Forcing game companies to compete with pirates who are effectively free to break all sorts of laws is a bad idea.
Unfortunately, it's inevitable. Piracy is pretty well unstoppable -- DRM does not work, legislation doesn't work, litigation doesn't work, and Internet filtering doesn't work. If any of these got to the point where they did work, the collateral damage would be unacceptable.
Fortunately, it's possible to compete with piracy -- as I explained, Valve does, pretty effectively.
I think that game companies should go hard after pirates, provided of course they have a damn lot better aim than the slipshod steamroller that is the RIAA.
I think that this would actually be just as counterproductive as DRM.
One of the reasons this is so harmful to the RIAA is that the biggest pirates are also the biggest music fans. If you can entice them into spending money, they'll spend a lot of it. If you instead piss them off by suing them into oblivion, you've probably lost them as a customer forever.
And note: It's completely irrelevant, at that point, whether or not it's accurate. The damage of suing your own customers is still the same.
Unless you have a super-strange, 1-in-a-million, freak configuration... like more than one monitor!
I have configured multiple monitors without resorting to the commandline.
The experience just sucks ass compared to an OS that can automatically detect and configure multiple monitors.
Ah. You must be an OS X fan, then, because I've never seen Windows do this.
I mean, it's correct on the technicality that nobody (or almost nobody) writes malware for Linux compared to Windows, but that doesn't make it safer by design.
Because a random EXE could very well be compromised. Either you could be visiting the wrong site, or it could be MITM'd, or any number of other things.
Software in a repository, however, is signed, and generally all downloaded from a trusted place. That doesn't mean it's impossible to get malware into a repository, but you do have to fool some rather paranoid people. It's roughly comparable to trying to inject malware into Windows Update.
Granted, at a certain "enterprise" level, you gain the ability to distribute at least some programs via WSUS -- though I have no idea how well it does with non-Microsoft software. But neither Microsoft nor Apple has made any significant effort to create a trusted package manager for third-party software -- unless you count the App Store, I suppose, which has its own problems.
GNOME isn't better, nor is KDE.
*sigh* Citation needed.
Personally, I use KDE. Here's one trivial example: I can bind keys to features I haven't seen on Windows or OS X -- for example, maximize horizontally or vertically (or both), pack a window in a given direction (I've mapped win+right to push the window to the right until it hits the edge of another window or the screen)... Even sloppy focus, the closest I could come on OS X was within Terminal.app, and it only applied to individual terminal windows, while Terminal.app had focus.
Where's the Linux killer-app for the desktop?
My point was that Linux people should be thinking about creating one.
Oh that'll bring the accountants and gamers running.
Bring the developers first. That's what happened with Firefox.
The saddest thing is that PowerShell *is* actually a new CLI, written from scratch, and it completely rocks.
The sadder thing is that even if PowerShell is the best CLI ever, it's tied to a platform for which many features are simply not accessible from a CLI.
I mean, look at the Linux world: it's perfectly acceptable and ok to change the C Standard Libraries, breaking dozens of applications in the process. On the other hand, do anything to BASH that would break a single obscure shell script written in 1976, and you'd get run out of town.
Really?
On my Ubuntu system,/bin/sh is not bash, it's dash. This broke many apps, at first, but most are now fixed. Granted, there will be obscure scripts tied to/bin/bash, but that doesn't prevent people from inventing other shells under other names, or even forking bash under a new name.
Look at all the backlash against Microsoft when they changed the Office interface for 2007.
Was it Linux people behind that backlash? I would think Linux people wouldn't really care what Office does, as they'd be using OpenOffice anyway.
It was *true* about 5 years ago. Long after all other consumer OSes were perfectly usable without touching the CLI.
About 8-10 years ago, I'd say. Regardless, it is not true now, and to drag it out makes you look about as educated as bashing Windows for running everything as admin. (Granted, there is still some fallout for that in old apps running on Vista, but it's no longer a fundamental architectural problem.)
If your windows machine gets infected and the attacker gets "root" access. Your Linux machines is also completely at risk.
That is true, but also (for the moment) extremely unlikely, and it can be avoidable.
For example: one solution is to install each on a separate hard drive. That makes it more difficult to share files between the two -- so put those on a network share, or on an external drive. Now, if you actually physically switch between the drives when rebooting, it is also physically impossible for Windows to touch the Linux filesystem -- it can just trash all the files that you've made shared.
Another solution: run one in a VM. Now, if the host OS gets compromised, you're hosed, but if the guest OS gets compromised, the host OS is fine.
The solution I used to use, on a laptop: Boot Linux off a USB thumb drive. Keep root and swap encrypted;/boot goes on that drive. Thus, Windows can scribble all over my Linux partition, but it can't do any sort of selective attack, nor can it gain any information -- it can just randomly corrupt it.
I don't let it bother me right now, though. I don't make much of a habit of letting my Windows machine get compromised, and I re-image it often. I also take solace in the fact that this kind of attack is currently theoretical, and there's even less incentive for someone to do this than there is for someone to try to attack Linux desktop machines. They'd probably have to be targeting me personally, and they'd still have to get lucky with a Windows vulnerability.
perhaps there should be more gradients between root and a normal desktop user.
The old solution was to use different users and groups for different things. A properly configured sudo helps -- you could have the 'mysql' user and group, under which the mysql process runs, and a 'mysql_admin' group, which is allowed to run a few mysql-related commands as root.
In fact, I think someone proved at one point that Unix permissions can do anything ACLs can, you just end up with a lot of groups.
I don't think, even in a modern distro, that there's too much stuff that requires root. I think the essential problem is that the user who owns the machine will be root. The only alternative is to give everyone an admin, or to have the person who set up the machine implement very complex sudo rules such that full root is denied, but things like updating the system and installing new packages are still allowed.
The way you head off that attitude is to, at the very least, provide as compelling an experience as the pirates.
For example: Until very recently, I pirated games, not because I didn't want to spend the money, but because I didn't have the time. Piracy simply gave me a better experience, even when you completely ignore the price.
And yes, once piracy is entrenched -- once you've made it easy to not feel bad about piracy, and actively driven large numbers of people to piracy (Spore was widely boycotted, yet was one of the most pirated games ever), there's a lot of those people it'll be difficult to get back.
But adding more DRM only vindicates the pirates (or their rationalization). It certainly isn't going to get you any paying customers back -- if it's "successful", many of them will simply switch to games which are more easily pirated. That's not more money for you, that's less free advertising.
This is one place you have to use the carrot, not the stick. Provide things that make people want to buy your product. I've seen it happen -- Steam, for example. We used to just set sv_lan 1 at LAN parties, thus allowing everyone to install Counter-Strike and play it in "offline mode" on the local server. But gradually, we started to shift towards pressuring people to just buy the game -- it's only $20, and that way, everyone has a proper steam ID, we can admin the server much more easily, we can hook it up to the Internet and allow random Internet gamers to join our LAN game...
Then we go home, and (finally!) the Friends List works, so I can just IM someone and invite them into a game. Add to that autoupdates, and as many installs as we want (just re-download the game)... factor in that most of the games are multiplayer, and most of their servers do hook into Steam to authenticate players, and it starts to make a lot of sense for people to just drop the $20 or so to buy a game.
Re:Lol.. fight piracy with hardware upgrades...
on
Piracy and the PSP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There is one advantage, though, especially in a small town:
I can do absolutely nothing about Lisco's current bandwidth cap, other than blog loudly. They know I'm not going to switch to Mediacom, and definitely not Iowa Telecom. No one else can really compete with their fiber network, partly because they have a government grant to do it.
However, if it was actually local to the town, and the town chose to be assholes about our Internet, all I really have to do is make enough of a fuss to get the rest of the town pissed off. That's not hard in a small town. March them all down to the town hall and demand to know why our tax dollars aren't being spent efficiently enough...
Maybe I'm being optimistic. Maybe things don't work that way in the real world. Or maybe the better solution would be to start laying some of our own fiber.
Apparently my motherboard has a super loud beep speaker attached, and Linux just loves making it go off for trivial stuff like typing too fast or clicking shutdown. Google informed me that inputrc was the place to mute it.
Odd. I believe I haven't seen my Ubuntu beep, well, ever...
For reference, a quick hack (that would work until next reboot) would be: sudo rmmod pcspkr
Then I noticed my monitor was running at the wrong resolution and refresh rate. I have a 1440x900 monitor, but Ubuntu decided to run it at 1920x1080, if I remember right. Distorted, blurry (it's an old VGA LCD), and in urgent need of fixing, so that was my second task.
Yes... this tends to happen less and less often these days. Worth mentioning, this also isn't quite comparable to Windows, in that if you buy a machine with Linux preinstalled, your resolution will be set properly, just as it is with Windows preinstalled.
Umm, now? Did OS X ever ship without bash? I know it became the default user shell in 2004, but I'm pretty sure it was installed by default from day one.
Fair enough.
Most don't want to resort to copy and pasting commands into the CLI and many fail at that because they don't understand the concepts involved so they do things like copy quotes or fail to recognize variables.
I'm talking about the few, rare instances where the commands are more useful than giving them GUI instructions with screenshots. Quotes can be managed by doing things like this:
apt-get update
rather than this:
"apt-get update"
But honestly, this is the kind of stuff which Windows would be forcing you to open the Registry for. I suppose there could be a case made for downloading a.reg file and running it, rather than copying and pasting shell commands, but still...
honestly, using Ubuntu I do have to use the CLI to perform certain tasks.
Which ones? File a bug!
Certainly Linux is ahead of the competition in several areas of OS design, but I don't think the UI is one of them.
There are places it sucks. There are places it's better than anything else.
A few examples of things Linux had first:
- TheDock (NextStep was before Gnustep, but WindowMaker was before OS X)
- program grouping in a taskbar (Windows does this now)
- virtual desktops (OS X has Spaces now)
- sloppy focus (does anything else have this yet?)
- the truly massive number of keyboard shortcuts kwin has -- name another system where I can map win+arrows to "push this window up against the nearest window in this direction, or the edge of the screen". Seriously, play with the "pack right/left/up/down" mappings to see what I mean -- on a large monitor, this is very useful.
Familiarity, ease of instruction from peers, application availability, applications designed and tested for usability for normal people, and commercial application ecosystem are big in my mind.
Of those, the only one that isn't directly related to massive marketshare is "designed and tested for usability by normal people". And while there is always room for improvement, I think it's fairly usable now, and there are things that I'm a bit addicted to -- see above comments about kwin.
My post above details 3 separate situations where it doesn't auto-elevate or prompt.
No it doesn't, unless "like OSX does" counts. Or quote yourself...
They're major GUI elements - the Desktop, Nautilus(in particular the/usr/share folder), and gedit on conf files like xorg.conf, inputrc, etc.
Nautilus would be nice, though it's difficult to think when a user would have to do that. A user really should never have to touch xorg.conf or inputrc directly -- and by the time they do, they know enough to alt+f2 and sudo it.
Dismissing is just sticking your head in the sand rather than fixing the issues.
Perhaps I should've read more carefully, but you really did not make it clear.
Before you harp "run wine or gimp" normal people don't know about wine, gimp, or why they should use it. They want to attach their iphone to their computer like Steve Jobs says they can with a Mac or Windows box.
Actually, I'd suggest that if they actually need Photoshop, they should use it. If not, they should use Gimp. And I'd suggest Amarok, but that's another matter...
What, exactly, do you suggest?
They don't care about FSF's definition of "free" or even "free as in beer" since they'll gladly throw cash at expensive gadgets and software sold by Apple, MS, and Adobe.
No, but they ma start to care when they actually want something Linux does well, or some software on Linux, and Windows won't do it.
This began with Firefox. At first it was a vocal minority, and there wasn't much change -- most websites would still be designed for IE, and many of them would look terrible in Firefox. And, as you predicted, people blamed Firefox. (Well, Mozilla at first, and then Firefox.)
The first thing that Firefox did right was the extension concept. In fact, Firefox was born out of the idea that Mozilla had a solid foundation, but too much crap built-in that could be done as an extension.
The real catalyst came with just a few of those extensions. Firebug made Firefox possibly the best browser to develop on -- very quickly, web developers started to prefer Firebug, and dislike Internet Explorer. Of course, to this day, few sites will actually be so bold as to refuse supporting IE, but similarly, few sites will not work on Firefox.
That was really a prerequisite to getting most users to even consider Firefox. Users don't like to even think about the browser, so asking them to run two -- Firefox for most things, and IE for that one last site -- is lunacy.
The other important extensions are Greasemonkey and the various blockers -- adblock, flashblock, noscript, etc. These are important in that they give the user a reason to love Firefox -- who wants to go back to the web before Adblock? These are features IE doesn't have, because there's no incentive -- why would Microsoft sabotage their own live.com ads?
It's worth noting: Firefox didn't have to add ActiveX support. (It's been added, but it's buggy enough that people use IE anyway.) There are still sites Firefox cannot be used for. Yet Firefox has forced IE back below 80% marketshare.
I see no reason Linux can't do the same thing. It will take longer, but it is possible. But constructive criticism will be useful here, because it's unlikely Linux will ever just run Photoshop, at least until Linux gains sufficient marketshare that Adobe targets it. (Not that this stopped them from porting the Flash player or Acrobat Reader...)
So, what does Linux do well now, or what is it that Windows and OS X really suck at that Linux could do?
They see, "click the wrong button and you're fucked." Except all the buttons are in Chinese. And they don't read Chinese.
That is about the first thing I try to cure most users of, on Linux or otherwise. Modern GUIs tend to say "Are you sure?" before you do anything drastic. And you don't need to understand anything except -- well, in that case, the word "appearance".
Not being able to speak Chinese (or techie) is one thing. Not being able to speak English (or whatever language the system is configured for), well, you're pretty fucked anyway.
If the nasty programs get root, you're already hosed.
So yes, this is interesting, but also completely irrelevant. On most systems, root can also
- modify libc, thus affecting every single dynamically-linked program on the system
- modify gcc, thus affecting any new programs downloaded/compiled from source
- modify tripwire (or whatever they're calling it now), thus hiding itself
- access/dev/mem, thus making attacks like this seem trivial
- rm -rf/, thus nuking the system
- dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda, thus nuking the system even more permanently
- access everyone's xauth, thus their X, thus easily keylogging and screenshotting, if it's a desktop
- access everyone's.ssh -- and if they have an unencrypted ssh key, thus accessing every machine they have access to! And you can find out which ones by looking at.ssh/known_hosts, and maybe.bash_history.
- kill any process (except zombied processes)
- access/tmp, or swap...
You get the idea.
There are various ideas to secure root (like selinux, etc), but it is still BAD for them to get root, and the best technique is still to prevent people from getting root in the first place.
The first time I set up a network laser printer, it went like this.
The first time? Really? You'd already discovered it?
I assure you that it was not this painless in Linux.
Checking this process on Linux, I see:
1) Click on Printers in the K-menu. 2) Click "New Printer". 3) Click "New Printer" inside. 4) Select protocol 5) Type in IP address 6) Select printer model 7) Done.
No need to download drivers, insert a CD, or anything like that.
This is actually a regression -- in KDE3, the "add printer" wizard included the ability to run a quick portscan of the local network, to see what's listening on the IPP port. Not the most elegant autodiscovery, but certainly reliable.
And consider, this is still not "all things being equal" -- manufacturers create their devices to work with Windows, and maybe with OS X. Few printer manufacturers target Linux -- more than none, but less than we'd like. Therefore, for the most part, the community has to write and maintain drivers and printer-specific utilities -- Microsoft doesn't.
I have. I wrote a post just above, which I'm sure will be modded as flamebait.
It should be. Both because you're playing the "poor me, my post will probably be modded unfairly" game (as a ploy to get sympathy modpoints), and because you clearly have not used a modern Ubuntu, when you make claims like this:
My biggest beef with linux is it doesn't prompt to elevate privs like OSX does. This is an incredible time sink if you're doing something for the first time.
Linux had sudo before OS X did, and OS X uses the exact same mechanism (sudo) that Linux does. Ubuntu has been using this for pretty much its entire history. Click anything that needs elevated privileges (in the GUI), and you'll be prompted. On the commandline, just add 'sudo' to the beginning of the command.
Contrast this to Windows -- pre-Vista, you already had elevated privileges, all the time. Post-Vista, you get prompted way more often than is needed -- for instance, sudo (on Linux) often caches that password for a few minutes -- thus if you close that screen, and re-open it, you aren't prompted again, so long as it's recently enough.
However, Linux has had this capability for longer than Sudo -- older GUI distributions, as far back as Redhat 5 or so (if I recall), would prompt you for the root password when you click anything that needs root. Newer ones (Ubuntu, Fedora) only differ in that they prompt you for your password, if you're an admin, and they don't set a root password.
Maybe there's a specific place where it doesn't prompt you -- in which case, file a bug. I haven't come across one yet.
Windows isn't very accommodating to the concept of meta-packages, so a user seeking to install, say, Battle for Wesnoth might get confused about all the packages with 'wesnoth' in the name.
I suppose. There is, however, exactly one program which simply says "wesnoth".
What I think is really missing right now is a way to expose the dependencies, at least as neatly as aptitude does. Right now, both Aptitude and Synaptic, when you install a package, show all the dependencies on the same level as the package itself in the list of changes you're about to apply -- and Synaptic doesn't seem to track reverse dependencies as neatly as aptitude.
I don't agree that the other options with "wesnoth" should be hidden. However, the one meta-package should be displayed very clearly as the top result, and as an application (ideally with an icon and everything), when you search for "wesnoth".
Altogether, though, I find that while Synaptic may be initially confusing, it is ultimately less confusing and difficult than trying to maintain a dozen different programs, each with their own system of updating themselves, many which instead require the user to re-download and reinstall.
To get Linux to work on the desktop Linux will have to make a 180 degree shift away from its current position, which I don't see happening. CLI will have to be all but abandoned, because no matter how easy a geek thinks CLI is 99% of the desktop users will NEVER use CLI and it is in fact a deal breaker.
What, by its existence? Windows has a CLI, too. It's called CMD -- there's a new one, too, called PowerShell. OS X even has Bash now. And people certainly used DOS when it was all that was there.
GUI interfaces, wizards, everything will have to be "clicky clicky" and the simple fact is most developers and IT guys HATE that.
It doesn't matter -- the two are not mutually exclusive. What I hate is when "clicky clicky" is the only option.
Have you ever fired up a modern distro, like Ubuntu? It is possible to use it without once opening up the commandline, except perhaps to copy and paste some commands -- and I think even people paranoid of the commandline know how to copy and paste.
Sadly the one company that I have seen really trying to make it work in a Windows based world, Xandros, with their buying of Click N' Run(which is a much nicer experience to a Windows user than Synaptic)
Could you be specific about what makes it better? I've always found Synaptic to be a better user experience, even for Windows People, because at the very least, it is safer than downloading random EXEs from the Internet.
gets flamed to the nine hells for having to deal with MSFT.
This is the Internet. Everyone gets flamed. For everything.
I'm going to say that Linux actually has a better GUI, in many respects, than its competition. Apple is a close enough second that I can see why people would prefer it, as a matter of taste. I really don't understand why people would prefer Windows, all other things being equal.
But they aren't. You identified the real problem, here:
MSFT rules the business and if your gear can't play nice with AD and Exchange you can give it up.
Exchange is just part of the massive lock-in that Windows generates -- all the things that have been built on the Windows platform over-the-years. Accountants are on Windows because of Quickbooks. Graphic designers are on Windows because of Photoshop. Gamers are on Windows because of Half-Life 2 -- I mean, Crysis -- I mean, Bioshock 2 -- insert game of the week here.
Linux has to be better than Windows in many ways before someone is willing to switch. And emulating Windows (better AD integration, for example) is important, but not nearly as important as developing the things that truly differentiate us.
And yes, one of those is the CLI. And yes, it is under active development -- just a month ago or so, I installed a set of scripts which adds a git status into my command prompt. Just yesterday, I wrote a new alias for a common (longer) command I often run.
But it has to be one of the oldest bits of FUD that you somehow can't use Linux without using the commandline, or that a UNIX commandline somehow precludes a decent GUI. The existence of OS X pretty much invalidates your whole argument.
I didn't know every computer ever made came with the flash plugin installed...
Just about every new computer shipped seems to. It's certainly there on Windows and Internet Explorer, and on OS X and Safari. I believe it may need to be installed for Firefox on Windows, though.
I'm sure it's not something that's supposed to be allowed everywhere.
Maybe not. I certainly don't like Flash -- but many of the reasons I don't like Flash don't seem applicable here. The big one: Flash is proprietary.
in which you compared CPU usage of viewing a streaming youtube video to viewing an.flv file locally. This is, indeed, comparing apples to oranges. The likely difference is in both streaming processing + player optimization.
It is comparing apples to apples, in terms of functionality, unless your assumption is that streaming a video should increase the CPU usage by two orders of magnitude. And this test, I have done fairly recently.
The test that I did several years ago was comparing a vector video (not an FLV) to a game.
My statement about HD video (when used in context) is actually explaining that your statement about how video games run in comparison to how a video runs is comparing apples to oranges.
Again: One test was comparing a vector video to a game. The other was comparing an actual video to the same video in a different player.
Render that 2d vector animation using a graphics card and see how well it runs (see how it takes 0 CPU, cuz it's on the GPU lawl,
Well, and how it runs faster, yes.
What's your point? Mine is that the fact that Flash can't offload a simple vector animation to the video card -- or at least, couldn't when I did that -- is an incredibly stupid decision on the part of flash. Even now, it's fairly limited how much it can do.
A lot of the arguments people have regarding implementation, such as memory leaks and high CPU usage, will be a non-issue for what this article is talking about. It'll be an optimized implementation, it's a closed box, it's a piece of hardware that uses flash probably to provide out of the box support for streaming internet content.
I suppose, if the fact that it's a closed box (and proprietary) is a "non-issue". I see no good reason why they couldn't use open technologies for this product.
However: If it's truly such an optimized implementation, yet still compatible with existing Flash, why does the desktop player still suck so much? If it's an optimized implementation that is not backwards-compatible, what's the advantage of using Flash again? If it's just throwing hardware at the problem, that seems like a waste.
lol, that video hovered around 5% or less for the duration, not sure what kind of processor you're using.
2.5 ghz Core2 Duo.
Guessing you're on Windows -- it would measure 5% there. Here, I'm looking at percentage of a core.
Youtube goes up to 20% at full screen, 10% or less in windowed.
It was certainly more than this for me when I last bothered to measure. And that's Youtube -- it gets a lot worse than that for others.
That's really not bad at all for full screen video rendering buddy (plus any additional processing that's being done for streaming content).
Streaming content -- I don't know that I've seen wget ever go above 1%. "Not bad" -- unless you bother to compare it to others, which tend to use many times less power.
Try running any format of HD video locally and see how much CPU time it takes. It'll max out most processors
Try comparing apples to apples. Playing an HD video locally takes a lot of CPU, and playing an HD video in Flash takes even more. Playing a crappy little Youtube-sized video locally -- for that matter the exact same FLV from Youtube -- ends up being something like fifty to a hundred times faster.
Running a game is entirely different than running a video, since a game is optimized for use on a graphics card.
In other words, Flash isn't optimized?
More relevantly, you're talking about that albinoblacksheep "video", which is not of the lossily-compressed format we use for raster video -- it's a vectorized video.
Guess what else is vector graphics? That's right, modern video games.
There's no reason Adobe couldn't have optimized this from the beginning to be hardware accelerated. Instead, we're talking about a 2D vector animation of really crappy quality being slower than a 3D vector animation of amazing quality.
I'm sure Adobe can improve on the way their video rendering, but this has nothing to do with the FILE STANDARD, which is what we're talking about here.
The license they've released those "standards" on is absurdly restrictive. And frankly, your assertion that it's a "standard" is questionable when there's exactly one viable implementation -- Silverlight is closer to being a standard, in any meaningful sense of the word beyond "defacto".
I often multi-task when I game. Alt+tab out to use programs. Browse some sites while the match is warming up, etc.
I suppose it depends to what extent, and which games. For example, I do have Firefox on my Windows partition...
I don't think WINE could keep up.
Again, depends very much which games. WoW is reported to play very well. I play a different MMO...
Wine is slow under certain circumstances. It is also occasionally faster. You cannot know which without having a specific game in mind.
The games I might actually play for long periods of time, and need to multitask out of, I get for Wine. If there's something good for Windows that I can stand playing for 2-3 hours and doing nothing else, I do that -- again, pretty much like a console.
And for everything else, well, gaming is a hobby, not a profession. And there are still enough games that are worth playing that fit the above criteria -- in fact, there are enough that play on Linux that I don't often boot Windows anyway, more like once a week or so.
Put it another way: You may be able to play all the decent open source games for Linux. You cannot play all the games that work under Wine -- that would be like trying to read every book in the library. What matters is whether the particular game you want to play works -- or whether you can find one that works that you want to play.
I don't have the spare parts to fuck around and try out Linux anyway so it's a moot point.
Slashdot Mirror
Forcing game companies to compete with pirates who are effectively free to break all sorts of laws is a bad idea.
Unfortunately, it's inevitable. Piracy is pretty well unstoppable -- DRM does not work, legislation doesn't work, litigation doesn't work, and Internet filtering doesn't work. If any of these got to the point where they did work, the collateral damage would be unacceptable.
Fortunately, it's possible to compete with piracy -- as I explained, Valve does, pretty effectively.
I think that game companies should go hard after pirates, provided of course they have a damn lot better aim than the slipshod steamroller that is the RIAA.
I think that this would actually be just as counterproductive as DRM.
One of the reasons this is so harmful to the RIAA is that the biggest pirates are also the biggest music fans. If you can entice them into spending money, they'll spend a lot of it. If you instead piss them off by suing them into oblivion, you've probably lost them as a customer forever.
And note: It's completely irrelevant, at that point, whether or not it's accurate. The damage of suing your own customers is still the same.
Huh. It's possible either I've already disabled it, or my laptop doesn't have the PC speaker enabled.
Unless you have a super-strange, 1-in-a-million, freak configuration... like more than one monitor!
I have configured multiple monitors without resorting to the commandline.
The experience just sucks ass compared to an OS that can automatically detect and configure multiple monitors.
Ah. You must be an OS X fan, then, because I've never seen Windows do this.
I mean, it's correct on the technicality that nobody (or almost nobody) writes malware for Linux compared to Windows, but that doesn't make it safer by design.
Because a random EXE could very well be compromised. Either you could be visiting the wrong site, or it could be MITM'd, or any number of other things.
Software in a repository, however, is signed, and generally all downloaded from a trusted place. That doesn't mean it's impossible to get malware into a repository, but you do have to fool some rather paranoid people. It's roughly comparable to trying to inject malware into Windows Update.
Granted, at a certain "enterprise" level, you gain the ability to distribute at least some programs via WSUS -- though I have no idea how well it does with non-Microsoft software. But neither Microsoft nor Apple has made any significant effort to create a trusted package manager for third-party software -- unless you count the App Store, I suppose, which has its own problems.
GNOME isn't better, nor is KDE.
*sigh* Citation needed.
Personally, I use KDE. Here's one trivial example: I can bind keys to features I haven't seen on Windows or OS X -- for example, maximize horizontally or vertically (or both), pack a window in a given direction (I've mapped win+right to push the window to the right until it hits the edge of another window or the screen)... Even sloppy focus, the closest I could come on OS X was within Terminal.app, and it only applied to individual terminal windows, while Terminal.app had focus.
Where's the Linux killer-app for the desktop?
My point was that Linux people should be thinking about creating one.
Oh that'll bring the accountants and gamers running.
Bring the developers first. That's what happened with Firefox.
The saddest thing is that PowerShell *is* actually a new CLI, written from scratch, and it completely rocks.
The sadder thing is that even if PowerShell is the best CLI ever, it's tied to a platform for which many features are simply not accessible from a CLI.
I mean, look at the Linux world: it's perfectly acceptable and ok to change the C Standard Libraries, breaking dozens of applications in the process. On the other hand, do anything to BASH that would break a single obscure shell script written in 1976, and you'd get run out of town.
Really?
On my Ubuntu system, /bin/sh is not bash, it's dash. This broke many apps, at first, but most are now fixed. Granted, there will be obscure scripts tied to /bin/bash, but that doesn't prevent people from inventing other shells under other names, or even forking bash under a new name.
Look at all the backlash against Microsoft when they changed the Office interface for 2007.
Was it Linux people behind that backlash? I would think Linux people wouldn't really care what Office does, as they'd be using OpenOffice anyway.
It was *true* about 5 years ago. Long after all other consumer OSes were perfectly usable without touching the CLI.
About 8-10 years ago, I'd say. Regardless, it is not true now, and to drag it out makes you look about as educated as bashing Windows for running everything as admin. (Granted, there is still some fallout for that in old apps running on Vista, but it's no longer a fundamental architectural problem.)
If your windows machine gets infected and the attacker gets "root" access. Your Linux machines is also completely at risk.
That is true, but also (for the moment) extremely unlikely, and it can be avoidable.
For example: one solution is to install each on a separate hard drive. That makes it more difficult to share files between the two -- so put those on a network share, or on an external drive. Now, if you actually physically switch between the drives when rebooting, it is also physically impossible for Windows to touch the Linux filesystem -- it can just trash all the files that you've made shared.
Another solution: run one in a VM. Now, if the host OS gets compromised, you're hosed, but if the guest OS gets compromised, the host OS is fine.
The solution I used to use, on a laptop: Boot Linux off a USB thumb drive. Keep root and swap encrypted; /boot goes on that drive. Thus, Windows can scribble all over my Linux partition, but it can't do any sort of selective attack, nor can it gain any information -- it can just randomly corrupt it.
I don't let it bother me right now, though. I don't make much of a habit of letting my Windows machine get compromised, and I re-image it often. I also take solace in the fact that this kind of attack is currently theoretical, and there's even less incentive for someone to do this than there is for someone to try to attack Linux desktop machines. They'd probably have to be targeting me personally, and they'd still have to get lucky with a Windows vulnerability.
perhaps there should be more gradients between root and a normal desktop user.
The old solution was to use different users and groups for different things. A properly configured sudo helps -- you could have the 'mysql' user and group, under which the mysql process runs, and a 'mysql_admin' group, which is allowed to run a few mysql-related commands as root.
In fact, I think someone proved at one point that Unix permissions can do anything ACLs can, you just end up with a lot of groups.
I don't think, even in a modern distro, that there's too much stuff that requires root. I think the essential problem is that the user who owns the machine will be root. The only alternative is to give everyone an admin, or to have the person who set up the machine implement very complex sudo rules such that full root is denied, but things like updating the system and installing new packages are still allowed.
The way you head off that attitude is to, at the very least, provide as compelling an experience as the pirates.
For example: Until very recently, I pirated games, not because I didn't want to spend the money, but because I didn't have the time. Piracy simply gave me a better experience, even when you completely ignore the price.
And yes, once piracy is entrenched -- once you've made it easy to not feel bad about piracy, and actively driven large numbers of people to piracy (Spore was widely boycotted, yet was one of the most pirated games ever), there's a lot of those people it'll be difficult to get back.
But adding more DRM only vindicates the pirates (or their rationalization). It certainly isn't going to get you any paying customers back -- if it's "successful", many of them will simply switch to games which are more easily pirated. That's not more money for you, that's less free advertising.
This is one place you have to use the carrot, not the stick. Provide things that make people want to buy your product. I've seen it happen -- Steam, for example. We used to just set sv_lan 1 at LAN parties, thus allowing everyone to install Counter-Strike and play it in "offline mode" on the local server. But gradually, we started to shift towards pressuring people to just buy the game -- it's only $20, and that way, everyone has a proper steam ID, we can admin the server much more easily, we can hook it up to the Internet and allow random Internet gamers to join our LAN game...
Then we go home, and (finally!) the Friends List works, so I can just IM someone and invite them into a game. Add to that autoupdates, and as many installs as we want (just re-download the game)... factor in that most of the games are multiplayer, and most of their servers do hook into Steam to authenticate players, and it starts to make a lot of sense for people to just drop the $20 or so to buy a game.
That's what Profanity Blacklist is for.
Spinning optical discs + portable player = disaster.
Does anyone know if there's a way, beyond piracy, to play a PSP game off a flash card of some sort?
There is one advantage, though, especially in a small town:
I can do absolutely nothing about Lisco's current bandwidth cap, other than blog loudly. They know I'm not going to switch to Mediacom, and definitely not Iowa Telecom. No one else can really compete with their fiber network, partly because they have a government grant to do it.
However, if it was actually local to the town, and the town chose to be assholes about our Internet, all I really have to do is make enough of a fuss to get the rest of the town pissed off. That's not hard in a small town. March them all down to the town hall and demand to know why our tax dollars aren't being spent efficiently enough...
Maybe I'm being optimistic. Maybe things don't work that way in the real world. Or maybe the better solution would be to start laying some of our own fiber.
Apparently my motherboard has a super loud beep speaker attached, and Linux just loves making it go off for trivial stuff like typing too fast or clicking shutdown. Google informed me that inputrc was the place to mute it.
Odd. I believe I haven't seen my Ubuntu beep, well, ever...
For reference, a quick hack (that would work until next reboot) would be: sudo rmmod pcspkr
Then I noticed my monitor was running at the wrong resolution and refresh rate. I have a 1440x900 monitor, but Ubuntu decided to run it at 1920x1080, if I remember right. Distorted, blurry (it's an old VGA LCD), and in urgent need of fixing, so that was my second task.
Yes... this tends to happen less and less often these days. Worth mentioning, this also isn't quite comparable to Windows, in that if you buy a machine with Linux preinstalled, your resolution will be set properly, just as it is with Windows preinstalled.
Exploits that escape virtualization are the next wave of nasty.
I suppose. Does this?
Umm, now? Did OS X ever ship without bash? I know it became the default user shell in 2004, but I'm pretty sure it was installed by default from day one.
Fair enough.
Most don't want to resort to copy and pasting commands into the CLI and many fail at that because they don't understand the concepts involved so they do things like copy quotes or fail to recognize variables.
I'm talking about the few, rare instances where the commands are more useful than giving them GUI instructions with screenshots. Quotes can be managed by doing things like this:
apt-get update
rather than this:
"apt-get update"
But honestly, this is the kind of stuff which Windows would be forcing you to open the Registry for. I suppose there could be a case made for downloading a .reg file and running it, rather than copying and pasting shell commands, but still...
honestly, using Ubuntu I do have to use the CLI to perform certain tasks.
Which ones? File a bug!
Certainly Linux is ahead of the competition in several areas of OS design, but I don't think the UI is one of them.
There are places it sucks. There are places it's better than anything else.
A few examples of things Linux had first:
- TheDock (NextStep was before Gnustep, but WindowMaker was before OS X)
- program grouping in a taskbar (Windows does this now)
- virtual desktops (OS X has Spaces now)
- sloppy focus (does anything else have this yet?)
- the truly massive number of keyboard shortcuts kwin has -- name another system where I can map win+arrows to "push this window up against the nearest window in this direction, or the edge of the screen". Seriously, play with the "pack right/left/up/down" mappings to see what I mean -- on a large monitor, this is very useful.
Familiarity, ease of instruction from peers, application availability, applications designed and tested for usability for normal people, and commercial application ecosystem are big in my mind.
Of those, the only one that isn't directly related to massive marketshare is "designed and tested for usability by normal people". And while there is always room for improvement, I think it's fairly usable now, and there are things that I'm a bit addicted to -- see above comments about kwin.
My post above details 3 separate situations where it doesn't auto-elevate or prompt.
No it doesn't, unless "like OSX does" counts. Or quote yourself...
They're major GUI elements - the Desktop, Nautilus(in particular the /usr/share folder), and gedit on conf files like xorg.conf, inputrc, etc.
Nautilus would be nice, though it's difficult to think when a user would have to do that. A user really should never have to touch xorg.conf or inputrc directly -- and by the time they do, they know enough to alt+f2 and sudo it.
Dismissing is just sticking your head in the sand rather than fixing the issues.
Perhaps I should've read more carefully, but you really did not make it clear.
Before you harp "run wine or gimp" normal people don't know about wine, gimp, or why they should use it. They want to attach their iphone to their computer like Steve Jobs says they can with a Mac or Windows box.
Actually, I'd suggest that if they actually need Photoshop, they should use it. If not, they should use Gimp. And I'd suggest Amarok, but that's another matter...
What, exactly, do you suggest?
They don't care about FSF's definition of "free" or even "free as in beer" since they'll gladly throw cash at expensive gadgets and software sold by Apple, MS, and Adobe.
No, but they ma start to care when they actually want something Linux does well, or some software on Linux, and Windows won't do it.
This began with Firefox. At first it was a vocal minority, and there wasn't much change -- most websites would still be designed for IE, and many of them would look terrible in Firefox. And, as you predicted, people blamed Firefox. (Well, Mozilla at first, and then Firefox.)
The first thing that Firefox did right was the extension concept. In fact, Firefox was born out of the idea that Mozilla had a solid foundation, but too much crap built-in that could be done as an extension.
The real catalyst came with just a few of those extensions. Firebug made Firefox possibly the best browser to develop on -- very quickly, web developers started to prefer Firebug, and dislike Internet Explorer. Of course, to this day, few sites will actually be so bold as to refuse supporting IE, but similarly, few sites will not work on Firefox.
That was really a prerequisite to getting most users to even consider Firefox. Users don't like to even think about the browser, so asking them to run two -- Firefox for most things, and IE for that one last site -- is lunacy.
The other important extensions are Greasemonkey and the various blockers -- adblock, flashblock, noscript, etc. These are important in that they give the user a reason to love Firefox -- who wants to go back to the web before Adblock? These are features IE doesn't have, because there's no incentive -- why would Microsoft sabotage their own live.com ads?
It's worth noting: Firefox didn't have to add ActiveX support. (It's been added, but it's buggy enough that people use IE anyway.) There are still sites Firefox cannot be used for. Yet Firefox has forced IE back below 80% marketshare.
I see no reason Linux can't do the same thing. It will take longer, but it is possible. But constructive criticism will be useful here, because it's unlikely Linux will ever just run Photoshop, at least until Linux gains sufficient marketshare that Adobe targets it. (Not that this stopped them from porting the Flash player or Acrobat Reader...)
So, what does Linux do well now, or what is it that Windows and OS X really suck at that Linux could do?
They see, "click the wrong button and you're fucked." Except all the buttons are in Chinese. And they don't read Chinese.
That is about the first thing I try to cure most users of, on Linux or otherwise. Modern GUIs tend to say "Are you sure?" before you do anything drastic. And you don't need to understand anything except -- well, in that case, the word "appearance".
Not being able to speak Chinese (or techie) is one thing. Not being able to speak English (or whatever language the system is configured for), well, you're pretty fucked anyway.
If the nasty programs get root, you're already hosed.
So yes, this is interesting, but also completely irrelevant. On most systems, root can also
- modify libc, thus affecting every single dynamically-linked program on the system /dev/mem, thus making attacks like this seem trivial /, thus nuking the system .ssh -- and if they have an unencrypted ssh key, thus accessing every machine they have access to! And you can find out which ones by looking at .ssh/known_hosts, and maybe .bash_history. /tmp, or swap...
- modify gcc, thus affecting any new programs downloaded/compiled from source
- modify tripwire (or whatever they're calling it now), thus hiding itself
- access
- rm -rf
- dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda, thus nuking the system even more permanently
- access everyone's xauth, thus their X, thus easily keylogging and screenshotting, if it's a desktop
- access everyone's
- kill any process (except zombied processes)
- access
You get the idea.
There are various ideas to secure root (like selinux, etc), but it is still BAD for them to get root, and the best technique is still to prevent people from getting root in the first place.
The first time I set up a network laser printer, it went like this.
The first time? Really? You'd already discovered it?
I assure you that it was not this painless in Linux.
Checking this process on Linux, I see:
1) Click on Printers in the K-menu.
2) Click "New Printer".
3) Click "New Printer" inside.
4) Select protocol
5) Type in IP address
6) Select printer model
7) Done.
No need to download drivers, insert a CD, or anything like that.
This is actually a regression -- in KDE3, the "add printer" wizard included the ability to run a quick portscan of the local network, to see what's listening on the IPP port. Not the most elegant autodiscovery, but certainly reliable.
And consider, this is still not "all things being equal" -- manufacturers create their devices to work with Windows, and maybe with OS X. Few printer manufacturers target Linux -- more than none, but less than we'd like. Therefore, for the most part, the community has to write and maintain drivers and printer-specific utilities -- Microsoft doesn't.
I have. I wrote a post just above, which I'm sure will be modded as flamebait.
It should be. Both because you're playing the "poor me, my post will probably be modded unfairly" game (as a ploy to get sympathy modpoints), and because you clearly have not used a modern Ubuntu, when you make claims like this:
My biggest beef with linux is it doesn't prompt to elevate privs like OSX does. This is an incredible time sink if you're doing something for the first time.
Linux had sudo before OS X did, and OS X uses the exact same mechanism (sudo) that Linux does. Ubuntu has been using this for pretty much its entire history. Click anything that needs elevated privileges (in the GUI), and you'll be prompted. On the commandline, just add 'sudo' to the beginning of the command.
Contrast this to Windows -- pre-Vista, you already had elevated privileges, all the time. Post-Vista, you get prompted way more often than is needed -- for instance, sudo (on Linux) often caches that password for a few minutes -- thus if you close that screen, and re-open it, you aren't prompted again, so long as it's recently enough.
However, Linux has had this capability for longer than Sudo -- older GUI distributions, as far back as Redhat 5 or so (if I recall), would prompt you for the root password when you click anything that needs root. Newer ones (Ubuntu, Fedora) only differ in that they prompt you for your password, if you're an admin, and they don't set a root password.
Maybe there's a specific place where it doesn't prompt you -- in which case, file a bug. I haven't come across one yet.
Windows isn't very accommodating to the concept of meta-packages, so a user seeking to install, say, Battle for Wesnoth might get confused about all the packages with 'wesnoth' in the name.
I suppose. There is, however, exactly one program which simply says "wesnoth".
What I think is really missing right now is a way to expose the dependencies, at least as neatly as aptitude does. Right now, both Aptitude and Synaptic, when you install a package, show all the dependencies on the same level as the package itself in the list of changes you're about to apply -- and Synaptic doesn't seem to track reverse dependencies as neatly as aptitude.
I don't agree that the other options with "wesnoth" should be hidden. However, the one meta-package should be displayed very clearly as the top result, and as an application (ideally with an icon and everything), when you search for "wesnoth".
Altogether, though, I find that while Synaptic may be initially confusing, it is ultimately less confusing and difficult than trying to maintain a dozen different programs, each with their own system of updating themselves, many which instead require the user to re-download and reinstall.
To get Linux to work on the desktop Linux will have to make a 180 degree shift away from its current position, which I don't see happening. CLI will have to be all but abandoned, because no matter how easy a geek thinks CLI is 99% of the desktop users will NEVER use CLI and it is in fact a deal breaker.
What, by its existence? Windows has a CLI, too. It's called CMD -- there's a new one, too, called PowerShell. OS X even has Bash now. And people certainly used DOS when it was all that was there.
GUI interfaces, wizards, everything will have to be "clicky clicky" and the simple fact is most developers and IT guys HATE that.
It doesn't matter -- the two are not mutually exclusive. What I hate is when "clicky clicky" is the only option.
Have you ever fired up a modern distro, like Ubuntu? It is possible to use it without once opening up the commandline, except perhaps to copy and paste some commands -- and I think even people paranoid of the commandline know how to copy and paste.
Sadly the one company that I have seen really trying to make it work in a Windows based world, Xandros, with their buying of Click N' Run(which is a much nicer experience to a Windows user than Synaptic)
Could you be specific about what makes it better? I've always found Synaptic to be a better user experience, even for Windows People, because at the very least, it is safer than downloading random EXEs from the Internet.
gets flamed to the nine hells for having to deal with MSFT.
This is the Internet. Everyone gets flamed. For everything.
I'm going to say that Linux actually has a better GUI, in many respects, than its competition. Apple is a close enough second that I can see why people would prefer it, as a matter of taste. I really don't understand why people would prefer Windows, all other things being equal.
But they aren't. You identified the real problem, here:
MSFT rules the business and if your gear can't play nice with AD and Exchange you can give it up.
Exchange is just part of the massive lock-in that Windows generates -- all the things that have been built on the Windows platform over-the-years. Accountants are on Windows because of Quickbooks. Graphic designers are on Windows because of Photoshop. Gamers are on Windows because of Half-Life 2 -- I mean, Crysis -- I mean, Bioshock 2 -- insert game of the week here.
Linux has to be better than Windows in many ways before someone is willing to switch. And emulating Windows (better AD integration, for example) is important, but not nearly as important as developing the things that truly differentiate us.
And yes, one of those is the CLI. And yes, it is under active development -- just a month ago or so, I installed a set of scripts which adds a git status into my command prompt. Just yesterday, I wrote a new alias for a common (longer) command I often run.
But it has to be one of the oldest bits of FUD that you somehow can't use Linux without using the commandline, or that a UNIX commandline somehow precludes a decent GUI. The existence of OS X pretty much invalidates your whole argument.
I didn't know every computer ever made came with the flash plugin installed...
Just about every new computer shipped seems to. It's certainly there on Windows and Internet Explorer, and on OS X and Safari. I believe it may need to be installed for Firefox on Windows, though.
I'm sure it's not something that's supposed to be allowed everywhere.
Maybe not. I certainly don't like Flash -- but many of the reasons I don't like Flash don't seem applicable here. The big one: Flash is proprietary.
in which you compared CPU usage of viewing a streaming youtube video to viewing an .flv file locally. This is, indeed, comparing apples to oranges. The likely difference is in both streaming processing + player optimization.
It is comparing apples to apples, in terms of functionality, unless your assumption is that streaming a video should increase the CPU usage by two orders of magnitude. And this test, I have done fairly recently.
The test that I did several years ago was comparing a vector video (not an FLV) to a game.
My statement about HD video (when used in context) is actually explaining that your statement about how video games run in comparison to how a video runs is comparing apples to oranges.
Again: One test was comparing a vector video to a game. The other was comparing an actual video to the same video in a different player.
Render that 2d vector animation using a graphics card and see how well it runs (see how it takes 0 CPU, cuz it's on the GPU lawl,
Well, and how it runs faster, yes.
What's your point? Mine is that the fact that Flash can't offload a simple vector animation to the video card -- or at least, couldn't when I did that -- is an incredibly stupid decision on the part of flash. Even now, it's fairly limited how much it can do.
A lot of the arguments people have regarding implementation, such as memory leaks and high CPU usage, will be a non-issue for what this article is talking about. It'll be an optimized implementation, it's a closed box, it's a piece of hardware that uses flash probably to provide out of the box support for streaming internet content.
I suppose, if the fact that it's a closed box (and proprietary) is a "non-issue". I see no good reason why they couldn't use open technologies for this product.
However: If it's truly such an optimized implementation, yet still compatible with existing Flash, why does the desktop player still suck so much? If it's an optimized implementation that is not backwards-compatible, what's the advantage of using Flash again? If it's just throwing hardware at the problem, that seems like a waste.
lol, that video hovered around 5% or less for the duration, not sure what kind of processor you're using.
2.5 ghz Core2 Duo.
Guessing you're on Windows -- it would measure 5% there. Here, I'm looking at percentage of a core.
Youtube goes up to 20% at full screen, 10% or less in windowed.
It was certainly more than this for me when I last bothered to measure. And that's Youtube -- it gets a lot worse than that for others.
That's really not bad at all for full screen video rendering buddy (plus any additional processing that's being done for streaming content).
Streaming content -- I don't know that I've seen wget ever go above 1%. "Not bad" -- unless you bother to compare it to others, which tend to use many times less power.
Try running any format of HD video locally and see how much CPU time it takes. It'll max out most processors
Try comparing apples to apples. Playing an HD video locally takes a lot of CPU, and playing an HD video in Flash takes even more. Playing a crappy little Youtube-sized video locally -- for that matter the exact same FLV from Youtube -- ends up being something like fifty to a hundred times faster.
Running a game is entirely different than running a video, since a game is optimized for use on a graphics card.
In other words, Flash isn't optimized?
More relevantly, you're talking about that albinoblacksheep "video", which is not of the lossily-compressed format we use for raster video -- it's a vectorized video.
Guess what else is vector graphics? That's right, modern video games.
There's no reason Adobe couldn't have optimized this from the beginning to be hardware accelerated. Instead, we're talking about a 2D vector animation of really crappy quality being slower than a 3D vector animation of amazing quality.
I'm sure Adobe can improve on the way their video rendering, but this has nothing to do with the FILE STANDARD, which is what we're talking about here.
The license they've released those "standards" on is absurdly restrictive. And frankly, your assertion that it's a "standard" is questionable when there's exactly one viable implementation -- Silverlight is closer to being a standard, in any meaningful sense of the word beyond "defacto".
I often multi-task when I game. Alt+tab out to use programs. Browse some sites while the match is warming up, etc.
I suppose it depends to what extent, and which games. For example, I do have Firefox on my Windows partition...
I don't think WINE could keep up.
Again, depends very much which games. WoW is reported to play very well. I play a different MMO...
Wine is slow under certain circumstances. It is also occasionally faster. You cannot know which without having a specific game in mind.
The games I might actually play for long periods of time, and need to multitask out of, I get for Wine. If there's something good for Windows that I can stand playing for 2-3 hours and doing nothing else, I do that -- again, pretty much like a console.
And for everything else, well, gaming is a hobby, not a profession. And there are still enough games that are worth playing that fit the above criteria -- in fact, there are enough that play on Linux that I don't often boot Windows anyway, more like once a week or so.
Put it another way: You may be able to play all the decent open source games for Linux. You cannot play all the games that work under Wine -- that would be like trying to read every book in the library. What matters is whether the particular game you want to play works -- or whether you can find one that works that you want to play.
I don't have the spare parts to fuck around and try out Linux anyway so it's a moot point.
You don't have spare disk space?
And if/when Apple ever falls through, despite those huge dollars?
the most grotesque sexual fetish anyone has ever come up with
This is the Internet. I'm fairly sure I could destroy that in about 3 seconds on /b/, but I just ate.
Sounds interesting, though. I may have to check these out.