"Hugo Campos got an implanted cardiac defibrillator shortly after collapsing on a BART train platform. He wants access to the data wirelessly collected by the computer implanted in his body, but the manufacturer says No.
If he wants information about his heart, why isn't he talking to his cardiologist?
Someone who knows his medical history? Someone who can interpret the data correctly?
Does the manufacturer have the data he wants?
What Is Follow-Up Like with ICDs?
After your ICD is implanted, the doctor will want to see you four to six weeks after surgery to make sure the surgical site is fully healed and to answer any additional questions that may have occurred to you in the interim. Afterward, the doctor will usually want to see you in the office two to four times per year. During all these visits, your ICD will be wirelessly "interrogated" using the programmer. This interrogation gives the doctor vital information on how the ICD is functioning, the status of its battery, the status of the leads and whether and how often the ICD has needed to deliver therapy - both pacing therapy and shocking therapy.
Some modern ICDs have the capacity to wirelessly send this kind of information to the doctor from your home, through the Internet. This "remote interrogation" feature allows the doctor to evaluate your ICD whenever needed, without requiring you to come to the office. Even if your ICD has this remote feature, however, the doctor will want to see you in the office at least once a year.
Talk to your lawyer, your accountant, your banker.
Trade association. Small business advisor.
The odds are pretty damn good that the professionals you will be working with will know QuickBooks. That they will know the right customized versions and add-ons for QuickBooks you will need.
The same will be true for MS Office and so on.
These people have a stake in the success of your business. Listen to them.
The proposal is to make these the mandatory to implement codecs because they're the only royalty-free options. Microsoft prefers to ignore the interoperability issue (ie, use h.264 via system codec installs) as anyone without h.264 is just a dirty hippie anyway.
A search of Google Shopping will return 192,000 hits for H.264.
Video security and industrial applications. Home video. Video conferencing. Video production. The list goes on and on and on.
There are over 1,000 H.264 licensees, including Google itself and about 30 H.264 licensors, most of them mega-industrial corporations the size of Mitsubishi and Samsung. Google, for all its might, doesn't wield that kind of power.
Class in college.. here's a photo. Everyone looks at it.
There's a young man in a cap and gown with what appears to be a diploma. A smiling man is standing to one side, a smiling woman to the other and in the forground is a girl about 12 looking bored.
Assertions, true or false: The father is proud of his son. The graduate's younger sister wants an ice cream. The mother is very happy.
Which would be an accurate description of tens or hundreds of millions of graduation photographs. It would be trivial exercise to find similar examples in your own family albums across several generations.
It can be easy to recognize dissonance.
The "son" doesn't resemble his "parents." The "father's" suit is crisply pressed and expensive. The "mother's" dress cheap and worn. Not Sunday-best as you would expect for the occasion.
She could potentially be a young boy with long hair in girls clothing.
She could be, but, realistically, what are the chances a long haired boy will be wearing girl's clothing in what appears to be a formally posed family photograph?
It is not the classroom exercise I object to. It is the credence the geek gives to extreme and improbable explanations for otherwise quite ordinary events.
Asimov once wrote that robots were logical but not reasonable. The distinction is important.
You have to transport the waste to these deep-sea sites. Underwater recovery in the event of an accident becomes a very expensive and dangerous business.
The worst that can happen to a shipment that moves by rail to a site in Nevada is a routine derailment.
You clear the site, bring in a crane, reload the containers onto another car, and move on.
A cheap console with cheapish games without Nanny Nintendo watching all of the games that get released on it to make sure they're fit for our eyes would be fantastic.
The Android developer thinks single player and mobile device.
Family-friendly console gaming --- and social gaming on the big screen TV --- has paid off handsomely for Nintendo.
As of October 18, 2010, Nintendo has sold over 565 million hardware units and 3.4 billion software units.
Joe average user doesn't know Linux exists, but let's pretend he's heard of it somewhere
Booting Linux was once just the providence of the enthusiast.
If Joe Average doesn't know Linux exists, then booting Linux remains the sole province of the enthusiast.
For Joe, maintaining two operating systems, software libraries, and skill sets has all the appeal of root canal. What he needs to see is the "killer app" that makes the pain worthwhile. The FOSS app that hasn't been ported to Windows.
I don't get it.
So after several decades of fighting for free software (and computer freedom in general), all these distributions are just going to roll over on command for Microsoft?
Secure Boot is not new.
Another case of trusted boot is the One Laptop per Child XO laptop which will only boot from software signed by a private cryptographic key known only to the OLPC non-profit organisation. However, the laptop and the OLPC organisation provide a way to disable the restrictions, by requesting a "developer key" unique to that laptop, over the Internet, waiting 24 hours to receive it, installing it, and running the firmware command "disable-security". The stated goal is to deter mass theft of laptops from children or via distribution channels, by making the laptops refuse to boot, making it hard to reprogram them so they will boot and delaying the issuance of developer keys to allow time to check whether a key-requesting laptop had been stolen.
Secure Boot is biting the geek in the ass because of his pathetic dependence on affordable hardware designed and built for the mass market Windows platform and because he has had damn little influence or control over the explosive evolution of a mobile market defined and shaped by Apple.
You do not gain converts to Linux by disabling low-level hardware security in Windows.
You do not gain converts to Linux by encouraging Windows users to dual boot into Linux.
Damn near everything client side in FOSS is ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app. There are strange, inexplicable, glitches. Try explaining to a Windows user why audio and video support isn't part isn't part of the default install of the Chromium browser...
You gain converts to Linux through strong OEM support and promotion and broad retail distribution of high quality Linux systems. The bottom feeders are no longer welcome even at Walmart.
There's no denying that his mother's connections to IBM folks made that happen for him,
Forget Gate's Mom.
Remember how big Microsoft had become in the CP/M era?
In programming languages.
MBASIC. FORTAN. COBOL and PASCAL.
MBASIC was the first million dollar best seller on the microcomputer platform. The killer app that united the all-but-hopelessly fragmented world of the eight bit micro.
In hardware.
The Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
Microsoft sold more copies of CP/M for the Apple II market then Digital Research sold in every other market combined,
The real question is "Why did IBM even think Bill gates, a schoolboy at the time, might have an OS worth actually paying for without seeing it first.
Because Microsoft in 1980 was a prime developer of programming languages for the microcomputer?
Because MBASIC had become virtually synonymous with the eight-bit micro? Because it had a viable candidate for the *NIX market in XENIX? Because it had a red hot seller in the hardware market with the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II?
Because in five years it had gone from a two or three man company with revenues of $22,000 to a company with forty employees and revenues of $7.5 million?
There's no denying that his mother's connections to IBM folks made that happen for him
Grow up.
Microsoft was selling microcomputer BASIC to the Fortune 500 in 1975. By 1980 it had a full suite of languages ready for porting to the 16 bit micro --- MBASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, PASCAL, and, I believe an assembler.
The Z-80 Softcard for the Apple II would became the primary distribution channel for CP/M.
By any standard, the SoftCard was a hugely successful and highly visible product.
In XENIX Microsoft had a plausible entrant in the *NIX market.
MBASIC was an industrial award-winner as the first million-dollar bestseller for the microcomputer.
A company on the move. Willing to take chances. Willing to cut a deal. None of this could possibly have passed unnoticed by the small, quick and agile IBM PC development team.
Making CP/M code easy to port to MS-DOS would have been a good idea
Of course it was a good idea.
The serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone was the Holy Grail for anyone who looked at the glacial pace of development of C/PM 86 and the potential market for the 8086.
In 1980 Microsoft had a full suite of programming languages for CP/M ready to port: BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL. PASCAL, and. I believe ASSEMBLER. The Microsoft CP/M Softcard for the Apple II was its first hardware product and a huge success.
The SoftCard was the single most popular platform to run CP/M. As Steve Ballmer stated during the Microsoft Surface reveal, the SoftCard was Microsoft's number one revenue source in 1980.
The fact remains that he did die conveniently in a plane crash just after failing to come to terms with MS.
Not true.
On July 8, 1994, Kildall fell at a Monterey, California, biker bar and hit his head. The exact circumstances of the injury remain unclear; however, he had suffered problems with alcoholism in his later years. Various sources have claimed he fell from a chair, fell down steps, or was assaulted because he walked in to the Franklin Street Bar & Grill wearing Harley-Davidson leathers. He checked in and out of the hospital twice, and died three days later at the Community Hospital of Monterey Peninsula. The coroner's report identified the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head. There was also evidence that he had experienced a heart attack, but an autopsy did not conclusively determine the cause of death.
Concurrent CP/M 3.1 and later, and single-user CP/M-86 with BDOS 3.3 and later (including DOS Plus), allow CP/M programs to access DOS-formatted discs via conventional BDOS calls, emulating (as far as possible) the behaviour of a normal CP/M filesystem. The behaviour is probably a good starting point for anyone writing a CP/M emulator which uses a hierarchical or non-CP/M filesystem.
I'm amazed at the indolent culture spawned by the iPhone: Nowadays, you can't just go to a website. You have to have a special executable for every single different website you visit!
The browser wars are over.
The wars for placement in the app store have begun.
The app developer can use any audio or video codec he likes, development can be as open or closed as he likes, web "standards" don't mean a hell of a lot and what the geek doesn't know won't hurt him.
The proper place for Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, and all the rest would seem to be as optional downloads from the iOS App Store.
The only fair alternatives are to pre-load all competing media players and give them the same prominence as iTunes or introduce a purely bureaucratic solution like the European "browser ballot" for media play.
Without mass market OEM Linux systems in general retail distribution Linux on the desktop is going nowhere,
The sensible thing for Valve to do would be to partner with Canonical, which has OEM partnerships, a willingness to be flexible about things like H.264 abd secure boot, and measurable market share in the home market --- no more than a bare 1/2 of 1% perhaps,, but still visible.
Of course, psychohistory doesn't work if you publish the results -- so all of this is bullshit.
Asimov's Psychohistory, like his Laws of Robotics are fiction.
His Second Foundation consisting of backstage manipulators answerable to no one but more than willing to impose their own sense of order on the whole of human history.
It is the oldest of all grand conspiracy theories and the one most likely to charm and seduce the intellectual.
Thankfully, Microsoft is making Linux a viable gaming platform by so utterly screwing up the Windows gaming platform with Windows 8.
Games are typically run full screen with the intrusion of any other program generally considered an unwanted distraction. I've already seen casual games like the SolSuite Solitaire take on a Metro look-and-feel and there the transition should be seamless.
If the geek can get past his hate for the Metro UI, Windows 8 tech looks fundamentally sound, with very good performance on older systems.
Not anyone I ever met except those who were unfortunate enough to be stuck with 16-color PCs that went "beep".
The modular design of the PC meant that improvements in graphics and sound would eventually out-pace even the best of the systems whose tech was frozen in amber.
Games like King's Quest demonstrated the raw horsepower of the 16 bit IBM PC.
Because anecdotally I hear lots of Linux users that are chomping at the bit for Steam to to come and looking forward to paying for games
"Anecdotally?"
What makes what you hear any better evidence than his?
Furthermore, the Humble Indie Bundle has shown that there are gamers on Linux that will pay
80% to 90% off retail list for the bundle.
The return on the HB is about $8 from the Windows gamer. 3/4 of the total.
For games which have seen have broad exposure and frequent discounts on the Windows platform.
$12 from the Linux gamer. 1/8 of the total.
The return from the HB is split among charities, developers, and Humble Bundle itself.
Linux users always have the highest average and a leaderboard of top contributors. The leaderboard has regulars, too, like Minecraft developer notch, and the "HumbleBrony Bundle" (a group that does a collective fundraising effort within the Brony community), both of whom contribute to the tune of thousands.
This is a legitimate job that has to be staffed 24/7 and probably requires about 20min worth of total combined labor in a typical year.
You can't know that.
SAC in the fifties became known for its relentless drill and discipline. It is what the military demands and expects on assignments like this.
Those who do not measure up get transfered out.
There is somewhere worse than mainland Alaska in the U.S. Military. An island called Shemya in the Aleutians, a group of islands off the coast of the Alaskan Peninsula. According to legend, the wind never drops below 60 knots, the temperature never rises above -20 C and there's a 10-foot visibility fog 300 days of the year. Primary duty there is clearing the runway of obstructions. Every time someone left, they took a rock with them so someday there would be no more island and no one would ever have to go back. Or so that legend goes/
The Summer Olympics is a two week event held every four years.
This is the first in London since 1948.
The logistical planning for events on this scale are enormously difficult. The tech has to work. Security is tight.
The costs are high.
You cannot please everyone when you try to insure that games with a global audience in the billions run smoothly and that the bills are paid.
The alternative is to restrict the games to venues where political control is absolute, and an ultra-nationalist and global-minded government pays all the bills. Berlin 1936. Beijing 2008.
It may distress the geek to discover that laws are mutable.
That they recognize special cases.
That your WiFI hotspot may sometimes have to give way to the needs of other users,
Slashdot Mirror
"Hugo Campos got an implanted cardiac defibrillator shortly after collapsing on a BART train platform. He wants access to the data wirelessly collected by the computer implanted in his body, but the manufacturer says No.
If he wants information about his heart, why isn't he talking to his cardiologist?
Someone who knows his medical history? Someone who can interpret the data correctly?
Does the manufacturer have the data he wants?
What Is Follow-Up Like with ICDs?
After your ICD is implanted, the doctor will want to see you four to six weeks after surgery to make sure the surgical site is fully healed and to answer any additional questions that may have occurred to you in the interim. Afterward, the doctor will usually want to see you in the office two to four times per year. During all these visits, your ICD will be wirelessly "interrogated" using the programmer. This interrogation gives the doctor vital information on how the ICD is functioning, the status of its battery, the status of the leads and whether and how often the ICD has needed to deliver therapy - both pacing therapy and shocking therapy.
Some modern ICDs have the capacity to wirelessly send this kind of information to the doctor from your home, through the Internet. This "remote interrogation" feature allows the doctor to evaluate your ICD whenever needed, without requiring you to come to the office. Even if your ICD has this remote feature, however, the doctor will want to see you in the office at least once a year.
The Implantable Defibrillator
Talk to your lawyer, your accountant, your banker.
Trade association. Small business advisor.
The odds are pretty damn good that the professionals you will be working with will know QuickBooks. That they will know the right customized versions and add-ons for QuickBooks you will need.
The same will be true for MS Office and so on.
These people have a stake in the success of your business. Listen to them.
The proposal is to make these the mandatory to implement codecs because they're the only royalty-free options. Microsoft prefers to ignore the interoperability issue (ie, use h.264 via system codec installs) as anyone without h.264 is just a dirty hippie anyway.
A search of Google Shopping will return 192,000 hits for H.264.
Video security and industrial applications. Home video. Video conferencing. Video production. The list goes on and on and on.
There are over 1,000 H.264 licensees, including Google itself and about 30 H.264 licensors, most of them mega-industrial corporations the size of Mitsubishi and Samsung. Google, for all its might, doesn't wield that kind of power.
Class in college .. here's a photo. Everyone looks at it.
There's a young man in a cap and gown with what appears to be a diploma. A smiling man is standing to one side, a smiling woman to the other and in the forground is a girl about 12 looking bored.
Assertions, true or false: The father is proud of his son. The graduate's younger sister wants an ice cream. The mother is very happy.
Which would be an accurate description of tens or hundreds of millions of graduation photographs. It would be trivial exercise to find similar examples in your own family albums across several generations.
It can be easy to recognize dissonance.
The "son" doesn't resemble his "parents." The "father's" suit is crisply pressed and expensive. The "mother's" dress cheap and worn. Not Sunday-best as you would expect for the occasion.
She could potentially be a young boy with long hair in girls clothing.
She could be, but, realistically, what are the chances a long haired boy will be wearing girl's clothing in what appears to be a formally posed family photograph?
It is not the classroom exercise I object to. It is the credence the geek gives to extreme and improbable explanations for otherwise quite ordinary events. Asimov once wrote that robots were logical but not reasonable. The distinction is important.
Burial of Radioactive Waste under the Seabed
You have to transport the waste to these deep-sea sites. Underwater recovery in the event of an accident becomes a very expensive and dangerous business.
The worst that can happen to a shipment that moves by rail to a site in Nevada is a routine derailment.
You clear the site, bring in a crane, reload the containers onto another car, and move on.
A cheap console with cheapish games without Nanny Nintendo watching all of the games that get released on it to make sure they're fit for our eyes would be fantastic.
The Android developer thinks single player and mobile device.
Family-friendly console gaming --- and social gaming on the big screen TV --- has paid off handsomely for Nintendo.
As of October 18, 2010, Nintendo has sold over 565 million hardware units and 3.4 billion software units.
96.56 million units of the Wii alone. (2012)
Nintendo
That would be something like fifty tines the number of Slashdot accounts.
Joe average user doesn't know Linux exists, but let's pretend he's heard of it somewhere
Booting Linux was once just the providence of the enthusiast.
If Joe Average doesn't know Linux exists, then booting Linux remains the sole province of the enthusiast.
For Joe, maintaining two operating systems, software libraries, and skill sets has all the appeal of root canal. What he needs to see is the "killer app" that makes the pain worthwhile. The FOSS app that hasn't been ported to Windows.
Name one.
This fall, the non profit Library of America will publishing two volumes of American sci-fi novels from the 1850s.
Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow
Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man
Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
James Blish, A Case of Conscience
Algis Budrys, Who?
Fritz Leiber, The Big Time
I don't get it.
So after several decades of fighting for free software (and computer freedom in general), all these distributions are just going to roll over on command for Microsoft?
Secure Boot is not new.
Another case of trusted boot is the One Laptop per Child XO laptop which will only boot from software signed by a private cryptographic key known only to the OLPC non-profit organisation. However, the laptop and the OLPC organisation provide a way to disable the restrictions, by requesting a "developer key" unique to that laptop, over the Internet, waiting 24 hours to receive it, installing it, and running the firmware command "disable-security". The stated goal is to deter mass theft of laptops from children or via distribution channels, by making the laptops refuse to boot, making it hard to reprogram them so they will boot and delaying the issuance of developer keys to allow time to check whether a key-requesting laptop had been stolen.
Hardware restrictions
Secure Boot makes a great deal of sense.
Secure Boot is biting the geek in the ass because of his pathetic dependence on affordable hardware designed and built for the mass market Windows platform and because he has had damn little influence or control over the explosive evolution of a mobile market defined and shaped by Apple.
You do not gain converts to Linux by disabling low-level hardware security in Windows.
You do not gain converts to Linux by encouraging Windows users to dual boot into Linux.
Damn near everything client side in FOSS is ported to Windows or begins as a native Windows app. There are strange, inexplicable, glitches. Try explaining to a Windows user why audio and video support isn't part isn't part of the default install of the Chromium browser...
You gain converts to Linux through strong OEM support and promotion and broad retail distribution of high quality Linux systems. The bottom feeders are no longer welcome even at Walmart.
There's no denying that his mother's connections to IBM folks made that happen for him,
Forget Gate's Mom.
Remember how big Microsoft had become in the CP/M era?
In programming languages.
MBASIC. FORTAN. COBOL and PASCAL.
MBASIC was the first million dollar best seller on the microcomputer platform. The killer app that united the all-but-hopelessly fragmented world of the eight bit micro.
In hardware.
The Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II.
Microsoft sold more copies of CP/M for the Apple II market then Digital Research sold in every other market combined,
The real question is "Why did IBM even think Bill gates, a schoolboy at the time, might have an OS worth actually paying for without seeing it first.
Because Microsoft in 1980 was a prime developer of programming languages for the microcomputer?
Because MBASIC had become virtually synonymous with the eight-bit micro? Because it had a viable candidate for the *NIX market in XENIX? Because it had a red hot seller in the hardware market with the Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II?
Because in five years it had gone from a two or three man company with revenues of $22,000 to a company with forty employees and revenues of $7.5 million?
There's no denying that his mother's connections to IBM folks made that happen for him
Grow up.
Microsoft was selling microcomputer BASIC to the Fortune 500 in 1975. By 1980 it had a full suite of languages ready for porting to the 16 bit micro --- MBASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, PASCAL, and, I believe an assembler.
The Z-80 Softcard for the Apple II would became the primary distribution channel for CP/M.
By any standard, the SoftCard was a hugely successful and highly visible product.
In XENIX Microsoft had a plausible entrant in the *NIX market.
MBASIC was an industrial award-winner as the first million-dollar bestseller for the microcomputer.
A company on the move. Willing to take chances. Willing to cut a deal. None of this could possibly have passed unnoticed by the small, quick and agile IBM PC development team.
Making CP/M code easy to port to MS-DOS would have been a good idea
Of course it was a good idea.
The serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone was the Holy Grail for anyone who looked at the glacial pace of development of C/PM 86 and the potential market for the 8086.
In 1980 Microsoft had a full suite of programming languages for CP/M ready to port: BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL. PASCAL, and. I believe ASSEMBLER. The Microsoft CP/M Softcard for the Apple II was its first hardware product and a huge success.
The SoftCard was the single most popular platform to run CP/M. As Steve Ballmer stated during the Microsoft Surface reveal, the SoftCard was Microsoft's number one revenue source in 1980.
Z-80 SoftCard
The fact remains that he did die conveniently in a plane crash just after failing to come to terms with MS.
Not true.
On July 8, 1994, Kildall fell at a Monterey, California, biker bar and hit his head. The exact circumstances of the injury remain unclear; however, he had suffered problems with alcoholism in his later years. Various sources have claimed he fell from a chair, fell down steps, or was assaulted because he walked in to the Franklin Street Bar & Grill wearing Harley-Davidson leathers. He checked in and out of the hospital twice, and died three days later at the Community Hospital of Monterey Peninsula. The coroner's report identified the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head. There was also evidence that he had experienced a heart attack, but an autopsy did not conclusively determine the cause of death.
Gary Kildall
Concurrent CP/M 3.1 and later, and single-user CP/M-86 with BDOS 3.3 and later (including DOS Plus), allow CP/M programs to access DOS-formatted discs via conventional BDOS calls, emulating (as far as possible) the behaviour of a normal CP/M filesystem. The behaviour is probably a good starting point for anyone writing a CP/M emulator which uses a hierarchical or non-CP/M filesystem.
The FAT filesystem in 16-bit CP/M-86
To me this says that the original or "normal" CP/M file system was not FAT.
QDOS implemented calls identically to CP/M with the specific aim of being as close to CP/M as possible.
CP/M 86's path to market can be described as glacial.
That is what made the 16 bit CP/M clone the Holy Grail for anyone looking at the potential market for the 8086.
I'm amazed at the indolent culture spawned by the iPhone: Nowadays, you can't just go to a website. You have to have a special executable for every single different website you visit!
The browser wars are over.
The wars for placement in the app store have begun.
The app developer can use any audio or video codec he likes, development can be as open or closed as he likes, web "standards" don't mean a hell of a lot and what the geek doesn't know won't hurt him.
The proper place for Hulu, YouTube, Netflix, and all the rest would seem to be as optional downloads from the iOS App Store.
The only fair alternatives are to pre-load all competing media players and give them the same prominence as iTunes or introduce a purely bureaucratic solution like the European "browser ballot" for media play.
Without mass market OEM Linux systems in general retail distribution Linux on the desktop is going nowhere,
The sensible thing for Valve to do would be to partner with Canonical, which has OEM partnerships, a willingness to be flexible about things like H.264 abd secure boot, and measurable market share in the home market --- no more than a bare 1/2 of 1% perhaps,, but still visible.
Of course, psychohistory doesn't work if you publish the results -- so all of this is bullshit.
Asimov's Psychohistory, like his Laws of Robotics are fiction.
His Second Foundation consisting of backstage manipulators answerable to no one but more than willing to impose their own sense of order on the whole of human history.
It is the oldest of all grand conspiracy theories and the one most likely to charm and seduce the intellectual.
Thankfully, Microsoft is making Linux a viable gaming platform by so utterly screwing up the Windows gaming platform with Windows 8.
Games are typically run full screen with the intrusion of any other program generally considered an unwanted distraction. I've already seen casual games like the SolSuite Solitaire take on a Metro look-and-feel and there the transition should be seamless.
If the geek can get past his hate for the Metro UI, Windows 8 tech looks fundamentally sound, with very good performance on older systems.
Tell me again how this hurts Windows gaming.
Not anyone I ever met except those who were unfortunate enough to be stuck with 16-color PCs that went "beep".
The modular design of the PC meant that improvements in graphics and sound would eventually out-pace even the best of the systems whose tech was frozen in amber.
Games like King's Quest demonstrated the raw horsepower of the 16 bit IBM PC.
No hardware supported sprite animation?
No problem.
If the FPS is better, the Windows-gamers will come...
Especially if the OS is free.
Marginal improvements in frame rate visible only on very high end systems is no big deal.
But comparing DX 9 level graphics with mainstream DX 11 gamer-graphics card performance just might be considered a tad misleading.
No one but the geek gives a damn about "free."
By the time product reaches retail shelves the OEM price of the OS is irrelevant.
Because anecdotally I hear lots of Linux users that are chomping at the bit for Steam to to come and looking forward to paying for games
"Anecdotally?"
What makes what you hear any better evidence than his?
Furthermore, the Humble Indie Bundle has shown that there are gamers on Linux that will pay
80% to 90% off retail list for the bundle.
The return on the HB is about $8 from the Windows gamer. 3/4 of the total.
For games which have seen have broad exposure and frequent discounts on the Windows platform.
$12 from the Linux gamer. 1/8 of the total.
The return from the HB is split among charities, developers, and Humble Bundle itself.
Linux users always have the highest average and a leaderboard of top contributors. The leaderboard has regulars, too, like Minecraft developer notch, and the "HumbleBrony Bundle" (a group that does a collective fundraising effort within the Brony community), both of whom contribute to the tune of thousands.
Latest Humble Bundle Of Pay-What-You-Want Indie Games Raises $1-Million In Five Hours
The problem with big ticket donations is that they projects Linux sales through a rose tinted lens. Things look better than they rare.
This is a legitimate job that has to be staffed 24/7 and probably requires about 20min worth of total combined labor in a typical year.
You can't know that.
SAC in the fifties became known for its relentless drill and discipline. It is what the military demands and expects on assignments like this.
Those who do not measure up get transfered out.
There is somewhere worse than mainland Alaska in the U.S. Military. An island called Shemya in the Aleutians, a group of islands off the coast of the Alaskan Peninsula. According to legend, the wind never drops below 60 knots, the temperature never rises above -20 C and there's a 10-foot visibility fog 300 days of the year. Primary duty there is clearing the runway of obstructions. Every time someone left, they took a rock with them so someday there would be no more island and no one would ever have to go back. Or so that legend goes/
Reassigned to Antarctica
The Summer Olympics is a two week event held every four years.
This is the first in London since 1948.
The logistical planning for events on this scale are enormously difficult. The tech has to work. Security is tight.
The costs are high.
You cannot please everyone when you try to insure that games with a global audience in the billions run smoothly and that the bills are paid.
The alternative is to restrict the games to venues where political control is absolute, and an ultra-nationalist and global-minded government pays all the bills. Berlin 1936. Beijing 2008.
It may distress the geek to discover that laws are mutable.
That they recognize special cases.
That your WiFI hotspot may sometimes have to give way to the needs of other users,