>>Maybe if the guy didn't work in a supermarket, he'd be taken more seriously.
OMG, an idea is an idea, no matter who it came from. And besides: "A Hampton Cove resident, Williams, 28, holds a master's degree in political science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a bachelor's degree in business management from Athens State University."
They're even involved in the LinuxBIOS ( http://www.linuxbios.org ) project. SiS has solid Linux drivers available right off their page, many of which seem to have been written by Ollie Lho.
nVidia deserves honorable mention as well, as they have the best Linux drivers for video devices. They may not be open source, they perform as well as their Windows counterparts, include support for features like their Windows counterparts, and are just overall solid drivers.
Check out the ACL's Toolbox LinuxBIOS Cluster!
on
Tool Box PC
·
· Score: 1
I do owe my fondness of Linux to Mandrake. I'm relatively new, been using Linux on my desktop for about nine months now. Every distribution has been by Mandrake. While I am now comfortable with installing most any distribution, Debians included, I must give credit to Mandrake for making my first real attempt to use Linux as smooth as possible. Without them, I'd have thrown away $150+ on a Windows 2000 or XP Pro edition. My $60 contribution is chump change compared to that.
Mandrake Club membership started quite some time before Sun announced that they were going to charge for Star Office, didn't they?
I know it's redundant by now, but do the math! If you didn't want your money to be treated with low reguard, then you should've gotten a better package. I paid $60 for standard membership and I'm perfectly fine with Mandrake's decision. Sun charging for StarOffice isn't Mandrake's fault, it's Sun's fault. Go bitch at them, instead.
Excellent points, all of them. I totally agree with you. I'm getting very sick of whiney users who just want everything for free because the OS just so happens to be free. These are the same people who put Loki out of business and I will NEVER forgive them for that (I own over $300 of Loki software). I use Linux because I simply find it to be more reliable and it's definately more flexable than Windows. However, I didn't expect to see high-quality, commercial grade software available for free. The money has to come in from somewhere, and there's only so much independant developers and non-profit organizations can do.
>>Sure - MS leverage their other products such as VBscript and.NET to make their own browser more capable - why shouldn't they? They offer a new thing for the server side, and damm well make sure the client side supports it.
A Linux development firm with virtually unlimited resources, this truly is Billmer's worst nightmare.
AOL may be evil and all, but that's the way users like it. They're lazy and somehow feel that they're just too damn important to waste their time picking and choosing their own software. They don't want to choose their own OS, web browser, IM program, e-mail client, etc. They want it crammed down thier throats and that's what makes MS such a success. Like it or not, AOL's the only company with enough influence and monetary resources to compete on this level.
Personally, I can't wait. With AOL spawning Linux-oriented products and services and *hopefully* forcing everyone to use them, a Linux user such as myself can only stand to gain from massively increased recognition. More people will use Linux-friendly services, maybe switch from Windows to Linux or an AOL-spawned Linux OS. Perhaps AOL's next move will be to buy Lindows and undersell Microsoft in the OS divison.
P.S. I served my time as an AOL user many years back when I first started getting on-line. I'm probably going to be modded down to 'flamebait' for saying this, but I LIKED IT. This was WAY back, they only offered 2400 baud dial-up in the Los Alamos / Santa Fe, NM areas and I was looking to 'upgrade' to 28.8. If they offered faster dial-up service, I probably would have remained with AOL until gaming became more important than integrated services.
>>1. Company A wants to improve their product.
2. Company A legally learns/purchases/adapts technologies from rival product.
3. As a result, company A's product is improved.
This sounds fair to me. It even sounds *gasp* competitive.
MS buying OpenGL patents is like Intel buying Alpha. They aren't going to improve their own products with the newly acquired technology, they're gonna kill it off and push their own arguably inferior technology.
>>Why do people think a basic user should be running Linux on their desktop? A lot of people don't even have much comprehension of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS, that runs of the computer they have.
IMHO, Linux is just as easy to use these days as Windows or MacOS. Put a KDE 2.2 desktop in front of a newbie and they won't know the difference. Rename the Mozilla / Opera / etc. icon to "Internet" and they'll be browsing in no time.
Linux seems to be difficult for people who have been exposed to Windows and MacOS for long periods of time. I hear of people on message boards who are enthusiastic at first about switching, but come back complaining about how they couldn't find the 'start menu' or how they couldn't run Internet Explorer and so on. I gave my mom (Who's up to just recently had been using a 20MHz Mac Color Classic to run Claris Works) a Mandrake 8.1 box and she didn't complain at all. I even got my little sister making crude drawings with The GIMP and playing Sim City 3000 from Loki.
Anyway, that's an experience I've been hearing about more and more of. Point being - just because someone sucks with Windows, don't assume they'll suck with Linux. The most daunting part of starting with Linux is getting rid of bias and preconceptions of it being difficult.
Single player is a bit weak, but like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, it's not exactly built for single-player. To it's credit, they single players missions are a lot more meaningful and have a much better story behind them than the UT and Q3 single player missions. Audio to go along with text in mission briefings is nice if you're not in the mood to read three or four paragraphs describing the full mission.
Multiplayer - This is what it all boils down to. Tribes 2 beats all others hands down. The netcode is absolutely unbelievable, I should know since I play on 28.8K dial-up (Yes, my phone lines are THAT bad, and there is on cable modem or wireless service available in my area yet). With a little getting used to, Tribes 2 makes compensation for lag incredibly easy, even more so than the latest Half-Life / Counter-Strike versions. Servers with up to 36 people on them are not a big deal with my connection, I can hardly handle players with other games. I can still hold my own pretty well in a fight against an LPB both on the ground on in the air. HPBs are simply eaten alive in Q3 and UT.
Sound - The music fits the environments, and the sound is clear. For those with broadband connections, they can use an integrated Tribes 2 voice chat system. The Linux version uses GDM protocol. I haven't heard such great things about the system (They tend to sound like frogs), but most people that I know who do have broadband use it even though it supposedly doesn't sound that great. Voice communication is outstanding and well layed out. It takes a little getting used to, but when you get a few important keystrokes memorized they become incredibly convenient. Hitting V-F-F to tell my team that I have the flag through audio and with a little text message is far superior to binding a macro for text-only communications and hoping people actually put in the effort to read what I have to say. Everything you need for teamplay is there, even extras that allow you to make gestures and taunt your enemy.
Graphics are absolutely gorgeous. With a GeForce 3, all the goodies can be turned on and the resolution can be brought to 1600x1200 with very playable framerates. Huge outdoor environments make for some stunning views, and the detail is incredible considering the massiveness of the envirvonments.
Gameplay varies from person to person. For some, it can be too complicated, but for myself and most I know it's well done overall. The physics engine is outstanding. For the first time I can remember, velocities actually add properly. Launch a disc while strafing and your disc copies your sideways movement. Drop a grenade while falling and your grenade's velocity will match your own. In other games, all your weapons move at a constant rate in one direction. In Quake 3, it was pretty easy to out-accelerate your own rocket if you knew how to strafe jump well. The jet pack takes some getting used to, as well as adjusting in different classes of armor, but those are pretty easy and sensible. Vehicles can be helpful, but are not necessary or overdone. Each one can be used for a variety of purposes, and each are equally as important. Deployable equipment is a huge plus, especially when it comes to defending your flag. Everything is extremely well balanced, and the gameplay reflects more upon the player himself than what the game limits him to be.
And finally, patches. Loki did an absolutely mind-blowingly cool thing by making patches for Tribes 2 easy to install and quick. Everyone I know who uses the Windows version absolutely despises the Sierra installer and update utility since it downloads the patches in sequence and has multiple updates that are required for the installer itself. Loki has a single patch file that updates Tribes 2 from the retail version to the latest version, making it infinately easier than the Windows version to get up and running.
Anyway, so it really does kick ass, and I'd definately have to say that it's an all-time great. It's almost a cross between first person shooter and real-time stratagy, and it's my choice for best Linux-friendly game ever.
Basically, the Linux kernel on the CMOS chip. It's been used in clusters, and will be shown off (again) this November at SuperComputing in Denver.
Part of the computational and computer science division (CCS-1) at Los Alamos National Laboratory is working in close conjunction with SiS, ALi, VIA, and less directly with Intel and AMD to put LinuxBIOS on off the shelf motherboards for cheap and effective clustering solutions. Boot time for a Beowulf cluster node (And I know you all go nuts when someone says 'Beowulf') can be as little as three seconds from the instant the power switch is hit. An actual desktop system can load in as little as 11 seconds, though a more realistic number for a not so stripped system would be about 20 seconds.
No slow floppies to wait for
No CDs to burn
No bad clusters on a HDD to worry about
No moving parts to break down.
Just a script that flashes every node's BIOS chip and gives about 2MBit/s bandwidth with practically no latency.
Anyway, so there's another gov't organization doing cool stuff with Linux.
Whoever write that article must have the Microsoft "must-upgrade-at-every-opportunity" syndrome.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it's free, don't pay for it. Ones should ask three questions before buying a new distribution.
First - Does my current distribution lack features or support that a new distribution will bring? Is there a point to upgrading in the first place, other than new desktop games?
Second - If there's a compatibility issue, can that be fixed by a quick kernal upgrade?
Third - Do I need the documentation and frills that come along with purchasing a distribution? If not, can I download the ISO and burn it or get just the CDs from somewhere else cheap?
It's understandable how someone new and enthusiastic would like to see every last piece of documentation there is about their new software, but eventually they'll just get buried in papers and confused.
So to summarize, I don't see why they would need / want to pay the premium for the extra documentation, and one would guess that after a few months they'd get comfortable enough with Linux to the point where they wouldn't find the need to pay for tech support or would have colligues that could answer most questions for them. They most likely did not need to pay 40+ every six months for new distro's, but rather chose to because they were uncertain what they would get without paying the extra money.
Slashdot Mirror
Flying slow-moving objects with narcs over a field of heavily armed cop-hating drug smugglers? You've got to be kidding me.
>>Maybe if the guy didn't work in a supermarket, he'd be taken more seriously.
OMG, an idea is an idea, no matter who it came from. And besides:
"A Hampton Cove resident, Williams, 28, holds a master's degree in political science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a bachelor's degree in business management from Athens State University."
They're even involved in the LinuxBIOS ( http://www.linuxbios.org ) project. SiS has solid Linux drivers available right off their page, many of which seem to have been written by Ollie Lho.
nVidia deserves honorable mention as well, as they have the best Linux drivers for video devices. They may not be open source, they perform as well as their Windows counterparts, include support for features like their Windows counterparts, and are just overall solid drivers.
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/clusters/bento/i ndex.html
Check out the other LinuxBIOS stuff while you're there.
I do owe my fondness of Linux to Mandrake. I'm relatively new, been using Linux on my desktop for about nine months now. Every distribution has been by Mandrake. While I am now comfortable with installing most any distribution, Debians included, I must give credit to Mandrake for making my first real attempt to use Linux as smooth as possible. Without them, I'd have thrown away $150+ on a Windows 2000 or XP Pro edition. My $60 contribution is chump change compared to that.
Mandrake Club membership started quite some time before Sun announced that they were going to charge for Star Office, didn't they?
I know it's redundant by now, but do the math! If you didn't want your money to be treated with low reguard, then you should've gotten a better package. I paid $60 for standard membership and I'm perfectly fine with Mandrake's decision. Sun charging for StarOffice isn't Mandrake's fault, it's Sun's fault. Go bitch at them, instead.
Excellent points, all of them. I totally agree with you. I'm getting very sick of whiney users who just want everything for free because the OS just so happens to be free. These are the same people who put Loki out of business and I will NEVER forgive them for that (I own over $300 of Loki software). I use Linux because I simply find it to be more reliable and it's definately more flexable than Windows. However, I didn't expect to see high-quality, commercial grade software available for free. The money has to come in from somewhere, and there's only so much independant developers and non-profit organizations can do.
>>Is the solution simply to not use Microsoft Messenger?
No, but that's a good start.
>>Sure - MS leverage their other products such as VBscript and .NET to make their own browser more capable - why shouldn't they? They offer a new thing for the server side, and damm well make sure the client side supports it.
Just the clients that use their browser.
A Linux development firm with virtually unlimited resources, this truly is Billmer's worst nightmare.
AOL may be evil and all, but that's the way users like it. They're lazy and somehow feel that they're just too damn important to waste their time picking and choosing their own software. They don't want to choose their own OS, web browser, IM program, e-mail client, etc. They want it crammed down thier throats and that's what makes MS such a success. Like it or not, AOL's the only company with enough influence and monetary resources to compete on this level.
Personally, I can't wait. With AOL spawning Linux-oriented products and services and *hopefully* forcing everyone to use them, a Linux user such as myself can only stand to gain from massively increased recognition. More people will use Linux-friendly services, maybe switch from Windows to Linux or an AOL-spawned Linux OS. Perhaps AOL's next move will be to buy Lindows and undersell Microsoft in the OS divison.
P.S. I served my time as an AOL user many years back when I first started getting on-line. I'm probably going to be modded down to 'flamebait' for saying this, but I LIKED IT. This was WAY back, they only offered 2400 baud dial-up in the Los Alamos / Santa Fe, NM areas and I was looking to 'upgrade' to 28.8. If they offered faster dial-up service, I probably would have remained with AOL until gaming became more important than integrated services.
Ha! Maybe now he can compile a kernel as fast as a 1.66GHz Athlon XP?
>>1. Company A wants to improve their product.
2. Company A legally learns/purchases/adapts technologies from rival product.
3. As a result, company A's product is improved.
This sounds fair to me. It even sounds *gasp* competitive.
MS buying OpenGL patents is like Intel buying Alpha. They aren't going to improve their own products with the newly acquired technology, they're gonna kill it off and push their own arguably inferior technology.
>>Why do people think a basic user should be running Linux on their desktop? A lot of people don't even have much comprehension of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS, that runs of the computer they have.
IMHO, Linux is just as easy to use these days as Windows or MacOS. Put a KDE 2.2 desktop in front of a newbie and they won't know the difference. Rename the Mozilla / Opera / etc. icon to "Internet" and they'll be browsing in no time.
Linux seems to be difficult for people who have been exposed to Windows and MacOS for long periods of time. I hear of people on message boards who are enthusiastic at first about switching, but come back complaining about how they couldn't find the 'start menu' or how they couldn't run Internet Explorer and so on. I gave my mom (Who's up to just recently had been using a 20MHz Mac Color Classic to run Claris Works) a Mandrake 8.1 box and she didn't complain at all. I even got my little sister making crude drawings with The GIMP and playing Sim City 3000 from Loki.
Anyway, that's an experience I've been hearing about more and more of. Point being - just because someone sucks with Windows, don't assume they'll suck with Linux. The most daunting part of starting with Linux is getting rid of bias and preconceptions of it being difficult.
M$ owns Apple. Not in a monetary sense, however. If MS stopped developing IE and MSOffice for MacOS, Apple & MacOS would be no better off than Linux.
Apple is MS's bitch.
Tribes 2.
Single player is a bit weak, but like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament, it's not exactly built for single-player. To it's credit, they single players missions are a lot more meaningful and have a much better story behind them than the UT and Q3 single player missions. Audio to go along with text in mission briefings is nice if you're not in the mood to read three or four paragraphs describing the full mission.
Multiplayer - This is what it all boils down to. Tribes 2 beats all others hands down. The netcode is absolutely unbelievable, I should know since I play on 28.8K dial-up (Yes, my phone lines are THAT bad, and there is on cable modem or wireless service available in my area yet). With a little getting used to, Tribes 2 makes compensation for lag incredibly easy, even more so than the latest Half-Life / Counter-Strike versions. Servers with up to 36 people on them are not a big deal with my connection, I can hardly handle players with other games. I can still hold my own pretty well in a fight against an LPB both on the ground on in the air. HPBs are simply eaten alive in Q3 and UT.
Sound - The music fits the environments, and the sound is clear. For those with broadband connections, they can use an integrated Tribes 2 voice chat system. The Linux version uses GDM protocol. I haven't heard such great things about the system (They tend to sound like frogs), but most people that I know who do have broadband use it even though it supposedly doesn't sound that great. Voice communication is outstanding and well layed out. It takes a little getting used to, but when you get a few important keystrokes memorized they become incredibly convenient. Hitting V-F-F to tell my team that I have the flag through audio and with a little text message is far superior to binding a macro for text-only communications and hoping people actually put in the effort to read what I have to say. Everything you need for teamplay is there, even extras that allow you to make gestures and taunt your enemy.
Graphics are absolutely gorgeous. With a GeForce 3, all the goodies can be turned on and the resolution can be brought to 1600x1200 with very playable framerates. Huge outdoor environments make for some stunning views, and the detail is incredible considering the massiveness of the envirvonments.
Gameplay varies from person to person. For some, it can be too complicated, but for myself and most I know it's well done overall. The physics engine is outstanding. For the first time I can remember, velocities actually add properly. Launch a disc while strafing and your disc copies your sideways movement. Drop a grenade while falling and your grenade's velocity will match your own. In other games, all your weapons move at a constant rate in one direction. In Quake 3, it was pretty easy to out-accelerate your own rocket if you knew how to strafe jump well. The jet pack takes some getting used to, as well as adjusting in different classes of armor, but those are pretty easy and sensible. Vehicles can be helpful, but are not necessary or overdone. Each one can be used for a variety of purposes, and each are equally as important. Deployable equipment is a huge plus, especially when it comes to defending your flag. Everything is extremely well balanced, and the gameplay reflects more upon the player himself than what the game limits him to be.
And finally, patches. Loki did an absolutely mind-blowingly cool thing by making patches for Tribes 2 easy to install and quick. Everyone I know who uses the Windows version absolutely despises the Sierra installer and update utility since it downloads the patches in sequence and has multiple updates that are required for the installer itself. Loki has a single patch file that updates Tribes 2 from the retail version to the latest version, making it infinately easier than the Windows version to get up and running.
Anyway, so it really does kick ass, and I'd definately have to say that it's an all-time great. It's almost a cross between first person shooter and real-time stratagy, and it's my choice for best Linux-friendly game ever.
www.linuxbios.org
Basically, the Linux kernel on the CMOS chip. It's been used in clusters, and will be shown off (again) this November at SuperComputing in Denver.
Part of the computational and computer science division (CCS-1) at Los Alamos National Laboratory is working in close conjunction with SiS, ALi, VIA, and less directly with Intel and AMD to put LinuxBIOS on off the shelf motherboards for cheap and effective clustering solutions. Boot time for a Beowulf cluster node (And I know you all go nuts when someone says 'Beowulf') can be as little as three seconds from the instant the power switch is hit. An actual desktop system can load in as little as 11 seconds, though a more realistic number for a not so stripped system would be about 20 seconds.
No slow floppies to wait for
No CDs to burn
No bad clusters on a HDD to worry about
No moving parts to break down.
Just a script that flashes every node's BIOS chip and gives about 2MBit/s bandwidth with practically no latency.
Anyway, so there's another gov't organization doing cool stuff with Linux.
Whoever write that article must have the Microsoft "must-upgrade-at-every-opportunity" syndrome. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if it's free, don't pay for it. Ones should ask three questions before buying a new distribution. First - Does my current distribution lack features or support that a new distribution will bring? Is there a point to upgrading in the first place, other than new desktop games? Second - If there's a compatibility issue, can that be fixed by a quick kernal upgrade? Third - Do I need the documentation and frills that come along with purchasing a distribution? If not, can I download the ISO and burn it or get just the CDs from somewhere else cheap? It's understandable how someone new and enthusiastic would like to see every last piece of documentation there is about their new software, but eventually they'll just get buried in papers and confused. So to summarize, I don't see why they would need / want to pay the premium for the extra documentation, and one would guess that after a few months they'd get comfortable enough with Linux to the point where they wouldn't find the need to pay for tech support or would have colligues that could answer most questions for them. They most likely did not need to pay 40+ every six months for new distro's, but rather chose to because they were uncertain what they would get without paying the extra money.