It's the same as claiming your child is of a specific religious belief, agnostic, atheist, liberal, democrat, or whatnot.
Whether or not it's right, I'm not sure it's the same kind of thing - the problem there is labelling, and the problem is it may well be factually incorrect (e.g., saying someone's a Christian, when they don't believe in it). Here there's no labelling, and nothing that's incorrect - when he labels them as donors, he's quite correct, because they are donors.
A closer analogy would be deciding things like whether children can or can't receiving vaccinations or blood donations. Is it the choice of the child, the parents, or the state? If a child is too young to make their own decision, it would be ludicrous to say that a parent deciding to have them vaccinated is equivalent to labelling them a Christian!
Also, with labels, there is a clear default - don't label them anything. What is the default for vaccination, receiving blood donation, or being an organ donor?
Although yes, I'd say that this is something that the child should decide for themselves, at least if they are able. If say, an 8 year old was horrified at the idea of their organs being donated, then they shouldn't (even if the parents think they should). But for a child too young to know or care? Given that organ donation is a great help to many people, and of significant importance, I can see there being an argument for allowing child donors. It's not like the child is going to know any different, when they're dead. The only reason we don't do it for everyone is because some people don't like the idea, but that wouldn't apply if the child is too young to know. Also, remember that in some countries, donation is assumed by default unless the person removes themselves.
I doubt that at age 4 and 6, either of them have that ability.
Right, so your argument about educating and letting them decide doesn't work.
Sure, the resolution has to be low, but given that people quite happily read Wikipedia, other websites, and books, on their phones and so on, I'm not sure that's a fundamental problem. I remember getting 640x256 on a low resolution TV with it looking fine.
And I'm not convinced by the argument that hardly anyone has HDTV - it seems a large number of TVs made in the last few years seem to be HD now.
If you're walking into a store, you don't have to choose the OS - same would apply to Linux. They'll just get the standard version already installed.
(And actually, you're wrong - most netbooks seem to come with Starter, so that's at least two versions.)
For those getting their operating system separately, you do have to choose which Windows version you want - also having to factor in how much you want to spend (and a wrong decision can be expensive). No problem with Ubuntu - just download the one standard version, and if I want to seek out one of these special variants (I had no idea they even exists, that's how "confusing" it isn't), I'm free to do so in future.
LiveJournal is going downhill fast (annoying popup ads for example), and most of my friends have stopped posting there since moving to facebook.
Well I know that Facebook is much more popular than Livejournal, clearly - but I mean, it's foolish for the OP to say that anything open source is rubbish. From a technical point of view Livejournal is a perfectly good engine for blogging and social networking, and my feeling is that Facebook's better success is due to other reasons (consider, Myspace was more popular than Livejournal too, but would anyone say that the website/engine was better?)
Should I use GNU, Ubuntu, Puppy, or some other variant?
Use what you like. What about closed source - do I use Windows, OS X, or some other variant?
Now do I use Gubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, or some other confusing mishmash of first letters?
I just used Ubuntu, the standard version. Unlike Windows, where you have to choose between Starter, Basic, Home, Professional, Ultimate.
But your average person would just roll his/her eyes, say "Forget it", and go buy a $2000 Windows laptop at Best Buy because it's easier and doesn't require thinking or learning nerd-speak.
The different variants of closed source operating systems don't put people off; and the "average person" gets the OS already on the computer.
Not that any of this Linux talk has anything to do with social networking, or open source in general.
People like my brother who would rather spend $70/month to have a Comcast technician install his television, rather than do the setup himself and get TV for free (via antenna). He's the type to walk in a store and just buy the first Windows machine he see, rather than mess with learning Linux.
What "setup" or "mess" with Linux? Personally I'm still a Windows fan, but having tried Ubuntu I fail to see what the problem is. Yes, it's true that most people would buy a computer rather than install an operating system separately, but that's not a Windows versus Linux issue.
Facebook is great because somebody else has already set up the service and the tools in a way that the 95% of the world that couldn't be bothered to set up their own website don't have to.
Well no, people would still set up the servers for you with open standards. It would be like saying that standardised email couldn't work, because 95% of the world can't be bothered to run their own email server. That doesn't mean we all have to use AOL email though.
Also, the fragmentation you mention between Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal would only become worse with a decentralized standard.
The problem with fragmentation is that there is little way to communicate between them. If this problem was solved, fragmentation wouldn't be a problem. Yet, open standards meant that email got far more fragmented, but the point is that isn't a problem.
We already have it, in fact; it's called the web.
The web doesn't solve the problems we are discussing here.
Open source will revolutionize social networking the same way it did desktop computing. We all remember the days of Windows domination, you know, before Linux took over with its thousand-and-one distribution flavors.
What has desktop computing got to do with this? This also isn't really about open source, but about open standards. You'd rather go back to the days where you could only email someone if you both used the same AOL email or whatever, because having open standards and a thousand-and-one flavours of email servers and clients that we have now is evidently terrible?
That is an interesting point, for the OP moaning about how terrible open source software is:)
What is closed source at Facebook?
But do you mean it's built using open source tools, or can I actually download the Facebook server code, and then set up a separate website that works just like Facebook? (The latter is what can be done with Livejournal, and indeed there are several alternative sites using the code.)
You admit that the closed source Facebook is awful, and then conclude that's an argument against Open Source? Let me know how it compares to open source sites like Livejournal...
(Apologies if this was your point and you were being sarcastic...)
Throwing insults at open source gets you +5 on Slashdot - I'd never thought I'd see the day.
If you want an example of an open source social networking site, take a look at Livejournal. Are you seriously telling me that the closed source Facebook is a better website than Livejournal? The UI is far better than Facebook, it's easy to use and doesn't have bugs, plenty of documentation, and was doing all this long before Facebook.
Aside from your comments being false (I use Windows personally, but I tried Ubuntu recently and found it worked and looked just fine; I didn't even need documenation), you're missing the point. This is more about open standards than open source as such. If you bother to RTFA:
Just like open standards for e-mail and the Web broke users free from proprietary closed networks of the early 1990s, so too could a new set of standards allow people to share their thoughts, photos and comments across the Internet, regardless of what social networking services they use
It's clear that it's more about open standards, than necessarily open source alternatives. If there were open standards, yes there'd be a load more "Facebooks", but closed source sites would still be free to make use of them - just as we have closed source email clients. So even if you believed that giving away source somehow made an application terrible, you'd still be okay.
I take it you must absolutely hate email then, because that's based on open standards like SMTP? Obviously all email clients must have terrible UIs, no documentation, and be a pain to install, by your logic...
In Facebook's case one big service works a lot better than thousand small ones. How would you even search for people, places, events and so on with them? It would go back to the @something.com convention which defeats the whole purpose.
I'm not sure what the problem with that is. I much prefer the current situation with email, where we have thousands of email services (they don't have to be "small", btw - e..g, GMail), but I can email someone on another service.
Compare with Facebook, where you can only message or read someone's status etc, if you join. And if they're on some other blog/networking site, you can't easily communicate.
As for searching, well, I think we've managed to do reasonably well at being able to search information on the Internet on multiple sites...
A similar issue applies to instant messaging - there is Jabber at least.
There have been some attempts to interoperate and promote open common standards - things like OpenID, RSS, FOAF. Unfortunately part of the problem is that it's a much harder problem to crack (e.g., how do you deal with things like privacy settings, so that a status/blog entry is only visible to certain people?)
Facebook is great because it lets me easily see them from all the people, even if I don't keep in touch with them so much.
Yes indeed - but how well does it work when you're updating on Facebook, someone else is on Twitter, and another person is on LiveJournal? RSS helps in this regard.
You're missing the point - there are tonnes of companies that ship phones with a "walled garden". They sell far more than Apple. They existed long before the Iphone. It is ludicrous to suggest MS will be "copying Apple".
Of course, I've no doubt that Apple fans will label it yet another "Apple first", and some of these people will be writing in the media. But it's a sad day if the disproportionate coverage of Apple in the media ends up deterring a massive company like MS from choosing what products to release...
The Zune is what people love to make fun of - though to put things into persepective, the market share varied over the years, up to 10%, dropping to a few per cent, which makes it a "flop" apparently; yet I'm not sure that Apple have passed 5% market share in the phone market, and this is seen as a runaway success.
(Not to mention that even if the Zune was a flop, who cares. Lots of companies have their misses, including Apple.)
What I'm getting at is that MS tends to enter markets that already have cut and dried leaders, and their attempts to catch up from years behind the curve give their products a distinct feeling of inferiority. They may catch up to Android and Apple
But the cut and dried leaders in phones are the likes of Nokia, RIM, along with many other companies like Samsung, LG, Motorola - and it's Google and Apple that entered as the new guys, and are playing catch-up (in Apple's case, "from years behind the curve" - 3G, Java, Flash, video recording, MMS, copy/paste, multitasking, etc). If they can do it, I don't see why this is an impossible problem for Microsoft.
I've yet to see evidence that Windows has a "stigma" outside of the geek world.
This is a good point - the whole so-called "feature phones" (which are still "smart" in the traditional sense, in that they run apps, allow Internet access, but don't get counted as such) seems to be completely forgotten among geeks, but they sell far more than the higher end phones. (It's an anomaly why the walled garden Iphone got counted in the smart phone category instead of feature phone in the first place.)
It's sad to see more platforms going for a locked down single-tasking model. But it's funny to see people criticising Microsoft whilst excusing Apple; and it's also clear that in the market for locked down phones, there's room for many companies (including those selling a lot more than Apple).
But this is the problem - what is meant by "cool"?
One could say the same of the mobile market - evidently things like fashion and "cool" are important, but it's unclear that who has it. For geeks round here, it's Apple (and to a lesser extent, Android) that seems "cool". But look at the mainstream, and it's RIM (in the US) and Nokia (worldwide), not to mention companies like LG, Samsung, Motorola. It's also not clear that Microsoft are incapable of doing something that the mainstream see as "cool" - again, it seems to be predominantly among geeks, rather than the mainstream, that mock Microsoft as not being "cool".
Good point - only a few years ago were Apple trying to falsely claim "first 64 bit PC", claiming that the Alphas didn't count, as they were "workstations". I fail to understand how workstations are mutually exclusive to PCs (is my workstation I use at work not a PC?), but nonetheless, it's clear that Apple do not consider their "Mac" PCs to be "workstations".
There are some fair points there - these days so-called "Macs" are just UNIX PCs - but:
3: Piracy. Mac users tend to pirate a lot less, so there will be more paid seats sold.
Not this FUD again. Do you have evidence (in particular, looking at piracy in the applications you're talking about, rather than including all the Windows users pirating games etc), or are you just insulting people based on what operating system people use?
(This is a common Apple myth - other various forms including "Linux users don't buy software" or "Non-Iphone users don't buy apps".)
6: Security. This is debatable, but it can be said that UNIX is more secure than Windows
It is indeed debatable, and it can be said whatever you like:)
7: Resale value. Mac Pros are priced competitively with other workstation class machines, so having the machines worth more when they are changed out at the end of an amortization cycle doesn't hurt.
I've never understood this argument. An Amiga 4000 maintains its resale value, but I wouldn't argue it as a point in its favour these days. If the price isn't dropping, it just means that the machines are more expensive in the first place - you can't make money from this method.
Unfortunately the categorisation isn't quite so straightforward - we've got gas giant being a subset of planet for example, but "dwarf planet" is not a subset of "planet" (aside from being misleading from the name, it also seems unclear why say Mercury and Jupiter are subsets of one thing, distinct to Pluto being something else).
I'm not saying the current system is bad - but I disagree it's analogous to a "class" system merely with different labels.
Well indeed, the point is that these stats are rather useless, and can be skewed either way.
But a far bigger uncertainty is, how many current non-"smart"-phone users will buy an Iphone, Android - or Symbian or Blackberry come to that, to include the market leaders? The problem is that "smart"-phone is an ill-defined category that just looks at an arbitrary subset of the phone market, virtually all of which these days can run apps and give you Internet, along with touchscreens, but most don't get marketed as a "smart"-phone.
I don't know why but back in the day when I used Windows games (suppose they were id games) which could switch between OpenGL and DirectX ran noticeably smoother on OpenGL and also the texture filtering looked better. I suppose there is no way to make such comparison now as almost nobody writes games which can run both.
This may be variation in the drivers, and it can happen both ways. I get annoyed by the poor support for OpenGL (both in terms of performance and odd/buggy behaviour) on Intel's GMA 950 chipset.
Nostalgia aside, from what I've been hearing from devs who had contact with DX and then picked up OGL, OGL API seems way more elegant and easier to deal with...
How long ago was this?
DirectX used to be a mess (versions 7 and earlier), but it's much better now (certainly I find DirectX 9 fine). And I'd argue it's more elegant, because they've cleaned out all of the legacy rubbish, and different hardware support are hidden beneath a single API (as opposed to OpenGL, where you have to cope with both vertex arrays and vertex buffer objects, for example). I believe one of the hopes of OpenGL 3 was to improve this; I've no idea how well OpenGL 4.1 actually manages this though.
OpenGL is indeed clearly going to stay around, if only for that reason. But the question is whether it will remain viable for realtime rendering in game programming.
The Star Trek classification system would indeed be far better than the whole "What's a planet" argument definitions we've had (which has been hard enough with just our solar system), and things like Dwarf planets etc. We have classes for stars, so why not planets...
it was the motorcyclist. Can't say I'm overly sympathetic.
What has that got to do with anything? The issue is the 16 years in prison for videotaping someone in public; not a speeding motorcyclist, nor the gun waving.
(If the motorcyclist is the guy in question - it's unclear from the article and I'm unable to watch the video now - it still doesn't change the point.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's the same as claiming your child is of a specific religious belief, agnostic, atheist, liberal, democrat, or whatnot.
Whether or not it's right, I'm not sure it's the same kind of thing - the problem there is labelling, and the problem is it may well be factually incorrect (e.g., saying someone's a Christian, when they don't believe in it). Here there's no labelling, and nothing that's incorrect - when he labels them as donors, he's quite correct, because they are donors.
A closer analogy would be deciding things like whether children can or can't receiving vaccinations or blood donations. Is it the choice of the child, the parents, or the state? If a child is too young to make their own decision, it would be ludicrous to say that a parent deciding to have them vaccinated is equivalent to labelling them a Christian!
Also, with labels, there is a clear default - don't label them anything. What is the default for vaccination, receiving blood donation, or being an organ donor?
Although yes, I'd say that this is something that the child should decide for themselves, at least if they are able. If say, an 8 year old was horrified at the idea of their organs being donated, then they shouldn't (even if the parents think they should). But for a child too young to know or care? Given that organ donation is a great help to many people, and of significant importance, I can see there being an argument for allowing child donors. It's not like the child is going to know any different, when they're dead. The only reason we don't do it for everyone is because some people don't like the idea, but that wouldn't apply if the child is too young to know. Also, remember that in some countries, donation is assumed by default unless the person removes themselves.
I doubt that at age 4 and 6, either of them have that ability.
Right, so your argument about educating and letting them decide doesn't work.
VGA-resolution is bad.
Sure, the resolution has to be low, but given that people quite happily read Wikipedia, other websites, and books, on their phones and so on, I'm not sure that's a fundamental problem. I remember getting 640x256 on a low resolution TV with it looking fine.
And I'm not convinced by the argument that hardly anyone has HDTV - it seems a large number of TVs made in the last few years seem to be HD now.
If you're walking into a store, you don't have to choose the OS - same would apply to Linux. They'll just get the standard version already installed.
(And actually, you're wrong - most netbooks seem to come with Starter, so that's at least two versions.)
For those getting their operating system separately, you do have to choose which Windows version you want - also having to factor in how much you want to spend (and a wrong decision can be expensive). No problem with Ubuntu - just download the one standard version, and if I want to seek out one of these special variants (I had no idea they even exists, that's how "confusing" it isn't), I'm free to do so in future.
LiveJournal is going downhill fast (annoying popup ads for example), and most of my friends have stopped posting there since moving to facebook.
Well I know that Facebook is much more popular than Livejournal, clearly - but I mean, it's foolish for the OP to say that anything open source is rubbish. From a technical point of view Livejournal is a perfectly good engine for blogging and social networking, and my feeling is that Facebook's better success is due to other reasons (consider, Myspace was more popular than Livejournal too, but would anyone say that the website/engine was better?)
Should I use GNU, Ubuntu, Puppy, or some other variant?
Use what you like. What about closed source - do I use Windows, OS X, or some other variant?
Now do I use Gubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, or some other confusing mishmash of first letters?
I just used Ubuntu, the standard version. Unlike Windows, where you have to choose between Starter, Basic, Home, Professional, Ultimate.
But your average person would just roll his/her eyes, say "Forget it", and go buy a $2000 Windows laptop at Best Buy because it's easier and doesn't require thinking or learning nerd-speak.
The different variants of closed source operating systems don't put people off; and the "average person" gets the OS already on the computer.
Not that any of this Linux talk has anything to do with social networking, or open source in general.
People like my brother who would rather spend $70/month to have a Comcast technician install his television, rather than do the setup himself and get TV for free (via antenna). He's the type to walk in a store and just buy the first Windows machine he see, rather than mess with learning Linux.
What "setup" or "mess" with Linux? Personally I'm still a Windows fan, but having tried Ubuntu I fail to see what the problem is. Yes, it's true that most people would buy a computer rather than install an operating system separately, but that's not a Windows versus Linux issue.
Obviously you can't download it, then run the same code elsewhere. This is no different than many, many other open source projects out on the web.
Such as?
Facebook is great because somebody else has already set up the service and the tools in a way that the 95% of the world that couldn't be bothered to set up their own website don't have to.
Well no, people would still set up the servers for you with open standards. It would be like saying that standardised email couldn't work, because 95% of the world can't be bothered to run their own email server. That doesn't mean we all have to use AOL email though.
Also, the fragmentation you mention between Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal would only become worse with a decentralized standard.
The problem with fragmentation is that there is little way to communicate between them. If this problem was solved, fragmentation wouldn't be a problem. Yet, open standards meant that email got far more fragmented, but the point is that isn't a problem.
We already have it, in fact; it's called the web.
The web doesn't solve the problems we are discussing here.
Open source will revolutionize social networking the same way it did desktop computing. We all remember the days of Windows domination, you know, before Linux took over with its thousand-and-one distribution flavors.
What has desktop computing got to do with this? This also isn't really about open source, but about open standards. You'd rather go back to the days where you could only email someone if you both used the same AOL email or whatever, because having open standards and a thousand-and-one flavours of email servers and clients that we have now is evidently terrible?
That is an interesting point, for the OP moaning about how terrible open source software is :)
What is closed source at Facebook?
But do you mean it's built using open source tools, or can I actually download the Facebook server code, and then set up a separate website that works just like Facebook? (The latter is what can be done with Livejournal, and indeed there are several alternative sites using the code.)
Yes clearly, a gun that can kill people and is designed to shoot, is comparable to something that modifies hardware that they own...
Are we going to outlaw bitorrent, along with backup programs and, I don't know, the Internet, because some people use them for copyright infringement?
You admit that the closed source Facebook is awful, and then conclude that's an argument against Open Source? Let me know how it compares to open source sites like Livejournal...
(Apologies if this was your point and you were being sarcastic...)
Throwing insults at open source gets you +5 on Slashdot - I'd never thought I'd see the day.
If you want an example of an open source social networking site, take a look at Livejournal. Are you seriously telling me that the closed source Facebook is a better website than Livejournal? The UI is far better than Facebook, it's easy to use and doesn't have bugs, plenty of documentation, and was doing all this long before Facebook.
Aside from your comments being false (I use Windows personally, but I tried Ubuntu recently and found it worked and looked just fine; I didn't even need documenation), you're missing the point. This is more about open standards than open source as such. If you bother to RTFA:
Just like open standards for e-mail and the Web broke users free from proprietary closed networks of the early 1990s, so too could a new set of standards allow people to share their thoughts, photos and comments across the Internet, regardless of what social networking services they use
It's clear that it's more about open standards, than necessarily open source alternatives. If there were open standards, yes there'd be a load more "Facebooks", but closed source sites would still be free to make use of them - just as we have closed source email clients. So even if you believed that giving away source somehow made an application terrible, you'd still be okay.
I take it you must absolutely hate email then, because that's based on open standards like SMTP? Obviously all email clients must have terrible UIs, no documentation, and be a pain to install, by your logic...
In Facebook's case one big service works a lot better than thousand small ones. How would you even search for people, places, events and so on with them? It would go back to the @something.com convention which defeats the whole purpose.
I'm not sure what the problem with that is. I much prefer the current situation with email, where we have thousands of email services (they don't have to be "small", btw - e..g, GMail), but I can email someone on another service.
Compare with Facebook, where you can only message or read someone's status etc, if you join. And if they're on some other blog/networking site, you can't easily communicate.
As for searching, well, I think we've managed to do reasonably well at being able to search information on the Internet on multiple sites...
A similar issue applies to instant messaging - there is Jabber at least.
There have been some attempts to interoperate and promote open common standards - things like OpenID, RSS, FOAF. Unfortunately part of the problem is that it's a much harder problem to crack (e.g., how do you deal with things like privacy settings, so that a status/blog entry is only visible to certain people?)
Facebook is great because it lets me easily see them from all the people, even if I don't keep in touch with them so much.
Yes indeed - but how well does it work when you're updating on Facebook, someone else is on Twitter, and another person is on LiveJournal? RSS helps in this regard.
You're missing the point - there are tonnes of companies that ship phones with a "walled garden". They sell far more than Apple. They existed long before the Iphone. It is ludicrous to suggest MS will be "copying Apple".
Of course, I've no doubt that Apple fans will label it yet another "Apple first", and some of these people will be writing in the media. But it's a sad day if the disproportionate coverage of Apple in the media ends up deterring a massive company like MS from choosing what products to release...
The Zune is what people love to make fun of - though to put things into persepective, the market share varied over the years, up to 10%, dropping to a few per cent, which makes it a "flop" apparently; yet I'm not sure that Apple have passed 5% market share in the phone market, and this is seen as a runaway success.
(Not to mention that even if the Zune was a flop, who cares. Lots of companies have their misses, including Apple.)
What I'm getting at is that MS tends to enter markets that already have cut and dried leaders, and their attempts to catch up from years behind the curve give their products a distinct feeling of inferiority. They may catch up to Android and Apple
But the cut and dried leaders in phones are the likes of Nokia, RIM, along with many other companies like Samsung, LG, Motorola - and it's Google and Apple that entered as the new guys, and are playing catch-up (in Apple's case, "from years behind the curve" - 3G, Java, Flash, video recording, MMS, copy/paste, multitasking, etc). If they can do it, I don't see why this is an impossible problem for Microsoft.
I've yet to see evidence that Windows has a "stigma" outside of the geek world.
This is a good point - the whole so-called "feature phones" (which are still "smart" in the traditional sense, in that they run apps, allow Internet access, but don't get counted as such) seems to be completely forgotten among geeks, but they sell far more than the higher end phones. (It's an anomaly why the walled garden Iphone got counted in the smart phone category instead of feature phone in the first place.)
It's sad to see more platforms going for a locked down single-tasking model. But it's funny to see people criticising Microsoft whilst excusing Apple; and it's also clear that in the market for locked down phones, there's room for many companies (including those selling a lot more than Apple).
But this is the problem - what is meant by "cool"?
One could say the same of the mobile market - evidently things like fashion and "cool" are important, but it's unclear that who has it. For geeks round here, it's Apple (and to a lesser extent, Android) that seems "cool". But look at the mainstream, and it's RIM (in the US) and Nokia (worldwide), not to mention companies like LG, Samsung, Motorola. It's also not clear that Microsoft are incapable of doing something that the mainstream see as "cool" - again, it seems to be predominantly among geeks, rather than the mainstream, that mock Microsoft as not being "cool".
Good point - only a few years ago were Apple trying to falsely claim "first 64 bit PC", claiming that the Alphas didn't count, as they were "workstations". I fail to understand how workstations are mutually exclusive to PCs (is my workstation I use at work not a PC?), but nonetheless, it's clear that Apple do not consider their "Mac" PCs to be "workstations".
There are some fair points there - these days so-called "Macs" are just UNIX PCs - but:
3: Piracy. Mac users tend to pirate a lot less, so there will be more paid seats sold.
Not this FUD again. Do you have evidence (in particular, looking at piracy in the applications you're talking about, rather than including all the Windows users pirating games etc), or are you just insulting people based on what operating system people use?
(This is a common Apple myth - other various forms including "Linux users don't buy software" or "Non-Iphone users don't buy apps".)
6: Security. This is debatable, but it can be said that UNIX is more secure than Windows
It is indeed debatable, and it can be said whatever you like :)
7: Resale value. Mac Pros are priced competitively with other workstation class machines, so having the machines worth more when they are changed out at the end of an amortization cycle doesn't hurt.
I've never understood this argument. An Amiga 4000 maintains its resale value, but I wouldn't argue it as a point in its favour these days. If the price isn't dropping, it just means that the machines are more expensive in the first place - you can't make money from this method.
Unfortunately the categorisation isn't quite so straightforward - we've got gas giant being a subset of planet for example, but "dwarf planet" is not a subset of "planet" (aside from being misleading from the name, it also seems unclear why say Mercury and Jupiter are subsets of one thing, distinct to Pluto being something else).
I'm not saying the current system is bad - but I disagree it's analogous to a "class" system merely with different labels.
Well indeed, the point is that these stats are rather useless, and can be skewed either way.
But a far bigger uncertainty is, how many current non-"smart"-phone users will buy an Iphone, Android - or Symbian or Blackberry come to that, to include the market leaders? The problem is that "smart"-phone is an ill-defined category that just looks at an arbitrary subset of the phone market, virtually all of which these days can run apps and give you Internet, along with touchscreens, but most don't get marketed as a "smart"-phone.
I don't know why but back in the day when I used Windows games (suppose they were id games) which could switch between OpenGL and DirectX ran noticeably smoother on OpenGL and also the texture filtering looked better. I suppose there is no way to make such comparison now as almost nobody writes games which can run both.
This may be variation in the drivers, and it can happen both ways. I get annoyed by the poor support for OpenGL (both in terms of performance and odd/buggy behaviour) on Intel's GMA 950 chipset.
Nostalgia aside, from what I've been hearing from devs who had contact with DX and then picked up OGL, OGL API seems way more elegant and easier to deal with...
How long ago was this?
DirectX used to be a mess (versions 7 and earlier), but it's much better now (certainly I find DirectX 9 fine). And I'd argue it's more elegant, because they've cleaned out all of the legacy rubbish, and different hardware support are hidden beneath a single API (as opposed to OpenGL, where you have to cope with both vertex arrays and vertex buffer objects, for example). I believe one of the hopes of OpenGL 3 was to improve this; I've no idea how well OpenGL 4.1 actually manages this though.
OpenGL is indeed clearly going to stay around, if only for that reason. But the question is whether it will remain viable for realtime rendering in game programming.
The Star Trek classification system would indeed be far better than the whole "What's a planet" argument definitions we've had (which has been hard enough with just our solar system), and things like Dwarf planets etc. We have classes for stars, so why not planets...
By that logic, you wouldn't mind if we went ahead and aired some of your private conversation as well, right?
Since when was this in private?
You can record me in public all you like - and the police and CCTV happily do that to others.
(Look at the recent case in the UK of Ian Tomlinson, of the importance of being able to record video in public, including of the police.)
it was the motorcyclist. Can't say I'm overly sympathetic.
What has that got to do with anything? The issue is the 16 years in prison for videotaping someone in public; not a speeding motorcyclist, nor the gun waving.
(If the motorcyclist is the guy in question - it's unclear from the article and I'm unable to watch the video now - it still doesn't change the point.)