show me a linux distro that compets on price with security updates for even 5 years, let alone 12.
It's called Gentoo Linux if you are talking about a distribution that can just use rolling updates forever - once you've installed it, just update it with any new kernels and libraries and then compile appropriate applications against those. Yep, it's time consuming and sometimes there's a problem but I spend no more time messing around with my Gentoo server or solving update problems than I do with my XP machine in order to keep everything clean and updated.
I don't use Ubuntu much but I understand it too is pretty straightforward if you upgrade to a new version.
As for price, please don't go there, you know Linux is downloadable pretty much for free across the board - sure, you might pay Red Hat, Novell or some other company for a maintenance contract but again that's no different to Windows shops.
I have no problem with anything you've said but please don't base your view of Linux on anything someone else has written but what you see for yourself.
There are countless bootable "live" CD/DVD images that you can just boot a PC from (without installing) that will immediately give you a good idea as to how well your hardware works with it.
Sure, there could well be some issues with some of your hardware that make it an OS you're not prepared to use, but at least then you have seen it for yourself. The fact is that the hardware support in Linux has improved exponentially over the past few years, Ubuntu and Knoppix do an excellent job at detecting all manner of hardware from bootup and I even know of diehard Windows people who use bootable Knoppix or Ubuntu to get an idea what Windows driver they'd need for an odd piece of hardware they're trying to get working in Windows.
XP is an old OS and is not nearly as secure as Vista.
With all respect, this one statement alone shows how little you know about security and I would suggest that you are taking security for granted which ultimately means you're more open to an attack from vulnerabilities as a result.
Standard security techniques involve deploying external NAT/firewall routers, shutting down unnecessary service, applying OS and application updates as quickly as possible, using strong passwords, not using administrator (root) level access unless necessary, and identifying applications prone to certain vulnerabilities which can be replaced by more secure alternatives.
All of the above are equally relevant whether you use Windows, Linux, UNIX, *BSD, OS X, etc. etc. and if you've done all the above, you can pretty much consider yourself relatively secure. Additional virus and malware checkers are also a good idea for Windows, for the other OSes it's probably debatable whether they're needed but if they're cheap, it's not a great issue putting them on also.
So please do not make such blanket statements as they are not true and may lead to some people opening their PCs up to more malware as a result of your over-confidence and lack of understanding.
They are the biggest advert on this site to stay well away from FOSS as much as possible, and in my opinion do more damage to the FOSS reputation than anything else.
OpenOffice, TheGimp, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Vim, Audacity, Wireshark - off the top of my head, just a few of the countless FOSS packages that run on Windows.
If you choose not to investigate FOSS applications for yourself, that's your problem - nobody else's.
The comments seem to fall in to one of two categories. People who installed SP1 and had no issues, and people trying to convert the masses to Linux.
Ahem! Please add a third category - "People who are happy with the functionality of XP and see no advantages Vista would bring them".
I admit I'm an 80%/20% Linux/XP user in that order. However, two weeks ago my niece gave me her XP laptop to fix because of countless malware and viruses. Three days later she got it back - no, I did give it back to her with Ubuntu, it had a nice clean XP rebuild on it with Firefox, Thunderbird, AVG Antivirus Free and other free/OSS applications that allow her to continue to use XP and to actually make her whole XP experience better for her. This is much the same as I've done for all Windows-using friends and relatives over the past 10 years or so when they need their PCs fixed.
Please do not assume everyone who uses Linux is a zealot - if someone comes and asks me about it, I'll happily tell them what they want to know or even help them install it. Otherwise they have as much right to choice about their computing experience as I do and I give a lot of my free time to building XP boxes that are as safe to use and virus proof as possible for those around me.
Your comments are therefore insulting, baseless and sound like those of a spoilt child.
How about we have 22,487 other articles from all the major establishments that are very happy to toll out SP1 on release day?
Very few major establishments will have rolled out Vista as of yet. This was the same with Windows XP, no corporate starts rollouts of this type until after the first service pack. Additional the difference in hardware requirements between XP and Vista is much more that it was with 2000 and XP - therefore, since a lot of hardware upgrades will likely be involved, it's safe to assume rollout will probably be slower.
Why not just call the site Slashdot - news for linux fanboys.
You are the first person to mention Linux in this topic, as far as I can see. The creator of the article does not like Vista - yes, he could be a Linux fanboy but he could also be a satisfied XP user as well.
Face it, the vast majority of vista users are very happy.
If previous postings on Slashdot is anything to go by, I would say that it's about half-and-half, slightly in favour of those who are unhappy with it and/or are staying with XP as long as possible.
Sorry if that makes a few people fume, but its the truth. if you don't want to install vista, don't, but do something constructive with your lie rather than just whining at people who are happy with vista FFS.
A lot of people feel short-changed by Microsoft because they have had Vista forced upon them, rather than being given the option of choice. I myself tried to buy a Dell XPS laptop with XP on it just before Christmas but Dell would only sell it with Vista (even though the NVidia graphics card inside in only designed for DirectX 9). As it happened, I sourced a new one from an Ebay seller who sells off Dell's cancelled orders - it was brand new, better spec than I originally looked for but cost me £500 than from Dell directly, plus it had XP Professional on it. I got what I wanted at a better price than expected, Dell lost a sale for being unable to provide what a customer requested - I'm certainly not fuming about it.
I think you will find that a lot of people just accept Vista as being what came with their new PC rather than having a love of it - if anything, as a person who fixes a lot of PCs for friends and relatives, the handful that do run Vista accept it but are not particularly enthused by it.
I'm sure there are people who genuinely like it, others who say they like it but don't really and don't want to admit it, and some who don't. But the facts are that even I've noticed that the enthusiasm there was for XP at the time of SP1 was much more than it is for Vista SP1 at the moment.
And I'd also be happier if you didn't automatically bring Linux into this argument just because you yourself are frustrated - people should use Linux purely because it fills some requirements they need from an OS or because they are genuinely interested in seeing what it can do and learning something about it.
People that use it as a political weapon because they don't like Microsoft or because they want to batter someone else over the head with it for not liking Microsoft are fools.
Finally, Apple products are held to a higher standard than other products, because of the expectation of greatness.
Please explain what you mean by "higher standard". If you're comparing an Airbook to a £400 Dell laptop then you're probably correct - but then you'll never get an Airbook for £400.
You also forgot to mention that all Apple products have an "Apple" look about them. Yes, it might, for you, be a nice-looking and elegant design but that has nothing to do with the higher operating standard of the product and you are paying a premium price as a result of paying for that design.
It's a pretty safe assumption to suggest that if people choose not to use Windows, their reasons for not doing so are primarily technical ones - namely because Windows doesn't do all that they need it to. Yes, a few people would use Linux because it's cheaper that Windows, fewer still will use Linux or OS X as a political statement because they don't like Microsoft.
It's also pretty safe to assume that migrating from Windows to Linux is a technical challenge for newbie users which therefore leads to the conclusion that most people who use Linux do indeed have greater technical knowledge than the "Joe Average" PC user.
People who migrate to Macs and OS X do not, we are frequently told here, need any additional technical knowledge to do so. So whilst I accept there are some very knowledgeable OS X people out there, most of them will still be pretty average users.
Consequently, when it gets to "my computer is better than your computer" discussions on here, most of the Linux people can put forward fairly reasoned technical arguments and there are enough Windows people globally that even if the tiniest percentage of them are technical people, that's still a lot of them.
However, most of the Mac users are not technical people so they are unable, most of the time, to argue at a similar technical level as the Linux people and the Windows people. Consequently, their only alternative is to get very defensive about the products they've paid a lot of money for & therefore try to use emotion, rather than fact, to get their points across.
The real reason Mac fans tend to be overly defensive is that they've felt marginalized by software and hardware vendors for years due to Microsoft's dominance in the desktop computing arena.
I find it difficult to believe that someone would come up with this excuse after having bought a Mac. Surely, a sensible person who plans on spending that much money on a piece of hardware, takes the availability of other hardware and software into account before making the purchase. To me that seems quite a major reason not to buy that piece of hardware in the first place, especially if that hardware comes at a premium cost.
From what I recall (I'd left the Amiga scene by this point), the later Amiga expansions had PowerPC capabilities which were also common to the Apple computers of the time.
I'd therefore suggest that a lot of the Amiga userbase went over to Apple due to platform similarities and the fact that they could port code and their own programming skills to the Apple platforms much easier.
which more or less sums up why OSX and Windows own 99% of the desktop market.
It may be the case in the USA but let me give you some facts from over here in Europe.
Counting all my family and my social and work colleagues, let say there's around 100 households, I can't think of one that doesn't run XP or Vista. About 10 of them are doing something with Linux because they use me for support and help with installing it - about half the Linux users have set aside a separate machine for it (e.g. Myth TV, Samba file server, etc.) and about half have it as a dual-boot on their desktop machines.
One of those people has a Mac. He was given it by his boss at work because it was sat in its box gathering dust. He bought it home, fired it up once and now it's back in its box again gathering dust. He's a Windows user who has a Ubuntu box that he does use a little, but nothing more than that.
These people are not all techies or computer buffs, in my mind they represent a good cross-section of computer users here in the UK, from the obvious techies to the novices. Yes, they have the occasional gripe about Windows, or indeed Linux, but not one has ever asked me about Macs or, as far as I know, ever looked at buying one.
I'm fully prepared to accept that there is a greater penetration of Macs in the US, but based on my cross-section of people, I'll give 95% to Windows, 4.5% to Linux (based on the fact that the 10 people are not full time Linux people) and 0.5% to the Mac for the guy that has one in a box.
Optional Safari installs undermine the hegemony of Internet Explorer, and that's good -- not just for the individual who uses Safari, but for the security of the whole Web.
Actually, it's not. If a newbie Windows user starts getting concerned about security then one of the first things they might do is ensure that it's settings are configured as tightly as possible. If, then, some other browser appears on their system with default configuration options, then that new browser, at that moment in time, is likely to be less secure than what IE has been configured to be. Consequently, one or more new security holes may have been opened on the system due to the installation of a new browser that the user possibly has no need of.
Correct me if I'm wrong but don't the Mac owners on here constantly force down our throats the fact that OS X is easier to use and understand than Windows for the inexperienced user?
But isn't the obfuscation of installing Safari on Windows with iTunes therefore a complete contradiction to that ethic? If not, then the only conclusion I can come to is that it's a deliberate attempt to confuse inexperienced Windows users to the point where they have Safari forced on them.
And isn't that pretty much the same as Microsoft forcing IE on Windows users, for which they have taken a big hammering over the years and accused of monopolistic practices as a result?
Incidentally, can someone answer this question please? On the basis that someone installs Safari on Windows like this, does it set its default home page to be that of IE or whatever other default browser the user currently has? Or does it just happen to be iTunes?
Just curious because, again, Microsoft took a lot of flak for setting its default IE home page to MSDN a few years back.
The emphasis on 3D has also destroyed proper RTS games.
From the perspective of the games companies, I suspect that programming objects based on points and textures is far cheaper than employing an artist to design animated sprites on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
But the fact is, if a fixed-view RTS game is designed well, adding the ability to change viewpoints and to zoom in just adds needless complexity to these games.
If anyone thinks of classic RTS titles, they immediately think of Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Total Annihilation and the C&C/Red Alert games, all of which are sprite based. I was amazed at how quickly Supreme Commander & Warcraft 3 appeared on the "2 for £15" shelves in my local game store - as a huge Total Annihilation fan, I bought Supreme Commander cheaply, played it once and gave up because I really couldn't be bothered learning all key and mouse combinations to change views & zoom in/out in order to find a single orientation that allowed me to play a game from start to finish.
Incidentally, before anyone starts with the "3D is the future argument", I've played just about every popular FPS between Castle Wolfenstein and Half-Life 2 right to the end - however, the problem with FPSes now is that they focus too much on prettiness for the sake of cutting down play-time to 8 hours and being totally linear.
And was it just me that reached the "I just can't be bothered any more" point about halfway through F.E.A.R and Doom 3? Both games were boringly repetitive and based purely on the premise of "you go into a dark area, something jumps out at you, you jump out of your chair" over and over again. Why were these games so highly rated?
It's not irrelevant to me because you have made a claim and I have asked you to substantiate that claim by naming the software. It seems quite reasonable to me and if you won't substantiate that claim then it is my belief you are lying.
Someone else posting something is irrelevant. Only your answer is relevant (to me).
IE's marketshare was low compared to Netscape - until MS forced IE upon users.
Stop with the rampant fanboi-ism - it's precisely the same reasons you Apple types constantly give on here for not using Windows or criticising Microsoft.
Just because Apple do it, does not mean it's okay to do it.
That is the real fight, thinking about India as good because vote against OOXML is naive, this is a battle for a stake of that BIG, BIG, BIG cake called the desktops computer.
I agree with pretty much all of your comments but would prefer it if you didn't refer to it as a "fight". Everyone will agree that Microsoft Windows has dominance of the desktop & that Microsoft themselves, as a big business, want to maintain or increase that dominance. Absolutely fine, no-one would expect otherwise from any corporation.
But to call something a "fight" means there has to be at lease 2 combatants and there are no others. Linux is not in a battle to displace Microsoft from the desktop, all it is asking for is for parity. No-one in the Linux community should either be forced to run a Windows OS & should not really care if others run it or not worried about - and that goal is achievable when the specification of all file formats is open such that it does not matter, regarding exchanging documents, whether someone runs MS Office or OpenOffice.
Yes there are zealots on both sides that think there is some kind of "Windows vs Linux" war going on but the fact is that a good proportion of the Open Source apps that run on Linux also run on Windows. So with open file formats, even a Windows user will have the choice of either paying MS Office or downloading OpenOffice just like currently a Windows user can run IE, Firefox or Opera.
I fully accept and understand that some people need the complex functionality and linkage between Word, Excel, Access etc. and that they're never going to even consider OpenOffice as an alternative. But I'm also fully aware that most home users only need fairly standard features in the same applications in MS Office but use it because they got a hooky copy of it rather than having to pay for it. OpenOffice and open file formats would become a viable legal alternative from which even MS and the legitimate users of MS Office would also benefit.
I had released at least 3 GPL'd programs that were entirely my own work, a 3-clause BSDL'd one, a couple of scripts dedicated to the public domain, and a several patches to existing free software.
So how about giving us the names of some of these you've written then?
Yes, okay, I admit to being about as knowledgeable in chemistry as a subnormal wooden rocking horse and that I care little for chemical reactions unless the end result is lukewarm pint of British real ale - but I'm sure that if I throw a few of the more wackier UNIX tool names at you and asked you to tell me what they do without looking them up elsewhere, you'd struggle.
If I continue to engage in this conversation with you about the differences in sophistication between Europeans and Americans, you know precisely how it will all end.
You'll question me about why the British can't get proper dental treatment and why French/Italian women don't shave their armpits and I'll ask you about why you lot were late for the World War II and demand that we have the blueprints for the Harrier back.
So let us politely agree that we have now reached that point and go from there, shall we without all that "needless mucking about in the middle" as the late Douglas Adams once said.
Yes, I accept that entirely but this is a news site which means that a chemistry layperson like myself needs to see a potted summary of what's being reported in plain English.
If all you chemistry boffins want to sit in here and talk hydrocarbons all day, that's fine by me. But if you're trying to maximise the audience and interest of an article, spare a thought for the likes of me who rarely get their noses out of UNIX manuals who would probably be quite interested in reading about other stuff occasionally, as long as it didn't require bringing up half of the Internet in my browser to translate it first.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called Gentoo Linux if you are talking about a distribution that can just use rolling updates forever - once you've installed it, just update it with any new kernels and libraries and then compile appropriate applications against those. Yep, it's time consuming and sometimes there's a problem but I spend no more time messing around with my Gentoo server or solving update problems than I do with my XP machine in order to keep everything clean and updated.
I don't use Ubuntu much but I understand it too is pretty straightforward if you upgrade to a new version.
As for price, please don't go there, you know Linux is downloadable pretty much for free across the board - sure, you might pay Red Hat, Novell or some other company for a maintenance contract but again that's no different to Windows shops.
There are countless bootable "live" CD/DVD images that you can just boot a PC from (without installing) that will immediately give you a good idea as to how well your hardware works with it.
Sure, there could well be some issues with some of your hardware that make it an OS you're not prepared to use, but at least then you have seen it for yourself. The fact is that the hardware support in Linux has improved exponentially over the past few years, Ubuntu and Knoppix do an excellent job at detecting all manner of hardware from bootup and I even know of diehard Windows people who use bootable Knoppix or Ubuntu to get an idea what Windows driver they'd need for an odd piece of hardware they're trying to get working in Windows.
With all respect, this one statement alone shows how little you know about security and I would suggest that you are taking security for granted which ultimately means you're more open to an attack from vulnerabilities as a result.
Standard security techniques involve deploying external NAT/firewall routers, shutting down unnecessary service, applying OS and application updates as quickly as possible, using strong passwords, not using administrator (root) level access unless necessary, and identifying applications prone to certain vulnerabilities which can be replaced by more secure alternatives.
All of the above are equally relevant whether you use Windows, Linux, UNIX, *BSD, OS X, etc. etc. and if you've done all the above, you can pretty much consider yourself relatively secure. Additional virus and malware checkers are also a good idea for Windows, for the other OSes it's probably debatable whether they're needed but if they're cheap, it's not a great issue putting them on also.
So please do not make such blanket statements as they are not true and may lead to some people opening their PCs up to more malware as a result of your over-confidence and lack of understanding.
OpenOffice, TheGimp, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Vim, Audacity, Wireshark - off the top of my head, just a few of the countless FOSS packages that run on Windows.
If you choose not to investigate FOSS applications for yourself, that's your problem - nobody else's.
Ahem! Please add a third category - "People who are happy with the functionality of XP and see no advantages Vista would bring them".
I admit I'm an 80%/20% Linux/XP user in that order. However, two weeks ago my niece gave me her XP laptop to fix because of countless malware and viruses. Three days later she got it back - no, I did give it back to her with Ubuntu, it had a nice clean XP rebuild on it with Firefox, Thunderbird, AVG Antivirus Free and other free/OSS applications that allow her to continue to use XP and to actually make her whole XP experience better for her. This is much the same as I've done for all Windows-using friends and relatives over the past 10 years or so when they need their PCs fixed.
Please do not assume everyone who uses Linux is a zealot - if someone comes and asks me about it, I'll happily tell them what they want to know or even help them install it. Otherwise they have as much right to choice about their computing experience as I do and I give a lot of my free time to building XP boxes that are as safe to use and virus proof as possible for those around me.
Your comments are therefore insulting, baseless and sound like those of a spoilt child.
Very few major establishments will have rolled out Vista as of yet. This was the same with Windows XP, no corporate starts rollouts of this type until after the first service pack. Additional the difference in hardware requirements between XP and Vista is much more that it was with 2000 and XP - therefore, since a lot of hardware upgrades will likely be involved, it's safe to assume rollout will probably be slower.
Why not just call the site Slashdot - news for linux fanboys.
You are the first person to mention Linux in this topic, as far as I can see. The creator of the article does not like Vista - yes, he could be a Linux fanboy but he could also be a satisfied XP user as well.
Face it, the vast majority of vista users are very happy.
If previous postings on Slashdot is anything to go by, I would say that it's about half-and-half, slightly in favour of those who are unhappy with it and/or are staying with XP as long as possible.
Sorry if that makes a few people fume, but its the truth. if you don't want to install vista, don't, but do something constructive with your lie rather than just whining at people who are happy with vista FFS.
A lot of people feel short-changed by Microsoft because they have had Vista forced upon them, rather than being given the option of choice. I myself tried to buy a Dell XPS laptop with XP on it just before Christmas but Dell would only sell it with Vista (even though the NVidia graphics card inside in only designed for DirectX 9). As it happened, I sourced a new one from an Ebay seller who sells off Dell's cancelled orders - it was brand new, better spec than I originally looked for but cost me £500 than from Dell directly, plus it had XP Professional on it. I got what I wanted at a better price than expected, Dell lost a sale for being unable to provide what a customer requested - I'm certainly not fuming about it.
I think you will find that a lot of people just accept Vista as being what came with their new PC rather than having a love of it - if anything, as a person who fixes a lot of PCs for friends and relatives, the handful that do run Vista accept it but are not particularly enthused by it.
I'm sure there are people who genuinely like it, others who say they like it but don't really and don't want to admit it, and some who don't. But the facts are that even I've noticed that the enthusiasm there was for XP at the time of SP1 was much more than it is for Vista SP1 at the moment.
And I'd also be happier if you didn't automatically bring Linux into this argument just because you yourself are frustrated - people should use Linux purely because it fills some requirements they need from an OS or because they are genuinely interested in seeing what it can do and learning something about it.
People that use it as a political weapon because they don't like Microsoft or because they want to batter someone else over the head with it for not liking Microsoft are fools.
Please explain what you mean by "higher standard". If you're comparing an Airbook to a £400 Dell laptop then you're probably correct - but then you'll never get an Airbook for £400.
You also forgot to mention that all Apple products have an "Apple" look about them. Yes, it might, for you, be a nice-looking and elegant design but that has nothing to do with the higher operating standard of the product and you are paying a premium price as a result of paying for that design.
It's also pretty safe to assume that migrating from Windows to Linux is a technical challenge for newbie users which therefore leads to the conclusion that most people who use Linux do indeed have greater technical knowledge than the "Joe Average" PC user.
People who migrate to Macs and OS X do not, we are frequently told here, need any additional technical knowledge to do so. So whilst I accept there are some very knowledgeable OS X people out there, most of them will still be pretty average users.
Consequently, when it gets to "my computer is better than your computer" discussions on here, most of the Linux people can put forward fairly reasoned technical arguments and there are enough Windows people globally that even if the tiniest percentage of them are technical people, that's still a lot of them.
However, most of the Mac users are not technical people so they are unable, most of the time, to argue at a similar technical level as the Linux people and the Windows people. Consequently, their only alternative is to get very defensive about the products they've paid a lot of money for & therefore try to use emotion, rather than fact, to get their points across.
I find it difficult to believe that someone would come up with this excuse after having bought a Mac. Surely, a sensible person who plans on spending that much money on a piece of hardware, takes the availability of other hardware and software into account before making the purchase. To me that seems quite a major reason not to buy that piece of hardware in the first place, especially if that hardware comes at a premium cost.
I'd therefore suggest that a lot of the Amiga userbase went over to Apple due to platform similarities and the fact that they could port code and their own programming skills to the Apple platforms much easier.
It may be the case in the USA but let me give you some facts from over here in Europe.
Counting all my family and my social and work colleagues, let say there's around 100 households, I can't think of one that doesn't run XP or Vista. About 10 of them are doing something with Linux because they use me for support and help with installing it - about half the Linux users have set aside a separate machine for it (e.g. Myth TV, Samba file server, etc.) and about half have it as a dual-boot on their desktop machines.
One of those people has a Mac. He was given it by his boss at work because it was sat in its box gathering dust. He bought it home, fired it up once and now it's back in its box again gathering dust. He's a Windows user who has a Ubuntu box that he does use a little, but nothing more than that.
These people are not all techies or computer buffs, in my mind they represent a good cross-section of computer users here in the UK, from the obvious techies to the novices. Yes, they have the occasional gripe about Windows, or indeed Linux, but not one has ever asked me about Macs or, as far as I know, ever looked at buying one.
I'm fully prepared to accept that there is a greater penetration of Macs in the US, but based on my cross-section of people, I'll give 95% to Windows, 4.5% to Linux (based on the fact that the 10 people are not full time Linux people) and 0.5% to the Mac for the guy that has one in a box.
Yep, maybe Mozilla should make it clearer to the user that they're collecting data on installation instances of their browser.
But then Apple should perhaps make it clearer that by installing Safari, the user is more likely to be the victim of a phishing attack.
Actually, it's not. If a newbie Windows user starts getting concerned about security then one of the first things they might do is ensure that it's settings are configured as tightly as possible. If, then, some other browser appears on their system with default configuration options, then that new browser, at that moment in time, is likely to be less secure than what IE has been configured to be. Consequently, one or more new security holes may have been opened on the system due to the installation of a new browser that the user possibly has no need of.
But isn't the obfuscation of installing Safari on Windows with iTunes therefore a complete contradiction to that ethic? If not, then the only conclusion I can come to is that it's a deliberate attempt to confuse inexperienced Windows users to the point where they have Safari forced on them.
And isn't that pretty much the same as Microsoft forcing IE on Windows users, for which they have taken a big hammering over the years and accused of monopolistic practices as a result?
Incidentally, can someone answer this question please? On the basis that someone installs Safari on Windows like this, does it set its default home page to be that of IE or whatever other default browser the user currently has? Or does it just happen to be iTunes?
Just curious because, again, Microsoft took a lot of flak for setting its default IE home page to MSDN a few years back.
From the perspective of the games companies, I suspect that programming objects based on points and textures is far cheaper than employing an artist to design animated sprites on a pixel-by-pixel basis.
But the fact is, if a fixed-view RTS game is designed well, adding the ability to change viewpoints and to zoom in just adds needless complexity to these games.
If anyone thinks of classic RTS titles, they immediately think of Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Total Annihilation and the C&C/Red Alert games, all of which are sprite based. I was amazed at how quickly Supreme Commander & Warcraft 3 appeared on the "2 for £15" shelves in my local game store - as a huge Total Annihilation fan, I bought Supreme Commander cheaply, played it once and gave up because I really couldn't be bothered learning all key and mouse combinations to change views & zoom in/out in order to find a single orientation that allowed me to play a game from start to finish.
Incidentally, before anyone starts with the "3D is the future argument", I've played just about every popular FPS between Castle Wolfenstein and Half-Life 2 right to the end - however, the problem with FPSes now is that they focus too much on prettiness for the sake of cutting down play-time to 8 hours and being totally linear.
And was it just me that reached the "I just can't be bothered any more" point about halfway through F.E.A.R and Doom 3? Both games were boringly repetitive and based purely on the premise of "you go into a dark area, something jumps out at you, you jump out of your chair" over and over again. Why were these games so highly rated?
It's not irrelevant to me because you have made a claim and I have asked you to substantiate that claim by naming the software. It seems quite reasonable to me and if you won't substantiate that claim then it is my belief you are lying.
Someone else posting something is irrelevant. Only your answer is relevant (to me).
Jeez, the absolute 100% shit lies some of you Apple people will tell just to feel you are in the right! UN-FUCKING-BELIEVABLE!
For your information, IE8 is still in beta, it is NOT yet in any Automatic Update.
Stop with the rampant fanboi-ism - it's precisely the same reasons you Apple types constantly give on here for not using Windows or criticising Microsoft.
Just because Apple do it, does not mean it's okay to do it.
I agree with pretty much all of your comments but would prefer it if you didn't refer to it as a "fight". Everyone will agree that Microsoft Windows has dominance of the desktop & that Microsoft themselves, as a big business, want to maintain or increase that dominance. Absolutely fine, no-one would expect otherwise from any corporation.
But to call something a "fight" means there has to be at lease 2 combatants and there are no others. Linux is not in a battle to displace Microsoft from the desktop, all it is asking for is for parity. No-one in the Linux community should either be forced to run a Windows OS & should not really care if others run it or not worried about - and that goal is achievable when the specification of all file formats is open such that it does not matter, regarding exchanging documents, whether someone runs MS Office or OpenOffice.
Yes there are zealots on both sides that think there is some kind of "Windows vs Linux" war going on but the fact is that a good proportion of the Open Source apps that run on Linux also run on Windows. So with open file formats, even a Windows user will have the choice of either paying MS Office or downloading OpenOffice just like currently a Windows user can run IE, Firefox or Opera.
I fully accept and understand that some people need the complex functionality and linkage between Word, Excel, Access etc. and that they're never going to even consider OpenOffice as an alternative. But I'm also fully aware that most home users only need fairly standard features in the same applications in MS Office but use it because they got a hooky copy of it rather than having to pay for it. OpenOffice and open file formats would become a viable legal alternative from which even MS and the legitimate users of MS Office would also benefit.
So how about giving us the names of some of these you've written then?
Anyone up for "Portly Pelican", "Blubbery Bison" or "Wobble-bottom Weasel"?
It was meant to be a light-hearted comment taking the pee out of my own polite British attitude as much as anything else.
Lighten up, have a bit of fun and try to see the funny side.
So ner-ny-ner-ny-ner-ner!
You'll question me about why the British can't get proper dental treatment and why French/Italian women don't shave their armpits and I'll ask you about why you lot were late for the World War II and demand that we have the blueprints for the Harrier back.
So let us politely agree that we have now reached that point and go from there, shall we without all that "needless mucking about in the middle" as the late Douglas Adams once said.
If all you chemistry boffins want to sit in here and talk hydrocarbons all day, that's fine by me. But if you're trying to maximise the audience and interest of an article, spare a thought for the likes of me who rarely get their noses out of UNIX manuals who would probably be quite interested in reading about other stuff occasionally, as long as it didn't require bringing up half of the Internet in my browser to translate it first.