As long as GIMP still saves in the format that a file has been opened when hitting the save button, that's what will be most-important. If they mess that up, they're shooting themselves in both feet with a 12-gauge. But either way, it's just making things confusing.
Well, you'll be unhappy to know that this behavior has indeed changed.
I lost track of how many times I said the word "goddammit" the other
night when I was working on a simple jpeg file with the latest gimp
and everytime I would hit , it would change the extension to
xcf thus forcing me to go into the menu to click export. Maybe they'll
fix this in the final release. We'll see.
Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. Once you're intelligent enough, in general, to use the machines that your tiny fraction of geniuses comes up with, the impetus towards more intelligence pretty much evaporates.
Hogwash. The very minute technology advances to the point permitting artificial cognitive augmentation via direct computer/machine interface (and it will, it's just too compelling a scenario to not happen), undergoing the procedure will become a necessity to remain socially competitive thus ushering in an era of ever accelerating levels of intelligence as successive generations of the technology is refined by previous generations thus completely short-circuiting and rendering moot the evolutionary process.
Furthermore, if we do discover alien species transmitting messages into the universe, it is almost certain they will be vastly advanced compared to ourselves as we have only been capable of that particular feat here on earth for a few decades, what are the chances that any E.T.'s we stumble upon will be anywhere inside of that very short envelope of time we are in now given the possibilities? They are as likely to have had the technology for 10's of thousands of years of longer. Statistically speaking, it's virtually certain they will be much more advanced than we are.
My G1 speaks the directions loudly and clearly even when I am talking on the phone. In fact, it's rather annoying until I remember that I need them to tell where I'm going.
This isn't any kind of fix but you can always just use GNU/Screen in
konsole or whatever xterminal you prefer to avoid having to switch
to a virtual terminal. With Screen, you can restart X
and then just reattach to the screen session you were using to
do your encoding in.
Not sure what your definition of "master" is but Linux is on over
3/4 of the top 500 supercomputers, comprises over 50 percent
of internet servers out there, dominates embedded systems by a very
significant margin and is at the heart of the fastest
growing cell phone platform. Believe me, the world of computers is
much larger than what you see at your local Best Buy.
I also eventually got an Intel Overdrive chip for that extra socket and moved from the 486 SX 20Mhz to a 486 DX 75Mhz (strange that a 55Mhz increase in clock speed made such a difference - back then the machine was several times faster - these days 55Mhz isn't even noticeable:)).
Yes, that would have made a huge difference. Something like going from a 1.2 GHz Core2Duo to a 3.6 GHz Core2Duo (this is a simplified example for all of you pedants out there). You have to think of the new clock speed as relative to the old (assuming similar processor family), so going from 20 MHz to 75 would have definitely been over 3 times faster not to mention the addition of faster bus speed and a functional math co-processor.
You missed a word up there. I've highlighted it for you.
Not at all. In English, as it is used in the US (not sure where you're from though I assume the same place) and in the context of your original
post, the connotation of that statement implies not only
does the subject's opinion "need not be submitted" but,
again the connotical, contextual, and idiomatic interpretation
is quite clearly, that an opinion "should" not even
be submitted in the first place. That is what
I was replying to. Back-pedaling does not
change that at all.
You are entitled to your free speech, but you have no right to use it to trod upon the rights of others. That's where it stops. If he's tired of hearing your opinion, for example, you need to give it a rest. You'd no longer be expressing yourself and instead will have switched over to simply shouting him down.
That's an absurd caricature of what I said.
I'm not a Neanderthal to sit around "shouting" (or whatever euphemism you wish to use or situation you wish to imply)
people down over their choice in software license. I
was responding to a very specific comment made in
the GGP's post:
Your opinion need not be submitted.
The answer is, yes, my opinion can and will
be submitted. The obvious implication being
as long as I'm not violating anyone's rights in doing so. A big part of that is called social skills. Most people, including myself, have them.
Thank you for allowing me to clarify that for
anyone else that didn't get it the first time though, as my girlfriend is oft to say... Really? Seriously?
True freedom of religion allows your neighbor to worship Satan, and true freedom in software means people will buy closed-source apps when they see value in doing so. Your opinion need not be submitted.
You have this whole freedom thing just a little
mixed up. Just because I think people should be free
to do something doesn't mean I can't have an
opinion or even verbalize that opinion about it. That's
part of my freedom. Ironically, it's
your freedom to express your disagreement
with that like you did above and I am now responding
to. See how that works?
If my neighbor
was a Satanist and I didn't agree with it,
I should still be able to say so. Obviously,
any laws against him being so would be immoral
as would any actions on my part depriving him
of his rights. And me simply saying that
I disapprove of someone's actions is not
depriving them of any rights, despite certain people's
protestations to the contrary. Same goes with open vs. closed
source software. I'm not going to try to physically
stop anyone from using closed source. However,
I'm damn sure going to give my opinion about
the matter and I'm perfectly justified in doing so.
I keep a Windows partition exclusively for gaming because of this.
Back when I was a Windows user (and a somewhat
younger man), I did a LOT of gaming. Hours
and hours, many days. Since I've been using
Linux for the last few years, my time has
been spent doing other things. I fiddle around
with Wine and have most of my stuff working
like FarCry, Half-Life, Morrowind, etc., and
it actually works amazingly well. Sometimes
even better than it did on old XP.
But, all in all, I actually see it as a net
positive that Linux doesn't support many games.
I can now find other creative outlets to
waste my time on. And not chasing the latest greatest video
card sure hasn't lost me any money.
I have used Virtual Box and I find that it getting bumped down for ease of use is a bit silly. It isn't hard to use at all. It maybe slightly more difficult to install but once installed it is trivial to use.
I have to agree with this as well. If someone has sense enough to make use of virtual machines then they should have sense enough to glom to the VBox or VMWare interfaces and controls about equally well in my opinion. The only thing I can honestly say is easier for me on VMWare is copying a virtual machine from one computer to another and then just starting it up. On VMWare, you just copy the machine's directory from/home/user/vmware to wherever you want on your other computer then click on the virtualmachine.vmx and away you go. Whereas on VBox, the.vdi and settings files are in different directories so it does add slightly to the complexity of going to a new host system with having to add the.vdi file in the drives selection menu and all of that. But once you've done it and know what to do, it isn't really a problem. Besides, you can just can just copy over the.vdi and just recreate the other settings.
All in all, I like VBox. There used to be a bit of a performance delta between it and VMWare, at least on my setup, so I use VMWare mostly to this day as I'm used to it. But that performance difference has been made up in recent releases so that's not an issue anymore. I think my only problem at this point is I like to have the virtual machine unmaximized and at a larger resolution than the host system then just alt/drag the window around to position it where I want. I.E., I have the host at 1280x1024 and the guest at 1600x1200 and while VMWare does this with no problem, VBox snaps the window back to 1280 if I try to make it any bigger than that. It's kind of a drag but it's a necessity that I have that functionality so I will continue with VMWare but the minute that changes or a work-a-round comes to my attention, I just may switch over.
VMware has Aero support in Windows VIsta/7, which VirtualBox does not. VMware's Direct3D and OpenGL support is more advanced.
Just thought I'd chime in on this. True VMWare will run aero. But it doesn't run it fast by any means at least in my experience on an E8400 Core2Duo running Ubuntu 9.10 as a host and Win7 guest. And VBox will run compiz in a Linux guest surprising well. Last I checked, VMWare didn't support compositing in a Linux guest. So, depending on what you're doing is what makes one better than the other in this regard.
My mom loves Craigslist. There is a greasemonkey script that automatically loads the images in each listing as a thumbnail on the main category page underneath said listings. Once I showed her that, it didn't take much convincing to get her to click on the orange icon vs. the blue one. I think that's how it's done. You have to demonstrate clear advantages to the alternative not just the "eat your vegetables" schtick of "it's more securer."
By what measure of success? Effectiveness, sure. But what is the market share of all the Linux distros put together? What is the ratio of Windows to Linux boxes globally or in the US?
How do you define success? Apparently for you, at least in this context, it's market share. That's a bit spurious considering the fact that Linux is Free. What is the market share of Linux anyway? Probably a lot higher than you realize. Oh, you thought only desktop computers ran operating systems? Ever heard of Tivo? Android? Routers? Embedded systems? Servers? I'll bet if you put every device that runs Linux vs. every device that runs Windows you might be surprised about the "ratio of Windows to Linux boxes globally". Besides, Ferrari has low market share. They're a success right?
Says you. You're omitting how many devices don't work on Linux due to a lack of drivers or simple inoperability with Linux. It's improving, but there's a long way to go.
Linux supports more peripherals than OSX; I don't see you bringing that up? You wouldn't happen to have an agenda would you? Besides, I've installed quite a few Linux boxes in my day. It's the very rare exception that I find a device that doesn't just work out of the box. Contrast this with literally every other operating system ever made. And everytime that has happened, I waited a few months for the next kernel update and it did work. A lot of hardware actually works better in Linux. For example, my Verizon USB aircard. In Windows, you have to wait over 30 seconds for it to do its thing and connect and it disconnects requiring pulling it out and reinserting it about once an hour. On Linux, it connects in about 5 seconds and works perfectly for as long as you want. Funny story, I was at my brother's house a couple of weeks back and his Windows 7 box bluescreened so many times, I lost count. Finally, I was like, dude, what does the error say when it crashes? Come to find out the problem was the USB network adapter he had was crashing his box. Plugged it into my netbook running Ubuntu 9.10 and it worked perfectly.
The main flaw i find in Linux is the opposite. It's small because it's small. Developers don't want to double their efforts to sell to a handful of neck beards.
I don't see Linux's smallness as a flaw. Actually, that tends to increase the signal to noise ratio quite a bit. There are quite a few quality software projects that only develop for Linux and/or OSX and refuse to port to Windows because of the inevitable flood of clueless users that would pull in thus swamping the project in handholding. This is a good example. Very high quality software.
As for the "handful of neck beards" comment, didn't you say something about the supposed childish and condescending tone of the GP? Besides, there are quite a few commercial projects that develop for Linux. But, if you stop and think about it, why would there be large amounts of commercial Linux development in any case? One of the possible reasons developing commercial software is such a niche for Linux is that practically anything you need is in the repositories anyway. And quite a bit of Free sofware spanks the commercial alternatives. K3B smokes Nero. Pidgin smokes YIM, AIM, and MSN Messenger. Firefox and Chrome smoke IE, Opera, Safari, what-have-you. And for the stuff where the Free stuff isn't as good as the proprietary bits, it's still pretty good. OpenOffice is pretty good, GIMP is pretty good, Eclipse is pretty good. Why pay for proprietary software when my needs are already met for free?
Wine isn't there either. i use as much FOSS as i can.
Exactly. Firefox has certainly got bigger over the years (though of course not bigger than its ancestor Mozilla), but it has also grown in the features it provides.
I think part of the problem is peoples'
confusion on what bloat even is and what
contexts it matters in. Take Firefox,
a general purpose web browser aimed squarely
at the typical desktop user. In this context
the more features, the better and that doesn't
equal the kind of bloat that matters. Bad
bloat in this context is anything happening behind
the scenes that touches everything the user
does even when it doesn't directly impact the
rendering of a web page. The Awesome Bar had
this issue to the point that if you had a large
enough history, say 90 days or so, it would
stall the entire browser just digging through
it for every letter you typed into the url bar.
That is the kind of bloat that needs to be
gotten rid of. The ability to render javascript,
java, flash, etc. isn't really the kind of bloat that even matters to Joe Desktop-User.
This is just like the firestorm that came
down over Linus Torvalds' comments about Linux
being bloated. People just ran with it not even
realizing that he wasn't talking about features or
drivers at all but the internal code auditing
the kernel does that stalls it for several
nanoseconds everytime a piece of code is run through.
I guess getting the story straight doesn't
make for fun sensationalism fueled flamewars.
This isn't a solution for everyone but, honestly, just root the phone and install any compatible firmware you want. I have been running CyanogenMod on my G1 and not only is the phone faster but I'm not limited on how many apps I can install by the phone's puny onboard flash as all of my apps now install onto the SD card, I now have wi-fi tethering so any wi-fi enabled device within reach can piggyback off of my phone's internet connection, if I do a hard reset on the phone, all of my apps are still there as they are on the SD card now, and when 2.0 comes out, contrary to what Google, T-Mobile or anyone else may think, I'll be able to put it on my phone.
Sure, the best place to start when you are looking for advice on how to get a particular Windows application to work in Wine is here . Just run a search for your games in the application database and see what comes up.
I've never personally ran either of the two games you mentioned, however, I do have a couple of general pointers.
The very first thing I do when wanting to try a new game is I just put the CD in the drive on my Ubuntu box and see if it will work. Ubuntu 9.10 which is going to drop here in a couple of days offers much tighter integration between apps installed in Wine and the regular desktop. The correct icons are used instead of generic Wine icons, menu entries are better integrated, and the stock software add/remove functionality now supports Wine apps right along side the native Linux ones.
Now, after you have installed Wine and put the CD in the drive and the autorun dialog comes up and you've installed the game, if you click on it in your menu and it doesn't work the most likely problem is there is a particular dll file it's looking for that isn't there. Open up your terminal and navigate to the game's executable in your/home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program files/ directory and try to run it with $ wine app_name.exe. Pay attention to the output and scan through the gobbledygood and look for what it says the problem is. If it is indeed a dll, just do a google search with "missing.dll download" and usually, a site will come up that has it for download. Copy it to the same directory the game's executable is and it should work at that point as that is in the search path for dll's when wine tries to load something. If it still doesn't work, that's when I hit the application database. Sometimes there are simple tweaks and sometimes there are more complex ones. Fallout 3 comes to mind here. That should get you started on that.
A couple of general Linux pointers:
First, don't be afraid to break your install. Linux is very robust but it will do anything you tell it to do with a salute and a smile. So, if you unwittingly tell it to break itself, it will. And as a curious technically adept user, you will do this probably more than once. No problem, just expect that at first, that will happen. Trying to fix it will be a good learning experience and even if you don't succeed and have to reinstall, you will still have learned a great deal. I generally recommend any new Linux user that really wants to learn Linux and not just use it to "get work done" start off in a virtual machine. VirtualBox is really good as it's free and it allows 3D capabilities in Linux guests unlike vmware so you get the full effect with compiz, etc. Run it and read all the Linux books you can find and experiment with it. It's a very rewarding experience and this is how I learned to use Linux. The funny thing is, after a year or so, you will look back on some of the mistakes you made at first, at the time seeing them as insurmountable errors requiring yet another reinstall but after the year, are the easiest thing in the world to fix. My first reinstall came after messing up the nvidia driver. Now, I can install and configure it in my sleep.
So, don't let anything discourage you. There will be times when you're like, "Screw this, I'm going back to Windows." Just know that when that happens, it means you are normal and just need to persevere a little longer.
I hope this helps and if I sound condescending at all, I don't mean it that way. If you have any questions, just reply.
Your analogy is flawed because, in general, a.exe file will run on Vista or XP or Win7. They don't have a different package format for different versions the way RedHat and Ubuntu do. Both Windows and Linux have programs break as versions change. You need to compare Apples to Apples and version changes in Windows to version changes in Ubuntu.
No, what I was getting at is that a setup.exe is a packaged installer. You run the exe and it runs a self contained script that copies the relevant files and settings to their intended directories and makes the appropriate registry entries for the program to work. If you just distributed the raw executables and expected the end user to put them in the right places themselves, it wouldn't work. This is akin to releasing a program for Ubuntu without packaging it in a deb file. And criticizing Canonical because third party software publishers aren't packaging their software in a deb file is like criticizing Microsoft if some developer didn't distribute their files as setup.exe's. I get that from your perspective this actually is Canonical's fault as they should somehow make it easier for developer's to make these deb files. Checkinstall is the program you are looking for. When the dev compiles their app they use checkinstall and it automatically compiles the app and packages it into a deb file. This tool is somewhat rudimentary and limited but it does work. Can the whole process be made even easier? Of course it can. Anything can be made easier. But with the plethora of good software that is packaged well and ready to go with just a click right now, difficulty of packaging software is not really the sticking point it's being made out to be by some people.
If they want to make their system more usable I think they should adapt their package manager in several ways. First, they should create a way to find and license software from within the package manager, a feature they've announced. Second, they should make sure those apps have the same functionality as other apps managed by the package manager (like auto updates). Adding customer reviews would be nice but is not essential. Adding the ability to automatically re-download already licensed apps or move those apps directly to a new machine and de-authenticate them on the exiting machine is also fairly critical. Finally, they need to make the method for developing and publishing these packages simple for users, by helping to tweak development tools to create the correct packages by default and by offering hosting by Canonical as well as an easy way for developers to run their own repositories that get added to the store.
I absolutely agree and have been preaching this exact thing to people any time the subject comes up. One of the greatest treasures of Linux that could really propel the platform is the package management system and sadly, it isn't being leveraged in an accessible user-friendly way. Hopefully the Software Store addresses this however, it is going to take a while as it's looking like it's going to be phased in over the next 4 releases. I understand that Canonical has to ration its limited resources but if I were Mark Shuttleworth, I would make this a top priority so as not find themselves in a position of too little too late as it's no secret that with the iPhones success and model, a lot of the industry is going to want to move in this direction. Even Microsoft is making some strides towards this model with the ease of driver downloads in Windows 7.
Helping companies clean up their software to work better is one of Canonical's big pushes right now. Remember the free usability testing they're offering? Ideally the available tools should make things easy without any hand holding, but if they are lacking or too unfamiliar to developers, Canonical needs to do whatever it takes to bridge the gap.
Your confusing my point. I'm not saying they shouldn't do this at all. I
That's funny, since I never see claims about the market share for Ubuntu versus Windows while I often see it for Linux versus Windows. I think the definition of operating system in those terms is very muddy so people are understandably confused, especially since almost all the software we're talking about will run on most any version of Linux, it just is difficult to install for normal users.
Yeah, and I see market share breakdowns for XP vs Vista. You see Linux vs Windows because many people see Linux as this big monolithic thing. Hint: IT'S NOT. Software in Ubuntu is NOT hard to install. Seriously, click on the.deb file and click "Install" on the little box that pops up. If the program is intended for Ubuntu yet is not distributed as a deb file then it is not finished. Start distributed Windows programs without a setup.exe or msi and watch the mayhem.
publisher doesn't make an installer for the Ubuntu OS, then that is the publisher's fault.
Why do I care? To me it doesn't matter whose fault it is, only if I can do what I want or not. That's where Apple is winning, by taking responsibility for broken parts of the user experience and filling in any holes rather than blaming others. Hopefully Canonical is doing the same to some extent and that includes making it easy and profitable and a good idea for developers to create software in a way that works well with Ubuntu.
What do you expect Canonical to do? Write anybody's app for them that wants to develop for Ubuntu? That's ridiculous. The pieces are there for a very smooth end user software installation experience. If publishers don't want to use them then what the hell do you expect Canonical or anybody else to do about it? Hold their hand?
If a publisher really wants their software to be used by users of a particular OS, there are ways to make the install process from start to finish completely easy and intuitive.
Not really. Like if a publisher wants to have an app that can be run from the network on different Linux boxes from the same executable, I suppose they could replace it with a script that call the right executable for a given machine, somehow. I also think it's beside the point. A developer could write their own Linux variant to work with their software, but they aren't going to. They;re just going to pass on Linux as too difficult to develop for, and provide nothing or some less usable junk and let the nerds figure it out or fail as it pans out.
Are you serious? Have you ever even used Linux? Hint... Make an executable script on the user's box that goes something like this:
#!/bin/sh
ssh -XC my.app.server.net $APP
Anybody with sense enough to set up an app server is going to be able to do this and it would work seamlessly. And that's just one way. *nix practically specializes in this.
If every publisher did as good a job with their website as they do, we wouldn't even be talking about this.
If every Linux distro used the same standards and made the task easy for developers we wouldn't be talking about it either. Given Linux's tiny market share and the resultant lack of financial motivation for Website developers, which do you think is more likely to happen? Which can people interested in promoting Linux actually do?
Yeah, and if Microsoft and Apple would hold hands and sing kumbaya, you could run Garageband on Windows 7. That makes about as much sense as what you said. The different Linux's are run by different people with different goals. Target Debian, Red Hat and Suse and you have practically cornered the market. Matter of fact, rpm's run on Debian as long as they are packaged to the standard and not the Red Hat specific superset. A competent developer would know this.
Except you really can't today, because the package managers don't support it. What you can do is provide a link to a script or just a binary installer.
Sure you can. Build an installer that has the program binary, config scripts for deb, rpm, and whatever else, an OS detection routine and some logic that when it detects a deb, rpm, or whatever based OS, puts the package together and calls the native package installer like dpkg -i on Ubuntu to do the rest. Every bit of that is very doable and can be rolled up into one file. I'd throw something together just to show you but it's getting late. Maybe tomorrow.
I ain't mad at you but the rest of your post is mostly opinionated wool-gathering and I'm not really going to bother responding with more of the same.
Firstly, I think we're on the same team here for the most part in this particular context so look at this as more a friendly discussion rather than the typical point scoring flamefest. With that having been said...
That couldn't be further from the truth. When I go to a website, say frostwire.com, and click on the Ubuntu download button for an application, the app downloads and the installer automatically opens.
The problem being, that site is a rare exception. Very few sites tailor their downloads for each particular Linux distro and package manager and even those that do often have a confusing array of different download options that rely upon the user having a lot more information about their OS and hardware than is common among normal users. A lot more common situation is to be directed to execute a series of CLI commands or to be given a binary blob installer that must be downloaded and run. This is no worse than Windows, mind you, except that Windows users are accustomed to it as the only method, whereas under Ubuntu there are several different methods users must learn.
See, people are confused. "Linux" is not an operating system just like NT is not an operating system. Ubuntu is an OS, WinXP is an os, RedHat is an OS, Win 98 is an OS, just to give a few examples. So, problem one, is publishers publishing, and you (the hypothetical neophyte consumer), going and looking for the "Linux" version of the app when the operating system you are using is not "Linux" but rather Ubuntu. No website that publishes software targeted at OS's using the Linux kernel should have a link for "Linux" unless you are specifically targeting power users. It doesn't even make sense to do so. Of course, that is a perception and perspective problem. Hopefully as Ubuntu gains mindshare, that will change. If a publisher doesn't make an installer for the Ubuntu OS, then that is the publisher's fault. Again, hopefully, as Ubuntu gains mindshare, this will also take care of itself. The only thing that is really confusing about clicking on the Ubuntu link for an installer on a website is are you running 9.04? 8.10? Karmic? 64 bit? That is a problem that again could be easily solved by software publishers. An install script could easily distinguish between each of these versions and set up the software correctly so that all you would have to click on the download page would be "Ubuntu". As a side note, a.deb file and a.rpm file aren't really all that different. You could publish a file containing the binary and the config files necessary for.rpm,.deb, so on and so forth and some OS detection logic and call it a "Linux" binary if you just had to do that. And that link isn't any harder to click than the ones that say "Windows 2000/XP" and "Windows Vista/7" right underneath it. I could see the publisher not wanting to waste bandwidth by shipping 64 and 32 bit binaries in every package but that's a choice for them to make. And the vast majority of Free software that is distributed via a website link doesn't have the source automatically included so I'm not sure what your contention is with the binary blob thing. If a publisher really wants their software to be used by users of a particular OS, there are ways to make the install process from start to finish completely easy and intuitive. Hopefully, this will happen sooner rather than later. Frostwire is an excellent example of what can be done. If every publisher did as good a job with their website as they do, we wouldn't even be talking about this.
Right, so a developer for Ubuntu just needs to write a specific version of their application for removable media and network drives
Yep, you got it. Typically referred to as static binaries. I have several on my harddrive now that I just click and they run. No fuss, no muss. So, yes, this can be done just like it is in Windows. As a matter of fac
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As long as GIMP still saves in the format that a file has been opened when hitting the save button, that's what will be most-important. If they mess that up, they're shooting themselves in both feet with a 12-gauge. But either way, it's just making things confusing.
Well, you'll be unhappy to know that this behavior has indeed changed. I lost track of how many times I said the word "goddammit" the other night when I was working on a simple jpeg file with the latest gimp and everytime I would hit , it would change the extension to xcf thus forcing me to go into the menu to click export. Maybe they'll fix this in the final release. We'll see.
Alas, there really doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. Once you're intelligent enough, in general, to use the machines that your tiny fraction of geniuses comes up with, the impetus towards more intelligence pretty much evaporates.
Hogwash. The very minute technology advances to the point permitting artificial cognitive augmentation via direct computer/machine interface (and it will, it's just too compelling a scenario to not happen), undergoing the procedure will become a necessity to remain socially competitive thus ushering in an era of ever accelerating levels of intelligence as successive generations of the technology is refined by previous generations thus completely short-circuiting and rendering moot the evolutionary process.
Furthermore, if we do discover alien species transmitting messages into the universe, it is almost certain they will be vastly advanced compared to ourselves as we have only been capable of that particular feat here on earth for a few decades, what are the chances that any E.T.'s we stumble upon will be anywhere inside of that very short envelope of time we are in now given the possibilities? They are as likely to have had the technology for 10's of thousands of years of longer. Statistically speaking, it's virtually certain they will be much more advanced than we are.
My G1 speaks the directions loudly and clearly even when I am talking on the phone. In fact, it's rather annoying until I remember that I need them to tell where I'm going.
Whenever I tell someone I actuall do that they always start to wonder what I have to hide
Do they have curtains covering their windows? What do they have to hide?
This isn't any kind of fix but you can always just use GNU/Screen in konsole or whatever xterminal you prefer to avoid having to switch to a virtual terminal. With Screen, you can restart X and then just reattach to the screen session you were using to do your encoding in.
Not sure what your definition of "master" is but Linux is on over 3/4 of the top 500 supercomputers, comprises over 50 percent of internet servers out there, dominates embedded systems by a very significant margin and is at the heart of the fastest growing cell phone platform. Believe me, the world of computers is much larger than what you see at your local Best Buy.
I also eventually got an Intel Overdrive chip for that extra socket and moved from the 486 SX 20Mhz to a 486 DX 75Mhz (strange that a 55Mhz increase in clock speed made such a difference - back then the machine was several times faster - these days 55Mhz isn't even noticeable :)).
Yes, that would have made a huge difference. Something like going from a 1.2 GHz Core2Duo to a 3.6 GHz Core2Duo (this is a simplified example for all of you pedants out there). You have to think of the new clock speed as relative to the old (assuming similar processor family), so going from 20 MHz to 75 would have definitely been over 3 times faster not to mention the addition of faster bus speed and a functional math co-processor.
Your opinion need not be submitted.
You missed a word up there. I've highlighted it for you.
Not at all. In English, as it is used in the US (not sure where you're from though I assume the same place) and in the context of your original post, the connotation of that statement implies not only does the subject's opinion "need not be submitted" but, again the connotical, contextual, and idiomatic interpretation is quite clearly, that an opinion "should" not even be submitted in the first place. That is what I was replying to. Back-pedaling does not change that at all.
If you misspoke, that is understandable.
You are entitled to your free speech, but you have no right to use it to trod upon the rights of others. That's where it stops. If he's tired of hearing your opinion, for example, you need to give it a rest. You'd no longer be expressing yourself and instead will have switched over to simply shouting him down.
That's an absurd caricature of what I said. I'm not a Neanderthal to sit around "shouting" (or whatever euphemism you wish to use or situation you wish to imply) people down over their choice in software license. I was responding to a very specific comment made in the GGP's post:
Your opinion need not be submitted.
The answer is, yes, my opinion can and will be submitted. The obvious implication being as long as I'm not violating anyone's rights in doing so. A big part of that is called social skills. Most people, including myself, have them.
Thank you for allowing me to clarify that for anyone else that didn't get it the first time though, as my girlfriend is oft to say...
Really?
Seriously?
True freedom of religion allows your neighbor to worship Satan, and true freedom in software means people will buy closed-source apps when they see value in doing so. Your opinion need not be submitted.
You have this whole freedom thing just a little mixed up. Just because I think people should be free to do something doesn't mean I can't have an opinion or even verbalize that opinion about it. That's part of my freedom. Ironically, it's your freedom to express your disagreement with that like you did above and I am now responding to. See how that works?
If my neighbor was a Satanist and I didn't agree with it, I should still be able to say so. Obviously, any laws against him being so would be immoral as would any actions on my part depriving him of his rights. And me simply saying that I disapprove of someone's actions is not depriving them of any rights, despite certain people's protestations to the contrary. Same goes with open vs. closed source software. I'm not going to try to physically stop anyone from using closed source. However, I'm damn sure going to give my opinion about the matter and I'm perfectly justified in doing so.
I keep a Windows partition exclusively for gaming because of this.
Back when I was a Windows user (and a somewhat younger man), I did a LOT of gaming. Hours and hours, many days. Since I've been using Linux for the last few years, my time has been spent doing other things. I fiddle around with Wine and have most of my stuff working like FarCry, Half-Life, Morrowind, etc., and it actually works amazingly well. Sometimes even better than it did on old XP.
But, all in all, I actually see it as a net positive that Linux doesn't support many games. I can now find other creative outlets to waste my time on. And not chasing the latest greatest video card sure hasn't lost me any money.
Personally, I like my coffee coffee flavored. If that's any consolation.
Yeah, I would imagine it's possible that the codebase for fusion on OSX and workstation on Linux could account for the difference. Who knows.
I have used Virtual Box and I find that it getting bumped down for ease of use is a bit silly. It isn't hard to use at all. It maybe slightly more difficult to install but once installed it is trivial to use.
I have to agree with this as well. If someone has sense enough to make use of virtual machines then they should have sense enough to glom to the VBox or VMWare interfaces and controls about equally well in my opinion. The only thing I can honestly say is easier for me on VMWare is copying a virtual machine from one computer to another and then just starting it up. On VMWare, you just copy the machine's directory from /home/user/vmware to wherever you want on your other computer then click on the virtualmachine.vmx and away you go. Whereas on VBox, the .vdi and settings files are in different directories so it does add slightly to the complexity of going to a new host system with having to add the .vdi file in the drives selection menu and all of that. But once you've done it and know what to do, it isn't really a problem. Besides, you can just can just copy over the .vdi and just recreate the other settings.
All in all, I like VBox. There used to be a bit of a performance delta between it and VMWare, at least on my setup, so I use VMWare mostly to this day as I'm used to it. But that performance difference has been made up in recent releases so that's not an issue anymore. I think my only problem at this point is I like to have the virtual machine unmaximized and at a larger resolution than the host system then just alt/drag the window around to position it where I want. I.E., I have the host at 1280x1024 and the guest at 1600x1200 and while VMWare does this with no problem, VBox snaps the window back to 1280 if I try to make it any bigger than that. It's kind of a drag but it's a necessity that I have that functionality so I will continue with VMWare but the minute that changes or a work-a-round comes to my attention, I just may switch over.
VMware has Aero support in Windows VIsta/7, which VirtualBox does not. VMware's Direct3D and OpenGL support is more advanced.
Just thought I'd chime in on this. True VMWare will run aero. But it doesn't run it fast by any means at least in my experience on an E8400 Core2Duo running Ubuntu 9.10 as a host and Win7 guest. And VBox will run compiz in a Linux guest surprising well. Last I checked, VMWare didn't support compositing in a Linux guest. So, depending on what you're doing is what makes one better than the other in this regard.
My mom loves Craigslist. There is a greasemonkey script that automatically loads the images in each listing as a thumbnail on the main category page underneath said listings. Once I showed her that, it didn't take much convincing to get her to click on the orange icon vs. the blue one. I think that's how it's done. You have to demonstrate clear advantages to the alternative not just the "eat your vegetables" schtick of "it's more securer."
By what measure of success? Effectiveness, sure. But what is the market share of all the Linux distros put together? What is the ratio of Windows to Linux boxes globally or in the US?
How do you define success? Apparently for you, at least in this context, it's market share. That's a bit spurious considering the fact that Linux is Free. What is the market share of Linux anyway? Probably a lot higher than you realize. Oh, you thought only desktop computers ran operating systems? Ever heard of Tivo? Android? Routers? Embedded systems? Servers? I'll bet if you put every device that runs Linux vs. every device that runs Windows you might be surprised about the "ratio of Windows to Linux boxes globally". Besides, Ferrari has low market share. They're a success right?
Says you. You're omitting how many devices don't work on Linux due to a lack of drivers or simple inoperability with Linux. It's improving, but there's a long way to go.
Linux supports more peripherals than OSX; I don't see you bringing that up? You wouldn't happen to have an agenda would you? Besides, I've installed quite a few Linux boxes in my day. It's the very rare exception that I find a device that doesn't just work out of the box. Contrast this with literally every other operating system ever made. And everytime that has happened, I waited a few months for the next kernel update and it did work. A lot of hardware actually works better in Linux. For example, my Verizon USB aircard. In Windows, you have to wait over 30 seconds for it to do its thing and connect and it disconnects requiring pulling it out and reinserting it about once an hour. On Linux, it connects in about 5 seconds and works perfectly for as long as you want. Funny story, I was at my brother's house a couple of weeks back and his Windows 7 box bluescreened so many times, I lost count. Finally, I was like, dude, what does the error say when it crashes? Come to find out the problem was the USB network adapter he had was crashing his box. Plugged it into my netbook running Ubuntu 9.10 and it worked perfectly.
The main flaw i find in Linux is the opposite. It's small because it's small. Developers don't want to double their efforts to sell to a handful of neck beards.
I don't see Linux's smallness as a flaw. Actually, that tends to increase the signal to noise ratio quite a bit. There are quite a few quality software projects that only develop for Linux and/or OSX and refuse to port to Windows because of the inevitable flood of clueless users that would pull in thus swamping the project in handholding. This is a good example. Very high quality software.
As for the "handful of neck beards" comment, didn't you say something about the supposed childish and condescending tone of the GP? Besides, there are quite a few commercial projects that develop for Linux. But, if you stop and think about it, why would there be large amounts of commercial Linux development in any case? One of the possible reasons developing commercial software is such a niche for Linux is that practically anything you need is in the repositories anyway. And quite a bit of Free sofware spanks the commercial alternatives. K3B smokes Nero. Pidgin smokes YIM, AIM, and MSN Messenger. Firefox and Chrome smoke IE, Opera, Safari, what-have-you. And for the stuff where the Free stuff isn't as good as the proprietary bits, it's still pretty good. OpenOffice is pretty good, GIMP is pretty good, Eclipse is pretty good. Why pay for proprietary software when my needs are already met for free?
Wine isn't there either. i use as much FOSS as i can.
That
Exactly. Firefox has certainly got bigger over the years (though of course not bigger than its ancestor Mozilla), but it has also grown in the features it provides.
I think part of the problem is peoples' confusion on what bloat even is and what contexts it matters in. Take Firefox, a general purpose web browser aimed squarely at the typical desktop user. In this context the more features, the better and that doesn't equal the kind of bloat that matters. Bad bloat in this context is anything happening behind the scenes that touches everything the user does even when it doesn't directly impact the rendering of a web page. The Awesome Bar had this issue to the point that if you had a large enough history, say 90 days or so, it would stall the entire browser just digging through it for every letter you typed into the url bar. That is the kind of bloat that needs to be gotten rid of. The ability to render javascript, java, flash, etc. isn't really the kind of bloat that even matters to Joe Desktop-User.
This is just like the firestorm that came down over Linus Torvalds' comments about Linux being bloated. People just ran with it not even realizing that he wasn't talking about features or drivers at all but the internal code auditing the kernel does that stalls it for several nanoseconds everytime a piece of code is run through. I guess getting the story straight doesn't make for fun sensationalism fueled flamewars.
This isn't a solution for everyone but, honestly, just root the phone and install any compatible firmware you want. I have been running CyanogenMod on my G1 and not only is the phone faster but I'm not limited on how many apps I can install by the phone's puny onboard flash as all of my apps now install onto the SD card, I now have wi-fi tethering so any wi-fi enabled device within reach can piggyback off of my phone's internet connection, if I do a hard reset on the phone, all of my apps are still there as they are on the SD card now, and when 2.0 comes out, contrary to what Google, T-Mobile or anyone else may think, I'll be able to put it on my phone.
Sure, the best place to start when you are looking for advice on how to get a particular Windows application to work in Wine is here . Just run a search for your games in the application database and see what comes up.
I've never personally ran either of the two games you mentioned, however, I do have a couple of general pointers.
The very first thing I do when wanting to try a new game is I just put the CD in the drive on my Ubuntu box and see if it will work. Ubuntu 9.10 which is going to drop here in a couple of days offers much tighter integration between apps installed in Wine and the regular desktop. The correct icons are used instead of generic Wine icons, menu entries are better integrated, and the stock software add/remove functionality now supports Wine apps right along side the native Linux ones.
Now, after you have installed Wine and put the CD in the drive and the autorun dialog comes up and you've installed the game, if you click on it in your menu and it doesn't work the most likely problem is there is a particular dll file it's looking for that isn't there. Open up your terminal and navigate to the game's executable in your /home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program files/ directory and try to run it with $ wine app_name.exe. Pay attention to the output and scan through the gobbledygood and look for what it says the problem is. If it is indeed a dll, just do a google search with "missing.dll download" and usually, a site will come up that has it for download. Copy it to the same directory the game's executable is and it should work at that point as that is in the search path for dll's when wine tries to load something. If it still doesn't work, that's when I hit the application database. Sometimes there are simple tweaks and sometimes there are more complex ones. Fallout 3 comes to mind here. That should get you started on that.
A couple of general Linux pointers:
First, don't be afraid to break your install. Linux is very robust but it will do anything you tell it to do with a salute and a smile. So, if you unwittingly tell it to break itself, it will. And as a curious technically adept user, you will do this probably more than once. No problem, just expect that at first, that will happen. Trying to fix it will be a good learning experience and even if you don't succeed and have to reinstall, you will still have learned a great deal. I generally recommend any new Linux user that really wants to learn Linux and not just use it to "get work done" start off in a virtual machine. VirtualBox is really good as it's free and it allows 3D capabilities in Linux guests unlike vmware so you get the full effect with compiz, etc. Run it and read all the Linux books you can find and experiment with it. It's a very rewarding experience and this is how I learned to use Linux. The funny thing is, after a year or so, you will look back on some of the mistakes you made at first, at the time seeing them as insurmountable errors requiring yet another reinstall but after the year, are the easiest thing in the world to fix. My first reinstall came after messing up the nvidia driver. Now, I can install and configure it in my sleep.
So, don't let anything discourage you. There will be times when you're like, "Screw this, I'm going back to Windows." Just know that when that happens, it means you are normal and just need to persevere a little longer.
I hope this helps and if I sound condescending at all, I don't mean it that way. If you have any questions, just reply.
Your analogy is flawed because, in general, a .exe file will run on Vista or XP or Win7. They don't have a different package format for different versions the way RedHat and Ubuntu do. Both Windows and Linux have programs break as versions change. You need to compare Apples to Apples and version changes in Windows to version changes in Ubuntu.
No, what I was getting at is that a setup.exe is a packaged installer. You run the exe and it runs a self contained script that copies the relevant files and settings to their intended directories and makes the appropriate registry entries for the program to work. If you just distributed the raw executables and expected the end user to put them in the right places themselves, it wouldn't work. This is akin to releasing a program for Ubuntu without packaging it in a deb file. And criticizing Canonical because third party software publishers aren't packaging their software in a deb file is like criticizing Microsoft if some developer didn't distribute their files as setup.exe's. I get that from your perspective this actually is Canonical's fault as they should somehow make it easier for developer's to make these deb files. Checkinstall is the program you are looking for. When the dev compiles their app they use checkinstall and it automatically compiles the app and packages it into a deb file. This tool is somewhat rudimentary and limited but it does work. Can the whole process be made even easier? Of course it can. Anything can be made easier. But with the plethora of good software that is packaged well and ready to go with just a click right now, difficulty of packaging software is not really the sticking point it's being made out to be by some people.
If they want to make their system more usable I think they should adapt their package manager in several ways. First, they should create a way to find and license software from within the package manager, a feature they've announced. Second, they should make sure those apps have the same functionality as other apps managed by the package manager (like auto updates). Adding customer reviews would be nice but is not essential. Adding the ability to automatically re-download already licensed apps or move those apps directly to a new machine and de-authenticate them on the exiting machine is also fairly critical. Finally, they need to make the method for developing and publishing these packages simple for users, by helping to tweak development tools to create the correct packages by default and by offering hosting by Canonical as well as an easy way for developers to run their own repositories that get added to the store.
I absolutely agree and have been preaching this exact thing to people any time the subject comes up. One of the greatest treasures of Linux that could really propel the platform is the package management system and sadly, it isn't being leveraged in an accessible user-friendly way. Hopefully the Software Store addresses this however, it is going to take a while as it's looking like it's going to be phased in over the next 4 releases. I understand that Canonical has to ration its limited resources but if I were Mark Shuttleworth, I would make this a top priority so as not find themselves in a position of too little too late as it's no secret that with the iPhones success and model, a lot of the industry is going to want to move in this direction. Even Microsoft is making some strides towards this model with the ease of driver downloads in Windows 7.
Helping companies clean up their software to work better is one of Canonical's big pushes right now. Remember the free usability testing they're offering? Ideally the available tools should make things easy without any hand holding, but if they are lacking or too unfamiliar to developers, Canonical needs to do whatever it takes to bridge the gap.
Your confusing my point. I'm not saying they shouldn't do this at all. I
That's funny, since I never see claims about the market share for Ubuntu versus Windows while I often see it for Linux versus Windows. I think the definition of operating system in those terms is very muddy so people are understandably confused, especially since almost all the software we're talking about will run on most any version of Linux, it just is difficult to install for normal users.
Yeah, and I see market share breakdowns for XP vs Vista. You see Linux vs Windows because many people see Linux as this big monolithic thing. Hint: IT'S NOT. Software in Ubuntu is NOT hard to install. Seriously, click on the .deb file and click "Install" on the little box that pops up. If the program is intended for Ubuntu yet is not distributed as a deb file then it is not finished. Start distributed Windows programs without a setup.exe or msi and watch the mayhem.
publisher doesn't make an installer for the Ubuntu OS, then that is the publisher's fault.
Why do I care? To me it doesn't matter whose fault it is, only if I can do what I want or not. That's where Apple is winning, by taking responsibility for broken parts of the user experience and filling in any holes rather than blaming others. Hopefully Canonical is doing the same to some extent and that includes making it easy and profitable and a good idea for developers to create software in a way that works well with Ubuntu.
What do you expect Canonical to do? Write anybody's app for them that wants to develop for Ubuntu? That's ridiculous. The pieces are there for a very smooth end user software installation experience. If publishers don't want to use them then what the hell do you expect Canonical or anybody else to do about it? Hold their hand?
If a publisher really wants their software to be used by users of a particular OS, there are ways to make the install process from start to finish completely easy and intuitive.
Not really. Like if a publisher wants to have an app that can be run from the network on different Linux boxes from the same executable, I suppose they could replace it with a script that call the right executable for a given machine, somehow. I also think it's beside the point. A developer could write their own Linux variant to work with their software, but they aren't going to. They;re just going to pass on Linux as too difficult to develop for, and provide nothing or some less usable junk and let the nerds figure it out or fail as it pans out.
Are you serious? Have you ever even used Linux? Hint... Make an executable script on the user's box that goes something like this:
#!/bin/sh
ssh -XC my.app.server.net $APP
Anybody with sense enough to set up an app server is going to be able to do this and it would work seamlessly. And that's just one way. *nix practically specializes in this.
If every publisher did as good a job with their website as they do, we wouldn't even be talking about this.
If every Linux distro used the same standards and made the task easy for developers we wouldn't be talking about it either. Given Linux's tiny market share and the resultant lack of financial motivation for Website developers, which do you think is more likely to happen? Which can people interested in promoting Linux actually do?
Yeah, and if Microsoft and Apple would hold hands and sing kumbaya, you could run Garageband on Windows 7. That makes about as much sense as what you said. The different Linux's are run by different people with different goals. Target Debian, Red Hat and Suse and you have practically cornered the market. Matter of fact, rpm's run on Debian as long as they are packaged to the standard and not the Red Hat specific superset. A competent developer would know this.
so a developer for Ubuntu just nee
Except you really can't today, because the package managers don't support it. What you can do is provide a link to a script or just a binary installer.
Sure you can. Build an installer that has the program binary, config scripts for deb, rpm, and whatever else, an OS detection routine and some logic that when it detects a deb, rpm, or whatever based OS, puts the package together and calls the native package installer like dpkg -i on Ubuntu to do the rest. Every bit of that is very doable and can be rolled up into one file. I'd throw something together just to show you but it's getting late. Maybe tomorrow.
I ain't mad at you but the rest of your post is mostly opinionated wool-gathering and I'm not really going to bother responding with more of the same.
That couldn't be further from the truth. When I go to a website, say frostwire.com, and click on the Ubuntu download button for an application, the app downloads and the installer automatically opens.
The problem being, that site is a rare exception. Very few sites tailor their downloads for each particular Linux distro and package manager and even those that do often have a confusing array of different download options that rely upon the user having a lot more information about their OS and hardware than is common among normal users. A lot more common situation is to be directed to execute a series of CLI commands or to be given a binary blob installer that must be downloaded and run. This is no worse than Windows, mind you, except that Windows users are accustomed to it as the only method, whereas under Ubuntu there are several different methods users must learn.
See, people are confused. "Linux" is not an operating system just like NT is not an operating system. Ubuntu is an OS, WinXP is an os, RedHat is an OS, Win 98 is an OS, just to give a few examples. So, problem one, is publishers publishing, and you (the hypothetical neophyte consumer), going and looking for the "Linux" version of the app when the operating system you are using is not "Linux" but rather Ubuntu. No website that publishes software targeted at OS's using the Linux kernel should have a link for "Linux" unless you are specifically targeting power users. It doesn't even make sense to do so. Of course, that is a perception and perspective problem. Hopefully as Ubuntu gains mindshare, that will change. If a publisher doesn't make an installer for the Ubuntu OS, then that is the publisher's fault. Again, hopefully, as Ubuntu gains mindshare, this will also take care of itself. The only thing that is really confusing about clicking on the Ubuntu link for an installer on a website is are you running 9.04? 8.10? Karmic? 64 bit? That is a problem that again could be easily solved by software publishers. An install script could easily distinguish between each of these versions and set up the software correctly so that all you would have to click on the download page would be "Ubuntu". As a side note, a .deb file and a .rpm file aren't really all that different. You could publish a file containing the binary and the config files necessary for .rpm, .deb, so on and so forth and some OS detection logic and call it a "Linux" binary if you just had to do that. And that link isn't any harder to click than the ones that say "Windows 2000/XP" and "Windows Vista/7" right underneath it. I could see the publisher not wanting to waste bandwidth by shipping 64 and 32 bit binaries in every package but that's a choice for them to make. And the vast majority of Free software that is distributed via a website link doesn't have the source automatically included so I'm not sure what your contention is with the binary blob thing. If a publisher really wants their software to be used by users of a particular OS, there are ways to make the install process from start to finish completely easy and intuitive. Hopefully, this will happen sooner rather than later. Frostwire is an excellent example of what can be done. If every publisher did as good a job with their website as they do, we wouldn't even be talking about this.
Right, so a developer for Ubuntu just needs to write a specific version of their application for removable media and network drives
Yep, you got it. Typically referred to as static binaries. I have several on my harddrive now that I just click and they run. No fuss, no muss. So, yes, this can be done just like it is in Windows. As a matter of fac
Provided you accept Android as a version of Linux, we have this.