barrier to understanding and modifying the code."
The summary, here: "When all is said and done, however, C++'s most fundamental problem is that it is basically just another conventional language. It confines the memory-management problem better than it did before the invention of the Standard Template Library, and a lot better than C does, but the confinement is brittle; it breaks unless your code uses objects and only objects. For many types of application its OO features are not significant, and simply add complexity to C without yielding much advantage. Open-source C++ compilers are available; if C++ were unequivocally superior to C it would now dominate... Consider using C++ if an existing C++ toolkit or service library offers powerful leverage for your application, or if you're in one of the application areas mentioned above for which an OO language is known to be a large win."
It's the "E911" stuff. Many new phones have at least some software for responding to cell towers (and sometimes even limited GPS ability) and this information is sent to the cell network, which can get reasonably precise location from triangulation and such among cell towers. See here and here.
My Verizon Treo 650 came with the default of transmitting its location data all the time. Fortunately, there was a (somewhat buried) option to turn it to "911 only". Of course, if you read the above link, you'll see that the cell company can get a pretty good handle on my location if they wanted just by triangulation anyway.
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Playing as an alien is fun in an entirely different way. You can climb on any surface, hide on the ceiling and pounce, etc. More like Spider-Man than any of the Spider-Man games.
What, the whole "Screw the Geneva Convention, let's torture people" (PDF file) thing wasn't enough?
"They say evil happens when good men do nothing. Well, the Democrats prove it also happens when mediocre people do nothing." - Bill Maher
My favorite cartoon about the Gonzales' "I don't recall" stuff.
Well, okay, but then the whole soul issue is not relevant to the question I asked... "Is something moral because God says it's moral, or does God say it's moral because it is moral?" I mean, okay, let's assume there's a God handing out the souls necessary for consciousness (and therefore morality). What does that have to do with what's moral or not?
Um... if there's no consciousness, then there's no belief. Rocks may exhibit 'rote falling behavior' if they are dropped, but they don't have any beliefs about falling. The latter state you propose is inherently self-contradictory and impossible.
Of course, even if a divinely-granted soul were vital to consciousness, that wouldn't imply anything about morality, either of humans or of God(s). As an example, what if God were exactly like a shepherd... down to the shearing and slaughtering, as well? Such a God could provide us with souls and so forth, but would it be a good or evil god?
Of course, this is... rather different from the contention that consciousness is an 'illusion' in the absence of a soul. To return to where we started, the existence of consciousness is demonstrable. (As I said, I personally know at least one conscious entity exists: myself. I can't absolutely disprove solipsism, of course, but I'm pretty sure everyone else is conscious, too.) So, we're back to Euthyphro. Is something good just because God says so, or are some things just inherently moral and other things not? Could God decree (or have at one point decreed) that killing children is a good thing?
If you say God could, then you're not alone, I guess, but you might understand why I wouldn't want you around me or my kids. How can I be sure you're not going to get a sudden revelation?
If you say God couldn't, then I guess you agree that something besides God gives content to morality.
You sound just like my Religion teacher in (Catholic) high school. That's a superficially plausible model... but the problem is that it doesn't match up with what you actually see when you start looking into neurology. I prescribe some books by Oliver Sacks (a neurologist who writes like he swallowed a poet) - e.g. "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" or "An Anthropologist on Mars" or "A Leg To Stand On". Fascinating and deeply moving as well as informative. You might also read some Daniel Dennett. For a book that will expand any mind, read "Goedel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. (That book has the highest 'deep idea per page' quotient of any book I've encountered.)
(And as I've said elsewhere... I've seen what Alzheimer's does. If there's anything left after my brain's gone, I can't see how it could really be called me in any substantive sense.)
Consciousness can't be illusory, by definition. (Descartes and all that.) However consciousness arises, there it is. I'm not telepathic, but I'm pretty sure other people are conscious, too. Saying they're 'illusions' is nonsensical. Consciousness is a lot more complicated than many people naively suppose, but that doesn't mean it's an 'illusion'.
Now, I personally think that consciousness arises from the operation of the brain. At the absolute bare minimum, we know that a brain is vitally necessary for human consciousness (see above link), and it may be (I think probably is) sufficient. We don't have to know everything about automotive engineering to be able to tell that if the engine is pulled out, the car won't run.
The universe isn't conscious, and thus isn't a moral agent, so in that sense it's amoral. But you should read the links I provided if you don't think the interaction between conscious agents and the universe has moral implications. If nothing else, take a look at this one, it addresses that specifically.
Can you see how that applies to morality? "Is something moral simply and only because God says so, or does God say so because it's moral?"
If you choose the former, it's just the ultimate case of "Might Makes Right". There's no difference at all between "Keep Off The Grass" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill" except that one has a bigger cop behind it. It also means that the people who collaborated with the Nazis had the right principle in mind, they just picked the wrong bully to suck up to.
If you choose the latter, then hey, there's something about morality that exists apart from God. To give you some hints if you don't follow my previous links, let's set up a thought experiment. Could God have created a universe exactly like this one in every physical detail, except that harming innocents was good and righteous?
Oy, again with this stuff.
Nope. Wrong.
And of course you posted that anonymously, because you're flat wrong. To quote from what you obviously didn't read: "Its exhaust is completely clean: It is very difficult to make hydrogen radioactive in a fission reactor. It basically can't happen." Feel free to propose a reaction based on the proposed engine that would actually do so. The craft is only dangerous if you're allergic to hydrogen.
I've seen numbers ranging from 12% to 20%, but since oil is a fungible commodity the political situation in the Middle East affects the price of oil worldwide.
Since the problem isn't a military one, a military solution alone will not work. Military action is certainly justified as part of the overall strategy (e.g. in Afghanistan, now sadly neglected) but can't be the only means we use. The ultimate solution is to greatly reduce our dependency on oil.
This doesn't have to involve austerity programs and such. We could go nuclear - not just nuclear power plants, but nuclear rockets - e.g. this one (the good tech stuff starts in section 7). With that, we can lift a thousand tons into orbit in a completely reusable and non-polluting craft that even eliminates not only its own nuclear waste but also waste generated on Earth. Using those, we can put up solar-power satellites that send their energy down to Earth in the form of microwaves. (If you've ever played Sim City... forget it. It doesn't work that way, it can be done very safely with large margins of safety. See here especially the section on "Safety".) With the lower launch costs of nuclear rockets, we can make the U.S. a net energy exporter, in time. This has plenty of military applications, as well. Space is the ultimate "high ground" and a dominant U.S. presence in space should have obvious strategic benefits.
Of course, at the same time we can work on more efficient techniques for utilizing the oil we do need. Cars with better mileage (improving our overall fuel efficiency by less than 3mpg would eliminate our need to import oil from the Persian Gulf), more efficient means of generating and using fertilizers, a bit of thought about how we use plastics, etc. Even better, we can sell the technology we develop to other parts of the world - further reducing world demand for oil, driving the price down. The lower the price of oil, the less funds the Islamist fanatics have to work with, and the less of a threat they pose. (Reducing oil prices also impacts people like Hugo Chavez, as a bonus.)
(Not that, realistically, Islamist fanatics pose an existential threat to the United States. They can harm us, certainly, and even cause a relatively large amount of damage, sometimes. That's not the same thing as posing a threat to the existence of the United States. For perspective, more than 30 times as many American citizens have died in traffic accidents since 9/11 than have died in 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined.)
Personally, I thought of BVS-1 (Phthsspok's Star). Too far away, though.
And, gee, I actually pointed out things that can be, and are, being "done here". But I can see how you'd miss it. I mean, look at me say "It'll happen eventually. Open standards are in the interest of the consumers, and eventually they spread. Consider how many networking models there were in the 80's, and then by the late 90's it was all TCP/IP, despite vendors attempts at lock-in. The same will happen with open-source software and general computing, it'll just take a while." That just reeks of "poor me" despair.
And I didn't 'blame the competition' any more than "to an extent". IBM owned computing until the late 80s, early 90s, but they made mistakes that MS took advantage of. It's not like IBM couldn't have stopped MS if they'd recognized the situation, but they were wedded to their mainframe business. Now MS is wedded to (a really ill-advised level of) backward compatibility (see the "Raymond Chen" stuff in that link) and the Windows codebase, which has grown to a size that it's unmanageable by the techniques they use. This leads to security issues (sure, it's possible to secure windows, but look how many people have trouble getting a regular oil change and ask yourself if they can keep a computer secure) and huge shipping delays and massive feature dumps so they can ship at all. Those are mistakes, and Linux is capitalizing on them.
You're just filing me away as another Linux zealot, even though I explicitly recognize the problem you point out and have listed specific strategies that are being pursued to deal with it. If that's your bag, well, okay, have a nice life and all.
If I may diffidently suggest, the common participant in every argument you've ever had is... you. If you keep having the same arguments, it's at least conceivable that you have something to do with that.
Oh, you mean here? Ah, yes, no one has ever thought of handing out LiveCDs before. Good one!
But let's see what you say in that comment: "I guess that's the catch-22. Linux needs big software to get the user base that it take to make it worth big software's investments to support Linux." And let's see what I had to say: "But there really is a chicken-and-egg problem in the desktop arena, and just saying 'Y'all need to try harder' isn't going to cut it... there still aren't many commercial games for Linux, because there isn't a big market for Linux games, in part because... there aren't many commercial games for Linux. That's a real problem, and that's what I and others are referring to when talking about the trouble of invading a monopoly market."
I guess I will keep thinking that. You certainly seem to, though you don't appear to recognize it when it's not stated in precisely your wording...
Well, you reiterated your points, but that's not quite the same thing as backing them up. You can't really accuse 'Linux in general' of just sitting around waiting for the competition to fail. (First off, there isn't a 'Linux in general' anyway, but again, others made that point, too.) I pointed out four markets that Linux companies are actively competing in and doing quite well at. It's worth noting that none of those markets had any one company owning around 90% market share before Linux came along.
I further pointed out that it's only in the last couple of years that Linux companies have been seriously targeting the desktop, and I stated they've done well from a technical standpoint. But there really is a chicken-and-egg problem in the desktop arena, and just saying "Y'all need to try harder" isn't going to cut it.
Loki Games made some poor business decisions (though, actually, not all of them were poor) but one technical thing they did very right was SDL. That plus OpenGL plus OpenAL is really a very nice setup for making games, and it easily rivals DirectX (yes, DirectX is more than Direct3D, that's why I pointed out the other two libraries which cover the other stuff). Several top game engines (including a very biggie, Id's) support Linux. From a technical perspective, it's hard to be more welcoming. But there still aren't many commercial games for Linux, because there isn't a big market for Linux games, in part because... there aren't many commercial games for Linux. That's a real problem, and that's what I and others are referring to when talking about the trouble of invading a monopoly market. (Of course, the PC games market isn't showing all that healthy growth anyway... I'm not sure games will continue to be such a sticking point for Windows retention in the future.) Fortunately, it's not the only factor.
Linux companies like SUSE and Red Hat and Canonical are targeting corporate desktops first, because it's an easier market to break into. A smaller collection of necessary apps for the majority, and the features (lower price, lower hardware requirements, mature management features (like remote admin), and mature privilege separation, etc.) are a very good fit, enough to to drive some switching.
I rather think once people are exposed to Linux where they work they'll use it at home, too. (That's one of the ways Windows got to where it is now.) The underlying OS matters less and less these days anyway; 80% of the things average people do involve the web. The more cross-platform apps people use, the lower the 'potential barrier' is to switching. (Witness how fanatically MS is fighting Office interoperability...) There won't be a "year of desktop Linux" any more than there was a "year of server Linux". There wasn't a "year of Mozilla/Firefox", either; it just grew until... y'know, I can't remember the last time I ran into an IE-only site...
It'll happen eventually. Open standards are in the interest of the consumers, and eventually they spread. Consider how many networking models there were in the 80's, and then by the late 90's it was all TCP/IP, despite vendors attempts at lock-in. The same will happen with open-source software and general computing, it'll just take a while. (Note: I'm not predicting the demise of commercial software. In many areas, e.g. games, it makes a lot of sense. But I figure most companies will eventually go the Id model.)
Anyway, that's enough for now. Maybe you can respond to more than one point next time, or at least a single point in context.
Yup, that's the only thing I wrote in my whole response. I certainly didn't point out plenty of areas where Linux is winning big in business on its merits or anything like that. Of course I didn't refer to greatly improved Linux desktop support in the last couple years. I didn't even point out, like others have, that Linux does have support if you want to pay for it.
You certainly showed me!
Um... not exactly. Linux has, fair and square, won a major (and growing) chunk of the server business, against competition not only from Microsoft but other Unix vendors. Linux has also grabbed a significant chunk of the embedded business, and aside from PDAs Microsoft hasn't done terribly well there. Linux is pretty much the dominant platform for high-end (and a lot of medium-end) scientific computing - MS wants to compete there, but none of their efforts have gained any traction that I'm aware of. Thanks to IBM, Linux is even doing well in mainframes.
Microsoft makes money in only about three areas - desktop OS, Office, and servers. Everything else is pretty much a loss leader from what I've seen. MS has to work hard for server dollars, but the real cash cows are desktop and office. That's by far their biggest cash source, and it reflects monopoly pricing.
Busting into that market is tough. When dealing with an effective monopoly, to an extent you do have to capitalize on the mistakes of the competition. But you have to have a good product, too, and only in the last few years have distributions really been focusing on that. And they've done very well.
I switched my parents to Ubuntu a year and a half ago and they've been quite happy. They can surf the web, do their email, write letters, even make greeting cards, etc. I do their tech support, sure - but I was doing that when they were running Windows, too. (Come on - in the home desktop market, how many people call up their tech-savvy cousin rather than sitting on hold with some company? My wife got me a t-shirt, "No, I will not fix your computer.", to wear to family functions.) And now I don't have to worry about malware. I spend a couple minutes installing updates when I walk in the door (click on the icon, give their password, click on 'install updates') and I have time to actually talk instead of cleaning up crap.
For corporate desktops, yeah there's tech support available. I'm having a hard time coming up with a way to say, "For f&ck's sake, haven't you ever used Google?" without sounding snide, and I'm failing.
Second paragraph of my comment.
We got a cheap-ass Dell, no hope of playing HD stuff. No worries there. The amusing thing is it won't play regular, non-HD DVDs anymore. Says something about the 'rights being incompatible' or something like that. I only got it so my wife could have her MS office, so I don't really care, but it's funny that I never had that problem with XP.
With all the libraries and the plethora of features, it also has a large measure of Perl's problem: "Some designs that are not compact have enough internal redundancy of features that individual programmers end up carving out compact dialects sufficient for that 80% of common tasks by choosing a working subset of the language. Perl has this kind of pseudo-compactness, for example. Such designs have a built-in trap; when two programmers try to communicate about a project, they may find that differences in their working subsets are a significant barrier to understanding and modifying the code."
The summary, here: "When all is said and done, however, C++'s most fundamental problem is that it is basically just another conventional language. It confines the memory-management problem better than it did before the invention of the Standard Template Library, and a lot better than C does, but the confinement is brittle; it breaks unless your code uses objects and only objects. For many types of application its OO features are not significant, and simply add complexity to C without yielding much advantage. Open-source C++ compilers are available; if C++ were unequivocally superior to C it would now dominate... Consider using C++ if an existing C++ toolkit or service library offers powerful leverage for your application, or if you're in one of the application areas mentioned above for which an OO language is known to be a large win."
My Verizon Treo 650 came with the default of transmitting its location data all the time. Fortunately, there was a (somewhat buried) option to turn it to "911 only". Of course, if you read the above link, you'll see that the cell company can get a pretty good handle on my location if they wanted just by triangulation anyway.