You may not even know if software you are buying is pirated. A few years back a friend lent me a cd folder full of games. All of them had the game logos on the cds, and most of them had full colour booklets with them. I ended up asking my friend how much he had spent on the games in the folder, and replied: hardly anything, they are all pirated. He bought them somewhere in Asia. They take piracy a bit more seriously over there, you don't just get a blank cd with the games name scribbled on it in felt pen, you get a full colour box, authentic looking cd, the works.
The bigger problem for game companies than people downloading torrents, is illegal factories which are producing pirated versions of games (and other types of software) which can be sold at lost cost, are hard to tell apart from the real deal. Many people who buy these games are unaware that they even have an illegal copy.
The internal kernel API's are subject to change. Functions within the kernel for dealing with lists, interrupts, devices drivers etc, can and have changed many times in the past. The API (ie syscall interface) which is exposed to userspace is very stable, and in many cases pre-dates Linux itself.
Typically userspace application developers do not need to worry about changes to the kernel, since the userspace APIs are mostly stable. Drivers within the kernel usually do not need to worry either, since changes which break in kernel code are generally not accepted. The only people the unstable kernel API really affects is those maintaining out of kernel drivers (whether they are binary or source).
Anybody else read that as iD tech, as in the new naming scheme for iD software's game engines? It might put Jack Thompson, et al in a bit of a conundrum, on one hand computer games are training the kiddies to be murderers, but on the other hand they are reducing the drinking problem;-).
Man you really lucked out, with a score of 1.5 million and two achievements the girls would have been all over you. But with no way to prove that it really happened, I guess you are doomed to die alone. Microsoft really does have a lot to answer for.
But operating systems need an overhaul, that's for sure. Not that old micro/monolithic debate (that I couldn't care less about), but currently a whole lot of tech is ending up in userland where it doesn't belong: virtualization, network-distributed/scaled filesystems, network-distributed/scaled services.
Shifting things into userspace has been one of the major innovations in operating systems. Back in the day, everything was crammed into the kernel (i.e. monolithic kernels). A bug in any part of it could bring down the entire system. The philosophy behind microkernels was to move as much stuff into userspace as possible, since it made the kernel easy to manage and stable since bugs in the userspace parts were less likely to bring down the whole system. Although operating systems like Linux are essentially a monolithic kernel, they have picked up parts of the microkernel philosophy through use of loadable kernel modules and splitting various subsystems into userspace. Look at operating systems like QNX, where even things like device drivers are in userspace, or the research into exokernels, where the kernel is basically nothing more than a resource manager.
Why isn't it ? Standardized APIs with regards to shared memory, synchronization devices, events; the UNIX crowd seems to find it very acceptable to rely on backward compatibility here. Why ?
You mean like shm_open/shm_unlink (POSIX) for managing shared memory? Synchronization primitives are provided by pthread_mutex_lock/unlock (POSIX) and sys_futex (Linux). Events are a bit trickier, since most Unix kernels don't really have a concept of events. You can use signal handling at the basic level to build simple event handlers. However, most environments where events are used have event handlers as part of their standard API, for example QT and GTK.
Part of the Unix philosophy is keeping things simple and concise and building complex functionality through layers of abstraction. For example, the standard C API provides most of the functionality you will ever need, but at a very primitive level. The open, close, read and write calls allow you to manage files (and pipes, sockets, etc) at a primitive level. If you need these calls to be thread safe, then you typically build another layer on top of this, or grab an existing library which provides the functionality you need. More modern languages and programming environments, such as Python, Java, QT and GTK use this approach by abstracting away the base APIs to provide more complex functionality such as easy synchronization and event handling.
I never really understood the idea of using rock music, video games, etc to bring people into a Church. Christianity is supposed to be about a belief in God and being kind to your fellow man. Getting together and jamming some songs, or going a few rounds of multi-player Halo is just hanging out with your mates. Now, if the Church is doing this as a way to keep teens out of trouble then that's great, but sell it for what it is. You aren't getting them to join the Christian Church, you are providing them with a free place to play music, games, whatever. How many of those kids would have joined if the games weren't offered, and how many will stay if you take them away.
To use an analogy, it is sort of like solving the few women in computer science/engineering "problem" by offering chick flick movie night instead of lectures. From the outside it looks great, you would have lots of women enrolled in computer science, it doesn't make them computer scientists though. Just because your Church has lots of teens there playing Halo, does not make them all Christian.
We have a memory allocation library at that we wrote which wraps the standard C memory allocation and freeing functions. One thing it allows you to do is create memory checkpoints. To find memory leaks, you set a checkpoint before the memory for some structure is allocated and another after it should all be freed (ie, anywhere the program terminates, or once a structure should no longer be needed).
The program can then dump a full list of the memory allocated, and where is was allocated from at the checkpoint. Granted it is a fair amount of work to wade through a checkpoint in a large application to see what is and isn't needed, but it can be used to detect and fix memory leaks. I successfully used it to track down a very small memory leak in an application (just a few bytes excess), which weren't being freed in a loop. The program would run okay for a short time, but start eating up significant amounts of memory if run long enough. We put a checkpoint before a loop which caused the problem, let the loop run 1000 or so times and did another checkpoint. Looking at the difference between the checkpoint we had 1000 allocations all done from the same file and line number. Pretty easy to fix after that.
Umm, what? According to http://www.kernel.org/ 2.6.19.1 is the latest stable version. Stable versions are denoted by having an even number for the major revision, odd numbers are for development versions.
Universal Music, RIAA, etc should stop thinking so small. All this pirated, or copyright infringing content is on the Internet right? Why not just sue the Internet and get it over with;-).
Why do we focus only on this "Video games train violence" aspect? If violent games train people to be killers then surely race car games can train people to be world class race drivers, golf simulators can make us as good as Tiger Woods, Simcity will make me an architect and playing life and death will train me up to perform an appendictomy on someone. Or maybe they are just games.
I always liked Frank Zappa's comment when rock music was the big target for these sort of law suits.
"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another." -- Frank Zappa
I'll second the modding up of the parent. I'm 23 years old and most of my music collection is on vinyl. I have albums by bands such as Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Korn, Tool and System of a Down as well as several metals bands like: Opeth, Dark Tranquility and Children of Bodom. I like vinyl for its collectible nature (I have a few limited edition records and picture discs), the packaging (gatefold covers with huge fold out liner notes, etc) and the sound (say what you will, I have a decent turntable and I like it).
Vinyl is also still heavily used by electronic (drum and bass, house, etc) music DJs and turntablists, although the newer CD turntables are quite cool (I have a set of DNS-5Ks). Vinyl has always been around and probably will be for some time yet.
An add-on controller which not all gamers will have, meaning developers can't make cames which completely depend on it, any more than they can for "alternative" PlayStation controllers.
You mean like Singstar or the host of eyetoy games for the Playstation 2. How do you play those with a standard controller again?
Not sure why the parent is modded as flamebait since he/she has a valid point. Cars do not cause pollution all by themselves. As far as I know car manufacturors do not fuel cars up when they are built so they are most probably not even capable of causing pollution when they leave the factory.
Like the parent said, if you want to target someone then target the drivers (obviously not the most popular opinion). They are willingly and deliberately driving a vehicle which they know causes pollution. Im not saying that this should be done, just that it makes about as much sense as what California is attempting to do.
Well back to disagreeing. My family has four computers including a home server. My server has our music collection on it and all computers have easy access using Jukebox or one of several other open source mp3/ogg players. These players are not "half-pie open source attempts." They are VERY professional and elligant applications. (Which I can't help think that you would know about if you really were a Linux user. Frankly you sound much more like a Microsoft shill to me.)
There are a number of very professional open source applications, the media players amongst them, but try and find an a good open source alternative to something like Soundforge, Cubase or Protools. Perhaps samba has gotten much better since I last used it, but setting connecting to or creating Windows shares was far easier with Windows than with Linux. Would one of the less computer savvy members of your family have more difficulty adding a Windows share on the Windows box or the Linux one?
Right things should never change not ever, ever, ever. **cough stupid argument cough**
I didn't say that. I asked why someone would switch from a perfectly good operating system that already does everything they want to another one that does the same thing? Many average users simply can't be bothered with installing Linux and relearning tasks. Granted most of these are simple like Internet Explorer -> Firefox, some are not so trivial and change depending on the distro. But what good reason does somebody have for switching, especially if the WGA issue means nothing to them?
Really? Most non-geeks that I talk to are not happy about having their fair use rights taken away.
But how many care enough to switch to an alternative operating system? Just about everyone I know complains about ever rising petrol prices, but very few have switched to alternative forms of transport such as cycling, busses or car pooling. The geeks will switch operating systems because they don't mind spending the effort in installing and learning a new system, the rest will complain about how Mircosoft is infringing on their rights and go back to using Windows. Just like hundreds of people went "oh, gasp, how dare they" about the Sony rootkits, but forget about it the minute they want the latest album released under the Sony label.
That is just blatant FUD. Now I know you're just a Microsoft shill. Browsing the Internet, reading email, watching movies and burning cds is just as easily done using Linux as Windows. Linux is no longer just a "geek OS." This is just the kind of Microsoft FUD a Microsoft shill would spew.
Again with the putting words in my mouth. I never said that Linux cannot do these things. I said that Windows does them perfectly well. However Linux is not capable of running all of the Windows games and applications that don't have native ports, it can't play some media files (whether it be because of lack of mp3 support out of the box or some random.wmv format) it lacks proper support from many hardware companies (Linux on laptops anyone?). Sooner or later these problems become frustrating to the average user.
Another point of interest is that Windows is often easier to get help on. For instance, try googling for "change screen resolution" and add either "Windows" or "Linux". The first link for Windows will take you to Microsofts page which gives detailed step by step instructions for using the Gui. The first "Linux" result takes you to a somewhat confusing page about the X configuration files. Even replacing "Linux" with "Ubuntu" or "Linspire", two of the desktop Linux distros result in pages about editing the X config files.
I don't consider myself a Microsoft Shill (tm) by any stretch, but I also don't consider Linux to be the be-all-and-end-all operating system that many people who have us believe that it is. I don't go around trying to religiously convert people who are perfectly happy with Windows. Both operating systems have their advanta
Comments like these are getting somewhat annoying on Slashdot these days. Everytime Microsoft does something bad or some fault in Windows is found, somebody has to stick their hand up and say "We should all just switch to Linux". As much as I like Linux, this is like saying "we found some minor fault with apples so we should all just eat oranges instead".
Linux is not a viable replacement for Windows in all situations (especially on the desktop), if it were then it would have been coming preinstalled on home machines for a while now. The zealots can make all the excuses they like: "you can play your Windows games with Wine", "ogg's are so much better than mp3's", "nautilus is way easier to use than explorer", etc, but Windows does do many of these things better. The average Joe wants his computer to just work, and while Linux is getting better all the time Windows is still leaps and bounds ahead in many areas. I'm running Fedora Core with Gnome at home (cue "my distro is better" statements). After doing an install I have to do extra work to get proper support for my NVidia card and be able to play mp3's (both of which required using a console). If I run a KDE app it takes about 5 times as long as a Gnome one to load. I understand the reasons for these and other problems (most of which are not directly the fault of Linux), but how do I explain this to Joe Average?
Even though I am capable of setting Linux up as a desktop system (Im doing a Masters in Computer Science), I use WinXP as a desktop system and Linux for working on my Masters. That way I don't have to jump through hoops to play the few games I have, share files over a local network with my flatmate (who is also running XP) and run audio software like Soundforge and Acid. Why should I piss around with configuration files, downloading drivers, crossing my fingers and hoping apps run in Wine or putting up with half-pie open source attempts when Windows does all this flawlessly?
Part of the problem is Microsoft's market share; why should people switch to an unfamiliar Linux environment when they are everyone else they know is already using a perfectly good operating system. The geeks may have a problem with the various DRM features of Windows, but the average Joe (the same guy who thinks downloading Bonzi Buddy is a good idea) doesn't give a shit. I think that whether we like or not, Linux is a geeks operating system and Windows is for all those who just want a computer in their living room for browsing teh interwebs, reading email, watching movies and burning cds. People (in general) aren't going to stop buying Windows and switch to Linux because of this, just like they didn't stop buying Sony CDs after the rootkit fiasco. It doesn't make it right and I would like to see companies like Sony and Microsoft be taken to task properly over shit like this, but I don't see it happening and I certainly don't see Linux being the answer, at least not yet.
It may not apply to everyone, but personally I don't mind paying $30(NZ) for a CD when it looks like some effort has gone into the design of the cover and liner notes. This is one of the reasons that I don't think that music distributions systems such as iTunes will kill CD sales, some people just like having a physical album with some nice artwork to look at.
It may just be powerful enough to draw the desktop in Windows Vista;-)
Re:"The wine is agreeable but the meat is rotten."
on
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Thats not really a bug. Phrases like "The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak" seldom translate very well or make sense in other languages. Many languages use the same word for many different things, I don't speak Russian, but perhaps 'meat' and 'flesh' are the same word and the meaning is inferred from context. There are of course many more difficulties than just this when building translators and perfect translations are simply not possible in some cases.
The fact that 'mind' got translated as 'wine' is a little strange though;-)
What if I like both eighties hair metal and symphonic orchestra?
Then you should have a listen to a band called Therion, in particular the albums Theli and Vovin. They combine the metal influences of Metallica and Iron Maiden, with an orchestra, two choirs and four soloist opera singers to produce some truely magnificent songs.
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You may not even know if software you are buying is pirated. A few years back a friend lent me a cd folder full of games. All of them had the game logos on the cds, and most of them had full colour booklets with them. I ended up asking my friend how much he had spent on the games in the folder, and replied: hardly anything, they are all pirated. He bought them somewhere in Asia. They take piracy a bit more seriously over there, you don't just get a blank cd with the games name scribbled on it in felt pen, you get a full colour box, authentic looking cd, the works.
The bigger problem for game companies than people downloading torrents, is illegal factories which are producing pirated versions of games (and other types of software) which can be sold at lost cost, are hard to tell apart from the real deal. Many people who buy these games are unaware that they even have an illegal copy.
The internal kernel API's are subject to change. Functions within the kernel for dealing with lists, interrupts, devices drivers etc, can and have changed many times in the past. The API (ie syscall interface) which is exposed to userspace is very stable, and in many cases pre-dates Linux itself.
Typically userspace application developers do not need to worry about changes to the kernel, since the userspace APIs are mostly stable. Drivers within the kernel usually do not need to worry either, since changes which break in kernel code are generally not accepted. The only people the unstable kernel API really affects is those maintaining out of kernel drivers (whether they are binary or source).
Anybody else read that as iD tech, as in the new naming scheme for iD software's game engines? It might put Jack Thompson, et al in a bit of a conundrum, on one hand computer games are training the kiddies to be murderers, but on the other hand they are reducing the drinking problem ;-).
Man you really lucked out, with a score of 1.5 million and two achievements the girls would have been all over you. But with no way to prove that it really happened, I guess you are doomed to die alone. Microsoft really does have a lot to answer for.
Tounge firmly in cheek ;-)
But operating systems need an overhaul, that's for sure. Not that old micro/monolithic debate (that I couldn't care less about), but currently a whole lot of tech is ending up in userland where it doesn't belong: virtualization, network-distributed/scaled filesystems, network-distributed/scaled services.
Shifting things into userspace has been one of the major innovations in operating systems. Back in the day, everything was crammed into the kernel (i.e. monolithic kernels). A bug in any part of it could bring down the entire system. The philosophy behind microkernels was to move as much stuff into userspace as possible, since it made the kernel easy to manage and stable since bugs in the userspace parts were less likely to bring down the whole system. Although operating systems like Linux are essentially a monolithic kernel, they have picked up parts of the microkernel philosophy through use of loadable kernel modules and splitting various subsystems into userspace. Look at operating systems like QNX, where even things like device drivers are in userspace, or the research into exokernels, where the kernel is basically nothing more than a resource manager.
Why isn't it ? Standardized APIs with regards to shared memory, synchronization devices, events; the UNIX crowd seems to find it very acceptable to rely on backward compatibility here. Why ?
You mean like shm_open/shm_unlink (POSIX) for managing shared memory? Synchronization primitives are provided by pthread_mutex_lock/unlock (POSIX) and sys_futex (Linux). Events are a bit trickier, since most Unix kernels don't really have a concept of events. You can use signal handling at the basic level to build simple event handlers. However, most environments where events are used have event handlers as part of their standard API, for example QT and GTK.
Part of the Unix philosophy is keeping things simple and concise and building complex functionality through layers of abstraction. For example, the standard C API provides most of the functionality you will ever need, but at a very primitive level. The open, close, read and write calls allow you to manage files (and pipes, sockets, etc) at a primitive level. If you need these calls to be thread safe, then you typically build another layer on top of this, or grab an existing library which provides the functionality you need. More modern languages and programming environments, such as Python, Java, QT and GTK use this approach by abstracting away the base APIs to provide more complex functionality such as easy synchronization and event handling.
I never really understood the idea of using rock music, video games, etc to bring people into a Church. Christianity is supposed to be about a belief in God and being kind to your fellow man. Getting together and jamming some songs, or going a few rounds of multi-player Halo is just hanging out with your mates. Now, if the Church is doing this as a way to keep teens out of trouble then that's great, but sell it for what it is. You aren't getting them to join the Christian Church, you are providing them with a free place to play music, games, whatever. How many of those kids would have joined if the games weren't offered, and how many will stay if you take them away.
To use an analogy, it is sort of like solving the few women in computer science/engineering "problem" by offering chick flick movie night instead of lectures. From the outside it looks great, you would have lots of women enrolled in computer science, it doesn't make them computer scientists though. Just because your Church has lots of teens there playing Halo, does not make them all Christian.
We have a memory allocation library at that we wrote which wraps the standard C memory allocation and freeing functions. One thing it allows you to do is create memory checkpoints. To find memory leaks, you set a checkpoint before the memory for some structure is allocated and another after it should all be freed (ie, anywhere the program terminates, or once a structure should no longer be needed).
The program can then dump a full list of the memory allocated, and where is was allocated from at the checkpoint. Granted it is a fair amount of work to wade through a checkpoint in a large application to see what is and isn't needed, but it can be used to detect and fix memory leaks. I successfully used it to track down a very small memory leak in an application (just a few bytes excess), which weren't being freed in a loop. The program would run okay for a short time, but start eating up significant amounts of memory if run long enough. We put a checkpoint before a loop which caused the problem, let the loop run 1000 or so times and did another checkpoint. Looking at the difference between the checkpoint we had 1000 allocations all done from the same file and line number. Pretty easy to fix after that.
Posting in this thread is a good start though.
Why do you think FORTRAN is one of the oldest computing languages in existence?
Because it was invented before most other computer languages? Is this a trick question ;-)
Umm, what? According to http://www.kernel.org/ 2.6.19.1 is the latest stable version. Stable versions are denoted by having an even number for the major revision, odd numbers are for development versions.
Universal Music, RIAA, etc should stop thinking so small. All this pirated, or copyright infringing content is on the Internet right? Why not just sue the Internet and get it over with ;-).
Why do we focus only on this "Video games train violence" aspect? If violent games train people to be killers then surely race car games can train people to be world class race drivers, golf simulators can make us as good as Tiger Woods, Simcity will make me an architect and playing life and death will train me up to perform an appendictomy on someone. Or maybe they are just games.
I always liked Frank Zappa's comment when rock music was the big target for these sort of law suits. "There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another." -- Frank Zappa
I'll second the modding up of the parent. I'm 23 years old and most of my music collection is on vinyl. I have albums by bands such as Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Korn, Tool and System of a Down as well as several metals bands like: Opeth, Dark Tranquility and Children of Bodom. I like vinyl for its collectible nature (I have a few limited edition records and picture discs), the packaging (gatefold covers with huge fold out liner notes, etc) and the sound (say what you will, I have a decent turntable and I like it).
Vinyl is also still heavily used by electronic (drum and bass, house, etc) music DJs and turntablists, although the newer CD turntables are quite cool (I have a set of DNS-5Ks). Vinyl has always been around and probably will be for some time yet.
You mean like Singstar or the host of eyetoy games for the Playstation 2. How do you play those with a standard controller again?
Not sure why the parent is modded as flamebait since he/she has a valid point. Cars do not cause pollution all by themselves. As far as I know car manufacturors do not fuel cars up when they are built so they are most probably not even capable of causing pollution when they leave the factory.
Like the parent said, if you want to target someone then target the drivers (obviously not the most popular opinion). They are willingly and deliberately driving a vehicle which they know causes pollution. Im not saying that this should be done, just that it makes about as much sense as what California is attempting to do.
Well back to disagreeing. My family has four computers including a home server. My server has our music collection on it and all computers have easy access using Jukebox or one of several other open source mp3/ogg players. These players are not "half-pie open source attempts." They are VERY professional and elligant applications. (Which I can't help think that you would know about if you really were a Linux user. Frankly you sound much more like a Microsoft shill to me.)
There are a number of very professional open source applications, the media players amongst them, but try and find an a good open source alternative to something like Soundforge, Cubase or Protools. Perhaps samba has gotten much better since I last used it, but setting connecting to or creating Windows shares was far easier with Windows than with Linux. Would one of the less computer savvy members of your family have more difficulty adding a Windows share on the Windows box or the Linux one?
Right things should never change not ever, ever, ever. **cough stupid argument cough**
I didn't say that. I asked why someone would switch from a perfectly good operating system that already does everything they want to another one that does the same thing? Many average users simply can't be bothered with installing Linux and relearning tasks. Granted most of these are simple like Internet Explorer -> Firefox, some are not so trivial and change depending on the distro. But what good reason does somebody have for switching, especially if the WGA issue means nothing to them?
Really? Most non-geeks that I talk to are not happy about having their fair use rights taken away.
But how many care enough to switch to an alternative operating system? Just about everyone I know complains about ever rising petrol prices, but very few have switched to alternative forms of transport such as cycling, busses or car pooling. The geeks will switch operating systems because they don't mind spending the effort in installing and learning a new system, the rest will complain about how Mircosoft is infringing on their rights and go back to using Windows. Just like hundreds of people went "oh, gasp, how dare they" about the Sony rootkits, but forget about it the minute they want the latest album released under the Sony label.
That is just blatant FUD. Now I know you're just a Microsoft shill. Browsing the Internet, reading email, watching movies and burning cds is just as easily done using Linux as Windows. Linux is no longer just a "geek OS." This is just the kind of Microsoft FUD a Microsoft shill would spew.
Again with the putting words in my mouth. I never said that Linux cannot do these things. I said that Windows does them perfectly well. However Linux is not capable of running all of the Windows games and applications that don't have native ports, it can't play some media files (whether it be because of lack of mp3 support out of the box or some random .wmv format) it lacks proper support from many hardware companies (Linux on laptops anyone?). Sooner or later these problems become frustrating to the average user.
Another point of interest is that Windows is often easier to get help on. For instance, try googling for "change screen resolution" and add either "Windows" or "Linux". The first link for Windows will take you to Microsofts page which gives detailed step by step instructions for using the Gui. The first "Linux" result takes you to a somewhat confusing page about the X configuration files. Even replacing "Linux" with "Ubuntu" or "Linspire", two of the desktop Linux distros result in pages about editing the X config files.
I don't consider myself a Microsoft Shill (tm) by any stretch, but I also don't consider Linux to be the be-all-and-end-all operating system that many people who have us believe that it is. I don't go around trying to religiously convert people who are perfectly happy with Windows. Both operating systems have their advanta
Comments like these are getting somewhat annoying on Slashdot these days. Everytime Microsoft does something bad or some fault in Windows is found, somebody has to stick their hand up and say "We should all just switch to Linux". As much as I like Linux, this is like saying "we found some minor fault with apples so we should all just eat oranges instead".
Linux is not a viable replacement for Windows in all situations (especially on the desktop), if it were then it would have been coming preinstalled on home machines for a while now. The zealots can make all the excuses they like: "you can play your Windows games with Wine", "ogg's are so much better than mp3's", "nautilus is way easier to use than explorer", etc, but Windows does do many of these things better. The average Joe wants his computer to just work, and while Linux is getting better all the time Windows is still leaps and bounds ahead in many areas. I'm running Fedora Core with Gnome at home (cue "my distro is better" statements). After doing an install I have to do extra work to get proper support for my NVidia card and be able to play mp3's (both of which required using a console). If I run a KDE app it takes about 5 times as long as a Gnome one to load. I understand the reasons for these and other problems (most of which are not directly the fault of Linux), but how do I explain this to Joe Average?
Even though I am capable of setting Linux up as a desktop system (Im doing a Masters in Computer Science), I use WinXP as a desktop system and Linux for working on my Masters. That way I don't have to jump through hoops to play the few games I have, share files over a local network with my flatmate (who is also running XP) and run audio software like Soundforge and Acid. Why should I piss around with configuration files, downloading drivers, crossing my fingers and hoping apps run in Wine or putting up with half-pie open source attempts when Windows does all this flawlessly?
Part of the problem is Microsoft's market share; why should people switch to an unfamiliar Linux environment when they are everyone else they know is already using a perfectly good operating system. The geeks may have a problem with the various DRM features of Windows, but the average Joe (the same guy who thinks downloading Bonzi Buddy is a good idea) doesn't give a shit. I think that whether we like or not, Linux is a geeks operating system and Windows is for all those who just want a computer in their living room for browsing teh interwebs, reading email, watching movies and burning cds. People (in general) aren't going to stop buying Windows and switch to Linux because of this, just like they didn't stop buying Sony CDs after the rootkit fiasco. It doesn't make it right and I would like to see companies like Sony and Microsoft be taken to task properly over shit like this, but I don't see it happening and I certainly don't see Linux being the answer, at least not yet.
Obligatory Family Guy reference: We have the technology, we can rebuild him. But I don't want to spend a lot of money.
Look, ADHD is a very serious disorder that affects a number of children and adul.... Oh look, a Monkey!
It may not apply to everyone, but personally I don't mind paying $30(NZ) for a CD when it looks like some effort has gone into the design of the cover and liner notes. This is one of the reasons that I don't think that music distributions systems such as iTunes will kill CD sales, some people just like having a physical album with some nice artwork to look at.
He wiped his arse.
Sorry.
It may just be powerful enough to draw the desktop in Windows Vista ;-)
The fact that 'mind' got translated as 'wine' is a little strange though ;-)
Then you should have a listen to a band called Therion, in particular the albums Theli and Vovin. They combine the metal influences of Metallica and Iron Maiden, with an orchestra, two choirs and four soloist opera singers to produce some truely magnificent songs.