Oh, one caveat. You do need to have machines with a BIOS smart enough to try to boot from the CD if there's not a bootable hard drive in the system. Or machines with a boot menu....in which case you'll also have to know how long it takes that menu to come up, and you still have to connect a keyboard.
Well, I've never actually seen or touched my server. Somebody at the colo joint booted the gentoo livecd, started the network and sshd, and left...probably long before they ever sold it to me. The BIOS was left booting from the hard drive by default, so once I got done with the install I just rebooted into the system.
If you really wanted to *never* hook up a monitor or console of any kind, you could build your own livecd that used dhcp and started sshd by itself, and just do everything over the network. And even if you don't, once the machine's installed, there's no reason to have to hook a monitor up to it.
Well...unless you break something. In which case, my advice is, "don't.";-)
You people are nuts. Flat taxation is a horrible idea, but sales-based taxes really take it to the next level.
How much is someone with a hundred million dollars annual income likely to spend in a year? Maybe a million, maybe 5? Say 5 million, and the tax is 10%. This guy paid half a percent of his income ($500k) in taxes.
Meanwhile, someone who made $25,000, who is safely above the poverty line, probably spends at least 20k of it. He pays 8% of his income ($2000) in taxes.
Obviously, the tax rate in this case (assuming revenue parity) would be much higher. That guy who made $25,000 actually probably wouldn't be able to spend 20 of it, because the tax would be more than $5000. But you get the idea.
Make no mistake about it, flat taxes, sales taxes, value-added taxes, consumption taxes, and any tax that has "simple" or "fair" in the name (think 1984 and the "ministry of truth") are designed with the intention of shifting the tax burden farther to the middle and lower class. These schemes were brought to us as Trojan Horses by the crazy rich, who have successfully been steadily reducing their own share of the tax burden since the early '80s. The unbelievable part is how well it's working.
There was a time in this country when we didn't have to argue about whether we should have progressive taxation. It's scary to see how far we've gone.
I probably owe a lot to the absolutely batty, wild-haired mother of two of the guys in my Boy Scout troop. I had a fairly clear idea of how nuts she was (I'm not kidding...this whole family was about as weird as I've known), but it wasn't until many years later that I realized just how outright hardcore she had been. She helped a few of us earn computing merit badges one year, and I was the only one who cared at all. I think it was Zork that did it. But looking back, she had a 386 Thinkpad triple-booting UNIX, Dos, and OS/2. And she taught me the rudiments of BASIC.
To tell the truth, I didn't understand how hardcore a lot of my early programming was. Connecting via SLIP to the local university so I could "gopher" things...riding a bike to that university's library so I could do the same thing from a VT-100 (not that I knew what it was then) about a million times faster...that 2400->14,400 bps upgrade.
Man, those were really the bad old days. Thanks Mimi.
Fine, assclown (if we're going to delve into simple namecalling). Then the context was dropped when the parent of my post generalized further and said, "If Linux can't offer the same basic "features" as Windows it will never become mainstream." Go back and read that post; it is very clear he's talking in a more general term than tablet PC's. And that's the context in which I replied.
Huh? Don't get me wrong, I recognize that I set that criteria, sort of. On the other hand, I didn't invalidate the second one I set just then; it's broader. I'm not sure what your point is, but it's not real well thought out.
And on this hilarity of your armchair character analysis, I really enjoy the irony. "Gee, you shouldn't even be replying to some AC like this." Don't forget who's the coward.
Oh, is that the criterion for Flamebait? Hi, Flamebait.
A better criterion, given the word itself, is something that provokes another to flame. In which case, I certainly can't deny your accuracy, insofar as you flamed me.
This is what's called a Straw Man. Since you couldn't address the AC's true point - that Linux lacks basic functionality on a Tablet PC - you reconstituted it in a form you could spew your canned arguments against.
Sorry, but you must have mixed up which post was the parent of my own. I went back and checked to make sure, but he's definitely talking about Linux vs. Windows in general (although a "desktop" bend is clearly assumed through the use of "the end user" diction) and I responded in kind. Piss off.
You're obviously an aggressive putz with an inferiority complex.
And I guess that means you've got a psych degree. Hehe...I'm not going to worry too much about my "inferiority complex" if I'm supposed to be feeling inferior to the likes of you.
Oh ya... and get a life!! Holy crap, did you seriously sit there and think up that huge list just to justify yourself to an AC?? Go drink something with alcohol in it for Christ's sake.
Damn. Busted. I've just been sitting here dicking around all day. Oh well. But at least I was drinking alcohol the whole time.
As you might have learned from Monty Python, simple denial will not suffice for an argument.
Right. But he wasn't making an argument. He was replying to me, and I had already made a logical and forthright one. He was just telling me to calm down because this guy was an idiot. I had already explained why he was an idiot.
Anyway, it doesn't much matter now. The post we're all talking about is labelled "funny," which I find reasonable. When I posted my reply, it wasn't even to that post, but one that complained about a (justified) flamebait rating and said the [joke|flamebait] had a "valid point." At the point when I replied to him, the post he had complained about was labelled "insightful."
Nice dropped context. Does it make a lot of sense on a Tablet PC, compared to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition? No? Then your comments are irrelevant blather.
Look, the context was dropped a long time ago, when we started talking about a car. And we're looking at pretty seriously prerelease stuff here. Nobody claimed this particular setup was ready for primetime.
The main difference is that someone that has a Mac computer and has only one computer can't run a windows game, so it's a lost sale... while most people that use linux and are even half interested in gaming at all at least dual boot into windows, so a linux version doesn't give extra buyers, while a mac version does.
Well, I guess I'm the exception. I do a bit of gaming, all in Linux native or WINE. But I recognize I'm giving up some...I quit being a hardcore gamer a long time ago (thank god). But you're probably right, that would impact the numbers pretty severely.
That's a really good point, if you only take it as far as the measurability problem. I still think it it's possible that we've got more Linux desktops out there in homes...less than 50% likely, maybe, but extremely hard to say, like you mentioned. Also, this bit about moving targets doesn't seem right to me...the Mac has switched up its whole system software in incompatible ways a whole lot of times.
But whatever. The basic point, that the Mac offers a known sales increase due to a known home market share while Linux doesn't, is good enough and true.
Why is ID still the big exception? And why are they also the exception with regards to releasing older engines as open source code?
Well, I'll bet part of it is that point about how they swim around in money. But that's true for some of those other guys too...perhaps they are just cooler.
Also, this does not explain why other games that use (modified versions of) their engines are available on Linux also (sure, it is not expensive to do it once then engine can do it so it may again make commercial sense, but why are they the only ones doing this?)
Hmm...not sure I caught all that, but I think it really is that simple; the engine is made in such a way that if you program to it, your code happens to run in three places. I think most development teams just look at that and think "why the hell wouldn't we release it on all of them?" Obviously, for a team writing to a D3D engine, it's not as easy a call. Or maybe it is, but in the other direction.
As far as the Atheros/Broadcom situation goes, cant just one host it in a country...
Yes. That's a pretty good idea. The only trouble is that you'd still have to hack the hardware without help from the hardware manufacturer. Even if it wouldn't be illegal for the hardware manufacturer to participate (and I'd expect it would) it would certainly piss the FCC off something fierce, and that's not something a big hardware company is going to do just to make a few geeks really impressed.
Failing that, is there an open alternative to madwifi/ndiswrapper?
NDISWrapper is GPL. And the madwifi code other than the HAL is dual licensed BSD/GPL. But either way you are still dealing with a closed binary component; either the HAL or the Windows NDIS driver. So, as far as something sanctioned by the manufacturers go, I doubt you're going to see fully open drivers if it allows modifications to output power and the like. Either the limits will be set in hardware, or they'll keep at this HAL thing, or we'll just have to hunker down and reverse engineer everything like in the bad old days before all the hardware manufacturers were playing ball with Linux. Or the FCC could change its regulations. Hehehe.
So you're saying that Intel and Atheros are breaking the law?
No, I'm saying that open sourcing the drivers would be illegal. I also said that Atheros found ways to work around this problem. They used a binary, closed source hardware abstraction layer to conceal the parts of the code which legally could not be exposed. I don't know Intel's story, but either they have something in hardware that limits the device to FCC spec, or a HAL, or they are violating FCC regulations. I'd bet on the first two possibilities.
Linux has many times the architecture support, not "hardware support".
No, I meant what I said. If you total up all the hardware devices that work on any given version of Windows, and compare them to the total number that work on Linux, Windows will lose. The "any given version" makes it a bit trickier, but that's only in fairness, and might not be necessary anyway. WindowsXP doesn't work with a whole ton of parallel printers which work on Linux (and win95/98). Windows 95 won't hack usb. CE would presumably refuse to do all sorts of things. And acting like you can just ignore processors, chipsets, and the like is bullshit. Those are devices too. And you have to count all the crazy high end devices on IBM mainframes and whatnot that don't have Windows drivers. No, when you get right down to it, I might have to leave off the "many times" part of my statement (or maybe not, I dunno), but Linux clearly runs on a larger number of hardware devices than Windows.
Personally I've run Windows on Alpha (an old NT server), MIPS (a P/PC and H/PC device) and ARM processors (my PPC2002 Jornada). The SHx family is also supported. Perhaps you're just not familiar with the full line of Windows products.
Ok, that's a good point. But it doesn't help much. Sure, you can still run NT, if you're crazy. Or you can run CE (or whatever they call that these days) but lose the world in terms of functionality. But you can run standard, modern Linux on dozens of chips. Again, if you force Windows to stay within any given version of its system, it loses big chunks of compatibility every time. If you spec that it has to be a 2.6 kernel, Linux still has basically all its support.
Sure, just about anything with a floating point unit (and even a lot without) can be made to run Linux.
Hehe. Yeah, you'll need a floating point unit. I think you must be thinking of a paged memory management unit. ucLinux will run without one, but normal Linux won't.
In fact, I have to be careful to check compatibility of devices I'm interested in so I don't get an unpleasant surprise later.
First, it's a good idea to check compatibility on any system software purchase. The only reason you don't have to do this with Windows is that you buy the hardware with it already installed, so you're pretty much certain it's compatible. If you are going to buy a bunch of components to build a machine from scratch and you're installing XP on it, I suggest you check real quick to make sure they work with it. That's common sense.
That said, the Linux situation isn't nearly as bad as you make it out there. If you don't do any checking at all and either buy a box from dell/hp/etc., or pick up a white box or parts and assemble, the results you get with Linux compatibility are going to be just fine the vast majority of the time. Obviously, the wireless issue is an exception, but this is well-known, and there are great wireless chipsets that do work fine. Since wifi isn't typically built into motherboards (yet), you can choose your chipset easily when buying parts, or you can leave that option out of your dell purchase and pick it up seperate. It's about as big a concern as the advice I'd give a prospective upgrader to XP: "check and make sure your printer's going to work..." Not a big deal.
Now, there is another exception that I feel causes more trouble than wifi. Winmodems. I don't know all the story on making them work, because, like most of
Right, and the reason you exclude 3rd party software for Windows and not your Linux distro is...?
Because:
1)I don't have to buy and pay for it seperately from my system software.
2)There isn't really a line between 1st and 3rd party software in Linux anyway (i.e. bash is not written by the same folks who write the kernel).
3)I consider the "party" writing my software to be the OSS community, which pretty much writes all of it.
4)I get to install all the "3rd party" software from my package manager, which basically makes it part of the system.
Well, if we're keeping score here, I know more Linux users (only counting desktop). But not by much. More importantly, the last halfway "real" data I saw was from one of those assclown paid thugs we call "research outfits." You know, IDC or something. But they said, IIRC, that more computers destined for desktop use shipped with Linux installed in 2003 than Macs.
Of course, I could be totally wrong. It might not have ben "in 2003" and instead been sales figures for one quarter or something. But what I remember clearly was that they were sales figures (which means the Mac numbers were right, and the Linux ones were horribly underrepresented), and that they were only counting the desktops.
Their priorities are in order - they spend their time and budget doing as well as they can making the game work on Windows, where 90% of their players are. Ports to minority OSs are a low priority issue in a tight-deadline industry.
Two things:
First, where did you get the idea that they spend their time and budjet on Windows? The only source I've read on the subject that I consider reliable was a Carmack.plan file in which he basically said that all the development was done totally cross-platform, only looking at each platform individually after the real work was done. And further, he said that out of the three target platforms (this was in Q3A days), they spent the most time making sure everything worked on the Mac.
Second, I agree that id's priorities are in order. But Phil's point might be the best...they have butt-tons of money, so they can pretty much afford to set their priorities however they want.
Well, yeah. But that just underscores the point that it makes a lot more sense for id to make sure they are cross-platform capable than anybody else. Those guys almost don't care whether they sell any games....the last time I looked, they made a couple orders of magnitude more money selling engines than games. People who are shopping for an engine to build a game on care slightly more than gamers themselves about technical merits like that.
One problem is that OpenGL (pre 2.0, haven't looked at that yet) is horrible to work with if you actually want to get stuff done.
Then dammit, use a real game API instead of just a graphics language. Might I suggest SDL?
(p.s. Sorry if I'm beating a dead SDL horse in this discussion...but seriously, this is the answer, and it just seems like no one is paying attention.)
Yeah, I'm a bit annoyed by that perception as well. However, the truth is they just aren't listing the right framework. I expect that if we just read all these comments and replaced each instance of "OpenGL" with "SDL" we'd have less complaining to do.
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Oh, one caveat. You do need to have machines with a BIOS smart enough to try to boot from the CD if there's not a bootable hard drive in the system. Or machines with a boot menu....in which case you'll also have to know how long it takes that menu to come up, and you still have to connect a keyboard.
Well, I've never actually seen or touched my server. Somebody at the colo joint booted the gentoo livecd, started the network and sshd, and left...probably long before they ever sold it to me. The BIOS was left booting from the hard drive by default, so once I got done with the install I just rebooted into the system.
;-)
If you really wanted to *never* hook up a monitor or console of any kind, you could build your own livecd that used dhcp and started sshd by itself, and just do everything over the network. And even if you don't, once the machine's installed, there's no reason to have to hook a monitor up to it.
Well...unless you break something. In which case, my advice is, "don't."
You people are nuts. Flat taxation is a horrible idea, but sales-based taxes really take it to the next level.
How much is someone with a hundred million dollars annual income likely to spend in a year? Maybe a million, maybe 5? Say 5 million, and the tax is 10%. This guy paid half a percent of his income ($500k) in taxes.
Meanwhile, someone who made $25,000, who is safely above the poverty line, probably spends at least 20k of it. He pays 8% of his income ($2000) in taxes.
Obviously, the tax rate in this case (assuming revenue parity) would be much higher. That guy who made $25,000 actually probably wouldn't be able to spend 20 of it, because the tax would be more than $5000. But you get the idea.
Make no mistake about it, flat taxes, sales taxes, value-added taxes, consumption taxes, and any tax that has "simple" or "fair" in the name (think 1984 and the "ministry of truth") are designed with the intention of shifting the tax burden farther to the middle and lower class. These schemes were brought to us as Trojan Horses by the crazy rich, who have successfully been steadily reducing their own share of the tax burden since the early '80s. The unbelievable part is how well it's working.
There was a time in this country when we didn't have to argue about whether we should have progressive taxation. It's scary to see how far we've gone.
I probably owe a lot to the absolutely batty, wild-haired mother of two of the guys in my Boy Scout troop. I had a fairly clear idea of how nuts she was (I'm not kidding...this whole family was about as weird as I've known), but it wasn't until many years later that I realized just how outright hardcore she had been. She helped a few of us earn computing merit badges one year, and I was the only one who cared at all. I think it was Zork that did it. But looking back, she had a 386 Thinkpad triple-booting UNIX, Dos, and OS/2. And she taught me the rudiments of BASIC.
To tell the truth, I didn't understand how hardcore a lot of my early programming was. Connecting via SLIP to the local university so I could "gopher" things...riding a bike to that university's library so I could do the same thing from a VT-100 (not that I knew what it was then) about a million times faster...that 2400->14,400 bps upgrade.
Man, those were really the bad old days. Thanks Mimi.
Thank God! I thought nobody was going to get it right. Somebody mod this one UP.
(well=adverb, good=adjective)
Fine, assclown (if we're going to delve into simple namecalling). Then the context was dropped when the parent of my post generalized further and said, "If Linux can't offer the same basic "features" as Windows it will never become mainstream." Go back and read that post; it is very clear he's talking in a more general term than tablet PC's. And that's the context in which I replied.
A better criterion, given the word itself,
I hope you\'re from Betelgeuse and not just dim.
Huh? Don't get me wrong, I recognize that I set that criteria, sort of. On the other hand, I didn't invalidate the second one I set just then; it's broader. I'm not sure what your point is, but it's not real well thought out.
And on this hilarity of your armchair character analysis, I really enjoy the irony. "Gee, you shouldn't even be replying to some AC like this." Don't forget who's the coward.
Oh, is that the criterion for Flamebait? Hi, Flamebait.
A better criterion, given the word itself, is something that provokes another to flame. In which case, I certainly can't deny your accuracy, insofar as you flamed me.
This is what's called a Straw Man. Since you couldn't address the AC's true point - that Linux lacks basic functionality on a Tablet PC - you reconstituted it in a form you could spew your canned arguments against.
Sorry, but you must have mixed up which post was the parent of my own. I went back and checked to make sure, but he's definitely talking about Linux vs. Windows in general (although a "desktop" bend is clearly assumed through the use of "the end user" diction) and I responded in kind. Piss off.
You're obviously an aggressive putz with an inferiority complex.
And I guess that means you've got a psych degree. Hehe...I'm not going to worry too much about my "inferiority complex" if I'm supposed to be feeling inferior to the likes of you.
Oh ya... and get a life!! Holy crap, did you seriously sit there and think up that huge list just to justify yourself to an AC?? Go drink something with alcohol in it for Christ's sake.
Damn. Busted. I've just been sitting here dicking around all day. Oh well. But at least I was drinking alcohol the whole time.
As you might have learned from Monty Python, simple denial will not suffice for an argument.
Right. But he wasn't making an argument. He was replying to me, and I had already made a logical and forthright one. He was just telling me to calm down because this guy was an idiot. I had already explained why he was an idiot.
Anyway, it doesn't much matter now. The post we're all talking about is labelled "funny," which I find reasonable. When I posted my reply, it wasn't even to that post, but one that complained about a (justified) flamebait rating and said the [joke|flamebait] had a "valid point." At the point when I replied to him, the post he had complained about was labelled "insightful."
Nice dropped context. Does it make a lot of sense on a Tablet PC, compared to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition? No? Then your comments are irrelevant blather.
Look, the context was dropped a long time ago, when we started talking about a car. And we're looking at pretty seriously prerelease stuff here. Nobody claimed this particular setup was ready for primetime.
The main difference is that someone that has a Mac computer and has only one computer can't run a windows game, so it's a lost sale... while most people that use linux and are even half interested in gaming at all at least dual boot into windows, so a linux version doesn't give extra buyers, while a mac version does.
Well, I guess I'm the exception. I do a bit of gaming, all in Linux native or WINE. But I recognize I'm giving up some...I quit being a hardcore gamer a long time ago (thank god). But you're probably right, that would impact the numbers pretty severely.
That's a really good point, if you only take it as far as the measurability problem. I still think it it's possible that we've got more Linux desktops out there in homes...less than 50% likely, maybe, but extremely hard to say, like you mentioned. Also, this bit about moving targets doesn't seem right to me...the Mac has switched up its whole system software in incompatible ways a whole lot of times.
But whatever. The basic point, that the Mac offers a known sales increase due to a known home market share while Linux doesn't, is good enough and true.
Er...I must have misread something...I thought you were talking about id? If you're talking about Epic, then, uh, nevermind.
Why is ID still the big exception? And why are they also the exception with regards to releasing older engines as open source code?
Well, I'll bet part of it is that point about how they swim around in money. But that's true for some of those other guys too...perhaps they are just cooler.
Also, this does not explain why other games that use (modified versions of) their engines are available on Linux also (sure, it is not expensive to do it once then engine can do it so it may again make commercial sense, but why are they the only ones doing this?)
Hmm...not sure I caught all that, but I think it really is that simple; the engine is made in such a way that if you program to it, your code happens to run in three places. I think most development teams just look at that and think "why the hell wouldn't we release it on all of them?" Obviously, for a team writing to a D3D engine, it's not as easy a call. Or maybe it is, but in the other direction.
As far as the Atheros/Broadcom situation goes, cant just one host it in a country...
Yes. That's a pretty good idea. The only trouble is that you'd still have to hack the hardware without help from the hardware manufacturer. Even if it wouldn't be illegal for the hardware manufacturer to participate (and I'd expect it would) it would certainly piss the FCC off something fierce, and that's not something a big hardware company is going to do just to make a few geeks really impressed.
Failing that, is there an open alternative to madwifi/ndiswrapper?
NDISWrapper is GPL. And the madwifi code other than the HAL is dual licensed BSD/GPL. But either way you are still dealing with a closed binary component; either the HAL or the Windows NDIS driver. So, as far as something sanctioned by the manufacturers go, I doubt you're going to see fully open drivers if it allows modifications to output power and the like. Either the limits will be set in hardware, or they'll keep at this HAL thing, or we'll just have to hunker down and reverse engineer everything like in the bad old days before all the hardware manufacturers were playing ball with Linux. Or the FCC could change its regulations. Hehehe.
So you're saying that Intel and Atheros are breaking the law?
No, I'm saying that open sourcing the drivers would be illegal. I also said that Atheros found ways to work around this problem. They used a binary, closed source hardware abstraction layer to conceal the parts of the code which legally could not be exposed. I don't know Intel's story, but either they have something in hardware that limits the device to FCC spec, or a HAL, or they are violating FCC regulations. I'd bet on the first two possibilities.
Linux has many times the architecture support, not "hardware support".
No, I meant what I said. If you total up all the hardware devices that work on any given version of Windows, and compare them to the total number that work on Linux, Windows will lose. The "any given version" makes it a bit trickier, but that's only in fairness, and might not be necessary anyway. WindowsXP doesn't work with a whole ton of parallel printers which work on Linux (and win95/98). Windows 95 won't hack usb. CE would presumably refuse to do all sorts of things. And acting like you can just ignore processors, chipsets, and the like is bullshit. Those are devices too. And you have to count all the crazy high end devices on IBM mainframes and whatnot that don't have Windows drivers. No, when you get right down to it, I might have to leave off the "many times" part of my statement (or maybe not, I dunno), but Linux clearly runs on a larger number of hardware devices than Windows.
Personally I've run Windows on Alpha (an old NT server), MIPS (a P/PC and H/PC device) and ARM processors (my PPC2002 Jornada). The SHx family is also supported. Perhaps you're just not familiar with the full line of Windows products.
Ok, that's a good point. But it doesn't help much. Sure, you can still run NT, if you're crazy. Or you can run CE (or whatever they call that these days) but lose the world in terms of functionality. But you can run standard, modern Linux on dozens of chips. Again, if you force Windows to stay within any given version of its system, it loses big chunks of compatibility every time. If you spec that it has to be a 2.6 kernel, Linux still has basically all its support.
Sure, just about anything with a floating point unit (and even a lot without) can be made to run Linux.
Hehe. Yeah, you'll need a floating point unit. I think you must be thinking of a paged memory management unit. ucLinux will run without one, but normal Linux won't.
In fact, I have to be careful to check compatibility of devices I'm interested in so I don't get an unpleasant surprise later.
First, it's a good idea to check compatibility on any system software purchase. The only reason you don't have to do this with Windows is that you buy the hardware with it already installed, so you're pretty much certain it's compatible. If you are going to buy a bunch of components to build a machine from scratch and you're installing XP on it, I suggest you check real quick to make sure they work with it. That's common sense.
That said, the Linux situation isn't nearly as bad as you make it out there. If you don't do any checking at all and either buy a box from dell/hp/etc., or pick up a white box or parts and assemble, the results you get with Linux compatibility are going to be just fine the vast majority of the time. Obviously, the wireless issue is an exception, but this is well-known, and there are great wireless chipsets that do work fine. Since wifi isn't typically built into motherboards (yet), you can choose your chipset easily when buying parts, or you can leave that option out of your dell purchase and pick it up seperate. It's about as big a concern as the advice I'd give a prospective upgrader to XP: "check and make sure your printer's going to work..." Not a big deal.
Now, there is another exception that I feel causes more trouble than wifi. Winmodems. I don't know all the story on making them work, because, like most of
Right, and the reason you exclude 3rd party software for Windows and not your Linux distro is...?
Because:
1)I don't have to buy and pay for it seperately from my system software.
2)There isn't really a line between 1st and 3rd party software in Linux anyway (i.e. bash is not written by the same folks who write the kernel).
3)I consider the "party" writing my software to be the OSS community, which pretty much writes all of it.
4)I get to install all the "3rd party" software from my package manager, which basically makes it part of the system.
Ok?
Well, if we're keeping score here, I know more Linux users (only counting desktop). But not by much. More importantly, the last halfway "real" data I saw was from one of those assclown paid thugs we call "research outfits." You know, IDC or something. But they said, IIRC, that more computers destined for desktop use shipped with Linux installed in 2003 than Macs.
Of course, I could be totally wrong. It might not have ben "in 2003" and instead been sales figures for one quarter or something. But what I remember clearly was that they were sales figures (which means the Mac numbers were right, and the Linux ones were horribly underrepresented), and that they were only counting the desktops.
Their priorities are in order - they spend their time and budget doing as well as they can making the game work on Windows, where 90% of their players are. Ports to minority OSs are a low priority issue in a tight-deadline industry.
Two things:
First, where did you get the idea that they spend their time and budjet on Windows? The only source I've read on the subject that I consider reliable was a Carmack .plan file in which he basically said that all the development was done totally cross-platform, only looking at each platform individually after the real work was done. And further, he said that out of the three target platforms (this was in Q3A days), they spent the most time making sure everything worked on the Mac.
Second, I agree that id's priorities are in order. But Phil's point might be the best...they have butt-tons of money, so they can pretty much afford to set their priorities however they want.
Well, yeah. But that just underscores the point that it makes a lot more sense for id to make sure they are cross-platform capable than anybody else. Those guys almost don't care whether they sell any games....the last time I looked, they made a couple orders of magnitude more money selling engines than games. People who are shopping for an engine to build a game on care slightly more than gamers themselves about technical merits like that.
Yeah, that's about right. It's just a straight-up direct access API, which has reasonable methods for accessing input, graphics, and sound.
One problem is that OpenGL (pre 2.0, haven't looked at that yet) is horrible to work with if you actually want to get stuff done.
Then dammit, use a real game API instead of just a graphics language. Might I suggest SDL?
(p.s. Sorry if I'm beating a dead SDL horse in this discussion...but seriously, this is the answer, and it just seems like no one is paying attention.)
What would drive the development of games on Linux is convincing the game manufacturers (e.g. Sony and its PS) to use Linux as the operating system...
You do realize that the PS2 does use Linux as the operating system, right?
Yeah, I'm a bit annoyed by that perception as well. However, the truth is they just aren't listing the right framework. I expect that if we just read all these comments and replaced each instance of "OpenGL" with "SDL" we'd have less complaining to do.
Yep. D3D and OpenGL both do more or less the same thing...
Not quite. D3D is a much fuller-featured development framework, rather than just a graphics description language. More like OpenGL+SDL.