If these people could expand on this concept and come up with a Morrowind model that spans across a few continents instead of one...
It already exists.
And it's actually called The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. And it's one of my favorite games ever. One order of magnitude above Morrowind in terms of freedom. If you've already covered 75% of Morrowind's map, well, just imagine that after playing Daggerfall for a year I hadn't even been in all the available subregions. To visit every place would take years and years. There are tens of thousands of them.
The plot is great, very complex and political, and very non-linear. There are hundreds of factions, some you can join and some you can't, and all of them will have opinions about you depending on who you serve and who you betray.
Heck, after finishing it, I still kept playing my character again and again because there were things I wanted to investigate after reading about them in books in some of the many libraries you'll find around. Turned out the things in question had indeed been implemented in the game. Wabbajack, Wabbajack, Wabbajack...
Note that most of the game is randomly-generated, so the landscape and day-to-day missions may feel repetitive after a while, but they still somehow manage to feel very engrossing. Possibly because some of them can't be completed. It's a very interesting phase of character development when you're driven to expatriate yourself because you fucked up a mission and started hearing rumors about how much you suck.:)
Also note that the game is possibly one of the buggiest ever made. But its qualities are otherwise so great that you'll keep coming back to it.
ATi only ships binary drivers, and they are rather buggy so far.
Bullshit.
The Radeon drivers are as open as ATI could make them -- all the functions they had to keep closed for whatever pointy-haired reason are exported into a static lib, so that all the rest could be open-sourced. Want to compile them against a custom kernel such as Gentoo's? Sure, you can, the drivers are designed so that this is absolutely possible.
As for buggy, I own a 3rd party card built around an ATI chip, the worst-case scenario, and I would sincerely like to know what you mean by 'rather buggy'. Outside pure FUD, of course.
So cut them some slack. You like your nVidia card, it's cool, I'm happy for you. But if you don't reward companies that get out of their way to provide us minority Linux folks with good drivers, like ATI did, then you provide strictly no incentive for those companies to support us. So let's drop the dick^W GPU contest and stop peeing in the soup, hmm? Thank you.
I'd hate to see this silent majority gradually lose the system they love as Linux is transformed into a Windows clone by vendors and project leaders who give too much credence to the voices of pundits
Erm, have you been using any Windows recently?
I am made to use Windows at work, and the interface is just plain freaking backwards.
STILL no virtual desktop, making it awkward to develop with an IDE in full screen mode while keeping some documentation open at the same time.
STILL no way to control, resize, or move a window at ALL if the app is busy (or frozen, for that matter)! I mean, it's, what, almost year 2003? On what is supposed to be a friendly OS?!
In terms of GUI convenience, KDE is a fucking order of magnitude ahead of Windows, man. Still much lagging behind MacOS X, but then, what isn't.
I don't know for Gnome, but KDE is freaking NOT being turned into a Windows clone. Take a look at the KDE framework, one day. That thing is fucking brilliant. Want to make it look and behave like Windows (without such retarded 'features' as the windows unmovable when busy)? Sure, you can. That's how my mother's account on my box works. And guess what, she can find her way around it out of the box. Want to make it completely different in the way YOU need it? Sure, you can. Want to lock features to make an easy to use but impossible to corrupt kiosk? Sure, you can!
What is it with people bleating that we shouldn't keep running after the Windows world? We've passed them MONTHS ago, people!
Now Linux as an OS still has some serious usability issues (primarily, there's no global software installation system that Just Works[*], that's the biggest showstopper right now), but in terms of GUI, the Windows world is severely lagging behind. I switched to Linux out of laziness, for crying out loud!
[*] I've tried to stir up discussion about that a couple time, but most of the Linux community seems to have an inertia you wouldn't believe. The answers were basically, "Shut up and use apt-get", "Shut up and use RPM", or "shut up and use configure; make; make install". Erm, hello? I can and do use any of those. But my mom and my (now ex, sigh) girlfriend can't. Now, why should it matter? Well, we want people to port their software to Linux, and that implies, giving them a way to make it easy to distribute their software in a global way. I've spent a while thinking about possible solutions to that most hairy problem, but I guess that's food for another thread. This post is long and ranty enough as it is.
Okay, so the Germans were bad in 1940, and ATI were bad in 2000. Now guess what? It's year 2002, almost 2003. Germany changed, and from the look of it ATI changed too. Enough as to acknowledge a small market that won't bring them any significant money anyway. They've been churning out driver releases steadily, immediately correcting the pointed out problems (lack of support for 3rd party boards), correcting bugs, improving speed. Oh my God, actual customer support! Of course customer support is pure marketing. That doesn't mean it's any less good for us. Linux has little to NO economical weight in the high-end 3D board market, so giving us an actually good driver is pure PR -- something that won't bring in any immediate money. In other words, ATI is actually showing long-term thought here! That's good!
And as for Mac drivers, alright, they SHOULD have been made. And Apple SHOULD have requested them! Who put the ATI card in your Powerbook in the first place? Yet I don't see you blaming the computer builder. If I bought a PC that didn't come with the driver for its own freaking video card I'd be very upset at whomever designed and sold that PC.
Now of course if you bought the ATI card as a 3rd party upgrade, it's different, alright, but from your post I gather it's not the case.
Anyway. ATI support was shitty, now it has improved considerably. That's commendable, but it will only go on if we send positive feedback. So let's keep the misdirected bitterness in check, and give ATI a chance to redeem themselves before we flame, hmm?
And, BTW, yes, I've owned a Radeon 8500 for months, and yes, I was very angry when it turned out there was little to no support for my primary OS, so I know about the bitterness. It still doesn't mean I shouldn't rejoice and send positive feedback when the situation starts improving dramatically. Heck, even 2D support is significantly faster with the latest version of the driver!
If the trend goes on, maybe I'll even consider making my next video card another ATI. We'll see if they deserve it.
I would be *VERY* interesting in knowing how you got XVideo to work with this driver. I've just installed it on my Gentoo, and XVideo just doesn't work. The XVideo extension is advertised as having been loaded in XFree.log, but xvinfo says it isn't. Durn it.
If you ever get a chance to go to Paris, be sure to spend some time at the Arts et Metiers Museum. Clement Ader's Avion III is still exposed there, hanging from a ceiling, and it's an extremely impressive sight to behold. It's very humbling to think that this guy spent decades inventing that machine, and tried it, and actually managed to fly in it. Damn, that makes look our daily bickering on/. so petty.
Erm. It may not always be that obvious (*coughspellingcough*), but Slashdot mainly uses the English language. Now try to correlate the proportion of Euros who speak English with the results of the poll, and you may have your answer.:)
I'm about as atheist as it goes, so don't take me wrong, but I think that Larry's point still stands.
Be it only because when shit happens (and sooner or later, shit does happen), it's much easier to live through it if you've got a blind belief that there's a benevolent, powerful being up there who is looking after you personally, and all the more so that you're in need for it.
That's actually a religion's major selling point, when you think of it.
Never sign up anywhere with a real email address.
Instead, get an account on Spamgourmet, and you'll have as many disposable email addresses as necessary, that will work only as many times as you want. Then they become a direct link to/dev/null, and you never hear about them again.
> are there protections in place to stop > companies obtaining this information?
Yep: it's just plain illegal. In a country where bigcorps don't have it as easy as in the U.S., it works very well.
I've lived in Denmark a while back, and they're socially well ahead of most other countries. It could be extremely profitable to admit that we're lagging behind, and try and see what they do well, and how. Instead of, say, assuming that because they don't do like us, it is 'bad'.
Well, we all know that this kind of ID already exists in many countries, and is called SS#.
Alright.
Now here's some food for thought: In some countries (well, only one that I know of), storing personal information in a database is strictly regulated: among other things, you are NOT allowed to use a person's SS# as a database key.
And it works. Banks, insurance companies, etc, can drool over people SS#, but they just plain can't use it (unless they want to be in a lot of trouble -- that country seems to be less bigcorp-friendly than the U.S.).
This may or may not work in the U.S., but it's still an interesting thing to ponder, I think.
Oh, where are the mod points when you need them. My good man, I agree with you SO entirely. I've been ranting about those points regularly since I switched my girlfriend to Linux (and more precisely, Mandrake) and analyzed her reactions to the system.
There's also one point you may have overlooked: if we want hardware makers to write device drivers, then we need to make writing drivers WAY easier. There are efforts underway (like the ALSA architecture for sound devices), but we're still not there yet. If you want to, say, write a driver for an USB tablet, then you'll need to 1) modify the HID kernel driver slightly, so that it won't get hold of the tablet and try to use it with the standard HID-mouse driver; 2) add the kernel module for your tablet; and 3) add the X driver for the XInput support of your tablet. And I leave out the hassle that is getting X configured right.
How the heck is an USB tablet vendor supposed to write a generic Linux driver in those conditions?
This said, it might be that you don't give Lycoris enough credit. I haven't tested it (can you download the distro from their site, BTW?), but if you look at those screenshots, they've got 1) a hardware installer utility, 2) a software installer utility, and 3) a X configuration utility. So it might be that they have figured out the real issues after all. We can hope, anyway. I wish them good luck. We'll all need it.
My mom didn't install Linux. She wouldn't be able to do it. And she didn't install Windows either.She wouldn't be able to do it.
Because I'm the neighborhood's computer guy, I get plenty of pleas for help with people's computers when they 'break'. Guess what? They're all running Windows, and people are still stuck when it doesn't work. Heck, once I had to install a printer for a friend of my father's, which was as easy as: 1) plug it in the USB port; 2) it's done, it works. And yet the guy wouldn't do it himself.
Now, don't take me wrong: there are several serious usability problems with Linux (mainly: X is a bitch to configure, and there's no simple click-and-install software installation system -- see my other post about this). But for someone who wouldn't try to install software or change the configuration (which means, for the most clueless users), Linux does work pretty fine.
Never ever show Gentoo/Slackware/Debian to your family and tell them "That's Linux".
From their point of view (it's very important to try to see things from their point of view), that 'Linux' thing is like Windows: one single thing, set in stone. It is not obvious to them that there as many kinds of Linux as there are types of needs to fulfill.
If you're gonna evangelize your family, FIRST tell them that your Linux is geeky because you wanted it so, but that if you were to install them a Linux of their own on their computer, you'd choose an easy-to-use version. Success stories with, say, Mandrake, abound: I switched my girlfriend from Windows to Mandrake and she's very happy with it. Do NOT try to convince them to use your Slackware/Gentoo/Debian. You'll scare them off.
On the other hand, it can go a long way if you make them an account on your machine, add plenty of links on the desktop so that they never have so see a command-line, and then let them play around with KDE, PySol (a *great* solitaire game that many moms seem to love), Konqueror (or Mozilla, or Opera), Open Office, etc. It also helps to use the Redmond theme at the beginning, so that they feel 'at home'. Also be sure to tell them that the system is secure, and they CAN'T mess it up even if they tried to. You can even try to explain them the concept of privilege separation, if you feel able to put it in simple words.
It worked pretty fine for me. My family knows that 1) my computer is geeky because I wanted it so, but Linux is much more versatile than that; 2) The desktop (KDE) is pretty fine and sleek, and easy to use; and 3) There are lotsa nice apps.
Result: my dad is gonna get a new computer soon, and he told me he wants to remove the mandatory preinstalled XP, and put a 98 (that's what he's used to) AND a Linux.
This said, there's still a major usability issue with Linux, the way I see it: there's still no easy way to install new software. When my girlfriend wanted to install the Psi instant manager, I couldn't get her to install it herself. It was too complicated to hunt for the right lib RPMs and everything.
We must design a non-centralized, click-and-install way to package Linux software. And no, RPM doesn't cut it: if you try to install some stuff that wasn't packaged for your distro, or you don't have the right lib installed, or whatever, it'll often fail. Portage and apt-get don't cut it either: they're centralized things, and there's thus no easy way for the amateur software developper to, say, offer his software for download on his Web page. Well, you can put.deb files for download, but then you'll still be stuck with the dependancy problem.
I've started working on it, but it's an extremely tricky problem, because, due to the nature of Linux, we can make no assumption about what libs are installed. Anyone wants to contribute ideas?
Actually, some companies did try originality. Let's take, say, Looking Glass. Those guys made *EXCELLENT* games. Thief revolutionized the FPS concept. Thief 2 is one of my fav games ever, and one of the very few remotely recent games that I consider worth my time.
Next thing you know, Looking Glass bites the dust.
Why?
My idea is that if you're reaching for the masses (and if you want to make money with a $50 game, you'd better reach for the masses), you'll have to aim for the masses' Lowest Common Denominator. Kind of like McD, if you want: they sell cheap crap that is successful worldwide because it's the lowest common denominator of food. Maybe it goes the same for games, and the suits, whose priority is to make the most money out of the game, will only approve games with the most basic gameplay...
Think of it: Microsoft acts like they're in a position to negotiate. And if there's something we've learned by now, it's that they may be crooks, but they're definitely not stupid.
Actually, I think Dave Winer wrote something about it (can't find the link though -- sorry!). Maybe there's indeed something MSFT can negotiate: government access to people's data. Remember that thing about the FBI wanting to spread viral spyware? I'm sorry, but that just didn't make sense -- why would they spread malware at random and hope to infect the right terrorists^Wpersons? Either they're clueless... or it's a cover-up story. I certainly hope they're clueless.
Gosh. I dearly hope I'm being paranoid here. Not that I use Microsoft software, of course... But still, that such a thing could happen scares the bejeesus out of me. Please tell me I'm wrong!
For the records, I *LOVED* my AWE 64 Gold, and I still love it.
Thing is, it was an ISA card, and I finally upgraded my motherboard recently. Needless to say... No ISA slot (which is otherwise a good thing, of course).
As far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't ever have needed to upgrade it, wasn't it for an external factor.
Oh, and sometimes when I look in the task manager under windows after completely thinking I closed mozilla, I'll still see mozilla.exe running, and have to kill it from the process manager in windows 2000.
It is truely an annoyance. I suggest you do the same with explorer.exe.:)
Slashdot Mirror
If these people could expand on this concept and come up with a Morrowind model that spans across a few continents instead of one...
:)
It already exists.
And it's actually called The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. And it's one of my favorite games ever. One order of magnitude above Morrowind in terms of freedom. If you've already covered 75% of Morrowind's map, well, just imagine that after playing Daggerfall for a year I hadn't even been in all the available subregions. To visit every place would take years and years. There are tens of thousands of them.
The plot is great, very complex and political, and very non-linear. There are hundreds of factions, some you can join and some you can't, and all of them will have opinions about you depending on who you serve and who you betray.
Heck, after finishing it, I still kept playing my character again and again because there were things I wanted to investigate after reading about them in books in some of the many libraries you'll find around. Turned out the things in question had indeed been implemented in the game. Wabbajack, Wabbajack, Wabbajack...
Note that most of the game is randomly-generated, so the landscape and day-to-day missions may feel repetitive after a while, but they still somehow manage to feel very engrossing. Possibly because some of them can't be completed. It's a very interesting phase of character development when you're driven to expatriate yourself because you fucked up a mission and started hearing rumors about how much you suck.
Also note that the game is possibly one of the buggiest ever made. But its qualities are otherwise so great that you'll keep coming back to it.
ATi only ships binary drivers, and they are rather buggy so far.
Bullshit.
The Radeon drivers are as open as ATI could make them -- all the functions they had to keep closed for whatever pointy-haired reason are exported into a static lib, so that all the rest could be open-sourced. Want to compile them against a custom kernel such as Gentoo's? Sure, you can, the drivers are designed so that this is absolutely possible.
As for buggy, I own a 3rd party card built around an ATI chip, the worst-case scenario, and I would sincerely like to know what you mean by 'rather buggy'. Outside pure FUD, of course.
So cut them some slack. You like your nVidia card, it's cool, I'm happy for you. But if you don't reward companies that get out of their way to provide us minority Linux folks with good drivers, like ATI did, then you provide strictly no incentive for those companies to support us. So let's drop the dick^W GPU contest and stop peeing in the soup, hmm? Thank you.
Rant over.
Microsoft put little more than a CDDB lookup into their player.
Err. Mind explaining what kind of use a CDDB lookup might have for DVDs?
I'd hate to see this silent majority gradually lose the system they love as Linux is transformed into a Windows clone by vendors and project leaders who give too much credence to the voices of pundits
Erm, have you been using any Windows recently?
I am made to use Windows at work, and the interface is just plain freaking backwards.
STILL no virtual desktop, making it awkward to develop with an IDE in full screen mode while keeping some documentation open at the same time.
STILL no way to control, resize, or move a window at ALL if the app is busy (or frozen, for that matter)! I mean, it's, what, almost year 2003? On what is supposed to be a friendly OS?!
In terms of GUI convenience, KDE is a fucking order of magnitude ahead of Windows, man. Still much lagging behind MacOS X, but then, what isn't.
I don't know for Gnome, but KDE is freaking NOT being turned into a Windows clone. Take a look at the KDE framework, one day. That thing is fucking brilliant. Want to make it look and behave like Windows (without such retarded 'features' as the windows unmovable when busy)? Sure, you can. That's how my mother's account on my box works. And guess what, she can find her way around it out of the box. Want to make it completely different in the way YOU need it? Sure, you can. Want to lock features to make an easy to use but impossible to corrupt kiosk? Sure, you can!
What is it with people bleating that we shouldn't keep running after the Windows world? We've passed them MONTHS ago, people!
Now Linux as an OS still has some serious usability issues (primarily, there's no global software installation system that Just Works[*], that's the biggest showstopper right now), but in terms of GUI, the Windows world is severely lagging behind. I switched to Linux out of laziness, for crying out loud!
[*] I've tried to stir up discussion about that a couple time, but most of the Linux community seems to have an inertia you wouldn't believe. The answers were basically, "Shut up and use apt-get", "Shut up and use RPM", or "shut up and use configure; make; make install". Erm, hello? I can and do use any of those. But my mom and my (now ex, sigh) girlfriend can't. Now, why should it matter? Well, we want people to port their software to Linux, and that implies, giving them a way to make it easy to distribute their software in a global way. I've spent a while thinking about possible solutions to that most hairy problem, but I guess that's food for another thread. This post is long and ranty enough as it is.
Anyway. Rant over. Flame with moderation, thanks.
You can write commercial Qt/X11 applications as long as they're GPLed.
Don't mix up commercial and closed source.
Okay, so the Germans were bad in 1940, and ATI were bad in 2000. Now guess what? It's year 2002, almost 2003. Germany changed, and from the look of it ATI changed too. Enough as to acknowledge a small market that won't bring them any significant money anyway. They've been churning out driver releases steadily, immediately correcting the pointed out problems (lack of support for 3rd party boards), correcting bugs, improving speed. Oh my God, actual customer support! Of course customer support is pure marketing. That doesn't mean it's any less good for us. Linux has little to NO economical weight in the high-end 3D board market, so giving us an actually good driver is pure PR -- something that won't bring in any immediate money. In other words, ATI is actually showing long-term thought here! That's good!
And as for Mac drivers, alright, they SHOULD have been made. And Apple SHOULD have requested them! Who put the ATI card in your Powerbook in the first place? Yet I don't see you blaming the computer builder. If I bought a PC that didn't come with the driver for its own freaking video card I'd be very upset at whomever designed and sold that PC.
Now of course if you bought the ATI card as a 3rd party upgrade, it's different, alright, but from your post I gather it's not the case.
Anyway. ATI support was shitty, now it has improved considerably. That's commendable, but it will only go on if we send positive feedback. So let's keep the misdirected bitterness in check, and give ATI a chance to redeem themselves before we flame, hmm?
And, BTW, yes, I've owned a Radeon 8500 for months, and yes, I was very angry when it turned out there was little to no support for my primary OS, so I know about the bitterness. It still doesn't mean I shouldn't rejoice and send positive feedback when the situation starts improving dramatically. Heck, even 2D support is significantly faster with the latest version of the driver!
If the trend goes on, maybe I'll even consider making my next video card another ATI. We'll see if they deserve it.
Greetings, dear AC,
I would be *VERY* interesting in knowing how you got XVideo to work with this driver. I've just installed it on my Gentoo, and XVideo just doesn't work. The XVideo extension is advertised as having been loaded in XFree.log, but xvinfo says it isn't. Durn it.
Thanks in advance!
Even though the aeroplane was "invented" right here in the good old U. S. of A, a lot of the technical language describing it is French.
:)
/. so petty.
For a good reason, my friend...
Prior art.
If you ever get a chance to go to Paris, be sure to spend some time at the Arts et Metiers Museum. Clement Ader's Avion III is still exposed there, hanging from a ceiling, and it's an extremely impressive sight to behold. It's very humbling to think that this guy spent decades inventing that machine, and tried it, and actually managed to fly in it. Damn, that makes look our daily bickering on
Erm. It may not always be that obvious (*coughspellingcough*), but Slashdot mainly uses the English language. Now try to correlate the proportion of Euros who speak English with the results of the poll, and you may have your answer. :)
I'm about as atheist as it goes, so don't take me wrong, but I think that Larry's point still stands.
Be it only because when shit happens (and sooner or later, shit does happen), it's much easier to live through it if you've got a blind belief that there's a benevolent, powerful being up there who is looking after you personally, and all the more so that you're in need for it.
That's actually a religion's major selling point, when you think of it.
Gratuitous guess: Prince.
I must say, I just love it, in a perverse kind of way, when MS actually pays Slashdot to host their own bashing.
:)
Sometimes, life's just too good.
Never sign up anywhere with a real email address. /dev/null, and you never hear about them again.
Instead, get an account on Spamgourmet, and you'll have as many disposable email addresses as necessary, that will work only as many times as you want. Then they become a direct link to
Seriously. This service rocks.
> are there protections in place to stop
> companies obtaining this information?
Yep: it's just plain illegal. In a country where bigcorps don't have it as easy as in the U.S., it works very well.
I've lived in Denmark a while back, and they're socially well ahead of most other countries. It could be extremely profitable to admit that we're lagging behind, and try and see what they do well, and how. Instead of, say, assuming that because they don't do like us, it is 'bad'.
Well, we all know that this kind of ID already exists in many countries, and is called SS#.
Alright.
Now here's some food for thought:
In some countries (well, only one that I know of), storing personal information in a database is strictly regulated: among other things, you are NOT allowed to use a person's SS# as a database key.
And it works. Banks, insurance companies, etc, can drool over people SS#, but they just plain can't use it (unless they want to be in a lot of trouble -- that country seems to be less bigcorp-friendly than the U.S.).
This may or may not work in the U.S., but it's still an interesting thing to ponder, I think.
Oh, where are the mod points when you need them.
My good man, I agree with you SO entirely. I've been ranting about those points regularly since I switched my girlfriend to Linux (and more precisely, Mandrake) and analyzed her reactions to the system.
There's also one point you may have overlooked: if we want hardware makers to write device drivers, then we need to make writing drivers WAY easier. There are efforts underway (like the ALSA architecture for sound devices), but we're still not there yet. If you want to, say, write a driver for an USB tablet, then you'll need to 1) modify the HID kernel driver slightly, so that it won't get hold of the tablet and try to use it with the standard HID-mouse driver; 2) add the kernel module for your tablet; and 3) add the X driver for the XInput support of your tablet. And I leave out the hassle that is getting X configured right. How the heck is an USB tablet vendor supposed to write a generic Linux driver in those conditions?
This said, it might be that you don't give Lycoris enough credit. I haven't tested it (can you download the distro from their site, BTW?), but if you look at those screenshots, they've got 1) a hardware installer utility, 2) a software installer utility, and 3) a X configuration utility. So it might be that they have figured out the real issues after all. We can hope, anyway. I wish them good luck. We'll all need it.
My mom didn't install Linux. She wouldn't be able to do it. And she didn't install Windows either.She wouldn't be able to do it.
Because I'm the neighborhood's computer guy, I get plenty of pleas for help with people's computers when they 'break'. Guess what? They're all running Windows, and people are still stuck when it doesn't work. Heck, once I had to install a printer for a friend of my father's, which was as easy as: 1) plug it in the USB port; 2) it's done, it works. And yet the guy wouldn't do it himself.
Now, don't take me wrong: there are several serious usability problems with Linux (mainly: X is a bitch to configure, and there's no simple click-and-install software installation system -- see my other post about this). But for someone who wouldn't try to install software or change the configuration (which means, for the most clueless users), Linux does work pretty fine.
Never ever show Gentoo/Slackware/Debian to your family and tell them "That's Linux".
.deb files for download, but then you'll still be stuck with the dependancy problem.
From their point of view (it's very important to try to see things from their point of view), that 'Linux' thing is like Windows: one single thing, set in stone. It is not obvious to them that there as many kinds of Linux as there are types of needs to fulfill.
If you're gonna evangelize your family, FIRST tell them that your Linux is geeky because you wanted it so, but that if you were to install them a Linux of their own on their computer, you'd choose an easy-to-use version. Success stories with, say, Mandrake, abound: I switched my girlfriend from Windows to Mandrake and she's very happy with it.
Do NOT try to convince them to use your Slackware/Gentoo/Debian. You'll scare them off.
On the other hand, it can go a long way if you make them an account on your machine, add plenty of links on the desktop so that they never have so see a command-line, and then let them play around with KDE, PySol (a *great* solitaire game that many moms seem to love), Konqueror (or Mozilla, or Opera), Open Office, etc. It also helps to use the Redmond theme at the beginning, so that they feel 'at home'. Also be sure to tell them that the system is secure, and they CAN'T mess it up even if they tried to. You can even try to explain them the concept of privilege separation, if you feel able to put it in simple words.
It worked pretty fine for me. My family knows that 1) my computer is geeky because I wanted it so, but Linux is much more versatile than that; 2) The desktop (KDE) is pretty fine and sleek, and easy to use; and 3) There are lotsa nice apps.
Result: my dad is gonna get a new computer soon, and he told me he wants to remove the mandatory preinstalled XP, and put a 98 (that's what he's used to) AND a Linux.
This said, there's still a major usability issue with Linux, the way I see it: there's still no easy way to install new software. When my girlfriend wanted to install the Psi instant manager, I couldn't get her to install it herself. It was too complicated to hunt for the right lib RPMs and everything.
We must design a non-centralized, click-and-install way to package Linux software. And no, RPM doesn't cut it: if you try to install some stuff that wasn't packaged for your distro, or you don't have the right lib installed, or whatever, it'll often fail. Portage and apt-get don't cut it either: they're centralized things, and there's thus no easy way for the amateur software developper to, say, offer his software for download on his Web page. Well, you can put
I've started working on it, but it's an extremely tricky problem, because, due to the nature of Linux, we can make no assumption about what libs are installed. Anyone wants to contribute ideas?
Actually, some companies did try originality. Let's take, say, Looking Glass. Those guys made *EXCELLENT* games. Thief revolutionized the FPS concept. Thief 2 is one of my fav games ever, and one of the very few remotely recent games that I consider worth my time.
Next thing you know, Looking Glass bites the dust.
Why?
My idea is that if you're reaching for the masses (and if you want to make money with a $50 game, you'd better reach for the masses), you'll have to aim for the masses' Lowest Common Denominator. Kind of like McD, if you want: they sell cheap crap that is successful worldwide because it's the lowest common denominator of food. Maybe it goes the same for games, and the suits, whose priority is to make the most money out of the game, will only approve games with the most basic gameplay...
Sad, indeed. Good thing there are mods...
Speaking of which... If you'd please inform someone who was living overseas at grade school age...
Is the pledge mandatory? What happens if a kid doesn't wish to recite it? What if the parents don't want their kids to do it?
That's probably a stupid question... But heck, I'd like to know.
Oh geeze, this thing rocks so hard I can barely stay on my chair. :)
I've already sent the link to dozens of friends. And you?
Yes, that's kinda scary, isn't it?
Think of it: Microsoft acts like they're in a position to negotiate. And if there's something we've learned by now, it's that they may be crooks, but they're definitely not stupid.
Actually, I think Dave Winer wrote something about it (can't find the link though -- sorry!). Maybe there's indeed something MSFT can negotiate: government access to people's data. Remember that thing about the FBI wanting to spread viral spyware? I'm sorry, but that just didn't make sense -- why would they spread malware at random and hope to infect the right terrorists^Wpersons? Either they're clueless... or it's a cover-up story. I certainly hope they're clueless.
Gosh. I dearly hope I'm being paranoid here. Not that I use Microsoft software, of course... But still, that such a thing could happen scares the bejeesus out of me. Please tell me I'm wrong!
For the records, I *LOVED* my AWE 64 Gold, and I still love it.
Thing is, it was an ISA card, and I finally upgraded my motherboard recently. Needless to say... No ISA slot (which is otherwise a good thing, of course).
As far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't ever have needed to upgrade it, wasn't it for an external factor.
Trains (at last in France) are nearly always on time
And the thing that definitely wins me is that if they're significantly late (over 30 min), they reimburse you.
Damn, those guys actually made it feasible for me to see my girlfriend regularly even when she had to go work in the north of France. They're good.
Oh, and sometimes when I look in the task manager under windows after completely thinking I closed mozilla, I'll still see mozilla.exe running, and have to kill it from the process manager in windows 2000.
:)
It is truely an annoyance. I suggest you do the same with explorer.exe.