Seriously. I've said it once, and I'll say it again:
I've spent well over $100 on music from iTunes, simply because I heard it on Pandora. I would have never found it otherwise. I know there is software out there to rip from Pandora, but I'd much rather get an iTunes file and strip the DRM out.
Though, now that I've figured out that it was the 7.x versions of iTunes screwing me over (sounded like a record skipping, even on my fast machine - must be that I'm using win2k) and downgraded to the newest 6.x version, I don't really need to strip the DRM anymore... I, for one, enjoy using itunes to listen to my music.
"Everyone with some algorithm design experience knows that you can get complex behaviors (often known as bugs) with a set of simple rules."
I'm convinced that JavaScript is the essence of this assertion.
"A good software developer writes applications that are meant to be run as binaries."
ASP.net 2.0 is compiled;)
Application: a program that gives a computer instructions that provide the user with tools to accomplish a task
That sounds a lot like a web application (and desktop application). It's tough to get a job outside the online direct marketing industry if you don't have experience developing in a server side language: asp.net, java, php, RoR - and sometimes more than one of those. HTML/CSS codemonkeys aren't developers to be sure - but if you knew what went into building a successful business-to-business (or business-to-customer) web application (not, say, freedogs.com or whatever that thinks it's going to make money off of giving people dogs for free) you wouldn't really say that.
You sound like a dinosaur that's complaining because his field is expanding into new arenas.
What I find really silly about this whole thing, is that the new Rambo movie's trailer is more violent than this montage of Dark Sector gameplay footage. Seriously, he rips dudes throats out, shoots them with explosive arrows, shoots at point blank with an M42, snaps necks, cuts heads off.. It's much more brutal and realistic than any of the over-normal-mapped graphics in that trailer/footage.
No, you fail. Because if someone really wanted to, they could drop in something else called find, that takes the same format of args, and nobody would know the difference - except that perhaps it's faster. You can't do the same with the kernel, which is the operating system.
Even without find, the operating system is USABLE... you can always just ls through your dirs. Or, you know, remember where you put shit.
[search is..] something that is necessary to have in an operating system.
Not by the strictest terms:) Does a TI84's OS have a file-finder application? Oh wait, I said application. That's because find is an application. That's because beagle is an application. That's because windows search, in all reality, should be an application.
An operating system is a kernel that handles events and provides an API for applications to deal with HID and other pieces of hardware. That's it.
Searching and finding files and folders on a computer is something that is necessary to have in an operating system.
Searching and finding files and folders on a computer is something that is necessary to have in file management software. The Linux OS doesn't have find software built in - find is an extra piece of software that you can delete and still use your computer.
Re:And It Pays for Undergrad Beer Money!
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 1
Have you ever tried to get fresh produce in, say, NYC?
There are places like whole foods, sarnac, etc, but they're more expensive than other places and not as high quality.
In the 1970s, the community garden movement sparked some of the change we've seen in NYC in recent years. It all began with one woman and a group of her artist hippie (damn hippies! *shakes fist* commies!..) friends cleared out 6 feet (tall) of trash from an empty lot and transformed it into a garden.
The neighbors, overwhelmingly African-American and Hispanic, were at first suspicious of a passel of Anglo kids in hippie clothes. But as they saw the Bowery Houston Community Farm Garden take shape, local teens pitched in. Within a few months, they were taking home armloads of tomatoes and cucumbers.
[...]
At the height of the movement, in the late 1980s, the city hosted more than 800 of the homegrown gardens. A survey by Green Thumb found the gardeners were growing over $1 million worth of produce each year.
What works better than community gardens in empty lots?
Community gardens on the roofs of buildings. Most buildings in NYC are roofed with tar. A penthouse apartment might have a balcony, but its roof is tar. Why not farm on the roofs of buildings?
William McDonough and partners are working on roof-based farming in China: rice paddies on roofs, connected with bridges. Granted it might be more difficult in New York, where roofs are definitely not design for it (and are not necessarily all at levels that it would work at), it is definitely an interesting concept. There is probably 13.766 square miles of usable land locked up in rooftops in Manhattan right now (60% of the landmass). Rough guesstimate.
In fact, smaller farms can be much more productive than large corporate-owned farms. These large farms produce one crop over and over again, sometimes rotating, but utilizing many chemical fertilizers, etc. According to the UN Chronicle:
The answer is simply that those big-farm advantages are always calculated on the basis of how much of one crop the land will yield per acre. The greater productivity of a smaller, more complex farm, however, is calculated on the basis of how much food overall is produced per acre. The smaller farm can grow several crops utilizing different root depths, plant heights, or nutrients on the same piece of land simultaneously. It is this "polyculture" that offers the small farm's productivity advantage.
This same article points out that a smaller farm can produce as much as 1,000% per unit of land than a large factory farm.
Fit some roofs with greenhouses and you can begin to grow things like tomatoes, etc. Rooftop gardens are MUCH more feasible than this, don't require much additional construction (ramps and bridges between old buildings, greenhouses), and would ultimately cool down the city by absorbing light and energy! Solar panels can be fitted to provide power to sprinkler systems, etc. It's the community garden redefined.
Nah, I wasn't calling people morons for liking a different system. I was calling people morons because they're whining about how it isn't their vision of what fallout 3 should play like. Most of the people like this, from what I've observed (and it could be completely the opposite..) are not involved in the designing of play mechanics for eye-level shelf title. Art, music, even programming or writing - none of them are really all that involved in the fundamental game design (what it takes to turn the game into a game, instead of being a film). They don't know all that much about what it takes to design a game that will do well in the current marketplace.
For people who are just coming into gaming five years ago or so, they probably have only spuriously heard of fallout. On a geek forum I moderate, a fair majority of the members are in the 18-24 age range. I'm fairly sure the gaming-centric core of posters have played fallout, but a lot of the members probably have never even seen the box art. That's why they're building up the hype for it this soon - because for the most part, it is a franchise that hasn't seen a real well-crafted title in a decade (by the time it hits shelves).
Because of this, they will have to take into account the most popular play mechanics and attempt to incorporate hints to them in the inherent gameplay. Part of the reason the AP system worked so well with the setting is that it drew things out and made it more tense (except in the case of many, many enemies on the screen at once - then it just got annoying). It would be an interesting mechanic to set it to automatically slow-mo-by-a-little-bit, slower for how many enemies there are (to a point), using up APs up as you move or fire. There are a lot of tactical shooters out there that are very popular.. this kind of mechanic would make it more accessible to classic RP gamers (I know, for instance, that my mother doesn't particularly like the first person shooter type game because she doesn't have the reflexes for it. She loved UO, baldurs gate, and a lot of the MMOs though). A mechanic like this might make her want to try playing it, though her preference runs towards classic fantasy.
Ugh. The AP system isn't what made fallout Fallout. The witty dialog, the gripping environmental immersion - broken, might I say, by the AP system - the choices to make - those are what made fallout Fallout.
Game mechanics have to change with the times... as do graphics engines. I don't think this AP system will be a "bones to the old crowd" type gesture. It will add breaks and pauses to the game-play just as the original AP system did. I just hope this time that the next time I walk into an area with 52 rats on screen it won't take me three hours to clear it waiting for all 52 enemies to move. The AP system was AMAZING for small encounters of 6 entities. Once it got to be more than that, it was a serious pitfall of the game - and turned a LOT of people off to it. Not only was it frustratingly long to wait through, but it interrupted the rhythm of the game, jarring you out of your sense of immersion.
Having the kind of graphics engine they will, that jarring effect will be even more pronounced if they had gone with the classic AP system.
You morons whining about how it won't be exactly like your precious original fallout annoy the hell out of me. "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" you say - but a lot of it WAS broken by today's standards. It's still extremely entertaining to dust off and play, but it still has gameplay flaws: just like every other game out there. It was a fantastic game, one of the best, but even the best have faults. Remember that.
Doubtful. Last I looked, crystal space was only just achieving what mainstream graphics engines were about 3 years ago. People who are interested in eyecandy will gloss over it, while a minor group of linux users who are gamers as well as sysadmins will cheer and cheer and cheer and.. nobody important will care.
Not to mention, somehow I doubt a game can be crafted with an open-source development model. A game needs some very strong creative forces behind it to keep it cohesive - if a typical OSS app can't even keep their user interface cohesive [ever look at your typical gnome or kde app's config screen?], something tells me it will be difficult for them to keep their: storyline cohesive, user interface cohesive (like I said, most simple desktop apps have a problem with this), game mechanics cohesive and logical, art direction and style cohesive, etc etc etc. Unless it's just TuxRacer 2.0 (maybe make a version named TuxRaver as a DDR clone?)
Considering the typical absurd workflow logic that goes into most OSS apps I've used (beyond your bread-and-water openoffice, etc)...
You will start out as a penguin in the north pole, whereby you will get a letter from your family in new mexico telling you to come quick because your cousin has died during the construction of the great pyramids. You arrive in Sicily only to find that Siberia has been taken over by mutant cyborgs all named 'Bill Gates.' You must travel to antarctica and battle the chair-throwing monster Ballmer in order to gain the GPL of truth, increasing your hit points by 6.02x10^23 while slowing you to a barely managable crawl. Desperately you make your way to florida, where you successfully battle jack thompson in court and gain the Writ of Winnitude. You combine this with your GPL of Destiny (the one you found during the side quest back in new mexico involving the trout and the cliff wren - you did that, didn't you? it's not in any of the docs anywhere, but it's so obvious! - it's NOT the Gpl of Truth - that item is useless) and are magically transported to a land of rainbows and penguins and free software for everyone. Unfortunately, this paradise is shattered by an Ax of Servitude hewn from the yggsadril-apple. It's shiny, but it works good and is simple to use...
Right about here, most people get bored developing the game and it slowly dies, forgotten in the depths of sourceforge. A few people stop by every couple of months and say, "hey.. there's this bug.. is anyone still working on this?" A few people wax nostalgic about the groundbreaking progress they made on the pixel shader they used to put a shine in the main penguin character's eye (but is not used anywhere else). The controls were odd (you used t to go forward, z to turn left, i to turn right, and clicking your mousebuttons realigned your characters eyes with the directions he was looking) and most people who downloaded it wished pain and suffering on the user interface developers, who decided to go with a "Leopard-meets-vista-meets-diabloII motif."
Note: I love open source software, but really.. I can't see it working in game development:) I could see a group of people taking some open source solutions that are released under the LGPL and developing an indie commercial app with it, but you need a solid and non-transitive team to build a good game.
This is very true. Gimp doesn't have certain features which make it somewhat useless for doing even web graphics: blending layers, etc.. I use it for basic photo work at home, but at work I have to use Photoshop. There's no program that comes close to it, except perhaps fireworks.
Both europe and asia have more users online than north america at this point. When it comes to the internet, populationwise we are shrinking in power.
Anecdotally, most of the innovation I see in web design recently comes out of Sweden. I actually think that other countries might (if not already have already) surpass the US in terms of net export of brainpower, invention, and developmental progress (as opposed to hardware progress). Not only with our national deficit, but with this trend.. Well, I'm not an analyst.
Anyway, actions like the MPAA's (if indeed TorrentSpy decides to cut access to the US), while relatively minor in the scope of things (there will always be other trackers) is evidence of a trend of self-sanctions. Instead of us putting economic sanctions on other countries (iraq, cuba), our actions are causing other countries to effectively sanction us...
The point was that violent crime is actually more pervasive in the UK than in the US, despite their ban on handguns. It's just that now most violent crime is perpetrated with knives and other physical weapons, like bats, metal pipes, chains, etc...
Can't help that most of their beat cops don't carry handguns either. What happens when they go up against a skel WITH a gun? Yell at it and shake their baton?
Hey, thanks for flaming me - I appreciate it. Just so you know, I run slackware with fluxbox on my old laptop - simple web browsing and email, combined with a pinned and virtual desktop independent terminal make for a convenient interface for me; I like typing in commands.
I have an iPod, and I use windows for gaming. I'm in no way a shill, just pointing out what some people don't realize - is that having to grok the difference between thirty different absurdly and counter intuitively named components is a major hurdle for most users.
Not to mention - how are they supposed to know off the bat if a package they download and install is actually still an active project?
Now, if package management systems - like, say, a.deb repository - had a community rating system and a flag to denote whether it's still in active development.. that might be handy. I'm not a great programmer, though - I'm a UI designer (silly, given that my laptop has a non-intuitive interface for most people, eh?) - so it's not like I can really help out with development of such a system.
Which brings me to the point that a lot of people make, that I'm not going to expound upon: the community tends to have their heads up their collective arse (as you have so aptly demonstrated). "You can't find the feature you want? Build it yourself! Don't bother me with your problems."
Linux is developed by developers for themselves, not as cohesive products to be marketed. That's why the UIs suck, why configuration utilities suck (tend to only do half of what you need them to do - to do anything else, you gotta drop to commandline or edit obfuscated config files after perusing cryptic how-tos and vague man files), and so on.. Projects like Ubuntu are slowly changing this, but there's a market untapped by any distribution.
They have "Easy, comes with everything a basic web-and-email-and-some-music user needs" and "Sort of easy but also kind of complicated, great as a development environment" and "Needs a PhD to use but is a very solid server"... but for your typical PC gamer, who likes to configure everything just how they want it but has little to no programming experience... that market is sorely lacking.
Not to mention you have to sift through hundreds of distributions to figure out which one is right for you.
Taking the car analogy from one of the other replies to my post a little bit further:
It's like going to a car dealer, searching through the lot for the car body you want, the only information given to you on a placard in front of the car. Then, you pick what kind of seats you want. Then you pick what size engine you want, what metal the pistons are made out of, the thickness of the tires, what kind of glass you want your windshield to be, what brand of transmission - and then the model of the transmission - to put in... It seriously is a huge headache for most users.
"Something like 22,000+ packages available in the Ubuntu repositories today, all of them precompiled. "
This is also a major hurdle to people. How is Joe User going to know which of the 30 browsers he should use, or 20 file management utilities, or 20 calculators? Distributions come with standard software, generally, but even Ubuntu still requires you to connect to dubious quasi-legal repositories in order to get mp3 working. What Joe User is going to scour the internet for an obscure how-to on getting that to work?
Then there's the fact that most of the free software - gimp and openoffice - while excellent for student work, is woefully inadequate for typical professional work. And from the gamer point of view, well, okay - tuxracer. Quake 3. Um. WoW has a port, maybe? Cedega might work, but most likely won't - and will enjoy crashing your x server?
The only real market for linux right now is education, programming, and server applications. Two out of three are a HUGE minority of the installed end-user computer population.
I completely agree! I don't know of any online radio stations that promote local NYC bands, although I'm sure there are hundreds - I don't fall into the hipster crowd anyway, so it probably wouldn't matter;)
I'm just pointing out that my anecdotal experience turns the RIAA's push to get this regulation legitimized on its head. If they killed Pandora, record companies would lose over $200 in sales to me over the next year. Is it really worth that to them? I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds new music with the service and then goes out and purchases a few albums.
Dude, I've purchased more music since listening to Pandora than I had in the previous four years. I've found some really interesting off-the-wall/radar artists with their service, and have spent approximately $130 in iTunes and amazon (via the pandora affiliate links so they get some c-c-c-cash) on their albums in the past 8 months.
The RIAA gets their money, maybe, but I want my music. It's anecdotal, but it proves a certain point: internet radio helps people find obscure music; obscure but good music drives sales; sales make more money.
In the long run, it will only be good for the music industry: too bad the RIAA is looking out for the suits who want to bolster the status quo this quarter instead of looking to what will make profits rain down six quarters or six years from now. Mainly because they're smelly old men who are only going to live for a few more years anyways, so who cares about future profits? GIMME MY LEAR JET NOW!
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. I've said it once, and I'll say it again: I've spent well over $100 on music from iTunes, simply because I heard it on Pandora. I would have never found it otherwise. I know there is software out there to rip from Pandora, but I'd much rather get an iTunes file and strip the DRM out. Though, now that I've figured out that it was the 7.x versions of iTunes screwing me over (sounded like a record skipping, even on my fast machine - must be that I'm using win2k) and downgraded to the newest 6.x version, I don't really need to strip the DRM anymore ... I, for one, enjoy using itunes to listen to my music.
That's why you combine it with user submitted data... which is what web2.0 is all about.
http://www.vision.ic.ac.uk/images/o2workstation.j
You mean doing what Mencia does all the time?
"Everyone with some algorithm design experience knows that you can get complex behaviors (often known as bugs) with a set of simple rules." I'm convinced that JavaScript is the essence of this assertion.
"A good software developer writes applications that are meant to be run as binaries." ASP.net 2.0 is compiled ;)
Application: a program that gives a computer instructions that provide the user with tools to accomplish a task
That sounds a lot like a web application (and desktop application). It's tough to get a job outside the online direct marketing industry if you don't have experience developing in a server side language: asp.net, java, php, RoR - and sometimes more than one of those. HTML/CSS codemonkeys aren't developers to be sure - but if you knew what went into building a successful business-to-business (or business-to-customer) web application (not, say, freedogs.com or whatever that thinks it's going to make money off of giving people dogs for free) you wouldn't really say that.
You sound like a dinosaur that's complaining because his field is expanding into new arenas.
Ehhhh, it's more like a construction company that graffiti'd a wall, then painted over it, and someone else came along and took the coverup paint off.
What I find really silly about this whole thing, is that the new Rambo movie's trailer is more violent than this montage of Dark Sector gameplay footage. Seriously, he rips dudes throats out, shoots them with explosive arrows, shoots at point blank with an M42, snaps necks, cuts heads off.. It's much more brutal and realistic than any of the over-normal-mapped graphics in that trailer/footage.
Even without find, the operating system is USABLE... you can always just ls through your dirs. Or, you know, remember where you put shit.
Not by the strictest terms
An operating system is a kernel that handles events and provides an API for applications to deal with HID and other pieces of hardware. That's it.
Go back to school.
What works better than community gardens in empty lots?
Community gardens on the roofs of buildings. Most buildings in NYC are roofed with tar. A penthouse apartment might have a balcony, but its roof is tar. Why not farm on the roofs of buildings?
William McDonough and partners are working on roof-based farming in China: rice paddies on roofs, connected with bridges. Granted it might be more difficult in New York, where roofs are definitely not design for it (and are not necessarily all at levels that it would work at), it is definitely an interesting concept. There is probably 13.766 square miles of usable land locked up in rooftops in Manhattan right now (60% of the landmass). Rough guesstimate.
In fact, smaller farms can be much more productive than large corporate-owned farms. These large farms produce one crop over and over again, sometimes rotating, but utilizing many chemical fertilizers, etc. According to the UN Chronicle: This same article points out that a smaller farm can produce as much as 1,000% per unit of land than a large factory farm.
Fit some roofs with greenhouses and you can begin to grow things like tomatoes, etc. Rooftop gardens are MUCH more feasible than this, don't require much additional construction (ramps and bridges between old buildings, greenhouses), and would ultimately cool down the city by absorbing light and energy! Solar panels can be fitted to provide power to sprinkler systems, etc. It's the community garden redefined.
Nah, I wasn't calling people morons for liking a different system. I was calling people morons because they're whining about how it isn't their vision of what fallout 3 should play like. Most of the people like this, from what I've observed (and it could be completely the opposite..) are not involved in the designing of play mechanics for eye-level shelf title. Art, music, even programming or writing - none of them are really all that involved in the fundamental game design (what it takes to turn the game into a game, instead of being a film). They don't know all that much about what it takes to design a game that will do well in the current marketplace.
For people who are just coming into gaming five years ago or so, they probably have only spuriously heard of fallout. On a geek forum I moderate, a fair majority of the members are in the 18-24 age range. I'm fairly sure the gaming-centric core of posters have played fallout, but a lot of the members probably have never even seen the box art. That's why they're building up the hype for it this soon - because for the most part, it is a franchise that hasn't seen a real well-crafted title in a decade (by the time it hits shelves).
Because of this, they will have to take into account the most popular play mechanics and attempt to incorporate hints to them in the inherent gameplay. Part of the reason the AP system worked so well with the setting is that it drew things out and made it more tense (except in the case of many, many enemies on the screen at once - then it just got annoying). It would be an interesting mechanic to set it to automatically slow-mo-by-a-little-bit, slower for how many enemies there are (to a point), using up APs up as you move or fire. There are a lot of tactical shooters out there that are very popular.. this kind of mechanic would make it more accessible to classic RP gamers (I know, for instance, that my mother doesn't particularly like the first person shooter type game because she doesn't have the reflexes for it. She loved UO, baldurs gate, and a lot of the MMOs though). A mechanic like this might make her want to try playing it, though her preference runs towards classic fantasy.
Ugh. The AP system isn't what made fallout Fallout. The witty dialog, the gripping environmental immersion - broken, might I say, by the AP system - the choices to make - those are what made fallout Fallout.
... as do graphics engines. I don't think this AP system will be a "bones to the old crowd" type gesture. It will add breaks and pauses to the game-play just as the original AP system did. I just hope this time that the next time I walk into an area with 52 rats on screen it won't take me three hours to clear it waiting for all 52 enemies to move. The AP system was AMAZING for small encounters of 6 entities. Once it got to be more than that, it was a serious pitfall of the game - and turned a LOT of people off to it. Not only was it frustratingly long to wait through, but it interrupted the rhythm of the game, jarring you out of your sense of immersion.
Game mechanics have to change with the times
Having the kind of graphics engine they will, that jarring effect will be even more pronounced if they had gone with the classic AP system.
You morons whining about how it won't be exactly like your precious original fallout annoy the hell out of me. "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" you say - but a lot of it WAS broken by today's standards. It's still extremely entertaining to dust off and play, but it still has gameplay flaws: just like every other game out there. It was a fantastic game, one of the best, but even the best have faults. Remember that.
Aaah It's too bad it's in Germany, it's something that I'd like to attend. Best of luck! I'll be keeping my eye out.
(I have a jar I keep it in on my desk)
Well then, good luck to you! Hope to see a fine result. When do you expect the design doc of the game to be published?
Doubtful. Last I looked, crystal space was only just achieving what mainstream graphics engines were about 3 years ago. People who are interested in eyecandy will gloss over it, while a minor group of linux users who are gamers as well as sysadmins will cheer and cheer and cheer and.. nobody important will care.
:) I could see a group of people taking some open source solutions that are released under the LGPL and developing an indie commercial app with it, but you need a solid and non-transitive team to build a good game.
Not to mention, somehow I doubt a game can be crafted with an open-source development model. A game needs some very strong creative forces behind it to keep it cohesive - if a typical OSS app can't even keep their user interface cohesive [ever look at your typical gnome or kde app's config screen?], something tells me it will be difficult for them to keep their: storyline cohesive, user interface cohesive (like I said, most simple desktop apps have a problem with this), game mechanics cohesive and logical, art direction and style cohesive, etc etc etc. Unless it's just TuxRacer 2.0 (maybe make a version named TuxRaver as a DDR clone?)
Considering the typical absurd workflow logic that goes into most OSS apps I've used (beyond your bread-and-water openoffice, etc)...
You will start out as a penguin in the north pole, whereby you will get a letter from your family in new mexico telling you to come quick because your cousin has died during the construction of the great pyramids. You arrive in Sicily only to find that Siberia has been taken over by mutant cyborgs all named 'Bill Gates.' You must travel to antarctica and battle the chair-throwing monster Ballmer in order to gain the GPL of truth, increasing your hit points by 6.02x10^23 while slowing you to a barely managable crawl. Desperately you make your way to florida, where you successfully battle jack thompson in court and gain the Writ of Winnitude. You combine this with your GPL of Destiny (the one you found during the side quest back in new mexico involving the trout and the cliff wren - you did that, didn't you? it's not in any of the docs anywhere, but it's so obvious! - it's NOT the Gpl of Truth - that item is useless) and are magically transported to a land of rainbows and penguins and free software for everyone. Unfortunately, this paradise is shattered by an Ax of Servitude hewn from the yggsadril-apple. It's shiny, but it works good and is simple to use...
Right about here, most people get bored developing the game and it slowly dies, forgotten in the depths of sourceforge. A few people stop by every couple of months and say, "hey.. there's this bug.. is anyone still working on this?" A few people wax nostalgic about the groundbreaking progress they made on the pixel shader they used to put a shine in the main penguin character's eye (but is not used anywhere else). The controls were odd (you used t to go forward, z to turn left, i to turn right, and clicking your mousebuttons realigned your characters eyes with the directions he was looking) and most people who downloaded it wished pain and suffering on the user interface developers, who decided to go with a "Leopard-meets-vista-meets-diabloII motif."
Note: I love open source software, but really.. I can't see it working in game development
This is very true. Gimp doesn't have certain features which make it somewhat useless for doing even web graphics: blending layers, etc.. I use it for basic photo work at home, but at work I have to use Photoshop. There's no program that comes close to it, except perhaps fireworks.
Interesting point.
Both europe and asia have more users online than north america at this point. When it comes to the internet, populationwise we are shrinking in power.
Anecdotally, most of the innovation I see in web design recently comes out of Sweden. I actually think that other countries might (if not already have already) surpass the US in terms of net export of brainpower, invention, and developmental progress (as opposed to hardware progress). Not only with our national deficit, but with this trend.. Well, I'm not an analyst.
Anyway, actions like the MPAA's (if indeed TorrentSpy decides to cut access to the US), while relatively minor in the scope of things (there will always be other trackers) is evidence of a trend of self-sanctions. Instead of us putting economic sanctions on other countries (iraq, cuba), our actions are causing other countries to effectively sanction us...
The point was that violent crime is actually more pervasive in the UK than in the US, despite their ban on handguns. It's just that now most violent crime is perpetrated with knives and other physical weapons, like bats, metal pipes, chains, etc... Can't help that most of their beat cops don't carry handguns either. What happens when they go up against a skel WITH a gun? Yell at it and shake their baton?
Hey, thanks for flaming me - I appreciate it. Just so you know, I run slackware with fluxbox on my old laptop - simple web browsing and email, combined with a pinned and virtual desktop independent terminal make for a convenient interface for me; I like typing in commands.
.deb repository - had a community rating system and a flag to denote whether it's still in active development.. that might be handy. I'm not a great programmer, though - I'm a UI designer (silly, given that my laptop has a non-intuitive interface for most people, eh?) - so it's not like I can really help out with development of such a system.
... but for your typical PC gamer, who likes to configure everything just how they want it but has little to no programming experience... that market is sorely lacking.
I have an iPod, and I use windows for gaming. I'm in no way a shill, just pointing out what some people don't realize - is that having to grok the difference between thirty different absurdly and counter intuitively named components is a major hurdle for most users.
Not to mention - how are they supposed to know off the bat if a package they download and install is actually still an active project?
Now, if package management systems - like, say, a
Which brings me to the point that a lot of people make, that I'm not going to expound upon: the community tends to have their heads up their collective arse (as you have so aptly demonstrated). "You can't find the feature you want? Build it yourself! Don't bother me with your problems."
Linux is developed by developers for themselves, not as cohesive products to be marketed. That's why the UIs suck, why configuration utilities suck (tend to only do half of what you need them to do - to do anything else, you gotta drop to commandline or edit obfuscated config files after perusing cryptic how-tos and vague man files), and so on.. Projects like Ubuntu are slowly changing this, but there's a market untapped by any distribution.
They have "Easy, comes with everything a basic web-and-email-and-some-music user needs" and "Sort of easy but also kind of complicated, great as a development environment" and "Needs a PhD to use but is a very solid server"
Not to mention you have to sift through hundreds of distributions to figure out which one is right for you.
Taking the car analogy from one of the other replies to my post a little bit further:
It's like going to a car dealer, searching through the lot for the car body you want, the only information given to you on a placard in front of the car. Then, you pick what kind of seats you want. Then you pick what size engine you want, what metal the pistons are made out of, the thickness of the tires, what kind of glass you want your windshield to be, what brand of transmission - and then the model of the transmission - to put in... It seriously is a huge headache for most users.
"Something like 22,000+ packages available in the Ubuntu repositories today, all of them precompiled. "
This is also a major hurdle to people. How is Joe User going to know which of the 30 browsers he should use, or 20 file management utilities, or 20 calculators? Distributions come with standard software, generally, but even Ubuntu still requires you to connect to dubious quasi-legal repositories in order to get mp3 working. What Joe User is going to scour the internet for an obscure how-to on getting that to work?
Then there's the fact that most of the free software - gimp and openoffice - while excellent for student work, is woefully inadequate for typical professional work. And from the gamer point of view, well, okay - tuxracer. Quake 3. Um. WoW has a port, maybe? Cedega might work, but most likely won't - and will enjoy crashing your x server?
The only real market for linux right now is education, programming, and server applications. Two out of three are a HUGE minority of the installed end-user computer population.
Hey. Don't talk about my mom like that.
Neither of those would work, since your main domain name needs to be at least three characters.
I completely agree! I don't know of any online radio stations that promote local NYC bands, although I'm sure there are hundreds - I don't fall into the hipster crowd anyway, so it probably wouldn't matter ;)
I'm just pointing out that my anecdotal experience turns the RIAA's push to get this regulation legitimized on its head. If they killed Pandora, record companies would lose over $200 in sales to me over the next year. Is it really worth that to them? I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds new music with the service and then goes out and purchases a few albums.
Dude, I've purchased more music since listening to Pandora than I had in the previous four years. I've found some really interesting off-the-wall/radar artists with their service, and have spent approximately $130 in iTunes and amazon (via the pandora affiliate links so they get some c-c-c-cash) on their albums in the past 8 months. The RIAA gets their money, maybe, but I want my music. It's anecdotal, but it proves a certain point: internet radio helps people find obscure music; obscure but good music drives sales; sales make more money. In the long run, it will only be good for the music industry: too bad the RIAA is looking out for the suits who want to bolster the status quo this quarter instead of looking to what will make profits rain down six quarters or six years from now. Mainly because they're smelly old men who are only going to live for a few more years anyways, so who cares about future profits? GIMME MY LEAR JET NOW!