... sorry but pricing is a major issue. How this man cannot say that it is't when games go on sale for 75% off on his site frequently seems ludicrous. The big things effecting modern games are:
1) Game quality 2) DRM 3) Buyers avoiding paying more then $15-20 for DRM laden crap they don't own.
Lots of people avoid buying games entirely because of DRM and low game quality. There are those of us who buy games at extremely deep discounts (5-15$ at most) on steam because of DRM we refuse to pay full price for DRM infested games that we don't own but we do want to support PC developers and have few alternatives since many small developers release on steam.
Gabe has done a lot of marketing to brainwash people and get people to thinking he's a good guy but he's not, if he was the good guy games would deprecate their DRM after a year and the exe's unhooked from steam. The purpose of steam is to datamine users for 'business reasons' and he's putting this massive spin his datamining operation. This means more metrics driven game development as if we didn't have this enough of this alread with the constant clones every year.
E-books don't have to be text, ebooks can include video clips, links to other sites, and even interactive programs embedded in web-pages. The whole idea of an 'e-book' is quite a bit of nonsense. Once data is electronic it is being displayed by a video adapter, it's all a matter of how much work/effort you're willing to put into an 'e-book'.
" in other areas where I am less knowledgeable I am probably duped into paying more than I should."
Clothes. I imagine most people have no clue what their clothes really cost but pay the exorbitantly high prices for clothes, shoes, etc because they don't buy clothes that often.
"Because all companies should support all products forever, even if no one uses them? What company does that?"
If users got source-code and the right to modify/update their software no one would have to rely on companies in the first place. The whole bit about companies being able to own in perpetuity software they no longer support or sell but their users still use is bullshit. Users need rights to get source-code, etc. They have every right to modify/update their own software.
... are protectionism and corporate welfare of the 21st century. I think it's best to say that copyright/patents are anti-free market, anti-technology and anti-science IMHO. Not only that human beings just aren't smart enough to judge when something should be or should not be patented. It's a giant clusterfuck.
I think those who argue for them just don't want to find new business models, using the law as a business model has made one hell of a legal mess and created a ethically bankrupt legal system clogged with up with suits. I think someone should really figure out how much inefficiency this is creating and how much all this costs us in terms of the legal system. I imagine that whatever supposed 'gains' we are allegedly getting from these systems are wiped out by lawyers and the lack of free exchange/modification of ideas between products and industries.
Newer RAIDS allow for multiple drive failures FYI. My beginning raid setup was RAID 5. More importantly I backup frequently (mirror drives) long before they fail I have 3 copies of everything or more at all times and for mission critical stuff I have multiple offline discs (DVD-R/BD-R).
... because hard drive costs have come down so much it's just cheaper to buy a bunch of hard drives and mirror like crazy. Another factor is speed. Backup up costs time and time is money. So it makes sense that more and more organizations have moved to to mirroring/RAID solutions.
RAID is pretty damn robust these days also and with drives as cheap as they are you can create many mirrors at once. I've owned raid 5 over the past 7 years and I've never lost data drives have always died 1 at a time on a disk array. As hard drives got cheaper I get to back up the entire array with one hard drive before I start to replace the drives in an array. My first array was 4x160GB drives as soon as 500GB drives became cheap enough you can copy the contents of 4 disks onto 1. I imagine this pattern has happened for many organizations as well. Drives just keep getting bigger and cheaper fast enough that you can affordably back up what used to be a 'big drive' in a year or two's time as the prices come down.
"If Apple are guilty of anything here, then so are the consumers of Apple products."
Not quite, the enlightenment and the free market theory that was spawned from the enlightenment thinkers were based on false views of how the human mind operates, see here:
"I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again today: the problem is that the "two" parties in power now both have the same agenda. It is time for people to start voting third party."
That is not how human beings work, the whole system was designed by enlightenment era thinkers with enlightenment view of human reasoning but it is scientifically wrong, the whole system is now the problem because of mistaken notions about human minds and how they function.
"Neither of these are viable options. So you need to get him voted out of office. Thus, the problem is the voters."
Sorry but the problem is not the voters so much as the system was designed according to the enlightenments view of man and it is scientifically wrong, see here:
" ship alarmingly priced cards in the face of shit that has the decency to be priced as such, from outfits like realtek, and genuinely decent hardware from companies that actually know something about audio..."
Their "alarmingly high priced" cards are your subjective perception and they are still miles better then most onboard solutions in terms of features and sound quality, volume and software features. I have yet to find a soundcard that comes with simple, easy to use and clean audio tools that you get with audigy card. Now I know you can download more advanced audio editing software but for quick and dirty stuff like "recording what you hear" through the wave channel from a movie/clip or off the internet it is a godsend. I still can't stand onboard motherboard audio after all these years because of the lack of software options and tweaking that I'm used to on audigy line of cards.
"Apple has been doing it the right way. Microsoft, not so much."
Apple has been riding on shallow fickle tastes of consumers they are not 'innovators' they've mostly just been taking what has always been around and then just making them beautiful/shiny. They've taken high tech products and turned them into the equivalent of televisions for mass consumption. There really has not been any real innovation in apple other then marketing and catering to the basest and shallowest elements of humanity.
The iPod was not the best MP3 on the market before and after it was released, the iPad is nothing to write home about either. I'd say when we get down to it we have software and usability problem as well as having a low intelligence population whose need and wants aren't exactly based on anything of long term value.
"I tired of Magicka very quickly because of that (and because of their stupid save system)."
Magicka did not have the pseudo-random dungeon generator like diablo, diablo 1 + 2 were so god damn addictive for so long because it wasn't 'exactly' the same. Lets not forget magicka was done by indies and not some big publishing house whereas diablo 1 + 2 had huge financial resources from earlier successes.
... the gameplay matters. Even if it is simpler then modern games the interactivity (being able to build/destroy) is off the charts since you're able to create/destroy what you want and as you wish. So that patterns never have to be the same, as opposed to modern static worlds of aesthetically pleasing art that are most always the same/w some scripted destruction in the world here and there.
Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game development, if developers weren't so clueless they should have either joined forces or complained to the government about the abuse they take at the hands of publishers.
"What we see now are interrelated systems of global mercantilism "
No what we're seeing is the true face of the free market, the free market has ALWAYS had the nanny state to protect it, only morons use linguistic obscurantism like yourself to protect your favored ideal from any kind of rational criticism.
"If anything, this is a poster child for the success of capitalism."
No because intel used all sorts of bribery and nonsensical bullshit with other companies to get them to not buy AMD when AMD had the advantage. It's not that AMD couldn't compete it's that Intel used it's market power and monopoly position in an abusive way. This is the problem with you americans - you're fucking stupid. The complete lack of anti-trust enforcement in the US has lead to AMD getting fucked even when it was ahead.
"Where I think AMD really fell behind was they were not able to afford the kind of R&D on the manufacturing side"
I believe more that it is a matter of market failure and problems related to anti-trust, that intels advanced manufacturing actually hinders chip design advancement through being able to monopolize production facilities. Look at the underhanded tactics intel used during the athlon era when AMD was ahead. In my opinion we have a special case of market failure. The resources that are now required to make chips at smaller and smaller geometries have pushed costs sky high and intel can whether it because it has been a monopoly for so long and they have the largest market share. This is why most other chip companies are fabless - they would need something on the order of sustained government investment to compete with intel because the barriers to entry are now too high producing market failure and limiting competition between chip designers. I'm sure there are lots of great chip designers out there but without the mfg facilities to back it up I'm sure we're wasting a lot of great talent.
" He is one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment, and his writings have influenced all of us, whether or not we are conscious of them."
Speaking of the enlightenment, the enlightenment thinkers had no idea how the brain or human reasoning worked. Much of what they thought about reasoning and what many people today think about their own ability to reason is absolutely incorrect. You should all see the following:
The net selects for low energy easily digestible and often times emotionally/politically charged information. One only has to look at how simple most perspectives are even on slashdot. No one really wants to critique ones own pet ideals or ideology. Most people and yes - even most people on slashdot don't have any interest in undermining ideas they find appealing. That's not how you go about finding truth and developing insight into the nature of reality. It's something we all do to lesser or greater extents. The problem is the amount of time and discipline that is needed in our distracted entertainment society is difficult to find when one is fighting off one's natural tendencies and habits that more often then not get the better of us.
We are not free - we are natural processes of the universe governed by principles of biology which we only have a very incomplete understanding of. The net gives us low entropy information that is easily consumed, I believe what we're really experiencing is the energy economy of the brain optimizing itself for highly condensed and/or simplified information.
We will go deeper if it something we are emotionally invested in or passionate about but even there we have limits and are still distractable. The best thing one can do for oneself is get a pad and a pen/pencil find a quiet room alone and write. It really encourages focus and thinking at the same time. To write ones thoughts and not just casually think them or write them on the net.
.. has inferior usability and interface. They also need to do more then just provide an OS they could make advancements in BIOS and drive controllers for hardware. I've often wondered why rich linux boys haven't gotten into agreements with controller manfuacturers. I've always wanted to be able to select hard drives to boot from done intelligently by "changing the channel" but not having to do it as it is done now in traditional bios.
raditional bios registers hard drives on controllers 0/1/2, etc. Instead controller assignment should be user selectable from software and automatically managed behind the scenes, so if you want to boot from drive 2 but have drive one not active/using power/shut off you can do so. Under current bios and power management regimes you are forced to either unplug the drive you don't want to use manually and switch the physical cables or having one of the drives idle and using power while dealing with manual ini/config tweaking (in Windows XP i.e. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=1).
After years and years of clockspeed improvements there hasn't really been a wave of simple usability improvements that are trivial to implement to make configuring/using computers especially for us power users less of a hassle.
IMHO The biggest thing holding back linux in my opinion is there is no compelling reason to change. If linux could give a significant performance advantage in games or applications over competing operating systems that would be a compelling reason to switch. Until they focus on providing a compelling reason to do so inertia, convenience and general lazyness keeps people on windows boxes. Let's also face it - windows has gotten good enough for the vast majority of users. So if you're trying to sell an operating system you have to have significant reasons for people to change. One would be to pay game developers to release major releases as DRM free games with native linux support.
If you want to get out of proprietary locked down software then you have to give the people what they want and be willing to create a for profit ecosystem on linux platform as well. Developers simply cannot maintain open source programs unless they do it for profit - no one has the discipline to serve users interests without any profit motive. You can still have open source/w profit IMHO. Developers need to eat and the only way they are going to make headway is to be able to not be driven into oblivion by lack of funds, leadership and the discpline for profit software enables to deal with idiot/moronic/undisciplined coders. This severe lack of funds for developers keeps linux and linux software quality at the margins and will never make headway with the mainstream. Making software people ** want to use ** is a lot of intense boring hard work a lot of the time let's be realistic. No can code any serious application for free because they don't have any discipline or drive to do what is necessary to gain customers/users.
... has inferior usability and interface. They also need to do more then just provide an OS they could make advancements in BIOS and drive controllers for hardware. I've often wondered why rich linux boys haven't gotten into agreements with controller manfuacturers. I've always wanted to be able to select hard drives to boot from done intelligently by "changing the channel" but not having to do it as it is done now in traditional bios.
The biggest thing holding back linux in my opinion is there is no compelling reason to change, if linux could give a significant performance advantage in games or applications over competing operating systems that would be a compelling reason to switch. Until they focus on providing a compelling reason to do so inertia, convenience and general lazyness keeps people on windows boxes. Let's also face it - windows has gotten good enough for the vast majority of users. So if you're trying to sell an operating system you have to have significant reasons for people to change. One would be to pay game developers to release major releases as DRM free games with native linux support. If you want to get out of proprietary locked down software then you have to give the people what they want and be willing to create a for profit ecosystem on linux platform as well. Developers simply cannot maintain open source programs unless they do it for profit - no one has the discipline to serve users interests without any profit motive. You can still have open source/w profit IMHO. Developers need to eat and the only way they are going to make headway is to be able to not be driven into oblivion by lack of funds, leadership and the discpline for profit software enables to deal with idiot/moronic/undisciplined coders. This severe lack of funds
Traditional bios registers hard drives on controllers 0/1/2, etc. Instead controller assignment should be user selectable from software and automatically managed behind the scenes, so if you want to boot from drive 2 but have drive one not active/using power/shut off you can do so. Under current bios and power management regimes you are forced to either unplug the drive you don't want to use manually and switch the physical cables or having one of the drives idle and using power while dealing with manual ini/config tweaking (in Windows XP i.e. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=1).
After years and years of clockspeed improvements there hasn't really been a wave of simple usability improvements that are trivial to implement to make configuring/using computers especially for us power users less of a hassle.
Slashdot Mirror
... sorry but pricing is a major issue. How this man cannot say that it is't when games go on sale for 75% off on his site frequently seems ludicrous. The big things effecting modern games are:
1) Game quality
2) DRM
3) Buyers avoiding paying more then $15-20 for DRM laden crap they don't own.
Lots of people avoid buying games entirely because of DRM and low game quality. There are those of us who buy games at extremely deep discounts (5-15$ at most) on steam because of DRM we refuse to pay full price for DRM infested games that we don't own but we do want to support PC developers and have few alternatives since many small developers release on steam.
Gabe has done a lot of marketing to brainwash people and get people to thinking he's a good guy but he's not, if he was the good guy games would deprecate their DRM after a year and the exe's unhooked from steam. The purpose of steam is to datamine users for 'business reasons' and he's putting this massive spin his datamining operation. This means more metrics driven game development as if we didn't have this enough of this alread with the constant clones every year.
VGchartz is not a respectable source for numbers so your argument is bullshit. Your numbers for skyrim are way off base as well.
E-books don't have to be text, ebooks can include video clips, links to other sites, and even interactive programs embedded in web-pages. The whole idea of an 'e-book' is quite a bit of nonsense. Once data is electronic it is being displayed by a video adapter, it's all a matter of how much work/effort you're willing to put into an 'e-book'.
" in other areas where I am less knowledgeable I am probably duped into paying more than I should."
Clothes. I imagine most people have no clue what their clothes really cost but pay the exorbitantly high prices for clothes, shoes, etc because they don't buy clothes that often.
"Because all companies should support all products forever, even if no one uses them? What company does that?"
If users got source-code and the right to modify/update their software no one would have to rely on companies in the first place. The whole bit about companies being able to own in perpetuity software they no longer support or sell but their users still use is bullshit. Users need rights to get source-code, etc. They have every right to modify/update their own software.
... are protectionism and corporate welfare of the 21st century. I think it's best to say that copyright/patents are anti-free market, anti-technology and anti-science IMHO. Not only that human beings just aren't smart enough to judge when something should be or should not be patented. It's a giant clusterfuck.
I think those who argue for them just don't want to find new business models, using the law as a business model has made one hell of a legal mess and created a ethically bankrupt legal system clogged with up with suits. I think someone should really figure out how much inefficiency this is creating and how much all this costs us in terms of the legal system. I imagine that whatever supposed 'gains' we are allegedly getting from these systems are wiped out by lawyers and the lack of free exchange/modification of ideas between products and industries.
Newer RAIDS allow for multiple drive failures FYI. My beginning raid setup was RAID 5. More importantly I backup frequently (mirror drives) long before they fail I have 3 copies of everything or more at all times and for mission critical stuff I have multiple offline discs (DVD-R/BD-R).
... because hard drive costs have come down so much it's just cheaper to buy a bunch of hard drives and mirror like crazy. Another factor is speed. Backup up costs time and time is money. So it makes sense that more and more organizations have moved to to mirroring/RAID solutions.
RAID is pretty damn robust these days also and with drives as cheap as they are you can create many mirrors at once. I've owned raid 5 over the past 7 years and I've never lost data drives have always died 1 at a time on a disk array. As hard drives got cheaper I get to back up the entire array with one hard drive before I start to replace the drives in an array. My first array was 4x160GB drives as soon as 500GB drives became cheap enough you can copy the contents of 4 disks onto 1. I imagine this pattern has happened for many organizations as well. Drives just keep getting bigger and cheaper fast enough that you can affordably back up what used to be a 'big drive' in a year or two's time as the prices come down.
"If Apple are guilty of anything here, then so are the consumers of Apple products."
Not quite, the enlightenment and the free market theory that was spawned from the enlightenment thinkers were based on false views of how the human mind operates, see here:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
"I've never understood Americans."
It's not just americans and there is a reason why, see below...
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
"I said this yesterday, and I'll say it again today: the problem is that the "two" parties in power now both have the same agenda. It is time for people to start voting third party."
That is not how human beings work, the whole system was designed by enlightenment era thinkers with enlightenment view of human reasoning but it is scientifically wrong, the whole system is now the problem because of mistaken notions about human minds and how they function.
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
"Neither of these are viable options. So you need to get him voted out of office. Thus, the problem is the voters."
Sorry but the problem is not the voters so much as the system was designed according to the enlightenments view of man and it is scientifically wrong, see here:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
" ship alarmingly priced cards in the face of shit that has the decency to be priced as such, from outfits like realtek, and genuinely decent hardware from companies that actually know something about audio..."
Their "alarmingly high priced" cards are your subjective perception and they are still miles better then most onboard solutions in terms of features and sound quality, volume and software features. I have yet to find a soundcard that comes with simple, easy to use and clean audio tools that you get with audigy card. Now I know you can download more advanced audio editing software but for quick and dirty stuff like "recording what you hear" through the wave channel from a movie/clip or off the internet it is a godsend. I still can't stand onboard motherboard audio after all these years because of the lack of software options and tweaking that I'm used to on audigy line of cards.
"Apple has been doing it the right way. Microsoft, not so much."
Apple has been riding on shallow fickle tastes of consumers they are not 'innovators' they've mostly just been taking what has always been around and then just making them beautiful/shiny. They've taken high tech products and turned them into the equivalent of televisions for mass consumption. There really has not been any real innovation in apple other then marketing and catering to the basest and shallowest elements of humanity.
The iPod was not the best MP3 on the market before and after it was released, the iPad is nothing to write home about either. I'd say when we get down to it we have software and usability problem as well as having a low intelligence population whose need and wants aren't exactly based on anything of long term value.
The problem is Modern warfare is all about the in game cinematics, not the actual game. It's all about the action movie-esque in game set pieces.
"I tired of Magicka very quickly because of that (and because of their stupid save system)."
Magicka did not have the pseudo-random dungeon generator like diablo, diablo 1 + 2 were so god damn addictive for so long because it wasn't 'exactly' the same. Lets not forget magicka was done by indies and not some big publishing house whereas diablo 1 + 2 had huge financial resources from earlier successes.
... the gameplay matters. Even if it is simpler then modern games the interactivity (being able to build/destroy) is off the charts since you're able to create/destroy what you want and as you wish. So that patterns never have to be the same, as opposed to modern static worlds of aesthetically pleasing art that are most always the same /w some scripted destruction in the world here and there.
Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game development, if developers weren't so clueless they should have either joined forces or complained to the government about the abuse they take at the hands of publishers.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
See here, you suffer from the enlightenment's false view of reason.
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
"What we see now are interrelated systems of global mercantilism "
No what we're seeing is the true face of the free market, the free market has ALWAYS had the nanny state to protect it, only morons use linguistic obscurantism like yourself to protect your favored ideal from any kind of rational criticism.
"If anything, this is a poster child for the success of capitalism."
No because intel used all sorts of bribery and nonsensical bullshit with other companies to get them to not buy AMD when AMD had the advantage. It's not that AMD couldn't compete it's that Intel used it's market power and monopoly position in an abusive way. This is the problem with you americans - you're fucking stupid. The complete lack of anti-trust enforcement in the US has lead to AMD getting fucked even when it was ahead.
"Where I think AMD really fell behind was they were not able to afford the kind of R&D on the manufacturing side"
I believe more that it is a matter of market failure and problems related to anti-trust, that intels advanced manufacturing actually hinders chip design advancement through being able to monopolize production facilities. Look at the underhanded tactics intel used during the athlon era when AMD was ahead. In my opinion we have a special case of market failure. The resources that are now required to make chips at smaller and smaller geometries have pushed costs sky high and intel can whether it because it has been a monopoly for so long and they have the largest market share. This is why most other chip companies are fabless - they would need something on the order of sustained government investment to compete with intel because the barriers to entry are now too high producing market failure and limiting competition between chip designers. I'm sure there are lots of great chip designers out there but without the mfg facilities to back it up I'm sure we're wasting a lot of great talent.
" He is one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment, and his writings have influenced all of us, whether or not we are conscious of them."
Speaking of the enlightenment, the enlightenment thinkers had no idea how the brain or human reasoning worked. Much of what they thought about reasoning and what many people today think about their own ability to reason is absolutely incorrect. You should all see the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
"I think this article raises valid concerns."
The net selects for low energy easily digestible and often times emotionally/politically charged information. One only has to look at how simple most perspectives are even on slashdot. No one really wants to critique ones own pet ideals or ideology. Most people and yes - even most people on slashdot don't have any interest in undermining ideas they find appealing. That's not how you go about finding truth and developing insight into the nature of reality. It's something we all do to lesser or greater extents. The problem is the amount of time and discipline that is needed in our distracted entertainment society is difficult to find when one is fighting off one's natural tendencies and habits that more often then not get the better of us.
We are not free - we are natural processes of the universe governed by principles of biology which we only have a very incomplete understanding of. The net gives us low entropy information that is easily consumed, I believe what we're really experiencing is the energy economy of the brain optimizing itself for highly condensed and/or simplified information.
We will go deeper if it something we are emotionally invested in or passionate about but even there we have limits and are still distractable. The best thing one can do for oneself is get a pad and a pen/pencil find a quiet room alone and write. It really encourages focus and thinking at the same time. To write ones thoughts and not just casually think them or write them on the net.
.. has inferior usability and interface. They also need to do more then just provide an OS they could make advancements in BIOS and drive controllers for hardware. I've often wondered why rich linux boys haven't gotten into agreements with controller manfuacturers. I've always wanted to be able to select hard drives to boot from done intelligently by "changing the channel" but not having to do it as it is done now in traditional bios.
raditional bios registers hard drives on controllers 0/1/2, etc. Instead controller assignment should be user selectable from software and automatically managed behind the scenes, so if you want to boot from drive 2 but have drive one not active/using power/shut off you can do so. Under current bios and power management regimes you are forced to either unplug the drive you don't want to use manually and switch the physical cables or having one of the drives idle and using power while dealing with manual ini/config tweaking (in Windows XP i.e. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=1).
After years and years of clockspeed improvements there hasn't really been a wave of simple usability improvements that are trivial to implement to make configuring/using computers especially for us power users less of a hassle.
IMHO The biggest thing holding back linux in my opinion is there is no compelling reason to change. If linux could give a significant performance advantage in games or applications over competing operating systems that would be a compelling reason to switch. Until they focus on providing a compelling reason to do so inertia, convenience and general lazyness keeps people on windows boxes. Let's also face it - windows has gotten good enough for the vast majority of users. So if you're trying to sell an operating system you have to have significant reasons for people to change. One would be to pay game developers to release major releases as DRM free games with native linux support.
If you want to get out of proprietary locked down software then you have to give the people what they want and be willing to create a for profit ecosystem on linux platform as well. Developers simply cannot maintain open source programs unless they do it for profit - no one has the discipline to serve users interests without any profit motive. You can still have open source /w profit IMHO. Developers need to eat and the only way they are going to make headway is to be able to not be driven into oblivion by lack of funds, leadership and the discpline for profit software enables to deal with idiot/moronic/undisciplined coders. This severe lack of funds for developers keeps linux and linux software quality at the margins and will never make headway with the mainstream. Making software people ** want to use ** is a lot of intense boring hard work a lot of the time let's be realistic. No can code any serious application for free because they don't have any discipline or drive to do what is necessary to gain customers/users.
... has inferior usability and interface. They also need to do more then just provide an OS they could make advancements in BIOS and drive controllers for hardware. I've often wondered why rich linux boys haven't gotten into agreements with controller manfuacturers. I've always wanted to be able to select hard drives to boot from done intelligently by "changing the channel" but not having to do it as it is done now in traditional bios.
The biggest thing holding back linux in my opinion is there is no compelling reason to change, if linux could give a significant performance advantage in games or applications over competing operating systems that would be a compelling reason to switch. Until they focus on providing a compelling reason to do so inertia, convenience and general lazyness keeps people on windows boxes. Let's also face it - windows has gotten good enough for the vast majority of users. So if you're trying to sell an operating system you have to have significant reasons for people to change. One would be to pay game developers to release major releases as DRM free games with native linux support. If you want to get out of proprietary locked down software then you have to give the people what they want and be willing to create a for profit ecosystem on linux platform as well. Developers simply cannot maintain open source programs unless they do it for profit - no one has the discipline to serve users interests without any profit motive. You can still have open source /w profit IMHO. Developers need to eat and the only way they are going to make headway is to be able to not be driven into oblivion by lack of funds, leadership and the discpline for profit software enables to deal with idiot/moronic/undisciplined coders. This severe lack of funds
Traditional bios registers hard drives on controllers 0/1/2, etc. Instead controller assignment should be user selectable from software and automatically managed behind the scenes, so if you want to boot from drive 2 but have drive one not active/using power/shut off you can do so. Under current bios and power management regimes you are forced to either unplug the drive you don't want to use manually and switch the physical cables or having one of the drives idle and using power while dealing with manual ini/config tweaking (in Windows XP i.e. multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=1).
After years and years of clockspeed improvements there hasn't really been a wave of simple usability improvements that are trivial to implement to make configuring/using computers especially for us power users less of a hassle.