How very true. I still play Darklands more than any other game, and not just because I'm a cheap bastard with a lousy 3D card. Outside of niche games like the Patrician series, very very few games are doing anything interesting these days. Have there been any decent RPGs in the past decade? Morrowind was a bit of a disappointment, but I have high hopes for Oblivion.
Unfortunately so. Of course, ICC and MSVC have the advantage of only needing to concentrate on one architecture (x86), whereas GCC compiles for pretty much everything.
Except there is no way of PROVING that the "healing rock" does NOT actually heal some people.
Of course there is. How do you think new drugs are teseted by the FDA? You seem to be jumping ahead to the "how" instead of the "if". Use a random rock as your placebo in a double-blind study, and do a chi-square analysis of the result. It's really very simple.
Arg! This is the worst anti-free speech argument there is, and I hear it all the time.
Probably because it was used as an example in the landmark case of Schenck v. United States.
The fact is, you have an INVIOLABLE right to yell Fire in a crowded theater, for the very simple and obvious reason that there might in fact be a fire.
Exactly. This is why I'm amazed at all the anti-Linux advertising being generated by Microsoft. It doesn't prove a thing (come on, the "research" was funded by MSFT) and it just acknowledges that Linux is a serious competitor.
Er well, not quite. It's really just dynamic routing, with the hardware necessary to make it work over wireless. A slightly better comparison would be Freenet.
They seem to have used only one trial, as well. Anyone who didn't sleep through their junior high science class should know how to design a better experiment, and that a ~0.5% difference is typically experimental error, not a significant difference.
What ugly fonts? Times New Roman (OO.o on Linux) looks exactly the same as in MS Word, as far as I can tell. If you're having problems, it's likely that your X server (or possibly FreeType?) isn't properly configured.
Gotta agree about LaTeX/LyX, especially if you're an aspiring scientist. If you're sane, you don't write your dissertation or journal articles in Word (or OpenOffice). It takes some getting used to, but it's a very valuable skill.
I'm no fan of Microsoft (posting this with Firefox on Gentoo Linux), but to be fair, that's not quite true. Few home LANs use a domain server. Simple LANs should work at least as well as they did in Win98, which was fine for me.
I'll join sepluv in asking what you actually need Windows for. If you're a gamer, your options are extremely limited, but there aren't too many areas outside that.
Linux (with KDE, etc) still have a long way to go, though they're improving every day. You can make a rock-solid Linux server, but most desktop apps are riddled with little bugs, quirks, inconsistencies, and annoyances. Mozilla's products are happy exceptions to this rule. There are also too many programs, especially KDE, with tons of configuration options that can only be changed by editing the text files. Look, Linux is my OS of choice, I love vim and bash, but really, I don't want to waste my time searching through my dotfiles and Google to figure out if and how to change something.
I could rant about Windows too, of course. It feels quite underpowered (in several different meanings) and inflexible after you know how to use a proper Linux workstation. Cygwin is a crappy substitute at best. Running the latest versions of KDE (actually the new beta) and X.org feels much more responsive than a near-clean install of WinXP, which wasn't true about a year ago.
So if you're looking for something that's usable right now, OS X looks pretty and works well enough, though personally I don't like it. It's suitable for most people who use computers and don't care about Windows-only games.
Seconded. Adblock with a good set of filters blocks all the crap. Speaking of which, is anyone compiling good (ie, no false positives) AdBlock filters and posting them somewhere?
I'm not so certain Linux wouldn't fork into a whole balkan state full of different versions if Linus was 'hit by a truck.'
There are already a lot of corporate entities using the Linux codebase in wide and varying ways. And Linus is a central force in holding it all together.
Consensus isn't some magic process that people naturally converge toward. Linus is a catalyst.
You have a good point, but Linus is not the only one coordinating Linux. If something happened to Linus, most likely Alan Cox or Andrew Morton would take over. Things would be in disorder for a while, but assuming that one of them is willing to take over, Linux would probably go on.
If not, the *BSD and GNU/Hurd kernels would probably gain a bunch of experienced hackers:-)
wx's sockets (instead of say winsock vs BSD sockets)
Kind of a bad example. If you don't use the Winsock functions (WSA*, except for WSAStartup), your sockets code should be easily portable between Windows and Unix.
Libraries allowing you to do similar things on both OSs can be completely different to implement. Audio, file management, program intercomunication, etc.
Well, that's why we need cross-platform toolkits. Qt (which is much more than just a GUI library) will be available in GPL form on Windows soon, making it a good choice for open-source programs.
I'm sorry, but most people I know of seem to distinguish between the OS and the kernel. The kernel itself is useless. Stick in glibc, sysvinit, and bash, and you've got an OS. For example, read this and this.
There's no such thing as a "Linux-like operating system", that's the difference. Linux is an OS kernel, not an OS. It's everything you put on top of the kernel that makes it an operating system. An OS with Linux as the kernel is called a Linux distribution.
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How very true. I still play Darklands more than any other game, and not just because I'm a cheap bastard with a lousy 3D card. Outside of niche games like the Patrician series, very very few games are doing anything interesting these days. Have there been any decent RPGs in the past decade? Morrowind was a bit of a disappointment, but I have high hopes for Oblivion.
Heh. Of course, that's completely true, because all of the kernel is "low level".
Sure. That would be all of them, right? Don't tell me you thought EDIT.COM qualified as "decent" in a time when vi and Emacs were around? :-)
Unfortunately so. Of course, ICC and MSVC have the advantage of only needing to concentrate on one architecture (x86), whereas GCC compiles for pretty much everything.
Gentoo supports at least as many architectures as Debian. A cursory glance at packages.gentoo.org will tell you that.
Of course there is. How do you think new drugs are teseted by the FDA? You seem to be jumping ahead to the "how" instead of the "if". Use a random rock as your placebo in a double-blind study, and do a chi-square analysis of the result. It's really very simple.
Probably because it was used as an example in the landmark case of Schenck v. United States.
The fact is, you have an INVIOLABLE right to yell Fire in a crowded theater, for the very simple and obvious reason that there might in fact be a fire.
Okay, now you're just being obtuse. Try not taking everything so literally, and understanding context. Or just look at the original:
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
In any halfway decent API, where the individual program can override the system default, sure it can. You'd just lose the easy-dragging feature.
Exactly. This is why I'm amazed at all the anti-Linux advertising being generated by Microsoft. It doesn't prove a thing (come on, the "research" was funded by MSFT) and it just acknowledges that Linux is a serious competitor.
So what happens when your hard drive inevitably crashes?
Er well, not quite. It's really just dynamic routing, with the hardware necessary to make it work over wireless. A slightly better comparison would be Freenet.
They seem to have used only one trial, as well. Anyone who didn't sleep through their junior high science class should know how to design a better experiment, and that a ~0.5% difference is typically experimental error, not a significant difference.
I think you misquoted them. That should read "I have no idea what the fuck a clock even is."
What ugly fonts? Times New Roman (OO.o on Linux) looks exactly the same as in MS Word, as far as I can tell. If you're having problems, it's likely that your X server (or possibly FreeType?) isn't properly configured.
Gotta agree about LaTeX/LyX, especially if you're an aspiring scientist. If you're sane, you don't write your dissertation or journal articles in Word (or OpenOffice). It takes some getting used to, but it's a very valuable skill.
I'm no fan of Microsoft (posting this with Firefox on Gentoo Linux), but to be fair, that's not quite true. Few home LANs use a domain server. Simple LANs should work at least as well as they did in Win98, which was fine for me.
Linux (with KDE, etc) still have a long way to go, though they're improving every day. You can make a rock-solid Linux server, but most desktop apps are riddled with little bugs, quirks, inconsistencies, and annoyances. Mozilla's products are happy exceptions to this rule. There are also too many programs, especially KDE, with tons of configuration options that can only be changed by editing the text files. Look, Linux is my OS of choice, I love vim and bash, but really, I don't want to waste my time searching through my dotfiles and Google to figure out if and how to change something.
I could rant about Windows too, of course. It feels quite underpowered (in several different meanings) and inflexible after you know how to use a proper Linux workstation. Cygwin is a crappy substitute at best. Running the latest versions of KDE (actually the new beta) and X.org feels much more responsive than a near-clean install of WinXP, which wasn't true about a year ago.
So if you're looking for something that's usable right now, OS X looks pretty and works well enough, though personally I don't like it. It's suitable for most people who use computers and don't care about Windows-only games.
Bah. Why would you use XMMS or mplayer to play music when you have amaroK, Rhythmbox, MPD and its clients, etc etc etc?
That's the easy way? If you're already using Firefox, why not just install the Adblock extension and add "adserver.com" to your filters?
Seconded. Adblock with a good set of filters blocks all the crap. Speaking of which, is anyone compiling good (ie, no false positives) AdBlock filters and posting them somewhere?
You have a good point, but Linus is not the only one coordinating Linux. If something happened to Linus, most likely Alan Cox or Andrew Morton would take over. Things would be in disorder for a while, but assuming that one of them is willing to take over, Linux would probably go on.
If not, the *BSD and GNU/Hurd kernels would probably gain a bunch of experienced hackers :-)
Kind of a bad example. If you don't use the Winsock functions (WSA*, except for WSAStartup), your sockets code should be easily portable between Windows and Unix.
Well, that's why we need cross-platform toolkits. Qt (which is much more than just a GUI library) will be available in GPL form on Windows soon, making it a good choice for open-source programs.
I'm sorry, but most people I know of seem to distinguish between the OS and the kernel. The kernel itself is useless. Stick in glibc, sysvinit, and bash, and you've got an OS. For example, read this and this.
There's no such thing as a "Linux-like operating system", that's the difference. Linux is an OS kernel, not an OS. It's everything you put on top of the kernel that makes it an operating system. An OS with Linux as the kernel is called a Linux distribution.