What Linux needs isn't marketing, what it needs is to become the better product. Back in the Windows98 days one could make some good arguments for Linux in terms of stability, security and such, but those days are long gone and Microsoft and Apples OS offerings are just as stable as your Linux box these days, if not even more so. Which doesn't leave much arguments for Linux on the desktop. In terms of usability it's a complete clusterfuck, the user interfaces are an inconsistent non-backward compatible mess (we used to complain about QT looking different then GTK, now GTK3 apps don't even look like GTK2 apps), the packaging formats are all incompatible (even if everything uses.deb, it's still all incompatible) and there still isn't a standard way to ship third party applications on Linux. The fact that it is all Free Software is essentially irrelevant as it rarely povides the user with any pratical benefits over a proprietary alternative (data formats from one app can't be handled by another, etc.). Security is also rather terrible for a desktop OS, as it provides little to no sandboxing for applications, thus making it risky to try third party applications.
In essence, stop complaining about lack of games, hardware suport or third party support. While those are holding Linux back, they are in large part simply the result of the underlying framework being rather shit. If it would be trivial to build and distribute Linux software, a lot more people might actually do so, but it's not, so the support overhead is rarely worth the effort.
For Python, Ruby, etc. you might need a few more variables to make things visible to them, but generally speaking there is almost always a way to install stuff locally without messing up the rest of the system.
My biggest issue with Open Source is bug replication and bug report management. By the time I get to use a software and it has made it's way into the Ubuntu repositories it is already a few month old. Bug reports on that software in turn are often of limited use as a newer version might already fix the issue. The problem is that going through all the trouble of actually getting a new version, all the dependency, getting it compiled and setup is rarely practical. Thus a lot of bug reports end up hanging in the Ubuntu bug tracker, as nobody is going to spend time on checking that the issue still exist upstream and then reporting the issue to upstream, maybe including a better test case then found in the original report.
So simply put: If you want to help, act as a mediator between the developer and the user. Browse the bugtrackers and forums for problems users have, replicate them and check that those issues still exist. Then provide test cases or fixes for those issues to upstream and workarounds to the users.
Localization is always needed, either correcting, improving or adding translations for an open source project.
While localization is an easy way to put time into a project, I find it is more often done only because it's easy, not because there is a need for it. I personally have given up on accepting localization on my newer projects simply because the overhead of maintaining those localizations is just to big and not worth the effort. And half the time the localizations are worthless anyway, as they are almost always outdated and incomplete, as getting localization updates never happens in sync with the release. This is of course a much bigger issue for text heavy apps.
Doing themes, skins, plugins, macros, whatever is around it that is not specifically programming and could need less or different skills than programming.
Same as for localizations, probably even more so. More stuff doesn't make a project better, it just means more stuff the maintainer has to worry about. The focus should thus be on making the existing stuff better, more smooth and more compatible, not just on making more of it.
Case in point: Gtk3 themes, there are hundreds of them, yet none that replicates the old Clearlooks of Gtk2, which used to be the default in Ubuntu for quite some years. Most of the Gtk3 themes also lack polish and throw tons of errors. So while specific themes that replicate popular Gtk2 looks or a convert tool to make Gtk2 themes compatible with Gtk3 would be very valuable, just yet another mindlessly thrown together half-done theme really is not.
* proper threads, allowing in depth discussion * a very large limit on maximum post size * all posts on a single page, so no flipping through webpages needed * a large line width that makes it easy to skim over content quickly
I think the moderation system is important as well, as it provides some incentive for good posts, while punishing bad ones. But ultimately it's really the usability that matters. If you have a system that makes it hard to read and write interesting discussion, no moderation system can fix that. That said, bad moderation system can do some harm, as they turn things into a popularity contest. The ability to have highly voted post on top on Youtube for example has basically turned into a game, it doesn't lead to interest post being promoted, but in people writing jokes specifically targeted at that spot. The front page of Reddit is also dominated by memes, cat images and other mostly useless stuff, as it is simply much easier to up-vote a short joke then a long article.
They have, around five years ago. Crysis 1 was pretty much the last hardware-pushing PC game. All the big PC games released today are console ports and thus run on old PC hardware perfectly fine. The only thing I spend on PC gaming hardware in the last five years was a $80 GPU upgrade and yet I can still play most modern games just fine. I didn't even start out with a gaming PC, just a regular old middle-class multimedia PC.
- The quality is not there. If you want to show off the highest quality vision of your product you want Photoshoped images.
The shiniest polished image of a front side of a product helps me little if I as a customer want to actually look at the backside of the product. I would absolutely love it when Amazon or another major shop would start putting their products under a 3D scanner and allowing the user the actually view a product from all sides in 3D so that one can get a proper feel for the size, instead of just having an 2D image that really tell you much about anything. Apple had that a decade or so ago with QuickTime VR and there have been a few experiments with ActiveX back in the day, but that all has disappeared since then and I would absolutely love to have it back.
Why is it that Euro cosmopolitans have this desire to have that "concentration camp" look.
The more skinny the models are, the more the design of the clothes stands out. If you have a curvy model that takes away the focus from the clothes and distorts the indented shape of the clothes.
Pretty much every browser in existence supports JavaScript, so with nothing more than a simple text editor and your browser of choice you can be off and running.
Not really. The default "development tools" of your browser are complete shit, half the time you won't even get an error message when something went wrong and printf-style debugging isn't all that easy either and of course you need to have a HTML to even start doing Javascript, which adds a another layer of complexity. So as a beginner you are confronted with a lot of "stuff doesn't work" without even a hint on what went wrong. Of course you can fix that by using browser add-ons, predefined HTML pages and a bunch of other stuff, but at that point you could simply use another language.
Now don't get we wrong, I absolutely agree that something graphic is extremely important to keep the children interested, I just find that Javascript is a lot more frustration then fun. I personally probably go with something like Python/Pygame.
This isn't something new or arbitrary, Paypal has an Acceptable Use Policy and sexual material isn't accepted:
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that: [...] relate to transactions involving (a) narcotics, steroids, certain controlled substances or other products that present a risk to consumer safety, (b) drug paraphernalia, (c) items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity, (d) stolen goods including digital and virtual goods (e) items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance, or the financial exploitation of a crime, (f) items that are considered obscene, (g) items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction, (h) certain sexually oriented materials or services, (i) ammunition, firearms, or certain firearm parts or accessories, or (j),certain weapons or knives regulated under applicable law.
That of course doesn't make it any better, it shouldn't be Paypals business what people are buying over their system.
> But C++11 describes a standard that absolutely nobody has ever got anywhere close to, so I don't imagine that there's going to be a lot of drive to adopt it.
All popular C++ compilers already implement large parts of C++11, so the chance of seeing widespread C++11 adaption in the not so distant future is pretty high. Also this wasn't really any different with C++98, which essentially no compiler supported on release and which then took a few years to gain widespread adoption.
Seriously? How so? It's my experience that most applications that I have on Linux can also run on other OSs due to them being either Open Source, or Proprietary and cross platform.
The apps may be portable, the data formats are however very often proprietary, so switching from one Open Source app to another is exactly the same mess as with proprietary applications (i.e. podcast players that don't allow import/export of podcast list, Gnome3 can't read any Gnome2 configurations or themes,etc.). Open Source apps also generally offer very little configurability, don't like the toolbar in a Gnome app? Bad luck, can't change that. Want to write a quick macro? Not supported either. And on the upgrade side distributions can force you to use new software just like any proprietary OS (i.e. Ubuntu forcing people to Unity, no longer shipping Gnome2, discarding libgtk1.2).
Yeah, you have the source and in theory could work around that, but that is rarely practical.
The whole problem is that Free Software has essentially lost track of it's goals. The movement was started with the goal to empower the user and some early applications did a heck of a lot of cool stuff in that direction (i.e. in Emacs you can reach the source code for any function with three clicks), today however that is no longer really the case. Very few application are configurable, provide easy to use script support or just something basic as good documentation.
Weird. I haven't used a Windows desktop for more than a few hours in the last three years.
Personal anecdotes don't really matter, Linux usage has essentially stayed the same since 2007 (Linux visitors of the biggest German IT magazine), so it looks like the year of the Linux desktop isn't coming any closer anytime soon.
I've been reading Slashdot for over 12 years now, and I still don't understand the obsession with Linux being on the desktop.
Once upon a time, back around 2000'ish, it looked like Linux would be a reasonable alternative on the desktop, people started doing games for it (Loki, id, Epic), it started to get commercial apps (WordPerfect, CorelDraw,...) and the desktops where imporving bit by bit. There where even some vendors looking to shipping with Linux by default. In the following decade however the situation stagnated, desktop environments switched from improving to reinventing the feel, all those little annoancies and inconsistencies that Linux has have in turn never been fixed. Software like Gimp, that once looked like it might be a Photoshop alternative has barely evolved at all, while Photoshop has a lot and most commercial software vendors have lost interest in Linux. Configurability that once was embraced, is now feared and users are just as locked in as on any other OS.
Long story short, it once looked like it might be a free desktop alternative, that however has turned out to be false. Right now it looks like it's going to be doomed to be a niche OS.
Science is progressing at a reasonable pace BECAUSE scientists share data, results, ideas, etc.
So should the Manhattan project have shared it's data with Nazi Germany? It might sure have speed up the science, but it might also have let to London getting nuked.
Can something like this be used in a combat or terrorist situation? Yes, but it can also be used to develop countermeasures as well.
The little problem with that is that we are getting to a point where an attack requires nothing more then a few thousands dollars and a mail order at your next biotech company, while a countermeasure might require billions of dollars and decades of work. So a little caution might not be such a bad idea.
Compare this to another project also breaking records on Kickstarter at the moment - the Order of the Stick reprint.
I don't doubt that some people can have large successes on Kickstarter. What I have a problem is with people calling that the end of the regular game/publishing industry. A big successful Indie projects make what? One million? Two? Three? Maybe ten if they get really really lucky. A big commercial game cost something like 25 million to build and that's the cheap low end game, the really big ones can cost multiple times that amount.
There is simply an order of magnitude or two between the money that gets moved around in Indie circles and what regular publishing does. What regular publishing has to fear are the Steams, Amazons and Apples that are trying to establish monopolies in the digital publishing world. Indie plays a role in there, as those method of publishing make it easier for them to get published, but indie isn't the driving force behind the change.
Decentralized funding will always triumph because a small number of people spending large amounts of money is dumb.
A small number of people spending large amounts of money is exactly what crowd funding is.
Big commercial successes work by selling to the masses, to the people that don't deeply care about the product, but that run across it at the supermarket, because it's on the Steam front page or because they have heard about it in the news. The informed consumer that reads reviews and keeps informed about a product is a tiny minority.
The success story of Mojang started by Minecraft being features on the Valve blog if I remember correctly, the game from which Minecraft took most of the ideas, InfiniMiner, wasn't so lucky. AngryBirds just had the luck of being high up in the iTunes Store and in turn creating a media hype which lead to a feedback loop that got it more hype. If it wouldn't have been for classical media hyping that game up to eleven, they would have gotten nowhere near as successful (helps of course that those guys are pretty damn good at managing that viral marketing).
Anyway, point here being, while it's true that those are different then the 1-3 mentioned above, their success is still largely based on media hype and there are only a very limited number of spots in the spotlight of the media. You can't drive a whole industry like that, those games are the exception.
I have to wonder if this isn't the future for mid-sized developers, maybe even film/show producers.
The problem is that almost all success stories with new business models so far have been something like this:
1) Do normal commercial work 2) Get advertised a ton doing your commercial work 3) Repeat 1) and 2) for years or decades and accumulate a fan-base 4) Do a kickstarter/pay-what-you-want/novel-new-business model and get a shitload of free press 5) Profit
The problem is that without accumulating the fan-base first, it wouldn't work. Getting the free press also only works as long as your business model is fresh and new. When everybody is doing their projects via Kickstarter, it will be a hell of a lot harder to get noticed.
That's not to say that this can't work for some cases. If Kickstarter allows a few popular people to do what they want, awesome. But the old industry is still where most of the money is. One million for an adventure game is awesome, but compared to 400 million that Modern Warfare 3 made on launch day, that's still a rather small amount.
Family videos: Simple 1080p video (not 3D, not multiple angles, etc) is 16GB/hr (on my camera, YMMV).
Depends on how much you are willing to compress it. You can get 720p down to something like 1GB per hour, which gives you a month 24/7 or so on a 1TB drive, i.e. $50/month to record your life, all of it, if you just film a birthday every year it will of course last a whole while longer. The less you compress, the shorter it last and completely uncompressed will still burn through drives pretty quickly.
HD compressed movies are 10-20GB/movie (IME, YMMV) so we're down to 100 movies.
A movie buff might need some more drives, but still compared to the $1000 or so that a DVD player cost a little over a decade ago, that's still pretty cheap.
but your mistake was suggesting $50 was enough for storing a "life worth of fotos, videos and [movies]".
Depends on how much you film and photograph. And for the casual photographer, by the time the 1TB drive is full, the 4TB drives will already be cheap and last a good bit longer.
and realizes 1080p isn't all that great - just better than what we had.
The problem is that you need bigger TVs to have any benefit from more then 1080p. At normal viewing distances the difference between 720p and 1080p is already tiny. Bigger then 1080p also has the problem that there are simply not a lot of movies for it.
We can never have enough CPUs, never enough cores on those CPUs, never enough CPU sockets (even on consumer grade stuff), never enough RAM (I just want a motherboard with 16 RAM slots per CPU), and yes, we can never have enough hard disk space.
You only need so much hardware power as the task at hand requires. The last decades have seen constant growth as the tasks we do with computers expanded. Early computers where mostly text and even rather slow computers can handle that, but then came graphics and thus higher requirements for GPU/CPU, then came 3D graphics and then video and there was a constant demand for new hardware. Instead of storing the work of a day on a floppy, we went to storing the work of a month on a HDD, now we are at a point where people store their lives worth of work on their computer.
So far so good, but we are getting close to a saturation point. Once you can store your life worth of fotos, videos and your whole DVD collection of a single $50 HDD. How more storage do you need? What is left there to store? One can sure come up with some crazy uses, how about a non-stop HD video stream of your whole life? How about one from multiple camera angles? 3D? That will sure take another few HDD drives, but that's not a far future fantasy, but something you can already do for reasonable amounts of money.
We are reaching a point where the HDD storage growth faster then we can produce content to fill it up. Not for everybody of course, I am sure there are profesional video producers that disagree, but for the average user we are pretty much there already. And that is a bit of a problem from an economic point of view, why buy a new drive when the last one isn't even full? Word and Excel haven't needed a new computer for a decade either. And gaming also has kind of stagnated with this console generation not having an end in sight yet.
I am sure there is still another decade or two of growth (or miniaturisation) in computers and one will always come up with ever more exotic uses to burn some CPU. But if you move beyond the point of what a human can consume, then there just isn't enough of a benefit to do a hardware upgrade. Unless of course we go all Transhumanism and increase the amount we can consume.
Making a console user upgradeable makes little sense, as consoles are meant to be compact and user upgradeable parts would work against that. In times where you can't even swap the battery in most devices, you can't expect to swap the GPU or CPU. On the other side consoles should reach a point where they can get upgrades in the mid of a generation or more dramatically the whole "console generation" thing should disappear and updates should be more fluent. Essentially they should reach a point where they act like a TV: Want to see the a movie in glorious 1080p, you have to buy a new TV, but you can also just use your SDTV and view the movie just fine, but at lower quality. Furthermore your 1080p can still play old SDTV content just fine. There is a lot of forward and backward compatibility in the system. Consoles don't have that right now, backward compatibility is very limited and forward compatibly almost non-existent (except for a few GameBoyColor games). Of course at some point there would be a cut-off where the old-console would really be to old to play some new content, but things like small PSN/XboxLive games could easily be made flexible enough to run not only on the latest generation of hardware, but also a generation before that.
Otherwise the remain your comments, freely posted, and ultimately your own responsibility,
Can I delete my Slashdot comments? If so, how? If not, why do we rally against Facebook and just accept Slashdot who has been in the never-delete-anything business for far longer then Facebook?
Slashdot Mirror
What Linux needs isn't marketing, what it needs is to become the better product. Back in the Windows98 days one could make some good arguments for Linux in terms of stability, security and such, but those days are long gone and Microsoft and Apples OS offerings are just as stable as your Linux box these days, if not even more so. Which doesn't leave much arguments for Linux on the desktop. In terms of usability it's a complete clusterfuck, the user interfaces are an inconsistent non-backward compatible mess (we used to complain about QT looking different then GTK, now GTK3 apps don't even look like GTK2 apps), the packaging formats are all incompatible (even if everything uses .deb, it's still all incompatible) and there still isn't a standard way to ship third party applications on Linux. The fact that it is all Free Software is essentially irrelevant as it rarely povides the user with any pratical benefits over a proprietary alternative (data formats from one app can't be handled by another, etc.). Security is also rather terrible for a desktop OS, as it provides little to no sandboxing for applications, thus making it risky to try third party applications.
In essence, stop complaining about lack of games, hardware suport or third party support. While those are holding Linux back, they are in large part simply the result of the underlying framework being rather shit. If it would be trivial to build and distribute Linux software, a lot more people might actually do so, but it's not, so the support overhead is rarely worth the effort.
Given that it will take quite a few years or decades before such planes go into production, it will probably all be done by autopilot by then.
-I'm afraid of what setting up the dev libraries would do to my normal environment I use for normal work.
You should never install anything into the global directories, instead install things into your home directory by setting the prefix:
PREFIX="/home/juser/dev/software/"
make
make install
Then when you want to compile/run anything depending on the installed library:
PREFIX="/home/juser/dev/software/"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="${PREFIX}/lib/pkgconfig/";
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${PREFIX}/lib/";
export LD_RUN_PATH="${PREFIX}/lib/"
export LIBRARY_PATH="${PREFIX}/lib/"
export CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH="${PREFIX}/include/"
export C_INCLUDE_PATH="${PREFIX}/include/"
For Python, Ruby, etc. you might need a few more variables to make things visible to them, but generally speaking there is almost always a way to install stuff locally without messing up the rest of the system.
My biggest issue with Open Source is bug replication and bug report management. By the time I get to use a software and it has made it's way into the Ubuntu repositories it is already a few month old. Bug reports on that software in turn are often of limited use as a newer version might already fix the issue. The problem is that going through all the trouble of actually getting a new version, all the dependency, getting it compiled and setup is rarely practical. Thus a lot of bug reports end up hanging in the Ubuntu bug tracker, as nobody is going to spend time on checking that the issue still exist upstream and then reporting the issue to upstream, maybe including a better test case then found in the original report.
So simply put: If you want to help, act as a mediator between the developer and the user. Browse the bugtrackers and forums for problems users have, replicate them and check that those issues still exist. Then provide test cases or fixes for those issues to upstream and workarounds to the users.
Localization is always needed, either correcting, improving or adding translations for an open source project.
While localization is an easy way to put time into a project, I find it is more often done only because it's easy, not because there is a need for it. I personally have given up on accepting localization on my newer projects simply because the overhead of maintaining those localizations is just to big and not worth the effort. And half the time the localizations are worthless anyway, as they are almost always outdated and incomplete, as getting localization updates never happens in sync with the release. This is of course a much bigger issue for text heavy apps.
Doing themes, skins, plugins, macros, whatever is around it that is not specifically programming and could need less or different skills than programming.
Same as for localizations, probably even more so. More stuff doesn't make a project better, it just means more stuff the maintainer has to worry about. The focus should thus be on making the existing stuff better, more smooth and more compatible, not just on making more of it.
Case in point: Gtk3 themes, there are hundreds of them, yet none that replicates the old Clearlooks of Gtk2, which used to be the default in Ubuntu for quite some years. Most of the Gtk3 themes also lack polish and throw tons of errors. So while specific themes that replicate popular Gtk2 looks or a convert tool to make Gtk2 themes compatible with Gtk3 would be very valuable, just yet another mindlessly thrown together half-done theme really is not.
Yep, I think the main reasons why Slashdot works:
* proper threads, allowing in depth discussion
* a very large limit on maximum post size
* all posts on a single page, so no flipping through webpages needed
* a large line width that makes it easy to skim over content quickly
I think the moderation system is important as well, as it provides some incentive for good posts, while punishing bad ones. But ultimately it's really the usability that matters. If you have a system that makes it hard to read and write interesting discussion, no moderation system can fix that. That said, bad moderation system can do some harm, as they turn things into a popularity contest. The ability to have highly voted post on top on Youtube for example has basically turned into a game, it doesn't lead to interest post being promoted, but in people writing jokes specifically targeted at that spot. The front page of Reddit is also dominated by memes, cat images and other mostly useless stuff, as it is simply much easier to up-vote a short joke then a long article.
Sweeny and company need to get a clue
They have, around five years ago. Crysis 1 was pretty much the last hardware-pushing PC game. All the big PC games released today are console ports and thus run on old PC hardware perfectly fine. The only thing I spend on PC gaming hardware in the last five years was a $80 GPU upgrade and yet I can still play most modern games just fine. I didn't even start out with a gaming PC, just a regular old middle-class multimedia PC.
Joystick-based gaming mostly disappeared and on a gamepad there isn't enough room for full force feedback.
- The quality is not there. If you want to show off the highest quality vision of your product you want Photoshoped images.
The shiniest polished image of a front side of a product helps me little if I as a customer want to actually look at the backside of the product. I would absolutely love it when Amazon or another major shop would start putting their products under a 3D scanner and allowing the user the actually view a product from all sides in 3D so that one can get a proper feel for the size, instead of just having an 2D image that really tell you much about anything. Apple had that a decade or so ago with QuickTime VR and there have been a few experiments with ActiveX back in the day, but that all has disappeared since then and I would absolutely love to have it back.
Why is it that Euro cosmopolitans have this desire to have that "concentration camp" look.
The more skinny the models are, the more the design of the clothes stands out. If you have a curvy model that takes away the focus from the clothes and distorts the indented shape of the clothes.
Pretty much every browser in existence supports JavaScript, so with nothing more than a simple text editor and your browser of choice you can be off and running.
Not really. The default "development tools" of your browser are complete shit, half the time you won't even get an error message when something went wrong and printf-style debugging isn't all that easy either and of course you need to have a HTML to even start doing Javascript, which adds a another layer of complexity. So as a beginner you are confronted with a lot of "stuff doesn't work" without even a hint on what went wrong. Of course you can fix that by using browser add-ons, predefined HTML pages and a bunch of other stuff, but at that point you could simply use another language.
Now don't get we wrong, I absolutely agree that something graphic is extremely important to keep the children interested, I just find that Javascript is a lot more frustration then fun. I personally probably go with something like Python/Pygame.
This isn't something new or arbitrary, Paypal has an Acceptable Use Policy and sexual material isn't accepted:
That of course doesn't make it any better, it shouldn't be Paypals business what people are buying over their system.
> But C++11 describes a standard that absolutely nobody has ever got anywhere close to, so I don't imagine that there's going to be a lot of drive to adopt it.
All popular C++ compilers already implement large parts of C++11, so the chance of seeing widespread C++11 adaption in the not so distant future is pretty high. Also this wasn't really any different with C++98, which essentially no compiler supported on release and which then took a few years to gain widespread adoption.
Seriously? How so? It's my experience that most applications that I have on Linux can also run on other OSs due to them being either Open Source, or Proprietary and cross platform.
The apps may be portable, the data formats are however very often proprietary, so switching from one Open Source app to another is exactly the same mess as with proprietary applications (i.e. podcast players that don't allow import/export of podcast list, Gnome3 can't read any Gnome2 configurations or themes,etc.). Open Source apps also generally offer very little configurability, don't like the toolbar in a Gnome app? Bad luck, can't change that. Want to write a quick macro? Not supported either. And on the upgrade side distributions can force you to use new software just like any proprietary OS (i.e. Ubuntu forcing people to Unity, no longer shipping Gnome2, discarding libgtk1.2).
Yeah, you have the source and in theory could work around that, but that is rarely practical.
The whole problem is that Free Software has essentially lost track of it's goals. The movement was started with the goal to empower the user and some early applications did a heck of a lot of cool stuff in that direction (i.e. in Emacs you can reach the source code for any function with three clicks), today however that is no longer really the case. Very few application are configurable, provide easy to use script support or just something basic as good documentation.
Weird. I haven't used a Windows desktop for more than a few hours in the last three years.
Personal anecdotes don't really matter, Linux usage has essentially stayed the same since 2007 (Linux visitors of the biggest German IT magazine), so it looks like the year of the Linux desktop isn't coming any closer anytime soon.
I've been reading Slashdot for over 12 years now, and I still don't understand the obsession with Linux being on the desktop.
Once upon a time, back around 2000'ish, it looked like Linux would be a reasonable alternative on the desktop, people started doing games for it (Loki, id, Epic), it started to get commercial apps (WordPerfect, CorelDraw, ...) and the desktops where imporving bit by bit. There where even some vendors looking to shipping with Linux by default. In the following decade however the situation stagnated, desktop environments switched from improving to reinventing the feel, all those little annoancies and inconsistencies that Linux has have in turn never been fixed. Software like Gimp, that once looked like it might be a Photoshop alternative has barely evolved at all, while Photoshop has a lot and most commercial software vendors have lost interest in Linux. Configurability that once was embraced, is now feared and users are just as locked in as on any other OS.
Long story short, it once looked like it might be a free desktop alternative, that however has turned out to be false. Right now it looks like it's going to be doomed to be a niche OS.
Science is progressing at a reasonable pace BECAUSE scientists share data, results, ideas, etc.
So should the Manhattan project have shared it's data with Nazi Germany? It might sure have speed up the science, but it might also have let to London getting nuked.
Can something like this be used in a combat or terrorist situation? Yes, but it can also be used to develop countermeasures as well.
The little problem with that is that we are getting to a point where an attack requires nothing more then a few thousands dollars and a mail order at your next biotech company, while a countermeasure might require billions of dollars and decades of work. So a little caution might not be such a bad idea.
Compare this to another project also breaking records on Kickstarter at the moment - the Order of the Stick reprint.
I don't doubt that some people can have large successes on Kickstarter. What I have a problem is with people calling that the end of the regular game/publishing industry. A big successful Indie projects make what? One million? Two? Three? Maybe ten if they get really really lucky. A big commercial game cost something like 25 million to build and that's the cheap low end game, the really big ones can cost multiple times that amount.
There is simply an order of magnitude or two between the money that gets moved around in Indie circles and what regular publishing does. What regular publishing has to fear are the Steams, Amazons and Apples that are trying to establish monopolies in the digital publishing world. Indie plays a role in there, as those method of publishing make it easier for them to get published, but indie isn't the driving force behind the change.
Decentralized funding will always triumph because a small number of people spending large amounts of money is dumb.
A small number of people spending large amounts of money is exactly what crowd funding is.
Big commercial successes work by selling to the masses, to the people that don't deeply care about the product, but that run across it at the supermarket, because it's on the Steam front page or because they have heard about it in the news. The informed consumer that reads reviews and keeps informed about a product is a tiny minority.
The success story of Mojang started by Minecraft being features on the Valve blog if I remember correctly, the game from which Minecraft took most of the ideas, InfiniMiner, wasn't so lucky. AngryBirds just had the luck of being high up in the iTunes Store and in turn creating a media hype which lead to a feedback loop that got it more hype. If it wouldn't have been for classical media hyping that game up to eleven, they would have gotten nowhere near as successful (helps of course that those guys are pretty damn good at managing that viral marketing).
Anyway, point here being, while it's true that those are different then the 1-3 mentioned above, their success is still largely based on media hype and there are only a very limited number of spots in the spotlight of the media. You can't drive a whole industry like that, those games are the exception.
I have to wonder if this isn't the future for mid-sized developers, maybe even film/show producers.
The problem is that almost all success stories with new business models so far have been something like this:
1) Do normal commercial work
2) Get advertised a ton doing your commercial work
3) Repeat 1) and 2) for years or decades and accumulate a fan-base
4) Do a kickstarter/pay-what-you-want/novel-new-business model and get a shitload of free press
5) Profit
The problem is that without accumulating the fan-base first, it wouldn't work. Getting the free press also only works as long as your business model is fresh and new. When everybody is doing their projects via Kickstarter, it will be a hell of a lot harder to get noticed.
That's not to say that this can't work for some cases. If Kickstarter allows a few popular people to do what they want, awesome. But the old industry is still where most of the money is. One million for an adventure game is awesome, but compared to 400 million that Modern Warfare 3 made on launch day, that's still a rather small amount.
Family videos: Simple 1080p video (not 3D, not multiple angles, etc) is 16GB/hr (on my camera, YMMV).
Depends on how much you are willing to compress it. You can get 720p down to something like 1GB per hour, which gives you a month 24/7 or so on a 1TB drive, i.e. $50/month to record your life, all of it, if you just film a birthday every year it will of course last a whole while longer. The less you compress, the shorter it last and completely uncompressed will still burn through drives pretty quickly.
HD compressed movies are 10-20GB/movie (IME, YMMV) so we're down to 100 movies.
A movie buff might need some more drives, but still compared to the $1000 or so that a DVD player cost a little over a decade ago, that's still pretty cheap.
but your mistake was suggesting $50 was enough for storing a "life worth of fotos, videos and [movies]".
Depends on how much you film and photograph. And for the casual photographer, by the time the 1TB drive is full, the 4TB drives will already be cheap and last a good bit longer.
and realizes 1080p isn't all that great - just better than what we had.
The problem is that you need bigger TVs to have any benefit from more then 1080p. At normal viewing distances the difference between 720p and 1080p is already tiny. Bigger then 1080p also has the problem that there are simply not a lot of movies for it.
We can never have enough CPUs, never enough cores on those CPUs, never enough CPU sockets (even on consumer grade stuff), never enough RAM (I just want a motherboard with 16 RAM slots per CPU), and yes, we can never have enough hard disk space.
You only need so much hardware power as the task at hand requires. The last decades have seen constant growth as the tasks we do with computers expanded. Early computers where mostly text and even rather slow computers can handle that, but then came graphics and thus higher requirements for GPU/CPU, then came 3D graphics and then video and there was a constant demand for new hardware. Instead of storing the work of a day on a floppy, we went to storing the work of a month on a HDD, now we are at a point where people store their lives worth of work on their computer.
So far so good, but we are getting close to a saturation point. Once you can store your life worth of fotos, videos and your whole DVD collection of a single $50 HDD. How more storage do you need? What is left there to store? One can sure come up with some crazy uses, how about a non-stop HD video stream of your whole life? How about one from multiple camera angles? 3D? That will sure take another few HDD drives, but that's not a far future fantasy, but something you can already do for reasonable amounts of money.
We are reaching a point where the HDD storage growth faster then we can produce content to fill it up. Not for everybody of course, I am sure there are profesional video producers that disagree, but for the average user we are pretty much there already. And that is a bit of a problem from an economic point of view, why buy a new drive when the last one isn't even full? Word and Excel haven't needed a new computer for a decade either. And gaming also has kind of stagnated with this console generation not having an end in sight yet.
I am sure there is still another decade or two of growth (or miniaturisation) in computers and one will always come up with ever more exotic uses to burn some CPU. But if you move beyond the point of what a human can consume, then there just isn't enough of a benefit to do a hardware upgrade. Unless of course we go all Transhumanism and increase the amount we can consume.
Making a console user upgradeable makes little sense, as consoles are meant to be compact and user upgradeable parts would work against that. In times where you can't even swap the battery in most devices, you can't expect to swap the GPU or CPU. On the other side consoles should reach a point where they can get upgrades in the mid of a generation or more dramatically the whole "console generation" thing should disappear and updates should be more fluent. Essentially they should reach a point where they act like a TV: Want to see the a movie in glorious 1080p, you have to buy a new TV, but you can also just use your SDTV and view the movie just fine, but at lower quality. Furthermore your 1080p can still play old SDTV content just fine. There is a lot of forward and backward compatibility in the system. Consoles don't have that right now, backward compatibility is very limited and forward compatibly almost non-existent (except for a few GameBoyColor games). Of course at some point there would be a cut-off where the old-console would really be to old to play some new content, but things like small PSN/XboxLive games could easily be made flexible enough to run not only on the latest generation of hardware, but also a generation before that.
Otherwise the remain your comments, freely posted, and ultimately your own responsibility,
Can I delete my Slashdot comments? If so, how? If not, why do we rally against Facebook and just accept Slashdot who has been in the never-delete-anything business for far longer then Facebook?