Novelty sells games. Currently, that's graphics novelty. Ooh, looky, now with more bump maps. So, yes, currently that's what gets people to dump their old games and fork over 40 bucks for a new game.
I'll tend to aggree with the article that, indeed, it's becoming less and less of a difference. Maybe the young ones won't go back to playing Prince of Persia in 320x200, but a lot of them _are_ perfectly willing to go back to 2, 3 or even 4 year old games. Heck, the most played online game is still HalfLife. It's a _lot_ older than that.
So indeed it's becoming less and less easy to keep people in the habbit of throwing away their old games and buying new ones on graphics alone.
In fact, I'll go further and say that even if the ability to produce better graphics continued indefinitely (which it won't), it still creates the effect that the novelty wears off. You start noticing that you've played the exact same game last year, only in lower resolution. Is the minor facelift really worth another 40 bucks for the same game?
But I'll disaggree with the article in that he seems to assume that graphics are the _only_ novelty factor possible. You see, the thing about those old games wasn't _only_ new graphics. What kept people buying new ones wasn't _only_ the transition from stick figures to blocky 2D to decent 2D to piss-poor 3D to semi-decent 3D to...
What kept a lot of us buying them was that they differed in more than the graphics department. Centipede involved shooting all right, but it was _not_ a clone of Galaga. Contra was a scrolling shooter, but was _not_ a clone of Penetrator. Tetris and Sokoban were both essentially puzzle games, but neither was just a remake of the other. _That_ is what the real magic of those days was.
And heck, if you even look around nowadays, there's still plenty of room for innovation. The Sims is the best selling game of all times. Not only did a lot of people buy the original game, they bought 7 (SEVEN!) add-ons to it. Because being really original actually pays.
Dune 2 spawned a new genre. So did Wolfenstein 3D. So did SimCity and Civilization. Diablo might not have been 100% original, but it was new and original enough for most people. It also was a very stable and polished game. It paid off big time.
So I'll say that graphics are _not_ the only thing that sells. In fact, I'd say not even the main one. With the debatable exception of Wolfenstein 3D, none of the games I've named above was that special in the graphics department. (The Sims is largely a 2D isometric game in an age of 3D bump-mapped pixel-shaded games.) But they vastly outsold games which were graphically superior.
Or heck, let's go back to my first example. More people are playing Counter-Strike, with its outdated low polygon count models and low res textures, than the latest and greatest Medal Of Honour incarnation.
So _if_ publishers keep focusing soleley on shiny graphics, yeah, we may well be headed for the crash predicted in the article. But maybe they're smart enough to see the way out. Maybe. I wouldn't bet on it, but I can still hope.
Well, I guess, sometimes relying on the people to connect the obvious dots, seems to be an unreasonable expectation. Oh well. Let me write a short summary of the last couple of messages in the thread up to that point for you:
- Parent's parent, basically: Real's stuff is crap, and that's why Real is losing. When the choice is etween MS MediaPlayer and RealOne, you be the judge.
- Parent, basically: yeah, let's all give in to Microsoft's monopoly
- Me, basically: RealOne is so crap, that I don't give a damn whether MS is a monopoly or not. If fighting MS means installing RealOne on my machine, damn, I don't want to fight MS after all.
Maybe now you can follow it. If not, hey, don't be affraid to ask. I can draw pretty colourful pictures for you;)
Or did you mean exactly what is wrong with RealOne? Well, how about the endless barrage of popups? How about that they annoyed the living crap out of me even when RealOne was _not_ in use and I had unassigned all file extensions from it? Or how about the fact that it seemed to want to load its crap into memory even when using the obvious options to tell it _not_ to? Sure, the icon disappeared from the tray, but somehow it still spammed me with popups.
No, sorry, it doesn't look like a good business plan to me. It just served to convince me that I don't want to see anything that comes encoded in Real Media format. I don't care if it's a recorded message from God himself, if it means RealOne, I don't want it. I suspect I'm not the only one.
Or how about the fact that for a long while, it was a pain in the butt to even find the free download on the RealNetwork site? It's not just my vague suspicion that some people gave up after the second or third link that pointed them to the paid version instead. We actually had an article right here on Slashdot and right on the front page about stations switching to Windows Media just for that reason: that people were complaining that there seems to be no free player to see the content with.
So again, just in case this is still too vague for you to follow: yes, RealOne is total crap, and RealNetworks is losing ground only because they're idiots. (With sincere apologies to the many fine idiots, whom I've insulted by comparing them to RealNetworks.)
The choice between MS MediaPlayer and RealOne, isn't as simple as a "monopoly scumbags at Microsoft vs the good guys at RealNetworks" choice. It basically boils down to choosing between the MS monopoly scumbags which actually make a good product, and the RealNetworks scumbags who make a crap product. There is no "good" choice there. There is, however, a slightly less bad choice. And it's Microsoft.
That is bull. When people encounter a site which says "ok, you need to install this plugin", most people tend to actually install it. They're in fact _too_ eager to install any plugin. That's how 90% of them get those dialers, spyware and God knows what else on their machines.
You may also notice how there's no shortage of people downloading DivX. (Seein' as there's no shortage of ripped movies on P2P, for example.) Not many start saying "bah, my computer already came with Microsoft's.avi codec, I'm not wasting my time downloading DivX."
You may also notice that there's no shortage of people downloading the latest and greatest Macromedia Flash player. There are whole sites available _only_ in Flash, and a thriving Flash ads industry. Much as I'd like to see both of those die a painful death, they're not going to. Why? Because surprisingly enough people do download the plugin.
Now if they had to _buy_ a product to view those files, they might think twice. But installing RealOne? I don't think anyone will start crying over a 10 minute download. (And don't start telling me about the poor people of Elbonia with their 9600 Baud modems. Anyone on that slow a modem doesn't watch streaming video of baseball players _training_.)
Why would someone then refuse to use RealOne? Well, how about the fact that RealOne is a spammy annoying piece of crap? Or that for a long while you had to dig deep to find the camouflaged link to even be able to download the "free" (annoyware) player? Being directed to a plugin site, and every link seems to want money for it, I can see how that would make people think twice.
RealOne sucks hard. It sucks harder than an industrial vaccuum cleaner. It sucks harder than an expensive hooker.
And I don't mean just from a technical point of view. While it isn't wrong per se to ask that a contract be upheld, what RealNetwors is doing to the users of their own damn product _is_ wrong.
Now I'm all for having some healthy competition and all, but there are times when I draw the line. If the way to fight Microsoft's monopoly is to install Real's crap on my computer... well, then I for one welcome our new Microsoft overlords.
Hence my remark that "I guess it would be too much to ask for, that on Slashdot someone actually does at least some _minimal_ research before posting highly inflamatory falsehoods as a summary." Yes, I won't argue with you there. The summary on the front page did make it sound like the four horsemen of the apocalypse are already on our collective doorstep, and their horses are crapping on the lawn.
Still, you know. I've had enough of lemming readers rushing to proclaim that the EU is owned by the corporations, or (in another thread) that the EU would never fine its own corporations, or other such.
Or seeing a whole sub-thread about the trivia that one of the politicians involved was, indeed married to a recording media bigwig. But missing the point that it's a rather reasonable directive nevertheless. Or it would have been shot down by the other polticians. If nothing else, to look good to their voters. You can't push a law with just one politician on your side, no matter how biased or even corrupt she may be.
Wholesale CD counterfitting wasn't legal before either, and a court could already do all that. Confiscating evidence is AFAIK standard police procedure in criminal cases on both sides of the Atlantic.
Briefly: When there'll be some actual news that private corporate stormtroopers actually kicked someone's door in, _then_ I'd start proclaiming that the EU as a whole is bought. But then I strongly suspect that the next news you read would be a bunch of ministers resigning, and some changes to the law being voted in a hurry. _No_ party wants to go down in history as having actually supported that kind of thing.
What the directive says is _not_ that some company's private stormtroopers can bash your door in, whenever they see fit.
It basically says that, given reasonable suspicion that you're running a wholesale counterfeiting opperation, the company can call upon the authorities (i.e., police, courts, government agencies) to take action. And those authorities can take whatever steps are necessary to prevent you from destroying the _evidence_. Including, yes, taking that evidence into custody.
It also says that the company will have to pay for your inconvenience, if you were unjustly accused.
So my questions are:
1. What the **** is so outrageous about that? The police could already do that for non-IP crimes. E.g., if you were accused of stealing 2000 hard drives, the police, yes, could always come confiscate them as evidence. It's just a simple extension of what the existing laws said.
2. How the heck does that justify the generalized whine across 200 different posts about allowing companies to do their own raids? Nowhere does the directive say that. The whole directive just says, basically, in layman's terms "the countries will each provide their own details about how this will be done, but we ought to treat massive scale IP theft as seriously as we already treated any other theft of that scale." (Which I don't find unreasonable at all.)
Rest assured that not many politicians in the actual countries would fill in those details as "duh, just hire your own stormtroopers and do what you damn please." That's the beauty of having 4 or 5 political parties and elections where the "winner" has 40% or less of the seats: none of the parties wants to commit political seppuku like that.
Rest assured that whatever raids will be done, will be done by the police and will involve a warrant. _Not_ some masked private corporate stormtroopers kicking in your door and shooting your TV and dog, like in cheap Hollywood crap.
3. Ditto for the whine about how it lets them harrass innocent citizens. It doesn't. Any company wanting to go on a mass harrassment spree, damn better have very deep pockets to pay reparations to all the unjustly raided.
4. That is, assuming they could even get that many warrants. More likely they'll have to show some damn convincing proof that it's all one huge smuggling and counterfeiting ring or some such, or they'll get jack squat.
5. "0wz0r3d by big corporations just like the U.S"? Oh please. If I remember right, in the USA the RIAA and stuff needed no warrant whatsoever to bully people around. I also think that the mostly USA companies in the BSA ever thought of asking for a warrant first, and much less of compensating someone for their wasted time if one of their raids found nothing wrong. By comparison, I'd say that this directive lays out a much more reasonable framework.
Ah well... I guess it would be too much to ask for, that on Slashdot someone actually does at least some _minimal_ research before posting highly inflamatory falsehoods as a summary. Doubly so when expecting someone to actually RTFA before going into the usual "Waaah! Corporations suck! The government sucks! Heellpp!!!" mode.
Re:They'll never get into the schools though, unti
on
KDE 3.2.1 Released
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· Score: 1
Probably "This application has no HONOUR! It shall taste my bat'leth!";)
Even less suggest that we all program in machine-code assembly or edit text source files in a hex editor (I thought you were programming in machine-code..?)
The hex entering on the 1K ZX-80 was indeed machine code. Those were the days;) Counting bytes for jumps and loops and all that fun;)
The thing on the CP/M machine was much later. On that machine you could actually run a compiler. And it had 8" floppies! The luxury of it all:)
Except, as I've said, a "smart" guy gave us everything _but_ an editor. The only thing which could edit anything at all, however uncomfortable and weird that editing, was a disk editor where you literally worked on a sector at a time. Presumably included in case we need to rescue our files from a bad sector, which happened a lot more often on floppies than nowadays on hard drives. Too bad noone thought that we needed something to make those files in the first place.
Time spent learning new skills (not 1337 skillz) is not a waste. Every year corporations spend how many billion$ educating their employees.
Time spent learning new skills is useful and all, if you're going to use those skills again.
E.g., my learning to program, is something I'm still getting paid for.
E.g., if your job description says "unix system administrator", by all means, do learn all that Unix stuff. I sure hope you know all those little commands if you're one of those admins on our servers.
But for normal users, which the article was all about? I have my doubts. I doubt that Joe Average, with some MacDonalds job (no offense to MacDonalds employees, just used as an example), the skill to configure CUPS from the command line will ever be of any use. There are only so many unix admin jobs around, and they generally want a lot more experience than that. Doubly so for grandma Jill Average, who's too old anyway.
I know you're just exaggerating to make a point, but just in case: There are games which do teach you stuff just as valuable as any TV documentary might.
E.g., "Die Gilde" ("Europa 1400 - The Guild" for you 'merkins) tells you each game year what happened historically in that city. Heck, it even has an option to actually apply that history to the city in which you're playing. E.g., you might have to fight (and lose massive health) in a historical war, or might get a chance to invest money in some historical venture, or whatever. You'd be surprised how that kind of stuff gets you to remember those historical events.
E.g., games like "Der Planer 3" provide a very faithful and realistic simulation of running a business. There is nothing reflex based or phantasy in it. It's based on the world as it is today.
E.g., even games which are purely phantasy, like MegaMek (a free Battletech multi-player game) are a game of thinking and planning. While you won't have any real life benefits from remembering the exact heat disipation and effective ranges of a PPC, the ability to do quick maths in your head and apply logic _is_ something useful.
In addition to what's already been said, there have been some downright pure advertising games.
E.g., Matel's Barbie games? Don't tell me there's any point in those other than to remind people of the dolls. I was unfortunate enough to see some and they're so brain-dead and pointless that I pity the poor kids who get force-fed that crap by their parents. By "pointless and brain dead" meaning there was hardly any gameplay, or even any game in there. And conversely to use the fact that parents just "know" that Barbie dolls are good for your girl, hence let's buy her a lobotomized game based on it too. It's marketting both ways.
Or the NES and SNES had a metric buttload of games based on M&M and various other products, or on characters starring in those products' TV ads.
Or let's think about marketting some more. Think of games based on popular franchises, or movies based on games. E.g., the ton of Star Wars games, or the Mario movie.
The marketting there again goes both ways. Some people will by a Star Wars game because they're die-hard Star Wars fans, _but_ also some non-fans might go see the movies because they liked the Knights Of The Old Republic game. (Great game, BTW. If you're into RPG's go buy it. Now:)
I know I didn't even know the Riftwar Saga existed until I played Betrayal At Krondor, and then went and bought the books. And a few other books by the same author. Or I hadn't even heard of Terry Pratchett is until I played the first Discworld PC game, and then... well, let's just say that's a lot of Discworld books I own.
Your average adult goes to work for 8 hours a day. They also usually sleep for 8 hours a day. They also spend some time commuting, fixing breakfasts, etc. They're not watching TV during that time.
Unless you're unemployed, that 6 hours slot is not just a quarter of the day. It's practically _all_ the time they have to feed you ads and faked news through the idiot box. Erm... I mean through the TV.
There's a reason why that's TV prime time. Because for a helluva lot of people that's the _only_ time when they can possibly watch TV. (I don't know about you, but I'm not watching TV at 2 PM. My employer would have a fit if I did.)
If you've lost those 6 hours to video games, you've just lost the viewer. That's it.
Well, I'm an "old timer" who does _not_ appreciate the command line.
By "old timer" meaning, admittedly, not 60 years old and having started on punched cards and electronic tubes.
I did, however, learn programming in hex, not even assembly, on a ZX-80 with 1K RAM. In 1K you didn't even have space to run an assembler. I had a big old paper notebook with 1 page per command and a matrix of the registers involved. E.g., this is the page for "ADD", take the column for "A" and the row for "B", and there you have the hex code for "ADD A, B".
I continued through such mis-haps as editing source files on a CP/M machine with a hex-based disk editor, because the PHB forgot to also give us a text editor. Sad, but true.
You know what? I _don't_ miss those days.
The command line is powerful and all, as long as you already know _exactly_ what you're doing. It is a pain in the donkey when you don't.
The time and effort to get past that learning curve is not fun, and not what Joe Average wants. Heck, it's not what _I_ want.
I do _not_ find it fun to spend hours digging through obsolete, incomplete man pages just to find out that I need to type some obscure command like "obscureProgram.sh -XFGXRmnq -i filename1 -o filename2 -c OBSCURE_COMMAND_CODE -p some_obscure_regexp -f unix-style-font-name" just to get something done. Bonus points if it expects me to already be in some directory, and some obscure configs to already be set right. More bonus points if it doesn't even do the whole job, but expects me to pipe it through other obscure programs. Double bonus if it outputs some cryptic error messages like "1962 Short School Bus", that don't even tell me what the **** went wrong there.
Gimme a break. My time is too valuable to spend it on that kind of crap.
Give me a GUI which has input fields for the stuff I need to enter. If it's a file name, give me a good file selector dialog, don't expect me to manually list directores 20 times to find it. If I'm supposed to enter options, give me checkboxes, radio buttons, or drop down combos. And, ffs, give me an up to date help for it. And clear, humanly understandable error codes.
And you know what? I'm surprised how much energy goes into defending the sacred right to produce crap code and piss-poor interfaces.
Here's an idea: if half the time that went into whining about how the 60's command line interfaces are better for the user, went instead into throwing together a simple user-friendly TK or ncurses or whatever GUI, we'd all be far better off than we are today.
And let me get back to the part where I've said "The command line is powerful and all, as long as you already know _exactly_ what you're doing. It is a pain in the donkey when you don't."
The problem there is that to get to know exactly what options to type there, you have to invest ludicrious ammounts of time into that. Which for most people isn't justified. If you'll configure printing on your home network maybe 4 times in your whole life, consider the following two situations:
1. spending 4 hours to learn how to do that with CUPS and only with command line tools. But then you can do that in 30 seconds flat each time.
2. spending 5 minutes each time doing the same in Windows, through the GUI
Believe it or not, solution 1 is _not_ an improvement. On the whole, the l33t Unix command line way took 4 hours from your life, while the point-and-drool Windows way took a total of 20 minutes. The winner is... the GUI.
Yearly millions of hours go into just learning to use some crap software. It isn't learning some l33t skillz, it isn't "getting a clue", it's just _wasted_. It's time when you're _not_ doing what you needed to do in the first place. Time where, like in the example above, instead of already having your file printed on that networked printer, you're still searching through obsolete man pages and trying stuff that fails for no obvious reason.
Further, I can set compiler-flags and all those other nifty things to get more performance out of the system.
That's comedy gold. No, seriously.
You'll get _gcc_ to compile faster code than Intel's compiler? Did you actually run any benchmarks there, or?
And even when starting with a speed handicap from the compiler... you'll still do a better job of optimizing _and_ testing that it still works with those settings, than a whole team whose job description is just that: producing the most optimized distro?
And let me highlight the testing part again. With gcc anything over -O2 might work or might not work. Or might have subtle bugs that only manifest themselves in rare conditions. Even the man page tells you that some options aren't that well tested. Even Gentoo's own site tells you to not even bother reporting a bug if it wasn't compiled with -O2.
So what do you do? Run an extensive benchmark _and_ an extensive testing for each and every program compiled? Or are you in effect getting your own compilation bugs instead of that dreaded malware that you so fear?
And at what time cost would one actually do get every program individually tuned and _tested_? Half a year? A year?
Using a precompiled distro doesn't make you "smarter," or even more efficient.
Using a distro doesn't make me smarter, but it does give me a metric buttload of free time to use on better stuff.
Time which, even when/if I feel nerdy to spend it coding, it's actually spent programming instead of mindlessly setting compiler flags, running a 2 hours emerge, then seeing if it runs. Repeat ad nauseam.
At the end of the day, actually coding something at least counts as experience, while learning that "ObscureProgram version 23.166.14 doesn't run well when compiled with -funroll-loops" counts as best at useless trivia. Unless your job will actually involve packing that exact version into a distro, that is.
But hey... in your case, it's your time, not mine. Whatever keeps you happy. If your idea of a fun way to spend your time is recompiling everything and still ending up 20% slower than Mandrake, ok. Go ahead. By all means:)
Both OS's integrate with their camera, hence not including that aspect in my dichotomy. Do you even know of a camera which _doesn't_ integrate well with Windows?:)
So it's more like:
A. A system which integrates seamlessly with their camera _and_ plays the latest games (_and_ talks to the printer on the other computer a lot easier than having Joe Average configure it in CUPS)
B. it integrates with the camera, but doesn't play games, nor does it run a bunch of other stuff.
But ok, I sorta get your point. It's a pure intelectual exercise, but ok:)
Well, I'm not sure which distro is the easiest to use after that install, seein' as at the end you'll probably have the exact same KDE or gnome desktop on all of them.
Well, in my case I'll download or emerge XFce 4 at the end. If you spend some 30 seconds configuring it right (e.g., so maximized windows don't overlap the panel) it's just as good as KDE or gnome and loads in a fraction of a second.
Portage is a very nice solution to compiling the latest stuff from sources, if you absolutely must do that. No arguments there. Beats downloading 30+.tar.bz2 files and figuring out the compile order yourself. Or even typing "./configure", "make" and "make install" some 30+ times in a row.
Until people start providing a "make world" option for their 30+ package stuff, like XFree86 does, yep, Portage is the best thing since sliced bits.
My beef is strictly with the user experience when installing Gentoo.
I figure I'm a tad more experienced than Joe Average. I can boast such true stories as having had to edit source code on an 8080 machine with CP/M with a disc editor in hex. Because the PHB had forgot to also give us a text editor. Well, we eventually got an editor too, but hey, I already had some work done.
Or like coding in hex, not even assembler, on a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1k RAM. Because in 1K, including the text mode screen buffer, you didn't have the space to run an assembler. Had a notebook with just the translation tables. Say, this page is "add". You take the "A" register column, and the "B" register row, and there you have the hex code for "ADD A, B".
And, well, the Gentoo installation sorta reminds me of those days. Getting a text file and a text browser as tools to install an OS is not exactly a 2004 interface. Installind DOS was more user-friendly than that.
I'll be honest and say that even for me it was worrying and sorta scary. Am I doing the right thing? Did I skip a page and missed some vital command? Did I remember to unset the flags after compiling that? That kind of thing. You give that install to anyone who's not a terminal nerd like us, and you've scared them away from Linux for the next decade.
Well, I'm not opposed to configurability, and I can see some good points in Portage. It's just that, well, there has to be a better way to get that.
E.g.: So, technically speaking, I can use USE="-kde -qt" in some program's emerge to avoid it downloading and compiling the whole KDE 3.2.0 on my hypothetical gnome-only workstation, just for some plugin. Which in turn would download everything but the kitchen sink, because some obscure plugin to some obscure 3'rd party KDE application needs it. So Portage can help me a lot there, right?
Except in practice I'd have to read through a ton of files just to figure out that those flags exist. And that without this or that flag I'd end up downloading half the internet. Do I have the time to do that for every program? No. More likely I'll just let it download KDE and a gigabyte of other libraries the first time I emerge a program with a plugin which depends on them.
Wouldn't it be nicer to have a simple text-mode GUI which shows me the dependencies, and has checkboxes for the keywords I can allow or block? Not even anything graphical or excessively colourful. Just a small ncurses front-end or some such.
I take it you're on the user side of the spectrum then;)
Actually, I come from the programmer side of the spectrum.
Let's face it, some people are too stupid to breathe, and these people insist on using computers.
I'll be the first to say that "the average human is an idiot, and half of them are under the average. That's what average means."
However, for better or worse, it's these stupid people who pay for my salary, and probably yours too. I might as well try to actually do the job I'm paid for.
And in many cases, I can see their point.
E.g., when it comes to user interfaces. A stupid cop-out interface, which exists just because the programmer was too lazy to make a better one, is _not_ the superior way to do things. It's just the cop-out piss-poor-quality way to do things.
Even for me, all those hours wasted reading incomplete obsolete man pages, and recompiling 20 libraries and X to get something to run, are just that: wasted hours.
It was not some proof of knowledge or hacker-jutsu, nor any reason to be proud of. At the end of it, I wasn't even left with any useful knowledge that might serve me well later. I was at best left with useless trivia, like "ooh, so ObscureProgram version 25.3.14 requires libObscureFileFormat.so version 13.666.1, which in turn requires libPointlessCuteWidgets.so version 1.96.28, which in turn compiles only with an older version of GTK than I already have."
It proves... what? That you have the eye to hand coordination to download 20 files? And run "./configure" and "make" and "make install" 20 times in a row? That's not some supreme hacker skill, it's mindless, boring, repetitive monkey work. It doesn't make you some cool uber-hacker that you could compile all that, it just proves that you're well suited for mindless repetitive jobs. Like hammering nails or plucking weeds.
No, all things being equal, I'll take a nice colourful GUI, same as Joe Average. Because my time is more valuable than that.
E.g., I think of all those pointless hours wasted just to configure something or get it to do whatever damn thing I needed.
If Joe Average can do that in 5 minutes in Windows, while I need days of reading incomplete obsolete man pages and learning obscure ways to pipe together Unix shell commands to do the same thing in Linux... It's not some supreme proof of intelligence or l33t hax0r skills. It just makes me think that maybe it's not Joe Average who's the stupid one there. Joe had the sense to pick the easy way and was already done by the time I was not even started. Maybe it's the l33t hacker way that's the real stupidity.
Now I'm not saying that Linux is still at that sad point. Because, thankfully enough, there seem to be enough people working on it who aren't elitist snobs.
"If you are not a joe user but you still want a good destkop OS to get your work done you should try the power of Gentoo."
To start with the punchline: actually that should IMHO read "if you're a masochist and want the computer equivalent of a kick in the teeth, you should try the power of Gentoo." Yep, that's some real power in that kick.
"Its fast, modular, not too hard to install (just read the docs, it holds your hand) and free."
Heh.
I was recently persuaded by some co-workers to try Gentoo on my Athlon 64 system. Now the thing that should have made me think twice is that said co-workers are hardy fronteer men. Real Men (TM) who edit source code in vi, will only configure anything with vi, and use a text mode browser. In fact, they start X and KDE to get a news ticker, then fire up xterm and lynx to browse the web.
I guess at home they sleep on a heap of rusty nails too, because using a bed would be too much like those lusers who want comfort. I guess the kind of people who, back in their age, had to walk 5 miles barefoot through the snow to school. Uphill _both_ ways. And they _liked_ it.
So I try it too. The first impression is that the install CD dumps me to a text mode prompt, with only a text file and links2 as a text-mode browser to download and compile the rest of it.
_That_ primitive. In fact, the only way to be more primitive would be to make me feed punched paper tape into the computer and toggle switches on the front pannel to make it load. Like in the good old days in the 70s.
The philosophy of Gentoo seems to be "why automate something, when it can be done by hand in text mode?"
E.g., it has a tool to find the best mirrors, but they don't even let you use it until later. First you have to use the text mode browser to go to their site and manually find a mirror to download stuff.
E.g., it has the tools to configure the network, but it's too stupid to launch them automatically. No, I have to read that text and launch them by hand.
E.g., if it knows that I'll have to create this and that directory and chroot, why the heck can't it provide a nice front-end that does that for me?
E.g., if it has 3 syslog demons total that it can install, and a recommended one... why can't that be on a nice page with 3 radio buttons? Why do I have to launch scripts by hand just to choose 1 option out of 3? No, seriously. I want to know.
The whole thing except maybe configuring and compiling the kernel could jolly well be automated. But no, let's be Real Men (TM) and do that by hand instead. Just having a user-friendly ncurses front-end wouldn't be macho enough, I guess.
And what's the point of the whole exercise spanning several days of recompiling everything? Just to be able to put my very own "-O3" in the compiler flags? (Which half the ebuilds will tone back down to -O2 or -O anyway.)
Why not just get Mandrake which is already compiled like that for you?
Lemme quote the original statement I was answering to: "Fortunately, for the vast majority of grown ups, our priorities are the other way round." Which is just false. Given a choice between:
1. an OS which can play games, and
2. an OS which mostly can't
the vast majority of adults will choose the second. That's what I'm saying.
And let me give you another reason for it: the majority of adults aren't high paid IT consultants. They might have a computer for the whole family. Not a whole farm of computers, which can be neatly split into dedicated routers, dedicated mail servers, linux desktops and gaming machines.
So even if you actually think that everyone playing a 3D game is not an adult game yet, guess what? They might have to share that machine with their 40+ year old mom and dad. Hence that machine just got "must run games" as an extra requirement.
And before you cite that "women over 40 play most games" survey, they're playing word games and puzzle games, not GTA3, which is pretty evidently *not* what the original poster means.
The gaming world isn't divided that sharply into (A) GTA or Quake 3 clones, and (B) 2d puzzles.
There are a ton of games, like "The Sims" or "Europa 1400 -- The Guild" that are very graphically intensive, sold very well, have a ton of adult players, and don't have a Linux port. And they're not GTA, they're puzzle games, business sims, or other such.
And even among puzzle games players, I don't think things are that interchangeable. "Ludicriously well cattered for" would be being able to run his/her favourite games from that genre, not basically "umm, you can play Pingus instead of The Sims.":)
The way to interact with an application is through its interface. When someone uses your program, they don't directly work with your clever code, they work with its interface.
The exact same product, with the exact same capabilities, can be a breeze to use or a bloody nightmare that needs you to spend days learning how to even get started. The difference between the two is the interface.
The thing is: Joe Average doesn't have a Ph.D. in CS, and shouldn't need one. He just wants, say, his pictures copied from his shiny new digital camera to his hard drive, and from there archived to CD-R. He also wants to send some of them per email to the kids, and to print some on his shiny new ink jet printer.
And he wants all that done with the absolute minimum of fuss and frustration. He doesn't want to learn new skills, he doesn't want to gain a ton of clue in how to compile the kernel and 20 libraries, and he doesn't find it great fun to experiment and tweak either. He just wants the job done. That's it.
Which means: he'll want some obvious buttons to click on. Which means: a GUI. That's what he'll interact with. And it's the GUI that can make this job a no-brainer 5 minute exercise, or a 7 day nightmare that includes reading outdated, incomplete and obscure man pages.
_If_ that 7 day nightmare is the best that you can offer him, he doesn't even want your product. It doesn't matter what cool hacks happen in your application, it doesn't matter how you cleverly coded your own uber-efficient image processing library to deal with your files. What matters is that he had to go through a lot of inconvenience to get a simple job done.
Hence, reviews that start with the surface aren't bogus, nor a bad idea.
The conception that the computer is something that only High Priests of the Sun (or IBM) should have access to, is so 60's that it isn't even funny.
Do you need to be an electronics expert to use your TV? Do you even need to understand microwave physics to use your microwave oven? Do you even have any knowledge at all of the chemistry and physics involved in using that detergent in your washing machine? Do you need to be an expert in lasers to operate your DVD player?
Well, then why the heck would an end user need to be a computer expert to use a computer?
And let's talk about the vendor-consumer relationship. If you're a programmer, your job is to deliver what the users want, _not_ to make them have to take a 5 year course in CS to be able to use your stuff. It's your job to deliver value to the customers, _not_ the other way around. Because it's those pesky users that pay for your salary.
And what the users _want_ is an appliance that's as easy and safe to use as their TV or microwave oven. That's it.
The current screw-up where computers are a fragile unstable contraption, and needs arcane rituals to keep it working, is _not_ what the users want.
And the current practice of blaming the users for your program's shortcomings, and calling them names like "lusers" or even "idiots", is a sad mockery of what the vendor-customer relationship was supposed to mean.
If that "clueless luser" had to call tech support to get your program to work, it's _your_ failure. It's that simple.
"Fortunately", the mis-conception of games being something only for kids is just that: a mis-conception.
On the bright side, it helps keep politicians in the business of screaming about how _M_ rated games are some conspiracy to turn 12 year olds into serial killers, because surely noone in the _M_ age bracket would buy a game. But that's the only "bright" side there is to that mis-conception.
Actual studies show that the average age for gamers is more like in the mid-to-late twenties nowadays. Like any bell curve, that extends both ways a lot. There are 50+ years old people in there too. (E.g., my father plays Counter Strike.)
And that's not even taking into account the millions who play Solitaire or Minesweeper some online web-based Backgammon game or such. Those usually won't say they're hardcore gamers, but guess what? They're still playing a game.
Electric motors not only can have a lot of torque, they basically don't have a torque-vs-RPM curve either. They start pulling hard from 0 RPM, which is one reason for accelerating well.
The also means that there is basically zero reason to leave the engine running when you're stopped at a traffic light or stuck in traffic. The engine can just as well be stopped when the car isn't actually moving. When you need to start moving again, just push the pedal and you have maximum torque within the next millisecond anyway. In the long run, that should count for some energy saved.
The problem nowadays is mostly that batteries suck. They're large, heavy, expensive, slow to load (compared to just pumping some gas into the tank in mere seconds), and the power stored isn't that great. Pollution notwithstanding, oil is still the superior way to haul some energy around.
Basically what I'm saying is: after you factor in the batteries to sustain that kind of power, you'd end up with a car heavier than the Viper. At a wild guess you'd probably need at least 600 HP to actually have the same power to weight ratio as a Viper.
And even then, to get that kind of juice on batteries and not have 5 tons of them... let's just say you might win the drag race, but you'd be out of power at the end of it. Whereas the Viper driver will get a good laugh and drive home.
So, well, I can see the point of electric engines in small or family cars, but I really can't see an electric race car being produces any time soon. Because that's more or less what the commercially sold Viper is: the race car minus the big wing. If you want a clean green way of racing a Viper, I'd set my hopes higher for hydrogen engines than electric engines.
Indeed, all those can be misused just as well, and to the same annoyance effect.
E.g., if you thought that sites made completely in flash loaded slowly, I can remember sites made entirely in GIF graphics. As a high profile example: the Ultima Online web site, sometime in the 90's.
Saying that flash can be well used is like saying that giving guns to monkeys could actually repel an enemy attack. Technically it's possible, but totally unlikely to happen.
For each 1 site which does use flash for something which absolutely needs an animated illustration of how something works, there'll be no less than 99 sites which:
1. Just make the whole goddamn site in flash, including the plain text parts. So now I have to wait 15 seconds on DSL (!!) for every single page to load. And I pity the poor buggers who are on dial-up.
Bonus points for forcing me to use it all in a tiny flash window, instead of letting me use the whole 1600x1200. More bonus points for forcing me to read whatever flyspeck font looked good on some retard's 640x480 screen. God forbid that they give me plain HTML which I can zoom to a readable size in Opera.
2. Clutter an otherwise potentially useful site with a bazillion slow-loading pointless flash animations. E.g., God forbid that they actually give me a link or button to click on, when they can make it a huge flash animation instead.
3. Make me watch some retarded and huge flash ad before even seeing what the site has to offer. And then give me half a dozen huge slow-loading flash ads per page.
4. Never even tested their flash crap on anything other than Windows 98 (or presumably now Linux). There's a difference in how the thread scheduling works in '98, NT, 2000 and XP. A tight loop which never yields control will _not_ slow the whole computer to a crawl on Win98. It _will_ on NT and 2000. So a single badly written flash ad (or java applet) can make my computer not even accept more than one keystroke per second. Oh, the fun.
And who's to blame?
A. The clueless graphics artist promoted to designer, without any extra training. Instead of making a usable site, he'll keep his old fetish that flashy graphics, colours and non-standard hard-to-read layouts are what art is all about.
B. The SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim.) This can be an artist, a PHB or even a programmer. The common ground is that they think newer _must_ be better, no matter how idiotically mis-used.
Don't get me wrong, new generally is better, but only when used right. Using plastic bottles instead of bricks, just because plastic is a newer technology, won't make a better building.
C. The dot-bomb style PHB or marketroid. The kind who thinks that what matters isn't the content, usefulness or even having a product to sell. The kind who thinks that people will surely rush to buy any useless crap, or even stuff available for free everywhere else, if it's on a site with a megabyte of animations per page and flashy colours everywhere. Yeah, verily, we just need more blink tags and flash animations, and everyone will just rush to give us tons of money for nothing.
Just for the record, I don't have anything against the professions of graphics artist, manager, or marketing expert. There are some skilled people in those professions. And I can respect someone's knowledge in any domain.
My beef is with the ones who are obviously unfit for their job. Some may have been skilled in a completely unrelated domain, but they don't even start to realize how different the new domain is, or how their new job is really a completely different one, with completely different rules, and which requires different skills. E.g., that making a usable GUI is _not_ the same thing as painting a work of art.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO you seem to miss the point of the article.
Novelty sells games. Currently, that's graphics novelty. Ooh, looky, now with more bump maps. So, yes, currently that's what gets people to dump their old games and fork over 40 bucks for a new game.
I'll tend to aggree with the article that, indeed, it's becoming less and less of a difference. Maybe the young ones won't go back to playing Prince of Persia in 320x200, but a lot of them _are_ perfectly willing to go back to 2, 3 or even 4 year old games. Heck, the most played online game is still HalfLife. It's a _lot_ older than that.
So indeed it's becoming less and less easy to keep people in the habbit of throwing away their old games and buying new ones on graphics alone.
In fact, I'll go further and say that even if the ability to produce better graphics continued indefinitely (which it won't), it still creates the effect that the novelty wears off. You start noticing that you've played the exact same game last year, only in lower resolution. Is the minor facelift really worth another 40 bucks for the same game?
But I'll disaggree with the article in that he seems to assume that graphics are the _only_ novelty factor possible. You see, the thing about those old games wasn't _only_ new graphics. What kept people buying new ones wasn't _only_ the transition from stick figures to blocky 2D to decent 2D to piss-poor 3D to semi-decent 3D to...
What kept a lot of us buying them was that they differed in more than the graphics department. Centipede involved shooting all right, but it was _not_ a clone of Galaga. Contra was a scrolling shooter, but was _not_ a clone of Penetrator. Tetris and Sokoban were both essentially puzzle games, but neither was just a remake of the other. _That_ is what the real magic of those days was.
And heck, if you even look around nowadays, there's still plenty of room for innovation. The Sims is the best selling game of all times. Not only did a lot of people buy the original game, they bought 7 (SEVEN!) add-ons to it. Because being really original actually pays.
Dune 2 spawned a new genre. So did Wolfenstein 3D. So did SimCity and Civilization. Diablo might not have been 100% original, but it was new and original enough for most people. It also was a very stable and polished game. It paid off big time.
So I'll say that graphics are _not_ the only thing that sells. In fact, I'd say not even the main one. With the debatable exception of Wolfenstein 3D, none of the games I've named above was that special in the graphics department. (The Sims is largely a 2D isometric game in an age of 3D bump-mapped pixel-shaded games.) But they vastly outsold games which were graphically superior.
Or heck, let's go back to my first example. More people are playing Counter-Strike, with its outdated low polygon count models and low res textures, than the latest and greatest Medal Of Honour incarnation.
So _if_ publishers keep focusing soleley on shiny graphics, yeah, we may well be headed for the crash predicted in the article. But maybe they're smart enough to see the way out. Maybe. I wouldn't bet on it, but I can still hope.
Well, I guess, sometimes relying on the people to connect the obvious dots, seems to be an unreasonable expectation. Oh well. Let me write a short summary of the last couple of messages in the thread up to that point for you:
;)
- Parent's parent, basically: Real's stuff is crap, and that's why Real is losing. When the choice is etween MS MediaPlayer and RealOne, you be the judge.
- Parent, basically: yeah, let's all give in to Microsoft's monopoly
- Me, basically: RealOne is so crap, that I don't give a damn whether MS is a monopoly or not. If fighting MS means installing RealOne on my machine, damn, I don't want to fight MS after all.
Maybe now you can follow it. If not, hey, don't be affraid to ask. I can draw pretty colourful pictures for you
Or did you mean exactly what is wrong with RealOne? Well, how about the endless barrage of popups? How about that they annoyed the living crap out of me even when RealOne was _not_ in use and I had unassigned all file extensions from it? Or how about the fact that it seemed to want to load its crap into memory even when using the obvious options to tell it _not_ to? Sure, the icon disappeared from the tray, but somehow it still spammed me with popups.
No, sorry, it doesn't look like a good business plan to me. It just served to convince me that I don't want to see anything that comes encoded in Real Media format. I don't care if it's a recorded message from God himself, if it means RealOne, I don't want it. I suspect I'm not the only one.
Or how about the fact that for a long while, it was a pain in the butt to even find the free download on the RealNetwork site? It's not just my vague suspicion that some people gave up after the second or third link that pointed them to the paid version instead. We actually had an article right here on Slashdot and right on the front page about stations switching to Windows Media just for that reason: that people were complaining that there seems to be no free player to see the content with.
So again, just in case this is still too vague for you to follow: yes, RealOne is total crap, and RealNetworks is losing ground only because they're idiots. (With sincere apologies to the many fine idiots, whom I've insulted by comparing them to RealNetworks.)
The choice between MS MediaPlayer and RealOne, isn't as simple as a "monopoly scumbags at Microsoft vs the good guys at RealNetworks" choice. It basically boils down to choosing between the MS monopoly scumbags which actually make a good product, and the RealNetworks scumbags who make a crap product. There is no "good" choice there. There is, however, a slightly less bad choice. And it's Microsoft.
That is bull. When people encounter a site which says "ok, you need to install this plugin", most people tend to actually install it. They're in fact _too_ eager to install any plugin. That's how 90% of them get those dialers, spyware and God knows what else on their machines.
.avi codec, I'm not wasting my time downloading DivX."
You may also notice how there's no shortage of people downloading DivX. (Seein' as there's no shortage of ripped movies on P2P, for example.) Not many start saying "bah, my computer already came with Microsoft's
You may also notice that there's no shortage of people downloading the latest and greatest Macromedia Flash player. There are whole sites available _only_ in Flash, and a thriving Flash ads industry. Much as I'd like to see both of those die a painful death, they're not going to. Why? Because surprisingly enough people do download the plugin.
Now if they had to _buy_ a product to view those files, they might think twice. But installing RealOne? I don't think anyone will start crying over a 10 minute download. (And don't start telling me about the poor people of Elbonia with their 9600 Baud modems. Anyone on that slow a modem doesn't watch streaming video of baseball players _training_.)
Why would someone then refuse to use RealOne? Well, how about the fact that RealOne is a spammy annoying piece of crap? Or that for a long while you had to dig deep to find the camouflaged link to even be able to download the "free" (annoyware) player? Being directed to a plugin site, and every link seems to want money for it, I can see how that would make people think twice.
IMHO you're missing the point.
RealOne sucks hard. It sucks harder than an industrial vaccuum cleaner. It sucks harder than an expensive hooker.
And I don't mean just from a technical point of view. While it isn't wrong per se to ask that a contract be upheld, what RealNetwors is doing to the users of their own damn product _is_ wrong.
Now I'm all for having some healthy competition and all, but there are times when I draw the line. If the way to fight Microsoft's monopoly is to install Real's crap on my computer... well, then I for one welcome our new Microsoft overlords.
Hence my remark that "I guess it would be too much to ask for, that on Slashdot someone actually does at least some _minimal_ research before posting highly inflamatory falsehoods as a summary." Yes, I won't argue with you there. The summary on the front page did make it sound like the four horsemen of the apocalypse are already on our collective doorstep, and their horses are crapping on the lawn.
Still, you know. I've had enough of lemming readers rushing to proclaim that the EU is owned by the corporations, or (in another thread) that the EU would never fine its own corporations, or other such.
Or seeing a whole sub-thread about the trivia that one of the politicians involved was, indeed married to a recording media bigwig. But missing the point that it's a rather reasonable directive nevertheless. Or it would have been shot down by the other polticians. If nothing else, to look good to their voters. You can't push a law with just one politician on your side, no matter how biased or even corrupt she may be.
Wholesale CD counterfitting wasn't legal before either, and a court could already do all that. Confiscating evidence is AFAIK standard police procedure in criminal cases on both sides of the Atlantic.
Briefly: When there'll be some actual news that private corporate stormtroopers actually kicked someone's door in, _then_ I'd start proclaiming that the EU as a whole is bought. But then I strongly suspect that the next news you read would be a bunch of ministers resigning, and some changes to the law being voted in a hurry. _No_ party wants to go down in history as having actually supported that kind of thing.
RTFA, lemming.
What the directive says is _not_ that some company's private stormtroopers can bash your door in, whenever they see fit.
It basically says that, given reasonable suspicion that you're running a wholesale counterfeiting opperation, the company can call upon the authorities (i.e., police, courts, government agencies) to take action. And those authorities can take whatever steps are necessary to prevent you from destroying the _evidence_. Including, yes, taking that evidence into custody.
It also says that the company will have to pay for your inconvenience, if you were unjustly accused.
So my questions are:
1. What the **** is so outrageous about that? The police could already do that for non-IP crimes. E.g., if you were accused of stealing 2000 hard drives, the police, yes, could always come confiscate them as evidence. It's just a simple extension of what the existing laws said.
2. How the heck does that justify the generalized whine across 200 different posts about allowing companies to do their own raids? Nowhere does the directive say that. The whole directive just says, basically, in layman's terms "the countries will each provide their own details about how this will be done, but we ought to treat massive scale IP theft as seriously as we already treated any other theft of that scale." (Which I don't find unreasonable at all.)
Rest assured that not many politicians in the actual countries would fill in those details as "duh, just hire your own stormtroopers and do what you damn please." That's the beauty of having 4 or 5 political parties and elections where the "winner" has 40% or less of the seats: none of the parties wants to commit political seppuku like that.
Rest assured that whatever raids will be done, will be done by the police and will involve a warrant. _Not_ some masked private corporate stormtroopers kicking in your door and shooting your TV and dog, like in cheap Hollywood crap.
3. Ditto for the whine about how it lets them harrass innocent citizens. It doesn't. Any company wanting to go on a mass harrassment spree, damn better have very deep pockets to pay reparations to all the unjustly raided.
4. That is, assuming they could even get that many warrants. More likely they'll have to show some damn convincing proof that it's all one huge smuggling and counterfeiting ring or some such, or they'll get jack squat.
5. "0wz0r3d by big corporations just like the U.S"? Oh please. If I remember right, in the USA the RIAA and stuff needed no warrant whatsoever to bully people around. I also think that the mostly USA companies in the BSA ever thought of asking for a warrant first, and much less of compensating someone for their wasted time if one of their raids found nothing wrong. By comparison, I'd say that this directive lays out a much more reasonable framework.
Ah well... I guess it would be too much to ask for, that on Slashdot someone actually does at least some _minimal_ research before posting highly inflamatory falsehoods as a summary. Doubly so when expecting someone to actually RTFA before going into the usual "Waaah! Corporations suck! The government sucks! Heellpp!!!" mode.
Probably "This application has no HONOUR! It shall taste my bat'leth!" ;)
Even less suggest that we all program in machine-code assembly or edit text source files in a hex editor (I thought you were programming in machine-code..?)
;) Counting bytes for jumps and loops and all that fun ;)
:)
The hex entering on the 1K ZX-80 was indeed machine code. Those were the days
The thing on the CP/M machine was much later. On that machine you could actually run a compiler. And it had 8" floppies! The luxury of it all
Except, as I've said, a "smart" guy gave us everything _but_ an editor. The only thing which could edit anything at all, however uncomfortable and weird that editing, was a disk editor where you literally worked on a sector at a time. Presumably included in case we need to rescue our files from a bad sector, which happened a lot more often on floppies than nowadays on hard drives. Too bad noone thought that we needed something to make those files in the first place.
Time spent learning new skills (not 1337 skillz) is not a waste. Every year corporations spend how many billion$ educating their employees.
Time spent learning new skills is useful and all, if you're going to use those skills again.
E.g., my learning to program, is something I'm still getting paid for.
E.g., if your job description says "unix system administrator", by all means, do learn all that Unix stuff. I sure hope you know all those little commands if you're one of those admins on our servers.
But for normal users, which the article was all about? I have my doubts. I doubt that Joe Average, with some MacDonalds job (no offense to MacDonalds employees, just used as an example), the skill to configure CUPS from the command line will ever be of any use. There are only so many unix admin jobs around, and they generally want a lot more experience than that. Doubly so for grandma Jill Average, who's too old anyway.
I know you're just exaggerating to make a point, but just in case: There are games which do teach you stuff just as valuable as any TV documentary might.
E.g., "Die Gilde" ("Europa 1400 - The Guild" for you 'merkins) tells you each game year what happened historically in that city. Heck, it even has an option to actually apply that history to the city in which you're playing. E.g., you might have to fight (and lose massive health) in a historical war, or might get a chance to invest money in some historical venture, or whatever. You'd be surprised how that kind of stuff gets you to remember those historical events.
E.g., games like "Der Planer 3" provide a very faithful and realistic simulation of running a business. There is nothing reflex based or phantasy in it. It's based on the world as it is today.
E.g., even games which are purely phantasy, like MegaMek (a free Battletech multi-player game) are a game of thinking and planning. While you won't have any real life benefits from remembering the exact heat disipation and effective ranges of a PPC, the ability to do quick maths in your head and apply logic _is_ something useful.
In addition to what's already been said, there have been some downright pure advertising games.
E.g., Matel's Barbie games? Don't tell me there's any point in those other than to remind people of the dolls. I was unfortunate enough to see some and they're so brain-dead and pointless that I pity the poor kids who get force-fed that crap by their parents. By "pointless and brain dead" meaning there was hardly any gameplay, or even any game in there. And conversely to use the fact that parents just "know" that Barbie dolls are good for your girl, hence let's buy her a lobotomized game based on it too. It's marketting both ways.
Or the NES and SNES had a metric buttload of games based on M&M and various other products, or on characters starring in those products' TV ads.
Or let's think about marketting some more. Think of games based on popular franchises, or movies based on games. E.g., the ton of Star Wars games, or the Mario movie.
The marketting there again goes both ways. Some people will by a Star Wars game because they're die-hard Star Wars fans, _but_ also some non-fans might go see the movies because they liked the Knights Of The Old Republic game. (Great game, BTW. If you're into RPG's go buy it. Now:)
I know I didn't even know the Riftwar Saga existed until I played Betrayal At Krondor, and then went and bought the books. And a few other books by the same author. Or I hadn't even heard of Terry Pratchett is until I played the first Discworld PC game, and then... well, let's just say that's a lot of Discworld books I own.
Very funny. Now sit and think about it a little.
Your average adult goes to work for 8 hours a day. They also usually sleep for 8 hours a day. They also spend some time commuting, fixing breakfasts, etc. They're not watching TV during that time.
Unless you're unemployed, that 6 hours slot is not just a quarter of the day. It's practically _all_ the time they have to feed you ads and faked news through the idiot box. Erm... I mean through the TV.
There's a reason why that's TV prime time. Because for a helluva lot of people that's the _only_ time when they can possibly watch TV. (I don't know about you, but I'm not watching TV at 2 PM. My employer would have a fit if I did.)
If you've lost those 6 hours to video games, you've just lost the viewer. That's it.
Well, I'm an "old timer" who does _not_ appreciate the command line.
By "old timer" meaning, admittedly, not 60 years old and having started on punched cards and electronic tubes.
I did, however, learn programming in hex, not even assembly, on a ZX-80 with 1K RAM. In 1K you didn't even have space to run an assembler. I had a big old paper notebook with 1 page per command and a matrix of the registers involved. E.g., this is the page for "ADD", take the column for "A" and the row for "B", and there you have the hex code for "ADD A, B".
I continued through such mis-haps as editing source files on a CP/M machine with a hex-based disk editor, because the PHB forgot to also give us a text editor. Sad, but true.
You know what? I _don't_ miss those days.
The command line is powerful and all, as long as you already know _exactly_ what you're doing. It is a pain in the donkey when you don't.
The time and effort to get past that learning curve is not fun, and not what Joe Average wants. Heck, it's not what _I_ want.
I do _not_ find it fun to spend hours digging through obsolete, incomplete man pages just to find out that I need to type some obscure command like "obscureProgram.sh -XFGXRmnq -i filename1 -o filename2 -c OBSCURE_COMMAND_CODE -p some_obscure_regexp -f unix-style-font-name" just to get something done. Bonus points if it expects me to already be in some directory, and some obscure configs to already be set right. More bonus points if it doesn't even do the whole job, but expects me to pipe it through other obscure programs. Double bonus if it outputs some cryptic error messages like "1962 Short School Bus", that don't even tell me what the **** went wrong there.
Gimme a break. My time is too valuable to spend it on that kind of crap.
Give me a GUI which has input fields for the stuff I need to enter. If it's a file name, give me a good file selector dialog, don't expect me to manually list directores 20 times to find it. If I'm supposed to enter options, give me checkboxes, radio buttons, or drop down combos. And, ffs, give me an up to date help for it. And clear, humanly understandable error codes.
And you know what? I'm surprised how much energy goes into defending the sacred right to produce crap code and piss-poor interfaces.
Here's an idea: if half the time that went into whining about how the 60's command line interfaces are better for the user, went instead into throwing together a simple user-friendly TK or ncurses or whatever GUI, we'd all be far better off than we are today.
And let me get back to the part where I've said "The command line is powerful and all, as long as you already know _exactly_ what you're doing. It is a pain in the donkey when you don't."
The problem there is that to get to know exactly what options to type there, you have to invest ludicrious ammounts of time into that. Which for most people isn't justified. If you'll configure printing on your home network maybe 4 times in your whole life, consider the following two situations:
1. spending 4 hours to learn how to do that with CUPS and only with command line tools. But then you can do that in 30 seconds flat each time.
2. spending 5 minutes each time doing the same in Windows, through the GUI
Believe it or not, solution 1 is _not_ an improvement. On the whole, the l33t Unix command line way took 4 hours from your life, while the point-and-drool Windows way took a total of 20 minutes. The winner is... the GUI.
Yearly millions of hours go into just learning to use some crap software. It isn't learning some l33t skillz, it isn't "getting a clue", it's just _wasted_. It's time when you're _not_ doing what you needed to do in the first place. Time where, like in the example above, instead of already having your file printed on that networked printer, you're still searching through obsolete man pages and trying stuff that fails for no obvious reason.
Further, I can set compiler-flags and all those other nifty things to get more performance out of the system.
:)
That's comedy gold. No, seriously.
You'll get _gcc_ to compile faster code than Intel's compiler? Did you actually run any benchmarks there, or?
And even when starting with a speed handicap from the compiler... you'll still do a better job of optimizing _and_ testing that it still works with those settings, than a whole team whose job description is just that: producing the most optimized distro?
And let me highlight the testing part again. With gcc anything over -O2 might work or might not work. Or might have subtle bugs that only manifest themselves in rare conditions. Even the man page tells you that some options aren't that well tested. Even Gentoo's own site tells you to not even bother reporting a bug if it wasn't compiled with -O2.
So what do you do? Run an extensive benchmark _and_ an extensive testing for each and every program compiled? Or are you in effect getting your own compilation bugs instead of that dreaded malware that you so fear?
And at what time cost would one actually do get every program individually tuned and _tested_? Half a year? A year?
Using a precompiled distro doesn't make you "smarter," or even more efficient.
Using a distro doesn't make me smarter, but it does give me a metric buttload of free time to use on better stuff.
Time which, even when/if I feel nerdy to spend it coding, it's actually spent programming instead of mindlessly setting compiler flags, running a 2 hours emerge, then seeing if it runs. Repeat ad nauseam.
At the end of the day, actually coding something at least counts as experience, while learning that "ObscureProgram version 23.166.14 doesn't run well when compiled with -funroll-loops" counts as best at useless trivia. Unless your job will actually involve packing that exact version into a distro, that is.
But hey... in your case, it's your time, not mine. Whatever keeps you happy. If your idea of a fun way to spend your time is recompiling everything and still ending up 20% slower than Mandrake, ok. Go ahead. By all means
Both OS's integrate with their camera, hence not including that aspect in my dichotomy. Do you even know of a camera which _doesn't_ integrate well with Windows? :)
:)
So it's more like:
A. A system which integrates seamlessly with their camera _and_ plays the latest games (_and_ talks to the printer on the other computer a lot easier than having Joe Average configure it in CUPS)
B. it integrates with the camera, but doesn't play games, nor does it run a bunch of other stuff.
But ok, I sorta get your point. It's a pure intelectual exercise, but ok
Well, I'm not sure which distro is the easiest to use after that install, seein' as at the end you'll probably have the exact same KDE or gnome desktop on all of them.
.tar.bz2 files and figuring out the compile order yourself. Or even typing "./configure", "make" and "make install" some 30+ times in a row.
Well, in my case I'll download or emerge XFce 4 at the end. If you spend some 30 seconds configuring it right (e.g., so maximized windows don't overlap the panel) it's just as good as KDE or gnome and loads in a fraction of a second.
Portage is a very nice solution to compiling the latest stuff from sources, if you absolutely must do that. No arguments there. Beats downloading 30+
Until people start providing a "make world" option for their 30+ package stuff, like XFree86 does, yep, Portage is the best thing since sliced bits.
My beef is strictly with the user experience when installing Gentoo.
I figure I'm a tad more experienced than Joe Average. I can boast such true stories as having had to edit source code on an 8080 machine with CP/M with a disc editor in hex. Because the PHB had forgot to also give us a text editor. Well, we eventually got an editor too, but hey, I already had some work done.
Or like coding in hex, not even assembler, on a Sinclair ZX-81 with 1k RAM. Because in 1K, including the text mode screen buffer, you didn't have the space to run an assembler. Had a notebook with just the translation tables. Say, this page is "add". You take the "A" register column, and the "B" register row, and there you have the hex code for "ADD A, B".
And, well, the Gentoo installation sorta reminds me of those days. Getting a text file and a text browser as tools to install an OS is not exactly a 2004 interface. Installind DOS was more user-friendly than that.
I'll be honest and say that even for me it was worrying and sorta scary. Am I doing the right thing? Did I skip a page and missed some vital command? Did I remember to unset the flags after compiling that? That kind of thing. You give that install to anyone who's not a terminal nerd like us, and you've scared them away from Linux for the next decade.
Well, I'm not opposed to configurability, and I can see some good points in Portage. It's just that, well, there has to be a better way to get that.
E.g.: So, technically speaking, I can use USE="-kde -qt" in some program's emerge to avoid it downloading and compiling the whole KDE 3.2.0 on my hypothetical gnome-only workstation, just for some plugin. Which in turn would download everything but the kitchen sink, because some obscure plugin to some obscure 3'rd party KDE application needs it. So Portage can help me a lot there, right?
Except in practice I'd have to read through a ton of files just to figure out that those flags exist. And that without this or that flag I'd end up downloading half the internet. Do I have the time to do that for every program? No. More likely I'll just let it download KDE and a gigabyte of other libraries the first time I emerge a program with a plugin which depends on them.
Wouldn't it be nicer to have a simple text-mode GUI which shows me the dependencies, and has checkboxes for the keywords I can allow or block? Not even anything graphical or excessively colourful. Just a small ncurses front-end or some such.
I take it you're on the user side of the spectrum then ;)
Actually, I come from the programmer side of the spectrum.
Let's face it, some people are too stupid to breathe, and these people insist on using computers.
I'll be the first to say that "the average human is an idiot, and half of them are under the average. That's what average means."
However, for better or worse, it's these stupid people who pay for my salary, and probably yours too. I might as well try to actually do the job I'm paid for.
And in many cases, I can see their point.
E.g., when it comes to user interfaces. A stupid cop-out interface, which exists just because the programmer was too lazy to make a better one, is _not_ the superior way to do things. It's just the cop-out piss-poor-quality way to do things.
Even for me, all those hours wasted reading incomplete obsolete man pages, and recompiling 20 libraries and X to get something to run, are just that: wasted hours.
It was not some proof of knowledge or hacker-jutsu, nor any reason to be proud of. At the end of it, I wasn't even left with any useful knowledge that might serve me well later. I was at best left with useless trivia, like "ooh, so ObscureProgram version 25.3.14 requires libObscureFileFormat.so version 13.666.1, which in turn requires libPointlessCuteWidgets.so version 1.96.28, which in turn compiles only with an older version of GTK than I already have."
It proves... what? That you have the eye to hand coordination to download 20 files? And run "./configure" and "make" and "make install" 20 times in a row? That's not some supreme hacker skill, it's mindless, boring, repetitive monkey work. It doesn't make you some cool uber-hacker that you could compile all that, it just proves that you're well suited for mindless repetitive jobs. Like hammering nails or plucking weeds.
No, all things being equal, I'll take a nice colourful GUI, same as Joe Average. Because my time is more valuable than that.
E.g., I think of all those pointless hours wasted just to configure something or get it to do whatever damn thing I needed.
If Joe Average can do that in 5 minutes in Windows, while I need days of reading incomplete obsolete man pages and learning obscure ways to pipe together Unix shell commands to do the same thing in Linux... It's not some supreme proof of intelligence or l33t hax0r skills. It just makes me think that maybe it's not Joe Average who's the stupid one there. Joe had the sense to pick the easy way and was already done by the time I was not even started. Maybe it's the l33t hacker way that's the real stupidity.
Now I'm not saying that Linux is still at that sad point. Because, thankfully enough, there seem to be enough people working on it who aren't elitist snobs.
"If you are not a joe user but you still want a good destkop OS to get your work done you should try the power of Gentoo."
To start with the punchline: actually that should IMHO read "if you're a masochist and want the computer equivalent of a kick in the teeth, you should try the power of Gentoo." Yep, that's some real power in that kick.
"Its fast, modular, not too hard to install (just read the docs, it holds your hand) and free."
Heh.
I was recently persuaded by some co-workers to try Gentoo on my Athlon 64 system. Now the thing that should have made me think twice is that said co-workers are hardy fronteer men. Real Men (TM) who edit source code in vi, will only configure anything with vi, and use a text mode browser. In fact, they start X and KDE to get a news ticker, then fire up xterm and lynx to browse the web.
I guess at home they sleep on a heap of rusty nails too, because using a bed would be too much like those lusers who want comfort. I guess the kind of people who, back in their age, had to walk 5 miles barefoot through the snow to school. Uphill _both_ ways. And they _liked_ it.
So I try it too. The first impression is that the install CD dumps me to a text mode prompt, with only a text file and links2 as a text-mode browser to download and compile the rest of it.
_That_ primitive. In fact, the only way to be more primitive would be to make me feed punched paper tape into the computer and toggle switches on the front pannel to make it load. Like in the good old days in the 70s.
The philosophy of Gentoo seems to be "why automate something, when it can be done by hand in text mode?"
E.g., it has a tool to find the best mirrors, but they don't even let you use it until later. First you have to use the text mode browser to go to their site and manually find a mirror to download stuff.
E.g., it has the tools to configure the network, but it's too stupid to launch them automatically. No, I have to read that text and launch them by hand.
E.g., if it knows that I'll have to create this and that directory and chroot, why the heck can't it provide a nice front-end that does that for me?
E.g., if it has 3 syslog demons total that it can install, and a recommended one... why can't that be on a nice page with 3 radio buttons? Why do I have to launch scripts by hand just to choose 1 option out of 3? No, seriously. I want to know.
The whole thing except maybe configuring and compiling the kernel could jolly well be automated. But no, let's be Real Men (TM) and do that by hand instead. Just having a user-friendly ncurses front-end wouldn't be macho enough, I guess.
And what's the point of the whole exercise spanning several days of recompiling everything? Just to be able to put my very own "-O3" in the compiler flags? (Which half the ebuilds will tone back down to -O2 or -O anyway.)
Why not just get Mandrake which is already compiled like that for you?
Lemme quote the original statement I was answering to: "Fortunately, for the vast majority of grown ups, our priorities are the other way round." Which is just false. Given a choice between:
:)
1. an OS which can play games, and
2. an OS which mostly can't
the vast majority of adults will choose the second. That's what I'm saying.
And let me give you another reason for it: the majority of adults aren't high paid IT consultants. They might have a computer for the whole family. Not a whole farm of computers, which can be neatly split into dedicated routers, dedicated mail servers, linux desktops and gaming machines.
So even if you actually think that everyone playing a 3D game is not an adult game yet, guess what? They might have to share that machine with their 40+ year old mom and dad. Hence that machine just got "must run games" as an extra requirement.
And before you cite that "women over 40 play most games" survey, they're playing word games and puzzle games, not GTA3, which is pretty evidently *not* what the original poster means.
The gaming world isn't divided that sharply into (A) GTA or Quake 3 clones, and (B) 2d puzzles.
There are a ton of games, like "The Sims" or "Europa 1400 -- The Guild" that are very graphically intensive, sold very well, have a ton of adult players, and don't have a Linux port. And they're not GTA, they're puzzle games, business sims, or other such.
And even among puzzle games players, I don't think things are that interchangeable. "Ludicriously well cattered for" would be being able to run his/her favourite games from that genre, not basically "umm, you can play Pingus instead of The Sims."
Actually, I don't see that as bogus at all.
The way to interact with an application is through its interface. When someone uses your program, they don't directly work with your clever code, they work with its interface.
The exact same product, with the exact same capabilities, can be a breeze to use or a bloody nightmare that needs you to spend days learning how to even get started. The difference between the two is the interface.
The thing is: Joe Average doesn't have a Ph.D. in CS, and shouldn't need one. He just wants, say, his pictures copied from his shiny new digital camera to his hard drive, and from there archived to CD-R. He also wants to send some of them per email to the kids, and to print some on his shiny new ink jet printer.
And he wants all that done with the absolute minimum of fuss and frustration. He doesn't want to learn new skills, he doesn't want to gain a ton of clue in how to compile the kernel and 20 libraries, and he doesn't find it great fun to experiment and tweak either. He just wants the job done. That's it.
Which means: he'll want some obvious buttons to click on. Which means: a GUI. That's what he'll interact with. And it's the GUI that can make this job a no-brainer 5 minute exercise, or a 7 day nightmare that includes reading outdated, incomplete and obscure man pages.
_If_ that 7 day nightmare is the best that you can offer him, he doesn't even want your product. It doesn't matter what cool hacks happen in your application, it doesn't matter how you cleverly coded your own uber-efficient image processing library to deal with your files. What matters is that he had to go through a lot of inconvenience to get a simple job done.
Hence, reviews that start with the surface aren't bogus, nor a bad idea.
The conception that the computer is something that only High Priests of the Sun (or IBM) should have access to, is so 60's that it isn't even funny.
Do you need to be an electronics expert to use your TV? Do you even need to understand microwave physics to use your microwave oven? Do you even have any knowledge at all of the chemistry and physics involved in using that detergent in your washing machine? Do you need to be an expert in lasers to operate your DVD player?
Well, then why the heck would an end user need to be a computer expert to use a computer?
And let's talk about the vendor-consumer relationship. If you're a programmer, your job is to deliver what the users want, _not_ to make them have to take a 5 year course in CS to be able to use your stuff. It's your job to deliver value to the customers, _not_ the other way around. Because it's those pesky users that pay for your salary.
And what the users _want_ is an appliance that's as easy and safe to use as their TV or microwave oven. That's it.
The current screw-up where computers are a fragile unstable contraption, and needs arcane rituals to keep it working, is _not_ what the users want.
And the current practice of blaming the users for your program's shortcomings, and calling them names like "lusers" or even "idiots", is a sad mockery of what the vendor-customer relationship was supposed to mean.
If that "clueless luser" had to call tech support to get your program to work, it's _your_ failure. It's that simple.
Just some food for thought.
"Fortunately", the mis-conception of games being something only for kids is just that: a mis-conception. On the bright side, it helps keep politicians in the business of screaming about how _M_ rated games are some conspiracy to turn 12 year olds into serial killers, because surely noone in the _M_ age bracket would buy a game. But that's the only "bright" side there is to that mis-conception. Actual studies show that the average age for gamers is more like in the mid-to-late twenties nowadays. Like any bell curve, that extends both ways a lot. There are 50+ years old people in there too. (E.g., my father plays Counter Strike.) And that's not even taking into account the millions who play Solitaire or Minesweeper some online web-based Backgammon game or such. Those usually won't say they're hardcore gamers, but guess what? They're still playing a game.
Electric motors not only can have a lot of torque, they basically don't have a torque-vs-RPM curve either. They start pulling hard from 0 RPM, which is one reason for accelerating well.
The also means that there is basically zero reason to leave the engine running when you're stopped at a traffic light or stuck in traffic. The engine can just as well be stopped when the car isn't actually moving. When you need to start moving again, just push the pedal and you have maximum torque within the next millisecond anyway. In the long run, that should count for some energy saved.
The problem nowadays is mostly that batteries suck. They're large, heavy, expensive, slow to load (compared to just pumping some gas into the tank in mere seconds), and the power stored isn't that great. Pollution notwithstanding, oil is still the superior way to haul some energy around.
Basically what I'm saying is: after you factor in the batteries to sustain that kind of power, you'd end up with a car heavier than the Viper. At a wild guess you'd probably need at least 600 HP to actually have the same power to weight ratio as a Viper.
And even then, to get that kind of juice on batteries and not have 5 tons of them... let's just say you might win the drag race, but you'd be out of power at the end of it. Whereas the Viper driver will get a good laugh and drive home.
So, well, I can see the point of electric engines in small or family cars, but I really can't see an electric race car being produces any time soon. Because that's more or less what the commercially sold Viper is: the race car minus the big wing. If you want a clean green way of racing a Viper, I'd set my hopes higher for hydrogen engines than electric engines.
Indeed, all those can be misused just as well, and to the same annoyance effect. E.g., if you thought that sites made completely in flash loaded slowly, I can remember sites made entirely in GIF graphics. As a high profile example: the Ultima Online web site, sometime in the 90's.
Saying that flash can be well used is like saying that giving guns to monkeys could actually repel an enemy attack. Technically it's possible, but totally unlikely to happen.
For each 1 site which does use flash for something which absolutely needs an animated illustration of how something works, there'll be no less than 99 sites which:
1. Just make the whole goddamn site in flash, including the plain text parts. So now I have to wait 15 seconds on DSL (!!) for every single page to load. And I pity the poor buggers who are on dial-up.
Bonus points for forcing me to use it all in a tiny flash window, instead of letting me use the whole 1600x1200. More bonus points for forcing me to read whatever flyspeck font looked good on some retard's 640x480 screen. God forbid that they give me plain HTML which I can zoom to a readable size in Opera.
2. Clutter an otherwise potentially useful site with a bazillion slow-loading pointless flash animations. E.g., God forbid that they actually give me a link or button to click on, when they can make it a huge flash animation instead.
3. Make me watch some retarded and huge flash ad before even seeing what the site has to offer. And then give me half a dozen huge slow-loading flash ads per page.
4. Never even tested their flash crap on anything other than Windows 98 (or presumably now Linux). There's a difference in how the thread scheduling works in '98, NT, 2000 and XP. A tight loop which never yields control will _not_ slow the whole computer to a crawl on Win98. It _will_ on NT and 2000. So a single badly written flash ad (or java applet) can make my computer not even accept more than one keystroke per second. Oh, the fun.
And who's to blame?
A. The clueless graphics artist promoted to designer, without any extra training. Instead of making a usable site, he'll keep his old fetish that flashy graphics, colours and non-standard hard-to-read layouts are what art is all about.
B. The SFV (Stupid Fashion Victim.) This can be an artist, a PHB or even a programmer. The common ground is that they think newer _must_ be better, no matter how idiotically mis-used.
Don't get me wrong, new generally is better, but only when used right. Using plastic bottles instead of bricks, just because plastic is a newer technology, won't make a better building.
C. The dot-bomb style PHB or marketroid. The kind who thinks that what matters isn't the content, usefulness or even having a product to sell. The kind who thinks that people will surely rush to buy any useless crap, or even stuff available for free everywhere else, if it's on a site with a megabyte of animations per page and flashy colours everywhere. Yeah, verily, we just need more blink tags and flash animations, and everyone will just rush to give us tons of money for nothing.
Just for the record, I don't have anything against the professions of graphics artist, manager, or marketing expert. There are some skilled people in those professions. And I can respect someone's knowledge in any domain.
My beef is with the ones who are obviously unfit for their job. Some may have been skilled in a completely unrelated domain, but they don't even start to realize how different the new domain is, or how their new job is really a completely different one, with completely different rules, and which requires different skills. E.g., that making a usable GUI is _not_ the same thing as painting a work of art.