Just to let everyone know, this morning after late-night patching my company's Exchange 2003 box it isn't sending/recieving internet emails (*cue Exchange jokes...now*).
I'm currently paying $250 so Microsoft can tell us if this is the correct behavior (oh, the humor), after asking them last night if all patches were approved for a Windows Server 2003/Exchange 2003 environment, and them telling me yes.
I know I'm in the minority for not using sendmail, but I am of the opinion that these patches may damage your system. Admins beware.
The fact remains is that there remains no viable alternative.
And I'm not just talking about games. I'm talking about more than word processing software, which seems to be the lone torch which supposed to bring users over. Well, that and Mozilla.
A good but slightly bloaty browser and StarOffice do not an operating system make.
But you can't fault Linux for not having third party support. It's a chicken and egg concept that every lone coder knows about.
Everyone knows that between a user base of hundreds of millions and a user base of a million who to code for. You want your work to be appreciated, used, and enjoyed. This doesn't mean just between the geeks who don't mind the CLI or perhaps an ugly GTK+ interface.
So the resident college coder studies MDAC and Visual Basic and uses Visual C++ Enterprise Edition because in the real world, most people want coders who can do that sort of thing.
Sure Java is an interesting market, and I have plenty of friends who make their living doing so. However, most of those java programmers are stuck relying on the user to use IE, and all that that implies.
The big corporations don't want to throw money at a non-existent market. Gaming companies run on shoe-string budgets and rarely if ever have the gumption to code for both platforms. Savage, the RTS/FPS hybrid, has both a Linux and a Windows version on the same disc. And good for them. But does that make it sell any better than Tony Hawk or Madded 200x? Didn't think so. Until the big boys line up, the smaller developers hold their breath and hope that their time and energy can be appreciated.
Of course a ton of users are sick of Microsoft software. It's not easy to dislike the exploits, the bugs, the inconsistency, the lies and the deception. The DRM that is slowly but surely infecting their user experience.
But Linux doesn't have DirectX. Mozilla will get rejected at some major websites because they accept IE only. I know this for a fact, because my quick but ultimately untimely attempt at infusing Mozilla en masse at my workplace ended with many corporate websites that are so infused with flash and other useless plugins simply demand that IE be used. The only way to get around that is to hack preferences.js, or use Opera. And even then the page sometimes screws up or just doens't show.
So again here we are at an inpass, a group of users who are fed up with their single alternative and nothing else is available. Personally, I believe its games that hold back Linux. But on the other hand, the lack of serious drafting, CAD, Image Editing, and publishing software is what makes Apple such a viable contender.
It doesn't take much thought to realize that 3rd party support is what is required for an operating system to "make it." But what made Microsoft so lucrative in getting it was exclusive deals, contracts and workarounds to assure that their 3rd party support remained their 3rd party support.
And that one-two punch will last for a good long while, at least as long as Microsoft pushes their agenda. Which will be, eh, around forever.
Coffers and user installations keep monopolies growing.
Modders are a different story. Without economic interests compelling them to buy a license, they might begin releasing compiled binaries of their work to the community without requiring a half-life 2 license, which would cripple Valve's sales numbers. But on the other hand with access to source, modders could create more extensive and more active modifications, creating original features instead of mere graphical facelifts. If these code modders require the original game to be playable, it could lead to a real renissance in modding and a tremendous boost in sales for Valve.
Please, don't be as nieve as you're sounding here.
Firstly this code is over a month old, and they're in crunch-mode. This means that drastic bug and graphics fixes are due for this code, and a month is a long time when everyone at Valve is probably putting in 16+ hour days.
Secondly, those modified binaries probably won't work correctly unless they also include modified DLL's, and even then some graphical bug could bite them in the ass, something that was probably fixed in the Gold release.
Thirdly this line: "Without economic interests compelling them to buy a license, they might begin releasing compiled binaries of their work to the community without requiring a half-life 2 license, which would cripple Valve's sales numbers. " is absolute nonsense, and kind of silly at best. Cripple their sales numbers? Hah! That was a good one.
However, with all that said, I do agree that releasing the total engine source is a double-edged sword, and there's a reason Carmack and other game companies wait many years before releasing the source under any sort of open source license.
This is terrible, dangerous stuff. I expect at least one firing to come from it.
I found this site last week via mefi and am very impressed.
While I'll freely admit that they're in need of a few Brilliant Artists, they still have some impressive stuff, especially in regards to their Electronica content.
But really, the thing that interests me more than anything is the business model and attitude. I mean, seriously, where else can you purchase movie rights to a song, based on movie budget, online? This is absolutely unheard of and should be commended.
Brilliant ideas and 128kb mp3 streams (wow!) keep me queueing up this stuff at work and purchasing music.
Rock on magnatune...one day the rest of the music industry will catch up with you.
I think it's important to notice the respectible restraint that google showed in the interview. They could've pimped out froogle while it's still in beta, but instead they let Amazon get their limelight for a moment.
But the thing is, once Froogle goes live and is advertised in a big way, expect this A9 stuff to be pushed under the rug...
The best for the average joe is the most reliable, and the best bang for the buck.
Did they need progressive scan? Well, if you're going to blow $4k on a TV, get the people the equipment to carry the best signal and hook em up with a nice sound system as well.
When someone who doesn't know anything about DVD asks me what to buy, I tell em Sony. Sony's aren't the cheapest, but they make a nice $100 or so model and those stand up over time.
I had a Toshiba that burnt out in a year. I know three different people who bought those $69 Apex pieces of shit and the best one lasted six months.
You get what you pay for, and suggesting Apex to your friends or family will just make sure they don't ask you for your advice ever again...
Technically, this probably means that some small part of the engine runs under Linux. In the past, dedicated servers have been little more than headless clients, clients without a rendering engine. As with Half-life, there is probably no technical reason that Half-life 2 couldn't run under Linux, especially given that the latest Linux drivers from ATI and NVIDIA have expanded support for even the newest hardware released by those vendors. Given that a game as new as UT2003 runs under Linux, I think that it isn't that much of a stretch to say that Linux could handle Half-life 2 as well.
No, it doesn't. Just because you can run a server, which people connect to and run maps from, doesn't mean your server is actually "rendering" anything. It's loading data for your clients to read/write to, and its controlling the flow of that data. Linux does this much better than Windows, which is why the Linux server exists in the first place. No one would bother cooking up a dedicated server for it otherwise.
But Half-Life 2 is DX9 from the ground up. This means it uses extensions, functions, and rendering calls that are so deeply ingrained into windows, that you can NOT run the game any other way. This is where WineX and whatnot come into play, taking those same function calls and telling Linux how to use them.
Firstly, this type of translation is going to make any port of the game run slower, until the code is much faster than it will be in the first few WineX releases supporting it. Yes, I know how fast UT2003 can run in Linux. But have you seen the tech demos for HL2? It will be quite some time before we see that level of speed and clarity on a Linux system.
And, this sounds really pathetic, but their licensing agreements with Installshield may hold them back as well. From what I recall, this is the same thing that held up NWN from being released on Linux. The Windows registry can be a shit-filled bog, and the Installshield makes the game-makers lives that much easier. It sounds pitiful, but little stuff like that can hold up development.
And finally, Valve has busted their ass on Steam, and even though it stumbled out of the gate with their recent full-on release (who didn't see that coming), they put so much time and effort on a solid DRM release platform that to try and convert that to Linux, who by nature is a registry-less system, would be too much time and trouble for a company to put themselves through, let alone farm out the work at considerable cost.
In this dreamworld that the article-writer lives in, he forgets that game companies are under intense pressure to deliver perfect product all of the time. It is easier to leave it up to the community than to put serious time and resources into making the same thing available on both OSes.
And don't forget about DRM. We geeks chuckle at it, but the fact remains that as the years go on, and MS has its way (which it always does, eventually), between the Windows versions of iTunes and delivery mechanisms such as Steam, you'd be surprised at how this will begin to hold Linux back, in my opinion. DRM is awful, I agree, but everyone loves iTunes and what is it but a wolf in sheeps clothing (nice interface and high moral standing but really just DRM)?
If your dad was a plumber, would you expect that a leaky pipe he fixed 50 years ago would buy you a new house today? Why should copyright holders and their descendants be any different.
Because the plumber didn't invent the pipe he fixed.
The fact is both regularly cheat on performance and quality benchmarks, and if you think you can actually say one is better then the other you are a biased fanboy.
Oh Good Lord, what kind of Trolling is that.
I'll note a few things here:
Firstly, NVidia has reigned supreme in the Direct X 8 and prior arena. Their GeForce cards are awesome.
But DX9 is all about pixel shaders. They are the future, and ATI realized that. They built their R300 core (Radeon 9600/9700) based on the DX9 spec, and it shows. The newest games, such as HL2, which rely heavily on DX9 extensions, run better on ATI hardware than NVidia's stuff because they have to use hacks to get DX9 extensions, such as pixel shaders, to work properly with the GeForce line. NVidia doesn't have it built into the hardware, and the gamers who have them will suffer because of it.
John Carmack has had to write special code in Doom 3 to compensate for the NV30 core that doesn't like DX9 as much as it should. Go read some of his.plan files for proof.
Look up your facts, and try to stay away from troll-like generalizing until you know what you're talking about.
But it does include some of the features I mentioned that might be in IE7, that's all.
Re:don't forget the real consequences for the web
on
Microsoft Longhorn Delayed
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually it looks as thought they haven't released IE7 because they're integrating it into Longhorn so much so that releasing a new version of the stand alone browser is irrevlevant.
That's why they're still releasing patches for IE6.01 but won't go the full nine and integrate tabbed browsing or gestures or any other cool feature because they're holding their breath for Longhorn.
Though, with this timeline they may actually just release IE7, but considering that there are existing IE alternatives, I don't expect any new IE stuff until 2005.
What the hell's the point of using an alternative to Microsoft if that alternative contains exactly the same problem the original has - lack of choice?
What's so great about an operating system if it can't just find something great and stick with it? When did that become Something Wrong?
Why do we have to debate and wonder and pontificate on the likelihood of this or that window manager "making it" and striking out for the Betterment Of Linux?
Linux is about ego. Right now, it is. I truly think this way.
Why? I mean, let's face it, the best operating system today (yes, Linux) was based on the fact that Linus thought he could do better. That he didn't have to pony up the cash for Unix, that he didn't have to suffer under Minix. And the world is better for it.
Believe what you want, but Microsoft was started much the same way. Remember, Gates was just a geek that hit it big. He had ideas and put them in motion. Sure he's went over to the Dark Side, but I think it should be said that he too just wanted something that would impress his geeky buddies. I mean, hell, he dropped out of Harvard, but no one ever pays attention to that when you're the richest guy on the planet.
Selecting one window manager would make everything simpler. Yes, simpler can mean worse. But it can also mean that all efforts are on a solid channel, something to strive for and to work towards.
Think of the possibilities: Picking one window manager will assure that business applications and games can use a certain set of libraries and not have to worry about it not working because someone didn't install KLibs.
In a year or less, we'd probably have our own version of DirectX. A simple set of libraries that could universally be used and adapted to. Remember that DX version 1.0 sucked too, but it got better. The problem as I see it is that though we've seen KDE and Gnome develop over the years, hitting version 3.0 would actually be 8.0 if someone just picked something and everyone worked on it.
The power is not in little sourceforge projects that have great ideas and ambition but not the manpower to back it up.
The power is in working together, trying to get over your ego, and making it better. Mass decisions means mass support. Which also means faster development and better results.
When I ask her how things work on the computer she has now, she's used to XP and having almost everything explained in simple, child-like steps. If I ask her to save something "to the hard drive" she doesn't know what this means.
And to non-geeks, this is a bad thing. To the rest of the world, it's not a big deal. They don't really care if their hard drive has 8MB of cache and runs at 7200RPMs. They don't care how much space is on their hard drive as long as they don't get a scary message saying they've run out of it.
And they certainly don't mind getting told, step-by-step, how to do certain tasks.
The reason that "leaked" screenshots of the new version of Windows gets posted on/. is because, no matter how much we try to deny it, we probably envy the strides made in UI that just aren't being done in Linux (yet).
Case in point: you're 13 year old sister doesn't need to know about xcopy or directory structures or file trees in order to save or retrieve files. And better yet, a grandma can do the same thing and while we see them as childlike step-by-step shortfalls, the simple fact is that UI brings computer efficiency to the masses. Is it as efficient as we are (or can be)? Of course not. But it lets them use something that they had not been able to use before (I'm speaking mainly of the grandmas at this point).
Either way, I think that dumbing down is a great thing. Because this gives users a choice: You can go step by step and make something work. Or, if you're curious, or if you're a Power User (tm), you can turn that off and work with more control and finesse than thought possible. I know the Aero interface will be disabled the instant
I install the newest Windows, but at least it's there for those who need it.
And those are the people you seem to have forgotten in your posting.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not like he's terrible stupid either.
:)
Oh, the irony
Just to let everyone know, this morning after late-night patching my company's Exchange 2003 box it isn't sending/recieving internet emails (*cue Exchange jokes...now*).
I'm currently paying $250 so Microsoft can tell us if this is the correct behavior (oh, the humor), after asking them last night if all patches were approved for a Windows Server 2003/Exchange 2003 environment, and them telling me yes.
I know I'm in the minority for not using sendmail, but I am of the opinion that these patches may damage your system. Admins beware.
The fact remains is that there remains no viable alternative.
And I'm not just talking about games. I'm talking about more than word processing software, which seems to be the lone torch which supposed to bring users over. Well, that and Mozilla.
A good but slightly bloaty browser and StarOffice do not an operating system make.
But you can't fault Linux for not having third party support. It's a chicken and egg concept that every lone coder knows about.
Everyone knows that between a user base of hundreds of millions and a user base of a million who to code for. You want your work to be appreciated, used, and enjoyed. This doesn't mean just between the geeks who don't mind the CLI or perhaps an ugly GTK+ interface.
So the resident college coder studies MDAC and Visual Basic and uses Visual C++ Enterprise Edition because in the real world, most people want coders who can do that sort of thing.
Sure Java is an interesting market, and I have plenty of friends who make their living doing so. However, most of those java programmers are stuck relying on the user to use IE, and all that that implies.
The big corporations don't want to throw money at a non-existent market. Gaming companies run on shoe-string budgets and rarely if ever have the gumption to code for both platforms. Savage, the RTS/FPS hybrid, has both a Linux and a Windows version on the same disc. And good for them. But does that make it sell any better than Tony Hawk or Madded 200x? Didn't think so. Until the big boys line up, the smaller developers hold their breath and hope that their time and energy can be appreciated.
Of course a ton of users are sick of Microsoft software. It's not easy to dislike the exploits, the bugs, the inconsistency, the lies and the deception. The DRM that is slowly but surely infecting their user experience.
But Linux doesn't have DirectX. Mozilla will get rejected at some major websites because they accept IE only. I know this for a fact, because my quick but ultimately untimely attempt at infusing Mozilla en masse at my workplace ended with many corporate websites that are so infused with flash and other useless plugins simply demand that IE be used. The only way to get around that is to hack preferences.js, or use Opera. And even then the page sometimes screws up or just doens't show.
So again here we are at an inpass, a group of users who are fed up with their single alternative and nothing else is available. Personally, I believe its games that hold back Linux. But on the other hand, the lack of serious drafting, CAD, Image Editing, and publishing software is what makes Apple such a viable contender.
It doesn't take much thought to realize that 3rd party support is what is required for an operating system to "make it." But what made Microsoft so lucrative in getting it was exclusive deals, contracts and workarounds to assure that their 3rd party support remained their 3rd party support.
And that one-two punch will last for a good long while, at least as long as Microsoft pushes their agenda. Which will be, eh, around forever.
Coffers and user installations keep monopolies growing.
Don't know where you got this idea but it isn't true. You can easily get the shares.
Hey, didn't know that. Thanks for the tip.
Seriously, I'm not trying to sound sarcastic...
Dammit even that sounds sarcastic!
Modders are a different story. Without economic interests compelling them to buy a license, they might begin releasing compiled binaries of their work to the community without requiring a half-life 2 license, which would cripple Valve's sales numbers. But on the other hand with access to source, modders could create more extensive and more active modifications, creating original features instead of mere graphical facelifts. If these code modders require the original game to be playable, it could lead to a real renissance in modding and a tremendous boost in sales for Valve.
Please, don't be as nieve as you're sounding here.
Firstly this code is over a month old, and they're in crunch-mode. This means that drastic bug and graphics fixes are due for this code, and a month is a long time when everyone at Valve is probably putting in 16+ hour days.
Secondly, those modified binaries probably won't work correctly unless they also include modified DLL's, and even then some graphical bug could bite them in the ass, something that was probably fixed in the Gold release.
Thirdly this line: "Without economic interests compelling them to buy a license, they might begin releasing compiled binaries of their work to the community without requiring a half-life 2 license, which would cripple Valve's sales numbers. " is absolute nonsense, and kind of silly at best. Cripple their sales numbers? Hah! That was a good one.
However, with all that said, I do agree that releasing the total engine source is a double-edged sword, and there's a reason Carmack and other game companies wait many years before releasing the source under any sort of open source license.
This is terrible, dangerous stuff. I expect at least one firing to come from it.
You can't short a stock that is on the down-tick. SCO's been on it for awhile.
Considering their record, no one will loan you the stock to short it even if it is on the uptick...
Whoa, whoa. Prom dates, panties?
This is slashdot. We do not know of these foreign objects you speak of.
I found this site last week via mefi and am very impressed.
While I'll freely admit that they're in need of a few Brilliant Artists, they still have some impressive stuff, especially in regards to their Electronica content.
But really, the thing that interests me more than anything is the business model and attitude. I mean, seriously, where else can you purchase movie rights to a song, based on movie budget, online? This is absolutely unheard of and should be commended.
Brilliant ideas and 128kb mp3 streams (wow!) keep me queueing up this stuff at work and purchasing music.
Rock on magnatune...one day the rest of the music industry will catch up with you.
I think it's important to notice the respectible restraint that google showed in the interview. They could've pimped out froogle while it's still in beta, but instead they let Amazon get their limelight for a moment.
But the thing is, once Froogle goes live and is advertised in a big way, expect this A9 stuff to be pushed under the rug...
No, the cheapest is not best for the average joe.
The best for the average joe is the most reliable, and the best bang for the buck.
Did they need progressive scan? Well, if you're going to blow $4k on a TV, get the people the equipment to carry the best signal and hook em up with a nice sound system as well.
When someone who doesn't know anything about DVD asks me what to buy, I tell em Sony. Sony's aren't the cheapest, but they make a nice $100 or so model and those stand up over time.
I had a Toshiba that burnt out in a year. I know three different people who bought those $69 Apex pieces of shit and the best one lasted six months.
You get what you pay for, and suggesting Apex to your friends or family will just make sure they don't ask you for your advice ever again...
Am I the only guy who misread "maturation" and giggled at the resulting sentence?
I think the next time someone links a pictures page, a paypal donate link should go right beside it, in order to pay for their melted server.
:)
Those poor hardware sites just get pounded
This would turn the PC into a giant console!
You mean like the X-Box? And speaking of giant, have you felt the heft on that thing? It's huge! Weighs like 20 pounds...
Technically, this probably means that some small part of the engine runs under Linux. In the past, dedicated servers have been little more than headless clients, clients without a rendering engine. As with Half-life, there is probably no technical reason that Half-life 2 couldn't run under Linux, especially given that the latest Linux drivers from ATI and NVIDIA have expanded support for even the newest hardware released by those vendors. Given that a game as new as UT2003 runs under Linux, I think that it isn't that much of a stretch to say that Linux could handle Half-life 2 as well.
No, it doesn't. Just because you can run a server, which people connect to and run maps from, doesn't mean your server is actually "rendering" anything. It's loading data for your clients to read/write to, and its controlling the flow of that data. Linux does this much better than Windows, which is why the Linux server exists in the first place. No one would bother cooking up a dedicated server for it otherwise.
But Half-Life 2 is DX9 from the ground up. This means it uses extensions, functions, and rendering calls that are so deeply ingrained into windows, that you can NOT run the game any other way. This is where WineX and whatnot come into play, taking those same function calls and telling Linux how to use them.
Firstly, this type of translation is going to make any port of the game run slower, until the code is much faster than it will be in the first few WineX releases supporting it. Yes, I know how fast UT2003 can run in Linux. But have you seen the tech demos for HL2? It will be quite some time before we see that level of speed and clarity on a Linux system.
And, this sounds really pathetic, but their licensing agreements with Installshield may hold them back as well. From what I recall, this is the same thing that held up NWN from being released on Linux. The Windows registry can be a shit-filled bog, and the Installshield makes the game-makers lives that much easier. It sounds pitiful, but little stuff like that can hold up development.
And finally, Valve has busted their ass on Steam, and even though it stumbled out of the gate with their recent full-on release (who didn't see that coming), they put so much time and effort on a solid DRM release platform that to try and convert that to Linux, who by nature is a registry-less system, would be too much time and trouble for a company to put themselves through, let alone farm out the work at considerable cost.
In this dreamworld that the article-writer lives in, he forgets that game companies are under intense pressure to deliver perfect product all of the time. It is easier to leave it up to the community than to put serious time and resources into making the same thing available on both OSes.
And don't forget about DRM. We geeks chuckle at it, but the fact remains that as the years go on, and MS has its way (which it always does, eventually), between the Windows versions of iTunes and delivery mechanisms such as Steam, you'd be surprised at how this will begin to hold Linux back, in my opinion. DRM is awful, I agree, but everyone loves iTunes and what is it but a wolf in sheeps clothing (nice interface and high moral standing but really just DRM)?
Food for thought.
If your dad was a plumber, would you expect that a leaky pipe he fixed 50 years ago would buy you a new house today? Why should copyright holders and their descendants be any different.
Because the plumber didn't invent the pipe he fixed.
I would be very interested in seeing that, or better yet, how you did it (exactly).
Any pictures/procedures you have to share?
The fact is both regularly cheat on performance and quality benchmarks, and if you think you can actually say one is better then the other you are a biased fanboy.
.plan files for proof.
Oh Good Lord, what kind of Trolling is that.
I'll note a few things here:
Firstly, NVidia has reigned supreme in the Direct X 8 and prior arena. Their GeForce cards are awesome.
But DX9 is all about pixel shaders. They are the future, and ATI realized that. They built their R300 core (Radeon 9600/9700) based on the DX9 spec, and it shows. The newest games, such as HL2, which rely heavily on DX9 extensions, run better on ATI hardware than NVidia's stuff because they have to use hacks to get DX9 extensions, such as pixel shaders, to work properly with the GeForce line. NVidia doesn't have it built into the hardware, and the gamers who have them will suffer because of it.
John Carmack has had to write special code in Doom 3 to compensate for the NV30 core that doesn't like DX9 as much as it should. Go read some of his
Look up your facts, and try to stay away from troll-like generalizing until you know what you're talking about.
For those who don't get the "dancing monkeyboy" part (all 12 of you), here's a mirror of the video of him making an ass of himself via my site.
But it does include some of the features I mentioned that might be in IE7, that's all.
Actually it looks as thought they haven't released IE7 because they're integrating it into Longhorn so much so that releasing a new version of the stand alone browser is irrevlevant.
That's why they're still releasing patches for IE6.01 but won't go the full nine and integrate tabbed browsing or gestures or any other cool feature because they're holding their breath for Longhorn.
Though, with this timeline they may actually just release IE7, but considering that there are existing IE alternatives, I don't expect any new IE stuff until 2005.
What the hell's the point of using an alternative to Microsoft if that alternative contains exactly the same problem the original has - lack of choice?
What's so great about an operating system if it can't just find something great and stick with it? When did that become Something Wrong?
Why do we have to debate and wonder and pontificate on the likelihood of this or that window manager "making it" and striking out for the Betterment Of Linux?
Linux is about ego. Right now, it is. I truly think this way.
Why? I mean, let's face it, the best operating system today (yes, Linux) was based on the fact that Linus thought he could do better. That he didn't have to pony up the cash for Unix, that he didn't have to suffer under Minix. And the world is better for it.
Believe what you want, but Microsoft was started much the same way. Remember, Gates was just a geek that hit it big. He had ideas and put them in motion. Sure he's went over to the Dark Side, but I think it should be said that he too just wanted something that would impress his geeky buddies. I mean, hell, he dropped out of Harvard, but no one ever pays attention to that when you're the richest guy on the planet.
Selecting one window manager would make everything simpler. Yes, simpler can mean worse. But it can also mean that all efforts are on a solid channel, something to strive for and to work towards.
Think of the possibilities: Picking one window manager will assure that business applications and games can use a certain set of libraries and not have to worry about it not working because someone didn't install KLibs.
In a year or less, we'd probably have our own version of DirectX. A simple set of libraries that could universally be used and adapted to. Remember that DX version 1.0 sucked too, but it got better. The problem as I see it is that though we've seen KDE and Gnome develop over the years, hitting version 3.0 would actually be 8.0 if someone just picked something and everyone worked on it.
The power is not in little sourceforge projects that have great ideas and ambition but not the manpower to back it up.
The power is in working together, trying to get over your ego, and making it better. Mass decisions means mass support. Which also means faster development and better results.
That is the point my friend.
I bought an XBox a year ago.
I think your problem lies somewhere in that sentence.
And we will quickly buy it, no matter what the cost, like the good LOTR geeks we are :)
I know I have my regular and extended version of LOTR:FOTR, don't you?
When I ask her how things work on the computer she has now, she's used to XP and having almost everything explained in simple, child-like steps. If I ask her to save something "to the hard drive" she doesn't know what this means.
/. is because, no matter how much we try to deny it, we probably envy the strides made in UI that just aren't being done in Linux (yet).
And to non-geeks, this is a bad thing. To the rest of the world, it's not a big deal. They don't really care if their hard drive has 8MB of cache and runs at 7200RPMs. They don't care how much space is on their hard drive as long as they don't get a scary message saying they've run out of it.
And they certainly don't mind getting told, step-by-step, how to do certain tasks.
The reason that "leaked" screenshots of the new version of Windows gets posted on
Case in point: you're 13 year old sister doesn't need to know about xcopy or directory structures or file trees in order to save or retrieve files. And better yet, a grandma can do the same thing and while we see them as childlike step-by-step shortfalls, the simple fact is that UI brings computer efficiency to the masses. Is it as efficient as we are (or can be)? Of course not. But it lets them use something that they had not been able to use before (I'm speaking mainly of the grandmas at this point).
Either way, I think that dumbing down is a great thing. Because this gives users a choice: You can go step by step and make something work. Or, if you're curious, or if you're a Power User (tm), you can turn that off and work with more control and finesse than thought possible. I know the Aero interface will be disabled the instant
I install the newest Windows, but at least it's there for those who need it.
And those are the people you seem to have forgotten in your posting.
But...can it check your email? ;)