It does promote development of software for the MS Windows platform, but commercial games development for Linux is in a bad way anyway, and we can hardly blame Transgaming for that.
However, as a user, if I can take a game off of the shelf and run it on a Linux system, what do I care if it was developed for another OS? "Oh, Microsoft Windows, is that thing still going?". What Transgaming should be ( and I think are) doing is persuading Windows developers to test their stuff on WineX. If they can convince them that for a few days work, they could get even a 1% hike in sales, they might succeed, and a few days work by fifty games companies will save Transgaming a hell of a lot of work in trying to make the platform fit the game.
WINEX [...] insulates programmers from cross-platform considerations
As an ex-commercial games developer, I'll stick my oar in and say that most games projects don't consider cross platform issues until well into development. If it's a choice between getting a version to market for one platform, or waiting six months or a year to add multiple platforms, most publishers will press for option 1 on economic grounds (which is why it will be great if Transgaming can persuade even a few of them to tweak for WineX on the basis that it's a cheap way to break into a new platform). In other words: there's never time to do it right, but always time to do it twice.;-)
Your one of those people [...] (BTW: since I'm on the subject of corrections, the hole your thinking of is 'whole' as in everything, not hole as in an empty space. Hehe)
BTW^2, the your you're thinking of is "you're" as in "you are", not "your" as in the possessive. Hehe.;-)
Hydrogen is expensive, difficult to handle, and pretty damn dangerous stuff in ANY situation
What's so dangerous about hydrogen in "ANY" situation? AFAIK, the big danger is leakage during storage, which is harder to detect than a leak of hydrocarbon vapour. A leak in use - in a moving vehicle - isn't significantly more likely than a hydrocarbon leak, nor more dangerous, as you have to be very unlucky to achieve the right fuel/air mixture at the right ignition point for sustained combustion.
Is this some Hindenburgh knee jerk response? The Hindenburgh was painted in a substance not dissimilar to rocket fuel, and even so, 61 of the 97 people on board survived. That's a pretty good survival rate for an aircraft that exploded on landing.
References that demonstrate the danger of hydrogen in "ANY" situation would be greatly appreciated.
The 1991 gulf war was not about the suffering of those poor Kuwaiti's
Uh, the major cause of suffering for Kuwaitis has been the DUP's and unexploded ordinance dropped inside Kuwait by the good old US of A.
I'm actually agreeing with your point, I'm just saying that there never was an ethical or moral motivation in the Gulf War. It was purely pragmatic: restore the regional balance of power, prop up a friendly dictatorship (sorry, "monarchy"), try out some new war toys, score a huge PR coup. And oil, oil, oil.
Same age as Wil Wheaton. Why, are you looking for friendship, perhaps leading to a romantic involvement? Got pictures?;-)
Seriously, I'm old enough to be comfortable enjoying content for its inherent quality rather than because it's targetted at my demographic. Sabrina is one of the best written and acted shows out there, in any market. Incidentally, it's very popular in prisons. Go figure.
And let's not forget that we're discussing a superhero show based on a comic book and a cartoon, by the way.;-)
Have you actually ever built a computer? It's hard to believe that you have.
I've lost count of the number of systems that I've built, all on a tight budget and mostly for general purpose use with some gaming.
NIC's aren't free. They're cheap, but not free. Same for sound. GeForce2MX is not, as you happily assert, a stupid choice. It's not ideal, but it offers astonishing bang-per-buck. The "little extra" for the Ultra compared to a basic GeForce2 MX 200 is (UK retail price) £180 ~= $270 and the Ultra is becoming harder to find. Do try and keep up.
When I build a system for myself, or friends or family, I start with a budget. A fixed one. I don't say "But for just a little more, I can have...". I squeeze everywhere, cutting on the stuff that I don't care too much about (NIC, sound, gfx on some systems) to buy what I do care about long term - CPU, RAM, HDD, CD-burner.
Your comments show that you completely missed my point about bang-per-buck, but fortunately your coward status mean that I don't have to care. Bah. I wave my paw dismissively at you.
pairing an 1800+ with a GeForce2MX is daft as far as doing anything 3D goes
Quite right. Sorry, I do a lot of compiling, so the extra crunching works out to a good compromise. That gets back to my original point though; if you're really looking for a game solution, then the price difference in the tested systems works out to the cost of a PS2 or Xbox!
It's funny to hear about the networks wanting to make the language more harsh, and the creator wanting to "censor" it.
Hardly. Sex sells. I was watching Grosse Pointe the other night, and was surprised to see vibrator based plot at 7:30pm.
I'm not complaining (hey, a post coital Lindsay Sloane is OK in my book), I was just surprised. And I can't say that I'm not a little disappointed that the Tick couldn't be rather more circumspect and clever. Ah well, early days.
No, I can't picture the Tick saying that. It's like Big Bird smacking Elmo around, or like this sweet little South Park interlude:
Fat Abbot: Hey hey hey. What's goin on Rudy?
Rudy: Man, Fat Abbot, you need to lose weight.
Fat Abbot: I lose weight when I feel like it bitch! Shut your bitch ass mouth hoe!
Rudy: Bitch I'll kick yo ass!
Kyle: Whoa dude!
Stan: Sweet!
Fat Abbot: You think you slick you punk ass blasphemous dopefeed bitch. I had my Jimmy waxed 7 times last week. I busta cap in yo nigga ass shit.
Stan: Wow cartoons are getting really dirty.
I'm not pushing any particular agenda here, I nearly choked lauging at Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, but on the other hand, I admire the highly disciplined writing and performances that make Sabrina the Teenage Witch more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, while still 100% kiddie friendly.
Perhaps this was funnier in context, but it's got the ring of lazy writing to it. Roll on the UK release so that I can find out.;-)
The nForce [...] has not just graphics, but sound integrated onto the motherboard, at a significant cost saving compared to buying them seperately.
And a NIC. I go for integrated boards (at least sound + NIC) simply because it allows me to buy a faster processor and more RAM, which pretty much negates the advantage of the bare bones performance board. Before the nForce, I wouldn't have gone down the integrated gfx route, but really, a GeForce2MX paired with an Athlon 1800+ is a pretty good solution right now. Off the top of my head, I work the KT266A + GeForce3 solution as about $300 more than the equivelant nForce before adding processor and RAM, and that's a pretty big differential.
Phew, another article that focusses on overclocking potential and absolute performance. All well and good, but I'd like to see Tom's doing more comparisons on total component price and bang per buck and not try and match specifications without regard to the retail price. When I upgrade, I pick a budget first, then go shopping to see what I can get for that money. The price difference between a fully integrated nForce and a bare VIA + NIC + GeForce2 + sound means I can afford to put a significantly faster processor and a shedload more RAM in the nForce. There's a tradeoff in that it's harder to upgrade piecemeal, but I choose not to do that anyway as I find that it's cheaper and more rewarding to make infrequent larger upgrades, and easier to find a deserving home for the old hardware if it can form the substantial core of a box.
Informative article, but it's once again aimed at the geek who simply has to have the rootinist, tootinist fastest system west of the Pecos, with cost not an issue. Note to Tom's; for those of us who don't get free hardware, cost is always an issue.;-)
Was Roxann just putting on an act, or is she truly as much of a colossal bitch as she seemed? My jaw dropped when watching her "exiting interrogation".
Here's something to bear in mind. Anyone who hasn't been following Wil's career would take him at face value too, and not realise that he was playing an (ill advised) part. We know better, but the vast majority of the audience won't.
So let's not be too hasty to judge Roxann. Wil and Roxann were basically doing live improv, and that's a pain to do with someone you don't know. I'd rather assume that they got their wires crossed and both escalated their jerkwad/bitch roles without realising that one of them needed to defuse it by turning it into a joke.
That said... just in case it wasn't an act on her part... hey, girl, you ain't all that. Wil's a lot finer than you.:-)
All of a sudden, the guy who you used to love from TV and Movies has grown up, and he's grown up to be a huge dick.
It's a shame, but honest open people do tend to assume that other folk will have the necessary clue to get the joke, rather than taking them at face value. Ouch, Wil, you should have remembered that most of us had a hard enough time separating Wesley and Wil, without reenforcing that by playing Jerkwad Wil.
On that matter, we seem to be assuming that Roxann really is a dumb bitch. Maybe she was just playing too, and we're too dumb to get the joke.;-)
That said, I don't think Wil needs to worry. Anyone who has been keeping track of him will get the joke. Anyone who hasn't probably remembers him as that irritating little geek from Next Gen anyway and was already predisposed to hate him.
He could have played it better, but cest la vie, I doubt if he's actually lost any credibility or fans. And he got his face and name on TV, along with the EFF. Any publicity is good publicity, right?
Roxanne may have come off as a bitch, but Wil came off as a obnoxious prima-donna
Yes, he's already said that was a collosal pooch fuck. He made the mistake of playing a character that's about as far removed from himself as possible, without realising that very few people actually know that, and will take him at face value. D'oh
But on the other hand, what the heck. Any publicity is good publicity, right?
[Chinese users] want a PC with something on it, but they want to load their pirate copy of Windows at home
Bollocks. Unless they've very different to you and me, they'll want a system that comes pre-installed with what they want. They won't want to go through the (small) bother of installing Windows themselves.
That's rather the point. If you've got a system that does everything you need, why spend even an hour fiddling around with it?
when you can get a free copy of Windows and then a free copy of Office and 1000 free games why wouldn't you switch to the OS that supports your language properly
Because it takes an hour. US users are lazy idiots. Why would Chinese ones be any different? And Red Flag Linux doesn't support the language? Riiiight.
Nope [StarOffice 6 isn't the killer app] it's the "me too!" app. All it does is remove one barrier to Linux, and it's still not as good as Office
Oh, really? Sure, it's "me too", but we've established that users are stupid and lazy. They want more of what they already know. It's one barrier, but it's the big barrier, as far as I'm concerned. And not as good as Office? That's a matter of opinion. I'm using it in preference to Office, not through any cultish behaviour, but because I honestly prefer it.
why will the Chinese like Linux any better than American companies
Oh, read what I bloody well wrote. They don't have to like it, they just have to not dislike it enough to go to the bother of replacing it if it's already there and does everything they need it to do.
It never worked on the desktop and now it never will
Strange. I tried and disliked Red Hat 6.2 and StarOffice 5.2. Now I've tried SuSE 7.3 and StarOffice 6.0, and I love them. They are a genuine replacement for Windows. They work for me.
KDE and GNOME continue the pie fight and studiously avoid issues of usability or robustness
Ouch. I've been trolled. Serves me right for replying to an AC.
Go and give a recent KDE desktop a try, Mr Coward. It's been getting better and better. One day it might overcome even your gnawing cynicism and brighten up your empty life. Now come here and give me a hug. C'mon, little guy, it won't hurt.
the only way that Google or another search engine could find a page with credit card numbers or other 'secret' data, would be if that page was linked to from another page, and so on, leading back to a 'public' area of some web site.
As my first reply to this immediately got modded to 0, I'll post it again. I'll type slower this time to make it easier to understand.
Are the moderators not understanding that my parent is just repeating the second sentence of the Slashdot article, only in a less focussed way? Go and read the second sentence of the Slashdot article. Now, how is my parent "insightful", "interesting", or "informative"? Try "redundant".
When I take the bother to read the Slashdot article, then go and actually read the referenced offsite article, I do not then want to find that the highest modded post is just parroting one of the very simple points that's already been covered. It demonstrates that both the poster and the moderators haven't even done us the courtesy of reading more than the first sentence of the Slashdot article, let alone the reference source. That's lazy and rude, and I'm going to keep shouting that at +1 until my parent gets modded down, or I drop to 26 karma. Then I'll shut up, and the lunatics can run the asylum in peace.
Mod me down (off topic, redundant, flamebait, honest), but do us all a favour and mod the parent down first please. Many thanks.
Maybe Linux is catching on a little bit with enthusiasts (a few of my Chinese friends have heard of it, and you can easily find it in stores) but wrestling with some install and Corel's Office lookalike is just not worth the effort
Look, first read the article, then post a reply.
Here's the salient points. 10-15% of retail boxes in the DPRC* ship with Linux pre-installed. StarOffice 6 is about to be released. Put those two together, and you get something very slick and very usable. I accept that you haven't seen any sign of this on the ground, but the point being made is that the two factors together might be enough to persuade a few percent of people to not go to the bother of installing WinXP + Office 2002. And that's a damn sight more than in the USA.
(* I'll accept China's claim to be the Democratic People's Republic of China until I have it explained to me exactly why a system that uses a cabal of political appointees to choose a president is any better.)
As Microsoft takes steps to reduce piracy in China (including things like product activation),
Sorry, but I think we can discount product activation as an effective anti-commercial-piracy tool. It's aimed squarely at Harry Homeowner.
Nobody is going to pay the full price for Windows/Office - it's just not that much better. MS will either lose tons of market share, or they'll have to reduce the price in China.
Not necessarily. If the vast majority of M$ products are pirated in China, and StarOffice starts eating into few sales they do have, they would have to drop the price substantially and sell for tens of dollars, not hundreds. And they still won't necessarily get a big rise in sales. They actually have to undercut the pirated stuff (which means giving it away) and/or pay huge bribes (sorry, tributes) to Chinese law enforcement to crack down on the pirated stuff. Until they change the culture, they can't control the market in China like they do in the US and to a lesser extent Europe.
During their monopoly trial, Microsoft made the point that the price of Windows doesn't have to be as low as it is. The admitted quite freely that they were had a monopoly strangehold, and that there were already plenty of people locked into using it, and that their figures showed their maximum profit point (after lost sales) to be at $800 a copy. Their point was that they weren't gouging these customers, even though they could. Strange way to make a point, but it seems to have worked out OK for them.
There's no reason why they can't operate on this basis in China. Target a few markets (e.g. government), gouge them on price, and pay for plenty of jackboot audits to keep them honest. If the bottom falls out of the market there, well, they aren't making money as it is, so no loss.
the only way that Google or another search engine could find a page with credit card numbers or other 'secret' data, would be if that page was linked to from another page, and so on, leading back to a 'public' area of some web site.
Do you always feel the need to recap the second god damn sentence in articles? And you get modded up? Has someone been handing out free beer with each bunch of moderator points today?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It does promote development of software for the MS Windows platform, but commercial games development for Linux is in a bad way anyway, and we can hardly blame Transgaming for that.
However, as a user, if I can take a game off of the shelf and run it on a Linux system, what do I care if it was developed for another OS? "Oh, Microsoft Windows, is that thing still going?". What Transgaming should be ( and I think are) doing is persuading Windows developers to test their stuff on WineX. If they can convince them that for a few days work, they could get even a 1% hike in sales, they might succeed, and a few days work by fifty games companies will save Transgaming a hell of a lot of work in trying to make the platform fit the game.
As an ex-commercial games developer, I'll stick my oar in and say that most games projects don't consider cross platform issues until well into development. If it's a choice between getting a version to market for one platform, or waiting six months or a year to add multiple platforms, most publishers will press for option 1 on economic grounds (which is why it will be great if Transgaming can persuade even a few of them to tweak for WineX on the basis that it's a cheap way to break into a new platform). In other words: there's never time to do it right, but always time to do it twice. ;-)
Yes. Further to that, I wonder how it's being distributed, because Transgaming claim that:
Any idea if the Macrovision Safedisc code is in there? (I know, I know, I'll find out myself tonight).
BTW^2, the your you're thinking of is "you're" as in "you are", not "your" as in the possessive. Hehe. ;-)
What's so dangerous about hydrogen in "ANY" situation? AFAIK, the big danger is leakage during storage, which is harder to detect than a leak of hydrocarbon vapour. A leak in use - in a moving vehicle - isn't significantly more likely than a hydrocarbon leak, nor more dangerous, as you have to be very unlucky to achieve the right fuel/air mixture at the right ignition point for sustained combustion.
Is this some Hindenburgh knee jerk response? The Hindenburgh was painted in a substance not dissimilar to rocket fuel, and even so, 61 of the 97 people on board survived. That's a pretty good survival rate for an aircraft that exploded on landing.
References that demonstrate the danger of hydrogen in "ANY" situation would be greatly appreciated.
Uh, the major cause of suffering for Kuwaitis has been the DUP's and unexploded ordinance dropped inside Kuwait by the good old US of A.
I'm actually agreeing with your point, I'm just saying that there never was an ethical or moral motivation in the Gulf War. It was purely pragmatic: restore the regional balance of power, prop up a friendly dictatorship (sorry, "monarchy"), try out some new war toys, score a huge PR coup. And oil, oil, oil.
Same age as Wil Wheaton. Why, are you looking for friendship, perhaps leading to a romantic involvement? Got pictures? ;-)
Seriously, I'm old enough to be comfortable enjoying content for its inherent quality rather than because it's targetted at my demographic. Sabrina is one of the best written and acted shows out there, in any market. Incidentally, it's very popular in prisons. Go figure.
And let's not forget that we're discussing a superhero show based on a comic book and a cartoon, by the way. ;-)
Why oh why do I torture myself biting AC trolls? Ah well...
Yes, I read the article. As you didn't read (or comprehend) my post, I'll type very, very slowly:
It. Was. A. Nice. Article. But. I'd. Prefer. More. Articles. That. Compared. Systems. On. Retail. Price. Rather. Than. On. Specification.
That's my point. Not any other point that you imagine I made. Respond to that, if you will.
I've lost count of the number of systems that I've built, all on a tight budget and mostly for general purpose use with some gaming.
NIC's aren't free. They're cheap, but not free. Same for sound. GeForce2MX is not, as you happily assert, a stupid choice. It's not ideal, but it offers astonishing bang-per-buck. The "little extra" for the Ultra compared to a basic GeForce2 MX 200 is (UK retail price) £180 ~= $270 and the Ultra is becoming harder to find. Do try and keep up.
When I build a system for myself, or friends or family, I start with a budget. A fixed one. I don't say "But for just a little more, I can have...". I squeeze everywhere, cutting on the stuff that I don't care too much about (NIC, sound, gfx on some systems) to buy what I do care about long term - CPU, RAM, HDD, CD-burner.
Your comments show that you completely missed my point about bang-per-buck, but fortunately your coward status mean that I don't have to care. Bah. I wave my paw dismissively at you.
Quite right. Sorry, I do a lot of compiling, so the extra crunching works out to a good compromise. That gets back to my original point though; if you're really looking for a game solution, then the price difference in the tested systems works out to the cost of a PS2 or Xbox!
(before anyone points out that sex != profanity, the quote is "... make Evil my bitch", which last I checked was primarily a sexual proposition)
Yeah, how about that shadowy figure, CleverNickName
We could get some washed up 29 year old ex-child actor to play him! I wonder if Corey Haim? is available. ;-)
Hardly. Sex sells. I was watching Grosse Pointe the other night, and was surprised to see vibrator based plot at 7:30pm.
I'm not complaining (hey, a post coital Lindsay Sloane is OK in my book), I was just surprised. And I can't say that I'm not a little disappointed that the Tick couldn't be rather more circumspect and clever. Ah well, early days.
No, I can't picture the Tick saying that. It's like Big Bird smacking Elmo around, or like this sweet little South Park interlude:
Fat Abbot: Hey hey hey. What's goin on Rudy?
Rudy: Man, Fat Abbot, you need to lose weight.
Fat Abbot: I lose weight when I feel like it bitch! Shut your bitch ass mouth hoe!
Rudy: Bitch I'll kick yo ass!
Kyle: Whoa dude!
Stan: Sweet!
Fat Abbot: You think you slick you punk ass blasphemous dopefeed bitch. I had my Jimmy waxed 7 times last week. I busta cap in yo nigga ass shit.
Stan: Wow cartoons are getting really dirty.
I'm not pushing any particular agenda here, I nearly choked lauging at Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, but on the other hand, I admire the highly disciplined writing and performances that make Sabrina the Teenage Witch more fun than a barrel full of monkeys, while still 100% kiddie friendly.
Perhaps this was funnier in context, but it's got the ring of lazy writing to it. Roll on the UK release so that I can find out. ;-)
No way, he'd just hit on Captain Liberty and end up getting bitch slapped.
And a NIC. I go for integrated boards (at least sound + NIC) simply because it allows me to buy a faster processor and more RAM, which pretty much negates the advantage of the bare bones performance board. Before the nForce, I wouldn't have gone down the integrated gfx route, but really, a GeForce2MX paired with an Athlon 1800+ is a pretty good solution right now. Off the top of my head, I work the KT266A + GeForce3 solution as about $300 more than the equivelant nForce before adding processor and RAM, and that's a pretty big differential.
Phew, another article that focusses on overclocking potential and absolute performance. All well and good, but I'd like to see Tom's doing more comparisons on total component price and bang per buck and not try and match specifications without regard to the retail price. When I upgrade, I pick a budget first, then go shopping to see what I can get for that money. The price difference between a fully integrated nForce and a bare VIA + NIC + GeForce2 + sound means I can afford to put a significantly faster processor and a shedload more RAM in the nForce. There's a tradeoff in that it's harder to upgrade piecemeal, but I choose not to do that anyway as I find that it's cheaper and more rewarding to make infrequent larger upgrades, and easier to find a deserving home for the old hardware if it can form the substantial core of a box.
Informative article, but it's once again aimed at the geek who simply has to have the rootinist, tootinist fastest system west of the Pecos, with cost not an issue. Note to Tom's; for those of us who don't get free hardware, cost is always an issue. ;-)
Here's something to bear in mind. Anyone who hasn't been following Wil's career would take him at face value too, and not realise that he was playing an (ill advised) part. We know better, but the vast majority of the audience won't.
So let's not be too hasty to judge Roxann. Wil and Roxann were basically doing live improv, and that's a pain to do with someone you don't know. I'd rather assume that they got their wires crossed and both escalated their jerkwad/bitch roles without realising that one of them needed to defuse it by turning it into a joke.
That said... just in case it wasn't an act on her part... hey, girl, you ain't all that. Wil's a lot finer than you. :-)
It's a shame, but honest open people do tend to assume that other folk will have the necessary clue to get the joke, rather than taking them at face value. Ouch, Wil, you should have remembered that most of us had a hard enough time separating Wesley and Wil, without reenforcing that by playing Jerkwad Wil.
On that matter, we seem to be assuming that Roxann really is a dumb bitch. Maybe she was just playing too, and we're too dumb to get the joke. ;-)
That said, I don't think Wil needs to worry. Anyone who has been keeping track of him will get the joke. Anyone who hasn't probably remembers him as that irritating little geek from Next Gen anyway and was already predisposed to hate him.
He could have played it better, but cest la vie, I doubt if he's actually lost any credibility or fans. And he got his face and name on TV, along with the EFF. Any publicity is good publicity, right?
Yes, he's already said that was a collosal pooch fuck. He made the mistake of playing a character that's about as far removed from himself as possible, without realising that very few people actually know that, and will take him at face value. D'oh
But on the other hand, what the heck. Any publicity is good publicity, right?
Bollocks. Unless they've very different to you and me, they'll want a system that comes pre-installed with what they want. They won't want to go through the (small) bother of installing Windows themselves.
That's rather the point. If you've got a system that does everything you need, why spend even an hour fiddling around with it?
Because it takes an hour. US users are lazy idiots. Why would Chinese ones be any different? And Red Flag Linux doesn't support the language? Riiiight.
Oh, really? Sure, it's "me too", but we've established that users are stupid and lazy. They want more of what they already know. It's one barrier, but it's the big barrier, as far as I'm concerned. And not as good as Office? That's a matter of opinion. I'm using it in preference to Office, not through any cultish behaviour, but because I honestly prefer it.
Oh, read what I bloody well wrote. They don't have to like it, they just have to not dislike it enough to go to the bother of replacing it if it's already there and does everything they need it to do.
Strange. I tried and disliked Red Hat 6.2 and StarOffice 5.2. Now I've tried SuSE 7.3 and StarOffice 6.0, and I love them. They are a genuine replacement for Windows. They work for me.
Ouch. I've been trolled. Serves me right for replying to an AC.
Go and give a recent KDE desktop a try, Mr Coward. It's been getting better and better. One day it might overcome even your gnawing cynicism and brighten up your empty life. Now come here and give me a hug. C'mon, little guy, it won't hurt.
As my first reply to this immediately got modded to 0, I'll post it again. I'll type slower this time to make it easier to understand.
Are the moderators not understanding that my parent is just repeating the second sentence of the Slashdot article, only in a less focussed way? Go and read the second sentence of the Slashdot article. Now, how is my parent "insightful", "interesting", or "informative"? Try "redundant".
When I take the bother to read the Slashdot article, then go and actually read the referenced offsite article, I do not then want to find that the highest modded post is just parroting one of the very simple points that's already been covered. It demonstrates that both the poster and the moderators haven't even done us the courtesy of reading more than the first sentence of the Slashdot article, let alone the reference source. That's lazy and rude, and I'm going to keep shouting that at +1 until my parent gets modded down, or I drop to 26 karma. Then I'll shut up, and the lunatics can run the asylum in peace.
Mod me down (off topic, redundant, flamebait, honest), but do us all a favour and mod the parent down first please. Many thanks.
Look, first read the article, then post a reply.
Here's the salient points. 10-15% of retail boxes in the DPRC* ship with Linux pre-installed. StarOffice 6 is about to be released. Put those two together, and you get something very slick and very usable. I accept that you haven't seen any sign of this on the ground, but the point being made is that the two factors together might be enough to persuade a few percent of people to not go to the bother of installing WinXP + Office 2002. And that's a damn sight more than in the USA.
(* I'll accept China's claim to be the Democratic People's Republic of China until I have it explained to me exactly why a system that uses a cabal of political appointees to choose a president is any better.)
Sorry, but I think we can discount product activation as an effective anti-commercial-piracy tool. It's aimed squarely at Harry Homeowner.
Not necessarily. If the vast majority of M$ products are pirated in China, and StarOffice starts eating into few sales they do have, they would have to drop the price substantially and sell for tens of dollars, not hundreds. And they still won't necessarily get a big rise in sales. They actually have to undercut the pirated stuff (which means giving it away) and/or pay huge bribes (sorry, tributes) to Chinese law enforcement to crack down on the pirated stuff. Until they change the culture, they can't control the market in China like they do in the US and to a lesser extent Europe.
During their monopoly trial, Microsoft made the point that the price of Windows doesn't have to be as low as it is. The admitted quite freely that they were had a monopoly strangehold, and that there were already plenty of people locked into using it, and that their figures showed their maximum profit point (after lost sales) to be at $800 a copy. Their point was that they weren't gouging these customers, even though they could. Strange way to make a point, but it seems to have worked out OK for them.
There's no reason why they can't operate on this basis in China. Target a few markets (e.g. government), gouge them on price, and pay for plenty of jackboot audits to keep them honest. If the bottom falls out of the market there, well, they aren't making money as it is, so no loss.
Uh, wait... Red Flag Linux doesn't sell a properly localised version?
Is that really the case, or is there some other issue? It's easier to get pirated copies of Windows than of Red Flag perhaps?
Do you always feel the need to recap the second god damn sentence in articles? And you get modded up? Has someone been handing out free beer with each bunch of moderator points today? ;-)