I'd say that is the biggest problem with what they call "horror" games today, they think spewing guts and blood equals horror when it just equals gore porn.
Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation nailed the problem when reviewing Dead Space 2 I think. Instead of building tension with sound and glimpses of the monster the game gets two inches from your face right from the start and has some guy's face melt in front of you. That isn't horror that is just gross out. He said the game reminded him of a child that beats its head against the wall for attention, no subtlety at all.
The last truly scary game I got to play was Nosferatu: the wrath of Malachi which with VERY primitive weapons you were let loose in a castle to try to rescue your family and there was no way to memorize because the rooms would shift, even between saves. Walking into a room and finding you've got THREE coffins and have less than 2 minutes to run through there and stake their asses (because once a master vamp rose your ass was grass, damned near impossible to drop with their speed and strength) while extremely creepy but subtle music floats around in the background? Now THAT is scary!
Not to mention the raw numbers don't take two factors into consideration: The first I call "Pokemon syndrome" where I have met pirates that have literally downloaded hundreds of games they have never played simply so they can have "all" of a particular genre/interest. Now me personally I don't fricking get it, but apparently from what I've seen it is a pretty common syndrome and the funny thing was the pirates bought more games than anybody I knew because anything they showed more than "Pokemon" interest in they wanted the full game with box art and multiplayer. so that doesn't get taken into consideration.
The second are guys that want to make sure it runs before handing out their hard earned dollars and I'll be the first to admit I have occasionally fallen into that category. One can't tell by demos anymore because often the demo will be "rigged" in that it has had the most strict QA and coding quality compared to the rest of the game. For example see the original Max Payne, which the demo ran great on my PC but after shelling out $39 at release I found the game would CTD the second you went past the demo stage and which they didn't fix for me until the game was at $10 which pissed me off. another was Vampire:Bloodlines where until the fan made patch came out I was screwed out of my $49 because even though I was WAAY over spec it would lock hard and simply fail.
So one can't simply look at TPB raw data and get any real feel for the situation. Hell I've bought a hell of a lot more media since the rise of P2P since it gave me a chance to try something I had NO access to locally and find out if I liked it or not. A good example of this is the $1000 I spent on the Joss Whedon collection, all because I heard about "this weird cool show about a girl that hunts vampires" and since I didn't have the WB in my area P2P was the only way for me to actually catch an episode. I have also bought entire game series simply because I try one and it works well on my system and looks like it will be reasonably fun.
So if one were to simply look at the raw data one would list me as a "dirty filthy pirate" when I don't actually HAVE any pirated games and was simply making sure something would play before shelling out my $$$. Nowadays you can't tell shit by system reqs anymore, as a game might play great on Intel and choke on AMD or vice versa, and thanks to not being able to return non functional games it doesn't take getting burned out of $50 too many times before one becomes gun shy. Personally if a game is more than $20 I want to see it run 20 minutes of non demo code to ensure the thing will actually be stable before I shell out my cash. Too many publishers are putting out gaming code I would be ashamed to even call alpha quality and a closet full of paperweights really isn't fun.
That is why I believe you and I benefited from Gates and Jobs with their singular vision and ability to get everyone on the same page. With FOSS you have 50 million guys reinventing the wheel (how many text editors are they up to now, 200?) and everyone "scratching their own itch" instead of working together as a cohesive unit. This leads to lost time and wasted efforts (how many distros are they up to now,500+?) and just makes a mess in the marketplace, ala what Apple had under Sculley with the Performa line, or Gates having to keep both Win9X and WinNT until he could merge the OS lines.
But sadly without real leadership and cohesive unity what you get is 50 million little fiefdoms and a HELL of a lot of zealotry. Too many here are of the "ZOMG M$ ZOMG!!" that it feels more and more like Boycott Novell instead of a place where we discuss the merits/demerits of the TECH, and no matter how many times you point out the numbers don't lie and something needs to change to draw the users you just get labeled a "paid shill" (I wish, where is my check Ballmer?) or astrorufer for pointing out the emperor has his Willie swinging in the breeze. If it was gonna sell it would have done so by now which is why I support what Shuttleworth is trying to do. He may fail but at least he isn't just repackaging the same shit and expecting people to "do it the Linux way" which has been shown time and time again to be a giant "DO NOT WANT" as far as customers goes.
BTW since you are a Mac guy you might want to check this out for one day only Paragon are giving away their excellent Windows/Macs interoperability tools on GAOTD. I have picked up several Paragon tools because of trying them on GAOTD and they really are top notch. These will give you read/write access between Windows and OSX at near native speed either way. Pretty cool and you can't beat free!
That is why I believe what will drive the next generation of GPU and PC will NOT be strictly gaming, although they will game with frankly insane graphics and framerate, it is the ease at which new Windows PCs tie everything together and give the customer a "one stop shop" for their entire multimedia experience.
I just finished up and installed a $500 quad core PC into a customer's living room just yesterday. Being able to show the customer that thanks to drag and drop transcoding on the new ATI GPUs converting videos to his PMP was literally "4, 3,2,1,done" and being able to rip their entire audio/video collection and have it all instantly accessible along with Netflix via the 10 foot UI of Windows Media Center? Easy sell.
The fact that he can instantly buy and have a huge library of games all right there at the click of his wireless mouse makes PC gaming just one attractive piece of the larger puzzle. Folks like simple, they like easy, they like not having to deal with discs and having all their media all wired up nice and neat with their new 7.1 surround sound systems. Thanks to GP-GPU and the sharing ability built into Windows 7 having a PC built into the entertainment center has never been easier, and thanks to the consoles being the target platform it has never been cheaper.
When I started anything less than $1500 and I hope you liked having low framerates and degraded picture, and you better be ready to buy a new GPU every year or so and a new PC every two. Now you can buy really nice triples and quads for less than $550 fully loaded with RAM and huge HDDs and it'll crank out the framerate and look better than anything the consoles can do, and do so for years to come with ZERO need for upgrades.
So I'd say from listening to my customers PC gaming has never been better. They love how they have endless choices from Steam to GOG to D2D, all MUCH cheaper than the consoles, how they can just HDMI right into their new widescreen and do everything from game to check their email from the comfort of their couch, and how they have access to anything and everything all right there at their fingertips. In the end the console can do gaming and Netflix and that is about it. With the PC you have nearly infinite jobs it can do and it will do them all well and cheaply to boot. I believe with the rise of super cheap widescreen TVs the future will be networked everything with a PC in the living room controlling it all. Gaming is just the nice icing on top of the delicious cake.
Hi MR FOSSie! You do realize that when you write M$ everyone assumes everything you post is coming from this guy yes? BTW like your Star Trek uniform!
As for your "points" why yes nobody ever bought or pirates MSFT Windows when your free wonderfulness was there, it is all network effects because nobody tried selling Linux...wait a tick...Hasn't everyone from Dell to ASUS and Walmart actually tried selling your OS and thanks to the PITA factor and shitty QA (which for a nice example see this little gem about how the Dell Ubuntu offering breaks if you update it) was labeled by the public a giant DO NOT WANT in fifty foot letters?
Or do you think it was a secret "M$ conspiracy" that OEMs saw 4 TIMES the returns with Linux or that when given a "choice" (you as a FOSSie ARE for freedom of choice, yes?) the customers ran to Windows as fast as they could even on netbooks which were supposed to be designed to take advantage of the strengths of Linux in the first place?
It really is simple MR FOSSie, hell it is practically first day business school 101: Give the customers what they want and listen to them and you gain share, give them a mess of CLI and "RTFM Noob!" bad attitude and watch as they stay away in droves it really is that simple. look at how Apple just waltzed in and royally kicked your ass, why is that? It is because they listen to their customers and designed an OS around the philosophy of "it just works" with little to no hoop jumping required, whereas Linux despite the pretty on top is really just CLI at heart. Which would have been fine if this was still 1997, but it is 2011 and the customers have made it clear all the CLI and hoop jumping (not to mention the driver mess or "update foo broke my drivers" which frankly we haven't seen in Windows since the end of Win9x or OSX since 10.2) is a giant "do NOT want!".
It really is simple: you are busy growing or you are busy dying. The only "growth" we have seen in Linux is Android (which is gonna be TiVo tricked right out from under you and therefor is as useful to the FOSS movement as having a Linux router) and despite FIFTEEN YEARS you are still below the margin for error. I didn't make those numbers up friend, and if those numbers would have been posted by any business they would have closed up shop by now. But you keep on thinking that you can force users to do things your way and that it is a big M$ conspiracy when you find users don't actually enjoy reading man pages or trawling forums for fixes. You DO know what the classic definition of insanity is, right? If it ain't worked after FIFTEEN YEARS perhaps it is time to try a different approach, ya?
So your answer is "We are superior in every way, do it our way or piss off noob!" and you wonder why Linux has no share, typical. The user asks for simple, you give him a 70s era term and tell him "RTFA noob!". The user asks for drivers that work in foo to work in foo+1 (which FYI, everyone else, from OSX to Solaris to BSD has had driver APIs that "just work" for ages now) you tell him either "learn to recompile!" or "wait for the next rev luser!".
Are you REALLY surprised when for all you elitist bullshit your numbers are less than the margin for error? Or that when given a choice the majority would rather pirate an OS than take your precious product for FREE? Or that not a single B&M will touch your product even though it would lower our upfront costs? Frankly it is the shitty its not Linux's fault, it is you or your belief that PITA equals superior design that has the VAST MAJORITY, something like over 800 MILLION at last count, go "How much is Windows Home again?" This is also why OSX is royally kicking your ass even with a $1000 barrier to entry.
It really is simple Chuck: Give the customers what they want or they will go elsewhere and you can sit in your basement smug that you are right there with Amiga users in the "who gives a shit" dept. Your choice Chuck.
Oh please console boy, your lame troll is lame. Today we have unprecedented choices, from Steam to Good Old Games to drop it on your doorstep like Amazon, and thanks to the consoles slowing things down PC gaming has never been cheaper or easier to get into.
When I started PC gaming it took a $200 GPU every year and a half and a new PC every three years just to have games that weren't a slideshow. Today I am often building sub $400 PCs for customers that make damned good gaming PCs even when hooked up to their new 1080p TV. I've personally been gaming just fine on an HD4650 that cost me a whole $60 two years ago and when it is replaced at the end of the week by my new GPU (my GF refuses to tell me which one she got me dammit) I have NO doubt I'll get another 2+ years out of it, and from the looks of things I'll easily get 5-7 years out of this AMD quad system, possibly more if I yank the HDD and go SSD.
So while you and your frat buddies may enjoy your Madden or Halo deathmatches on your X360 frankly we PC gamers have never had it so good. If anything we are experiencing gaming overload, with such low prices and such a wealth of titles I personally probably have a good dozen games I haven't even had a chance to fire up yet thanks to splurging on sales. Where else are you gonna have 1 day sales like Batman:AA for $3 or Bioshock 2 for $1.99?
And this of course doesn't count the fact that when I'm not gaming with it my quadcore gaming PC gives me all sorts of other advantages, like a nice DVR for my cable (thanks to the $20 USB TV Tuner I picked up off of Woot!) and drag and drop GPU transcoding built into all 4xxx and newer ATI chips. This is why I'm having more and more customers pick up these cheap triple and quad AMD gaming PCs and have me hook them into their new widescreen TVs, because with it they have a "one stop shop" that allows them to have everything from all their audio/video to gaming to checking their FB all from the comfort of their couch with a wireless KB/Mouse combo. Add in the excellent 10 foot UI of Windows Media Center and built in support for Netflix it is just a no brainer.
Actually if YOU have been looking at what is going on in the BRIC you'd see that homegrown companies are putting out smartphones for that market already which while not up to the level of a Droid or iOS phone is already head and shoulders above what Nokia is offering for dumbphones.
Like it or not there is a reason why everyone is calling for the death of the dumbphone, because like the VCR the time is simply up. Just as the VCR didn't disappear overnight when DVD showed up so too will the dumbphone not instantly disappear, but anyone actually investing money in that market would have to be insane. It is pretty clear that what the third world and second world like the BRIC is gonna do is simply skip the PC revolution completely and just go straight to mobile, since it gives the power of a connected world without the need for the power generation and infrastructure required for the traditional desktop.
Like it or not Symbian is over, it is an outdated OS that simply wasn't up to the task, no different than PalmOS which like Nokia would have done if followed your advice they would have hung onto until they simply had NO market anymore. All that money for R&D (which frankly would have been MASSIVE in the case of MeeGo because like it or not it simply isn't anywhere near iOS level of quality or integration) had to come from somewhere and the market for dumbphones is razor thin margins at best.
The simple fact is we already saw the strategy your are advocating from Palm and we all saw how well THAT turned out, didn't we? By the time they got WebOS ready for primetime they simply had no money for marketing or incentives and simply bled out. That is EXACTLY what would have happened to Nokia if they would have stayed the course, That left Symbian,Droid, and WinPhone. Now I'm sure even you would agree that pushing out yet more Droids in a market this flooded would have been suicide, and while Symbian had a few fans like WinMo 6.5 more hated it than loved it.
Frankly I just don't see how you are able to say that giving up the smartphone market for 2 years while trying to survive on a rapidly dying razor thin dumbphone market would have been a wise move. it was simply a path with more chances to fail than to succeed and by going with MSFT they get billions in marketing as well as access to MSFT's WinPhone engineers and the ability to tie their hardware to the X360 and Win 7 desktop, both of which are doing quite well and are already in millions of homes. It seems to me given the options available to them the MSFT one was the safest and least likely to leave the company DOA.
It was just a smart business move and time will tell if it gives them a win. I personally believe if MSFT makes tie in to the X360 and Win 7 smooth and seamless that while they won't unseat iOS they could take a solid second and if they manage to appeal to X360 owners may even give Google a run for their money. Anyway time will tell and personally the more choices I have the better.
And what would you call yourself, if you automatically label anyone that differs from your viewpoint or listens to anything other than your beliefs stupid or crazy?
I'd say the smart thing to do would be to listen to all viewpoints and then make up one's own mind. And I know this will probably shock you if you even are willing to accept it, but some of what Beck says is actually...gasp!...true. look up his Jan 31 show of this year, where he pointed out for all our posturing on "freedom" and "democracy" we have time and time again to the tune of billions in tax dollars propped one truly evil monster after another.
His solution? Since it is obvious our continued propping up of "el presidente' regimes simply create more people that want us dead and rightly so for the monsters we inflict upon them, it is time for the USA to "be Switzerland" and leave everyone else the hell alone and tend to our own business. We don't have the money to start with, and propping up monsters simply breeds more hatred of us.
So I'd say on that point, and feel free to call me crazy or an idiot for agreeing with him, that he is 100% correct and burying our nation in debt to prop up monsters simply isn't the way to go. He was also the ONLY one I saw repeatedly say "you don't tear up the constitution to get the bad guy" when it came to trying terror suspects. Is he right about Google? I honestly don't know, I simply don't have enough data on the subject. What I DO know is that the US government is employing "professional trolls" and having their very own trolling software written with our tax dollars to try to control the masses and shift opinion using "the bandwagon effect". We know this is true because Wikileaks and Anonymous put the data out there for all to see.
So with all the truly sleazy nasty shit the US government is pulling which reads like something out of COINTELPRO I wouldn't be so quick to just "poo poo" any talk of the government getting in bad with corps to control and spy on citizens. Remember it isn't paranoia if they are really out to get you.
Oh don't worry I expected it. if you look at my past comments they are always evenly split between insightful and troll/flamebait, with the nasty mods coming from zealots that stick their heads in the sand and refuse to accept the truth. instead of actual debate all you get is accusations of "shill" astroturfer, etc.
And I agree wholeheartedly that Apple fanboys ain't got shit on the RDF that surrounds FOSSies as I call them. I've found there is a BIG difference between a FOSS users and a FOSSie, but sadly it seems the FOSSies are winning control and the fact that any that dare to say anything other than "Gee Biff, isn't Linux perfect? It sure is Bill, and RMS's beard smells like roses!" gets modded down is just proof of that.
Is Linux ready for the masses? Sadly not by a long shot, as while Canonical has made great strides once you get past the top layer it is just a mess, and one of the reason why he is trying to ditch X-Server and GNOME for Unity/Wayland. With Windows a good 90% of problems can be solved by GUI alone, and most fixed with a simple reboot or system restore.
With Linux even trivial problems will often give you as the ONLY answer "open up bash and type" this big huge CLI mess that 1.-Assumes the users even understands half of it, 2.-The user has intimate knowledge of the hardware since it is nearly always tailored to a VERY specific chipset/hardware combo, 3.- the skill to "tweak" said "fix" because they have hardware f rev d and the fix was designed for hardware c rev b and simply won't work without tweaking, and 4.-That the user has the skill to type a huge list of arcane commands into a 70s era term with NO autocorrect or spellcheck and get everything perfectly right, with a serious risk of breaking the machine if they get anything wrong (which they will get NO visual cues before getting boned).
But if they want to look up server numbers by absolute share which is what seems to have so many butthurt by my earlier links here is the latest I could find by Gartner which shows Windows-66.8% and climbing, Linux-23.2 and falling while Unix-6.8% and falling. The other link I found with overall shows 89% Windows, 5.9% Mac, 2.05% iOS, and Linux just barely above Java ME in overall share at 0.95%.
So I'm sorry if the numbers make FOSSies all butthurt but just remember you have the power to change it by giving the customers what they want. Lose the CLI, demand a hardware abi so drivers that work in foo won't be broken in foo+1, push for better UIs and simpler layouts, etc. And for the one that says "Linux thanks to Ubuntu is ALREADY dumbed down?" if you think Ubuntu is dumbed down enough for the masses it just shows why Linux hasn't got a chance. Try Windows 7 sometime, it is simple enough my 67 year old clueless dad installed it by himself with NO assistance required and EVERYTHING "just worked". All the drivers were downloaded and installed FOR him the worst question it asked him was whether he was at home or at work (which set up the firewall policy without him having to touch it) and frankly the ONLY thing I had to do when I got there a week later was show him how to get Firefox. Hell it even pointed out he had no AV on first boot and pointed him to a free one. So I'm sorry but while Shuttleworth is making strides Ubuntu is in NO way up to that level of simple yet, it just isn't.
I brought up Engadget simply because they are one of the few that actually got a hands on instead of simply regurgitating the press releases. but I'm sure there are others that got a hands on, feel free to look them up as well. What you will find is the same thing that I found when looking up MeeGo, which was an Intel making excuses and saying "it'll be better in the future, promise" while showing code that frankly didn't work as well as Android 1.5 on CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) which simply won't cut it when faced with WebOS and WinPhone 7, much less the juggernaut that is iOS.
So please, look it up yourself. If you look at actual reviews and not just press releases you'll find the same thing I did, an OS that wasn't alpha quality and was nowhere near shipping ready. Since iOS and WebOS aren't for sale that left Nokia with Symbian, Android, or WinPhone 7. The Droid is beyond saturated, Symbian just wasn't up to the job of competing with whats out there which is why companies dropped it for Droid, so that just leaves WinPhone 7.
I just don't see how anybody looking at the data could conclude that Nokia had anywhere else to go. They simply don't have another year or two to coast on dumbphones while they sink money they can't afford into R&D for MeeGo in the hopes it'll shape up in time, and without a real product in the smartphone category they are bleeding share like there is no tomorrow. Despite the FUD being spread about 2012 at the earliest I'd lay my money on a Sept release of the first round of WinPhone 7, probably with a nice tie in and low bundle price for anyone that picks up an X360 with a Nokia WinPhone, since MSFT is spending big money to get Windows 7, X360, and WinPhone 7 to all play nice together.
When you look at the numbers Nokia just couldn't afford to stay the course as they don't have a practical monopoly to ride like Intel does. I think in the end the CEO will be given credit for making the best call he could with what he had to work with, especially if MeeGo isn't even at beta stage this time next year which from reviews is what they are looking at.
The simple fact is if you want to gain REAL share, I mean "change the world get the hardware OEMs to listen to you" kind of momentum, then you are gonna need your very own Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. You're gonna need someone to put their foot down and say "the buck stops here" and pull this big mess where everyone is scratching their own itch into a cohesive experience with concrete guidelines, especially when it comes to UI, behavior, quality, documentation, and ease of use.
Will that man be Mark Shuttleworth? I don't know but what I DO know is he has done more to get Linux out of the "CLI heavy OS for basement nerds and CS grads" mindset and into the "Linux for humans" goals. Whether he can actually pull it off while staying in the community is the question and I personally believe he'll just have to give the community the finger and fork Ubuntu away from traditional Linux, simply because making Linux friendly to the masses WILL require changes that the CLI heavy nerds and server admins won't care for one damned bit.
As TFA shows Canonical might as well fork the whole smash away from Linux, because nobody is gonna be happy with them anyway. Everyone complains they don't send upstream but the guys upstream don't want to go the way Ubuntu is going so it is just pissing in the wind anyway. But Linux has had fifteen years to get people to switch using the CLI heavy nerd way and what has it gotten you? 22% of the server and falling, and so low on the desktop it is literally below the margin for error. If Linux is gonna truly become a "third way" for the masses, to be looked at and treated as an equal to OSX and Windows 7, then changes have to be made and Shuttleworth seems ready to make those changes.
The question is whether he can make those changes without pissing off the "community" and stepping on too many toes, and I would argue he simply can't. Canonical would be better off to just ignore the community and slowly but surely fork the thing away from them and perhaps by doing so actually give us a "Linux for humans" that "just works" for the average man out there. It still has a hell of a long ways to go IMHO, but it looks to me with Wayland and Unity the man is seriously trying.
It really is simple: Windows gets hit because that is where the easy marks are and if you switch everyone over tomorrow then by default you bring the easy marks to Linux and the famous Linux security gets turned to crapola 3 minutes later.
As a PC repairman I see the nasties that hit Windows every day, you know what the biggest two are BY FAR? The "ZOMG You got teh Viruz! Run "this_iz_not_a_viruz.exe" to kill it quick! ZOMG!" and the ever popular "Enjoy free (insert new movies, music, porn) all you want just by installing out "this_is_not_a_viruz_codec.exe" today!" Now how in any way shape or form will Linux protect the user from social engineering attacks or from running outdated third party software like Flash or Reader? Gonna hold a gun to their head and force them to update? Hell Windows has had automatic updates for over a decade yet I still see XP SP2 machines cross my desk.
The simple facts are these: as long as the user has the right to install software he also has the right to royally screw the pooch when it comes to malware. Linux by default because it is more "fiddly" and because one has to do step by step troubleshooting with it like go to forum, find relevant topic, launch bash, apply fix, has users that know more about their OS internals and are more security minded. It ain't rocket science folks. Windows got rid of the last legitimate complaint, forcing users to run as admins, more than 3 years ago. But as long as the majority of home and business users have no clue how anything works you are gonna see bugs on whatever OS is dominant because that is where the clueless are. Just look at how we are seeing more malware for Android now that it is becoming popular. With the users come the malware, simple as that. And switching to Linux won't magically give the user a level up in IT knowledge.
Actually I give us another 10 years tops before we reenact what is happening in Egypt and the rich either find a way to pull a tiananmen square or do their own reenactment of the fall of Saigon.
For a look at how badly the government has worked against the people you might want read this but I warn you it ain't a pretty picture. The numbers simply aren't sustainable, and never in our history has the gap between the rich and the poor been so wide. What is the answer our great leaders give us? "Get more education!" and crush yourself with ever increasing amounts of debt for that same said education while being expected to compete with those like India who pay 1/20th what we do for a degree.
Frankly it doesn't matter if you are black or white, left or right, if you aren't one of the top 1% then your government is against you. We have millions out of work, millions more living hand to mouth, and every single day those numbers continue to grow. Honestly I'll be amazed if we last another decade because what we have right now is a powderkeg and it wouldn't take much of an orator to give us our own Uncle Joe or crazy Austrian. I already know many that would happily go communist or totalitarian if it meant "bread and jobs" and not having to worry about being outsourced or losing their homes. As the people lose any faith and belief in the government all it takes is a spark, and the revolving door like TFA illustrates just shows to the people the pointlessness of participation.
All it will take is a single voice to stir the masses and light the fuse, and as we have seen from the Russian revolution to Mao, from the crazy Austrian to the current middle east on fire, you can't fuck over the people forever sooner or later they WILL turn on you the only question is when. looking out my window at the boarded up homes and closed down shops I'm voting on sooner rather than later. The numbers simply aren't sustainable and you can't keep the masses placated with bread and circuses when there is no roof over their heads or money to buy the bread.
The only reason we have lasted this long is the government willing to add ever more debt to keep things afloat, but as we are seeing with the states eventually that fails as well. It simply isn't sustainable and the greed from the top will be their own downfall. It reminds me of the classic quote by Lenin: "The capitalist will gladly sell you the rope to hang him with" and their unending unrepentant greed destroying the middle class and leaving the poor living like animals is perfect proof of that. Maybe democracy will always fail in this manner, as the rich become so powerful they tilt the laws farther and farther in their favor until it collapses like a Ponzi scheme. Because to these old eyes short of following the example of Egypt I really don't see any coming back, the rich are just too powerful now.
All the popular ones like Netflix? Oh wait, no it doesn't and as I pointed out Janus has been here OVER five years and all FOSS "hackers" have to show for it is a giant FAIL next to their score. Next!
BTW you want to see "the ultimate future" of FOSS? Do you? It is kinda sad but you can see the end result today of the "never compromise, down with the great Satan!" holy war pushed by RMS. All you have to do is look up what "PC" RMS uses to see how FOSS will ultimately end...in case you don't know he is stuck on a Loongson "netbook" that only supports a teeny tiny niche of software, no flash, no web video, hell I bet the man can't even listen to music unless it is a specially crafted Vorbis file, and frankly the machine is probably illegal in the west due to the fact the Chinese incorporated x86 instructions into their ARM chip without a license.
And your big "savior" is Android? BWA HA HA HA! You ever see "Pirates of silicon valley"? Remember the scene where Jobs is rallying against IBM and his engineer is pointing to the IBM video and to Gates, who is about to fuck him raw? Well guess what? Notice anything...funny...about Android? Like how Google refuses to allow ANY GPL V3 code into DroidOS? Why do you think that is? It is because Google is gonna buttfuck FOSS by pulling the TiVo trick which they can't do if they allow GPL V3, that's why! Your "savior" is gonna be about as useful to FOSS as TiVo! It is SOOOO funny!
As for Janus now who is spreading FUD? In case you haven't heard The EU busted MSFT and made them open their protocols so all the Linux foundation would have to do is ask for a Janus binary blob (and Get Linus to quit acting like an ass and support a stable driver API) and the EU would make MSFT cough one up or drop the banhammer on them to the tune of a couple of hundred million.
And again you go "la la la" and refuse to accept reality. In reality The ONLY reason the music companies allowed MP3 is because Apple has a monopoly with iTunes which means there was simply no way to offer DRM, since Apple refuses to license Fairplay and doesn't support Janus on WMA. Which means if they want Amazon and other music retailers to compete with Apple it HAS to work on an iPod and frankly the ONLY format that fit that bill was either MP3 or WAV, so it wasn't like they had a choice.
Now compare that to video where the studios have gone out of their way to ensure that Apple doesn't get squat since they don't want a repeat of the music debacle where Apple could pretty much dictate terms and could kill an artists sales by simply burying their ads to the back of iTunes, and where the X360 owns a significant share of the living room. Here you will simply never see a repeat of MP3 because MSFT has licensed Janus liberally, with the X360, PS3, Wii, and numerous set top boxes supporting Netflix and by extension Janus DRM. Google tried to force the issue and got the banhammer dropped on them making Google TV worthless when compared to even CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) set top box, so frankly this battle is over, like Mp3 VS Vorbis.
But in the end thanks to the militants wing of FOSS the future of FOSS is bleak with corps like Google "TiVo Tricking" away your four freedoms on one side (and which is being assisted by Linus who refuses to go GPL V3) and online DRM Video being "the killer app" which will ensure that not a single B&M will carry your product. Not Walmart not Best Buy not a single one shall be had. In the end without the ability to compromise FOSS will simply stay locked into an increasingly smallweb server niche because thanks to t
Not every OS is suitable for every job. IMHO Linux excels at server roles, kicks ass in embedded, but in desktops, where so much is still dependent on proprietary hardware? Not so much. And before anyone pipes in with "it works for you" well fine and dandy, but getting it to work for a single guy with infinite time to fiddle and look at forums is a hell of a lot different than getting it to fulfill all the roles a large org like this has.
So in the end I wouldn't say this means Linux fails, just that it didn't fit the role required and the cost to fit the square peg in the round hole simply wsn't cost effective. Happens all the time.
Do you HONESTLY believe Meego had a snowball's chance in hell? Really? Because you might want to go to Endgadget and read their actual hands on review and not just the fawning press releases. There you will find lovely quotes such as "not even alpha quality", "Under the top shine there is nothing substantial" "Very little functionality" and "would need at least a year to be where the others are now" which of course by then would be even farther behind as nobody else will be standing still.
It is pretty sad that/. has become Boycott Novell with all the "ZOMG M$!" so thick that people would completely ignore reality just to throw in another M$ conspiracy. Do you think they hired a new CEO just because it was Tuesday? The facts are thus: Nokia is bleeding share like there is no tomorrow, dumbphones are going the way of 8-tracks and that was the only market Nokia had real share in, their smartphone OS was frankly a joke compared to iOS, and they simply didn't have the luxury to throw another year at development of yet another Linux based OS that may or may not sell.
Now considering if they would have went Android all they would have gotten is a thank you letter from Brin and Page while leaping into a market that is already beyond saturated, both HP and Apple won't sell them WebOS and iOS respectfully, and MSFT was willing to shell out billions to make Nokia the hardware arm for WinPhone 7. Considering their choices you'd have to be a Boycott Novell level of "ZOMG M$! ZOMG!!" conspiracy theorist to honestly think they had another option here. What did you expect them to do, just close up shop and return the money to the shareholders?
I'm sure there are those here that would honestly rather see a company close down and thousands go out of work rather than seeing MSFT get anything, but those of us that can just look at the numbers without being blinded by nerd rage can see the writing on the wall: They had no real smartphone presence, their OS they did have was seriously behind and would take time they didn't have to catch up, and the only other OS they could get their hands on is so over saturated you'd have to be nuts to want to use it ATM. They made the best call with what they had to work with, and only time will tell if it was a good one or not, but I fail to see how they had much of a choice here. It wasn't like the company was all hearts and flowers before the big bad MSFT came along.
I have some customers that are SERIOUSLY click happy, we are talking some serious PEBKAC here, ones that would pick up more viruses than a Bangkok Whore. Since switching them to Comodo AV they've been clean as a whistle and everything "just works".
Now if you are setting up a new PC I'd suggest a quick trip to Ninite first just to get the basics installed, and if you are wanting to install any bloated drivers like Realtek or seriously funky ones like DaemonTools SPTD drivers I'd go ahead and do those first, as Comodo naturally doesn't like the way certain drivers like Realtek splatter files all over the place and you'll have to click through multiple warnings otherwise.
But once you have a machine set up you can just drop in Comodo AV or Comodo IS and it "just works" with no hassle. And if you want the PC to be pretty much break proof short of hardware failure just add Comodo Time Machine which makes daily snapshots and gives the user an easy way to restore even if they manage to somehow bork booting (for those users that can kill a Sherman tank with a toothbrush) and with CTM getting it back up is as easy as push F11> choose snapshot to restore > let it reboot and you're back up and running.
So I'd say its not real hard to keep most bugs off the machine, just use software that by default deny policies and sandboxes everything. Sadly NO AV is 100% perfect, especially if they use the right bait, as I have sat there in shock and watched as a user refused to listen to me OR the AV and shut it down so that he could "see free blockbuster movies with this super(tm)codec!" Sometimes even the best tools and advice just can't stop the stupid.
Alright bright boy, riddle me this: How EXACTLY is all your magical Xeon powered cloud crap going to give me ANY advantage when it is literally faster to drive 20 miles to the shop and back than it is to use the average DSL connection in these parts to download over 50Mb in files,hmmm? And running a "private website" requires either an extra $200 for a "business connection" or a nice termination notice, your choice. BTW here the ONLY difference between the "business connection" and standard cable is $200 and a static IP. Whoopee, I'm sure gonna jump on that!
You see you and all the "cloud baby cloud" types have a serious flaw in your big plans and that is for huge chunks of the country home connections blow for anything other than checking email or low res youtube videos.
So how EXACTLY is you magical Xeon cloud going to give me ANY advantage at all with an average 150kbps DSL connection being the norm here, hmmm? Am I supposed to tell all my customers "LOL call me when you spend $500 a month on a T connection LOL!"?
Sadly you are EXACTLY like some of the FOSS zealots I've dealt with here that have given me marvelous "suggestions" like tell my customers when some device doesn't work in Linux "Go buy something else LOL!" and all so they can have a worse experience than they have now, but hey, they're running FOSS so that makes it better by default, right?
Tell you what, when we all have FIOS around here, which is scheduled for the fifth Tuesday in the month of never, right after the third go fuck yourself of spring, THEN I'll be happy to go "cloud baby cloud". But as of right now for large sections of the country all your fancy magical Xeon powered bullshit is is buzzword bingo that works about as well as WebTV did in the 90s, that is not at all. Thanks but no thanks junior, I prefer solutions that...oh what's the word? Oh yeah actually work regardless of connection speed which sure as hell don't apply to your cloud.
Its called Tivoization and GPL V3 was written specifically to keep guys like you from screwing the GPL by "TiVoing" GPL code. Look it is simple, keep up: GPL was written for protecting four freedoms and you fuck ALL users out of the second freedom by locking your GPL running device with the "TiVo trick".
Nobody gives a shit about your reasons why, there is BSD and proprietary vendors that will happily give or sell you code for your purpose no matter what you want to do with it. But you are fucking the community by taking their work and locking it down which frankly makes what you are doing no better then any software thief. The ONLY WAY that code is given to you free is if you abide by the GPL, otherwise YOU HAVE NO LICENSE to that code. With the TiVo trick you are using legalese bullshit to get around the license without actually having to abide by it and it is just as sorry and no different than any other corp that uses hot software to get ahead.
So the GPL V3 was written to get rid of guys like you once and for all, and frankly the sooner everyone switches over the better. Then you'll have the choice of opening up your device and respecting the license or paying to write or buying a proprietary solution which will cost you more. But all those coders didn't write those thousands of man years worth of code for free just to enrich your company, they did it to enrich the community and encourage sharing, otherwise they would have went BSD. You want to take advantage of the richer ecosystem that GPL has with regards to embedded but you don't want to actually follow the rules and that is bullshit. Sorry if that gets you butthurt but your excuses are just that.
Actually you'd probably have just as many books and movies, you just wouldn't have dreck like the Dukes of Hazzard remake.
What you would do would be the same as what Joss Whedon was talking about when he was thinking of doing Faith the Vampire Slayer or Spike&Dru, you'd have a "buy our shit" for fan investment, which would in turn help guide the artist by letting him/her know which the fans were more interested in. Want Spike&Dru over Faith? Buy this shirt, and this mug, oh and pick up a keyring while you're at it. want a sequel? buy the DVD, hell buy a few and give them to friends.
Basically it would be like patronage only by the fans themselves instead of a single wealthy donor. this way the fans could help decide which project they would prefer to see, and it would mean that unlike now where everything is "high concept" and has to be sold to a suit in one sentence or less it wouldn't matter how weird or dark or highbrow your idea was if enough of the audience liked the idea.
If Serenity would have been made in this manner instead of by suits that expected they were getting the next Star Wars the movie would have had a smaller budget but could have been edgier and probably had a couple of sequels since it would encourage more interaction with the fans as they ultimately would have been writing the checks. Hell I don't see how it could be worse than the "high concept" and "Me too!" drivel we get nowadays on TV and in films.
I think you and everybody here are missing the "Oh boy did we fuck up" part of the above poster's story and it is this: The TiVo trick is here to stay and anybody releasing under GPL V2 might as well just go PD or BSD because GPL V2 is now worthless thanks to the TiVo trick.
Anybody who has read any of my postings knows I have NO problem with proprietary software as long as it serves my purpose but one thing I DO have a problem with is weasel worded legal BS which is EXACTLY what the "TiVo trick" is in a nutshell. As much as I don't agree with RMS on...well pretty much anything, I do respect what the man is trying to accomplish and respect the right to write HIS license HIS way along with the right of developers to choose the license that best fits their wishes, and if someone can't be bothered to respect the license it isn't like there isn't BSD and proprietary code that will do the same job.
Anybody who releases or updates their code under GPL V2 frankly needs their heads examined as you're just giving corps a right to steal your code by ignoring the license thanks to the TiVo trick. WTH is the point of releasing under GPL V2 when the whole point of the GPL is the four freedoms which don't exist anymore under V2 thanks to the TiVo trick?
What the GP's little story about the PVR should illustrate is now that the TiVo trick is known more and more will use it thanks to the embedded tools in Linux being better than BSD. the ONLY way you are gonna actually have the four freedoms on anything besides an x86 PC is to go GPL V3, and by continuing to support GPL V2 all you are doing is giving corps free work which they will "reward" you in turn by giving you the finger. If all those working on GPL code would switch to GPL V3 it would force the OEMs to spend money keeping the code up to date and adding features which would quickly making TiVo tricking less worthwhile. Supporting GPL V2 at this stage of the game frankly is assisted suicide.
So in other words the answer to why they should go to HTML V5 is "they shouldn't, as we won't give you what you want since we are Pirate party. Please stick with Silverlight and.Net so that FOSS users can't have native access at all, like with Netflix. Thanks"
So glad you cleared that up! Of course I figure ultimately that is what is gonna happen anyway, as FOSS has been tilting at the DRM windmill for nearly 15 years now and have made squat for headway which in a way is sad, but really not surprising. But all you are doing is cutting off your nose to spite your face as the "must have" ATM and for the foreseeable future is Netflix which without DRM will NEVER run native on Linux which simply gives both Windows and OSX a "killer app" that makes them more valuable to the common user.
So in the end Google making HTML V5 into a FOSS battle will do jack and squat and will probably kill the video tag dead except for a tiny niche ala Vorbis and Theora. Despite what Google thinks Youtube isn't the only video site on the web, not by a long shot, and it will be trivial for content owners to simply go elsewhere if they desire. So my prediction is this: the "winner" of the HTML V5 fight will be....drum roll....Flash! It will be H.264 in a flash wrapper followed by Silverlight and.NET because all of these formats allow for DRM which whether you like it or not the majority of content owners aren't gonna just go DRM free ala.mp3.
The ONLY reason you have DRM free music right now is Apple, and their attempts to get into the video business have frankly failed when compared to iPod's dominance of music. Since Apple supports H.264 and has deals with MSFT to support Janus my guess is a Silverlight or.NET Janus based DRM for iDevices and Flash for everyone else. But hey, please enjoy your completely free an open design that is only supported by less than 2% of the video out there! While DRM free everything is nice in theory reality has a way of nipping those ideas in the bud, and if anything we are seeing more DRM being placed upon content via Internet required connection and such, not less. And honestly the average guy doesn't give a shit about "free as in freedom!" as long as his video plays, which with the Janus DRM like Netflix it "just works". But thanks for playing and have a nice day!
In order 1.-I have NO desire to make a "gee aren't I interesting love me" website, and free hosting sucks and I sure as hell ain't paying for a website for as little as I'd use it. 2.-I HATE Google Docs, as I find it a clunky badly done ripoff of MS Office. 3.-Must not have kids, or you would know they have a habit of carrying off your flash drives no matter how many you have. 4.-Again the free services suck and it would be stupid to pay for a service that in the end wouldn't give me enough advantage to pay for itself in the long run. 5.- My phone is actually a phone and is used for such, therefor no battery sucking smartphone crap. 6.-Tend to get scratched and/or left at a customer's somewhere.
So in the end why reinvent the wheel? What I have works as simply as a BCC, makes it trivial to backup email, pics,etc from anywhere without needing to leave squat on a customer's PC (just download portable Opera which is less than 5Mb and toss afterward) and it all "just works" without either costing a dime or taking any real effort on my part since I already have the email addresses anyway. Your arguments remind me on some I've had with those trying to get me to switch my shop to FOSS, when I have no problems with Windows why bother? in the end you are just giving me more work to arrive at the same place I was before with no real advantages. Every file I would need for any fix that could be done in the field is less than 25Mb anyway, which means there really isn't a point in paying for a hosting site like EC2. if it requires larger files frankly most of the home connections around here blow ass and it would literally be faster for me to simply drive to the shop and sneakernet than it would be to wait on their crappy connection, again killing many of your selling points. in the end your "solutions" are just more work with no real advantages and increased cost, well unless you call being able to say you're "in the cloud" to be a big advantage or something.
I'm just an old greybeard that tries to call it as he sees it, groupthink be damned. You'll notice my posts tend to be an even split between +3 insightful and -1 troll or flamebait as some here appreciate an honest comment while others can't stand having anything negative said about their sacred cows. Personally I think life is too short for lying and hypocrisy so I'd rather just always be honest, whether the group agrees with me or not. Sorry if I may have stepped on one of your pet projects in the past but I'm just being my brutally honest self.
Personally while I like the Whedon writing style (as I said I own the box sets of Buffy/Angel) you'd have to be deluded to not notice when the man gets a "new hotness" project the writing suffers on anything he had going to that point. Anyone who has watched the earlier seasons of Buffy/Angel can tell almost to the episode when Firefly started taking hold because he starts phoning it in and it really shows. While his core team of Noxon/Greenwald are good writers they remind me of musicians where they don't really do their best work unless their other half (in this case Joss) is there to bounce ideas off of.
And while I can't give a full critique of Dollhouse as I only watched the first two episodes just from those two I got the feeling it was another case of Joss phoning it in and got turned off. Sure enough I read later Joss is pissed at Fox for executive meddling and is actively chasing the Wonder Woman writing gig. It is almost like the guy has ADHD and can't stand to turn down a job, as he seems to always end up biting off more than he can chew and when his attention is focused on some new thing he just phones it in and uses CYA third stringers to try to cover for him, which with his peculiar writing style sticks out like a sore thumb.
If anyone here wants a perfect example just watch season six of Buffy and compare the rest of the episodes to the musical and the last two episodes of the season, or to frankly anything in season three or four. What you will notice right off the bat is the "Buffyisms" way of speaking, such as her valley butchering the language or Willow's babbles, are almost completely absent, and along with them nearly all character development or building on the mythos. I believe this is because the third stringers are afraid of accidentally fucking with the cannon so they just follow the backstory instead of adding to it, which inevitably leads to characters simply spouting cliche versions of their lines instead of actually being in character. For an example see how they had Anya spout off an inappropriate sexual comment nearly every episode without any of the character building like her speech in the body.
So in conclusion while I like the witty Whedon writing style that doesn't give the man the right to just phone it in and expect us to buy it. If he wouldn't bite off more than he can chew and concentrate on the show at hand frankly his shows would last longer, as when he is on the ball it is some of the wittiest writing on television. If he would have even had half the great dialog and wit he is currently showing in the Buffy/Angel extended season comics the shows would probably still be here. And as for the one who said Spike wouldn't make a great show? Don't judge what happened to the character to what he started out as, as even in the commentary some of the second stringers talk about how they didn't know how to write for the character and basically gave him the Cordy/Anya comic relief lines just to give Marsters something to do. If they wrote it as "Spike and Dru:The early days" it would probably be kick ass, although frankly too dark and disturbing for an American TV series. As we saw with American Gothic or Brimstone the average US viewer don't like their TV TOO dark. What allowed Buffy/Angel to get away with it was the humor, I just don't know if the American audience would accept the humor coming from a pair of serial killers like Spike and Dru.
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I'd say that is the biggest problem with what they call "horror" games today, they think spewing guts and blood equals horror when it just equals gore porn.
Yahtzee at Zero Punctuation nailed the problem when reviewing Dead Space 2 I think. Instead of building tension with sound and glimpses of the monster the game gets two inches from your face right from the start and has some guy's face melt in front of you. That isn't horror that is just gross out. He said the game reminded him of a child that beats its head against the wall for attention, no subtlety at all.
The last truly scary game I got to play was Nosferatu: the wrath of Malachi which with VERY primitive weapons you were let loose in a castle to try to rescue your family and there was no way to memorize because the rooms would shift, even between saves. Walking into a room and finding you've got THREE coffins and have less than 2 minutes to run through there and stake their asses (because once a master vamp rose your ass was grass, damned near impossible to drop with their speed and strength) while extremely creepy but subtle music floats around in the background? Now THAT is scary!
Not to mention the raw numbers don't take two factors into consideration: The first I call "Pokemon syndrome" where I have met pirates that have literally downloaded hundreds of games they have never played simply so they can have "all" of a particular genre/interest. Now me personally I don't fricking get it, but apparently from what I've seen it is a pretty common syndrome and the funny thing was the pirates bought more games than anybody I knew because anything they showed more than "Pokemon" interest in they wanted the full game with box art and multiplayer. so that doesn't get taken into consideration.
The second are guys that want to make sure it runs before handing out their hard earned dollars and I'll be the first to admit I have occasionally fallen into that category. One can't tell by demos anymore because often the demo will be "rigged" in that it has had the most strict QA and coding quality compared to the rest of the game. For example see the original Max Payne, which the demo ran great on my PC but after shelling out $39 at release I found the game would CTD the second you went past the demo stage and which they didn't fix for me until the game was at $10 which pissed me off. another was Vampire:Bloodlines where until the fan made patch came out I was screwed out of my $49 because even though I was WAAY over spec it would lock hard and simply fail.
So one can't simply look at TPB raw data and get any real feel for the situation. Hell I've bought a hell of a lot more media since the rise of P2P since it gave me a chance to try something I had NO access to locally and find out if I liked it or not. A good example of this is the $1000 I spent on the Joss Whedon collection, all because I heard about "this weird cool show about a girl that hunts vampires" and since I didn't have the WB in my area P2P was the only way for me to actually catch an episode. I have also bought entire game series simply because I try one and it works well on my system and looks like it will be reasonably fun.
So if one were to simply look at the raw data one would list me as a "dirty filthy pirate" when I don't actually HAVE any pirated games and was simply making sure something would play before shelling out my $$$. Nowadays you can't tell shit by system reqs anymore, as a game might play great on Intel and choke on AMD or vice versa, and thanks to not being able to return non functional games it doesn't take getting burned out of $50 too many times before one becomes gun shy. Personally if a game is more than $20 I want to see it run 20 minutes of non demo code to ensure the thing will actually be stable before I shell out my cash. Too many publishers are putting out gaming code I would be ashamed to even call alpha quality and a closet full of paperweights really isn't fun.
That is why I believe you and I benefited from Gates and Jobs with their singular vision and ability to get everyone on the same page. With FOSS you have 50 million guys reinventing the wheel (how many text editors are they up to now, 200?) and everyone "scratching their own itch" instead of working together as a cohesive unit. This leads to lost time and wasted efforts (how many distros are they up to now,500+?) and just makes a mess in the marketplace, ala what Apple had under Sculley with the Performa line, or Gates having to keep both Win9X and WinNT until he could merge the OS lines.
But sadly without real leadership and cohesive unity what you get is 50 million little fiefdoms and a HELL of a lot of zealotry. Too many here are of the "ZOMG M$ ZOMG!!" that it feels more and more like Boycott Novell instead of a place where we discuss the merits/demerits of the TECH, and no matter how many times you point out the numbers don't lie and something needs to change to draw the users you just get labeled a "paid shill" (I wish, where is my check Ballmer?) or astrorufer for pointing out the emperor has his Willie swinging in the breeze. If it was gonna sell it would have done so by now which is why I support what Shuttleworth is trying to do. He may fail but at least he isn't just repackaging the same shit and expecting people to "do it the Linux way" which has been shown time and time again to be a giant "DO NOT WANT" as far as customers goes.
BTW since you are a Mac guy you might want to check this out for one day only Paragon are giving away their excellent Windows/Macs interoperability tools on GAOTD. I have picked up several Paragon tools because of trying them on GAOTD and they really are top notch. These will give you read/write access between Windows and OSX at near native speed either way. Pretty cool and you can't beat free!
That is why I believe what will drive the next generation of GPU and PC will NOT be strictly gaming, although they will game with frankly insane graphics and framerate, it is the ease at which new Windows PCs tie everything together and give the customer a "one stop shop" for their entire multimedia experience.
I just finished up and installed a $500 quad core PC into a customer's living room just yesterday. Being able to show the customer that thanks to drag and drop transcoding on the new ATI GPUs converting videos to his PMP was literally "4, 3,2,1,done" and being able to rip their entire audio/video collection and have it all instantly accessible along with Netflix via the 10 foot UI of Windows Media Center? Easy sell.
The fact that he can instantly buy and have a huge library of games all right there at the click of his wireless mouse makes PC gaming just one attractive piece of the larger puzzle. Folks like simple, they like easy, they like not having to deal with discs and having all their media all wired up nice and neat with their new 7.1 surround sound systems. Thanks to GP-GPU and the sharing ability built into Windows 7 having a PC built into the entertainment center has never been easier, and thanks to the consoles being the target platform it has never been cheaper.
When I started anything less than $1500 and I hope you liked having low framerates and degraded picture, and you better be ready to buy a new GPU every year or so and a new PC every two. Now you can buy really nice triples and quads for less than $550 fully loaded with RAM and huge HDDs and it'll crank out the framerate and look better than anything the consoles can do, and do so for years to come with ZERO need for upgrades.
So I'd say from listening to my customers PC gaming has never been better. They love how they have endless choices from Steam to GOG to D2D, all MUCH cheaper than the consoles, how they can just HDMI right into their new widescreen and do everything from game to check their email from the comfort of their couch, and how they have access to anything and everything all right there at their fingertips. In the end the console can do gaming and Netflix and that is about it. With the PC you have nearly infinite jobs it can do and it will do them all well and cheaply to boot. I believe with the rise of super cheap widescreen TVs the future will be networked everything with a PC in the living room controlling it all. Gaming is just the nice icing on top of the delicious cake.
Hi MR FOSSie! You do realize that when you write M$ everyone assumes everything you post is coming from this guy yes? BTW like your Star Trek uniform!
As for your "points" why yes nobody ever bought or pirates MSFT Windows when your free wonderfulness was there, it is all network effects because nobody tried selling Linux...wait a tick...Hasn't everyone from Dell to ASUS and Walmart actually tried selling your OS and thanks to the PITA factor and shitty QA (which for a nice example see this little gem about how the Dell Ubuntu offering breaks if you update it) was labeled by the public a giant DO NOT WANT in fifty foot letters?
Or do you think it was a secret "M$ conspiracy" that OEMs saw 4 TIMES the returns with Linux or that when given a "choice" (you as a FOSSie ARE for freedom of choice, yes?) the customers ran to Windows as fast as they could even on netbooks which were supposed to be designed to take advantage of the strengths of Linux in the first place?
It really is simple MR FOSSie, hell it is practically first day business school 101: Give the customers what they want and listen to them and you gain share, give them a mess of CLI and "RTFM Noob!" bad attitude and watch as they stay away in droves it really is that simple. look at how Apple just waltzed in and royally kicked your ass, why is that? It is because they listen to their customers and designed an OS around the philosophy of "it just works" with little to no hoop jumping required, whereas Linux despite the pretty on top is really just CLI at heart. Which would have been fine if this was still 1997, but it is 2011 and the customers have made it clear all the CLI and hoop jumping (not to mention the driver mess or "update foo broke my drivers" which frankly we haven't seen in Windows since the end of Win9x or OSX since 10.2) is a giant "do NOT want!".
It really is simple: you are busy growing or you are busy dying. The only "growth" we have seen in Linux is Android (which is gonna be TiVo tricked right out from under you and therefor is as useful to the FOSS movement as having a Linux router) and despite FIFTEEN YEARS you are still below the margin for error. I didn't make those numbers up friend, and if those numbers would have been posted by any business they would have closed up shop by now. But you keep on thinking that you can force users to do things your way and that it is a big M$ conspiracy when you find users don't actually enjoy reading man pages or trawling forums for fixes. You DO know what the classic definition of insanity is, right? If it ain't worked after FIFTEEN YEARS perhaps it is time to try a different approach, ya?
So your answer is "We are superior in every way, do it our way or piss off noob!" and you wonder why Linux has no share, typical. The user asks for simple, you give him a 70s era term and tell him "RTFA noob!". The user asks for drivers that work in foo to work in foo+1 (which FYI, everyone else, from OSX to Solaris to BSD has had driver APIs that "just work" for ages now) you tell him either "learn to recompile!" or "wait for the next rev luser!".
Are you REALLY surprised when for all you elitist bullshit your numbers are less than the margin for error? Or that when given a choice the majority would rather pirate an OS than take your precious product for FREE? Or that not a single B&M will touch your product even though it would lower our upfront costs? Frankly it is the shitty its not Linux's fault, it is you or your belief that PITA equals superior design that has the VAST MAJORITY, something like over 800 MILLION at last count, go "How much is Windows Home again?" This is also why OSX is royally kicking your ass even with a $1000 barrier to entry.
It really is simple Chuck: Give the customers what they want or they will go elsewhere and you can sit in your basement smug that you are right there with Amiga users in the "who gives a shit" dept. Your choice Chuck.
Oh please console boy, your lame troll is lame. Today we have unprecedented choices, from Steam to Good Old Games to drop it on your doorstep like Amazon, and thanks to the consoles slowing things down PC gaming has never been cheaper or easier to get into.
When I started PC gaming it took a $200 GPU every year and a half and a new PC every three years just to have games that weren't a slideshow. Today I am often building sub $400 PCs for customers that make damned good gaming PCs even when hooked up to their new 1080p TV. I've personally been gaming just fine on an HD4650 that cost me a whole $60 two years ago and when it is replaced at the end of the week by my new GPU (my GF refuses to tell me which one she got me dammit) I have NO doubt I'll get another 2+ years out of it, and from the looks of things I'll easily get 5-7 years out of this AMD quad system, possibly more if I yank the HDD and go SSD.
So while you and your frat buddies may enjoy your Madden or Halo deathmatches on your X360 frankly we PC gamers have never had it so good. If anything we are experiencing gaming overload, with such low prices and such a wealth of titles I personally probably have a good dozen games I haven't even had a chance to fire up yet thanks to splurging on sales. Where else are you gonna have 1 day sales like Batman:AA for $3 or Bioshock 2 for $1.99?
And this of course doesn't count the fact that when I'm not gaming with it my quadcore gaming PC gives me all sorts of other advantages, like a nice DVR for my cable (thanks to the $20 USB TV Tuner I picked up off of Woot!) and drag and drop GPU transcoding built into all 4xxx and newer ATI chips. This is why I'm having more and more customers pick up these cheap triple and quad AMD gaming PCs and have me hook them into their new widescreen TVs, because with it they have a "one stop shop" that allows them to have everything from all their audio/video to gaming to checking their FB all from the comfort of their couch with a wireless KB/Mouse combo. Add in the excellent 10 foot UI of Windows Media Center and built in support for Netflix it is just a no brainer.
Actually if YOU have been looking at what is going on in the BRIC you'd see that homegrown companies are putting out smartphones for that market already which while not up to the level of a Droid or iOS phone is already head and shoulders above what Nokia is offering for dumbphones.
Like it or not there is a reason why everyone is calling for the death of the dumbphone, because like the VCR the time is simply up. Just as the VCR didn't disappear overnight when DVD showed up so too will the dumbphone not instantly disappear, but anyone actually investing money in that market would have to be insane. It is pretty clear that what the third world and second world like the BRIC is gonna do is simply skip the PC revolution completely and just go straight to mobile, since it gives the power of a connected world without the need for the power generation and infrastructure required for the traditional desktop.
Like it or not Symbian is over, it is an outdated OS that simply wasn't up to the task, no different than PalmOS which like Nokia would have done if followed your advice they would have hung onto until they simply had NO market anymore. All that money for R&D (which frankly would have been MASSIVE in the case of MeeGo because like it or not it simply isn't anywhere near iOS level of quality or integration) had to come from somewhere and the market for dumbphones is razor thin margins at best.
The simple fact is we already saw the strategy your are advocating from Palm and we all saw how well THAT turned out, didn't we? By the time they got WebOS ready for primetime they simply had no money for marketing or incentives and simply bled out. That is EXACTLY what would have happened to Nokia if they would have stayed the course, That left Symbian,Droid, and WinPhone. Now I'm sure even you would agree that pushing out yet more Droids in a market this flooded would have been suicide, and while Symbian had a few fans like WinMo 6.5 more hated it than loved it.
Frankly I just don't see how you are able to say that giving up the smartphone market for 2 years while trying to survive on a rapidly dying razor thin dumbphone market would have been a wise move. it was simply a path with more chances to fail than to succeed and by going with MSFT they get billions in marketing as well as access to MSFT's WinPhone engineers and the ability to tie their hardware to the X360 and Win 7 desktop, both of which are doing quite well and are already in millions of homes. It seems to me given the options available to them the MSFT one was the safest and least likely to leave the company DOA.
It was just a smart business move and time will tell if it gives them a win. I personally believe if MSFT makes tie in to the X360 and Win 7 smooth and seamless that while they won't unseat iOS they could take a solid second and if they manage to appeal to X360 owners may even give Google a run for their money. Anyway time will tell and personally the more choices I have the better.
And what would you call yourself, if you automatically label anyone that differs from your viewpoint or listens to anything other than your beliefs stupid or crazy?
I'd say the smart thing to do would be to listen to all viewpoints and then make up one's own mind. And I know this will probably shock you if you even are willing to accept it, but some of what Beck says is actually...gasp!...true. look up his Jan 31 show of this year, where he pointed out for all our posturing on "freedom" and "democracy" we have time and time again to the tune of billions in tax dollars propped one truly evil monster after another.
His solution? Since it is obvious our continued propping up of "el presidente' regimes simply create more people that want us dead and rightly so for the monsters we inflict upon them, it is time for the USA to "be Switzerland" and leave everyone else the hell alone and tend to our own business. We don't have the money to start with, and propping up monsters simply breeds more hatred of us.
So I'd say on that point, and feel free to call me crazy or an idiot for agreeing with him, that he is 100% correct and burying our nation in debt to prop up monsters simply isn't the way to go. He was also the ONLY one I saw repeatedly say "you don't tear up the constitution to get the bad guy" when it came to trying terror suspects. Is he right about Google? I honestly don't know, I simply don't have enough data on the subject. What I DO know is that the US government is employing "professional trolls" and having their very own trolling software written with our tax dollars to try to control the masses and shift opinion using "the bandwagon effect". We know this is true because Wikileaks and Anonymous put the data out there for all to see.
So with all the truly sleazy nasty shit the US government is pulling which reads like something out of COINTELPRO I wouldn't be so quick to just "poo poo" any talk of the government getting in bad with corps to control and spy on citizens. Remember it isn't paranoia if they are really out to get you.
Oh don't worry I expected it. if you look at my past comments they are always evenly split between insightful and troll/flamebait, with the nasty mods coming from zealots that stick their heads in the sand and refuse to accept the truth. instead of actual debate all you get is accusations of "shill" astroturfer, etc.
And I agree wholeheartedly that Apple fanboys ain't got shit on the RDF that surrounds FOSSies as I call them. I've found there is a BIG difference between a FOSS users and a FOSSie, but sadly it seems the FOSSies are winning control and the fact that any that dare to say anything other than "Gee Biff, isn't Linux perfect? It sure is Bill, and RMS's beard smells like roses!" gets modded down is just proof of that.
Is Linux ready for the masses? Sadly not by a long shot, as while Canonical has made great strides once you get past the top layer it is just a mess, and one of the reason why he is trying to ditch X-Server and GNOME for Unity/Wayland. With Windows a good 90% of problems can be solved by GUI alone, and most fixed with a simple reboot or system restore.
With Linux even trivial problems will often give you as the ONLY answer "open up bash and type" this big huge CLI mess that 1.-Assumes the users even understands half of it, 2.-The user has intimate knowledge of the hardware since it is nearly always tailored to a VERY specific chipset/hardware combo, 3.- the skill to "tweak" said "fix" because they have hardware f rev d and the fix was designed for hardware c rev b and simply won't work without tweaking, and 4.-That the user has the skill to type a huge list of arcane commands into a 70s era term with NO autocorrect or spellcheck and get everything perfectly right, with a serious risk of breaking the machine if they get anything wrong (which they will get NO visual cues before getting boned).
But if they want to look up server numbers by absolute share which is what seems to have so many butthurt by my earlier links here is the latest I could find by Gartner which shows Windows-66.8% and climbing, Linux-23.2 and falling while Unix-6.8% and falling. The other link I found with overall shows 89% Windows, 5.9% Mac, 2.05% iOS, and Linux just barely above Java ME in overall share at 0.95%.
So I'm sorry if the numbers make FOSSies all butthurt but just remember you have the power to change it by giving the customers what they want. Lose the CLI, demand a hardware abi so drivers that work in foo won't be broken in foo+1, push for better UIs and simpler layouts, etc. And for the one that says "Linux thanks to Ubuntu is ALREADY dumbed down?" if you think Ubuntu is dumbed down enough for the masses it just shows why Linux hasn't got a chance. Try Windows 7 sometime, it is simple enough my 67 year old clueless dad installed it by himself with NO assistance required and EVERYTHING "just worked". All the drivers were downloaded and installed FOR him the worst question it asked him was whether he was at home or at work (which set up the firewall policy without him having to touch it) and frankly the ONLY thing I had to do when I got there a week later was show him how to get Firefox. Hell it even pointed out he had no AV on first boot and pointed him to a free one. So I'm sorry but while Shuttleworth is making strides Ubuntu is in NO way up to that level of simple yet, it just isn't.
I brought up Engadget simply because they are one of the few that actually got a hands on instead of simply regurgitating the press releases. but I'm sure there are others that got a hands on, feel free to look them up as well. What you will find is the same thing that I found when looking up MeeGo, which was an Intel making excuses and saying "it'll be better in the future, promise" while showing code that frankly didn't work as well as Android 1.5 on CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) which simply won't cut it when faced with WebOS and WinPhone 7, much less the juggernaut that is iOS.
So please, look it up yourself. If you look at actual reviews and not just press releases you'll find the same thing I did, an OS that wasn't alpha quality and was nowhere near shipping ready. Since iOS and WebOS aren't for sale that left Nokia with Symbian, Android, or WinPhone 7. The Droid is beyond saturated, Symbian just wasn't up to the job of competing with whats out there which is why companies dropped it for Droid, so that just leaves WinPhone 7.
I just don't see how anybody looking at the data could conclude that Nokia had anywhere else to go. They simply don't have another year or two to coast on dumbphones while they sink money they can't afford into R&D for MeeGo in the hopes it'll shape up in time, and without a real product in the smartphone category they are bleeding share like there is no tomorrow. Despite the FUD being spread about 2012 at the earliest I'd lay my money on a Sept release of the first round of WinPhone 7, probably with a nice tie in and low bundle price for anyone that picks up an X360 with a Nokia WinPhone, since MSFT is spending big money to get Windows 7, X360, and WinPhone 7 to all play nice together.
When you look at the numbers Nokia just couldn't afford to stay the course as they don't have a practical monopoly to ride like Intel does. I think in the end the CEO will be given credit for making the best call he could with what he had to work with, especially if MeeGo isn't even at beta stage this time next year which from reviews is what they are looking at.
Unless Linux runs 89% of the web with just 21.2% of the servers I'd say your math was a little off friend. Desktops are even more bleak with half of a single percent for Linux while Apple has gone up to nearly 12%.
The simple fact is if you want to gain REAL share, I mean "change the world get the hardware OEMs to listen to you" kind of momentum, then you are gonna need your very own Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. You're gonna need someone to put their foot down and say "the buck stops here" and pull this big mess where everyone is scratching their own itch into a cohesive experience with concrete guidelines, especially when it comes to UI, behavior, quality, documentation, and ease of use.
Will that man be Mark Shuttleworth? I don't know but what I DO know is he has done more to get Linux out of the "CLI heavy OS for basement nerds and CS grads" mindset and into the "Linux for humans" goals. Whether he can actually pull it off while staying in the community is the question and I personally believe he'll just have to give the community the finger and fork Ubuntu away from traditional Linux, simply because making Linux friendly to the masses WILL require changes that the CLI heavy nerds and server admins won't care for one damned bit.
As TFA shows Canonical might as well fork the whole smash away from Linux, because nobody is gonna be happy with them anyway. Everyone complains they don't send upstream but the guys upstream don't want to go the way Ubuntu is going so it is just pissing in the wind anyway. But Linux has had fifteen years to get people to switch using the CLI heavy nerd way and what has it gotten you? 22% of the server and falling, and so low on the desktop it is literally below the margin for error. If Linux is gonna truly become a "third way" for the masses, to be looked at and treated as an equal to OSX and Windows 7, then changes have to be made and Shuttleworth seems ready to make those changes.
The question is whether he can make those changes without pissing off the "community" and stepping on too many toes, and I would argue he simply can't. Canonical would be better off to just ignore the community and slowly but surely fork the thing away from them and perhaps by doing so actually give us a "Linux for humans" that "just works" for the average man out there. It still has a hell of a long ways to go IMHO, but it looks to me with Wayland and Unity the man is seriously trying.
Allow me to show you what would happen if banks switched to requiring Ubuntu tomorrow, I give you how to write a Linux virus in just 5 easy steps tada! You just got pwned!
It really is simple: Windows gets hit because that is where the easy marks are and if you switch everyone over tomorrow then by default you bring the easy marks to Linux and the famous Linux security gets turned to crapola 3 minutes later.
As a PC repairman I see the nasties that hit Windows every day, you know what the biggest two are BY FAR? The "ZOMG You got teh Viruz! Run "this_iz_not_a_viruz.exe" to kill it quick! ZOMG!" and the ever popular "Enjoy free (insert new movies, music, porn) all you want just by installing out "this_is_not_a_viruz_codec.exe" today!" Now how in any way shape or form will Linux protect the user from social engineering attacks or from running outdated third party software like Flash or Reader? Gonna hold a gun to their head and force them to update? Hell Windows has had automatic updates for over a decade yet I still see XP SP2 machines cross my desk.
The simple facts are these: as long as the user has the right to install software he also has the right to royally screw the pooch when it comes to malware. Linux by default because it is more "fiddly" and because one has to do step by step troubleshooting with it like go to forum, find relevant topic, launch bash, apply fix, has users that know more about their OS internals and are more security minded. It ain't rocket science folks. Windows got rid of the last legitimate complaint, forcing users to run as admins, more than 3 years ago. But as long as the majority of home and business users have no clue how anything works you are gonna see bugs on whatever OS is dominant because that is where the clueless are. Just look at how we are seeing more malware for Android now that it is becoming popular. With the users come the malware, simple as that. And switching to Linux won't magically give the user a level up in IT knowledge.
Actually I give us another 10 years tops before we reenact what is happening in Egypt and the rich either find a way to pull a tiananmen square or do their own reenactment of the fall of Saigon.
For a look at how badly the government has worked against the people you might want read this but I warn you it ain't a pretty picture. The numbers simply aren't sustainable, and never in our history has the gap between the rich and the poor been so wide. What is the answer our great leaders give us? "Get more education!" and crush yourself with ever increasing amounts of debt for that same said education while being expected to compete with those like India who pay 1/20th what we do for a degree.
Frankly it doesn't matter if you are black or white, left or right, if you aren't one of the top 1% then your government is against you. We have millions out of work, millions more living hand to mouth, and every single day those numbers continue to grow. Honestly I'll be amazed if we last another decade because what we have right now is a powderkeg and it wouldn't take much of an orator to give us our own Uncle Joe or crazy Austrian. I already know many that would happily go communist or totalitarian if it meant "bread and jobs" and not having to worry about being outsourced or losing their homes. As the people lose any faith and belief in the government all it takes is a spark, and the revolving door like TFA illustrates just shows to the people the pointlessness of participation.
All it will take is a single voice to stir the masses and light the fuse, and as we have seen from the Russian revolution to Mao, from the crazy Austrian to the current middle east on fire, you can't fuck over the people forever sooner or later they WILL turn on you the only question is when. looking out my window at the boarded up homes and closed down shops I'm voting on sooner rather than later. The numbers simply aren't sustainable and you can't keep the masses placated with bread and circuses when there is no roof over their heads or money to buy the bread.
The only reason we have lasted this long is the government willing to add ever more debt to keep things afloat, but as we are seeing with the states eventually that fails as well. It simply isn't sustainable and the greed from the top will be their own downfall. It reminds me of the classic quote by Lenin: "The capitalist will gladly sell you the rope to hang him with" and their unending unrepentant greed destroying the middle class and leaving the poor living like animals is perfect proof of that. Maybe democracy will always fail in this manner, as the rich become so powerful they tilt the laws farther and farther in their favor until it collapses like a Ponzi scheme. Because to these old eyes short of following the example of Egypt I really don't see any coming back, the rich are just too powerful now.
All the popular ones like Netflix? Oh wait, no it doesn't and as I pointed out Janus has been here OVER five years and all FOSS "hackers" have to show for it is a giant FAIL next to their score. Next!
BTW you want to see "the ultimate future" of FOSS? Do you? It is kinda sad but you can see the end result today of the "never compromise, down with the great Satan!" holy war pushed by RMS. All you have to do is look up what "PC" RMS uses to see how FOSS will ultimately end...in case you don't know he is stuck on a Loongson "netbook" that only supports a teeny tiny niche of software, no flash, no web video, hell I bet the man can't even listen to music unless it is a specially crafted Vorbis file, and frankly the machine is probably illegal in the west due to the fact the Chinese incorporated x86 instructions into their ARM chip without a license.
And your big "savior" is Android? BWA HA HA HA! You ever see "Pirates of silicon valley"? Remember the scene where Jobs is rallying against IBM and his engineer is pointing to the IBM video and to Gates, who is about to fuck him raw? Well guess what? Notice anything...funny...about Android? Like how Google refuses to allow ANY GPL V3 code into DroidOS? Why do you think that is? It is because Google is gonna buttfuck FOSS by pulling the TiVo trick which they can't do if they allow GPL V3, that's why! Your "savior" is gonna be about as useful to FOSS as TiVo! It is SOOOO funny!
As for Janus now who is spreading FUD? In case you haven't heard The EU busted MSFT and made them open their protocols so all the Linux foundation would have to do is ask for a Janus binary blob (and Get Linus to quit acting like an ass and support a stable driver API) and the EU would make MSFT cough one up or drop the banhammer on them to the tune of a couple of hundred million.
And again you go "la la la" and refuse to accept reality. In reality The ONLY reason the music companies allowed MP3 is because Apple has a monopoly with iTunes which means there was simply no way to offer DRM, since Apple refuses to license Fairplay and doesn't support Janus on WMA. Which means if they want Amazon and other music retailers to compete with Apple it HAS to work on an iPod and frankly the ONLY format that fit that bill was either MP3 or WAV, so it wasn't like they had a choice.
Now compare that to video where the studios have gone out of their way to ensure that Apple doesn't get squat since they don't want a repeat of the music debacle where Apple could pretty much dictate terms and could kill an artists sales by simply burying their ads to the back of iTunes, and where the X360 owns a significant share of the living room. Here you will simply never see a repeat of MP3 because MSFT has licensed Janus liberally, with the X360, PS3, Wii, and numerous set top boxes supporting Netflix and by extension Janus DRM. Google tried to force the issue and got the banhammer dropped on them making Google TV worthless when compared to even CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) set top box, so frankly this battle is over, like Mp3 VS Vorbis.
But in the end thanks to the militants wing of FOSS the future of FOSS is bleak with corps like Google "TiVo Tricking" away your four freedoms on one side (and which is being assisted by Linus who refuses to go GPL V3) and online DRM Video being "the killer app" which will ensure that not a single B&M will carry your product. Not Walmart not Best Buy not a single one shall be had. In the end without the ability to compromise FOSS will simply stay locked into an increasingly small web server niche because thanks to t
Not every OS is suitable for every job. IMHO Linux excels at server roles, kicks ass in embedded, but in desktops, where so much is still dependent on proprietary hardware? Not so much. And before anyone pipes in with "it works for you" well fine and dandy, but getting it to work for a single guy with infinite time to fiddle and look at forums is a hell of a lot different than getting it to fulfill all the roles a large org like this has.
So in the end I wouldn't say this means Linux fails, just that it didn't fit the role required and the cost to fit the square peg in the round hole simply wsn't cost effective. Happens all the time.
Do you HONESTLY believe Meego had a snowball's chance in hell? Really? Because you might want to go to Endgadget and read their actual hands on review and not just the fawning press releases. There you will find lovely quotes such as "not even alpha quality", "Under the top shine there is nothing substantial" "Very little functionality" and "would need at least a year to be where the others are now" which of course by then would be even farther behind as nobody else will be standing still.
It is pretty sad that /. has become Boycott Novell with all the "ZOMG M$!" so thick that people would completely ignore reality just to throw in another M$ conspiracy. Do you think they hired a new CEO just because it was Tuesday? The facts are thus: Nokia is bleeding share like there is no tomorrow, dumbphones are going the way of 8-tracks and that was the only market Nokia had real share in, their smartphone OS was frankly a joke compared to iOS, and they simply didn't have the luxury to throw another year at development of yet another Linux based OS that may or may not sell.
Now considering if they would have went Android all they would have gotten is a thank you letter from Brin and Page while leaping into a market that is already beyond saturated, both HP and Apple won't sell them WebOS and iOS respectfully, and MSFT was willing to shell out billions to make Nokia the hardware arm for WinPhone 7. Considering their choices you'd have to be a Boycott Novell level of "ZOMG M$! ZOMG!!" conspiracy theorist to honestly think they had another option here. What did you expect them to do, just close up shop and return the money to the shareholders?
I'm sure there are those here that would honestly rather see a company close down and thousands go out of work rather than seeing MSFT get anything, but those of us that can just look at the numbers without being blinded by nerd rage can see the writing on the wall: They had no real smartphone presence, their OS they did have was seriously behind and would take time they didn't have to catch up, and the only other OS they could get their hands on is so over saturated you'd have to be nuts to want to use it ATM. They made the best call with what they had to work with, and only time will tell if it was a good one or not, but I fail to see how they had much of a choice here. It wasn't like the company was all hearts and flowers before the big bad MSFT came along.
Or you could just get Comodo AV or Internet Security which is free for BOTH business and personal use and which uses a default deny policy along with default sandboxing of ALL apps helps keep the crap from ever getting in and doing damage in the first place.
I have some customers that are SERIOUSLY click happy, we are talking some serious PEBKAC here, ones that would pick up more viruses than a Bangkok Whore. Since switching them to Comodo AV they've been clean as a whistle and everything "just works".
Now if you are setting up a new PC I'd suggest a quick trip to Ninite first just to get the basics installed, and if you are wanting to install any bloated drivers like Realtek or seriously funky ones like DaemonTools SPTD drivers I'd go ahead and do those first, as Comodo naturally doesn't like the way certain drivers like Realtek splatter files all over the place and you'll have to click through multiple warnings otherwise.
But once you have a machine set up you can just drop in Comodo AV or Comodo IS and it "just works" with no hassle. And if you want the PC to be pretty much break proof short of hardware failure just add Comodo Time Machine which makes daily snapshots and gives the user an easy way to restore even if they manage to somehow bork booting (for those users that can kill a Sherman tank with a toothbrush) and with CTM getting it back up is as easy as push F11> choose snapshot to restore > let it reboot and you're back up and running.
So I'd say its not real hard to keep most bugs off the machine, just use software that by default deny policies and sandboxes everything. Sadly NO AV is 100% perfect, especially if they use the right bait, as I have sat there in shock and watched as a user refused to listen to me OR the AV and shut it down so that he could "see free blockbuster movies with this super(tm)codec!" Sometimes even the best tools and advice just can't stop the stupid.
Alright bright boy, riddle me this: How EXACTLY is all your magical Xeon powered cloud crap going to give me ANY advantage when it is literally faster to drive 20 miles to the shop and back than it is to use the average DSL connection in these parts to download over 50Mb in files,hmmm? And running a "private website" requires either an extra $200 for a "business connection" or a nice termination notice, your choice. BTW here the ONLY difference between the "business connection" and standard cable is $200 and a static IP. Whoopee, I'm sure gonna jump on that!
You see you and all the "cloud baby cloud" types have a serious flaw in your big plans and that is for huge chunks of the country home connections blow for anything other than checking email or low res youtube videos.
So how EXACTLY is you magical Xeon cloud going to give me ANY advantage at all with an average 150kbps DSL connection being the norm here, hmmm? Am I supposed to tell all my customers "LOL call me when you spend $500 a month on a T connection LOL!"?
Sadly you are EXACTLY like some of the FOSS zealots I've dealt with here that have given me marvelous "suggestions" like tell my customers when some device doesn't work in Linux "Go buy something else LOL!" and all so they can have a worse experience than they have now, but hey, they're running FOSS so that makes it better by default, right?
Tell you what, when we all have FIOS around here, which is scheduled for the fifth Tuesday in the month of never, right after the third go fuck yourself of spring, THEN I'll be happy to go "cloud baby cloud". But as of right now for large sections of the country all your fancy magical Xeon powered bullshit is is buzzword bingo that works about as well as WebTV did in the 90s, that is not at all. Thanks but no thanks junior, I prefer solutions that...oh what's the word? Oh yeah actually work regardless of connection speed which sure as hell don't apply to your cloud.
Its called Tivoization and GPL V3 was written specifically to keep guys like you from screwing the GPL by "TiVoing" GPL code. Look it is simple, keep up: GPL was written for protecting four freedoms and you fuck ALL users out of the second freedom by locking your GPL running device with the "TiVo trick".
Nobody gives a shit about your reasons why, there is BSD and proprietary vendors that will happily give or sell you code for your purpose no matter what you want to do with it. But you are fucking the community by taking their work and locking it down which frankly makes what you are doing no better then any software thief. The ONLY WAY that code is given to you free is if you abide by the GPL, otherwise YOU HAVE NO LICENSE to that code. With the TiVo trick you are using legalese bullshit to get around the license without actually having to abide by it and it is just as sorry and no different than any other corp that uses hot software to get ahead.
So the GPL V3 was written to get rid of guys like you once and for all, and frankly the sooner everyone switches over the better. Then you'll have the choice of opening up your device and respecting the license or paying to write or buying a proprietary solution which will cost you more. But all those coders didn't write those thousands of man years worth of code for free just to enrich your company, they did it to enrich the community and encourage sharing, otherwise they would have went BSD. You want to take advantage of the richer ecosystem that GPL has with regards to embedded but you don't want to actually follow the rules and that is bullshit. Sorry if that gets you butthurt but your excuses are just that.
Actually you'd probably have just as many books and movies, you just wouldn't have dreck like the Dukes of Hazzard remake.
What you would do would be the same as what Joss Whedon was talking about when he was thinking of doing Faith the Vampire Slayer or Spike&Dru, you'd have a "buy our shit" for fan investment, which would in turn help guide the artist by letting him/her know which the fans were more interested in. Want Spike&Dru over Faith? Buy this shirt, and this mug, oh and pick up a keyring while you're at it. want a sequel? buy the DVD, hell buy a few and give them to friends.
Basically it would be like patronage only by the fans themselves instead of a single wealthy donor. this way the fans could help decide which project they would prefer to see, and it would mean that unlike now where everything is "high concept" and has to be sold to a suit in one sentence or less it wouldn't matter how weird or dark or highbrow your idea was if enough of the audience liked the idea.
If Serenity would have been made in this manner instead of by suits that expected they were getting the next Star Wars the movie would have had a smaller budget but could have been edgier and probably had a couple of sequels since it would encourage more interaction with the fans as they ultimately would have been writing the checks. Hell I don't see how it could be worse than the "high concept" and "Me too!" drivel we get nowadays on TV and in films.
I think you and everybody here are missing the "Oh boy did we fuck up" part of the above poster's story and it is this: The TiVo trick is here to stay and anybody releasing under GPL V2 might as well just go PD or BSD because GPL V2 is now worthless thanks to the TiVo trick.
Anybody who has read any of my postings knows I have NO problem with proprietary software as long as it serves my purpose but one thing I DO have a problem with is weasel worded legal BS which is EXACTLY what the "TiVo trick" is in a nutshell. As much as I don't agree with RMS on...well pretty much anything, I do respect what the man is trying to accomplish and respect the right to write HIS license HIS way along with the right of developers to choose the license that best fits their wishes, and if someone can't be bothered to respect the license it isn't like there isn't BSD and proprietary code that will do the same job.
Anybody who releases or updates their code under GPL V2 frankly needs their heads examined as you're just giving corps a right to steal your code by ignoring the license thanks to the TiVo trick. WTH is the point of releasing under GPL V2 when the whole point of the GPL is the four freedoms which don't exist anymore under V2 thanks to the TiVo trick?
What the GP's little story about the PVR should illustrate is now that the TiVo trick is known more and more will use it thanks to the embedded tools in Linux being better than BSD. the ONLY way you are gonna actually have the four freedoms on anything besides an x86 PC is to go GPL V3, and by continuing to support GPL V2 all you are doing is giving corps free work which they will "reward" you in turn by giving you the finger. If all those working on GPL code would switch to GPL V3 it would force the OEMs to spend money keeping the code up to date and adding features which would quickly making TiVo tricking less worthwhile. Supporting GPL V2 at this stage of the game frankly is assisted suicide.
So in other words the answer to why they should go to HTML V5 is "they shouldn't, as we won't give you what you want since we are Pirate party. Please stick with Silverlight and .Net so that FOSS users can't have native access at all, like with Netflix. Thanks"
So glad you cleared that up! Of course I figure ultimately that is what is gonna happen anyway, as FOSS has been tilting at the DRM windmill for nearly 15 years now and have made squat for headway which in a way is sad, but really not surprising. But all you are doing is cutting off your nose to spite your face as the "must have" ATM and for the foreseeable future is Netflix which without DRM will NEVER run native on Linux which simply gives both Windows and OSX a "killer app" that makes them more valuable to the common user.
So in the end Google making HTML V5 into a FOSS battle will do jack and squat and will probably kill the video tag dead except for a tiny niche ala Vorbis and Theora. Despite what Google thinks Youtube isn't the only video site on the web, not by a long shot, and it will be trivial for content owners to simply go elsewhere if they desire. So my prediction is this: the "winner" of the HTML V5 fight will be....drum roll....Flash! It will be H.264 in a flash wrapper followed by Silverlight and .NET because all of these formats allow for DRM which whether you like it or not the majority of content owners aren't gonna just go DRM free ala .mp3.
The ONLY reason you have DRM free music right now is Apple, and their attempts to get into the video business have frankly failed when compared to iPod's dominance of music. Since Apple supports H.264 and has deals with MSFT to support Janus my guess is a Silverlight or .NET Janus based DRM for iDevices and Flash for everyone else. But hey, please enjoy your completely free an open design that is only supported by less than 2% of the video out there! While DRM free everything is nice in theory reality has a way of nipping those ideas in the bud, and if anything we are seeing more DRM being placed upon content via Internet required connection and such, not less. And honestly the average guy doesn't give a shit about "free as in freedom!" as long as his video plays, which with the Janus DRM like Netflix it "just works". But thanks for playing and have a nice day!
In order 1.-I have NO desire to make a "gee aren't I interesting love me" website, and free hosting sucks and I sure as hell ain't paying for a website for as little as I'd use it. 2.-I HATE Google Docs, as I find it a clunky badly done ripoff of MS Office. 3.-Must not have kids, or you would know they have a habit of carrying off your flash drives no matter how many you have. 4.-Again the free services suck and it would be stupid to pay for a service that in the end wouldn't give me enough advantage to pay for itself in the long run. 5.- My phone is actually a phone and is used for such, therefor no battery sucking smartphone crap. 6.-Tend to get scratched and/or left at a customer's somewhere.
So in the end why reinvent the wheel? What I have works as simply as a BCC, makes it trivial to backup email, pics,etc from anywhere without needing to leave squat on a customer's PC (just download portable Opera which is less than 5Mb and toss afterward) and it all "just works" without either costing a dime or taking any real effort on my part since I already have the email addresses anyway. Your arguments remind me on some I've had with those trying to get me to switch my shop to FOSS, when I have no problems with Windows why bother? in the end you are just giving me more work to arrive at the same place I was before with no real advantages. Every file I would need for any fix that could be done in the field is less than 25Mb anyway, which means there really isn't a point in paying for a hosting site like EC2. if it requires larger files frankly most of the home connections around here blow ass and it would literally be faster for me to simply drive to the shop and sneakernet than it would be to wait on their crappy connection, again killing many of your selling points. in the end your "solutions" are just more work with no real advantages and increased cost, well unless you call being able to say you're "in the cloud" to be a big advantage or something.
I'm just an old greybeard that tries to call it as he sees it, groupthink be damned. You'll notice my posts tend to be an even split between +3 insightful and -1 troll or flamebait as some here appreciate an honest comment while others can't stand having anything negative said about their sacred cows. Personally I think life is too short for lying and hypocrisy so I'd rather just always be honest, whether the group agrees with me or not. Sorry if I may have stepped on one of your pet projects in the past but I'm just being my brutally honest self.
Personally while I like the Whedon writing style (as I said I own the box sets of Buffy/Angel) you'd have to be deluded to not notice when the man gets a "new hotness" project the writing suffers on anything he had going to that point. Anyone who has watched the earlier seasons of Buffy/Angel can tell almost to the episode when Firefly started taking hold because he starts phoning it in and it really shows. While his core team of Noxon/Greenwald are good writers they remind me of musicians where they don't really do their best work unless their other half (in this case Joss) is there to bounce ideas off of.
And while I can't give a full critique of Dollhouse as I only watched the first two episodes just from those two I got the feeling it was another case of Joss phoning it in and got turned off. Sure enough I read later Joss is pissed at Fox for executive meddling and is actively chasing the Wonder Woman writing gig. It is almost like the guy has ADHD and can't stand to turn down a job, as he seems to always end up biting off more than he can chew and when his attention is focused on some new thing he just phones it in and uses CYA third stringers to try to cover for him, which with his peculiar writing style sticks out like a sore thumb.
If anyone here wants a perfect example just watch season six of Buffy and compare the rest of the episodes to the musical and the last two episodes of the season, or to frankly anything in season three or four. What you will notice right off the bat is the "Buffyisms" way of speaking, such as her valley butchering the language or Willow's babbles, are almost completely absent, and along with them nearly all character development or building on the mythos. I believe this is because the third stringers are afraid of accidentally fucking with the cannon so they just follow the backstory instead of adding to it, which inevitably leads to characters simply spouting cliche versions of their lines instead of actually being in character. For an example see how they had Anya spout off an inappropriate sexual comment nearly every episode without any of the character building like her speech in the body.
So in conclusion while I like the witty Whedon writing style that doesn't give the man the right to just phone it in and expect us to buy it. If he wouldn't bite off more than he can chew and concentrate on the show at hand frankly his shows would last longer, as when he is on the ball it is some of the wittiest writing on television. If he would have even had half the great dialog and wit he is currently showing in the Buffy/Angel extended season comics the shows would probably still be here. And as for the one who said Spike wouldn't make a great show? Don't judge what happened to the character to what he started out as, as even in the commentary some of the second stringers talk about how they didn't know how to write for the character and basically gave him the Cordy/Anya comic relief lines just to give Marsters something to do. If they wrote it as "Spike and Dru:The early days" it would probably be kick ass, although frankly too dark and disturbing for an American TV series. As we saw with American Gothic or Brimstone the average US viewer don't like their TV TOO dark. What allowed Buffy/Angel to get away with it was the humor, I just don't know if the American audience would accept the humor coming from a pair of serial killers like Spike and Dru.