TFS states that it's a Cortex-A5. That family of chips implements the ARMv7 instruction set. Cortex-A5 looks like it's a little less powerful per-MHz than a Cortex-A8, but the higher clock and core count should mean that it's much more powerful than the Beagleboard XM. I don't get the focus on Ubuntu, though. There's no real benefit to running that instead of Debian.
Well, they could provide a marketing benefit via word-of-mouth, of course. But what software do you know that's really bug-free? And anyhow, you can't say that a user like that isn't *more* of a freeloader than someone who at least gives some kind of positive feedback to the developer (well, you can, but I'd disagree with you).
The "freeriders" in the summary don't include those that "test it, and give feedback, find bugs, suggest improvements". If someone's doing that, then they're a helpful part of the development process. The text in the summary that describes freeriders/freeloaders is:
A huge number of people and businesses ostensibly benefit from these projects, and the vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development.
Obviously, that can't be talking about people that submit bug reports and suggestions.
I'm in southern California, and I have a similar experience. I work 40 hours, and it's enough to finish everything that's required of me. In the 6 years I've been employed here, there've been maybe a dozen times that I've had to go over a 45 hour week. When I hear some of the work stories that people talk about, all I can do is thank my lucky stars that I don't live somewhere like SV, because I wouldn't have lasted long with those kinds of workdays.
There are lots of interesting and/or frustrating problems to work on at home too. If TV's all you can come up with, then you aren't even trying. My work is within a fairly constrained field. I have a lot of ideas for things that I don't have the opportunity to do at work, and when one becomes sufficiently interesting, I find time to write it at home instead.
I go to work to do the things that my employer wants done. I go home and do the things that I want to do. It works out nicely.
I noticed a similar tendency in my own behavior. There are two things that I've done about it. First, around an hour before bedtime, all the electronics go off. Pull out a book of whatever you like to read for recreation. Force yourself to start reading, but don't force yourself to keep reading, because then it will feel like a chore. The deal is that you can read as long as you'd like, but when you put the book down, the light needs to go off too. Second, almost everyone has some kind of creative endeavor that they can pursue on their computer. In my case, there are a small number of programming projects that I've started. Writing software requires long periods of concentration, and if you're working on something interesting, then you'll have more incentive to stick to the project.
If you're unhappy with your level of concentration, then find something you enjoy concentrating on. Then when you're obligated to do something tedious, you at least have the attention span to properly apply yourself to the task.
DRM is a source of bugs. Removing it can have significant benefits beyond piracy. When games usually came on CD/DVD, it was my standard practice to download a No-CD crack after I bought the game, so that I could be lazy, and avoid digging through the CD pile to switch games.
The equivalent today is perhaps playing a game without an available internet connection. I'm not in that situation often, but a few times a year, I am. Then again, that usually means I'll just switch to the cellphone instead.
No, the device worked as well as it did before, but with some improvements (a shell to log into wirelessly, compiler, normal contents of binutils, alternate appstores, customized UIs, etc).
Closed hardware is certainly shittier than open hardware, but exaggerating the point is counterproductive.
It's not sold as a computer, but it can be made into one. I turned my iPod Touch into a little remote-accessible Unix system with some compilers and such. I'd be surprised if you couldn't do the same with the current crop of hardware.
I can also buy an off-the-shelf hard drive and modify it for use in my Xbox; that doesn't mean that Microsoft supports the use of hard drives that they didn't supply. In a similar sense, I've got a 10 year old iPod, and I got to ride along as the first reverse-engineered libraries were designed. It worked fine during certain stretches of time....when Apple wasn't repeatedly changing the on-device database format to break compatibility with non-iTunes song management. My iPod Touch was worse; none of the open software ever reached feature-parity with iTunes, in terms of managing that device.
Just because someone figured out how to circumvent Apple's lock-out measures doesn't mean that Apple didn't do something anti-competitive.
I think that they should just focus on helping people come to a deep and intuitive understanding of how and why the math works. Sadly, they go for the rote memorization route instead.
Rote memorization gave me a list of facts to play around with in my head, and it became the basis of the mental math that I use now. If we studied math without using numbers, then I can see how the memorization would've been unnecessary. Then again, I don't see that having a practical application in most people's lives, since concrete numbers are all that people generally deal with. In any case that comes to mind, learning math itself isn't directly useful, while learning arithmetic most definitely is.
I had to learn cursive in grade school around 1993. My cursive was never pretty or fast, and three years of writing purely in cursive ruined my printing. I've never understood people saying that it's faster and easier. I've had the opposite experience.
Damn straight. Literacy either. I can't think of a single time in my life where I would've literally died if I couldn't read. Chuck it; useless. All the times that it would've helped, I either had someone else there to tell me what I needed, or I had a device with text-to-speech functionality.
I don't know. Do people that you primarily communicate with using mailed letters deserve to be called friends?
You've got a system that's simultaneously a detailed rolodex, a scheduler/calendar of events, a shared photo album, a mass e-mailer, an instantaneous communication system, and somewhere to make announcements that are visible to selected groups of people. For no direct payment of money. Oh, and it spies on you all the time and occasionally sells the results to its friends. Except for that last point, everything else is a useful feature. Whether the trade-off is worth it depends on individual preference, and the individual's acquaintances' preferences when it comes to communication.
Platformers, shmups, fighting games, lots of puzzle games, and many non-RTS top-down view games work better without a pointing device. Some of them work just fine with digital buttons, some are better with some kind of analog control (but still not a mouse).
Give a 2-minute editing window, and clearly mark the post as being edited if it was altered after someone else replied to it. Also don't let ACs edit their posts. Between those, it gets rid of a lot of the opportunity for trolling.
You mean for white USA, not for ALL USA. I don't know if this can be called truly democracy.
If you're going to make that argument, then you need to say "white male USA".
You could make the same argument that none of the ancient Greek city-states weren't democracies either, using that argument. Or that the Roman Republic wasn't a representative democracy/republic, although those are generally accepted as the classic examples of those forms of government.
On the other hand, if they weren't democracies, then the U.S. wasn't a republic either until at least when the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, giving women the vote. The 14th and 15th Amendments were passed around 1870, giving all races the right to vote, technically (although it took the country almost 100 years to get serious about closing the loopholes).
I'd happily move to an Apple phone if they made a product that does what I want. I want a phone that I can develop for on an arbitrary brand of computer without paying anything for the opportunity. I want a phone that I can sideload unapproved apps on, use multiple app stores on, has a choice of browsers with different back-ends, and that uses a standard mini or micro USB power input. I want to be able to keep around old app backups and install back-level versions of software that changes in a way that I don't like. I want one that'll run my emulators, an ssh server, an FTP client, and Busybox.
I had an iPod Touch before I had any kind of smartphone. It was awesome for what it could do, but what it *couldn't* do influenced two choices for me. First, that I would get a smartphone. Second, that it wouldn't be an Apple, because it would be too much work getting it to do everything that I would want it to do. Nothing of consequence has changed in the balance there since I bought my first smartphone. In the meantime, I'm happy with what I've got, and I'm not going to begrudge the people that have different desires than I do, who are happy with what *they* have. Apple makes some great products. It's just my opinion that they aren't great for *my* uses.
So, Wine's decreasing the number of games that you can't buy, it's doing so without Valve or the other game developers having to do any work (or more importantly, pay any money), *and* it puts the onus of product support on the users themselves. You're not part of the demographic I've described. You're part of a demographic that still buys a percentage of the games that they would if native Linux ports were available, and where that percentage is growing on its own. They get sales, and you get the shaft because you don't really have any recourse for support from the company, if something goes wrong. "Ohhhh, we can't verify that problem's existence on Windows, and we don't support Wine. So sorry". As a software developer, support issues where I can say "That isn't a supported use-case" are quite welcome.
You and your friends aren't the "corner guy", you're another group, in between him and the group I'd consider myself part of. I'd *prefer* Linux games, but if they aren't available, I'll boot Windows instead. I tend to game in streaks of time on Windows and program in streaks on Linux (with "general use" being done on either), so I'll kind of switch off between primary OSes a couple of times per month.
The way I see it though, is that even with the assumption that *no* people that use Linux at all buy any games, and that they'd all represent part of a completely untapped market, they might make up 5% of the potential market (being generous, IMO). If there's already a MacOS port or the game was written in OpenGL anyhow, they may as well reach for that extra percentage. But of course, you've got the people that buy some Windows or consoles games anyhow (grudgingly or not), so that decreases the sales benefit of targeting that group.
I'm convinced that game developers will act in their own short-term best interests. 10% increase in dev costs to gain 15% of the market? Score! 10% increase in dev costs to gain 5% of the market? Even if there's a net profit, I think that they're worried about the percentage of the profit margin.
And all this doesn't even mention that "Linux" isn't exactly one platform. "Ubuntu" is several platforms, depending on the DE in use, and with frequent releases, it makes a kind of moving target. Add in all the people that want to use some kind of Redhat, Debian, SuSE, Arch, etc, and you've got a bigger mess than the dev issues deploying an app to Android. There are several fairly-solid reasons *not* to target Linux (favoring Windows, and Mac to a lesser extent), and comparatively-tenuous reasons *to* support it.
This site has an unusual demographic, compared to the general population. We're much more likely to be Linux users, for instance, so this site was the wrong place to take my hyperbole in that direction. I'm still not convinced that there's a sizable market for Linux games. I'd consider the Humble Indie Bundle packs to be the best-case scenarios, and there, you see Linux users paying more than anyone else (which speaks to a desire among the Linux users out there), but there're generally about 50% as many sales as Mac users, and closer to 5% as many sales as Windows users.
Plus, my two biggest gaming time sinks got ported: Civilization 5 and Mount & Blade: Warband.
Gone are the days of fussing around with Wine or going through the hassle of discarding my workspace to boot Windows.
And I wish that was true for me, as well. The last time it was, my time sinks were Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2003. Warcraft 3 worked passably in Wine without much futzing, and so did Alpha Centauri (I didn't know, at the time, that AC had a native Linux release). Ah, wait, that's not right. I played a fair amount of Minecraft a couple of years ago. Still, most of what I'm interested in isn't available on the platform I'd like it to use it on. I don't think that's going to change, because I just don't believe that a big enough market exists to justify the dev+support costs.
I usually keep the desktop booted into Windows, and the laptop booted into Linux. Steam's network streaming feature comes in handy, with that setup. There's no reboot involved, but I *do* end up using two computers at once. Good thing the wife has her own laptop...
My point wasn't that your demographic doesn't exist, just that it's nowhere near low-hanging fruit. Being generous, it's the intersection of gamers and people who use Linux in any form. Realistically, the demographic is more nuanced, something like "Linux users who have an x% likelihood to buy a specific Windows-only game, and an increase of y% that they'll buy it as a Linux port". There's a point where the splinters of markets get too small for a lot of developers to worry about, where it becomes a question of spending 5% more in development to gain an extra 2% in sales, and it doesn't make sense any more.
I'd expect Humble Indie Bundle numbers to be fairly high, in terms of Linux user representation. I know that I've marked "Linux" as my OS of choice every time I've purchased one. Out of 4,998,506 purchases, 332,944 have been Linux (6.7%), 616,596 are OSX (12.3%), and 3,962,890 have been Windows (79.2%). Linux users generally pay nearly double what Windows users do, so there's that in their favor.
~20% of the market may be worth it, depending on how much more work it takes to get there. ~5% may not be, based on the same factors. Most of the large developers seem to be taking the gamble that enough of the people that are "Linux users" will still buy a Windows-only game (or buy the same thing on a console). And while there are exceptions, they seem to be mostly right. From the dev's perspective, losing a few percent of your market is bad; spending a disproportionate amount of your budget to pick up a few extra percent is worse.
From a technical viewpoint, OSX is more similar to Linux than Windows, true. It's a Unix OS with OpenGL as its 3D graphics API, and OSX ports are an important stepping stone to making Linux ports more likely.
From a marketing an pop-culture viewpoint, OSX is more similar to Windows. It's a larger market, and it's a mainstream product. It's actually available in stores and viewed as something that "normal people" buy. As an example, my fairly non-technical parents would consider (and have considered) buying an Apple computer. That is why I "casually lumped [them] together". The technical hurdles aren't the problem, IMO. Not the biggest barrier to seeing more games on Linux, anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
Hoping this new little ARM board is ARM v7
TFS states that it's a Cortex-A5. That family of chips implements the ARMv7 instruction set. Cortex-A5 looks like it's a little less powerful per-MHz than a Cortex-A8, but the higher clock and core count should mean that it's much more powerful than the Beagleboard XM. I don't get the focus on Ubuntu, though. There's no real benefit to running that instead of Debian.
Well, they could provide a marketing benefit via word-of-mouth, of course. But what software do you know that's really bug-free? And anyhow, you can't say that a user like that isn't *more* of a freeloader than someone who at least gives some kind of positive feedback to the developer (well, you can, but I'd disagree with you).
A huge number of people and businesses ostensibly benefit from these projects, and the vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development.
Obviously, that can't be talking about people that submit bug reports and suggestions.
I'm in southern California, and I have a similar experience. I work 40 hours, and it's enough to finish everything that's required of me. In the 6 years I've been employed here, there've been maybe a dozen times that I've had to go over a 45 hour week. When I hear some of the work stories that people talk about, all I can do is thank my lucky stars that I don't live somewhere like SV, because I wouldn't have lasted long with those kinds of workdays.
but not much to do at home besides watch TV.
There are lots of interesting and/or frustrating problems to work on at home too. If TV's all you can come up with, then you aren't even trying. My work is within a fairly constrained field. I have a lot of ideas for things that I don't have the opportunity to do at work, and when one becomes sufficiently interesting, I find time to write it at home instead.
I go to work to do the things that my employer wants done. I go home and do the things that I want to do. It works out nicely.
I noticed a similar tendency in my own behavior. There are two things that I've done about it. First, around an hour before bedtime, all the electronics go off. Pull out a book of whatever you like to read for recreation. Force yourself to start reading, but don't force yourself to keep reading, because then it will feel like a chore. The deal is that you can read as long as you'd like, but when you put the book down, the light needs to go off too. Second, almost everyone has some kind of creative endeavor that they can pursue on their computer. In my case, there are a small number of programming projects that I've started. Writing software requires long periods of concentration, and if you're working on something interesting, then you'll have more incentive to stick to the project.
If you're unhappy with your level of concentration, then find something you enjoy concentrating on. Then when you're obligated to do something tedious, you at least have the attention span to properly apply yourself to the task.
Good to know, thank you.
A new study reports
molecular evidence
Because fuck using URL shorteners when they're unnecessary. It's better to know at least the domain that a link will take you to.
DRM is a source of bugs. Removing it can have significant benefits beyond piracy. When games usually came on CD/DVD, it was my standard practice to download a No-CD crack after I bought the game, so that I could be lazy, and avoid digging through the CD pile to switch games.
The equivalent today is perhaps playing a game without an available internet connection. I'm not in that situation often, but a few times a year, I am. Then again, that usually means I'll just switch to the cellphone instead.
No, the device worked as well as it did before, but with some improvements (a shell to log into wirelessly, compiler, normal contents of binutils, alternate appstores, customized UIs, etc).
Closed hardware is certainly shittier than open hardware, but exaggerating the point is counterproductive.
It's not sold as a computer, but it can be made into one. I turned my iPod Touch into a little remote-accessible Unix system with some compilers and such. I'd be surprised if you couldn't do the same with the current crop of hardware.
I can also buy an off-the-shelf hard drive and modify it for use in my Xbox; that doesn't mean that Microsoft supports the use of hard drives that they didn't supply. In a similar sense, I've got a 10 year old iPod, and I got to ride along as the first reverse-engineered libraries were designed. It worked fine during certain stretches of time....when Apple wasn't repeatedly changing the on-device database format to break compatibility with non-iTunes song management. My iPod Touch was worse; none of the open software ever reached feature-parity with iTunes, in terms of managing that device.
Just because someone figured out how to circumvent Apple's lock-out measures doesn't mean that Apple didn't do something anti-competitive.
I think that they should just focus on helping people come to a deep and intuitive understanding of how and why the math works. Sadly, they go for the rote memorization route instead.
Rote memorization gave me a list of facts to play around with in my head, and it became the basis of the mental math that I use now. If we studied math without using numbers, then I can see how the memorization would've been unnecessary. Then again, I don't see that having a practical application in most people's lives, since concrete numbers are all that people generally deal with. In any case that comes to mind, learning math itself isn't directly useful, while learning arithmetic most definitely is.
I had to learn cursive in grade school around 1993. My cursive was never pretty or fast, and three years of writing purely in cursive ruined my printing. I've never understood people saying that it's faster and easier. I've had the opposite experience.
Damn straight. Literacy either. I can't think of a single time in my life where I would've literally died if I couldn't read. Chuck it; useless. All the times that it would've helped, I either had someone else there to tell me what I needed, or I had a device with text-to-speech functionality.
I don't know. Do people that you primarily communicate with using mailed letters deserve to be called friends?
You've got a system that's simultaneously a detailed rolodex, a scheduler/calendar of events, a shared photo album, a mass e-mailer, an instantaneous communication system, and somewhere to make announcements that are visible to selected groups of people. For no direct payment of money. Oh, and it spies on you all the time and occasionally sells the results to its friends. Except for that last point, everything else is a useful feature. Whether the trade-off is worth it depends on individual preference, and the individual's acquaintances' preferences when it comes to communication.
Platformers, shmups, fighting games, lots of puzzle games, and many non-RTS top-down view games work better without a pointing device. Some of them work just fine with digital buttons, some are better with some kind of analog control (but still not a mouse).
Give a 2-minute editing window, and clearly mark the post as being edited if it was altered after someone else replied to it. Also don't let ACs edit their posts. Between those, it gets rid of a lot of the opportunity for trolling.
You mean for white USA, not for ALL USA. I don't know if this can be called truly democracy.
If you're going to make that argument, then you need to say "white male USA".
You could make the same argument that none of the ancient Greek city-states weren't democracies either, using that argument. Or that the Roman Republic wasn't a representative democracy/republic, although those are generally accepted as the classic examples of those forms of government.
On the other hand, if they weren't democracies, then the U.S. wasn't a republic either until at least when the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, giving women the vote. The 14th and 15th Amendments were passed around 1870, giving all races the right to vote, technically (although it took the country almost 100 years to get serious about closing the loopholes).
I'd happily move to an Apple phone if they made a product that does what I want. I want a phone that I can develop for on an arbitrary brand of computer without paying anything for the opportunity. I want a phone that I can sideload unapproved apps on, use multiple app stores on, has a choice of browsers with different back-ends, and that uses a standard mini or micro USB power input. I want to be able to keep around old app backups and install back-level versions of software that changes in a way that I don't like. I want one that'll run my emulators, an ssh server, an FTP client, and Busybox.
I had an iPod Touch before I had any kind of smartphone. It was awesome for what it could do, but what it *couldn't* do influenced two choices for me. First, that I would get a smartphone. Second, that it wouldn't be an Apple, because it would be too much work getting it to do everything that I would want it to do. Nothing of consequence has changed in the balance there since I bought my first smartphone. In the meantime, I'm happy with what I've got, and I'm not going to begrudge the people that have different desires than I do, who are happy with what *they* have. Apple makes some great products. It's just my opinion that they aren't great for *my* uses.
So, Wine's decreasing the number of games that you can't buy, it's doing so without Valve or the other game developers having to do any work (or more importantly, pay any money), *and* it puts the onus of product support on the users themselves. You're not part of the demographic I've described. You're part of a demographic that still buys a percentage of the games that they would if native Linux ports were available, and where that percentage is growing on its own. They get sales, and you get the shaft because you don't really have any recourse for support from the company, if something goes wrong. "Ohhhh, we can't verify that problem's existence on Windows, and we don't support Wine. So sorry". As a software developer, support issues where I can say "That isn't a supported use-case" are quite welcome.
You and your friends aren't the "corner guy", you're another group, in between him and the group I'd consider myself part of. I'd *prefer* Linux games, but if they aren't available, I'll boot Windows instead. I tend to game in streaks of time on Windows and program in streaks on Linux (with "general use" being done on either), so I'll kind of switch off between primary OSes a couple of times per month.
The way I see it though, is that even with the assumption that *no* people that use Linux at all buy any games, and that they'd all represent part of a completely untapped market, they might make up 5% of the potential market (being generous, IMO). If there's already a MacOS port or the game was written in OpenGL anyhow, they may as well reach for that extra percentage. But of course, you've got the people that buy some Windows or consoles games anyhow (grudgingly or not), so that decreases the sales benefit of targeting that group.
I'm convinced that game developers will act in their own short-term best interests. 10% increase in dev costs to gain 15% of the market? Score! 10% increase in dev costs to gain 5% of the market? Even if there's a net profit, I think that they're worried about the percentage of the profit margin.
And all this doesn't even mention that "Linux" isn't exactly one platform. "Ubuntu" is several platforms, depending on the DE in use, and with frequent releases, it makes a kind of moving target. Add in all the people that want to use some kind of Redhat, Debian, SuSE, Arch, etc, and you've got a bigger mess than the dev issues deploying an app to Android. There are several fairly-solid reasons *not* to target Linux (favoring Windows, and Mac to a lesser extent), and comparatively-tenuous reasons *to* support it.
Um, I'm that guy too.
This site has an unusual demographic, compared to the general population. We're much more likely to be Linux users, for instance, so this site was the wrong place to take my hyperbole in that direction. I'm still not convinced that there's a sizable market for Linux games. I'd consider the Humble Indie Bundle packs to be the best-case scenarios, and there, you see Linux users paying more than anyone else (which speaks to a desire among the Linux users out there), but there're generally about 50% as many sales as Mac users, and closer to 5% as many sales as Windows users.
Plus, my two biggest gaming time sinks got ported: Civilization 5 and Mount & Blade: Warband.
Gone are the days of fussing around with Wine or going through the hassle of discarding my workspace to boot Windows.
And I wish that was true for me, as well. The last time it was, my time sinks were Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2003. Warcraft 3 worked passably in Wine without much futzing, and so did Alpha Centauri (I didn't know, at the time, that AC had a native Linux release). Ah, wait, that's not right. I played a fair amount of Minecraft a couple of years ago. Still, most of what I'm interested in isn't available on the platform I'd like it to use it on. I don't think that's going to change, because I just don't believe that a big enough market exists to justify the dev+support costs.
I usually keep the desktop booted into Windows, and the laptop booted into Linux. Steam's network streaming feature comes in handy, with that setup. There's no reboot involved, but I *do* end up using two computers at once. Good thing the wife has her own laptop...
My point wasn't that your demographic doesn't exist, just that it's nowhere near low-hanging fruit. Being generous, it's the intersection of gamers and people who use Linux in any form. Realistically, the demographic is more nuanced, something like "Linux users who have an x% likelihood to buy a specific Windows-only game, and an increase of y% that they'll buy it as a Linux port". There's a point where the splinters of markets get too small for a lot of developers to worry about, where it becomes a question of spending 5% more in development to gain an extra 2% in sales, and it doesn't make sense any more.
I'd expect Humble Indie Bundle numbers to be fairly high, in terms of Linux user representation. I know that I've marked "Linux" as my OS of choice every time I've purchased one. Out of 4,998,506 purchases, 332,944 have been Linux (6.7%), 616,596 are OSX (12.3%), and 3,962,890 have been Windows (79.2%). Linux users generally pay nearly double what Windows users do, so there's that in their favor.
~20% of the market may be worth it, depending on how much more work it takes to get there. ~5% may not be, based on the same factors. Most of the large developers seem to be taking the gamble that enough of the people that are "Linux users" will still buy a Windows-only game (or buy the same thing on a console). And while there are exceptions, they seem to be mostly right. From the dev's perspective, losing a few percent of your market is bad; spending a disproportionate amount of your budget to pick up a few extra percent is worse.
From a marketing an pop-culture viewpoint, OSX is more similar to Windows. It's a larger market, and it's a mainstream product. It's actually available in stores and viewed as something that "normal people" buy. As an example, my fairly non-technical parents would consider (and have considered) buying an Apple computer. That is why I "casually lumped [them] together". The technical hurdles aren't the problem, IMO. Not the biggest barrier to seeing more games on Linux, anyhow.
Blithering idiots.
Glass houses, and all that.