No no, I'm not laughing at your insult. I'm laughing at how unoriginal it is. Did you seriously think that nobody's called me "NanoDick" or made fun of my mom? Heh. Thanks for the laugh, I needed it.:)
"Apparently it doesn't work with QuickTime 6 beta, which is the only other mass-market real MP4 product out there. Either DivX or Apple has got it wrong somehow (and I'm betting it's DivX). "
Oh, that's a bummer.:(
What's sad is that we have all these choices, but the interesting hardware can't really keep up. I wish I could just buy a card with the TV outs etc on it, and just replace the chip once in a while.
On the plus side, though, this card could really be an important component to making a PC based Tivo device. I went on a business trip last week and had a few eps of MST3k that kept me entertained on the plane.:)
"CPUs are getting faster and faster, and since processor intensive tasks are getting exported to cards what the hell do you need your cpu for. "
"I guess there are some porfessionals that need to do processor intensive tasks in the background but thats not true for most people."
This is true. Sadly, though, Windows' threading model makes it so that browsing the web while watching a vid causes lags in the audio and video, which is a horrible nuisance.
This card is interesting to me because I set up another box to capture TV shows. Then, on my main computer where i do email/internet/games etc, I watch these shows in a little window while I'm browsing. I don't think that's common for people to do right now, so I'm not claiming this is a mass market device. However, I personally find it interesting if it can play the video solidly without lagging.
I have a 13 inch TV not doing anything, I'd be happy to hook this guy up to a card like that and watch my PVR stuff on it. I like the idea of pausing via the mouse in case I get an important ICQ message or something.
I have a regular television, but I'm rarely home in time to watch anything interesting (hence my building a PVR). During some of those precious hours where I'm not at my GF's house, I'm usually skimming Slashdot and other forums I contribute to. So a device like this gives me time to browse and watch my TV show. Most of the stuff I watch is MST3k or That 70's Show, so my multiplexed attention isn't that degraded.
Again, not trying to convince you that you should go run out and buy one. I'm just saying that it does fill a neat little niche market. As P2P gets stronger, I can see a larger need for this type of stuff. However, I expect it'll get built into my next vid card.
You may be slightly underpowered for what I'm going to suggest, but it's worth a try, right?
Go to www.JPG.com and download the PicVideo Motion JPEG codec. Then download Virtual Dub. Use VirtualDub to capture from your TV card to the Motion JPEG codec. If it works as well as you'd like, then pay the $19 and you'll get the coded that doesn't have the watermark on it.
You should be able to capture 2 hours of video, but I think it'll be expensive hard-disk wise. If you do at 320 by 240 (which is roughly what VHS is..) at the highest quality,it shouldn't be too bad. You could do it at 640 by 480, but I'm a little concerned that you'll have trouble with it. If memory serves, 640 by 480 will roughly mean 4 gigs an hour. (Potentially higher...)
Next you'll need a TV out. You can buy cheap-o video cards that do that. Play the video back at full screen and hit record on the VCR. Voila!
Not sure what you'll think of the quality. You'll definitely take a quality hit because VGA to NTSC isn't that good. But that's really up to your tastes.:)
Divx 5 has an option to make the file 'Mpeg 4 compliant'. Worst case scenario is now people have a reason to use that feature.
"Hell(o) how many different variants of DivX exist... 3 or 4? "
Well, you have DivX 3.11 which was an alpha version. DivX 4 which was their first real version. And Divx5 which is their actual shipping product. They're fairly interoperable so far it seems, though I'm sure there are scenarios where they break each other. I installed DivX 5 and haven't had any problems. The only reason I installed 3.11 was because it game with a commonly used audio codec.
There are other companies that have made flavors of DivX, but they're seldom used. At least on the P2P networks.
In other words, you are right. But it's not so bad.
Umm okay. I didn't expect nor desire to get modded up for pasting the link. I didn't expect to get modded down though. The whole reason I wrote the linked post was to specifically answer 3 people's questions. I figured if I wrote it once and pasted a link to the other two, it'd be better than re-posting what I originally wrote.
*Sigh* Oh well. I apologize for trying to answer people's questions.
"Quoting yourself in your sig is like bragging about your Star Wars lego collection. In your own mind, it might make you feel cool...but to everyone else, it just reveals that you're a total fucking tool. hope you realize this soon and take appropriate remedies. "
You're making assumptions about why I quoted myself, and you're completely wrong.
I did't quote myself out of ego or self gratification. I originaly put my sig without the quote. I did this because I got tangled up in a thread where about 15 people or so (not exaggerating) all jumped down my throat about a post I made. 3 of them got my point and politely rebutted my comment. The rest of them said "what you're saying is like..." and they put in a really obtuse and oversimplified metaphor that, really, was unrelated. All they did was read the first couple of lines of my post and responded to that.
So I put in a sig that said "Don't bother using a metaphor to prove me wrong...it means you don't get my point" because I was sick of people being so shitheaded about it.
However, somebody approached me and said that they thought I had typed that in my original post. With Slashdot, it's really hard to tell what is really a sig unless you change your default settings. So what I did was I looked around at other people's sigs and determined that the ones that were the most obvious sigs were quotes from other people.
So I quoted myself, and now you know it's my sig as oppposed to thinking I added that to the end of a post. If Slashdot had better default settings, I would have left the comment plain. I'm a System Analyst. I design interfaces for a living. I made a design choice with my sig as a better interface to the rest of the/. population. I'm sorry your hardwired brain is incapable of understanding anything that cannot be explained as a 1-sentence metaphor, but my sig still stands. Question: Do you get this hostile when somebody wears their hat backwards? You strike me as that type.
"Quoting yourself in your sig is like bragging about your Star Wars lego collection..." -- This is a very good example of what the sig is talking about. You used an incorrect metaphor to prove me wrong, and it turns out you totally didn't get my point. The result? You're wrong, and you look overly sensitive and hostile. I can imagine people reading your post and thinking you have a really thick forehead.
Thank you for illustrating why I needed this sig in the first place, it is much appreciated. Now I can link back to you when people ask about it! I was hoping somebody as boneheaded as you would come along and prove my point! Thank ya mucho!:)
The DivX codec is based on the MPEG4 standard. It has little improvements here and there, but it's not going to change much. It's possible you'd have to flash the card, but I wouldn't expec to need to for at least a year when DivX 6 comes out.
"Not trolling. Just pointing out that not all that glitters is worth $99."
I'll tell you why I want this: I want to build a cheap TiVO like unit. I have an old p2400 right now that's acting as a VCR using a Hauppauge WinTV PCI card and Snapstream to do the capturing. It's hooked up to a TV with a VGA input installed.
The problem I have right now is that I cannot playback and record. Would a faster machine fix this? Err possibly. That depends. Both capture and playback are time dependent. If I had a dual proc machine available for it, it'd definitely work.
I'm not building a more powerful box if I can just buy a $99 card and plug it into the one I already have running. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to find the info on how to buy one of these cards right now.:)
Incidentally, if you're interested in a reason to buy one of these doodads if you have a more modern machine: I, for one, watch a lot of vids on my computer. As I said, I have that capture box acting as a vcr right now. While I'm browsing the web, I watch the shows I've capped in a little window. Unfortunately, the vids do cause little lags in my machine. If I scroll in IE, sometimes it'll lag the video. Is that something I should pay $99 to fix? Hmm I might, but I don't expect anybody else to. However, I have one more interesting twist to throw at this. I have a 13 inch TV doing nothing right now. I could place that TV right here on my desk off to the right, and the card will decode to it.
Now that is totally cool. If I'm at my computer, it makes it trivial to pause the video or fast forward through commercials. I could see people who download lots of stuff from P2P really enjoying this card.
"My mother's been using a dual celeron 366, a hand-me-down after I got my P3-866. It's enough for her to do everything she wants (MS Office, surfing, email, IM)."
What's interesting is that the dual machine your mother has now may actually be faster to her than the 866 you have. No, I don't mean that the apps are going to run faster, I mean that the Windows interface will be more responsive.
I've noticed that my dual machine at work (550) was far more responsive than my Athlon 1.2gig at home. I think the reason for this is that Windows' multi-threading techniques keeps the interface from getting lagged on multi-processor machines. So even though I may be doing lots of stuff, Explorer/IE etc are still very responsive.
If your mother were to use your computer, she may feel that hers is more powerful. I doubt she'd notice the megahertz difference. To think, if Intel were to sell dual processor machines to consumers, they may wait longer to buy upgrades.
"When why do about 50,000 people play CS/Half-Life? It's older than Quake3."
Oh, you're right. You found one rare example (afterall, we don't live in a world of absolutes) so my point is 100% negated. Every single game is a classic forever and people buy millions of copies every day.
"But if tomorrow the nice government man wants another one, and another one the day after that, I am going to start to want to resist a little bit to the government wanting my little freedom marbles, no matter how 'noble' the cause."
You're assuming that the Government wants to take your freedoms away. There's no evidence of that. It isn't in the US's best interests to control everything. If it were looking for an opportunity, it had one on 9-11. Did things change? Yep. But it was nowhere near as drastic as it could have been.
It's more like this: The man from the Government wants to take one of your marbles so that he can make you safe. You're happy to give him this one, but you're overly-cautious of giving him any more because you're working under the assumption that he wants all your marbles. You don't realize that the constitution prevents him from taking more marbles. You also don't realize that he's not after all of your marbles.
Try to picture how this metaphor would be different if we were living in Nazi Germany. You'd instantly understand the way things could have been had the US wanted to get rid of Free Speech and privacy. I'm not a fan of George Bush, but he's not really an extremist.
"Everyone who wanted to pirate Blizzard games already had the bnet code anyway.
You realize that you're generalizing a whole lot in there, right? The truth is, you have no idea who was using it or why. It would have made WC3 a lot easier to pirate as soon as it came out sine BnetD doesn't check the keys.
You don't want Blizzard losing interest in making good games. Trust me on that.
"So let me see if I've got your argument straight: You have no interest in Linux as a gaming platform, thus it will fail." -- Heh, no. I was reinforcing the point that I didn't participate in the 'rehashed argument'.
You never hear about people complaining about Ferrari not having the same sales volume as Volkswagen. 40,000 X $50 really isn't that bad if you're a company of around 10 employees, especially considering they didn't really have to do the hard parts: design, art, etc...
there's a vastly different culture associated with the different platforms: Linux and Unix tend to be used by engineers, scientists, programmers, other researchers, and generally anyone who wants a stable machine, but isn't afraid of the learning curve...
In other words, the best they can do is ride on the success of another game and market it to people who aren't big game players. How do they decide which game to port? Well. it sold a million copies. Dontcha think the people who really want the game already have it? If a Linux user (who can't/won't run Windows) wants the game, why isn't he/she equipped to play other games too? Either that game in particular strikes a chord with them, or they're very masochistic with respect to playing games.
First, things like what Transgaming is trying to do makes porting relatively trivial. -- Obviously it's not that trivial. Even if it's as simple as 'press this button and a Linux version will get pooped out', there's still the issue of packaging it up for sale. That's where significant money goes. There's new boxes, a different run of CD's burnt, customer support for Linux users, and so on. Given what I said earlier, most companies really won't care to go through that just to 'appease noisy Linux users' because it's not clear that they represent a significant number of gamers. Is it good logic? I don't think so, but this isn't about what I think.
So where was that point again? You started off on the original post I replied to that Linux needs platform-specific titles, and then concluded with Linux users should just use Windows instead. -- No, I didn't conclude that Linux users should run Windows. I said that as long as Linux gaming is going to be ports, gamers are better off using Windows. I suppose I could have made that a little clearer. *Shrug*
...they fail because they didn't get the memo that porting companies have no chance of success. -- Yes. The word 'duh' comes to mind.
"Maybe you could also throw in some about all the other Linux-centric game companies that have failed, thus proving there's no way to pull off such an endeavor? -- Don't need to, it's common knowledge if you're a gamer. (Macintosh... Sega Saturn...)
Why don't you show me a success? You're arguing with me in concept, but you're conjuring up nothing to give me any clue why porting games will ever be successful on Linux.
Meanwhile, the most successful game companies (Nintendo, for example...) build dedicated audiences by continuously providing innovative games. The N64 did very well against the PSOne. But the Saturn, which had several months head start, died miserably. This isn't because the Saturn was underpowered (Remember Virtua Fighter 2?), but because the games were mainly ports of games that had been out for a year.
Sega lost a system to that. So why should I believe that a company like Loki had any chance of entering Linux into the gaming market? Provide information, not theory.
A rather large chunk of the Slashdot population are Linux enthusiasts. The other chunk (and there is a lot of mixture here) is anti-MS.
So we see everything that is anti-MS and everything that sounds like Linux may gain a larger share of the market.
The result? We get idiotic stories like "An e-mail from an executive proves that MS intends to assymilate the world!" and "Walmart sells cheap-o computers nobody will want with Linux installed!"
My answer to your post was more like "That's the way things work, make the most of it" rather than "I found this interesting!". Don't give me shit about it.
Slashdot Mirror
"I can almost hear my father in the mid to late 1960s saying "But really, what on earth is going to the Moon gonna do for mankind?"
Heh, I think an episode of the Simpsons would answer your question:
"The Moon belongs to America..."
"Windows 98 doesn't use multiple processors."
...? Are you telling me this as a point of interest, or are you telling me I'm not right about something...?
lol!!!
:)
No no, I'm not laughing at your insult. I'm laughing at how unoriginal it is. Did you seriously think that nobody's called me "NanoDick" or made fun of my mom? Heh. Thanks for the laugh, I needed it.
Just wanted to thank you. :) It's easy for a Windows guy like me to not understand the difference between Open Source, GPL, and BSD licenses.
"But does this open codec have a chance to overtake DivX?"
That depends on if they can keep the secret sauce away from DivX.
Is it possible under the BSD license they mentioned that they can keep the algorithms secret? *Interested in learning more about the BSD license.*
"Apparently it doesn't work with QuickTime 6 beta, which is the only other mass-market real MP4 product out there. Either DivX or Apple has got it wrong somehow (and I'm betting it's DivX). "
:(
:)
Oh, that's a bummer.
What's sad is that we have all these choices, but the interesting hardware can't really keep up. I wish I could just buy a card with the TV outs etc on it, and just replace the chip once in a while.
On the plus side, though, this card could really be an important component to making a PC based Tivo device. I went on a business trip last week and had a few eps of MST3k that kept me entertained on the plane.
"CPUs are getting faster and faster, and since processor intensive tasks are getting exported to cards what the hell do you need your cpu for. "
"I guess there are some porfessionals that need to do processor intensive tasks in the background but thats not true for most people."
This is true. Sadly, though, Windows' threading model makes it so that browsing the web while watching a vid causes lags in the audio and video, which is a horrible nuisance.
This card is interesting to me because I set up another box to capture TV shows. Then, on my main computer where i do email/internet/games etc, I watch these shows in a little window while I'm browsing. I don't think that's common for people to do right now, so I'm not claiming this is a mass market device. However, I personally find it interesting if it can play the video solidly without lagging.
I have a 13 inch TV not doing anything, I'd be happy to hook this guy up to a card like that and watch my PVR stuff on it. I like the idea of pausing via the mouse in case I get an important ICQ message or something.
I have a regular television, but I'm rarely home in time to watch anything interesting (hence my building a PVR). During some of those precious hours where I'm not at my GF's house, I'm usually skimming Slashdot and other forums I contribute to. So a device like this gives me time to browse and watch my TV show. Most of the stuff I watch is MST3k or That 70's Show, so my multiplexed attention isn't that degraded.
Again, not trying to convince you that you should go run out and buy one. I'm just saying that it does fill a neat little niche market. As P2P gets stronger, I can see a larger need for this type of stuff. However, I expect it'll get built into my next vid card.
You may be slightly underpowered for what I'm going to suggest, but it's worth a try, right?
:)
Go to www.JPG.com and download the PicVideo Motion JPEG codec. Then download Virtual Dub. Use VirtualDub to capture from your TV card to the Motion JPEG codec. If it works as well as you'd like, then pay the $19 and you'll get the coded that doesn't have the watermark on it.
You should be able to capture 2 hours of video, but I think it'll be expensive hard-disk wise. If you do at 320 by 240 (which is roughly what VHS is..) at the highest quality,it shouldn't be too bad. You could do it at 640 by 480, but I'm a little concerned that you'll have trouble with it. If memory serves, 640 by 480 will roughly mean 4 gigs an hour. (Potentially higher...)
Next you'll need a TV out. You can buy cheap-o video cards that do that. Play the video back at full screen and hit record on the VCR. Voila!
Not sure what you'll think of the quality. You'll definitely take a quality hit because VGA to NTSC isn't that good. But that's really up to your tastes.
"MPEG-4 != DivX
DivX != MPEG-4"
Divx 5 has an option to make the file 'Mpeg 4 compliant'. Worst case scenario is now people have a reason to use that feature.
"Hell(o) how many different variants of DivX exist... 3 or 4? "
Well, you have DivX 3.11 which was an alpha version. DivX 4 which was their first real version. And Divx5 which is their actual shipping product. They're fairly interoperable so far it seems, though I'm sure there are scenarios where they break each other. I installed DivX 5 and haven't had any problems. The only reason I installed 3.11 was because it game with a commonly used audio codec.
There are other companies that have made flavors of DivX, but they're seldom used. At least on the P2P networks.
In other words, you are right. But it's not so bad.
*Shrug* so it was long, big deal. I explained myself in good humor.
:)
No harm has been done to my ego, sorry.
Umm okay. I didn't expect nor desire to get modded up for pasting the link. I didn't expect to get modded down though. The whole reason I wrote the linked post was to specifically answer 3 people's questions. I figured if I wrote it once and pasted a link to the other two, it'd be better than re-posting what I originally wrote.
*Sigh* Oh well. I apologize for trying to answer people's questions.
"Quoting yourself in your sig is like bragging about your Star Wars lego collection. In your own mind, it might make you feel cool...but to everyone else, it just reveals that you're a total fucking tool. hope you realize this soon and take appropriate remedies. "
/. population. I'm sorry your hardwired brain is incapable of understanding anything that cannot be explained as a 1-sentence metaphor, but my sig still stands. Question: Do you get this hostile when somebody wears their hat backwards? You strike me as that type.
:)
You're making assumptions about why I quoted myself, and you're completely wrong.
I did't quote myself out of ego or self gratification. I originaly put my sig without the quote. I did this because I got tangled up in a thread where about 15 people or so (not exaggerating) all jumped down my throat about a post I made. 3 of them got my point and politely rebutted my comment. The rest of them said "what you're saying is like..." and they put in a really obtuse and oversimplified metaphor that, really, was unrelated. All they did was read the first couple of lines of my post and responded to that.
So I put in a sig that said "Don't bother using a metaphor to prove me wrong...it means you don't get my point" because I was sick of people being so shitheaded about it.
However, somebody approached me and said that they thought I had typed that in my original post. With Slashdot, it's really hard to tell what is really a sig unless you change your default settings. So what I did was I looked around at other people's sigs and determined that the ones that were the most obvious sigs were quotes from other people.
So I quoted myself, and now you know it's my sig as oppposed to thinking I added that to the end of a post. If Slashdot had better default settings, I would have left the comment plain. I'm a System Analyst. I design interfaces for a living. I made a design choice with my sig as a better interface to the rest of the
"Quoting yourself in your sig is like bragging about your Star Wars lego collection..." -- This is a very good example of what the sig is talking about. You used an incorrect metaphor to prove me wrong, and it turns out you totally didn't get my point. The result? You're wrong, and you look overly sensitive and hostile. I can imagine people reading your post and thinking you have a really thick forehead.
Thank you for illustrating why I needed this sig in the first place, it is much appreciated. Now I can link back to you when people ask about it! I was hoping somebody as boneheaded as you would come along and prove my point! Thank ya mucho!
Check out my post here, it might give you an idea or two hy it's not an entirely moot point. :)
Check out my post here, it might give you an idea or two why this hardware is interesting. :)
The DivX codec is based on the MPEG4 standard. It has little improvements here and there, but it's not going to change much. It's possible you'd have to flash the card, but I wouldn't expec to need to for at least a year when DivX 6 comes out.
"Not trolling. Just pointing out that not all that glitters is worth $99."
:)
I'll tell you why I want this: I want to build a cheap TiVO like unit. I have an old p2400 right now that's acting as a VCR using a Hauppauge WinTV PCI card and Snapstream to do the capturing. It's hooked up to a TV with a VGA input installed.
The problem I have right now is that I cannot playback and record. Would a faster machine fix this? Err possibly. That depends. Both capture and playback are time dependent. If I had a dual proc machine available for it, it'd definitely work.
I'm not building a more powerful box if I can just buy a $99 card and plug it into the one I already have running. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to find the info on how to buy one of these cards right now.
Incidentally, if you're interested in a reason to buy one of these doodads if you have a more modern machine: I, for one, watch a lot of vids on my computer. As I said, I have that capture box acting as a vcr right now. While I'm browsing the web, I watch the shows I've capped in a little window. Unfortunately, the vids do cause little lags in my machine. If I scroll in IE, sometimes it'll lag the video. Is that something I should pay $99 to fix? Hmm I might, but I don't expect anybody else to. However, I have one more interesting twist to throw at this. I have a 13 inch TV doing nothing right now. I could place that TV right here on my desk off to the right, and the card will decode to it.
Now that is totally cool. If I'm at my computer, it makes it trivial to pause the video or fast forward through commercials. I could see people who download lots of stuff from P2P really enjoying this card.
"My mother's been using a dual celeron 366, a hand-me-down after I got my P3-866. It's enough for her to do everything she wants (MS Office, surfing, email, IM)."
What's interesting is that the dual machine your mother has now may actually be faster to her than the 866 you have. No, I don't mean that the apps are going to run faster, I mean that the Windows interface will be more responsive.
I've noticed that my dual machine at work (550) was far more responsive than my Athlon 1.2gig at home. I think the reason for this is that Windows' multi-threading techniques keeps the interface from getting lagged on multi-processor machines. So even though I may be doing lots of stuff, Explorer/IE etc are still very responsive.
If your mother were to use your computer, she may feel that hers is more powerful. I doubt she'd notice the megahertz difference. To think, if Intel were to sell dual processor machines to consumers, they may wait longer to buy upgrades.
"When why do about 50,000 people play CS/Half-Life? It's older than Quake3."
Oh, you're right. You found one rare example (afterall, we don't live in a world of absolutes) so my point is 100% negated. Every single game is a classic forever and people buy millions of copies every day.
"It's very interesting how hard companies try to hold on to thier respective IP."
Slashdotting the info on mod-chips and emulators will certainly expedite us finding out how extreme they'll get.
Nope, it doesn't.
"But if tomorrow the nice government man wants another one, and another one the day after that, I am going to start to want to resist a little bit to the government wanting my little freedom marbles, no matter how 'noble' the cause."
You're assuming that the Government wants to take your freedoms away. There's no evidence of that. It isn't in the US's best interests to control everything. If it were looking for an opportunity, it had one on 9-11. Did things change? Yep. But it was nowhere near as drastic as it could have been.
It's more like this: The man from the Government wants to take one of your marbles so that he can make you safe. You're happy to give him this one, but you're overly-cautious of giving him any more because you're working under the assumption that he wants all your marbles. You don't realize that the constitution prevents him from taking more marbles. You also don't realize that he's not after all of your marbles.
Try to picture how this metaphor would be different if we were living in Nazi Germany. You'd instantly understand the way things could have been had the US wanted to get rid of Free Speech and privacy. I'm not a fan of George Bush, but he's not really an extremist.
"Everyone who wanted to pirate Blizzard games already had the bnet code anyway.
You realize that you're generalizing a whole lot in there, right? The truth is, you have no idea who was using it or why. It would have made WC3 a lot easier to pirate as soon as it came out sine BnetD doesn't check the keys.
You don't want Blizzard losing interest in making good games. Trust me on that.
For a PC game, that is ancient. PC games have a shelf life of roughly a month. (if that) They're not like console games that can last over a year.
That's why companies that make console games do so much better even though a console only has 5-10 million people on average that own one.
"So let me see if I've got your argument straight: You have no interest in Linux as a gaming platform, thus it will fail." -- Heh, no. I was reinforcing the point that I didn't participate in the 'rehashed argument'.
...they fail because they didn't get the memo that porting companies have no chance of success. -- Yes. The word 'duh' comes to mind.
You never hear about people complaining about Ferrari not having the same sales volume as Volkswagen. 40,000 X $50 really isn't that bad if you're a company of around 10 employees, especially considering they didn't really have to do the hard parts: design, art, etc...
there's a vastly different culture associated with the different platforms: Linux and Unix tend to be used by engineers, scientists, programmers, other researchers, and generally anyone who wants a stable machine, but isn't afraid of the learning curve...
In other words, the best they can do is ride on the success of another game and market it to people who aren't big game players. How do they decide which game to port? Well. it sold a million copies. Dontcha think the people who really want the game already have it? If a Linux user (who can't/won't run Windows) wants the game, why isn't he/she equipped to play other games too? Either that game in particular strikes a chord with them, or they're very masochistic with respect to playing games.
First, things like what Transgaming is trying to do makes porting relatively trivial. -- Obviously it's not that trivial. Even if it's as simple as 'press this button and a Linux version will get pooped out', there's still the issue of packaging it up for sale. That's where significant money goes. There's new boxes, a different run of CD's burnt, customer support for Linux users, and so on. Given what I said earlier, most companies really won't care to go through that just to 'appease noisy Linux users' because it's not clear that they represent a significant number of gamers. Is it good logic? I don't think so, but this isn't about what I think.
So where was that point again? You started off on the original post I replied to that Linux needs platform-specific titles, and then concluded with Linux users should just use Windows instead. -- No, I didn't conclude that Linux users should run Windows. I said that as long as Linux gaming is going to be ports, gamers are better off using Windows. I suppose I could have made that a little clearer. *Shrug*
"Maybe you could also throw in some about all the other Linux-centric game companies that have failed, thus proving there's no way to pull off such an endeavor? -- Don't need to, it's common knowledge if you're a gamer. (Macintosh... Sega Saturn...)
Why don't you show me a success? You're arguing with me in concept, but you're conjuring up nothing to give me any clue why porting games will ever be successful on Linux.
Meanwhile, the most successful game companies (Nintendo, for example...) build dedicated audiences by continuously providing innovative games. The N64 did very well against the PSOne. But the Saturn, which had several months head start, died miserably. This isn't because the Saturn was underpowered (Remember Virtua Fighter 2?), but because the games were mainly ports of games that had been out for a year.
Sega lost a system to that. So why should I believe that a company like Loki had any chance of entering Linux into the gaming market? Provide information, not theory.
"oh just because its linux its newsworthy then"
A rather large chunk of the Slashdot population are Linux enthusiasts. The other chunk (and there is a lot of mixture here) is anti-MS.
So we see everything that is anti-MS and everything that sounds like Linux may gain a larger share of the market.
The result? We get idiotic stories like "An e-mail from an executive proves that MS intends to assymilate the world!" and "Walmart sells cheap-o computers nobody will want with Linux installed!"
My answer to your post was more like "That's the way things work, make the most of it" rather than "I found this interesting!". Don't give me shit about it.
Ah! I getcha. Sorry if I failed to interpret your post. :)