Pretty simple, actually - at least, if you're thinking of the point I am when you say that. You're talking about the hidden passage behind the poster in one of the cells, right? All you have to be is observant; if you look, you can see what looks like an odd gap just below the bottom of the poster. If you blow the poster up with an explosive weapon (such as the RPG), the passage will be revealed in all its glory. It just takes a keen eye for detail.
What I liked the best about DN3D's levels, especially in the Atomic Edition upgrade, is that they seem to tell a story of sorts. My favorite such level would be the "Duke-Burger" mission in the Atomic Edition. To set the scene, you begin outside a new fast-food joint built in Duke's honor. In the background are the offices of an organization known only as "S.P.C.H.", though there's no way to enter the building and no clue what that acronym stands for. Eventually, though, you find your way into the burger joint - at first it's bright and colorful, like your local McDonald's, but as you go behind the counter and start to get deeper into the kitchen, you find some clues that all is not quite as it appears (and I don't just mean the alien infestation). Finally, you discover a conveyor belt that leads to the kitchen from what looks to be a slaughterhouse... and when you enter said slaughterhouse, you find it populated by sad-eyed dogs in cages. This is the office headquarters of the S.P.C.H., which you now learn stands for the Society for the Preparation of Canine Hamburgers - and the Duke-Burger is their "factory outlet." The reason I love this level (despite its mildly nauseating overtones) is that it's funny, it tells a story almost without words, and it provides the gamer with a great moment of dawning realization when he or she realizes exactly what's going on here. I haven't really seen this type of imaginative design in any similar FPS before or since.
Another good one is one of the original secret levels, "Tier Drop." This one exploits a bug in the Build engine and plays havoc with your mind... the level itself is a square walkway built as a perimeter around a central area, but as you walk around you'll notice that each time you turn a corner, the contents of the central area change dramatically. It's a great little mindtrip of a level, and even getting here is kind of fun - especially for Kubrick fans. If I recall, to get here you need to be on one of the lunar-base levels (I forget exactly which one), and find a secret passage through one of the crater walls. This passage leads down a dark tunnel, and as you approach the end you begin to hear some eerie (and very familiar) chanting... When you emerge, you find yourself in what looks to be an excavation area, with a black monolith presiding over all (and now the chanting makes sense). You jump into the TMA-1 lookalike to find the secret-level trigger.
DN3D is a game that doesn't take itself seriously at all, a refreshing change from the more modern stuff. It has a sense of humor, and is laden with all sorts of movie and pop-culture references both blatant (the aforementioned 2001 gag, plus the "DOOMed space marine" I'm sure everyone knows about by now) and subtle (on the walls of the bathroom in the very first level, you see a phone number - 867-5309 - scrawled on the wall, a nod to a famous '80s song). Maybe it isn't as technologically advanced as the Quakes, Half-Lifes (Lives?), and Unreal Tournaments of today, but it doesn't have to be - its goals are different, its design philosophy geared more for humor and irreverence. I'm glad 3D Realms decided to finally open the source; maybe now, someone will *finally* give us a version of the game that'll run not only under Linux, but under NT-based systems as well.
First, they have an OS that displays windows on your screen. They call it Windows.
At least Microsoft didn't go with their original first choice when naming this product for its 1.0 release, which was even more generic that "Windows"; IIRC, it was going to be called "Display Manager" or something like that before the marketroids convinced Bill otherwise.
I do see your point, though, and it does annoy me too - although this list doesn't do them justice, as Microsoft does have a few creatively-named products (Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, FrontPage) in their repertoire. Still and all, though, when a company relies on naming products that simply flat-out tell what that product does - and in addition to those above, you can also add the oh-so-creative Photo Editor and Publisher - it's a further sign of the unfortunate "dumbing-down" of the computer industry over the past decade or so.
Not exactly. The original Odyssey *did* use "cartridges" of a sort, although they weren't cartridges in the sense you probably mean. The Odyssey, as you might expect, was an extremely primitive system, capable of only drawing two paddles and a ball, with *maybe* a line down the middle of the "court" for a Pong-type game. Movement and placement of these objects was controlled by the placement of jumpers on the motherboard; the system's cartridges were nothing more than removable, hard-wired jumper settings. In other words, you're technically correct that the Odyssey did contain all of its games internally, but the cartridges were necessary before anything useful could be done with them. Changing a cartridge was no different than flicking the switch on a later Pong-type system, and unlike later cartridge-based systems could even be done while the unit was on.
As shipped in 1972, the Odyssey came with ten cartridges, numbered 1-10. There were two additional cartridges manufactured as add-ons. These add-on packages, as well as the Odyssey itself, also shipped with various screen overlays (for both 13" and 19" TVs) to provide additional graphics, play money for gambling-type games, rub-off scoreboards, dice, chips, gameboards, and various other elements of games that the unit itself was too "dumb" to handle by itself. The later "Master Strategy Series" games for the Odyssey2 system, which were hailed as being among the most innovative of the Golden Age, simply carried on the tradition of the grandaddy of all game consoles.
I know someone who thinks the moon landing was a hoax - she's a friend's mother.. she was a doubter WAY before the TV show aired (I heard her talk about it in the late 1980s) and truth be told, I don't think she even watched the TV show, as she doesn't have a TV..
Of course, Capricorn One is a helluva lot older than the Fox network... so it's just possible she got the idea from that.
(For the unaware, Capricorn One is a novel and a movie that presents a manned Martian expedition as an elaborate hoax by NASA, in a desperate bid for additional funds. The similarities between this story and the Moon conspiracy theorists is striking.)
I meant to type gnome-toaster instead, which is the GUI frontend for cdrecord. I don't know what I was thinking. Sorry about that - I do know better than that, really.
because all of the great applications that i can't live without (Winamp, Photoshop, Flash MX, Nero, Exact Audio Copy) aren't found on Linux;
I wasn't going to reply to this, but then I saw this little nugget.
You may already be aware, but just in case you're not, there are a few *nix equivalents for these "applications you can't live without":
WinAmp: Try XMMS. It does everything WinAmp does, plus several things it can't, and even looks and works the same (it is 100% skin-compatible with WinAmp). Of all the *nix equivalents, XMMS is probably the closest match. Home Page
Photoshop: Of course, everyone will tell you that The GIMP is a worthy replacement for Adobe's product. In practice, it lacks only a few high-end features (such as CMYK color separation) that professional users require; but for everyday use it's very close indeed. Try the Win32 port first, though, to help determine if it's right for you. Home Page
Flash MX:...You've got me here. I don't think there's a single Flash solution for *nix, beyond the outdated Flash 5 plugin for Netscape/Mozilla. Anyone with better knowledge?
Nero: Believe it or not, Nero disc images are simply ISOs with a different TLA tacked on, so switching to Linux or another *nix doesn't require giving up the ability to use them. For CD burning and mastering, I've found cdrecord to be an excellent program, almost as easy to use as Nero, and unlike Nero I've yet to make a coaster with this thing. Excellent piece of software. Home Page
Exact Audio Copy:...I admit it, I don't know what this program is - I've never heard of it. Thus, I can't give an alternative for it, I fear...
When it comes right down to it, there is one and only one thing standing between me and adopting Linux full-time.
The GIMP is a superb photo-editing tool that has already replaced Corel Photo-PAINT!, which is what I used to use on Windows, but what I need is a GIMP-like replacement for CorelDRAW! itself.
I've tried several of the Free/Open vector drawing packages that're available - OpenOffice.org's Draw component, Sketch, xfig, kontour, and so on - but none of them have had all the features I'm looking for. The closest I've come across is OpenOffice.org, but I can't say as I'm a fan of the way its menu system is constructed; tools I need, such as grid placement and duplication, are either buried in a submenu I don't usually look for them in, or are handled differently than I'd like. (I want duplication to be handled by a simple Ctrl+D, not just the dialog box that asks how many times I want to copy the selection. A simple cut and paste does the same job, but my sensibilities see that as having one unnecessary step.)
So far, the best solution I've been able to find is Win4Lin, which let me run CorelDRAW! flawlessly. Unfortunately, I've since upgraded my system to a new distribution - I was running Mandrake, but now I'm in with the Libranet crowd - and in the interim I somehow allowed the CD envelope containing Win4Lin's registration key to be thrown out. It's not like I can contact Netraverse for a new one, because of the obvious conclusion they'll draw, and I am NOT going to shell out another eighty bucks for the want of one tiny little scrap of paper... so, at the moment, the only way I can use CorelDRAW! is to reboot to Windows, or try running it under WINE (which I don't entirely trust - for some reason on my system, when it crashes it tends to take X along for the ride). So, I'm looking at native *nix alternatives.
I've been thinking about it, and the more I do, the more I realize that Rasterman has a very valid point.
When he says that, as projects get bigger and involve more people, they tend to focus less on the actual project itself and more on politics and advocacy, he's absolutely right. I forget exactly who it was (Abraham Lincoln?) who said that a house divided against itself cannot stand, but that's certainly the case in the Linux community. I mean, how many political Jihads have been declared here - GNOME-vs.-KDE, emacs-vs.-vi, Red Hat-vs.-Debian, GPL-vs.-BSD, RMS-vs.-everything that isn't GNU... the list goes on. And even though some of these "wars" involve Linux only tangentially, such as emacs-vs.-vi (which is more of a general Unix thing), the status of Linux as the highest-profile Unix workalike on the market today that it becomes, at least in the public eye, the sole heir to all of this excess baggage.
In the Linux community, too often ideaology takes precedence over common sense. We sneer at Microsoft for its perverted definition of "innovation," which seems to solely consist of squashing and/or absorbing all its competition, yet when was the last time we produced any real "innovation" of our own? It's been a while. Most of the development effort of, for example, KDE and GNOME appears to be aimed in the emulate-the-Windows-experience direction. That's not innovation, that's retreading old tires at best, blatant copying at worst.
I'm not what you'd consider a programmer, but I've taken enough classes to at least have a rudimentary idea of what it's all about, and I do know that it's often easier not to have to "reinvent the wheel" for each new project. I also realize that the best way to make new users comfortable in Linux is to present them with a GUI similar to one they've already had experience with (ie: Windows or Macintosh), which is why so much effort is spent emulating those UIs. The inherent problem with this approach, however, is that the average user's perceptions are skewed somewhat by two factors: A) Being generally computer-illiterate, or at least unfamiliar with the concept of a home computer, and B) said computer likely came "out of the box" with Windows pre-installed, and since Joe Average is likely unfamiliar with how to run a PC beyond the QuickStart guides included in so many packages, he isn't aware that it will run anything other than Windows. This is why installing Linux is percieved as such a hassle by so many people... they've never had to do this with Windows. Give these same people a Windows CD and a fresh hard drive, and they'd be just as intimidated at the prospect.
Applications? Oh, the apps are there, no question. However, the problem is that, for various reasons, few of them really act as "killers" for their Windows equivalents. The GIMP, while an outstanding program, is still missing some features that many Photoshop professionals rely on, such as true PANTONE color matching. OpenOffice seems to be lacking in several ease-of-use features many would-be converts from MS Office are specifically looking for, and this invariably knocks them for the proverbial loop. Evolution is a superb mail/groupware application, yet people who have used both it and Outlook will usually claim that Outlook just "feels" more elegant. (Note that I'm referring to the full Outlook application here, not the God-awful Express version bundled with Windows.) No matter how good Mozilla, Galeon, and Konqueror get, they simply cannot keep up with the latest Web trends and technologies the way IE can. And there has yet to be one single, decent Free/Open vector-graphics package to compete favorably against the likes of Adobe Illustrator, or even CorelDRAW.
Too many distributions? That may be an issue as well. When you get right down to it, though, there are still only three "different" Linux distros - Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware - each with their own particluar package system (RPM, apt-get, and tarballs respectively). Everything else seems to build off one of these distros, or at least their respective packaging systems. This fact, however, is generally not well-known outside the community, and as a result all the end users see are almost a dozen entirely different OS packages, each claiming to be "Linux." Some standardization would have helped... again, though, this gets into an almost political/ideaological choice between distributions, and that sort of thing never makes new users feel comfortable.
Is Linux dead on the desktop? That depends on how you define the term. If you mean it to say "a Microsoft killer," as was defined at the start of the Linux boom, then it is not only dead, but has been for quite some time; the family just hasn't had the heart to pull the plug. If it means "a commercially-viable desktop operating system," then the penguin isn't exactly dead... but he is in the intensive-care unit, condition listed as critical. If, however, you define it as "a readily-usable environment for geeks and newbies alike, well suited for nearly all day-to-day tasks," then Linux is indeed alive and well - it just suffers from something of an image problem. But all this Beast needs is a Beauty (read: user) to see past the coarse, unhewn exterior - and, of course, Microsoft's FUD deflection tactics - to see the true strengh and beauty of the system.
That's my take on it, anyway. I'm sure this will generate some comments, both pro and con... feel free to do so.
Read your GPL. You can charge money for GPL-licensed software if you so desire. Otherwise, every distribution on the planet, save the "true" Debian, would be in violation. "Free," in this sense, does not necessarily mean "no cost to the user."
Now, if Click-n-Run both charged money for its service *and* provided no way for the user to acquire the source code for GPL-licensed software... now in *that* case, they would be violating the GPL.
Besides which, the implication from the articles I've read is that LindowsOS, being somewhat built on Debian technology, still incorporates the apt-get system. An experienced user can still apt-get.deb packages just as s/he has always been able to do; Click-n-Run is a comfort-zone tool for the newbies. Nothing wrong with that.
It does seem perfectly in line with what I say about Stallman, however. Based on this, I now believe more strongly than ever that he does indeed want to be the "Bill" of our little corner of the computing world.
Think about it. Isn't one of the major complaints about Gates that he (or, at the very least, Microsoft) claims full responsibility for "re-inventing" the personal computer to make it easy for everyone's Great-Aunt Edna to use?
RMS's power play as described in this glibc case - which I again stress, I knew nothing of before now - smacks of his trying to do exactly the same thing.
Again I ask, how precisely is this any less "wrong" than what Microsoft does? It isn't, at least not in my view. The only possible justification I can see is "the ends justify the means," which is a lousy argument for anything.
Is the cause of Free Software really worth the risk of harboring another power-hungry egomaniac, which RMS certainly can seem to be on occassion? For all the good Stallman has done, he is at a real risk of squandering it all thanks to what seems to be his inherent inability to acknowledge that there are others who can do what he does, and perhaps even better, than he.
...who thinks that RMS is trying to do for Free Software what Bill Gates has done for proprietary/commercial software?
Don't get me wrong - I have tremendous respect for RMS as a programmer. GCC and Emacs alone should be enough to qualify him as a charter member in the Hacker's Elite, and I feel that the GPL is one of the best things to ever happen to software. Besides, they say that one should never criticize a person unless they know they can do better. Not being a programmer myself (just your average end-(l)user), I keep my mouth tightly sealed on such matters.
However, as much as I respect RMS's ability, I *do* feel that he needs a few pointers on how to conduct himself as a representative of the "community." Whatever else RMS may be, he is most certainly not one who plays politics; he wears his opinions firmly on his sleeve, and be damned with what anyone else says about it. While this is an admirable trait in most cases, it does tend to make one... difficult... to deal with.
I'm remembering several months ago (closer to a year now?), when RMS was making noises about how KDE, despite having recently become fully compliant with the GPL in every respect, needed to "apologize"(?) to him before he would consider adding KDE to his list of "approved" Free Software. Granted, I may be misremembering a few details, but that was the gist of the situation as I was able to grasp it then. That, to me, is the height of arrogance, every bit as much as Gates's infamous "NT will be a better Unix than Unix" comment. It's almost as if RMS feels that he, and he alone, is the only person capable of determining what is Free Software and what isn't.
This latest stunt, running for a seat on the GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors, smells to me like something born of desperation. Having seen a project built largely on his own ideals veer away from its original goals (the advent of Ximian, a commercial entity, becoming almost the de facto standard GNOME for newbies and even some power users), as well as becoming borderline irrelevant (the recent "freeing-up" of KDE, which is now Free Software in every sense of the word), it seems as if RMS wants more than anything to steer GNOME "back on track," as he sees it.
If all Free Software must have RMS"s official stamp of approval, how is this any better, fundamentally, than Microsoft having the final say-so on what will work with their proprietary OS and what won't? Note that any argument that boils down to "because WE are RIGHT and THEY are WRONG" will be immediately discredited.
I applaud RMS for being a man who stands up for his beliefs and for everything he has done for the Free Software movement, but there are times when he can act very much like a spoiled child who screams and pounds the floor until Mommy and Daddy cave in and buy him that cool new toy. And, based on what I see, the "toy" in this instance appears to be a "monopoly" on Free Software.
A dictatorship built on peace and understanding is still a dictatorship. Think about it...
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What I liked the best about DN3D's levels, especially in the Atomic Edition upgrade, is that they seem to tell a story of sorts. My favorite such level would be the "Duke-Burger" mission in the Atomic Edition. To set the scene, you begin outside a new fast-food joint built in Duke's honor. In the background are the offices of an organization known only as "S.P.C.H.", though there's no way to enter the building and no clue what that acronym stands for. Eventually, though, you find your way into the burger joint - at first it's bright and colorful, like your local McDonald's, but as you go behind the counter and start to get deeper into the kitchen, you find some clues that all is not quite as it appears (and I don't just mean the alien infestation). Finally, you discover a conveyor belt that leads to the kitchen from what looks to be a slaughterhouse... and when you enter said slaughterhouse, you find it populated by sad-eyed dogs in cages. This is the office headquarters of the S.P.C.H., which you now learn stands for the Society for the Preparation of Canine Hamburgers - and the Duke-Burger is their "factory outlet." The reason I love this level (despite its mildly nauseating overtones) is that it's funny, it tells a story almost without words, and it provides the gamer with a great moment of dawning realization when he or she realizes exactly what's going on here. I haven't really seen this type of imaginative design in any similar FPS before or since.
Another good one is one of the original secret levels, "Tier Drop." This one exploits a bug in the Build engine and plays havoc with your mind... the level itself is a square walkway built as a perimeter around a central area, but as you walk around you'll notice that each time you turn a corner, the contents of the central area change dramatically. It's a great little mindtrip of a level, and even getting here is kind of fun - especially for Kubrick fans. If I recall, to get here you need to be on one of the lunar-base levels (I forget exactly which one), and find a secret passage through one of the crater walls. This passage leads down a dark tunnel, and as you approach the end you begin to hear some eerie (and very familiar) chanting... When you emerge, you find yourself in what looks to be an excavation area, with a black monolith presiding over all (and now the chanting makes sense). You jump into the TMA-1 lookalike to find the secret-level trigger.
DN3D is a game that doesn't take itself seriously at all, a refreshing change from the more modern stuff. It has a sense of humor, and is laden with all sorts of movie and pop-culture references both blatant (the aforementioned 2001 gag, plus the "DOOMed space marine" I'm sure everyone knows about by now) and subtle (on the walls of the bathroom in the very first level, you see a phone number - 867-5309 - scrawled on the wall, a nod to a famous '80s song). Maybe it isn't as technologically advanced as the Quakes, Half-Lifes (Lives?), and Unreal Tournaments of today, but it doesn't have to be - its goals are different, its design philosophy geared more for humor and irreverence. I'm glad 3D Realms decided to finally open the source; maybe now, someone will *finally* give us a version of the game that'll run not only under Linux, but under NT-based systems as well.
First, they have an OS that displays windows on your screen. They call it Windows.
At least Microsoft didn't go with their original first choice when naming this product for its 1.0 release, which was even more generic that "Windows"; IIRC, it was going to be called "Display Manager" or something like that before the marketroids convinced Bill otherwise.
I do see your point, though, and it does annoy me too - although this list doesn't do them justice, as Microsoft does have a few creatively-named products (Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, FrontPage) in their repertoire. Still and all, though, when a company relies on naming products that simply flat-out tell what that product does - and in addition to those above, you can also add the oh-so-creative Photo Editor and Publisher - it's a further sign of the unfortunate "dumbing-down" of the computer industry over the past decade or so.
Not exactly. The original Odyssey *did* use "cartridges" of a sort, although they weren't cartridges in the sense you probably mean. The Odyssey, as you might expect, was an extremely primitive system, capable of only drawing two paddles and a ball, with *maybe* a line down the middle of the "court" for a Pong-type game. Movement and placement of these objects was controlled by the placement of jumpers on the motherboard; the system's cartridges were nothing more than removable, hard-wired jumper settings. In other words, you're technically correct that the Odyssey did contain all of its games internally, but the cartridges were necessary before anything useful could be done with them. Changing a cartridge was no different than flicking the switch on a later Pong-type system, and unlike later cartridge-based systems could even be done while the unit was on.
As shipped in 1972, the Odyssey came with ten cartridges, numbered 1-10. There were two additional cartridges manufactured as add-ons. These add-on packages, as well as the Odyssey itself, also shipped with various screen overlays (for both 13" and 19" TVs) to provide additional graphics, play money for gambling-type games, rub-off scoreboards, dice, chips, gameboards, and various other elements of games that the unit itself was too "dumb" to handle by itself. The later "Master Strategy Series" games for the Odyssey2 system, which were hailed as being among the most innovative of the Golden Age, simply carried on the tradition of the grandaddy of all game consoles.
Of course, Capricorn One is a helluva lot older than the Fox network... so it's just possible she got the idea from that.
(For the unaware, Capricorn One is a novel and a movie that presents a manned Martian expedition as an elaborate hoax by NASA, in a desperate bid for additional funds. The similarities between this story and the Moon conspiracy theorists is striking.)
I meant to type gnome-toaster instead, which is the GUI frontend for cdrecord. I don't know what I was thinking. Sorry about that - I do know better than that, really.
Gnome-toaster home page
I wasn't going to reply to this, but then I saw this little nugget.
You may already be aware, but just in case you're not, there are a few *nix equivalents for these "applications you can't live without":
WinAmp: Try XMMS. It does everything WinAmp does, plus several things it can't, and even looks and works the same (it is 100% skin-compatible with WinAmp). Of all the *nix equivalents, XMMS is probably the closest match. Home Page
Photoshop: Of course, everyone will tell you that The GIMP is a worthy replacement for Adobe's product. In practice, it lacks only a few high-end features (such as CMYK color separation) that professional users require; but for everyday use it's very close indeed. Try the Win32 port first, though, to help determine if it's right for you. Home Page
Flash MX:
Nero: Believe it or not, Nero disc images are simply ISOs with a different TLA tacked on, so switching to Linux or another *nix doesn't require giving up the ability to use them. For CD burning and mastering, I've found cdrecord to be an excellent program, almost as easy to use as Nero, and unlike Nero I've yet to make a coaster with this thing. Excellent piece of software. Home Page
Exact Audio Copy:
The GIMP is a superb photo-editing tool that has already replaced Corel Photo-PAINT!, which is what I used to use on Windows, but what I need is a GIMP-like replacement for CorelDRAW! itself.
I've tried several of the Free/Open vector drawing packages that're available - OpenOffice.org's Draw component, Sketch, xfig, kontour, and so on - but none of them have had all the features I'm looking for. The closest I've come across is OpenOffice.org, but I can't say as I'm a fan of the way its menu system is constructed; tools I need, such as grid placement and duplication, are either buried in a submenu I don't usually look for them in, or are handled differently than I'd like. (I want duplication to be handled by a simple Ctrl+D, not just the dialog box that asks how many times I want to copy the selection. A simple cut and paste does the same job, but my sensibilities see that as having one unnecessary step.)
So far, the best solution I've been able to find is Win4Lin, which let me run CorelDRAW! flawlessly. Unfortunately, I've since upgraded my system to a new distribution - I was running Mandrake, but now I'm in with the Libranet crowd - and in the interim I somehow allowed the CD envelope containing Win4Lin's registration key to be thrown out. It's not like I can contact Netraverse for a new one, because of the obvious conclusion they'll draw, and I am NOT going to shell out another eighty bucks for the want of one tiny little scrap of paper... so, at the moment, the only way I can use CorelDRAW! is to reboot to Windows, or try running it under WINE (which I don't entirely trust - for some reason on my system, when it crashes it tends to take X along for the ride). So, I'm looking at native *nix alternatives.
Any suggestions?
I've been thinking about it, and the more I do, the more I realize that Rasterman has a very valid point.
When he says that, as projects get bigger and involve more people, they tend to focus less on the actual project itself and more on politics and advocacy, he's absolutely right. I forget exactly who it was (Abraham Lincoln?) who said that a house divided against itself cannot stand, but that's certainly the case in the Linux community. I mean, how many political Jihads have been declared here - GNOME-vs.-KDE, emacs-vs.-vi, Red Hat-vs.-Debian, GPL-vs.-BSD, RMS-vs.-everything that isn't GNU... the list goes on. And even though some of these "wars" involve Linux only tangentially, such as emacs-vs.-vi (which is more of a general Unix thing), the status of Linux as the highest-profile Unix workalike on the market today that it becomes, at least in the public eye, the sole heir to all of this excess baggage.
In the Linux community, too often ideaology takes precedence over common sense. We sneer at Microsoft for its perverted definition of "innovation," which seems to solely consist of squashing and/or absorbing all its competition, yet when was the last time we produced any real "innovation" of our own? It's been a while. Most of the development effort of, for example, KDE and GNOME appears to be aimed in the emulate-the-Windows-experience direction. That's not innovation, that's retreading old tires at best, blatant copying at worst.
I'm not what you'd consider a programmer, but I've taken enough classes to at least have a rudimentary idea of what it's all about, and I do know that it's often easier not to have to "reinvent the wheel" for each new project. I also realize that the best way to make new users comfortable in Linux is to present them with a GUI similar to one they've already had experience with (ie: Windows or Macintosh), which is why so much effort is spent emulating those UIs. The inherent problem with this approach, however, is that the average user's perceptions are skewed somewhat by two factors: A) Being generally computer-illiterate, or at least unfamiliar with the concept of a home computer, and B) said computer likely came "out of the box" with Windows pre-installed, and since Joe Average is likely unfamiliar with how to run a PC beyond the QuickStart guides included in so many packages, he isn't aware that it will run anything other than Windows. This is why installing Linux is percieved as such a hassle by so many people... they've never had to do this with Windows. Give these same people a Windows CD and a fresh hard drive, and they'd be just as intimidated at the prospect.
Applications? Oh, the apps are there, no question. However, the problem is that, for various reasons, few of them really act as "killers" for their Windows equivalents. The GIMP, while an outstanding program, is still missing some features that many Photoshop professionals rely on, such as true PANTONE color matching. OpenOffice seems to be lacking in several ease-of-use features many would-be converts from MS Office are specifically looking for, and this invariably knocks them for the proverbial loop. Evolution is a superb mail/groupware application, yet people who have used both it and Outlook will usually claim that Outlook just "feels" more elegant. (Note that I'm referring to the full Outlook application here, not the God-awful Express version bundled with Windows.) No matter how good Mozilla, Galeon, and Konqueror get, they simply cannot keep up with the latest Web trends and technologies the way IE can. And there has yet to be one single, decent Free/Open vector-graphics package to compete favorably against the likes of Adobe Illustrator, or even CorelDRAW.
Too many distributions? That may be an issue as well. When you get right down to it, though, there are still only three "different" Linux distros - Red Hat, Debian, and Slackware - each with their own particluar package system (RPM, apt-get, and tarballs respectively). Everything else seems to build off one of these distros, or at least their respective packaging systems. This fact, however, is generally not well-known outside the community, and as a result all the end users see are almost a dozen entirely different OS packages, each claiming to be "Linux." Some standardization would have helped... again, though, this gets into an almost political/ideaological choice between distributions, and that sort of thing never makes new users feel comfortable.
Is Linux dead on the desktop? That depends on how you define the term. If you mean it to say "a Microsoft killer," as was defined at the start of the Linux boom, then it is not only dead, but has been for quite some time; the family just hasn't had the heart to pull the plug. If it means "a commercially-viable desktop operating system," then the penguin isn't exactly dead... but he is in the intensive-care unit, condition listed as critical. If, however, you define it as "a readily-usable environment for geeks and newbies alike, well suited for nearly all day-to-day tasks," then Linux is indeed alive and well - it just suffers from something of an image problem. But all this Beast needs is a Beauty (read: user) to see past the coarse, unhewn exterior - and, of course, Microsoft's FUD deflection tactics - to see the true strengh and beauty of the system.
That's my take on it, anyway. I'm sure this will generate some comments, both pro and con... feel free to do so.
And your point would be...?
.deb packages just as s/he has always been able to do; Click-n-Run is a comfort-zone tool for the newbies. Nothing wrong with that.
Read your GPL. You can charge money for GPL-licensed software if you so desire. Otherwise, every distribution on the planet, save the "true" Debian, would be in violation. "Free," in this sense, does not necessarily mean "no cost to the user."
Now, if Click-n-Run both charged money for its service *and* provided no way for the user to acquire the source code for GPL-licensed software... now in *that* case, they would be violating the GPL.
Besides which, the implication from the articles I've read is that LindowsOS, being somewhat built on Debian technology, still incorporates the apt-get system. An experienced user can still apt-get
Ouch... I hadn't seen that one.
It does seem perfectly in line with what I say about Stallman, however. Based on this, I now believe more strongly than ever that he does indeed want to be the "Bill" of our little corner of the computing world.
Think about it. Isn't one of the major complaints about Gates that he (or, at the very least, Microsoft) claims full responsibility for "re-inventing" the personal computer to make it easy for everyone's Great-Aunt Edna to use?
RMS's power play as described in this glibc case - which I again stress, I knew nothing of before now - smacks of his trying to do exactly the same thing.
Again I ask, how precisely is this any less "wrong" than what Microsoft does? It isn't, at least not in my view. The only possible justification I can see is "the ends justify the means," which is a lousy argument for anything.
Is the cause of Free Software really worth the risk of harboring another power-hungry egomaniac, which RMS certainly can seem to be on occassion? For all the good Stallman has done, he is at a real risk of squandering it all thanks to what seems to be his inherent inability to acknowledge that there are others who can do what he does, and perhaps even better, than he.
...who thinks that RMS is trying to do for Free Software what Bill Gates has done for proprietary/commercial software?
Don't get me wrong - I have tremendous respect for RMS as a programmer. GCC and Emacs alone should be enough to qualify him as a charter member in the Hacker's Elite, and I feel that the GPL is one of the best things to ever happen to software. Besides, they say that one should never criticize a person unless they know they can do better. Not being a programmer myself (just your average end-(l)user), I keep my mouth tightly sealed on such matters.
However, as much as I respect RMS's ability, I *do* feel that he needs a few pointers on how to conduct himself as a representative of the "community." Whatever else RMS may be, he is most certainly not one who plays politics; he wears his opinions firmly on his sleeve, and be damned with what anyone else says about it. While this is an admirable trait in most cases, it does tend to make one... difficult... to deal with.
I'm remembering several months ago (closer to a year now?), when RMS was making noises about how KDE, despite having recently become fully compliant with the GPL in every respect, needed to "apologize"(?) to him before he would consider adding KDE to his list of "approved" Free Software. Granted, I may be misremembering a few details, but that was the gist of the situation as I was able to grasp it then. That, to me, is the height of arrogance, every bit as much as Gates's infamous "NT will be a better Unix than Unix" comment. It's almost as if RMS feels that he, and he alone, is the only person capable of determining what is Free Software and what isn't.
This latest stunt, running for a seat on the GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors, smells to me like something born of desperation. Having seen a project built largely on his own ideals veer away from its original goals (the advent of Ximian, a commercial entity, becoming almost the de facto standard GNOME for newbies and even some power users), as well as becoming borderline irrelevant (the recent "freeing-up" of KDE, which is now Free Software in every sense of the word), it seems as if RMS wants more than anything to steer GNOME "back on track," as he sees it.
If all Free Software must have RMS"s official stamp of approval, how is this any better, fundamentally, than Microsoft having the final say-so on what will work with their proprietary OS and what won't? Note that any argument that boils down to "because WE are RIGHT and THEY are WRONG" will be immediately discredited.
I applaud RMS for being a man who stands up for his beliefs and for everything he has done for the Free Software movement, but there are times when he can act very much like a spoiled child who screams and pounds the floor until Mommy and Daddy cave in and buy him that cool new toy. And, based on what I see, the "toy" in this instance appears to be a "monopoly" on Free Software.
A dictatorship built on peace and understanding is still a dictatorship. Think about it...