The point you missed is that companies want to make money, and if they feel they can raise prices in order to raise income over expenses, they'll do it.
Again...only on Slashdot is it better to not sell anything then to put money into selling something and getting back some profit. Apparently losing money is better than making money. I forgot, we're "doing MS a favor." Even though they don't need any.
Because 80% of the time, someone can't take home the new device they bought and hook it up to Linux. Gee your soundcard and palm and USB keychain worked. Congratulations.
Just because you use udev and hotplug doesn't mean squat--Linux has plenty of hardware support to catch up to. My scanner has never worked under Linux, and from the looks of it never will. Many, many people have hardware problems with Linux that require hours of hacking to fix.
Seriously, I don't see how this proved anything other than someone let a 4-year-old point and click one of Linux's GUIs, as though that proved that all of Linux was easy...nobody is gonna buy that.
Try having her install a kid's game sometime...my 5-year-old knows how to insert the CD, click "Next", etc. I'd love to see a 4-year-old mess with RPM package managers...
This girl will probably use linux for the rest of her life.
Why? All she's done is used a Windows-alike GUI. If anything, she'll switch to Windows when she wants the apps her friends are using (and wants to play The Sims 5), and when she wants to connect to a shared printer or install a soundcard...
It is about refuting the claim that Linux is "hard" to use.
It didn't refute anything. Nobody's going to buy that Linux is magically not hard to use simply because someone took the time to set it up for someone so it was easy.
What if you don't have someone to set it up for you? I'm sorry, but I've been using Linux since the mid-90s, and I've taken days and weeks out of my time to set things up sometimes. Even Eric Raymond had trouble setting up a printer...remember?
All the article showed is that, as long as you make sure nothing will ever need to be set up or anything, you can have a 4-year-old use one of Linux's GUIs. This is true of any operating system.
"Uh, I disagree with you, so you're automatically a troll! I'm headed over to someone's house to fix a Windows printer, so that one instance invalidates the 95% of the time that drivers automatically work under Windows, and somehow also invalidates that a lot of printers almost never work under Linux.
Oh, and Windows XP doesn't 'feel' right. I'm actually going to offer this as some sort of proof of my argument! I'll vaguely claim it eats itself alive!
You troll. How dare you point out the obvious--Windows is easier to configure than Linux!"
Uh...anyone see a double-standard?
on
A Babe in Tuxland
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Microsoft posting this kind of story and passing it off as real news = "astroturfing."
OSDN-owned Slashdot posting OSDN-owned Newsforge's story and passing it off as real news = nobody says anything.
If some Windows company owned a news site that was always posting anti-Linux stuff, people would be up in arms, but it's okay for OSDN to do it with Slashdot.
Off-topic I know..."No Karma Bonus" unchecked accordingly.
Can you prove they're not moving to OS X? Clearly, they must have had a reason for saying ssuch...it was probably due to all the registered developers who are grabbing their Apple Developer Tools. They do keep tabs on this stuff, you know.
Cocoa kicks ass to develop with. Most people who use it can't imagine having not used it before. It's up there with.NET as far as positive developer reaction, but I think Cocoa is probably even more elegant
I love Slashdot. "If anything this refutes the RIAA's claim that P2P has any significant effect at all." All the sudden, it's magically proven that P2P has no effect on sales simply because their are online music stores. Scientific principle applied at its finest.
Doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. You people assume your niche opinions represent all of society. I'm sorry to tell you that lots of people watch MTV and enjoy the rubbish that's on it. But we're geeks, we have this elitist attitude that we're "above" that and so is the music we like. That's just how we are.:)
Therefore, we assume because sales are down, it's because nobody likes the music. Sorry, but drive by a high school parking lot after school sometime and hear all the shit blaring from the cars. Kids like the music...it's just that they're downloading it all now. You think those millions upon millions of users on Kazaa right now are all file-sharing legal files? Give me a break.
Oh, come on, mods...that was funny, particularly the sig. There was a big red circle pointing to the duck in the water in the background...didn't you see?:D
As an example, try Metroid Zero Mission sometime. Better yet, Metroid Fusion. You're forced to sit through boring cutscenes.
At the least, the storyline in Prime was fascinating, because they used it to add to the mystique and the atmosphere. I like Samus being somewhat of a mysterious bounty hunter killing shit in the far-flung reaches of space.
But the fact remains that everyone else likes the music coming out, especially young kids. You guys sound like old fogies--actually, you sound like my parents when I was growing up and they heard my music. Meanwhile, a lot of people DO like today's music, from the Strokes to Clay Aiken to Norah Jones to so on and so forth. But downloading is so easy and convenient now, today's youth don't give a second thought about it anymore. And that doesn't make what they're doing suddenly a-okay.
Yet, you people don't seem to care because you've grown accustomed to the convenience as well, and in order to remove the label of criminality, you've tried to brush it off on to the record label lobbying group that just so happens to be doing the *exact thing Slashdotters said they should be doing* a few years ago--suing individual copyright infringers.
This is silly. There are online stores now. There are services like iTunes. How many knocked-down excuses will people keep using to justify that they've got eMule down there in their system tray right now?
Artists willingly sign their contracts, and I find it hard to feel sorry for them when they shit on gold toilets, have antique car collections, and do movies all the time. Yet, Slashdot pretends they're fighting for the artist by ripping them off and not paying for their music.
What's amusing is that there is somewhat of a stigma when it comes to pirating games and apps simply because a lot of people here are programmers. Are you guys going to talk about "sampling games" when Doom 3 gets leaked a month early (as they all are now) and kids, college students, and people on high-bandwith connections pirate the fuck out of it?
If everyone here at Slashdot was a musician, the message would be completely different. What I find most amusing, however, is the double-standard pointed out in my sig.
But go ahead and play the "b-but the RIAA is *evil*!!! That gives me the right to pretend their copyright was magicaly transferred over to me to illegally distribute all over the place" game.
99% of the users on Kazaa aren't "sampling" those albums. Hell, on eMule they're just RARing up entire discographies now and sticking them online. I'd respect pro-piracy people more if they just admitted what was going on and that it was legally and morally wrong. At least I can debate your position logically because you know where you stand. But this bullshit "it's the RIAA's fault we're illegally sharing all their copyrighted materials!" mindset will never, ever fly.
Not only the fact that it took so damned long for something like RandR to appear, but we STILL don't have true alpha-blending and transparencies.
I'm sorry folks, but other GUIs have had this forever. Windows 2000 supported it directly back in the late '99 betas.
The Linux kernel makes incredible strides constantly. Mozilla and Firefox can't seem to stop putting out minor version updates, to the joy of all. But XFree86? It takes five fucking years to get major new features that should have been there from the beginning. People bitch at Microsoft for Windows not having certain things integrated in from the beginning, claiming it's impossible to truly hack things in that weren't designed that way from the ground up, yet we wait on hands and knees for the next "extension" to come along. Why the incredible difference in development pace compared to other open source projects? KDE and GNOME are putting out new releases all the time.
The Y-Windows paper even talks about how the extensions are conflicting with each other now (i.e., Xinerama and XVideo). Why do we do this to ourselves? Let's get some real development going! First step is making the development of X more open, or contributing to projects like Y which intend to start over and include an X compatibility layer for older apps. Personally, I'm looking forward to Y.
The PDF there describes all the reasons they're replacing X, and they make sense. They're planning to get a 1.0 release out the door within a year. It's going to be vector-based, hardware-accelerated and so on.
I think it will eventually be the superior technology to X, which is so riddle with extensions that they're conflicting each other now.
This movie will suffer the same thing the recent Metroids have suffered, with the possible exception of Prime because of the way it was done--obsessing over Samus the character and her origins.
It's a bit like the difference between GTA3 and Vice City. One was an originless, storyless everyman people could live vicariously through, the second game was good but included a character hard for me to relate with.
The same with the Metroids. They keep trying to introduce plot and storylines now, cut-scenes and so forth, when the first game and Super Metroid were about being sent to some far-flung planet and travelling deeper and deeper underground into claustrophic caverns and tunnels, battling bizarre creatures. The fact that you were in a cool-looking suit was great, but even better was that it was just taken for granted that you were Samus Aran, a woman. It was never really a big deal. Even in Super Metroid, in which you already knew it was a woman. She just happened to be one.
This movie's going to play off the whole woman thing and make it extremely cheesy. I liked Samus when she was just some mysterious, silent bounty hunter you knew little about. Now they're trying to fill in her origins, storyline, motivations, and so on, and it doesn't feel like it belongs. Somehow, Prime pulled it off because they never really revealed too much and kept things myserious and ambient. Most of the plot was revealed through Chozo lore on the walls.
I guess it's one of those situations where you know you and your game-playing buddies who love Metroid could sit around one night and come up with a better story and movie tone than the one that's going to come out from John Woo...and it's going to be extremely frustrating when you see the resulting movie. Then again, this doesn't necessarily mean a movie will get made...just that he's signed on if one happens.
Actually, the idea that Samus was a woman wasn't around during the development of Metroid. The character originally was an unnamed man, but in the end they decided to throw a little twist just for fun and make her a woman. I don't think they realized it would have such an impact.
This article breathlessly tries to hype the fact that Linux was used in an "upcomming feature."
Turns out that's a complete, absolute lie--it's not a feature, it's a shitty direct-to-video release that often blue-screens unknown actors in front of footage from the first film.
Slashdot Mirror
The point you missed is that companies want to make money, and if they feel they can raise prices in order to raise income over expenses, they'll do it.
Have you ever run a business?
Again...only on Slashdot is it better to not sell anything then to put money into selling something and getting back some profit. Apparently losing money is better than making money. I forgot, we're "doing MS a favor." Even though they don't need any.
Why do people still think that Linux is in 1997?
Because 80% of the time, someone can't take home the new device they bought and hook it up to Linux. Gee your soundcard and palm and USB keychain worked. Congratulations.
Just because you use udev and hotplug doesn't mean squat--Linux has plenty of hardware support to catch up to. My scanner has never worked under Linux, and from the looks of it never will. Many, many people have hardware problems with Linux that require hours of hacking to fix.
Every company sells something in an attempt to succeed and control that market. Welcome to what we call "capitalism."
Only on Slashdot is someone "doing a favor" for a company by emulating their console so that nobody buys it.
Somehow, your logic is:
Game sales > Game sales + X-Box sales
Completely insane and depressing.
MS loses a lot of money on every x-box sale.
So by not buying X-Boxes, they're magically recouping the money for those X-Boxes sitting at the store?
...so what?
Seriously, I don't see how this proved anything other than someone let a 4-year-old point and click one of Linux's GUIs, as though that proved that all of Linux was easy...nobody is gonna buy that.
Try having her install a kid's game sometime...my 5-year-old knows how to insert the CD, click "Next", etc. I'd love to see a 4-year-old mess with RPM package managers...
This girl will probably use linux for the rest of her life.
Why? All she's done is used a Windows-alike GUI. If anything, she'll switch to Windows when she wants the apps her friends are using (and wants to play The Sims 5), and when she wants to connect to a shared printer or install a soundcard...
It is about refuting the claim that Linux is "hard" to use.
It didn't refute anything. Nobody's going to buy that Linux is magically not hard to use simply because someone took the time to set it up for someone so it was easy.
What if you don't have someone to set it up for you? I'm sorry, but I've been using Linux since the mid-90s, and I've taken days and weeks out of my time to set things up sometimes. Even Eric Raymond had trouble setting up a printer...remember?
All the article showed is that, as long as you make sure nothing will ever need to be set up or anything, you can have a 4-year-old use one of Linux's GUIs. This is true of any operating system.
When translated, your post reads:
"Uh, I disagree with you, so you're automatically a troll! I'm headed over to someone's house to fix a Windows printer, so that one instance invalidates the 95% of the time that drivers automatically work under Windows, and somehow also invalidates that a lot of printers almost never work under Linux.
Oh, and Windows XP doesn't 'feel' right. I'm actually going to offer this as some sort of proof of my argument! I'll vaguely claim it eats itself alive!
You troll. How dare you point out the obvious--Windows is easier to configure than Linux!"
Microsoft posting this kind of story and passing it off as real news = "astroturfing."
OSDN-owned Slashdot posting OSDN-owned Newsforge's story and passing it off as real news = nobody says anything.
If some Windows company owned a news site that was always posting anti-Linux stuff, people would be up in arms, but it's okay for OSDN to do it with Slashdot.
Off-topic I know..."No Karma Bonus" unchecked accordingly.
Can you prove they're not moving to OS X? Clearly, they must have had a reason for saying ssuch...it was probably due to all the registered developers who are grabbing their Apple Developer Tools. They do keep tabs on this stuff, you know.
People are verifiably moving to OS X.
:P
You: "Uh, no they're not, they're moving to OSS. I have no other reason for this statement other than I said so."
Meanwhile, what we're talking about is Cocoa and the Apple Developer Tools.
My next purchase is going to be a PowerBook. Why? One word--quality.
It's a level of quality that can't be found in Linux or Windows right now.
Cocoa kicks ass to develop with. Most people who use it can't imagine having not used it before. It's up there with .NET as far as positive developer reaction, but I think Cocoa is probably even more elegant
I love Slashdot. "If anything this refutes the RIAA's claim that P2P has any significant effect at all." All the sudden, it's magically proven that P2P has no effect on sales simply because their are online music stores. Scientific principle applied at its finest.
Doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. You people assume your niche opinions represent all of society. I'm sorry to tell you that lots of people watch MTV and enjoy the rubbish that's on it. But we're geeks, we have this elitist attitude that we're "above" that and so is the music we like. That's just how we are. :)
Therefore, we assume because sales are down, it's because nobody likes the music. Sorry, but drive by a high school parking lot after school sometime and hear all the shit blaring from the cars. Kids like the music...it's just that they're downloading it all now. You think those millions upon millions of users on Kazaa right now are all file-sharing legal files? Give me a break.
Oh, come on, mods...that was funny, particularly the sig. There was a big red circle pointing to the duck in the water in the background...didn't you see? :D
Nonetheless, a NSFW warning would be nice.
As an example, try Metroid Zero Mission sometime. Better yet, Metroid Fusion. You're forced to sit through boring cutscenes.
At the least, the storyline in Prime was fascinating, because they used it to add to the mystique and the atmosphere. I like Samus being somewhat of a mysterious bounty hunter killing shit in the far-flung reaches of space.
But the fact remains that everyone else likes the music coming out, especially young kids. You guys sound like old fogies--actually, you sound like my parents when I was growing up and they heard my music. Meanwhile, a lot of people DO like today's music, from the Strokes to Clay Aiken to Norah Jones to so on and so forth. But downloading is so easy and convenient now, today's youth don't give a second thought about it anymore. And that doesn't make what they're doing suddenly a-okay.
Yet, you people don't seem to care because you've grown accustomed to the convenience as well, and in order to remove the label of criminality, you've tried to brush it off on to the record label lobbying group that just so happens to be doing the *exact thing Slashdotters said they should be doing* a few years ago--suing individual copyright infringers.
This is silly. There are online stores now. There are services like iTunes. How many knocked-down excuses will people keep using to justify that they've got eMule down there in their system tray right now?
Artists willingly sign their contracts, and I find it hard to feel sorry for them when they shit on gold toilets, have antique car collections, and do movies all the time. Yet, Slashdot pretends they're fighting for the artist by ripping them off and not paying for their music.
What's amusing is that there is somewhat of a stigma when it comes to pirating games and apps simply because a lot of people here are programmers. Are you guys going to talk about "sampling games" when Doom 3 gets leaked a month early (as they all are now) and kids, college students, and people on high-bandwith connections pirate the fuck out of it?
If everyone here at Slashdot was a musician, the message would be completely different. What I find most amusing, however, is the double-standard pointed out in my sig.
But go ahead and play the "b-but the RIAA is *evil*!!! That gives me the right to pretend their copyright was magicaly transferred over to me to illegally distribute all over the place" game.
99% of the users on Kazaa aren't "sampling" those albums. Hell, on eMule they're just RARing up entire discographies now and sticking them online. I'd respect pro-piracy people more if they just admitted what was going on and that it was legally and morally wrong. At least I can debate your position logically because you know where you stand. But this bullshit "it's the RIAA's fault we're illegally sharing all their copyrighted materials!" mindset will never, ever fly.
Not only the fact that it took so damned long for something like RandR to appear, but we STILL don't have true alpha-blending and transparencies.
I'm sorry folks, but other GUIs have had this forever. Windows 2000 supported it directly back in the late '99 betas.
The Linux kernel makes incredible strides constantly. Mozilla and Firefox can't seem to stop putting out minor version updates, to the joy of all. But XFree86? It takes five fucking years to get major new features that should have been there from the beginning. People bitch at Microsoft for Windows not having certain things integrated in from the beginning, claiming it's impossible to truly hack things in that weren't designed that way from the ground up, yet we wait on hands and knees for the next "extension" to come along. Why the incredible difference in development pace compared to other open source projects? KDE and GNOME are putting out new releases all the time.
The Y-Windows paper even talks about how the extensions are conflicting with each other now (i.e., Xinerama and XVideo). Why do we do this to ourselves? Let's get some real development going! First step is making the development of X more open, or contributing to projects like Y which intend to start over and include an X compatibility layer for older apps. Personally, I'm looking forward to Y.
Y-you mean a distro is using it and the world didn't explode?! Their apps didn't die?!
I don't understand!
Website for those interested.
The PDF there describes all the reasons they're replacing X, and they make sense. They're planning to get a 1.0 release out the door within a year. It's going to be vector-based, hardware-accelerated and so on.
I think it will eventually be the superior technology to X, which is so riddle with extensions that they're conflicting each other now.
This movie will suffer the same thing the recent Metroids have suffered, with the possible exception of Prime because of the way it was done--obsessing over Samus the character and her origins.
It's a bit like the difference between GTA3 and Vice City. One was an originless, storyless everyman people could live vicariously through, the second game was good but included a character hard for me to relate with.
The same with the Metroids. They keep trying to introduce plot and storylines now, cut-scenes and so forth, when the first game and Super Metroid were about being sent to some far-flung planet and travelling deeper and deeper underground into claustrophic caverns and tunnels, battling bizarre creatures. The fact that you were in a cool-looking suit was great, but even better was that it was just taken for granted that you were Samus Aran, a woman. It was never really a big deal. Even in Super Metroid, in which you already knew it was a woman. She just happened to be one.
This movie's going to play off the whole woman thing and make it extremely cheesy. I liked Samus when she was just some mysterious, silent bounty hunter you knew little about. Now they're trying to fill in her origins, storyline, motivations, and so on, and it doesn't feel like it belongs. Somehow, Prime pulled it off because they never really revealed too much and kept things myserious and ambient. Most of the plot was revealed through Chozo lore on the walls.
I guess it's one of those situations where you know you and your game-playing buddies who love Metroid could sit around one night and come up with a better story and movie tone than the one that's going to come out from John Woo...and it's going to be extremely frustrating when you see the resulting movie. Then again, this doesn't necessarily mean a movie will get made...just that he's signed on if one happens.
Actually, the idea that Samus was a woman wasn't around during the development of Metroid. The character originally was an unnamed man, but in the end they decided to throw a little twist just for fun and make her a woman. I don't think they realized it would have such an impact.
This article breathlessly tries to hype the fact that Linux was used in an "upcomming feature."
Turns out that's a complete, absolute lie--it's not a feature, it's a shitty direct-to-video release that often blue-screens unknown actors in front of footage from the first film.
Not exactly something to be bragging about...