It has little to do with the games. Waiting for some magical moment where everything happens and AAA games come out on stable, fast drivers is insanity.
What happens is you get a field-leader, like Steam. They start down the road of Linux. They get several HUNDREDS of games that weren't on Linux onto Linux by encouraging it. This now prompts stories like this where performance OF THE PROPRIETARY AND FREE GRAPHICS DRIVERS is brought to the fore.
The games aren't slow. The OS isn't slow. It's the graphics drivers. Now nVidia are shown up - pushing out flagship products from a major player but let down by the quality of Linux drivers. So they are now encouraged / bullied into making those drivers the equivalent of the Windows drivers. This makes those drivers more popular. More people are going to have cards that use them (even if just Steam Boxes). Now there's slightly more of an excuse for games developers to target Linux too. So now the quality of the drivers matters that little bit more. So nVidia/AMD improve the drivers a little more. Which encourages more benchmarks to show the leaps and bounds. So they get press from it. Which means more developers target SteamOS as part of their engines and platforms. And so on... ad infinitum.
We waited ten years for something to "Just Happen" in terms of graphic driver quality - both free and proprietary - to bring Linux drivers up to par with Windows. It didn't happen. So Valve are breaking the deadlock, removing the stalemate and saying "Your move, nVidia" - one of their partners, who is going to get bad press for having crap Linux drivers. nVidia will respond in time. And, incrementally, things will start to improve.
Good on Valve I say. Good for Linux. Probably not so good for nVidia et al but they've been dragging their feet anyway. And, ultimately, good for the consumer. But if we only used the one thing that worked and is top-speed and competitive and expensive, ATI/AMD wouldn't exist, Windows and nVidia would be on every console, and the situation would be even worse because of the lack of competition. Now that someone's seriously pushing gaming on Linux, and shows these shortfalls to the people SELLING PARTS OF THIS HARDWARE, there might well be a push to get more optimised drivers running on Linux for that hardware.
Can't help thinking about the information about George Boole that I was reading recently.
Despite being the father of swathes of logic, he died in the most illogical way possible.
He walked through the rain for miles, and lectured while still dripping wet for hours. He got ill. He laid up in bed. And his wife thought that the best cure for him was the same thing that made him ill. So she kept throwing buckets of water over him. Which made him worse. So she kept throwing more water over him. Until he died.
I just couldn't help laughing and wondering if he consented to such "treatment".
This is about the UK where we provide, like most civilised countries, free healthcare to all.
You won't get homeopathy for free, is what this says. If you want to piss your own money away on it, you're welcome - same as cosmetic surgery, unproven drugs, experimental treatments, Chinese medicine, etc.
But I as a taxpayer am not going to pay for your stupid, proven-no-better-than-placebo "treatments" in preference to buying someone else effective drugs or surgery that they need.
Although it may be technically possible to get them running, it's certainly not as easy as just copying the files across and running the program.
The fact that it is to do with weather suggests it interfaces with hardware of some kind or some external services. That's where you'll REALLY hit problems that just running as admin or renaming files or providing substitutes isn't going to fix.
Good luck getting a driver from the 3.1 era working on anything at all nowadays, even emulated. You would literally just be better off throwing it out, starting again and suffering the inconvenience.
All iOS web browsers use the WebKit API and don't actually render themselves. Others cheat by rendering on remote servers and showing you the result only, but it's not allowed to contain its own rendering engine.
This is how Chrome on iPad operates - it's not Chrome at all.
HTML parsers have to be mindful anyway. That's why scripts end with and nothing else (i.e. it's SUPPOSED to ignore any HTML tags within the script as well, in case the SCRIPT wants put push out HTML tags!).
">" is universally understood in mathematics "GT" relies on a knowledge of English, and what it stands for, and thus what it means.
But the bigger question - WHY does any language created nowadays have hard-coded operator names? If you prefer >, why not just use that and make it equivalent to GT in whatever default settings you provide? Why are you constrained to the choice of operators given to you and the mnemonics they choose to use?
However, arguing over it is pointless. Change if it you can, otherwise it doesn't matter. If you can change it, or overload it, or rename it, or macro-ise it as you like, than it doesn't matter either.
What you just made is called a boat. So why piss about floating that boat on a cushion of air when you could have just pointed that fan behind you and got a faster boat.
This is exactly the problem with hovercraft. Especially cargo-carrying. If you have to be bouyant enough to cope if the power fails, it's cheaper to let the power fail and be a boat instead.
Hovercraft have to LIFT their cargo. It's a stupendous waste of energy compared to other methods (floating their cargo, etc.). Only aircraft, hovercraft and things like cranes actually are required to lift their cargo and all take huge amounts of engineering and energy to do so.
For a quick sojourn across some water, it's a pointless waste of time and effort to lift the load up and then move it around, by blowing air at the floor - no matter how you skirt it. Helicopters are the only equivalent but they have low weight limits in comparison to everything else for the same reasons - they have to push air down with more energy than their load takes to lift directly.
As such, I'm not surprised that boats (where you just have to design to have enough bouyancy to counter-balance the load, and then enough energy to slide forward a little) are surpassing hovercraft.
Hovercraft's only advantage is to be able to seamlessly switch between sea and (relatively flat and open) land. Going beach-to-beach, that's an advantage, but that's quite a rare circumstance - you can't drop off tourist cars to a beach, for example, even between England and France (hell, the English side is mostly sheer cliff-face). And, let's face it, a duck-bus (amphibious vehicle) can do that too and they're dead in the water (sorry) as well.
Hovercraft are for niche transport, not anything common, heavy, en-masse, or sustained. I'm not surprised they're dying out.
Electric motors aren't going to save them either. That requires huge weights of batteries which are going to weigh more than their current fuel + engine to provide equivalent power. And, as such, play against their biggest weakness of having to lift their load up before they can move about.
It would strike me that a brute-force approach is pretty poor for this.
As the digits of the sequences are well-known and predictable, some ancient mathematical tricks (e.g. if the digits sum to a multiple of three, etc.) and a bit of algebra on the base-10 expression should surely yield more convincing proof one way or another than anything else, certainly if you'd got as far as they have by brute-force.
Anything ending is 2,4,5,6,8 or 0 is gone immediately as non-prime. Three, sixes and nines have rules similar to the above that operate on the digits of base-10 expression. It would seem to rule out vast swathes of such numbers. Past that, there's not much left to check at all.
But because the sequence is highly predictable and can only end in so many things, you're quickly only looking at massively large numbers as factors to see if they "hit".
You can just stream a huge virtual desktop from one PC and split it into a set of wall screens and stream each individual screen to a client as a normal video stream.
Waste of time, though, because you're destroying performance to do such things.
I'd suggest looking at the myriad over-the-top flight simulator systems people build, which just spend the money and buy a graphics card capable of natively driving that many screens.
I'm buying the cheapest Chinese LCD junk I can get my hand on, putting them up as digital signage, and leaving them on 24/7. So far, 18 months and not a sign of burn-in.
I'm also running them off thin-client things (nComputing, that were unanimously panned as being useless for anything else in this day and age but were old clients that were bought a LONG time ago) that have VESA mountings and can run from a single central VM running TS. Combine it with some open-source digital signage software (Xibo) and it all just works. That might well be a way - if they're running lots of servers, it'll be better to have a lot of thin-clients just doing the displays and a central overpowered computer actually running the browser - no cable spaghetti, built in VESA mountings, can even run off PoE if you do it right. One switch, one VM, and a one-off investment in thin-clients and you're done, rather than some knocked-together homebrew junk that will fall over more than the stuff it's monitoring.
Burn-in is the very, very, least of your problems and god knows what you're buying to see burn-in.
(Hint: My signage is all white-background, with hard B/W logos and text, up for days on end. No burn-in).
At the absolute very least, you need a proven history of delivering on previous promises. The only kickstarters I've backed are from companies which have already given me a product via conventional channels and are asking for help. Those kinds of things generally work out fine, because you know they can deliver, can be trusted, the quality of their previous work.
But, yeah, the "we have a bright idea" crowd have a long way to go to prove themselves.
Qualified electricial engineers who were working within some of the world's largest companies in 1991 (when I was barely in secondary school?). They'd be about 60-something by now. Probably retired. Certainly not in the "social media" generation, in any large way. And probably still subject to NDA's.
Most of those people would have had a small part personally, be long out of the industry, and likely can't talk without checking with legal departments at companies they left years ago anyway. And most likely they are Japanese, I'd assume?
Good luck with that.
There are still coders online from the ZX Spectrum era, writing games and answering questions. Julian Gollop, for instance, has just released an update to Chaos. But... they are either celebrities or not all that interested in a pet project they knocked out over 20 years ago, most probably. Alan Cox used to write ZX Spectrum games. See how much information about that is online from "the man" himself. Not a lot.
Where is that on Steam? Because it only shows Windows and Mac Steamplay, not Linux. Hence it's NOT on Steam.
I can't find it on steamdb.info either, which is incredibly suspicious. Maybe you should do more than 2 minutes of research. The Steam client isn't Linux, and the Linux client isn't Steam. The user is of course able to cobble this together of their own accord (i.e. it looks like it can run under Wine) but that's not what we were talking about.
The licensing on Wine is quite heavy (LGPL). As such you can bundle it without having to give your game's source code away but only as a separate DLL, from what I remember of my own forays into making sure my code was compliant.
Transgaming were, of course, doing a lot of helping to port games. But that was generic ports, nothing Steam-specific. Again - is there a Steam game that has wine libraries in it? I can't see any and there has to be attribution.
I've only got 1000 games on my account but I can't see anything of this. As such, if they are any that do, the answer is still viably "virtually none", as specified.
In terms of stability, that's not an inherent property of Linux or Windows, as much the programmers themselves. I can't say that I've managed to crash a Steam app on Linux any more than on Windows. Anything ported using Wine will hit a lot of Wine bugs and corner cases, that much is inevitable, but native ports? Same as anything else.
I don't know of a single Steam Linux game that incorporates Wine in any way. The licensing itself would be a bit of a nightmare to resolve.
Most of them are native ports, ports using cross-platform libraries so requiring little tweaking anyway. There are a handful of DOSBox conversions on Steam - but even on Windows those same games are distributed with DOSBox around the game to remove the platform-specific things that people no longer have (e.g. Soundblaster cards and full DOS access).
Seriously, rather than try to spread FUD, load up Steam on Linux and take a look. An awful lot of games on Windows Steam use things like OpenGL, SDL, etc. anyway, so the porting to Mac or Linux is pretty easy (not trivial, but easier than not using such libraries). And Linux ports don't require a Mac with XCode to compile them properly.
And as SteamOS takes hold, a lot of big, pretty and intensive games are being released on Linux at launch, which is pretty impressive.
Seriously, if Valve have proved anything here, it's that all the FUD about developing for Linux being more difficult or less-well-performing is a load of junk (they optimised TF2 to run better on Linux than on Windows, and that's their own code!). It's only the closed-source graphics drivers on Linux that are letting it down, and the total lack of interest from AAA title makers.
Actually, a lot of what I use on Linux has very little to do with GNU at all.
And unless you want to get into the crap that would be Apache/XFree86/OpenGL/Linux and other such nonsense, there's no reason to credit GNU over any other project that has contributed.
And GNU is an entirely replaceable part of an ordinary Linux distro. In fact, much of it is nothing more than those things present in BusyBox.
It's suprisingly... bland software to be honest. Easily replaceable, many alternates, etc. and very o ften not the preferred alternatives of modern distros anyway. It forms an absolute minority by SLOC, file size or even number of executables on a typical Linux distro.
And this is exactly my point. It's as ridiculous to call it GNU/Linux as it would be to call something ClassicShell/Windows, and just as inaccurate in terms of proportion of the overall contribution.
About the biggest thing they contribute is bash, but bash is being phased out silently via symlinks to use other shells, and being pulled from the system initialisation sequences (whether I agree with that or not).
Sorry, but at one time GNU was relevant. Not any more. Those who care don't always care about the naming. And I imagine the vast majority of Linux devices out there (e.g. Android, and embedded devices) don't run most of the GNU software at all.
Although "big-studio" games are largely absent, an awful lot of top-end indie games are there. Indie doesn't always mean shite in a bundle, by the way.
Killing Floor, X3, Civ, Bioshock, Trine and all kinds of other games are well worth the money.
And there are definitely more of them lately, and bigger titles are getting more attention since Valve started their Linux port.
There's a reason for that that has nothing to do with government intentions.
Google and others have enabled full encryption for even search terms. Without SSL man-in-the-middle attacks that are plainly obvious on systems affected by them (depending on the root certificates chosen to be trusted), you can't even get that information.
And going through Google "officially" was something they always could have done. They have no interest in actually obtaining warrants etc. to do this. They want to just sniff traffic. But that's not giving them the information they want, and companies are fighting back, so they have to dial-down their ambitions.
Using a proxy is no different from that point of view - it's still just an encrypted connection they can't sniff. Whereas if they asked Google to provide data, there would be warrants required and records kept and accountability.
VPN's are the same. They can't legislate against them without making it impossible to comply with Data Protection legislation for ordinary companies, and they can't sniff them, and they don't want to provide warrants for them. That leaves them with a bill to do exactly what they can currently do - and no more - which is pointless.
Why can't they just put it in the hold and you pick it up the other end if you actually want it?
You're already through security, it's been identified, you don't want it in the cabin, but if you'd packed it in the hold luggage it would have been accepted.
So put it in a box on a conveyor, send it via the same tracks as you send luggage, to arrive at the hold of the flight that probably hasn't arrived yet, and isn't going to be leaving for at least 45 minutes if you've followed proper check-in guidelines.
It doesn't have to be labelled, just thrown in a "non-cabin" box and stuffed in the hold, which you can then just put on the carousel at the other end.
It has NOTHING to do with security, whatsoever. Having you have to pay to send it, they'd be accused of profiteering (but then they would at least have an incentive to find this shit on you!). But why the fuck can't you just put it in the hold with everything else?
It's to do with displays of fake power - by the government and the front-line staff.
But there's a lot worse shit within airports that bothers me.
Slashdot Mirror
It has little to do with the games. Waiting for some magical moment where everything happens and AAA games come out on stable, fast drivers is insanity.
What happens is you get a field-leader, like Steam. They start down the road of Linux. They get several HUNDREDS of games that weren't on Linux onto Linux by encouraging it. This now prompts stories like this where performance OF THE PROPRIETARY AND FREE GRAPHICS DRIVERS is brought to the fore.
The games aren't slow. The OS isn't slow. It's the graphics drivers. Now nVidia are shown up - pushing out flagship products from a major player but let down by the quality of Linux drivers. So they are now encouraged / bullied into making those drivers the equivalent of the Windows drivers. This makes those drivers more popular. More people are going to have cards that use them (even if just Steam Boxes). Now there's slightly more of an excuse for games developers to target Linux too. So now the quality of the drivers matters that little bit more. So nVidia/AMD improve the drivers a little more. Which encourages more benchmarks to show the leaps and bounds. So they get press from it. Which means more developers target SteamOS as part of their engines and platforms. And so on... ad infinitum.
We waited ten years for something to "Just Happen" in terms of graphic driver quality - both free and proprietary - to bring Linux drivers up to par with Windows. It didn't happen. So Valve are breaking the deadlock, removing the stalemate and saying "Your move, nVidia" - one of their partners, who is going to get bad press for having crap Linux drivers. nVidia will respond in time. And, incrementally, things will start to improve.
Good on Valve I say. Good for Linux. Probably not so good for nVidia et al but they've been dragging their feet anyway. And, ultimately, good for the consumer. But if we only used the one thing that worked and is top-speed and competitive and expensive, ATI/AMD wouldn't exist, Windows and nVidia would be on every console, and the situation would be even worse because of the lack of competition. Now that someone's seriously pushing gaming on Linux, and shows these shortfalls to the people SELLING PARTS OF THIS HARDWARE, there might well be a push to get more optimised drivers running on Linux for that hardware.
Can't help thinking about the information about George Boole that I was reading recently.
Despite being the father of swathes of logic, he died in the most illogical way possible.
He walked through the rain for miles, and lectured while still dripping wet for hours. He got ill. He laid up in bed. And his wife thought that the best cure for him was the same thing that made him ill. So she kept throwing buckets of water over him. Which made him worse. So she kept throwing more water over him. Until he died.
I just couldn't help laughing and wondering if he consented to such "treatment".
First they came for the NHS.
Then we told them where to go and where to stick their stupid ideas about making us pay for basic healthcare.
I grew old and got a rare disease and got free treatment no matter my age, income or medical history for as long as it was necessary.
We called it civilisation.
Not for free and not on the state.
This is about the UK where we provide, like most civilised countries, free healthcare to all.
You won't get homeopathy for free, is what this says. If you want to piss your own money away on it, you're welcome - same as cosmetic surgery, unproven drugs, experimental treatments, Chinese medicine, etc.
But I as a taxpayer am not going to pay for your stupid, proven-no-better-than-placebo "treatments" in preference to buying someone else effective drugs or surgery that they need.
I have some old VB apps from the 3.1 era.
Although it may be technically possible to get them running, it's certainly not as easy as just copying the files across and running the program.
The fact that it is to do with weather suggests it interfaces with hardware of some kind or some external services. That's where you'll REALLY hit problems that just running as admin or renaming files or providing substitutes isn't going to fix.
Good luck getting a driver from the 3.1 era working on anything at all nowadays, even emulated. You would literally just be better off throwing it out, starting again and suffering the inconvenience.
Nothing.
All iOS web browsers use the WebKit API and don't actually render themselves. Others cheat by rendering on remote servers and showing you the result only, but it's not allowed to contain its own rendering engine.
This is how Chrome on iPad operates - it's not Chrome at all.
Fucking Slashdot - was your crappy parser written by one of the Slashdot crowd? There's supposed to be a close script tag in there.
HTML parsers have to be mindful anyway. That's why scripts end with and nothing else (i.e. it's SUPPOSED to ignore any HTML tags within the script as well, in case the SCRIPT wants put push out HTML tags!).
Your crappy parser is not an excuse.
">" is universally understood in mathematics
"GT" relies on a knowledge of English, and what it stands for, and thus what it means.
But the bigger question - WHY does any language created nowadays have hard-coded operator names? If you prefer >, why not just use that and make it equivalent to GT in whatever default settings you provide? Why are you constrained to the choice of operators given to you and the mnemonics they choose to use?
However, arguing over it is pointless. Change if it you can, otherwise it doesn't matter. If you can change it, or overload it, or rename it, or macro-ise it as you like, than it doesn't matter either.
What you just made is called a boat. So why piss about floating that boat on a cushion of air when you could have just pointed that fan behind you and got a faster boat.
This is exactly the problem with hovercraft. Especially cargo-carrying. If you have to be bouyant enough to cope if the power fails, it's cheaper to let the power fail and be a boat instead.
Hovercraft have to LIFT their cargo. It's a stupendous waste of energy compared to other methods (floating their cargo, etc.). Only aircraft, hovercraft and things like cranes actually are required to lift their cargo and all take huge amounts of engineering and energy to do so.
For a quick sojourn across some water, it's a pointless waste of time and effort to lift the load up and then move it around, by blowing air at the floor - no matter how you skirt it. Helicopters are the only equivalent but they have low weight limits in comparison to everything else for the same reasons - they have to push air down with more energy than their load takes to lift directly.
As such, I'm not surprised that boats (where you just have to design to have enough bouyancy to counter-balance the load, and then enough energy to slide forward a little) are surpassing hovercraft.
Hovercraft's only advantage is to be able to seamlessly switch between sea and (relatively flat and open) land. Going beach-to-beach, that's an advantage, but that's quite a rare circumstance - you can't drop off tourist cars to a beach, for example, even between England and France (hell, the English side is mostly sheer cliff-face). And, let's face it, a duck-bus (amphibious vehicle) can do that too and they're dead in the water (sorry) as well.
Hovercraft are for niche transport, not anything common, heavy, en-masse, or sustained. I'm not surprised they're dying out.
Electric motors aren't going to save them either. That requires huge weights of batteries which are going to weigh more than their current fuel + engine to provide equivalent power. And, as such, play against their biggest weakness of having to lift their load up before they can move about.
It would strike me that a brute-force approach is pretty poor for this.
As the digits of the sequences are well-known and predictable, some ancient mathematical tricks (e.g. if the digits sum to a multiple of three, etc.) and a bit of algebra on the base-10 expression should surely yield more convincing proof one way or another than anything else, certainly if you'd got as far as they have by brute-force.
Anything ending is 2,4,5,6,8 or 0 is gone immediately as non-prime. Three, sixes and nines have rules similar to the above that operate on the digits of base-10 expression. It would seem to rule out vast swathes of such numbers. Past that, there's not much left to check at all.
But because the sequence is highly predictable and can only end in so many things, you're quickly only looking at massively large numbers as factors to see if they "hit".
VideoLAN VLC.
You can just stream a huge virtual desktop from one PC and split it into a set of wall screens and stream each individual screen to a client as a normal video stream.
Waste of time, though, because you're destroying performance to do such things.
I'd suggest looking at the myriad over-the-top flight simulator systems people build, which just spend the money and buy a graphics card capable of natively driving that many screens.
Burn-in? In this day and age?
I'm buying the cheapest Chinese LCD junk I can get my hand on, putting them up as digital signage, and leaving them on 24/7. So far, 18 months and not a sign of burn-in.
I'm also running them off thin-client things (nComputing, that were unanimously panned as being useless for anything else in this day and age but were old clients that were bought a LONG time ago) that have VESA mountings and can run from a single central VM running TS. Combine it with some open-source digital signage software (Xibo) and it all just works. That might well be a way - if they're running lots of servers, it'll be better to have a lot of thin-clients just doing the displays and a central overpowered computer actually running the browser - no cable spaghetti, built in VESA mountings, can even run off PoE if you do it right. One switch, one VM, and a one-off investment in thin-clients and you're done, rather than some knocked-together homebrew junk that will fall over more than the stuff it's monitoring.
Burn-in is the very, very, least of your problems and god knows what you're buying to see burn-in.
(Hint: My signage is all white-background, with hard B/W logos and text, up for days on end. No burn-in).
At the absolute very least, you need a proven history of delivering on previous promises. The only kickstarters I've backed are from companies which have already given me a product via conventional channels and are asking for help. Those kinds of things generally work out fine, because you know they can deliver, can be trusted, the quality of their previous work.
But, yeah, the "we have a bright idea" crowd have a long way to go to prove themselves.
Qualified electricial engineers who were working within some of the world's largest companies in 1991 (when I was barely in secondary school?). They'd be about 60-something by now. Probably retired. Certainly not in the "social media" generation, in any large way. And probably still subject to NDA's.
Most of those people would have had a small part personally, be long out of the industry, and likely can't talk without checking with legal departments at companies they left years ago anyway. And most likely they are Japanese, I'd assume?
Good luck with that.
There are still coders online from the ZX Spectrum era, writing games and answering questions. Julian Gollop, for instance, has just released an update to Chaos. But... they are either celebrities or not all that interested in a pet project they knocked out over 20 years ago, most probably. Alan Cox used to write ZX Spectrum games. See how much information about that is online from "the man" himself. Not a lot.
"EVE:Online's Linux client, on Steam, uses Wine"
Where is that on Steam? Because it only shows Windows and Mac Steamplay, not Linux. Hence it's NOT on Steam.
I can't find it on steamdb.info either, which is incredibly suspicious. Maybe you should do more than 2 minutes of research. The Steam client isn't Linux, and the Linux client isn't Steam. The user is of course able to cobble this together of their own accord (i.e. it looks like it can run under Wine) but that's not what we were talking about.
The licensing on Wine is quite heavy (LGPL). As such you can bundle it without having to give your game's source code away but only as a separate DLL, from what I remember of my own forays into making sure my code was compliant.
Transgaming were, of course, doing a lot of helping to port games. But that was generic ports, nothing Steam-specific. Again - is there a Steam game that has wine libraries in it? I can't see any and there has to be attribution.
I've only got 1000 games on my account but I can't see anything of this. As such, if they are any that do, the answer is still viably "virtually none", as specified.
In terms of stability, that's not an inherent property of Linux or Windows, as much the programmers themselves. I can't say that I've managed to crash a Steam app on Linux any more than on Windows. Anything ported using Wine will hit a lot of Wine bugs and corner cases, that much is inevitable, but native ports? Same as anything else.
Virtually none.
I don't know of a single Steam Linux game that incorporates Wine in any way. The licensing itself would be a bit of a nightmare to resolve.
Most of them are native ports, ports using cross-platform libraries so requiring little tweaking anyway. There are a handful of DOSBox conversions on Steam - but even on Windows those same games are distributed with DOSBox around the game to remove the platform-specific things that people no longer have (e.g. Soundblaster cards and full DOS access).
Seriously, rather than try to spread FUD, load up Steam on Linux and take a look. An awful lot of games on Windows Steam use things like OpenGL, SDL, etc. anyway, so the porting to Mac or Linux is pretty easy (not trivial, but easier than not using such libraries). And Linux ports don't require a Mac with XCode to compile them properly.
And as SteamOS takes hold, a lot of big, pretty and intensive games are being released on Linux at launch, which is pretty impressive.
Seriously, if Valve have proved anything here, it's that all the FUD about developing for Linux being more difficult or less-well-performing is a load of junk (they optimised TF2 to run better on Linux than on Windows, and that's their own code!). It's only the closed-source graphics drivers on Linux that are letting it down, and the total lack of interest from AAA title makers.
Actually, a lot of what I use on Linux has very little to do with GNU at all.
And unless you want to get into the crap that would be Apache/XFree86/OpenGL/Linux and other such nonsense, there's no reason to credit GNU over any other project that has contributed.
And GNU is an entirely replaceable part of an ordinary Linux distro. In fact, much of it is nothing more than those things present in BusyBox.
http://www.gnu.org/manual/blur...
It's suprisingly... bland software to be honest. Easily replaceable, many alternates, etc. and very o ften not the preferred alternatives of modern distros anyway. It forms an absolute minority by SLOC, file size or even number of executables on a typical Linux distro.
And this is exactly my point. It's as ridiculous to call it GNU/Linux as it would be to call something ClassicShell/Windows, and just as inaccurate in terms of proportion of the overall contribution.
About the biggest thing they contribute is bash, but bash is being phased out silently via symlinks to use other shells, and being pulled from the system initialisation sequences (whether I agree with that or not).
Sorry, but at one time GNU was relevant. Not any more. Those who care don't always care about the naming. And I imagine the vast majority of Linux devices out there (e.g. Android, and embedded devices) don't run most of the GNU software at all.
I'll do that the second that certain people stop telling me to use GNU/Linux instead.
So, basically, never.
I suggest you peruse the actual lists once in a while:
https://steamdb.info/linux/
Although "big-studio" games are largely absent, an awful lot of top-end indie games are there. Indie doesn't always mean shite in a bundle, by the way.
Killing Floor, X3, Civ, Bioshock, Trine and all kinds of other games are well worth the money.
And there are definitely more of them lately, and bigger titles are getting more attention since Valve started their Linux port.
I've just mugged you for your wallet.
"Give me your phone and I'll give you your wallet back."
Yeah. Right.
"Help Americans Never Get Unwanted Phone calls" (HANGUP) Act."
Your politicians spend far too much time thinking up cute names for laws, instead of enacting or repealing the bastard things.
There's a reason for that that has nothing to do with government intentions.
Google and others have enabled full encryption for even search terms. Without SSL man-in-the-middle attacks that are plainly obvious on systems affected by them (depending on the root certificates chosen to be trusted), you can't even get that information.
And going through Google "officially" was something they always could have done. They have no interest in actually obtaining warrants etc. to do this. They want to just sniff traffic. But that's not giving them the information they want, and companies are fighting back, so they have to dial-down their ambitions.
Using a proxy is no different from that point of view - it's still just an encrypted connection they can't sniff. Whereas if they asked Google to provide data, there would be warrants required and records kept and accountability.
VPN's are the same. They can't legislate against them without making it impossible to comply with Data Protection legislation for ordinary companies, and they can't sniff them, and they don't want to provide warrants for them. That leaves them with a bill to do exactly what they can currently do - and no more - which is pointless.
Why can't they just put it in the hold and you pick it up the other end if you actually want it?
You're already through security, it's been identified, you don't want it in the cabin, but if you'd packed it in the hold luggage it would have been accepted.
So put it in a box on a conveyor, send it via the same tracks as you send luggage, to arrive at the hold of the flight that probably hasn't arrived yet, and isn't going to be leaving for at least 45 minutes if you've followed proper check-in guidelines.
It doesn't have to be labelled, just thrown in a "non-cabin" box and stuffed in the hold, which you can then just put on the carousel at the other end.
It has NOTHING to do with security, whatsoever.
Having you have to pay to send it, they'd be accused of profiteering (but then they would at least have an incentive to find this shit on you!).
But why the fuck can't you just put it in the hold with everything else?
It's to do with displays of fake power - by the government and the front-line staff.
But there's a lot worse shit within airports that bothers me.