And Linux is like a house, but you used to have to build it yourself, but not so anymore! Because every two weeks some company or other makes a new house that is always so much better than the other companies houses, and the other houses made by that company, but it's usually designed so that only scientists or people with 500 children or people who keep angora rabbits can use it because it's the angora rabbit house distribution.
Anyway, the house is free and you don't even have to build it yourself anymore, the company comes around and arranges everything perfectly depending on the size of the land you have and the available power and water. It looks really great! Then you try to get in the house, but the doorway is bricked up. You look for an easy way to open the door but it just isn't going to happen. Turns out the only way to get that door happening is for you to wander up and down the street looking for other people in Linux houses to find someone who knows enough about masonry to teach you how to rebrick the area around the door so you have a doorway that works right. One all-nighter with a bunch of bricks and cement you've gotten yourself into your new house!
So you go out and you buy a sink for your new kitchen, it's a really popular sink and everyone in the Windows rental houses has one. You try to install your new sink and the pipes are all wrong! But your neighbour has a linux house and he had a similar sink, it's easy, all you have to do is get a metal pipe and an oxy-acetaline torch...
Just like IBM has an unbreakable monopoly on the business and personal computer? And Netscape is the only browser that anyone uses because it's the only good one? And Novell continues to totally dominate the server OS market? And Altavista, Excite! and Yahoo are the only search engines anyone really uses? And Internet Explorer will never lose market share to an open source product? And ATI and 3DFX are the only graphics card producers worth considering for gaming?
Things can change. But they only change because:
1) The product is good enough and people don't care about the marketing muscle/coercion. 2) The product is great despite the lack of marketing muscle/coercion.
If you make a bad product, no matter how much you leverage it, it won't hold. Take OS/2 and Windows Me and the PC-Jr and the Lisa for fine examples.
Wait... it's Microsoft's fault that Adobe makes a poor quality product that interferes with the normal Windows logoff/shut down procedure?
Anyone can write software that breaks or damages a perfectly good Windows system. Anyone can write software that breaks or damages any perfectly good operating system.
Is it the fault of the OS developer or the software developer that this is the case?
It's like renting a house, inviting a thug with a gun to come in, then blaming your landlord when the thug shoots you.
However, of all people I know, the ones who use Windows are the only ones I hear complaining about the stability of their systems.
So you don't know anyone who runs Linux besides yourself? Just kidding, I'm sure you do. But there's definately a mentality amongst Linux users, probably some deep insecurity complex that keeps their mouths shut about crashes. Complaining about Linux stability when you're trying to be a Linux advocate is just stupid, so people don't, I can't blame them for that, but it does reduce the quality of your anecdotal evidence.
It's likely, as many people have said, that the cause of the BSODs will be a third party - either poor quality or faulty hardware, or some kind of Norton thing or other intrusive third party software bashing the OS. Try running Windows up in Safe Mode and disabling services and uninstalling apps that aren't necessary.
And here's a personal Linux anecdote - I've been running Windows on my system for about 2 years now, different service packs and so on, and I've had nothing but rock solid stability out of it. I've also tried 3 different releases of Knoppix Live CD's and not one of them will even boot into the OS properly without dying hard at some stage of the driver initialisation - let alone going anywhere near a GUI. I have a pretty standard desktop PC. I'm not saying that Knoppix is bad software, but who's going to fix that problem? I'll do what the majority of users do, I'll use Windows because it just works.
It all goes back to the value of categorisation in the first place - how useful is it to classify games anyway?
Tags are definately a better idea. There are no absolutes.
You can tag Scorched Earth as Artillery, Turn Based Strategy, Multiplayer, etc You can tag Magic Carpet as all those genres at the same time, it all works. You pick out every game that's tagged flight sim and you'll get Magic Carpet, but you'll still get it if you go looking for action games too.
Your use of the dynamic single-ocular orally curled emotional intent gestural device ";)"(tm)(c) is a direct violation of patents held by my client, Microsoft Corporation. Please cease and desist immediately. Steve Ballmer will be arriving shortly with a van full of chairs.
This isn't right - what if there is a game that, perhaps not on your person, but in your house? Or, a game that you purchase with a friend, and play the game half the time at your house, and half the time at his? Or what if you just borrow a game and have it in your house? What if it's in your locker at work, where the locker is technically yours but owned by the company? How about if you hire-purchase a game?
Have you read the EULA for World of Warcraft? I would not be surprised if that game said you're licensed to use it but you don't own it - how does that fit into your classifications, Mr Smarty Pants?
These games can both be classified by the genres in the Wikipedia article on game genres.
Scorched Earth is a 2.4 - Artillery game
Magic Carpet could technically be classified into several - it should, because of it's complexity in terms of content, be classified as 1.1 - Action (it is an action game - but most games are). It can also be classified as a Flight Sim, but then, many flight sims contain action and vice-versa, action games can simulate flight (which Magic Carpet does, if unconventionally).
As games can have properties of multiple genres, it is a good idea to use a tagging system, as has been mentioned here in/. previously.
The inclusion of a "misc" category implies by default that your method for categorisation of games does not cover every possible categorisation of game...
I ran RC1 for a while last night, it is a lot more stable than the betas ever were. Games all ran properly, one or two apps crashed, but they were old and doing pretty involved stuff (screen capture, on the fly encoding etc), and a quick look on the web shows that there are other apps that do the same stuff that work well with Vista.
I wouldn't say it was like an unassembled bike, I would say it was a very thorougly assembled bike, but blockier than the bike I am used to with the gears doing the same thing but in different places. And with safety padlocks on half of the controls that I have to unlock before I can use them (like Computer Management!). I am sure I will get use to the new interfaces but at the moment it defiantely takes longer to get basic things done under Vista than it does under XP.
I am going to become sick and tired of being asked if I was responsible for running an executable every time I run an executable!
Vista right now is like that unassembled bike you got as a kid for Christmas. All the parts are there but you can't quite get it fitted together right.
What does that make Linux? Not to be a troll, but every Linux distro I've touched has required at some point or another manual editing of conf files to make it work perfectly as it should. If Windows is like an unassembled bike, surely Linux is made like an unassembled bike on purpose? Open source, with all the components open for you to modify?
If they release it too soon (i.e. as currently planned), it is likely going to require significant upgrades and probably also a super fast SP1 upgrade.
Well that sounds like a brilliant idea. How many times do you hear people say "I'm not installing that until SP1 is out!"
Might be the best way to enforce rapid worldwide adoption of the OS.
As Mac OS X marketshare increases, more and more of those essential Windows apps will get a Mac version, especially if their customers start demanding it - "I hate having to reboot into windows just to run your software", etc.
This will never happen in more than a very small minority of cases.
There are three kinds of people who buy an Apple PC/laptop:
1) People who want to run some kind of MacOS 2) People who want the iPod computer 3) Linux guys who want a shiny UI with unixy bits underneath
Now, the majority of PC buyers will buy on a cost-benefit basis. I'm talking about the most important people here, the people who made Intel (not Nvidia or ATI) the largest supplier of graphics chips in the world. These are the people that make up the bulk of the IT world. These people will not choose MacOS over Windows, because the hardware is more expensive. These people will not buy a computer as a fashion accessory. These people will never understand nor desire open source or the characteristics of a Unix like OS.
Since these people won't be using MacOS, they also won't be demanding that developers write code for MacOS.
The only way that Apple stands any chance of touching the majority of the IT world is through commodity. Which means they need to sell faster and cheaper computers than Dell.
Ugh, by the same logic, there *isn't* a huge virus/malware/zombie problem on Windows PC's because nobody is making you use Windows.
I think it's foolish not to consider the power and influence of the masses, who will buy something because it's what they've bought before or because it's fancy or because the neighbours use it or because it's got a white plastic case.
Second, does anyone actually believe that - if this was true - you'd be forced to use it to use Google software? Google might track every statistic imaginable, but no one is forced to use anything they provide....yet.
Hideous. It won't handle in-use files at all. It will back up shedloads of useless files that you probably don't want restored.
Although it is a one liner!
Try using MS-Backup. It will let you back everything to file (including system-state) and it will be readable from anywhere, and it hooks into scheduled tasks without any problems so you can fire-and-forget.
You should bear in mind the morality of Warcraft - the Horde aren't bad guys, the blood elves joined the Horde simply because Alliance paladins deemed them to be "tainted" and attempted to wipe them out in the good old ethnic cleansing genocide style. They only narrowly escaped to the Outlands. The Night Elves themselves just flipped a coin to decide whether to go with the Orcs or the Humans, but really they just wanted to kill everyone invading their territory.
The "forsaken" are the victims of the scourge, undead who managed to at least recover their own souls and destinies, and while they can't just make themselves alive again, they are certainly trying to make the best of a bad situation.
So really, I'll stick with the Horde side so I can play the good guys.
Are you kidding? Netscape begat open source Mozilla begat Firefox! For me there is no other browser. Not only is it open source, but it's arguably the best browser ever! Certainly the best I have ever used.
The direct consequences of code being open sourced is often underwhelming. But that source becomes a freely available resource that eventually can be used to construct the next firefox, linux, thunderbird, what have you.
Why is this flamebait? The license terms and conditions for an MS OEM license specifically states you cannot transfer the license!
When the grandparent violated the terms of his license and installed Windows on a machine that is not covered by his license agreement with Microsoft, that installation of Windows became effectively "pirated".
I'm not saying that Microsofts OEM licensing scheme is a legitimate or morally correct form of business, but from a (IANAL) legal perspective, the guy violated his license agreement and then was completely astounded when WGA told him that he had violated his license agreement... (jokes about Microsoft software actually working well enough to do what it should aside...)
That's an interesting point, the commodity desktop - if only the Linux desktop offerings were more cohesive, so people wouldn't be quite so afraid of it.
People are ok to say, "I want an iPod computer" or "I want a Windows computer" but not "I want a redhatdebianmandrakesuseslackware2.6kernellindows computer".
I think that efforts to enforce limited use of the Linux trademark are only damaging the marketability of Linux as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
And Linux is like a house, but you used to have to build it yourself, but not so anymore! Because every two weeks some company or other makes a new house that is always so much better than the other companies houses, and the other houses made by that company, but it's usually designed so that only scientists or people with 500 children or people who keep angora rabbits can use it because it's the angora rabbit house distribution.
Anyway, the house is free and you don't even have to build it yourself anymore, the company comes around and arranges everything perfectly depending on the size of the land you have and the available power and water. It looks really great! Then you try to get in the house, but the doorway is bricked up. You look for an easy way to open the door but it just isn't going to happen. Turns out the only way to get that door happening is for you to wander up and down the street looking for other people in Linux houses to find someone who knows enough about masonry to teach you how to rebrick the area around the door so you have a doorway that works right. One all-nighter with a bunch of bricks and cement you've gotten yourself into your new house!
So you go out and you buy a sink for your new kitchen, it's a really popular sink and everyone in the Windows rental houses has one. You try to install your new sink and the pipes are all wrong! But your neighbour has a linux house and he had a similar sink, it's easy, all you have to do is get a metal pipe and an oxy-acetaline torch...
Just like IBM has an unbreakable monopoly on the business and personal computer?
And Netscape is the only browser that anyone uses because it's the only good one?
And Novell continues to totally dominate the server OS market?
And Altavista, Excite! and Yahoo are the only search engines anyone really uses?
And Internet Explorer will never lose market share to an open source product?
And ATI and 3DFX are the only graphics card producers worth considering for gaming?
Things can change. But they only change because:
1) The product is good enough and people don't care about the marketing muscle/coercion.
2) The product is great despite the lack of marketing muscle/coercion.
If you make a bad product, no matter how much you leverage it, it won't hold. Take OS/2 and Windows Me and the PC-Jr and the Lisa for fine examples.
Wait... it's Microsoft's fault that Adobe makes a poor quality product that interferes with the normal Windows logoff/shut down procedure?
Anyone can write software that breaks or damages a perfectly good Windows system.
Anyone can write software that breaks or damages any perfectly good operating system.
Is it the fault of the OS developer or the software developer that this is the case?
It's like renting a house, inviting a thug with a gun to come in, then blaming your landlord when the thug shoots you.
1845248 ref unperson, unevent, rewrite fullwise.
However, of all people I know, the ones who use Windows are the only ones I hear complaining about the stability of their systems.
So you don't know anyone who runs Linux besides yourself? Just kidding, I'm sure you do. But there's definately a mentality amongst Linux users, probably some deep insecurity complex that keeps their mouths shut about crashes. Complaining about Linux stability when you're trying to be a Linux advocate is just stupid, so people don't, I can't blame them for that, but it does reduce the quality of your anecdotal evidence.
It's likely, as many people have said, that the cause of the BSODs will be a third party - either poor quality or faulty hardware, or some kind of Norton thing or other intrusive third party software bashing the OS. Try running Windows up in Safe Mode and disabling services and uninstalling apps that aren't necessary.
And here's a personal Linux anecdote - I've been running Windows on my system for about 2 years now, different service packs and so on, and I've had nothing but rock solid stability out of it. I've also tried 3 different releases of Knoppix Live CD's and not one of them will even boot into the OS properly without dying hard at some stage of the driver initialisation - let alone going anywhere near a GUI. I have a pretty standard desktop PC. I'm not saying that Knoppix is bad software, but who's going to fix that problem? I'll do what the majority of users do, I'll use Windows because it just works.
It all goes back to the value of categorisation in the first place - how useful is it to classify games anyway?
Tags are definately a better idea. There are no absolutes.
You can tag Scorched Earth as Artillery, Turn Based Strategy, Multiplayer, etc
You can tag Magic Carpet as all those genres at the same time, it all works. You pick out every game that's tagged flight sim and you'll get Magic Carpet, but you'll still get it if you go looking for action games too.
Dear sir,
Your use of the dynamic single-ocular orally curled emotional intent gestural device ";)"(tm)(c) is a direct violation of patents held by my client, Microsoft Corporation. Please cease and desist immediately. Steve Ballmer will be arriving shortly with a van full of chairs.
Best regards,
Evil Microsoft IP Lawyer.
This isn't right - what if there is a game that, perhaps not on your person, but in your house? Or, a game that you purchase with a friend, and play the game half the time at your house, and half the time at his? Or what if you just borrow a game and have it in your house? What if it's in your locker at work, where the locker is technically yours but owned by the company? How about if you hire-purchase a game?
Have you read the EULA for World of Warcraft? I would not be surprised if that game said you're licensed to use it but you don't own it - how does that fit into your classifications, Mr Smarty Pants?
These games can both be classified by the genres in the Wikipedia article on game genres.
/. previously.
Scorched Earth is a 2.4 - Artillery game
Magic Carpet could technically be classified into several - it should, because of it's complexity in terms of content, be classified as 1.1 - Action (it is an action game - but most games are). It can also be classified as a Flight Sim, but then, many flight sims contain action and vice-versa, action games can simulate flight (which Magic Carpet does, if unconventionally).
As games can have properties of multiple genres, it is a good idea to use a tagging system, as has been mentioned here in
What if you have a game that is all like, action/sports/adventure/puzzle etc that bursts out into a subgame of Nethack some way through?
The inclusion of a "misc" category implies by default that your method for categorisation of games does not cover every possible categorisation of game...
I like Wikipedias list of categories.
I ran RC1 for a while last night, it is a lot more stable than the betas ever were. Games all ran properly, one or two apps crashed, but they were old and doing pretty involved stuff (screen capture, on the fly encoding etc), and a quick look on the web shows that there are other apps that do the same stuff that work well with Vista.
I wouldn't say it was like an unassembled bike, I would say it was a very thorougly assembled bike, but blockier than the bike I am used to with the gears doing the same thing but in different places. And with safety padlocks on half of the controls that I have to unlock before I can use them (like Computer Management!). I am sure I will get use to the new interfaces but at the moment it defiantely takes longer to get basic things done under Vista than it does under XP.
I am going to become sick and tired of being asked if I was responsible for running an executable every time I run an executable!
Vista right now is like that unassembled bike you got as a kid for Christmas. All the parts are there but you can't quite get it fitted together right.
What does that make Linux? Not to be a troll, but every Linux distro I've touched has required at some point or another manual editing of conf files to make it work perfectly as it should. If Windows is like an unassembled bike, surely Linux is made like an unassembled bike on purpose? Open source, with all the components open for you to modify?
If they release it too soon (i.e. as currently planned), it is likely going to require significant upgrades and probably also a super fast SP1 upgrade.
Well that sounds like a brilliant idea. How many times do you hear people say "I'm not installing that until SP1 is out!"
Might be the best way to enforce rapid worldwide adoption of the OS.
Why? It's America, you have Predidential Candidates unsuitable for Presidency. What's more, they win all the time!
As Mac OS X marketshare increases, more and more of those essential Windows apps will get a Mac version, especially if their customers start demanding it - "I hate having to reboot into windows just to run your software", etc.
This will never happen in more than a very small minority of cases.
There are three kinds of people who buy an Apple PC/laptop:
1) People who want to run some kind of MacOS
2) People who want the iPod computer
3) Linux guys who want a shiny UI with unixy bits underneath
Now, the majority of PC buyers will buy on a cost-benefit basis. I'm talking about the most important people here, the people who made Intel (not Nvidia or ATI) the largest supplier of graphics chips in the world. These are the people that make up the bulk of the IT world. These people will not choose MacOS over Windows, because the hardware is more expensive. These people will not buy a computer as a fashion accessory. These people will never understand nor desire open source or the characteristics of a Unix like OS.
Since these people won't be using MacOS, they also won't be demanding that developers write code for MacOS.
The only way that Apple stands any chance of touching the majority of the IT world is through commodity. Which means they need to sell faster and cheaper computers than Dell.
Ugh, by the same logic, there *isn't* a huge virus/malware/zombie problem on Windows PC's because nobody is making you use Windows.
I think it's foolish not to consider the power and influence of the masses, who will buy something because it's what they've bought before or because it's fancy or because the neighbours use it or because it's got a white plastic case.
I go out and leave a looped soundtrack of piggies oinking?
Or machinegun fire?
Or "IhategoogleIhategoogleIhategoogle"
Or arabic speech? (will I get a visit from the secret anti-terror police?)
Second, does anyone actually believe that - if this was true - you'd be forced to use it to use Google software? Google might track every statistic imaginable, but no one is forced to use anything they provide. ...yet.
Who doesn't use Google?
Hideous. It won't handle in-use files at all. It will back up shedloads of useless files that you probably don't want restored.
Although it is a one liner!
Try using MS-Backup. It will let you back everything to file (including system-state) and it will be readable from anywhere, and it hooks into scheduled tasks without any problems so you can fire-and-forget.
You should bear in mind the morality of Warcraft - the Horde aren't bad guys, the blood elves joined the Horde simply because Alliance paladins deemed them to be "tainted" and attempted to wipe them out in the good old ethnic cleansing genocide style. They only narrowly escaped to the Outlands. The Night Elves themselves just flipped a coin to decide whether to go with the Orcs or the Humans, but really they just wanted to kill everyone invading their territory.
The "forsaken" are the victims of the scourge, undead who managed to at least recover their own souls and destinies, and while they can't just make themselves alive again, they are certainly trying to make the best of a bad situation.
So really, I'll stick with the Horde side so I can play the good guys.
Are you kidding? Netscape begat open source Mozilla begat Firefox! For me there is no other browser. Not only is it open source, but it's arguably the best browser ever! Certainly the best I have ever used.
The direct consequences of code being open sourced is often underwhelming. But that source becomes a freely available resource that eventually can be used to construct the next firefox, linux, thunderbird, what have you.
Why is this flamebait? The license terms and conditions for an MS OEM license specifically states you cannot transfer the license!
When the grandparent violated the terms of his license and installed Windows on a machine that is not covered by his license agreement with Microsoft, that installation of Windows became effectively "pirated".
I'm not saying that Microsofts OEM licensing scheme is a legitimate or morally correct form of business, but from a (IANAL) legal perspective, the guy violated his license agreement and then was completely astounded when WGA told him that he had violated his license agreement... (jokes about Microsoft software actually working well enough to do what it should aside...)
I have a lazy eye, you insensitive clods!
That's an interesting point, the commodity desktop - if only the Linux desktop offerings were more cohesive, so people wouldn't be quite so afraid of it.
People are ok to say, "I want an iPod computer" or "I want a Windows computer" but not "I want a redhatdebianmandrakesuseslackware2.6kernellindows computer".
I think that efforts to enforce limited use of the Linux trademark are only damaging the marketability of Linux as a whole.