Doesn't really have anything to do with being new. All modern ARM GPUs have closed drivers. That's part of the reason it can be a bitch getting newer Android on older handsets sometimes. If you look here at the binary blob page for the Google Nexus devices you will notice that all of the devices except for the Nexus One have a binary for the GPU and most for Wifi/Bluetooth. This despite the fact that Google has professed a strong desire to have the hardware be completely open. Hopefully this will change at some point as this hurts the efforts of porting standard Linux distros to things like the Xoom but as of right now you can forget open source in the ARM space.
Still the issues of access. Ask WikiLeaks about that. All the encryption in the world doesn't matter if you can't access your files. And, if your files are backed up locally, aren't you just mirroring on a remote server?
All true. I've never uploaded a file anywhere that I didn't have a local backup of (in the context of this conversation). I use dropbox as a convenient way to share files between my devices and with the occasional other person. Naturally, all of the files reside both on dropbox and on each of my computers. I don't really know what to say about the people that got caught up in the Megaupload shakedown. I would never have put anything up there in the first place that I couldn't also access elsewhere. I guess that's just me though. The only thing I would use MU for in the first place might be to distribute Android ROMs or maybe custom Linux distros. Files that are completely legal to share but are big enough that I'd rather not use my own bandwidth every time somebody wants to download one. Of course if I was somebody like wiki-leaks, I'd be hosting an.onion site that would be much harder to bring down. But that's really a special case and I'm sure the best in the world are giving them advice which probably means they won't be going away anytime soon.
I never quit Apple. That suggestion was based on an incorrect Wall Street Journal that said I was leaving Apple because I didn't like things there. Actually, I had told the Wall Street Journal writer that I wasn't leaving Apple because of things that I didn't like and that I wasn't even leaving, keeping my small salary forever as a loyal employee. I just wanted a small startup experience and a chance to design a smaller product again, a universal remote control.
All of your points are correct but the risks are certainly manageable with due diligence and planning.
Amazon and Microsoft's Azure have both went down recently, causing havoc for many businesses.
We don't use either of these services since we don't really need the scale but I would imagine that provided they didn't go down too long, money is still saved in the aggregate. You have to look at the numbers and strike the right balance. What is the likely downtime of $CLOUD_IAAS_PROVIDER? Will that much downtime cost us more in money, goodwill, and customers than just building and maintaining our own gear? What hurts is just jumping on the bandwagon with both eyes closed. We use Google Apps here but we also keep copies of all of our documents and emails on the premises. The value adds like collaborative editing, etc. are nice but we could go a few hours without them. And we might not be able to get new emails during an outage but we can definitely read the old ones and send what we need to with different accounts temporarily. Running our own mail server isn't really something we're interested in getting into but so far Google's been pretty reliable and they'd be damn fools to misuse the little amount of strategic info they could glean from our communications as the goodwill fallout if something like that came to light would destroy them.
When Megaupload went down, it caused a huge loss for many legitimate customers as well.
A stack of blank DVDs is like 10 bucks at the walgreens down the street. There is no way I would make the mistake of thinking that something like filestube.com or 4shared.com is some kind of legitimate back up service. That's pretty much laughable. Hopefully the word got out to people that don't realize this and they won't be making the same mistake again.
If your Steam account gets suspended, or you disagree with the new TOS - you're shit out of luck, all that you "own" is gone for good and you can't do shit about it.
I've never bought anything through Steam but as far as I can tell, the only thing you actually have to pay for is the games and DLC for the games you have. The social features are just added stickiness keeping people there but you aren't directly paying for them. I have a Steam account but only as a test of installing the client on Linux. It works, I can browse stuff and participate but I've never spent a dime. I say that to say this, if I lost access to my games, I'm pretty sure I could find some backups somewhere. I paid so I wouldn't feel bad at all doing that.
Dropbox lost a shitload of emails due to a security breach
That didn't have anything to do with their cloud stuff though as that was chalked up to an employee's stupidity of having a weak password on a laptop or something. It could have happened to anybody that happened to have some personal info about users. I think the UK lost a bunch of data a while back by some goof being careless.
Sony lost the details for 70million+ customers for a similar reason
Heh. Sony. No sympathy. Their customers didn't deserve that though. My suggestion is use a different email for all of your online stuff. Maybe use some pattern like oakgroveSony@gmail.com or whatever floats your boat. Same thing for passwords. Of course nobody does that but it is a solution.
Every single example of a cloud operation that I can think of, be it a service or a product, has had issues and it's not going to change.
Yeah, if it's a server hooked up to the 'net, it has the potential to be hacked. Act accordingly and encrypt your data if you're uploading files, make backups, don't use the same credentials across different sites as you are trusting the security of the person you gave those credentials to and always assume that the provider will go under at some point or be bought out. Personally I use "cloud" services like its going out of style but I keep my wits about me and have had no problems yet.
My Cloud recipe for success: encrypt all data you upload and use local apps to open/consume/create it all. Don't forget to use your own meatspace backup system of choice from time to time. All the taste none of the fat.
I have to hand it to you tepples, you do take some contrived positions sometimes but more often than not you do give some food for thought. I hadn't thought about the difficulties in exclusive touch screen gaming quite in the terms of relative vs. absolute pointing device for onscreen elements. A lot of games that need relative movement like Final Fantasy for example allow you to put your thumb anywhere on the screen and the "joystick" just appears under it so you get an absolute positioning for the relative controller. That seems to be a good compromise and the games that don't offer this are much more difficult to control well. Most emulators don't perform this trick and they mostly suck as a consequence. Also re your sig, sounds like a job for Baye's Theorem.
Not sure what particular compositing window manager you're running on Fedora but on Ubuntu with Unity I just do a "metacity --replace" when I need to turn compositing off. And when I want to go back I just do "compiz --replace" as that's the wm Unity uses. No logging out necessary. Of course this is assuming you don't have metacity set up with the compositing but if you do just turn that off in gconf-editor.
Yes, developing their own distro would doom this entire initiative from the start. Valve is good at making games and maintaining a distribution platform that runs on top of somebody else's operating system. There is no scenario where them making their own distro makes sense and the concept of some kind of live CD is even more absurd since if you need to reboot anyway to play games you might as well just use WIndows. At worst all they have to do is maintain their own repo's. Google does it with Chrome. You just download the Chrome installer in Linux and the installer sets up the repositories for you behind the scenes and it all Just Works(TM).
I don't think very many people are under any illusions about what's motivating this move. Gabe Newell sees the app store in Windows 8 as an existential threat and its not some new-found love for butterflies and Freedom on Valve's part. Fine, let's get past that as it is a distraction anyway. When we're all done politicizing this maybe it'll come to pass that Linux on the desktop is an underserved market that might, heaven forbid, make money for Valve and friends. This reminds me of the iOS vs. Android debate where applications slowly but surely move over. The fanboy furor on both sides is just ridiculous. The devs make money on iOS now they're making money on Android and Android users have more apps. The end. Hopefully the same happens with Linux and Windows gamers can keep right on using their platform of choice and Linux users will have some cool games to play.
Hairyfeet, we went through this yesterday with the last Steam on Linux story. You keep saying that the "purists" are going to fuck the whole works up then you get a ton of replies from the pragmatists telling you it isn't so. Where are the replies from the so-called purists backing you up? Let it go, man. You're wrong.
The first thing to find out is what makes consciousness appear. Currently we have no clue.
I've never thought that was a particularly interesting question. Imagine you have a computer that is so powerful and has such a comprehensive decision tree that it can simulate what we perceive as conscious behavior to a level indistinguishable from a natural human being. Is it conscious? Does it matter? I can see philosophical value in telling the difference but practically speaking I just don't see where it's relevant. And if there is a quantum mechanical principal that consciousness relies on then that just adds complexity it doesn't make reverse engineering intractable. I do realize that I am doing a bit of conceptual hand-waving with the whole "simulates consciousness" bit but the idea only really breaks down at the level of simulating creativity. In particular creative problem solving. Can a computer ever be capable of designing its own successor without outside help? To me that's the ultimate Turing test.
1 word...OpenMoko. FOSS "advocates" talk a good game but when it comes to opening their wallets? Not so good.
I've never seen a single OpenMoko phone in my entire life. Not only that but the Neo1973 made its initial splash before the smartphone market was in full swing and by the time people started buying touch screens phones in large numbers, the Neo was already very outdated. Another problem was the fact the phone just didn't work very well so you are cutting out all but the most hardcore users anyway. FOSS isn't magic pixie dust that means any product infused with it will convert into an automatic sale by an "advocate". You also have to have a good product that is marketed well, has a reasonable cost and is generally available. Trying to hang OpenMoko's failure on Linux advocates just not opening their wallets while leaving "for a crap product" off of your statement is only telling half the story and doesn't support your argument at all.
And of COURSE he's working with multiple vendors, can you say "start the bidding" boys and girls? They know that if they are gonna do this they are gonna need competition, you don't want to lock yourself into a single vendor too quick in case the fuck you, see Apple getting fucked by Intel over Nvidia chipsets for an example.
There is also the fact that they have confirmed a Steam client is coming to Ubuntu. They have not confirmed nor even hinted at a console. Will there be a console? Maybe, perhaps even probably but we do know that Linux will be getting Steam and Valve working with multiple vendors to get good drivers makes sense. Think about it like this, Valve is scared shitless of Windows 8 and are in it to win it, unlike the previous efforts by other companies. That being the case, they recognize one of the largest issues with Linux gaming is GPU drivers so in the interest of covering all the bases, they are working to correct that.
But if you think he's even gonna break even on Linux desktops I have some magic beans you might be interested in. Hell the entire web is full of "Why pay? Run Linux for FREE LOL!" articles up the ying yang
Yes, those articles exist but the free as in beer is just a bullet point for anybody in the west likely reading those blogs. To the average person Windows is "free" as it comes on the box they bought and most of the high profile software that runs on Linux runs on Windows too so the third party stuff costs the same. I just don't think that the average Linux user came in the fold after reading one of those blogs and while it is pretty nice to be able to fire up a package manager and have thousands and thousands of different titles readily available for free, I don't think the average Linux person expects to get top quality games for free. At this point people get that games cost a ton of money to produce if they have any hope of being true AAA caliber. Mass Effect 3 will never be made by a collaborative free software effort. People get it and can fully grok that concept while on the other hand appreciating the "free as in beer" side of what can be achieved by that collaborative effort.
Other than Canonical I seriously doubt most will even allow a DRM program like Steam into their repos so frankly I'll be amazed if Valve gets even 30% of the already minuscule user base.
According to what I've read, they aren't trying to get into any other repo as Ubuntu is the only officially supported distro. Of course that makes it a drop-in for Mint another very popular version of Linux. I'm not sure what Fedora plans to do but they are playing ball with the secure boot so it is completely unprecedented for them to take a practical approach to things some in the Free software community might find questionable. Those 3 distros sum up the vast majority of the Linux desktop userbase.
not to mention as we saw here on the Steam Linux announcement the "Free as in
Please regale us on how Valve's efforts in the 10's of porting Source titles years after everyone has played them on Windows and just throwing it out there for the typical Linux user is going to fare any better than Loki. The parallel is exact.
The parallel is not even close, actually. First of all, Loki had a distribution problem. They had to get stores to stock their merchandise and few would. And the ones that did stock them generally made a half-hearted effort and put the Linux games in one little corner off the main display. Contrast this with Steam which is not just a game here and there but a delivery platform. The Linux versions of games will be there right next to the Windows and Mac version and download/installation is just a click away. In addition to this fact is the point that in absolute numbers there are more Linux users today than there were in the 90's. Also, unlike Loki, Valve is working with hardware makers to get better graphics drivers on Linux so no longer will the same game run with a higher framerate on Windows which was a major issue for Loki as many of their ports were FPS twitch games where every last frame dropped (at least subjectively). Another point is that while Loki ported games, they did not create their own so they had very little ability to polish up the engine like what Valve is doing with Source to make sure that it runs spectacularly on Linux. Another issue that Loki contended with is that Linux users were slightly more idealistic back then and actually held out hope that Free AAA titles would just appear for Linux. That hasn't happened and I think the community at large realizes this and has accepted it so they are more receptive to paying for proprietary binaries. Another point is that money talks and Valve have orders of magnitude more of it than Icculous ever thought about. When you have enough money to get Intel, AMD, and nVidia's attention then you stand a much better chance of making heretofore untenable things happen.
Your point of the games on Linux being late possibly sabotaging the effort is valid though. That will have to be addressed and I hope Valve realizes this.
On your a) point, yes, it will be extremely difficult for MS to make that happen but they have an Ace in the hole with Metro. If they can get consumers to move to using Metro in lieu of the classic desktop then they don't have to de jure block third party developers because the consumers have de facto done it for them. This scares Valve.
How so? If they are already using Steam through Wine why would they suddenly spend more money in the Valve ecosystem if you migrate them to native Steam?
Wine is unreliable and games that worked before are prone to breakage with the next update. This is nerve-wrecking and I'm sure has a depressive effect on how many games are bought by Linux gamers using Steam right now. Make it native and not dependent on a brittle translation layer and people will buy more games as they will have a reasonable expectation of having a good time and not wrestling with Wine for the upteenth time this month. Also, there are many games that are on Steam that do not work on Wine at all or give a terrible experience missing textures, etc. so there will be some "exclusive" titles that can't be played on Linux any other way. Then you have people like me that refuse to get sucked into the time sync that is trying to get Wine running well and just don't play at all. I will install and buy games through Steam with no problem at all and Valve will make money. As it stands right now, they make nothing from me.
Other than a few things like the humble bundle the simple fact is FOSS is built around "free as in beer" as much as it is "free as in freedom" so there simply aren't enough users willing to buy to make it a market worth pursuing.
Many users and advocates of FOSS software have accepted the fact that "free as in beer" will never translate into AAA titles being developed for your platform so I don't think Valve has this particular hurdle to overcome. As far as the minimum viable number of users I don't know what that is but I would assume that Valve has crunched those numbers and feel like it is indeed a market worth pursuing. Note that they have access to the Steam install statistics so they know exactly how many people are playing the games in Wine. Of course that will not directly translate to sales for the native Steam but it is a good guideline as to the size of the underserved Linux AAA title game market. There is also an argument to be made for "creating" a market. Newell seems to be very committed to this idea and it is already known that Valve are working with hardware vendors on drivers, they're optimizing their own very popular Source engine for Linux, and they are highly motivated through fear of the future for independent software distribution platforms on Windows their core market. If Valve can adequately address the historical difficulties of bringing proprietary software to Linux then I would expect the market to grow larger as a by-product of that.
I mean you have at best estimates around 3% being actual desktop users (no you aren't allowed to count servers, routers, your CCC Droid phone, because lets face it those won't run the latest Quake engine games) and of those how many have bought software in the last 6 months? Frankly if that answer was 20% I'd be amazed, probably less than 10%. FOSS users are simply used to getting everything "free as in beer" and if you are trying to actually sell software that's just not a market you should target.
Again, ask the typical Linux user if they believe AAA games will come to Linux for free and I doubt very many would say yes. As a Linux user and as a software developer, I am very pragmatic about the situation. I want a free platform that I can install and have a usable computer. I want drivers to run my hardware that do not necessarily have to be Free but if they are non-free then I should have a reasonable expectation that they will carry me for the life of the product. In the case of video drivers, nVidia is very good at supporting their products on Linux for their useful lifespan whereas AMD will drop support in a heartbeat. Ergo, if I want to game on Linux, I buy nVidia. Going beyond that, I prefer essential software to be Free as that is what makes the computer usable. But, and this is where the difference comes in, when it comes to non-essential throw-aways like games, I don't have any problem at all with them being non-free. I'm not into playing the same game after I've beaten it once so I don't care about recompiling it for future hardware or anything else. I understand that there are still Doom die-hards playing multi-player with that but I'm not in that camp. I think the success of Android amongs Linux users points to the pragmatic acceptance that some things just aren't Free. There is no remotely modern handset on the market with completely free hardware and while that isn't the greatest thing ever, it isn't something stopping Linux users from buying Android phones. I don't think Steam being non-Free will be a serious impediment either.
In the end we all know Old Gabe at Valve isn't looking at Linux because he gives a rat's ass about Steam on the Linux desktop, okay? Ballmer dropped trou and waved his sweaty ass at Gabe by trying to cut Valve out of the market with the appstore and old Gabe don't get mad he gets even by trying to royally fuck MSFT in a market they've spent billions trying to capture, the home console market. Well if yo
Wait, so you're expecting the Mac repertoire to be available for Linux before Linux even proves itself as viable market?
No, not at all. I'm expecting Linux to prove a viable market for the intrepid publishers that start with it and then I expect the titles that run on the Mac to be ported over. But that wasn't the point of what I said. The AC above based his argument on only L4D2 and Portal coming to Linux so I just pointed out that there is precedent for games other than those being ported (at least on the Mac). The bottom line was that, of course, more than those two titles will come over and the situation on the Mac while not directly supporting my contention at least gives a model of what might be expected.
And what relative ease of porting from OSX to Linux? Where's Linux's analogue to CoreAudio, CoreVideo and the other CoreFrameworks? Where's the analogue to the Cocoa framework? The only thing the two systems have in common is OpenGL, Almost everything needs to be rewritten.
By "relative" I meant relative to porting DirectX games from Windows. Porting a directx game from Windows involves all you mentioned above and additionally the added issue of moving from DX to Opengl. So, 'relatively' speaking, it is easier to go from OSX to Linux than from Windows to Linux at least with respect to DX based games.
CoreAudio
OpenAL which CoreAudio contains an implementation of.
CoreVideo
Not sure how this is very important in the game space. Care to elaborate?
other core frameworks
Most of which are confined to the space of accelerating the user interface so not particularly relevant to the kind of games found on Steam.
I'm not sure I completely buy your idea about converting WINE-using Linux gamers into native Linux gamers. Obviously these people already have an alternative for their Linux gaming needs, so it might be a relatively hard sell to get them to take the last step when they're most of the way already.
Yes they do have a working alternative in place. The issue and where native ports can shine is a game that works today in Wine might not work tomorrow and as a once avid Linux gamer, this is the one thing that will drive you up the wall and make a Wintendo install. And many games that work in Wine even the best ones have some little graphical anomaly here or there or framerate might not be as good as with Windows (this matters considerably in twitch multi-player games like TF2). So, assuming players using Wine now will not re-download their existing games in the native format, they will probably at least buy new games like that vs. playing Windows titles in Wine. Also, consider that there are some popular titles that will not work satisfactorily in Wine at all so if they become available for Linux Steam will be enough bait for some people to move from Wine and if the experience is positive, they will be more likely to follow that pattern in the future.
In the near term, Steam would not be made irrelevant, but they might be less relevant due to people just downloading games from the Windows App store. In the mid-term, if consumer demand warrants it, AAA titles will most definitely show up in the app store and a sale made through there is a sale not made through Steam. In the long term, if MS does any of
a) closing off installation of all binaries on Windows except through the app store
b) beefing up the Windows 8 app store to being a full fledged AAA title platform a la Xbox Live
c) Making it trivial to cross compile AAA titles to WinRT ARM tablets
then Steam faces the potential of becoming completely irrelevant through either complete exclusion from the platform or having to compete directly with MS themselves in the same space but with MS having the advantage of owning the underlying platform.
How is writing one's own software any harder or more expensive on Windows or Mac OS X than on GNU/Linux? Windows has Visual Studio Express, Code::Blocks, and Eclipse, and Mac OS X has Xcode and Eclipse.
I can't speak for anyone else but I find it easier to write software on Linux for a few reasons. Being able to scroll a window with your mouse wheel without it needing to be in focus makes perusing code in multiple sub-windows in Eclipse very easy. I know there is a way to make Windows do that but Linux does it out of the box. Another feature I like on Linux is that if I need any little tool, I can just open up the package manager and install it assuming its there and so far I haven't been disappointed. A good example is installing something like pymssql a library for accessing SQL server databases in a script. I needed it the other day and I just searched for it in synaptic and a couple of minutes later I was using it. Another thing that makes it easier for me on Linux is the readily available powerful Bash prompt. I have guake set to the F12 key to drop down like the Quake terminal of old whenever I need it. I do a lot of Android development and need to adb shell into the phones regularly and get specific logcat output etc. and being able to just mash F12 and type in what I need is invaluable. I do my fair share of Python scripting too and find it much easier to do with vim in a guake tab than the equivalent on Windows. I'm sure all of this could be approximated on Windows with some trouble but Linux is much closer out of the box.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't really have anything to do with being new. All modern ARM GPUs have closed drivers. That's part of the reason it can be a bitch getting newer Android on older handsets sometimes. If you look here at the binary blob page for the Google Nexus devices you will notice that all of the devices except for the Nexus One have a binary for the GPU and most for Wifi/Bluetooth. This despite the fact that Google has professed a strong desire to have the hardware be completely open. Hopefully this will change at some point as this hurts the efforts of porting standard Linux distros to things like the Xoom but as of right now you can forget open source in the ARM space.
Still the issues of access. Ask WikiLeaks about that. All the encryption in the world doesn't matter if you can't access your files. And, if your files are backed up locally, aren't you just mirroring on a remote server?
All true. I've never uploaded a file anywhere that I didn't have a local backup of (in the context of this conversation). I use dropbox as a convenient way to share files between my devices and with the occasional other person. Naturally, all of the files reside both on dropbox and on each of my computers. I don't really know what to say about the people that got caught up in the Megaupload shakedown. I would never have put anything up there in the first place that I couldn't also access elsewhere. I guess that's just me though. The only thing I would use MU for in the first place might be to distribute Android ROMs or maybe custom Linux distros. Files that are completely legal to share but are big enough that I'd rather not use my own bandwidth every time somebody wants to download one. Of course if I was somebody like wiki-leaks, I'd be hosting an .onion site that would be much harder to bring down. But that's really a special case and I'm sure the best in the world are giving them advice which probably means they won't be going away anytime soon.
$ whois woz.org
[...] Registrant Name:Steve Wozniak[...]
I never quit Apple. That suggestion was based on an incorrect Wall Street Journal that said I was leaving Apple because I didn't like things there. Actually, I had told the Wall Street Journal writer that I wasn't leaving Apple because of things that I didn't like and that I wasn't even leaving, keeping my small salary forever as a loyal employee. I just wanted a small startup experience and a chance to design a smaller product again, a universal remote control.
--Steve Wozniak
Amazon and Microsoft's Azure have both went down recently, causing havoc for many businesses.
We don't use either of these services since we don't really need the scale but I would imagine that provided they didn't go down too long, money is still saved in the aggregate. You have to look at the numbers and strike the right balance. What is the likely downtime of $CLOUD_IAAS_PROVIDER? Will that much downtime cost us more in money, goodwill, and customers than just building and maintaining our own gear? What hurts is just jumping on the bandwagon with both eyes closed. We use Google Apps here but we also keep copies of all of our documents and emails on the premises. The value adds like collaborative editing, etc. are nice but we could go a few hours without them. And we might not be able to get new emails during an outage but we can definitely read the old ones and send what we need to with different accounts temporarily. Running our own mail server isn't really something we're interested in getting into but so far Google's been pretty reliable and they'd be damn fools to misuse the little amount of strategic info they could glean from our communications as the goodwill fallout if something like that came to light would destroy them.
When Megaupload went down, it caused a huge loss for many legitimate customers as well.
A stack of blank DVDs is like 10 bucks at the walgreens down the street. There is no way I would make the mistake of thinking that something like filestube.com or 4shared.com is some kind of legitimate back up service. That's pretty much laughable. Hopefully the word got out to people that don't realize this and they won't be making the same mistake again.
If your Steam account gets suspended, or you disagree with the new TOS - you're shit out of luck, all that you "own" is gone for good and you can't do shit about it.
I've never bought anything through Steam but as far as I can tell, the only thing you actually have to pay for is the games and DLC for the games you have. The social features are just added stickiness keeping people there but you aren't directly paying for them. I have a Steam account but only as a test of installing the client on Linux. It works, I can browse stuff and participate but I've never spent a dime. I say that to say this, if I lost access to my games, I'm pretty sure I could find some backups somewhere. I paid so I wouldn't feel bad at all doing that.
Dropbox lost a shitload of emails due to a security breach
That didn't have anything to do with their cloud stuff though as that was chalked up to an employee's stupidity of having a weak password on a laptop or something. It could have happened to anybody that happened to have some personal info about users. I think the UK lost a bunch of data a while back by some goof being careless.
Sony lost the details for 70million+ customers for a similar reason
Heh. Sony. No sympathy. Their customers didn't deserve that though. My suggestion is use a different email for all of your online stuff. Maybe use some pattern like oakgroveSony@gmail.com or whatever floats your boat. Same thing for passwords. Of course nobody does that but it is a solution.
Every single example of a cloud operation that I can think of, be it a service or a product, has had issues and it's not going to change.
Yeah, if it's a server hooked up to the 'net, it has the potential to be hacked. Act accordingly and encrypt your data if you're uploading files, make backups, don't use the same credentials across different sites as you are trusting the security of the person you gave those credentials to and always assume that the provider will go under at some point or be bought out. Personally I use "cloud" services like its going out of style but I keep my wits about me and have had no problems yet.
Screen scrape 'em 'til it hurts. I'll bet there's a script floating around somewhere that makes it easy.
My Cloud recipe for success: encrypt all data you upload and use local apps to open/consume/create it all. Don't forget to use your own meatspace backup system of choice from time to time. All the taste none of the fat.
I have to hand it to you tepples, you do take some contrived positions sometimes but more often than not you do give some food for thought. I hadn't thought about the difficulties in exclusive touch screen gaming quite in the terms of relative vs. absolute pointing device for onscreen elements. A lot of games that need relative movement like Final Fantasy for example allow you to put your thumb anywhere on the screen and the "joystick" just appears under it so you get an absolute positioning for the relative controller. That seems to be a good compromise and the games that don't offer this are much more difficult to control well. Most emulators don't perform this trick and they mostly suck as a consequence. Also re your sig, sounds like a job for Baye's Theorem.
Not sure what particular compositing window manager you're running on Fedora but on Ubuntu with Unity I just do a "metacity --replace" when I need to turn compositing off. And when I want to go back I just do "compiz --replace" as that's the wm Unity uses. No logging out necessary. Of course this is assuming you don't have metacity set up with the compositing but if you do just turn that off in gconf-editor.
Yes, developing their own distro would doom this entire initiative from the start. Valve is good at making games and maintaining a distribution platform that runs on top of somebody else's operating system. There is no scenario where them making their own distro makes sense and the concept of some kind of live CD is even more absurd since if you need to reboot anyway to play games you might as well just use WIndows. At worst all they have to do is maintain their own repo's. Google does it with Chrome. You just download the Chrome installer in Linux and the installer sets up the repositories for you behind the scenes and it all Just Works(TM).
I don't think very many people are under any illusions about what's motivating this move. Gabe Newell sees the app store in Windows 8 as an existential threat and its not some new-found love for butterflies and Freedom on Valve's part. Fine, let's get past that as it is a distraction anyway. When we're all done politicizing this maybe it'll come to pass that Linux on the desktop is an underserved market that might, heaven forbid, make money for Valve and friends. This reminds me of the iOS vs. Android debate where applications slowly but surely move over. The fanboy furor on both sides is just ridiculous. The devs make money on iOS now they're making money on Android and Android users have more apps. The end. Hopefully the same happens with Linux and Windows gamers can keep right on using their platform of choice and Linux users will have some cool games to play.
Hairyfeet, we went through this yesterday with the last Steam on Linux story. You keep saying that the "purists" are going to fuck the whole works up then you get a ton of replies from the pragmatists telling you it isn't so. Where are the replies from the so-called purists backing you up? Let it go, man. You're wrong.
FYI, you've been false flag trolled.
I was referring to 3D games like shadow gun and Aralon most of which are pretty much indistinguishable.
The first thing to find out is what makes consciousness appear. Currently we have no clue.
I've never thought that was a particularly interesting question. Imagine you have a computer that is so powerful and has such a comprehensive decision tree that it can simulate what we perceive as conscious behavior to a level indistinguishable from a natural human being. Is it conscious? Does it matter? I can see philosophical value in telling the difference but practically speaking I just don't see where it's relevant. And if there is a quantum mechanical principal that consciousness relies on then that just adds complexity it doesn't make reverse engineering intractable. I do realize that I am doing a bit of conceptual hand-waving with the whole "simulates consciousness" bit but the idea only really breaks down at the level of simulating creativity. In particular creative problem solving. Can a computer ever be capable of designing its own successor without outside help? To me that's the ultimate Turing test.
1 word...OpenMoko. FOSS "advocates" talk a good game but when it comes to opening their wallets? Not so good.
I've never seen a single OpenMoko phone in my entire life. Not only that but the Neo1973 made its initial splash before the smartphone market was in full swing and by the time people started buying touch screens phones in large numbers, the Neo was already very outdated. Another problem was the fact the phone just didn't work very well so you are cutting out all but the most hardcore users anyway. FOSS isn't magic pixie dust that means any product infused with it will convert into an automatic sale by an "advocate". You also have to have a good product that is marketed well, has a reasonable cost and is generally available. Trying to hang OpenMoko's failure on Linux advocates just not opening their wallets while leaving "for a crap product" off of your statement is only telling half the story and doesn't support your argument at all.
And of COURSE he's working with multiple vendors, can you say "start the bidding" boys and girls? They know that if they are gonna do this they are gonna need competition, you don't want to lock yourself into a single vendor too quick in case the fuck you, see Apple getting fucked by Intel over Nvidia chipsets for an example.
There is also the fact that they have confirmed a Steam client is coming to Ubuntu. They have not confirmed nor even hinted at a console. Will there be a console? Maybe, perhaps even probably but we do know that Linux will be getting Steam and Valve working with multiple vendors to get good drivers makes sense. Think about it like this, Valve is scared shitless of Windows 8 and are in it to win it, unlike the previous efforts by other companies. That being the case, they recognize one of the largest issues with Linux gaming is GPU drivers so in the interest of covering all the bases, they are working to correct that.
But if you think he's even gonna break even on Linux desktops I have some magic beans you might be interested in. Hell the entire web is full of "Why pay? Run Linux for FREE LOL!" articles up the ying yang
Yes, those articles exist but the free as in beer is just a bullet point for anybody in the west likely reading those blogs. To the average person Windows is "free" as it comes on the box they bought and most of the high profile software that runs on Linux runs on Windows too so the third party stuff costs the same. I just don't think that the average Linux user came in the fold after reading one of those blogs and while it is pretty nice to be able to fire up a package manager and have thousands and thousands of different titles readily available for free, I don't think the average Linux person expects to get top quality games for free. At this point people get that games cost a ton of money to produce if they have any hope of being true AAA caliber. Mass Effect 3 will never be made by a collaborative free software effort. People get it and can fully grok that concept while on the other hand appreciating the "free as in beer" side of what can be achieved by that collaborative effort.
Other than Canonical I seriously doubt most will even allow a DRM program like Steam into their repos so frankly I'll be amazed if Valve gets even 30% of the already minuscule user base.
According to what I've read, they aren't trying to get into any other repo as Ubuntu is the only officially supported distro. Of course that makes it a drop-in for Mint another very popular version of Linux. I'm not sure what Fedora plans to do but they are playing ball with the secure boot so it is completely unprecedented for them to take a practical approach to things some in the Free software community might find questionable. Those 3 distros sum up the vast majority of the Linux desktop userbase.
not to mention as we saw here on the Steam Linux announcement the "Free as in
Please regale us on how Valve's efforts in the 10's of porting Source titles years after everyone has played them on Windows and just throwing it out there for the typical Linux user is going to fare any better than Loki. The parallel is exact.
The parallel is not even close, actually. First of all, Loki had a distribution problem. They had to get stores to stock their merchandise and few would. And the ones that did stock them generally made a half-hearted effort and put the Linux games in one little corner off the main display. Contrast this with Steam which is not just a game here and there but a delivery platform. The Linux versions of games will be there right next to the Windows and Mac version and download/installation is just a click away. In addition to this fact is the point that in absolute numbers there are more Linux users today than there were in the 90's. Also, unlike Loki, Valve is working with hardware makers to get better graphics drivers on Linux so no longer will the same game run with a higher framerate on Windows which was a major issue for Loki as many of their ports were FPS twitch games where every last frame dropped (at least subjectively). Another point is that while Loki ported games, they did not create their own so they had very little ability to polish up the engine like what Valve is doing with Source to make sure that it runs spectacularly on Linux. Another issue that Loki contended with is that Linux users were slightly more idealistic back then and actually held out hope that Free AAA titles would just appear for Linux. That hasn't happened and I think the community at large realizes this and has accepted it so they are more receptive to paying for proprietary binaries. Another point is that money talks and Valve have orders of magnitude more of it than Icculous ever thought about. When you have enough money to get Intel, AMD, and nVidia's attention then you stand a much better chance of making heretofore untenable things happen.
Your point of the games on Linux being late possibly sabotaging the effort is valid though. That will have to be addressed and I hope Valve realizes this.
On your a) point, yes, it will be extremely difficult for MS to make that happen but they have an Ace in the hole with Metro. If they can get consumers to move to using Metro in lieu of the classic desktop then they don't have to de jure block third party developers because the consumers have de facto done it for them. This scares Valve.
How so? If they are already using Steam through Wine why would they suddenly spend more money in the Valve ecosystem if you migrate them to native Steam?
Wine is unreliable and games that worked before are prone to breakage with the next update. This is nerve-wrecking and I'm sure has a depressive effect on how many games are bought by Linux gamers using Steam right now. Make it native and not dependent on a brittle translation layer and people will buy more games as they will have a reasonable expectation of having a good time and not wrestling with Wine for the upteenth time this month. Also, there are many games that are on Steam that do not work on Wine at all or give a terrible experience missing textures, etc. so there will be some "exclusive" titles that can't be played on Linux any other way. Then you have people like me that refuse to get sucked into the time sync that is trying to get Wine running well and just don't play at all. I will install and buy games through Steam with no problem at all and Valve will make money. As it stands right now, they make nothing from me.
Other than a few things like the humble bundle the simple fact is FOSS is built around "free as in beer" as much as it is "free as in freedom" so there simply aren't enough users willing to buy to make it a market worth pursuing.
Many users and advocates of FOSS software have accepted the fact that "free as in beer" will never translate into AAA titles being developed for your platform so I don't think Valve has this particular hurdle to overcome. As far as the minimum viable number of users I don't know what that is but I would assume that Valve has crunched those numbers and feel like it is indeed a market worth pursuing. Note that they have access to the Steam install statistics so they know exactly how many people are playing the games in Wine. Of course that will not directly translate to sales for the native Steam but it is a good guideline as to the size of the underserved Linux AAA title game market. There is also an argument to be made for "creating" a market. Newell seems to be very committed to this idea and it is already known that Valve are working with hardware vendors on drivers, they're optimizing their own very popular Source engine for Linux, and they are highly motivated through fear of the future for independent software distribution platforms on Windows their core market. If Valve can adequately address the historical difficulties of bringing proprietary software to Linux then I would expect the market to grow larger as a by-product of that.
I mean you have at best estimates around 3% being actual desktop users (no you aren't allowed to count servers, routers, your CCC Droid phone, because lets face it those won't run the latest Quake engine games) and of those how many have bought software in the last 6 months? Frankly if that answer was 20% I'd be amazed, probably less than 10%. FOSS users are simply used to getting everything "free as in beer" and if you are trying to actually sell software that's just not a market you should target.
Again, ask the typical Linux user if they believe AAA games will come to Linux for free and I doubt very many would say yes. As a Linux user and as a software developer, I am very pragmatic about the situation. I want a free platform that I can install and have a usable computer. I want drivers to run my hardware that do not necessarily have to be Free but if they are non-free then I should have a reasonable expectation that they will carry me for the life of the product. In the case of video drivers, nVidia is very good at supporting their products on Linux for their useful lifespan whereas AMD will drop support in a heartbeat. Ergo, if I want to game on Linux, I buy nVidia. Going beyond that, I prefer essential software to be Free as that is what makes the computer usable. But, and this is where the difference comes in, when it comes to non-essential throw-aways like games, I don't have any problem at all with them being non-free. I'm not into playing the same game after I've beaten it once so I don't care about recompiling it for future hardware or anything else. I understand that there are still Doom die-hards playing multi-player with that but I'm not in that camp. I think the success of Android amongs Linux users points to the pragmatic acceptance that some things just aren't Free. There is no remotely modern handset on the market with completely free hardware and while that isn't the greatest thing ever, it isn't something stopping Linux users from buying Android phones. I don't think Steam being non-Free will be a serious impediment either.
In the end we all know Old Gabe at Valve isn't looking at Linux because he gives a rat's ass about Steam on the Linux desktop, okay? Ballmer dropped trou and waved his sweaty ass at Gabe by trying to cut Valve out of the market with the appstore and old Gabe don't get mad he gets even by trying to royally fuck MSFT in a market they've spent billions trying to capture, the home console market. Well if yo
Wait, so you're expecting the Mac repertoire to be available for Linux before Linux even proves itself as viable market?
No, not at all. I'm expecting Linux to prove a viable market for the intrepid publishers that start with it and then I expect the titles that run on the Mac to be ported over. But that wasn't the point of what I said. The AC above based his argument on only L4D2 and Portal coming to Linux so I just pointed out that there is precedent for games other than those being ported (at least on the Mac). The bottom line was that, of course, more than those two titles will come over and the situation on the Mac while not directly supporting my contention at least gives a model of what might be expected.
And what relative ease of porting from OSX to Linux? Where's Linux's analogue to CoreAudio, CoreVideo and the other CoreFrameworks? Where's the analogue to the Cocoa framework? The only thing the two systems have in common is OpenGL, Almost everything needs to be rewritten.
By "relative" I meant relative to porting DirectX games from Windows. Porting a directx game from Windows involves all you mentioned above and additionally the added issue of moving from DX to Opengl. So, 'relatively' speaking, it is easier to go from OSX to Linux than from Windows to Linux at least with respect to DX based games.
CoreAudio
OpenAL which CoreAudio contains an implementation of.
CoreVideo
Not sure how this is very important in the game space. Care to elaborate?
other core frameworks
Most of which are confined to the space of accelerating the user interface so not particularly relevant to the kind of games found on Steam.
I'm not sure I completely buy your idea about converting WINE-using Linux gamers into native Linux gamers. Obviously these people already have an alternative for their Linux gaming needs, so it might be a relatively hard sell to get them to take the last step when they're most of the way already.
Yes they do have a working alternative in place. The issue and where native ports can shine is a game that works today in Wine might not work tomorrow and as a once avid Linux gamer, this is the one thing that will drive you up the wall and make a Wintendo install. And many games that work in Wine even the best ones have some little graphical anomaly here or there or framerate might not be as good as with Windows (this matters considerably in twitch multi-player games like TF2). So, assuming players using Wine now will not re-download their existing games in the native format, they will probably at least buy new games like that vs. playing Windows titles in Wine. Also, consider that there are some popular titles that will not work satisfactorily in Wine at all so if they become available for Linux Steam will be enough bait for some people to move from Wine and if the experience is positive, they will be more likely to follow that pattern in the future.
Be very careful here. Most applications written for iOS are written in Objective-C, while most applications written for Android are written in Java.
Yes, you're right. I should have mentioned that I was specifically talking about games written in C/C++ and making opengl calls.
a) closing off installation of all binaries on Windows except through the app store
b) beefing up the Windows 8 app store to being a full fledged AAA title platform a la Xbox Live
c) Making it trivial to cross compile AAA titles to WinRT ARM tablets
then Steam faces the potential of becoming completely irrelevant through either complete exclusion from the platform or having to compete directly with MS themselves in the same space but with MS having the advantage of owning the underlying platform.
How is writing one's own software any harder or more expensive on Windows or Mac OS X than on GNU/Linux? Windows has Visual Studio Express, Code::Blocks, and Eclipse, and Mac OS X has Xcode and Eclipse.
I can't speak for anyone else but I find it easier to write software on Linux for a few reasons. Being able to scroll a window with your mouse wheel without it needing to be in focus makes perusing code in multiple sub-windows in Eclipse very easy. I know there is a way to make Windows do that but Linux does it out of the box. Another feature I like on Linux is that if I need any little tool, I can just open up the package manager and install it assuming its there and so far I haven't been disappointed. A good example is installing something like pymssql a library for accessing SQL server databases in a script. I needed it the other day and I just searched for it in synaptic and a couple of minutes later I was using it. Another thing that makes it easier for me on Linux is the readily available powerful Bash prompt. I have guake set to the F12 key to drop down like the Quake terminal of old whenever I need it. I do a lot of Android development and need to adb shell into the phones regularly and get specific logcat output etc. and being able to just mash F12 and type in what I need is invaluable. I do my fair share of Python scripting too and find it much easier to do with vim in a guake tab than the equivalent on Windows. I'm sure all of this could be approximated on Windows with some trouble but Linux is much closer out of the box.