As another post has pointed out on here, OS X has essentially one for the moment. The GUI goodness of Aqua alone mops the floor with Linux.
Wait! Before you mod me down as a troll, let me explain.
First, I love Linux. I've used it for 5 years, and for the last 2 or 3, I've used it exclusively on my computer here at home. However, and I say this in a parent-who-loves-their-kid-but-has-to-punish-them- anyway kind of way... Linux's desktop GUIs suck.
Don't get me wrong - KDE is a good looking and extremely functional desktop. It's really slick, and I like a lot of the KDE apps. The same goes for GNOME, although it still doesn't feel quite as polished to me. The problem is, these desktops are all clones of Windows. One of the reasons I left Windows in the first place was the annoying GUI, and these "desktop environments" do little more than mimic it.
I want a Mac simply so I can play around with Aqua, because it's such a neat GUI, and I know from others that it is as efficient as it is beautiful. I want something like that on Linux, and unfortunately no existing project really gives that to me. Most window managers are, to some extent, Windows clones. As long as that's all there is, Linux will not penetrate the desktop market much further.
Major open source projects have gotten to the point where we're playing catch-up. Clone Office, clone IE, clone the desktop, and so forth. We need to innovate if Linux is to keep momentum. Simply playing copy-cat with everything that looks neat is not good enough. Don't copy Aqua - improve on it. Winning users over from Windows isn't happening at a very rapid pace anyway, so instead of worrying about alienating them with a frightening interface and copying the one they're comfy with, why not create something new? Something so cool, so pretty, and so functional that everybody will want it? That's a big chunk of what MacOS X has going for it, and Linux should have that too.
I'm still technically on @Home, since Comcast is still scurrying to set up their own network. So far, I (and others in my area using the service) have had zero interruptions or problems. Well, zero more than we usually have with @Home.:P
I just know that the Comcast network is going to suck, with all sorts of lame caps and new restrictions. Oh well, there's always modem... Bleh.
I realized that any of the difficulty-altering codes took all the challenge out of the game.
Possibly, depending on how you use the codes. But at any rate... One thing I loved the Game Genie for was the ability to make old games more interesting. I'd already whipped Mario 3 so many times that it wasn't fun anymore, but it was neat to experiment with the codes and just goof around.
Great, but some problems
on
Uplink
·
· Score: 1, Informative
This is a really cool game, and I haven't been able to put the demo down yet. It's really exhilerating to crack a government system, search their database, and change someone's SSN with precious few seconds remaining before you get caught. Of course, Uplink is movie-style computer cracking, certainly nothing realistic. But that's why it's fun!
However, there are some problems. A lot of people are reporting some glitches, such as the game not responding for a few seconds at random intervals. I personally don't have this problem as much as others, but I have one of my own. The sound lags about 3 seconds behind everything that happens on-screen (I'm thinking it's a problem with ALSA... sigh, isn't it always?).
Anyway, the few flaws I've seen are very minor, and I still think it's a great game. With some patching/tweaking it will undoubtedly get even better. Definitely worth $25, which I'll be coughing up for my full copy soon.;)
It's gone up by 650% for me in the last month. I get about 20 spam messages an hour, ranging from breast enlargement ads (I'm a guy, btw), to fixing my credit (which is already perfect).
Fortunately, there was an easy solution. I just added Pine filters for these words in the "from" address: deal, offer, bargain, save, money, and winner. That cut it down from ~20 an hour to maybe 3 random e-mails a day that slip through.:P
... when webrings were pretty big, a few years back. Every page you went to on any subject seemed to have a "This site is a member of such-and-such ring" box on it somewhere. I even joined a webring myself, back when I had a web site about the Euphoria programming language.
But almost as quickly as webrings became popular, they (for the most part) vanished once again. I think there are three major reasons for this:
Most webrings were poorly maintained, at best, and filled with broken links.
Sites like Google, the Netscape "What's Related" menu, etc. made webrings obsolete. Why bother with a webring when your favorite search engine had a feature to show you related pages, and most browsers had this built in?
Why the hell do we need 50 Linux webrings?! "Linux Users," "Linux Lovers," "The *Official* Linux Webring," "The Unofficial Linux Webring"... sheesh!
Those reasons and a myriad of lesser ones are what contributed to the death of webrings, if you ask me. Kind of a shame, but honestly I (as a web surfer and as a webmaster) never found much use for webrings beyond the fact that it was kinda cool to be part of a "group."
I've been using Linux for five years now, and I'm very comfortable with it. I love the OS, I love the software, and (for the most part) I love the community. Okay, so I can't play Black and White (well, maybe not yet), and I can't use Bryce, and so forth. This is the price I pay for getting the features I really want and getting the power I want.
I'll probably get flamed for going against the grain of Linux World Domination(tm) but honestly, I don't think it'll happen in the sense most people want and expect. Indeed, I don't want it to. Because for Linux to dominate, it'd have to end up like Windows. It'd have to be pointy-clicky to no end, and eventually bugs would creep in in the name of usability. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as Windows - but it wouldn't be the Linux I love.
Us Linux users, we want our l33t cake but we want to pig out on it too. We want all the apps, but we don't want to deal with the average user, which is what drives the development of many of those apps. We want to be elite, yet we want people to be like us to an extent, and enjoy the benefits we do. I really don't think that can happen.
Linux has great potential to win out in a lot of arenas - server side, graphics, clustering, and so forth. Those are its strong points, and those are very likely to be where Linux will dominate. But is my grandfather (despite being really good with computers) going to deal with logins, kernel patches, tar'ing, and rc files? I highly doubt it.
There are exceptions to the rule, and I've encountered more than one story of "my wife-who-can't-even-program-the-VCR told me, 'never go back to that Microsoft crap'." But it's not common, and it may never be.
Linux should stop trying to play copycat with Windows. It can be its own animal, successful in its own ways, as is the Mac. MacOS X isn't Windows XP, but its users love it. Pardon me for stealing the phrase, Apple, but people... It's a good idea to "think different." Let's keep Linux different and good at what it does, and stop catering to a market that may not (and if you agree with my sentiments above, should not) come to light.
I want Linux because it's Linux. I don't want Linux because it's Windows, and I don't want it to be.
... Office for Linux isn't the solution. Opening the specifications for the file formats would be a much more effective remedy, if you ask me.
Porting Office to Linux would just be helping to enforce the MS Office monopoly on even more systems (assuming anybody on Linux would buy/use it, anyway). The remedy should encourage competition, and not necessarily more widespread use of a monopolistic piece of software. Open up the.doc,.xls, etc. formats and that will allow more fair competition. That's what this is supposed to be about, isn't it?
At least five times a week, I see some sort of windows based kiosk type device screwing up.
Yeah, I saw an example of this when I was in Denmark... I was in the main train station in Copenhagen, and every single schedule kiosk for getting train info, etc. was crashed. And guess what I saw? The blue screen of death. Shortly thereafter, they all changed to a Windows NT boot-up screen, before promptly crashing again.
Info on the status of B&W under WineX can be found here, and if you're a subscriber, you can vote to show you want TransGaming to focus on it. It's already got a popularity rating of 325 as I write this, which is good.
If TransGaming have said that once they reach a certain level of subscriptions, they will remove the restrictions on their code (I didn't see that on their site, but I'll take your word for it)
"Once we have reached our subscription goals, we plan to release all of the WineX source code under the Wine license, which will allow it to be directly integrated with the core Wine project code hosted at www.winehq.com."
The version of WineX that you download is only available in source, unless you subscribe to TransGaming. So, you have to build it and configure it all by yourself.
The bundle with Mandrake is 'supported' by TransGaming, and gets you one of those subscriptions mentioned in the previous items. So you can get support and vote on games you'd like to see working with WineX.
The version of The Sims bundled with Mandrake includes modified code in the game itself to make it work better with WineX than the out-of-the-box Windows version would.
I'm a subscriber to @home, and I don't feel too sorry either. I mean, granted, they're the only broadband source in my area. But my cable provider was going to switch to another service anyway, so this will probably just speed things up. There's three big reasons I'm not crying too much about this, though:
Shitty tech support. Out of 4 times I needed their tech support help, only one time did I get any actual help, and it was obviously from somebody who had some knowledge beyond Windows questions on a clipboard.
Poor DNS. I had so many DNS outages with @home, I ended up setting up my own caching server just so I'd have a backup. What's worse, their "secondary" DNS for my area is nothing but a second IP pointing to the primary. So when it goes down, there's no backup server. Not smart, especially considering the frequencies of said failures.
Poorly-configured gateways. During the first 6 months of my service, I had stalled data transfers (upstream and downstream) for 30 to 180 seconds every 5 or 10 minutes. That made gaming impossible, downloads a real hassle, and streaming media a joke (one of the features they flaunt the most). See my complaint on item 1 for why I had the problem for that long. Oh yeah, and it started again a week ago after not being a problem for months.
So even though I may be broadband-less for a while if @home cuts me off, I'm not going to shed too many tears. I'll hold out for the prospect that my cable provider finds a better service. Or I'll just go back to modem, fire up my ad filter proxy to speed things up, and continue as usual. At this point, even modem may be better.
I mean really... how many of them are going to run into that platform in the workplace...
Well, if everything goes according to the One True And Grand Plan(tm), Linux will have taken over the world by the time they graduate, so it'll be a non-issue.;)
Is it just me, or is timothy getting irritating with his insulting the very content he posts? If it's such awful news, or so pointless, why post it? And if it's worth posting, why put snide remarks in for the "department" and throughout the post?
But if you think about it, most portable power applications today excepting laptops) use a disposable battery - so that is easy to replace with compact, disposable tanks.
Exactly, and if you ask me, I'd rather be able to carry around spare batteries than deal with charging. As a small example, when travelling, I always take a handheld with me. I bring along an extra pack of batteries, and I'll be set for well over a month of usage (I use a Visor Platinum, which helps since there's no massive drain from a color display). That's a lot better than lugging along a charging cradle and adaptor, especially if you're on bike trips like me, and a power supply isn't always handy...
So yeah, a laptop that could run for days on one of these little cartridges would be really nice. Just bring a few of them along when you travel, and no more power worries.
Of course you can type a lot that's not in the dictionary. But this device is targeted at people taking notes, typing documents, etc. This isn't meant to be a be-all and end-all replacement for keyboards, it's simply to make typing common things on a PDA, etc. easier. If you're going to be working at a Linux prompt on your Palm or something, obviously this isn't going to be for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Re:mod this the fuck down (Score:5, Troll)
by asa (asa at mozilla dot org)
Umm, this moderator should actually read the message, and who it's from. Then mod themselves -1 Dummy. :)
As another post has pointed out on here, OS X has essentially one for the moment. The GUI goodness of Aqua alone mops the floor with Linux.
Wait! Before you mod me down as a troll, let me explain.
First, I love Linux. I've used it for 5 years, and for the last 2 or 3, I've used it exclusively on my computer here at home. However, and I say this in a parent-who-loves-their-kid-but-has-to-punish-them- anyway kind of way... Linux's desktop GUIs suck.
Don't get me wrong - KDE is a good looking and extremely functional desktop. It's really slick, and I like a lot of the KDE apps. The same goes for GNOME, although it still doesn't feel quite as polished to me. The problem is, these desktops are all clones of Windows. One of the reasons I left Windows in the first place was the annoying GUI, and these "desktop environments" do little more than mimic it.
I want a Mac simply so I can play around with Aqua, because it's such a neat GUI, and I know from others that it is as efficient as it is beautiful. I want something like that on Linux, and unfortunately no existing project really gives that to me. Most window managers are, to some extent, Windows clones. As long as that's all there is, Linux will not penetrate the desktop market much further.
Major open source projects have gotten to the point where we're playing catch-up. Clone Office, clone IE, clone the desktop, and so forth. We need to innovate if Linux is to keep momentum. Simply playing copy-cat with everything that looks neat is not good enough. Don't copy Aqua - improve on it. Winning users over from Windows isn't happening at a very rapid pace anyway, so instead of worrying about alienating them with a frightening interface and copying the one they're comfy with, why not create something new? Something so cool, so pretty, and so functional that everybody will want it? That's a big chunk of what MacOS X has going for it, and Linux should have that too.
I'm still technically on @Home, since Comcast is still scurrying to set up their own network. So far, I (and others in my area using the service) have had zero interruptions or problems. Well, zero more than we usually have with @Home. :P
I just know that the Comcast network is going to suck, with all sorts of lame caps and new restrictions. Oh well, there's always modem... Bleh.
You can get Mandrake Gaming Edition for $45 here
Beats the heck out of the $80 or so Mandrake wants for it on their own site, and The Sims for Windows sells for about $40 anyway...
Combine this with Magic Lantern and the FBI can "read" your conversations too. :)
I realized that any of the difficulty-altering codes took all the challenge out of the game.
Possibly, depending on how you use the codes. But at any rate... One thing I loved the Game Genie for was the ability to make old games more interesting. I'd already whipped Mario 3 so many times that it wasn't fun anymore, but it was neat to experiment with the codes and just goof around.
This is a really cool game, and I haven't been able to put the demo down yet. It's really exhilerating to crack a government system, search their database, and change someone's SSN with precious few seconds remaining before you get caught. Of course, Uplink is movie-style computer cracking, certainly nothing realistic. But that's why it's fun!
;)
However, there are some problems. A lot of people are reporting some glitches, such as the game not responding for a few seconds at random intervals. I personally don't have this problem as much as others, but I have one of my own. The sound lags about 3 seconds behind everything that happens on-screen (I'm thinking it's a problem with ALSA... sigh, isn't it always?).
Anyway, the few flaws I've seen are very minor, and I still think it's a great game. With some patching/tweaking it will undoubtedly get even better. Definitely worth $25, which I'll be coughing up for my full copy soon.
Fortunately, there was an easy solution. I just added Pine filters for these words in the "from" address: deal, offer, bargain, save, money, and winner. That cut it down from ~20 an hour to maybe 3 random e-mails a day that slip through. :P
But almost as quickly as webrings became popular, they (for the most part) vanished once again. I think there are three major reasons for this:
Those reasons and a myriad of lesser ones are what contributed to the death of webrings, if you ask me. Kind of a shame, but honestly I (as a web surfer and as a webmaster) never found much use for webrings beyond the fact that it was kinda cool to be part of a "group."
I've been using Linux for five years now, and I'm very comfortable with it. I love the OS, I love the software, and (for the most part) I love the community. Okay, so I can't play Black and White (well, maybe not yet), and I can't use Bryce, and so forth. This is the price I pay for getting the features I really want and getting the power I want.
I'll probably get flamed for going against the grain of Linux World Domination(tm) but honestly, I don't think it'll happen in the sense most people want and expect. Indeed, I don't want it to. Because for Linux to dominate, it'd have to end up like Windows. It'd have to be pointy-clicky to no end, and eventually bugs would creep in in the name of usability. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as Windows - but it wouldn't be the Linux I love.
Us Linux users, we want our l33t cake but we want to pig out on it too. We want all the apps, but we don't want to deal with the average user, which is what drives the development of many of those apps. We want to be elite, yet we want people to be like us to an extent, and enjoy the benefits we do. I really don't think that can happen.
Linux has great potential to win out in a lot of arenas - server side, graphics, clustering, and so forth. Those are its strong points, and those are very likely to be where Linux will dominate. But is my grandfather (despite being really good with computers) going to deal with logins, kernel patches, tar'ing, and rc files? I highly doubt it.
There are exceptions to the rule, and I've encountered more than one story of "my wife-who-can't-even-program-the-VCR told me, 'never go back to that Microsoft crap'." But it's not common, and it may never be.
Linux should stop trying to play copycat with Windows. It can be its own animal, successful in its own ways, as is the Mac. MacOS X isn't Windows XP, but its users love it. Pardon me for stealing the phrase, Apple, but people... It's a good idea to "think different." Let's keep Linux different and good at what it does, and stop catering to a market that may not (and if you agree with my sentiments above, should not) come to light.
I want Linux because it's Linux. I don't want Linux because it's Windows, and I don't want it to be.
[commence flaming]
Porting Office to Linux would just be helping to enforce the MS Office monopoly on even more systems (assuming anybody on Linux would buy/use it, anyway). The remedy should encourage competition, and not necessarily more widespread use of a monopolistic piece of software. Open up the .doc, .xls, etc. formats and that will allow more fair competition. That's what this is supposed to be about, isn't it?
That could mean quicktime for Linux, but would we need it?
We already have it.
If I was disconnected today, how am I reading your comment? Or posting this snide remark in reply? :)
At least five times a week, I see some sort of windows based kiosk type device screwing up.
Yeah, I saw an example of this when I was in Denmark... I was in the main train station in Copenhagen, and every single schedule kiosk for getting train info, etc. was crashed. And guess what I saw? The blue screen of death. Shortly thereafter, they all changed to a Windows NT boot-up screen, before promptly crashing again.
Info on the status of B&W under WineX can be found here, and if you're a subscriber, you can vote to show you want TransGaming to focus on it. It's already got a popularity rating of 325 as I write this, which is good.
If TransGaming have said that once they reach a certain level of subscriptions, they will remove the restrictions on their code (I didn't see that on their site, but I'll take your word for it)
Here's a snippet from the WineX source code download page:
"Once we have reached our subscription goals, we plan to release all of the WineX source code under the Wine license, which will allow it to be directly integrated with the core Wine project code hosted at www.winehq.com."
It's different in three main ways:
So even though I may be broadband-less for a while if @home cuts me off, I'm not going to shed too many tears. I'll hold out for the prospect that my cable provider finds a better service. Or I'll just go back to modem, fire up my ad filter proxy to speed things up, and continue as usual. At this point, even modem may be better.
</rant>
I upgraded to a Radeon recently, and NetHack flies. :)
I mean really... how many of them are going to run into that platform in the workplace...
Well, if everything goes according to the One True And Grand Plan(tm), Linux will have taken over the world by the time they graduate, so it'll be a non-issue. ;)
Im not much of a gammer
You're not much of a speller either. :P
Here ya go
Is it just me, or is timothy getting irritating with his insulting the very content he posts? If it's such awful news, or so pointless, why post it? And if it's worth posting, why put snide remarks in for the "department" and throughout the post?
Leave the snide remarks to us visitors. :)
But if you think about it, most portable power applications today excepting laptops) use a disposable battery - so that is easy to replace with compact, disposable tanks.
Exactly, and if you ask me, I'd rather be able to carry around spare batteries than deal with charging. As a small example, when travelling, I always take a handheld with me. I bring along an extra pack of batteries, and I'll be set for well over a month of usage (I use a Visor Platinum, which helps since there's no massive drain from a color display). That's a lot better than lugging along a charging cradle and adaptor, especially if you're on bike trips like me, and a power supply isn't always handy...
So yeah, a laptop that could run for days on one of these little cartridges would be really nice. Just bring a few of them along when you travel, and no more power worries.
*sigh*
Of course you can type a lot that's not in the dictionary. But this device is targeted at people taking notes, typing documents, etc. This isn't meant to be a be-all and end-all replacement for keyboards, it's simply to make typing common things on a PDA, etc. easier. If you're going to be working at a Linux prompt on your Palm or something, obviously this isn't going to be for you.