That doesn't mean it's a problem because when you've done it, everything works fine and everyone is happy - but the Windows people seem to conveniently forget these things when they accuse Linux of being difficult to install.
I don't recall anyone on this thread saying thta Linux was difficult to install. I think you're seeing anti-Linux sentiments where none exist.
No Matlab. Not portable, not open, and it perpetuates a vendor lock-in for quantitative scientists/engineers every bit as bad and destructive as the stranglehold Windows has enjoyed on the desktop for decades.
I think you're over-stating things a touch. Some of the core stuff is closed source but most of the functions are open, meaning that they are readable.m scripts. e.g. if you're worried about how MATLAB implements ANOVA then you read the file and check. You can modify if needed. So MATLAB is open enough in most normal usage scenarios. You're not really locked in given that we have Octave.
Python is more readable, more enjoyable to code, has equivalent IDEs available (Spyder), far more user-friendly features, you can use your code literally anywhere you go without worrying about a Matlab license, and the SciPy Stack has reached functional feature parity with Matlab (and is evolving well beyond in certain areas).
I like Python and I've spent some time learning it recently and ported some of MATLAB code. Python is not a panacea, however. For starters, there is no equivalent of the excellent MATLAB docs. For a newcomer with no programming experience, the entry barrier is definitely higher. Much more Googling needed to get stuff to work. The plots produced by Matplotlib are good but don't do everything. e.g. I found animating data was too slow in Matplotlib and I spent ages messing about with pyqtgraph. So to get the most out of it you have to screw about with different plotting packages and that can be very time consuming. In general, the syntax for matrix operations is a lot more elegant and economical in MATLAB than in Python/numpy. I also ran into issues where seemingly equivalent code would run substantially slower in Python than MATLAB. In many cases I was able to resolve the issue and surely to a degree it was due to me being a numpy beginner, but I do feel it's easier to get the most out of MATLAB than the most of out of numpy. MATLAB has now become quite smart about helping the user to optimise code. Admittedly this might make the user a less careful programmer: I definitely learned things whilst trying to get Python code to run at the same speed as my original MATLAB code. So the process was useful. I'd like to use Python more in the future, but rabidly hating on MATLAB isn't fair. Finally, they're pretty different languages: Python is a general-purpose language which has been adapted to number crunching, whereas MATLAB was designed for number-crunching from the ground up. When you use these languages, their heritage shows.
Yes you can see Uranus with binos but you'll need a telescope resolve it as a disk. Ditto for Neptune. Pluto is the only TNO you can see with a small scope but even here you'll need at least about a 10" objective since it's rather faint (about 13th or 14th magnitude, IIRC). The exact scope size you need will depend on your experience, vision, and possibly your latitude as Pluto is is currently quite far south.
Granted, I did the setup work on both those machines myself - I don't think they could have done the install, but many people can't install Windows either. As long as the system is up and running already though I don't think its too complicated for most people to use.
I agree. The problems mostly come when some people have set ideas of what they expect from the experience (based on Windows, usually) and these preconceptions are not met. Unless they're motivated to learn the new way, they will end up back on Windows pretty soon. Support doesn't help in this case.
I've seen the same thing trying to get my girlfriend to analyse her data in R rather than Excel. I explained why R was better for stats and how it could be much quicker for making graphs. I wrote R scripts to automatically generate her graphs (so she doesn't have to click her way through constructing each new graph in Excel). I wrote scripts to make webpages to display them neatly together. I explained how the scripts worked and how to modify them. I commented them very extensively. I spent hours on the sodding thing making the graphs look how she wanted by default she wouldn't have to trudge through the intricacies of ggplot2. She understood why it was better and faster and was grateful. She used it for a short period of time and now she's back to Excel. Basically, if she can't figure out the R way in under 90 seconds she'll just fire up Excel and go back to that. She knows she could come and ask me, but she just can't be bothered.
Not at all. I hardly ever recommend Linux to non-techies because I've seen the issues it often causes.
I have absolutely no problem with intelligent discussion with anyone on the pros and cons of Linux, but why do so many of the anti-Linux people make these generalised, sweeping statements about Linux without putting any meat into their points?
Calm down, I'm on your side, I was just responding to the previous guy who seemed to be claiming that SuSE install was hard in 2004. The point of my post was that it wasn't hard (or was no harder than Ubuntu was back then). I'm not anti-Linux, I've been using it for over a decade. What I was getting at with the comment you picked up is that I don't rabidly promote it or expect others to like it. I have got others to use Linux in the past but for various reasons (e.g. they just preferred Windows and couldn't bothered to change or the software they *had* to use was Windows only) it didn't work in the long term. I have provided support, but some people just don't want to switch. At work (I'm a researcher), where there are often good reasons to switch from Win to Linux, people usually don't want to because they don't want to spend the time to learn something new. I'm happy to support it but people aren't interested (even when their Win machine starts to run slowly, they'd prefer to just buy a new laptop).
Good points. It is a shame that 82.6% of Americans live in cities and have little chance of seeing much more than the Big Dipper, let alone moons on Jupiter. I'm sure this puts a pretty big damper on telescope tech talk on anything but a specialized forum. Still, talk away and I'll try to learn something.
You can see the moons of Jupiter through a telescope even from the city centre. The moons are damn bright and will punch through light pollution. City lights obliterate galaxies. The brighter nebulae will be visible even from terrible light pollution, but they will be much diminished. However, the real thing that's lost is the sense of awe you get from looking up at a dark sky with the naked eye. Even the most jaded person will STFU and gawp.
Re:Popularity of space stuff based on replies
on
Saturn In All Its Glory
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Alright. You got your +5. Now what do we actually talk about?
For starters, we could discuss how many of the features seen in the image are visible in a small telescope and how to go about seeing stuff. This is supposed to be a curious, techy, crowd. I'm surprised the small telescope question comes up so rarely on stories such as this one. In fact, quite a lot is visible on Saturn: major storms, cloud bands, rings, at least the most major ring division (Cassini division), shadow of planet on rings, shadow of rings on planet, coloration in rings, change of ring tilt during Saturn's year, half a dozen of the brightest moons (the largest of which can appear as a tiny disk). A lot of people here have kids and might like to show them this stuff to pique their interest. Saturn won't be easily visible in Q2 of 2014 but Jupiter is becoming progressively more accesible (rises late right now but earlier each night) and there's loads to see on it: moons, eclipses, loads of storms (inc. great red spot), rotation of the planet is very fast and quite evident over a one hour time course, etc. It appears much larger than Saturn and changes all the time, with even whole cloud bands appearing and disappearing over periods of months. You don't need expensive gear or dark skies to see this stuff.
Other than that, we could also discuss the hexagon, as mentioned by a link placed by a previous post. Of course there's also the stuff you mention, but that's not so directly related to this story. Not that this should discourage the topics, of course.
Re:Popularity of space stuff based on replies
on
Saturn In All Its Glory
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It doesn't help that there is now so much light pollution that most people have either never seen the Milky Way, or see such skies so rarely that they haven't had a chance to become personally anquanted with the night sky in any real depth.
They're ending production of the Wii soon (http://kotaku.com/nintendo-says-wii-production-will-end-soon-1433163493) so hopefully that will focus attention more on the Wii U and improve the software situation. Now if only they'd quit the region-lock BS, I'd more interested.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if that's the reason I get spam messages with no attachments or links to tell me where to get the product should I have a temporarily absence from reason and want to actually purchase them...
Perhaps it's just looking for a reply to indicate they have a valid e-mail address. Even an out of office reply would do the trick.
NOT A SINGLE PUBLIC THEORY ABOUT THE CAUSE OF AUTISM!?! SERIOUSLY?
Bollocks. There are lots of theories. All you have to do is look at the WIkipedia to get started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism#Causes I work at an institute which is studying autism: people are working on it and doing real research.
I'm not American either, but I live here and I would have voted for him too had I been able to. I'm so glad I didn't, as it happens, because he's shown himself to be a disappointment and a liar.
Show me mathematically how my vote will not be a spoiler and I might vote third party. Otherwise I have to shore up this dam with my fingers. Third party was 1% last election, how does it get the other 32% ?
What do you mean by "won't be a spoiler." This isn't maths: If you vote 3rd party the 3rd party probably still won't get in, but that's not the point. If 5% or 10% of people were to vote 3rd party then it would send a message to the other two and start to affect the debate. The two main parties need those votes and will hopefully work to get them by ceasing to be wankers, which is the point of your 3rd party vote.
As long we continue to vote for one of the two main parties we are rewarding them for being pricks. Their bickering and childish behaviour is just manufactured controversy that keeps people voting for them to the exclusion of 3rd parties. They do this because they're fixated on shafting the opposing side rather and the best of doing that is to vote for "their" side. The two parties in the US are more or less the same shit with minor differences. They each get a year or two in office then they switch sides. It's in their mutual interests to maintain this situation and exclude a viable third party.
Find me a kid that wants to get shots. Of course they're going to be against it. But yeah, it's sad this very dangerous idea is still floating around, all because somebody wanted to get money from an alternative vaccine and thus fabricated a lie.
As far as I know, the MMR controversy was not initially related to an alternative vaccine (at least not one that was ever produced). It originated with Dr. Andrew Wakefield in the UK who claimed there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He produced a flawed paper claiming such a link and had been paid 55k GBP by parties interested in establishing a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Wakefield_Lancet_paper_controversy The only reason the whole thing blew up as it did was because the press reported his "findings" in an uncritically positive light. (This is the same press who have warned the British public about the dangers of "WiFi radiation in our schools" on the front page of a national broadsheet.) Wakefield's paper was later retracted when evidence of fraud (data fabrication) came to light. Whilst this was reported in the media, it wasn't really made clear that the whole house of cards had collapsed. The media didn't apologise (as far as I know) nor did they embark on a campaign to clear the name of the MMR vaccine, so to speak.
Wakefield had plans to profit from the demise of MMR (testing kits, alternative vaccines, etc) but he never got that far.
I built a machine yesterday with my son with parts from Newegg, and installed Ubuntu 13.04. The motherboard was DOA. Is the average gamer going to figure that out? The Samsung SSD wouldn't come up and talk to Ubuntu until I initialized it in Windows, and even then I had to set the SATA.
Yeah, they'll figure it out. Plenty of gamers are tweakers and build their own rigs. In fact, I'd argue that gaming is the primary motivation behind building your own rig. Uncle Bob who wants a PC to do his accounts in Excel isn't going to build his own rig, is he? Building a PC really is not rocket science (it's even impossible to hook things up incorrectly) and mostly the peripherals aren't DOA.
Installing Linux isn't solely in the domain of geeks. It used to be, but now it's very point and click and it works flawlessly most of the time. You bought a still relatively new technology (SSD) and all you really had to do was flip one BIOS setting. Shit like this happens in Windows too, you know.
No, I think it does have to be exclusive, period. Firstly, not everyone buys games/consoles at the time of release. e.g. I just bought a (now cheap) PS3 for Journey, Little Big Planet2, and GT5. Those are all at least a year old. If I could have bought those on the PC, I couldn't have justified the PS3 purchase. Secondly, all consoles need at least one good exclusive series of games to maintain their branding. What would happen to the XBox if after a year or two Halo goes on general release? What if Nintendo allowed that with Mario? Never going to happen because people buy a console for the games not the hardware. Linux needs an exclusive killer title that stays exclusive. It's had Doom3, Quake 4, UT2004 (amongst others) and none of this made any difference other than having penguins on the game boxes.
ignoring your FUD about Google and Valve, there are good reasons why it's important for Linux to be viable as a desktop environment. The main reason is that the other two main contenders seem to be moving towards a more 'controlled' sort of environment where they get a cut of all software sold and can allow or disallow whatever they want.
Linux is a viable desktop environment now, it's just that the masses prefer/use Windows. Let them have it along with their viruses, malware, and over-priced little utilities like Winzip. In the meantime, Linux does everything I need.
Of course a gamepad can't beat a mouse in doing a mouse's job. Valve isn't stupid. The target market isn't PC gamers but console gamers, so Valve needs something like a gamepad.
The target market is people who want to play games in the living room. I'm a PC gamer at heart, but I often like being in the living room. I'd be interested in Valve's angle if it works well.
There is still the problem that on competitive multiplayer games the console gamers would be up against PC gamers. Unless Valve finds a way to segregate the servers that will be a very painful experience for the mouseless.
How is that that a problem? They're segregated now. If the console kids were mixed with PC gamers in a multiplayer FPS they would be anhialiated instantly. All you have to do is segregate according to input device (or allow the gamepad user a choice of whether they want to be). But let's see how it performs. If it's good enough there may be no need to segregate.
Yeah, so there are shitty console games out there. I agree. I've just bought a PS3 because they're cheap and some of what I've seen has really disappointed me: boring formulaic stuff. On the other hand, I'm really enjoying Journey, Unfinished Swan, Little Big Planet, and Gran Turismo. I'm more in two minds about Drake's Deception, which came with the console: I don't like the control scheme with the game pad. Aiming is painfully hard and it's obvious that the enemies' behavior is designed with this in mind. I believe aiming will get better with practice, but you're fighting against an bad input method.
On the Wii you lots of games with excellent gameplay and the Wiimote allows for natural aiming. I've had a lot of fun on it and I wouldn't characterise it as "press X to kill all" gameplay.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't mean it's a problem because when you've done it, everything works fine and everyone is happy - but the Windows people seem to conveniently forget these things when they accuse Linux of being difficult to install.
I don't recall anyone on this thread saying thta Linux was difficult to install. I think you're seeing anti-Linux sentiments where none exist.
NO.
No Matlab. Not portable, not open, and it perpetuates a vendor lock-in for quantitative scientists/engineers every bit as bad and destructive as the stranglehold Windows has enjoyed on the desktop for decades.
I think you're over-stating things a touch. Some of the core stuff is closed source but most of the functions are open, meaning that they are readable .m scripts. e.g. if you're worried about how MATLAB implements ANOVA then you read the file and check. You can modify if needed. So MATLAB is open enough in most normal usage scenarios. You're not really locked in given that we have Octave.
Python is more readable, more enjoyable to code, has equivalent IDEs available (Spyder), far more user-friendly features, you can use your code literally anywhere you go without worrying about a Matlab license, and the SciPy Stack has reached functional feature parity with Matlab (and is evolving well beyond in certain areas).
I like Python and I've spent some time learning it recently and ported some of MATLAB code. Python is not a panacea, however. For starters, there is no equivalent of the excellent MATLAB docs. For a newcomer with no programming experience, the entry barrier is definitely higher. Much more Googling needed to get stuff to work. The plots produced by Matplotlib are good but don't do everything. e.g. I found animating data was too slow in Matplotlib and I spent ages messing about with pyqtgraph. So to get the most out of it you have to screw about with different plotting packages and that can be very time consuming. In general, the syntax for matrix operations is a lot more elegant and economical in MATLAB than in Python/numpy. I also ran into issues where seemingly equivalent code would run substantially slower in Python than MATLAB. In many cases I was able to resolve the issue and surely to a degree it was due to me being a numpy beginner, but I do feel it's easier to get the most out of MATLAB than the most of out of numpy. MATLAB has now become quite smart about helping the user to optimise code. Admittedly this might make the user a less careful programmer: I definitely learned things whilst trying to get Python code to run at the same speed as my original MATLAB code. So the process was useful. I'd like to use Python more in the future, but rabidly hating on MATLAB isn't fair. Finally, they're pretty different languages: Python is a general-purpose language which has been adapted to number crunching, whereas MATLAB was designed for number-crunching from the ground up. When you use these languages, their heritage shows.
Yes you can see Uranus with binos but you'll need a telescope resolve it as a disk. Ditto for Neptune. Pluto is the only TNO you can see with a small scope but even here you'll need at least about a 10" objective since it's rather faint (about 13th or 14th magnitude, IIRC). The exact scope size you need will depend on your experience, vision, and possibly your latitude as Pluto is is currently quite far south.
Granted, I did the setup work on both those machines myself - I don't think they could have done the install, but many people can't install Windows either. As long as the system is up and running already though I don't think its too complicated for most people to use.
I agree. The problems mostly come when some people have set ideas of what they expect from the experience (based on Windows, usually) and these preconceptions are not met. Unless they're motivated to learn the new way, they will end up back on Windows pretty soon. Support doesn't help in this case.
I've seen the same thing trying to get my girlfriend to analyse her data in R rather than Excel. I explained why R was better for stats and how it could be much quicker for making graphs. I wrote R scripts to automatically generate her graphs (so she doesn't have to click her way through constructing each new graph in Excel). I wrote scripts to make webpages to display them neatly together. I explained how the scripts worked and how to modify them. I commented them very extensively. I spent hours on the sodding thing making the graphs look how she wanted by default she wouldn't have to trudge through the intricacies of ggplot2. She understood why it was better and faster and was grateful. She used it for a short period of time and now she's back to Excel. Basically, if she can't figure out the R way in under 90 seconds she'll just fire up Excel and go back to that. She knows she could come and ask me, but she just can't be bothered.
Not at all. I hardly ever recommend Linux to non-techies because I've seen the issues it often causes.
I have absolutely no problem with intelligent discussion with anyone on the pros and cons of Linux, but why do so many of the anti-Linux people make these generalised, sweeping statements about Linux without putting any meat into their points?
Calm down, I'm on your side, I was just responding to the previous guy who seemed to be claiming that SuSE install was hard in 2004. The point of my post was that it wasn't hard (or was no harder than Ubuntu was back then). I'm not anti-Linux, I've been using it for over a decade. What I was getting at with the comment you picked up is that I don't rabidly promote it or expect others to like it. I have got others to use Linux in the past but for various reasons (e.g. they just preferred Windows and couldn't bothered to change or the software they *had* to use was Windows only) it didn't work in the long term. I have provided support, but some people just don't want to switch. At work (I'm a researcher), where there are often good reasons to switch from Win to Linux, people usually don't want to because they don't want to spend the time to learn something new. I'm happy to support it but people aren't interested (even when their Win machine starts to run slowly, they'd prefer to just buy a new laptop).
Good points. It is a shame that 82.6% of Americans live in cities and have little chance of seeing much more than the Big Dipper, let alone moons on Jupiter. I'm sure this puts a pretty big damper on telescope tech talk on anything but a specialized forum. Still, talk away and I'll try to learn something.
You can see the moons of Jupiter through a telescope even from the city centre. The moons are damn bright and will punch through light pollution. City lights obliterate galaxies. The brighter nebulae will be visible even from terrible light pollution, but they will be much diminished. However, the real thing that's lost is the sense of awe you get from looking up at a dark sky with the naked eye. Even the most jaded person will STFU and gawp.
Says the techie who has no clue how incredibly out of touch with reality he is
Not at all. I hardly ever recommend Linux to non-techies because I've seen the issues it often causes. But I think it still stands that in 2004 SuSE was roughly equally as easy to install as Ubuntu. Someone who could have installed Ubuntu back then could have installed SuSE. Here's the Ubuntu 4 install: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEmm8-PgRHM Here's the SuSE 9 install guide: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDQQFjAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.suse.com%2Fdocumentation%2Fsuse%2Fpdfdoc%2FSuSE-Linux-Userguide-9.0.0.0b.pdf&ei=EBFgUqOgIs_I4AOsmoCIDg&usg=AFQjCNHsSqsGhjaVKbO9Fy6_uoWO0-VeQg&sig2=Y2s_E1MNJQVki19DH-rtnQ&bvm=bv.54176721,d.dmg&cad=rja If you look at the "quick install" section for SuSE you'll see that it's about as complicated as the Ubuntu install, plus it's not ncurses and has a nice GUI.
Other distros, like SuSE, had achieved this before Ubuntu was released.
... S.u.S.E. had achieved this before Ubuntu was released.
FTFY
Actually, it's been called "SuSE" since 1998 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux_distributions and Ubuntu was released in 2004.
Alright. You got your +5. Now what do we actually talk about?
For starters, we could discuss how many of the features seen in the image are visible in a small telescope and how to go about seeing stuff. This is supposed to be a curious, techy, crowd. I'm surprised the small telescope question comes up so rarely on stories such as this one. In fact, quite a lot is visible on Saturn: major storms, cloud bands, rings, at least the most major ring division (Cassini division), shadow of planet on rings, shadow of rings on planet, coloration in rings, change of ring tilt during Saturn's year, half a dozen of the brightest moons (the largest of which can appear as a tiny disk). A lot of people here have kids and might like to show them this stuff to pique their interest. Saturn won't be easily visible in Q2 of 2014 but Jupiter is becoming progressively more accesible (rises late right now but earlier each night) and there's loads to see on it: moons, eclipses, loads of storms (inc. great red spot), rotation of the planet is very fast and quite evident over a one hour time course, etc. It appears much larger than Saturn and changes all the time, with even whole cloud bands appearing and disappearing over periods of months. You don't need expensive gear or dark skies to see this stuff.
Other than that, we could also discuss the hexagon, as mentioned by a link placed by a previous post. Of course there's also the stuff you mention, but that's not so directly related to this story. Not that this should discourage the topics, of course.
It doesn't help that there is now so much light pollution that most people have either never seen the Milky Way, or see such skies so rarely that they haven't had a chance to become personally anquanted with the night sky in any real depth.
I think in the early days Ubuntu was very good for linux. It showed that you could have a linux install that was fairly user friendly.
Other distros, like SuSE, had achieved this before Ubuntu was released.
For fly-by movie assembled from Cassini's images see here: http://vimeo.com/11386048
They're ending production of the Wii soon (http://kotaku.com/nintendo-says-wii-production-will-end-soon-1433163493) so hopefully that will focus attention more on the Wii U and improve the software situation. Now if only they'd quit the region-lock BS, I'd more interested.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if that's the reason I get spam messages with no attachments or links to tell me where to get the product should I have a temporarily absence from reason and want to actually purchase them...
Perhaps it's just looking for a reply to indicate they have a valid e-mail address. Even an out of office reply would do the trick.
What I find more shocking is the level of outrage and general dismissiveness directed toward these parents.
Ah, but the dismissiveness follows the Cochrane meta-analysis involving 14 million children which found no evidence of a link between MMR and autism: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004407.pub3/abstract;jsessionid=44093446A596169411BA31145D75B3CA.f02t02 Studies like this are conducted to determine if the anecdotes you allude to have a scientific basis. Turns out they don't seem to.
NOT A SINGLE PUBLIC THEORY ABOUT THE CAUSE OF AUTISM!?! SERIOUSLY?
Bollocks. There are lots of theories. All you have to do is look at the WIkipedia to get started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism#Causes I work at an institute which is studying autism: people are working on it and doing real research.
Yes, you're right.
Personally, I would have*
I'm not American either, but I live here and I would have voted for him too had I been able to. I'm so glad I didn't, as it happens, because he's shown himself to be a disappointment and a liar.
Show me mathematically how my vote will not be a spoiler and I might vote third party. Otherwise I have to shore up this dam with my fingers. Third party was 1% last election, how does it get the other 32% ?
What do you mean by "won't be a spoiler." This isn't maths: If you vote 3rd party the 3rd party probably still won't get in, but that's not the point. If 5% or 10% of people were to vote 3rd party then it would send a message to the other two and start to affect the debate. The two main parties need those votes and will hopefully work to get them by ceasing to be wankers, which is the point of your 3rd party vote.
As long we continue to vote for one of the two main parties we are rewarding them for being pricks. Their bickering and childish behaviour is just manufactured controversy that keeps people voting for them to the exclusion of 3rd parties. They do this because they're fixated on shafting the opposing side rather and the best of doing that is to vote for "their" side. The two parties in the US are more or less the same shit with minor differences. They each get a year or two in office then they switch sides. It's in their mutual interests to maintain this situation and exclude a viable third party.
Find me a kid that wants to get shots. Of course they're going to be against it. But yeah, it's sad this very dangerous idea is still floating around, all because somebody wanted to get money from an alternative vaccine and thus fabricated a lie.
As far as I know, the MMR controversy was not initially related to an alternative vaccine (at least not one that was ever produced). It originated with Dr. Andrew Wakefield in the UK who claimed there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He produced a flawed paper claiming such a link and had been paid 55k GBP by parties interested in establishing a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Wakefield_Lancet_paper_controversy The only reason the whole thing blew up as it did was because the press reported his "findings" in an uncritically positive light. (This is the same press who have warned the British public about the dangers of "WiFi radiation in our schools" on the front page of a national broadsheet.) Wakefield's paper was later retracted when evidence of fraud (data fabrication) came to light. Whilst this was reported in the media, it wasn't really made clear that the whole house of cards had collapsed. The media didn't apologise (as far as I know) nor did they embark on a campaign to clear the name of the MMR vaccine, so to speak.
Wakefield had plans to profit from the demise of MMR (testing kits, alternative vaccines, etc) but he never got that far.
I built a machine yesterday with my son with parts from Newegg, and installed Ubuntu 13.04. The motherboard was DOA. Is the average gamer going to figure that out? The Samsung SSD wouldn't come up and talk to Ubuntu until I initialized it in Windows, and even then I had to set the SATA .
Yeah, they'll figure it out. Plenty of gamers are tweakers and build their own rigs. In fact, I'd argue that gaming is the primary motivation behind building your own rig. Uncle Bob who wants a PC to do his accounts in Excel isn't going to build his own rig, is he? Building a PC really is not rocket science (it's even impossible to hook things up incorrectly) and mostly the peripherals aren't DOA.
Installing Linux isn't solely in the domain of geeks. It used to be, but now it's very point and click and it works flawlessly most of the time. You bought a still relatively new technology (SSD) and all you really had to do was flip one BIOS setting. Shit like this happens in Windows too, you know.
No, I think it does have to be exclusive, period. Firstly, not everyone buys games/consoles at the time of release. e.g. I just bought a (now cheap) PS3 for Journey, Little Big Planet2, and GT5. Those are all at least a year old. If I could have bought those on the PC, I couldn't have justified the PS3 purchase. Secondly, all consoles need at least one good exclusive series of games to maintain their branding. What would happen to the XBox if after a year or two Halo goes on general release? What if Nintendo allowed that with Mario? Never going to happen because people buy a console for the games not the hardware. Linux needs an exclusive killer title that stays exclusive. It's had Doom3, Quake 4, UT2004 (amongst others) and none of this made any difference other than having penguins on the game boxes.
ignoring your FUD about Google and Valve, there are good reasons why it's important for Linux to be viable as a desktop environment. The main reason is that the other two main contenders seem to be moving towards a more 'controlled' sort of environment where they get a cut of all software sold and can allow or disallow whatever they want.
Linux is a viable desktop environment now, it's just that the masses prefer/use Windows. Let them have it along with their viruses, malware, and over-priced little utilities like Winzip. In the meantime, Linux does everything I need.
I'm sure you're right: practice will help.
Of course a gamepad can't beat a mouse in doing a mouse's job. Valve isn't stupid. The target market isn't PC gamers but console gamers, so Valve needs something like a gamepad.
The target market is people who want to play games in the living room. I'm a PC gamer at heart, but I often like being in the living room. I'd be interested in Valve's angle if it works well.
There is still the problem that on competitive multiplayer games the console gamers would be up against PC gamers. Unless Valve finds a way to segregate the servers that will be a very painful experience for the mouseless.
How is that that a problem? They're segregated now. If the console kids were mixed with PC gamers in a multiplayer FPS they would be anhialiated instantly. All you have to do is segregate according to input device (or allow the gamepad user a choice of whether they want to be). But let's see how it performs. If it's good enough there may be no need to segregate.
Yeah, so there are shitty console games out there. I agree. I've just bought a PS3 because they're cheap and some of what I've seen has really disappointed me: boring formulaic stuff. On the other hand, I'm really enjoying Journey, Unfinished Swan, Little Big Planet, and Gran Turismo. I'm more in two minds about Drake's Deception, which came with the console: I don't like the control scheme with the game pad. Aiming is painfully hard and it's obvious that the enemies' behavior is designed with this in mind. I believe aiming will get better with practice, but you're fighting against an bad input method.
On the Wii you lots of games with excellent gameplay and the Wiimote allows for natural aiming. I've had a lot of fun on it and I wouldn't characterise it as "press X to kill all" gameplay.