Developers, yes. Middleware means you can and will have ports to all consoles.
But users still have the choice between the Xbox 360 for its exclusives, the PS3 for its raw power (unless the 360 is enough), or the Wii for the Wiimote. And once they have one of these, they lose all the benefits of any of the others. Were they to switch, they'd still have games that only work on one.
So, simplest example: Say you buy an Xbox 360 and a Wii, which seems the sanest choice (vs a PS3, which might still cost as much as both). Now, when you see a new game that's out for both, do you buy it for the 360 (superior graphics), or the Wii (cool controls)? Even if you bought both, which do you play, since you can't port savegames?
Why should you have to choose?
Had consoles died, say, five years ago, the Wiimote might exist anyway, but it'd be a PC peripheral. That would mean you could develop a game that'd be both -- it would demand the very highest performance, and a Wiimote. Or you could ship exactly the same game, and have it use a Wiimote if available, and a mouse if not.
I'm not saying I want consoles to die, but I am saying that it's not enough to have a single software target for developers -- for it to be effective, this must also be a single target for consumers. The PC is close, but consoles are too much cheaper, and Windows just makes this suck.
you would have never seen a pointer in a game controller or a touch screen on a portable, it would be the standard controller and buttons galore, not much else.
You know you don't need a completely separate console for that, right? The only reason the Wiimote needs a Wii is because Nintendo hasn't licensed it for the PC, Xbox 360, or PS3.
The PS2 has the EyeToy, the SNES had the Lightgun -- all by basically letting people develop accessories. Why should a standard console be any different?
Even just OpenGL on Windows, they could do without paying a licensing fee. (Not sure what's needed for DirectX.)
And there are plenty of open source libs, even engines, some BSD-licensed, which could give you a "platform" that is a compile away from any desktop OS.
So why do they use DirectX on Windows, and consoles? (Hell, I seem to remember EA embeds IE on Windows.)
You can't even make one that will work in every computer without periodically updating the disc.
Game consoles do this by storing updates on the hard drive. But at that point, why not just boot an OS off the hard drive to manage it?
In short... not gonna work, even on a PC, let alone consoles. I could rant for quite awhile on why it won't work, and why it'd be a bad idea even if it would, but for now, the fact that you've even suggested the idea tells me you haven't seriously thought it through. So do the research, or take my word for it.
There are actually quite a few big-name games that are OpenGL, and even a couple that have native Linux ports.
But making a port is more than just OpenGL. Not much more, technologically, maybe, but it does mean you suddenly have to support people on Linux, and that's going to be the real issue.
But for many people, WoW is the only game. And WoW can run in OpenGL mode, and works very well under Cedega, at least, and very likely under vanilla Wine. (Haven't tried in awhile, though, I don't play WoW.)
The biggest problem, too, is caring. As in, Valve obviously doesn't care -- their Linux support on servers is half-assed, compared to what it could be, but look at Steam. Steam embeds IE. There goes Linux support.
I mean, yes, people have written wrappers to allow Wine to pretend Gecko is IE -- meaning Steam on Linux embeds the Firefox/Mozilla engine instead. But designing for portability, even in a game, really isn't hard.
And, contrary to the opinion of many gamers, there are throngs of people who never-ever game... or never-ever game on a computer. Judging from the folks I know, it'd be the vast majority. Most folks just use their computers to communicate, to budget, to work, and to just dink around on the web. Those are the folks Ubuntu is going after right now.
These are the folks Ubuntu has pretty much succeeded in, right now. Or, I'd say, once the machine is set up.
The reason gaming is seen as important is partly because it's just another brick in the wall, but also because it's a really hard problem. The day gamers have as few excuses as office drones is a day we'd see a lot more office drones taking a second look.
I also don't want file transfers interrupted or services abruptly halted because of the task I choose.
That much is fair. I suppose I'm unique there in that I have another machine set up as a server (fileserver, among other things), so I can simply tell it to download something, then reboot my desktop (gaming machine) as many times as I want.
Being able to do it all on one OS is certainly preferable, but I decided that Ubuntu was worth the hassle (though I did already have that other box).
I'm also running Ubuntu (and reccomend it to others) specifically because it's the laziest distro I've stumbled upon.
I do, because it's that lazy, but also because when I want to get under the hood, I can. A Debian base isn't bad.
I used to use Gentoo, but I found that I really don't give anything up by going to Ubuntu, and I gain laziness. However, going to Windows, I do lose a lot, and I am far too lazy to spend much time trying to make my Windows work as well as my Linux did -- in the places where that's even possible.
You are mistaken. The phrase "9/11" does not convey any emotion; it is simply a common descriptor for an event. It may instill emotion in the receiver
This is, fundamentally, how language works. Every word is "simply a common descriptor" for whatever meaning we choose to attach to it.
The phrase "9/11" may even instill a vastly different emotion in the receiver than the sender attempts to impart.
So might any descriptor.
Unlike normal descriptors, profanity actually changes its meaning with overuse or disuse and the list of words considered profane will necessarily mutate over time.
How is this unlike normal descriptors?
Profanity need not have a negative impact. An email from your boss that says something like, "Your sales demo fucking rocked!", is generally a positive thing.
I'll agree with that. But also, no overuse of the word "fuck" will make that mean less for me, because my boss doesn't use that word much. Even if I was swearing like a fucking sailor all the time, he doesn't, therefore, when he says it, it means something.
I would also say that a certain amount is needed. Suppose he said: "Your sales demo rocked in a sexual way!" That would be generally disturbing, which is why the emotional impact, and the actual meaning, does need to be reduced from what it originally was.
But you touched on it when you said "it's just a descriptor". No amount of me saying "9/11" will make the actual event mean less to the people who lost someone there. And no amount of watching the South Park movie, or listening to ICP's "fuck the world", will make "Your demo fucking rocked!" mean less to me. (I'm not sales, but I do make demos.) Interpretation is ultimately up to the interpreter -- to the person who hears the word, not the person who says it.
It's like littering. One more piece of trash won't change much, but it's still rude.
When you litter, someone has to pick it up. When I say "fuck", you can simply choose not to listen.
And really should be -- if these people know anything about the issue, they'd know that this is a cop-out. Had they done it the other way -- only ODF support, and shrugged and told MS Office people to use the ODF plugin -- they'd have lost business.
I also have (or used to have) scripts to export an ODF document as several formats. Yes, there's PDF -- but also, if they asked for Office, I'd attach three different versions (OpenOffice supports Office 97+, Office 95, and Office 6.0), as well as RTF, maybe even TXT. And of course the ODF.
Waste of bandwidth, in an email attachment? Maybe, but considering the whole thing is still going to be less than 100k, not a big deal.
I don't have to do this anymore, actually. At work, we use Google Documents, and most of what you'd expect isn't even there, it's on a Wiki. Beyond that, well, a traditional word processor is getting more and more irrelevant these days.
Ubuntu can't win, if that's your attitude, unless you bought a Dell. Even then, it can't win, due to patent issues.
But regardless, it's an odd attitude. By your definition, the pleasantness of something is defined by whether or not it was installed and ready to go by default.
I have a different definition: I care about whether it's actually more pleasant to use once installed. I also care about installation, but that's really secondary -- if a better program takes a little more work, I will use it. Isn't that why people buy Microsoft Office, and often install it themselves, rather than using the built-in Notepad or Wordpad?
I don't really have a solution. MS seems to have the games all locked up. WINE is making slow inroads but with the arrival of DirectX 10 they are another gen behind.
In other words, you're too lazy to dual-boot (or don't know how?), so you stay on Windows all the time just in case you might want to play a game -- every day or so.
Also, there are games which work fine on Linux. You've chosen a couple that don't.
What's really confusing, though, is that you're worried about DirectX 10. Keep in mind, most games don't support it, and Windows XP doesn't support it. With all we've been hearing about Vista, you'd really rather run Vista than Linux?
What I do: The games I can play on Linux, I play on Linux. Then, once a month, I go to a LAN party and boot Windows. At work, I run Windows most of the time, due to having to run a few Windows apps almost all the time -- yet I do still actually have a good reason for virtualizing it, as soon as I get around to it.
I much prefer Valve's approach -- Lost Coast, Half-Life 2 Episodes, where I can get a completely new game.
Yeah, go ahead and add features and playability to the elements you carry over -- but also give me a new story, new areas to fight through, even a completely new environment.
To me, "enhancing replayability" is a cop-out, so they can selectively implement whatever they feel like -- a new gun here, an upgraded map there -- rather than having to replace almost everything, and upgrade what you keep.
Also: I'll pay for an expansion. I won't pay to enhance replayability.
One can use the word "fifteen" as many times as necessary without diminishing its utility.
And it can also be misused and overused. Just think of the words "nine" and "eleven".
The difference is, 9/11 attaches an emotional impact to meaningless numbers, while overuse of the word "fuck" removes the emotional impact from a word.
But what does any of this have to do with it being antisocial or not? Seems to me, if it generally has a negative impact, and you reduce the emotional impact, that's a socially good thing to do...
How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them
What does this have to do with what's running by default?
You have source code to the init scripts right there. You can get source code for any C code that might be involved, if any. Therefore, you CAN disable any feature, or service, you want to -- but the act of "disabling" it pretty much implies it was running by default.
That's the first question. On my Ubuntu, updates never break anything that wasn't broken already, but sometimes they fix things. What you want is a stable distro, not "kernel line", so that you know that a kernel update (from your distro) won't break a driver update (from your distro).
About your GNOME update: Did you try creating a new user? Sure, not easy to do, but you managed to install KDE. In fact, if you were going to reinstall, you might as well have just done "rm -rf ~/.gnome", and reset your entire environment.
Not easy, but did you even bother to ask anyone, on IRC or something?
THe install becomes so hosed it's useless and I have to reinstall from the latest didks for that distro. (Some merely cut off support completely after 12 months)
Try Ubuntu. You get 12 months of support for the short version, which is released every six months, and 3 years of support for the LTS version. You can also get discs of the new version shipped for free, assuming the upgrade doesn't "just work".
This, by the way, is actual support you can buy from Canonical. Chances are, the community will support you as long as you like, and again, no cost for upgrading -- with Windows, if Microsoft decides not to support Windows XP anymore, you're stuck with Vista, AND the $200 upgrade fee (or more).
I have ZERO trust in ANY update I do with Linux now, Microsoft has 100 times as much information about their updates than any Linux distro
Microsoft does not include full source code. They barely include a changelog. Sorry, but you lose this one.
Maybe you just don't know where to look? Did you ask?
Unconsciously everyone KNOWS what a shabmbles the Linux update situation is so to try to stave off some kind of guilt about it they find ways of picking no their enemy for the same thing instead.
On Linux, I have everything update automatically, through the same interface. It updates from a distro, which generally tests for incompatibilities between various software, so I don't have to. On Windows, Microsoft products update through Microsoft Update (assuming you enabled it instead of just "Windows Update"), and everything else updates through its own update service, or not at all -- there's likely a dozen programs I have to check manually. OS X isn't any better.
I'm not sure if Wine is even in Ubuntu, but I know the version there lags behind real Wine development...
So WineHQ hosts their own repository. You can add that to your list, and thus automatically update both Ubuntu and Wine, both through Synaptic, or the system tray thing, or Adept if you're on Kubuntu.
This isn't limited to adding one package at a time, or adding stuff not really in the normal Ubuntu. Medibuntu provides all the codecs and such, of questionable legality, which are needed to make an Ubuntu box play modern media. Add one repository, update, and install maybe three or four packages, and you've got DVD playback, win32codecs (not that they're needed much), and so on.
In other words:
Ubuntu already includes a massive repository of stuff to update, from your web browser and OS (which Microsoft bundles together) to your bittorrent client. Windows Update can be "upgraded" to Microsoft Update, which will then handle all Microsoft products (provided they are new enough) -- but it will not handle any non-MS products.
Third-parties can provide their own repositories, which you can mix and match with the official ones. On Windows (and OS X), the system-wide update is vendor-specific, meaning each vendor has to go reinvent the wheel and provide their own package management system, and many don't. (Case in point: on Windows, my only indication that there are new nVidia drivers is when Steam tells me, and Steam didn't come from nVidia. On Linux, they get installed automatically. Video drivers are kind of important to keep updated.)
Net result: On any decent Linux, updating is a one-stop shop. Maybe not one click, but maybe three.
On Windows and OS X, critical updates are near-automatic, but if you're like me, there are still anywhere from five to twenty additional free apps that need to be updated individually, by checking their website, downloading a new installer, uninstalling the old version, installing the new one, etc. Slightly easier on OS X only because installation/uninstallation is faster -- for SOME apps.
But to be completely fair, there's not even an issue with this if you use Mac OS X or Windows.
To be completely fair, as I understand it, OS X and Windows can do this legally. Or at least, this is true for codecs. Neither is very hard, although I kind of feel like the documentation required should come with it, maybe even an option at install time to enable these things.
2) with several distros (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you) the tools aren't included and you have to track them down along with their dependent libs/tools/etc.
If you're wanting to compile random stuff downloaded off the internet, sudo apt-get install build-essential.
If you want all the dependencies for every source package handled automatically, I suppose there's Gentoo -- although at least some of these will be handled by apt-get source, which is at least a handy way of getting the source for some package you already have.
They've already done it in the dev community with.NET.
That's not doing it right, that's faking it. At least technologically,.NET is theoretically (and pointlessly) cross-platform, but most.NET apps are Windows only.
I should also point out that year after year, the same people complain that Linux isn't ready -- yet year after year, it gets amazingly closer. This year, I put it on a work laptop, and wireless Just Worked. Out of the box. WEP, WPA2, everything, with a nice Gui -- at least as nice as OS X's, I dare say. Came with a dozen apps that I needed, out of the box -- sure, they'd be free downloads on Windows, if you know where to look, but that's not exactly "just works" either.
It varies, person to person -- depends what you need. For me, Linux has been better for a long time now, and only recently am I having to shift back to Windows at work -- and then only because I work on HD-DVD, and haven't gotten Microsoft's HDi tools running yet under Wine, or the.NET parts under Mono. But then, they don't work on Vista yet, either. (Yes, even Microsoft has stuff not ported to Vista yet, after a year...)
I'll admit that I haven't read the bible from cover to cover yet, but I haven't seen anything in there that says rape, murder, and enslave.
It is a bit over the top, but here's a starting point: rape, murder, enslave. Ok, it's not telling you to do this, but it is most definitely documenting cases of God telling His people to do these things.
If you don't like the commentary, go right to the source, and that's not the only copy on Gutenberg. Look it up for yourself.
Now, go ahead and tell me I don't understand. I still say that being a rational being, I cannot trust, let alone worship, anything that is so obviously evil to me. That its reasons are beyond my comprehension is irrelevant -- most psychopaths have reasons I'll never understand, and you could easily argue Satan would be similarly beyond my comprehension. Assuming both exist, roughly as they are described in the Bible, which should I choose? Because it's not obvious.
So the next question is: How many of the new features can you shut off because you do not need them and how much of a power savings will you see then?
Given that the stock Ubuntu (if you don't include "restricted drivers") comes with FULL source code, yes, all of them.
On a more realistic note, most people do need restricted drivers, and most people don't want to mess around with source code. But it's based on Debian, which means, for the most part, you can completely remove services you don't need, point and click, provided you know what they are.
Then again, I actually do want most of these services -- for example, the parts that make everything plug'n'play, from USB storage to wireless, even the CD "autorun" feature of Windows if you really want it. Most users won't have to think about "mounting" any more than they do on Windows, and somewhat more than they might on OS X, and that's a good thing.
Especially when Microsoft won't even admit what they broke.
Go back and read about the network bullshit -- about how playing any sound at all will throttle your network activity to one tenth of what it's supposed to be.
And about how Microsoft still hasn't admitted it's a problem.
Or has that finally been fixed? If so, it's hardly the only problem -- I could point you to one of Microsoft's own products that we kind of depend on which hasn't been ported to Vista, and is the reason I must run XP at work.
No. Windows *is* a monopoly by any defini9tion used by economists or the law, save for a hyper-technical definition.
Economists and the law are irrelevant without a good understanding of the technical world.
And Windows is nowhere near a monopoly, for example, on servers -- there, I believe they enjoy less than half the markit, the rest being dominated by Unix. It's been awhile since I looked, though.
Even on the desktop, there are alternatives -- Mac, Linux, even BeOS. Not for serious amounts of marketshare, but these are the arguments which Microsoft used to win their case -- or at least stall it until Bush was elected.
Ipod, however, may well be the largest player, but they don't control a majority of the market, let alone control the market.
Everyone I know who's bothered to get a portable music player recently has gotten an iPod. The first question often asked when considering Linux is "Will it work with my iPod?"
What's more, there is absolutely no competition for the very large iPod accessory market. As far as I know, if you buy, for example, a boombox with a little slot on the top, into which you can put an iPod, no other player will work with it in the same way. The spec is supposedly open, but then, OpenXML is supposedly open.
Without a monopoly or use of market power, these are just plain irrelevant....
No. This assumption is where the problem is. Apple would have no choice but to function differently if it were to become a monopoly. What is acceptable, even desirable, for a smaller player is neither legal, nor likely the optimal strategy, as a monopolist.
Yet, there are plenty of smaller players who play nice, with open standards. I see no reason why being a monopoly or not has anything to do with how a company should behave.
Also, I imagine that most of the people who bought iPods could care less whether Apple had a monopoly or not, because they make good products. That is essentially my point -- they have enough lock-in that I would stay away, monopoly or not. But they also are good enough products that monopoly and lock-in become irrelevant -- the reason people hate MS is not the monopoly, it's the combination of a monopoly and a product which sucks enough that without a monopoly, it would've died a long time ago.
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Developers, yes. Middleware means you can and will have ports to all consoles.
But users still have the choice between the Xbox 360 for its exclusives, the PS3 for its raw power (unless the 360 is enough), or the Wii for the Wiimote. And once they have one of these, they lose all the benefits of any of the others. Were they to switch, they'd still have games that only work on one.
So, simplest example: Say you buy an Xbox 360 and a Wii, which seems the sanest choice (vs a PS3, which might still cost as much as both). Now, when you see a new game that's out for both, do you buy it for the 360 (superior graphics), or the Wii (cool controls)? Even if you bought both, which do you play, since you can't port savegames?
Why should you have to choose?
Had consoles died, say, five years ago, the Wiimote might exist anyway, but it'd be a PC peripheral. That would mean you could develop a game that'd be both -- it would demand the very highest performance, and a Wiimote. Or you could ship exactly the same game, and have it use a Wiimote if available, and a mouse if not.
I'm not saying I want consoles to die, but I am saying that it's not enough to have a single software target for developers -- for it to be effective, this must also be a single target for consumers. The PC is close, but consoles are too much cheaper, and Windows just makes this suck.
You know you don't need a completely separate console for that, right? The only reason the Wiimote needs a Wii is because Nintendo hasn't licensed it for the PC, Xbox 360, or PS3.
The PS2 has the EyeToy, the SNES had the Lightgun -- all by basically letting people develop accessories. Why should a standard console be any different?
Even just OpenGL on Windows, they could do without paying a licensing fee. (Not sure what's needed for DirectX.)
And there are plenty of open source libs, even engines, some BSD-licensed, which could give you a "platform" that is a compile away from any desktop OS.
So why do they use DirectX on Windows, and consoles? (Hell, I seem to remember EA embeds IE on Windows.)
You can't even make one that will work in every computer without periodically updating the disc.
Game consoles do this by storing updates on the hard drive. But at that point, why not just boot an OS off the hard drive to manage it?
In short... not gonna work, even on a PC, let alone consoles. I could rant for quite awhile on why it won't work, and why it'd be a bad idea even if it would, but for now, the fact that you've even suggested the idea tells me you haven't seriously thought it through. So do the research, or take my word for it.
There are actually quite a few big-name games that are OpenGL, and even a couple that have native Linux ports.
But making a port is more than just OpenGL. Not much more, technologically, maybe, but it does mean you suddenly have to support people on Linux, and that's going to be the real issue.
But for many people, WoW is the only game. And WoW can run in OpenGL mode, and works very well under Cedega, at least, and very likely under vanilla Wine. (Haven't tried in awhile, though, I don't play WoW.)
The biggest problem, too, is caring. As in, Valve obviously doesn't care -- their Linux support on servers is half-assed, compared to what it could be, but look at Steam. Steam embeds IE. There goes Linux support.
I mean, yes, people have written wrappers to allow Wine to pretend Gecko is IE -- meaning Steam on Linux embeds the Firefox/Mozilla engine instead. But designing for portability, even in a game, really isn't hard.
These are the folks Ubuntu has pretty much succeeded in, right now. Or, I'd say, once the machine is set up.
The reason gaming is seen as important is partly because it's just another brick in the wall, but also because it's a really hard problem. The day gamers have as few excuses as office drones is a day we'd see a lot more office drones taking a second look.
And also doesn't support plenty of things, including at least one of Microsoft's own products.
I strongly suspect that in at least a few circumstances, the overhead of Wine's dx10 will be far less than the overhead of Vista.
That much is fair. I suppose I'm unique there in that I have another machine set up as a server (fileserver, among other things), so I can simply tell it to download something, then reboot my desktop (gaming machine) as many times as I want.
Being able to do it all on one OS is certainly preferable, but I decided that Ubuntu was worth the hassle (though I did already have that other box).
I do, because it's that lazy, but also because when I want to get under the hood, I can. A Debian base isn't bad.
I used to use Gentoo, but I found that I really don't give anything up by going to Ubuntu, and I gain laziness. However, going to Windows, I do lose a lot, and I am far too lazy to spend much time trying to make my Windows work as well as my Linux did -- in the places where that's even possible.
This is, fundamentally, how language works. Every word is "simply a common descriptor" for whatever meaning we choose to attach to it.
So might any descriptor.
How is this unlike normal descriptors?
I'll agree with that. But also, no overuse of the word "fuck" will make that mean less for me, because my boss doesn't use that word much. Even if I was swearing like a fucking sailor all the time, he doesn't, therefore, when he says it, it means something.
I would also say that a certain amount is needed. Suppose he said: "Your sales demo rocked in a sexual way!" That would be generally disturbing, which is why the emotional impact, and the actual meaning, does need to be reduced from what it originally was.
But you touched on it when you said "it's just a descriptor". No amount of me saying "9/11" will make the actual event mean less to the people who lost someone there. And no amount of watching the South Park movie, or listening to ICP's "fuck the world", will make "Your demo fucking rocked!" mean less to me. (I'm not sales, but I do make demos.) Interpretation is ultimately up to the interpreter -- to the person who hears the word, not the person who says it.
When you litter, someone has to pick it up. When I say "fuck", you can simply choose not to listen.
The ODF is the master copy.
And really should be -- if these people know anything about the issue, they'd know that this is a cop-out. Had they done it the other way -- only ODF support, and shrugged and told MS Office people to use the ODF plugin -- they'd have lost business.
I also have (or used to have) scripts to export an ODF document as several formats. Yes, there's PDF -- but also, if they asked for Office, I'd attach three different versions (OpenOffice supports Office 97+, Office 95, and Office 6.0), as well as RTF, maybe even TXT. And of course the ODF.
Waste of bandwidth, in an email attachment? Maybe, but considering the whole thing is still going to be less than 100k, not a big deal.
I don't have to do this anymore, actually. At work, we use Google Documents, and most of what you'd expect isn't even there, it's on a Wiki. Beyond that, well, a traditional word processor is getting more and more irrelevant these days.
Ubuntu can't win, if that's your attitude, unless you bought a Dell. Even then, it can't win, due to patent issues.
But regardless, it's an odd attitude. By your definition, the pleasantness of something is defined by whether or not it was installed and ready to go by default.
I have a different definition: I care about whether it's actually more pleasant to use once installed. I also care about installation, but that's really secondary -- if a better program takes a little more work, I will use it. Isn't that why people buy Microsoft Office, and often install it themselves, rather than using the built-in Notepad or Wordpad?
In other words, you're too lazy to dual-boot (or don't know how?), so you stay on Windows all the time just in case you might want to play a game -- every day or so.
Also, there are games which work fine on Linux. You've chosen a couple that don't.
What's really confusing, though, is that you're worried about DirectX 10. Keep in mind, most games don't support it, and Windows XP doesn't support it. With all we've been hearing about Vista, you'd really rather run Vista than Linux?
What I do: The games I can play on Linux, I play on Linux. Then, once a month, I go to a LAN party and boot Windows. At work, I run Windows most of the time, due to having to run a few Windows apps almost all the time -- yet I do still actually have a good reason for virtualizing it, as soon as I get around to it.
I much prefer Valve's approach -- Lost Coast, Half-Life 2 Episodes, where I can get a completely new game.
Yeah, go ahead and add features and playability to the elements you carry over -- but also give me a new story, new areas to fight through, even a completely new environment.
To me, "enhancing replayability" is a cop-out, so they can selectively implement whatever they feel like -- a new gun here, an upgraded map there -- rather than having to replace almost everything, and upgrade what you keep.
Also: I'll pay for an expansion. I won't pay to enhance replayability.
And it can also be misused and overused. Just think of the words "nine" and "eleven".
The difference is, 9/11 attaches an emotional impact to meaningless numbers, while overuse of the word "fuck" removes the emotional impact from a word.
But what does any of this have to do with it being antisocial or not? Seems to me, if it generally has a negative impact, and you reduce the emotional impact, that's a socially good thing to do...
No one said "by default". I was replying to this:
What does this have to do with what's running by default?
You have source code to the init scripts right there. You can get source code for any C code that might be involved, if any. Therefore, you CAN disable any feature, or service, you want to -- but the act of "disabling" it pretty much implies it was running by default.
At this point, that's a UI issue. You can, in fact, force an unmount -- umount -f. (I think. It might not actually work.)
You can also find out what's using the device -- fuser -m /cdrom, or, in very rare situations, "mount" and look for anything mounted under the CD.
That's the first question. On my Ubuntu, updates never break anything that wasn't broken already, but sometimes they fix things. What you want is a stable distro, not "kernel line", so that you know that a kernel update (from your distro) won't break a driver update (from your distro).
About your GNOME update: Did you try creating a new user? Sure, not easy to do, but you managed to install KDE. In fact, if you were going to reinstall, you might as well have just done "rm -rf ~/.gnome", and reset your entire environment.
Not easy, but did you even bother to ask anyone, on IRC or something?
Try Ubuntu. You get 12 months of support for the short version, which is released every six months, and 3 years of support for the LTS version. You can also get discs of the new version shipped for free, assuming the upgrade doesn't "just work".
This, by the way, is actual support you can buy from Canonical. Chances are, the community will support you as long as you like, and again, no cost for upgrading -- with Windows, if Microsoft decides not to support Windows XP anymore, you're stuck with Vista, AND the $200 upgrade fee (or more).
Microsoft does not include full source code. They barely include a changelog. Sorry, but you lose this one.
Maybe you just don't know where to look? Did you ask?
On Linux, I have everything update automatically, through the same interface. It updates from a distro, which generally tests for incompatibilities between various software, so I don't have to. On Windows, Microsoft products update through Microsoft Update (assuming you enabled it instead of just "Windows Update"), and everything else updates through its own update service, or not at all -- there's likely a dozen programs I have to check manually. OS X isn't any better.
Should be mentioned that the latest Unreal, Quake, and Doom are always ported fairly quickly.
Also should be mentioned that quite a lot of games work under Cedega, or even vanilla Wine. I believe WoW is like that -- stock WineHQ will work fine.
I'm not sure if Wine is even in Ubuntu, but I know the version there lags behind real Wine development...
So WineHQ hosts their own repository. You can add that to your list, and thus automatically update both Ubuntu and Wine, both through Synaptic, or the system tray thing, or Adept if you're on Kubuntu.
This isn't limited to adding one package at a time, or adding stuff not really in the normal Ubuntu. Medibuntu provides all the codecs and such, of questionable legality, which are needed to make an Ubuntu box play modern media. Add one repository, update, and install maybe three or four packages, and you've got DVD playback, win32codecs (not that they're needed much), and so on.
In other words:
Ubuntu already includes a massive repository of stuff to update, from your web browser and OS (which Microsoft bundles together) to your bittorrent client. Windows Update can be "upgraded" to Microsoft Update, which will then handle all Microsoft products (provided they are new enough) -- but it will not handle any non-MS products.
Third-parties can provide their own repositories, which you can mix and match with the official ones. On Windows (and OS X), the system-wide update is vendor-specific, meaning each vendor has to go reinvent the wheel and provide their own package management system, and many don't. (Case in point: on Windows, my only indication that there are new nVidia drivers is when Steam tells me, and Steam didn't come from nVidia. On Linux, they get installed automatically. Video drivers are kind of important to keep updated.)
Net result: On any decent Linux, updating is a one-stop shop. Maybe not one click, but maybe three.
On Windows and OS X, critical updates are near-automatic, but if you're like me, there are still anywhere from five to twenty additional free apps that need to be updated individually, by checking their website, downloading a new installer, uninstalling the old version, installing the new one, etc. Slightly easier on OS X only because installation/uninstallation is faster -- for SOME apps.
If you're wanting to compile random stuff downloaded off the internet, sudo apt-get install build-essential.
If you want all the dependencies for every source package handled automatically, I suppose there's Gentoo -- although at least some of these will be handled by apt-get source, which is at least a handy way of getting the source for some package you already have.
That's not doing it right, that's faking it. At least technologically, .NET is theoretically (and pointlessly) cross-platform, but most .NET apps are Windows only.
I should also point out that year after year, the same people complain that Linux isn't ready -- yet year after year, it gets amazingly closer. This year, I put it on a work laptop, and wireless Just Worked. Out of the box. WEP, WPA2, everything, with a nice Gui -- at least as nice as OS X's, I dare say. Came with a dozen apps that I needed, out of the box -- sure, they'd be free downloads on Windows, if you know where to look, but that's not exactly "just works" either.
It varies, person to person -- depends what you need. For me, Linux has been better for a long time now, and only recently am I having to shift back to Windows at work -- and then only because I work on HD-DVD, and haven't gotten Microsoft's HDi tools running yet under Wine, or the .NET parts under Mono. But then, they don't work on Vista yet, either. (Yes, even Microsoft has stuff not ported to Vista yet, after a year...)
It is a bit over the top, but here's a starting point: rape, murder, enslave. Ok, it's not telling you to do this, but it is most definitely documenting cases of God telling His people to do these things.
If you don't like the commentary, go right to the source, and that's not the only copy on Gutenberg. Look it up for yourself.
Now, go ahead and tell me I don't understand. I still say that being a rational being, I cannot trust, let alone worship, anything that is so obviously evil to me. That its reasons are beyond my comprehension is irrelevant -- most psychopaths have reasons I'll never understand, and you could easily argue Satan would be similarly beyond my comprehension. Assuming both exist, roughly as they are described in the Bible, which should I choose? Because it's not obvious.
Given that the stock Ubuntu (if you don't include "restricted drivers") comes with FULL source code, yes, all of them.
On a more realistic note, most people do need restricted drivers, and most people don't want to mess around with source code. But it's based on Debian, which means, for the most part, you can completely remove services you don't need, point and click, provided you know what they are.
Then again, I actually do want most of these services -- for example, the parts that make everything plug'n'play, from USB storage to wireless, even the CD "autorun" feature of Windows if you really want it. Most users won't have to think about "mounting" any more than they do on Windows, and somewhat more than they might on OS X, and that's a good thing.
They won't give you a free copy of XP, but they will let you trade your Vista license for an XP license?
Or am I thinking of something else?
Especially when Microsoft won't even admit what they broke.
Go back and read about the network bullshit -- about how playing any sound at all will throttle your network activity to one tenth of what it's supposed to be.
And about how Microsoft still hasn't admitted it's a problem.
Or has that finally been fixed? If so, it's hardly the only problem -- I could point you to one of Microsoft's own products that we kind of depend on which hasn't been ported to Vista, and is the reason I must run XP at work.
Economists and the law are irrelevant without a good understanding of the technical world.
And Windows is nowhere near a monopoly, for example, on servers -- there, I believe they enjoy less than half the markit, the rest being dominated by Unix. It's been awhile since I looked, though.
Even on the desktop, there are alternatives -- Mac, Linux, even BeOS. Not for serious amounts of marketshare, but these are the arguments which Microsoft used to win their case -- or at least stall it until Bush was elected.
Everyone I know who's bothered to get a portable music player recently has gotten an iPod. The first question often asked when considering Linux is "Will it work with my iPod?"
What's more, there is absolutely no competition for the very large iPod accessory market. As far as I know, if you buy, for example, a boombox with a little slot on the top, into which you can put an iPod, no other player will work with it in the same way. The spec is supposedly open, but then, OpenXML is supposedly open.
Yet, there are plenty of smaller players who play nice, with open standards. I see no reason why being a monopoly or not has anything to do with how a company should behave.
Also, I imagine that most of the people who bought iPods could care less whether Apple had a monopoly or not, because they make good products. That is essentially my point -- they have enough lock-in that I would stay away, monopoly or not. But they also are good enough products that monopoly and lock-in become irrelevant -- the reason people hate MS is not the monopoly, it's the combination of a monopoly and a product which sucks enough that without a monopoly, it would've died a long time ago.