If your windows box exists only to play games, then replacing it with a linux box thats also capable of playing games would save you money, you could buy a couple more games or a hardware upgrade with the cost of windows...
There are quite a few people in a similar boat, they have windows solely for gaming and would happily get rid of it if they were able to play their games under linux... The fact that people are willing to make effort to get games running with wine shows that there is at least some demand for linux games.
Similarly, sales of the recent indie bundles show that there are plenty of linux users out there who not only want games, but are also willing to pay for them. The market may not be as big in terms of percentages, but there are still large numbers of potential customers and very little in the way of competition.
A port is very cheap compared to the cost of writing a game from scratch, and depending how the game was written in the first place that port could require very little effort... If there is a mac port, or existing opengl support in the game for instance then linux support would be relatively easy. Similarly if your game already uses a cross platform engine, porting it to any other platform supported by that engine should be trivial. A relatively small number of sales could easily outweigh the cost of porting, not to mention the goodwill and publicity generated by having a linux version. Also many games already have linux support for dedicated servers, so at least some of the game code is already running on linux.
If Valve are planning to release their own game console, linux would be the obvious choice... Writing their own OS from scratch, even a small embedded one for a single purpose device would be a lot of effort while they can use linux for free. If games are already running on linux, then porting to their console should be trivial and gives them a head start.
The binary blob drivers, atleast the nvidia ones tend to outperform their windows counterparts by a small margin. The open amd drivers are coming along, and outperform their closed counterparts in some areas, despite not having complete documentation.
It's already trivially easy to pirate games on all the other gaming platforms... And most of them are also capable of running emulators.
What's really needed however, is a modern day equivalent of the Amiga. A system with a good selection of games, the insert and boot simplicity of a console, and a proper computer underpinning the system that allows people to learn more should they wish to do so. Think about it like this:
Parents don't want to buy their kids a games console because it's not very educational, all it does is play games. Kids may not be terribly interested in learning how a computer works to start with, but if the facility is there then curiosity will often get the better of them. Most importantly, the system needs to encourage people to learn about it, and needs to have a simple procedure to return it to a working state regardless of how much you've messed with it.
As for piracy, all the various anti piracy measures do is limit casual piracy, that is kids sharing copies of games with friends, or buying a single copy of a game to play at a lan party... These schemes inevitably get cracked anyway, and instead of buying one copy to share those kids will simply obtain a pirate copy to start with.
Unfortunately, a lot of mac games published since apple went to x86 have just been the windows versions, wrapped in a custom version of wine... Very little in the way of actual porting.
Keeping a windows install stable and performance is actually quite hard, if you use it on a regular basis it gradually deteriorates even today, as you install applications you end up with all manner of background "updaters" running, and when you uninstall something there is often some cruft left behind. Keeping a windows box that is used solely for gaming actually gives you a much better chance, since there will be much less application churn and a lot less installed in general.
For years you heard the "people wont like linux because they cant go down the store and buy software for it"... As the appstore proves, people actually do love the convenience of the repository model... Now if only all those linux based netbooks had come with a proper distro, a usable repository and a graphical interface to it, instead of the gimped distros they had.
I looked at funambol, but didn't like the idea of having to install a client on each device.
However, I do something similar with Zarafa...
Their old web ui was pretty ugly, but the new one is much improved... It supports caldav (which many desktop clients and ios devices support by default). It also supports activesync through the z-push plugin, which ios/android/webos/etc all support by default, and which will sync mail/contacts/calenders. And there's another plugin i recently installed to get carddav support, the name escapes me at the moment but it works well with the osx address book.
There is a variant of ODT which is a flat uncompressed XML file... That works well with git, also there is a plugin for libreoffice which saves your documents directly into a git (or subversion, cvs etc) repository (which i believe stores the data as dirs rather than zipfiles)...
If MS made a good mail client that was built in to windows, then it could potentially reduce sales of outlook.. MS are very scared of competing with themselves and reducing sales of their existing products.
That depends on the punishment for getting caught... If you are just fined, then of course the rich will speed more - the fine is a trivial amount to them, especially compared to all the other costs associated with their high end cars.
Slower is not more efficient... It's a product of how a vehicle is designed which in itself is a trade off.
Cars today are designed to be most efficient at around 50mph because thats a sensible medium where speed limits typically range between 30 and 80mph... If they designed the car to be most efficient at 70-80mph then it would likely be less efficient at 30.
At slower speeds, the energy used for motion will be lower, but then the journey will be take longer so the lower level of power will be in use for a longer period of time. And there is background energy use which is not related to motion, such as lights etc... This power use will be there regardless of speed, and thus a longer journey will increase it.
That's assuming you have something to do during the journey... If you don't, then you will be sitting there extremely bored for an extended period, whereas if you were actually driving your mind would be occupied and time seems to pass more quickly.
For metals pulled from the earth and smelted, and products which are assembled a high level of effort must be expended for each and every product...
For any form of digital media, effort may well have gone into creating the initial version, but all subsequent copies were produced trivially... So by extension, only the original has any value and all the copies have little or no value.
Or you could argue that the value of the media should be split equally amongst each produced copy...
To declare that trivially produced copies hold value would in effect be to declare that the work has infinite value, since infinite additional copies can trivially be produced for no additional effort.
The difference between 1990 and 2012 feature sets is considerably smaller than the difference between 1990 and 2012 hardware... Many of the features you describe can actually be added to amigaos, and i doubt it would make the boot time that much slower. My A3000 is mostly default, with a few extra programs installed and nothing having been done to tune the boot time.
There's no good reason for a modern dual core system with 2gb ram to take 25 seconds or longer to boot, let alone for a 4 core system with 8gb to take even longer! Yes modern systems have many more features, but they are also MANY times more powerful, and the extra performance should more than compensate for the difference in features.
So basically windows 7 is unnecessarily bloated and slow, because 8 which has the same if not more features is able to boot faster on slower hardware... I would guess that 8 is also unnecessarily bloated and slow, just not as bad as 7...
The amiga may do a lot less, but the difference in hardware is considerably bigger than the gap in features... There is no reason that things like ASLR/DEP would reduce performance on modern hardware, and enabling a tcp stack at bootup on the amiga seems to make a negligible difference to startup speed so i would expect a tcp stack to make even less of a difference on modern hardware.
My favorite new security hole is "Instead of typing a password, users can create a four-digit PIN for easy logon to the computer." That and "picture password".
Or you could just set a 4 digit numerical password, and hey presto you have a 4 digit pin for logging in.
I wonder how these features interact with the existing windows ntlm auth and hashing systems etc...
*only" 2GB of ram and *only* 2x 1.6ghz cores? Nothing should be remotely slow on such hardware, that MS are clearing up some of their bloat is not a good thing, it should never have been otherwise.
An Amiga 3000, 25mhz and with 4mb ram circa 1990 boots in WindowsTOGO makes it possible to use a Windows bootcd like Linux users have done for a decade.
This is available for earlier versions of windows, search for bartpe...
Firefox and Chrome updates are supersets, that is they add features and fix bugs, and providing your page complies with standards and didn't depend on those bugs there's no reason it wouldn't render the same in subsequent versions.
IE on the other hand introduces, promotes and then subsequently deprecates all manner of non standard features.. Similarly, their support for standards has traditionally been so poor and buggy that people have resorted to all kinds of kludgy workarounds... Workarounds which then break on new versions which have a different set of bugs.
I have never had any standards compliant apps or pages break in either firefox or chrome when they worked on an earlier version.
Or a package manager, choose a browser from a list, hit install, done. No messing with CLI or FTP.
It's not the fault of browser makers that MS seem to have stuck their basic functionality in the 80s (rcp? telnet? no ssh? ftp but no sftp or rsync? no package downloader/manager? etc etc).
How could it get updated when the users running it are (presumably) non admin users who won't have sufficient access to update it... Firefox automatic updates don't seem to bother linux distros, where the built in update function is disabled and the system package manager is used for installing updates.
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If your windows box exists only to play games, then replacing it with a linux box thats also capable of playing games would save you money, you could buy a couple more games or a hardware upgrade with the cost of windows...
There are quite a few people in a similar boat, they have windows solely for gaming and would happily get rid of it if they were able to play their games under linux... The fact that people are willing to make effort to get games running with wine shows that there is at least some demand for linux games.
Similarly, sales of the recent indie bundles show that there are plenty of linux users out there who not only want games, but are also willing to pay for them. The market may not be as big in terms of percentages, but there are still large numbers of potential customers and very little in the way of competition.
A port is very cheap compared to the cost of writing a game from scratch, and depending how the game was written in the first place that port could require very little effort... If there is a mac port, or existing opengl support in the game for instance then linux support would be relatively easy. Similarly if your game already uses a cross platform engine, porting it to any other platform supported by that engine should be trivial. A relatively small number of sales could easily outweigh the cost of porting, not to mention the goodwill and publicity generated by having a linux version.
Also many games already have linux support for dedicated servers, so at least some of the game code is already running on linux.
If Valve are planning to release their own game console, linux would be the obvious choice... Writing their own OS from scratch, even a small embedded one for a single purpose device would be a lot of effort while they can use linux for free. If games are already running on linux, then porting to their console should be trivial and gives them a head start.
I remember how things used to be...
On consoles, insert disc, play game.
On the Amiga, insert disk, play game.
Install game, no longer require original media to play.
The binary blob drivers, atleast the nvidia ones tend to outperform their windows counterparts by a small margin.
The open amd drivers are coming along, and outperform their closed counterparts in some areas, despite not having complete documentation.
Why would anyone want to play doom in dosbox, when there are modern ports of the doom engine available?
It's already trivially easy to pirate games on all the other gaming platforms... And most of them are also capable of running emulators.
What's really needed however, is a modern day equivalent of the Amiga. A system with a good selection of games, the insert and boot simplicity of a console, and a proper computer underpinning the system that allows people to learn more should they wish to do so. Think about it like this:
Parents don't want to buy their kids a games console because it's not very educational, all it does is play games.
Kids may not be terribly interested in learning how a computer works to start with, but if the facility is there then curiosity will often get the better of them.
Most importantly, the system needs to encourage people to learn about it, and needs to have a simple procedure to return it to a working state regardless of how much you've messed with it.
As for piracy, all the various anti piracy measures do is limit casual piracy, that is kids sharing copies of games with friends, or buying a single copy of a game to play at a lan party... These schemes inevitably get cracked anyway, and instead of buying one copy to share those kids will simply obtain a pirate copy to start with.
Unfortunately, a lot of mac games published since apple went to x86 have just been the windows versions, wrapped in a custom version of wine... Very little in the way of actual porting.
Keeping a windows install stable and performance is actually quite hard, if you use it on a regular basis it gradually deteriorates even today, as you install applications you end up with all manner of background "updaters" running, and when you uninstall something there is often some cruft left behind.
Keeping a windows box that is used solely for gaming actually gives you a much better chance, since there will be much less application churn and a lot less installed in general.
For years you heard the "people wont like linux because they cant go down the store and buy software for it"... As the appstore proves, people actually do love the convenience of the repository model... Now if only all those linux based netbooks had come with a proper distro, a usable repository and a graphical interface to it, instead of the gimped distros they had.
I'm able to view calendars shared by other users on the system, or are you referring to something else?
zarafa webaccess is the old interface, the new one is called zarafa webapp, although im pretty sure the old one let me share calendars too...
the comparison table does say "advanced calendar sharing", so perhaps there are some extra features i'm missing.
I looked at funambol, but didn't like the idea of having to install a client on each device.
However, I do something similar with Zarafa...
Their old web ui was pretty ugly, but the new one is much improved...
It supports caldav (which many desktop clients and ios devices support by default).
It also supports activesync through the z-push plugin, which ios/android/webos/etc all support by default, and which will sync mail/contacts/calenders.
And there's another plugin i recently installed to get carddav support, the name escapes me at the moment but it works well with the osx address book.
There is a variant of ODT which is a flat uncompressed XML file... That works well with git, also there is a plugin for libreoffice which saves your documents directly into a git (or subversion, cvs etc) repository (which i believe stores the data as dirs rather than zipfiles)...
If MS made a good mail client that was built in to windows, then it could potentially reduce sales of outlook.. MS are very scared of competing with themselves and reducing sales of their existing products.
That depends on the punishment for getting caught...
If you are just fined, then of course the rich will speed more - the fine is a trivial amount to them, especially compared to all the other costs associated with their high end cars.
Well have a failsafe override, where manual control is allowed but the computer takes over if it perceives a danger...
Slower is not more efficient... It's a product of how a vehicle is designed which in itself is a trade off.
Cars today are designed to be most efficient at around 50mph because thats a sensible medium where speed limits typically range between 30 and 80mph... If they designed the car to be most efficient at 70-80mph then it would likely be less efficient at 30.
At slower speeds, the energy used for motion will be lower, but then the journey will be take longer so the lower level of power will be in use for a longer period of time. And there is background energy use which is not related to motion, such as lights etc... This power use will be there regardless of speed, and thus a longer journey will increase it.
That's assuming you have something to do during the journey...
If you don't, then you will be sitting there extremely bored for an extended period, whereas if you were actually driving your mind would be occupied and time seems to pass more quickly.
The rich already have self driving cars, in the form of chauffeurs..
For metals pulled from the earth and smelted, and products which are assembled a high level of effort must be expended for each and every product...
For any form of digital media, effort may well have gone into creating the initial version, but all subsequent copies were produced trivially... So by extension, only the original has any value and all the copies have little or no value.
Or you could argue that the value of the media should be split equally amongst each produced copy...
To declare that trivially produced copies hold value would in effect be to declare that the work has infinite value, since infinite additional copies can trivially be produced for no additional effort.
It has internet connectivity...
The difference between 1990 and 2012 feature sets is considerably smaller than the difference between 1990 and 2012 hardware... Many of the features you describe can actually be added to amigaos, and i doubt it would make the boot time that much slower. My A3000 is mostly default, with a few extra programs installed and nothing having been done to tune the boot time.
There's no good reason for a modern dual core system with 2gb ram to take 25 seconds or longer to boot, let alone for a 4 core system with 8gb to take even longer! Yes modern systems have many more features, but they are also MANY times more powerful, and the extra performance should more than compensate for the difference in features.
So basically windows 7 is unnecessarily bloated and slow, because 8 which has the same if not more features is able to boot faster on slower hardware... I would guess that 8 is also unnecessarily bloated and slow, just not as bad as 7...
The amiga may do a lot less, but the difference in hardware is considerably bigger than the gap in features... There is no reason that things like ASLR/DEP would reduce performance on modern hardware, and enabling a tcp stack at bootup on the amiga seems to make a negligible difference to startup speed so i would expect a tcp stack to make even less of a difference on modern hardware.
My favorite new security hole is "Instead of typing a password, users can create a four-digit PIN for easy logon to the computer." That and "picture password".
Or you could just set a 4 digit numerical password, and hey presto you have a 4 digit pin for logging in.
I wonder how these features interact with the existing windows ntlm auth and hashing systems etc...
*only" 2GB of ram and *only* 2x 1.6ghz cores?
Nothing should be remotely slow on such hardware, that MS are clearing up some of their bloat is not a good thing, it should never have been otherwise.
An Amiga 3000, 25mhz and with 4mb ram circa 1990 boots in
WindowsTOGO makes it possible to use a Windows bootcd like Linux users have done for a decade.
This is available for earlier versions of windows, search for bartpe...
Firefox and Chrome updates are supersets, that is they add features and fix bugs, and providing your page complies with standards and didn't depend on those bugs there's no reason it wouldn't render the same in subsequent versions.
IE on the other hand introduces, promotes and then subsequently deprecates all manner of non standard features.. Similarly, their support for standards has traditionally been so poor and buggy that people have resorted to all kinds of kludgy workarounds... Workarounds which then break on new versions which have a different set of bugs.
I have never had any standards compliant apps or pages break in either firefox or chrome when they worked on an earlier version.
Or a package manager, choose a browser from a list, hit install, done. No messing with CLI or FTP.
It's not the fault of browser makers that MS seem to have stuck their basic functionality in the 80s (rcp? telnet? no ssh? ftp but no sftp or rsync? no package downloader/manager? etc etc).
How could it get updated when the users running it are (presumably) non admin users who won't have sufficient access to update it...
Firefox automatic updates don't seem to bother linux distros, where the built in update function is disabled and the system package manager is used for installing updates.