People have demonstrated via DLC they are happy to spend $2 a song. If you get 80 new songs with a game for $50-$60, then that is a bargain. Not to mention that with each new game they also add new gameplay such as guitar battles, online co-op, online battles, etc. The new guitar hero is adding quite a bit, such as music authoring, a new guitar slide bar, drums, full band gameplay modes, battle of the bands game modes, etc.
I've never seen Neversoft claim they were the first full band game. If they made the statement, then it was inane because everyone knows it isn't remotely true. They were however the first to do guitars and start the genre to begin with.
I will say having played Rock Band and Guitar Hero, I prefer Guitar Hero for a couple reasons. The guitar portion of Rock Band is far too easy. I sit there all day waiting for notes to play, where as drums provides a reasonable challenge. There is a great disparity there. Next, Rock Band added drums, but it didn't do much in creating gameplay around the instruments.
Guitar Hero: World Tour has developed a better guitar, better drums, and has better gameplay to boot.
Not to mention everyone I know with Rock Band has complained about cheap instruments breaking, especially the drums.
The one advantage Rock Band had (and might have with the next generation) was more DLC. Guitar Hero says they are going to step up here and offer more DLC. We'll see.
I think this will be huge. Guitar Hero: World Tour lets you actually put new music in the game. Plenty of people will be putting in covers of copyrighted music, but I'm think small local bands will use Guitar Hero to promote their music in grassroots type of way. I'd love to see the first band that gets a record contract because their song was a top download through Guitar Hero. It will happen.
Out of that population, how many don't have the income to purchase games? How many our outside the age bracket to purchase games? How many live in countries where rampant piracy means they don't really have a proper retail market for American games?
I don't think RedHat has ever concerned themselves with average desktop users. Novell is still aiming at the enterprise market with SLES/SLED, but openSUSE is an attempt at a community distro. They united several fan-run forums into an official openSUSE community forum. They have a good wiki and decent documentation. You can buy a retail box of openSUSE with a thick manual, case badges, and a DVD featuring both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.
I wouldn't say that openSUSE has the best community. It isn't near the size that Ubuntu is. But openSUSE has a passable community for support.
I also still enjoy the Gentoo forums, even though I moved away from Gentoo (the lack of package maintainers is killing Gentoo).
Honestly, I understand how people would feel that way. I think Novell's patent deal enables MS fud. I'm not sure I would give Novell a single dime. However, openSUSE is free and largely community driven. The openSUSE build tools are aimed at the entire Linux community, and allow anyone to compile anything for any distro.
There are other quality distros like Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Arch, etc. I just happen to really like openSUSE for a couple of reasons.
Yast obviously, but the biggest thing is that Novell pays tons of developers to patch upstream bugs, backport features, etc. I find openSUSE just has great packages. Novell's go-oo fork of OOo has been pushing innovation, and largely forced OOo to adopt features they were slow to adopt.
Almost every time I say this I get modded troll, but really it is the truth. Ubuntu is doing a very good job at increasing visibility for Linux on the whole, but in many ways, it is far from the best Linux has to offer. It frustrates me that people have bad experiences with Ubuntu and then assume that Linux is bad on the whole.
Ubuntu is supposed to be very simple. It is designed for people who want a working, basic desktop out of the box with sane defaults. It is marketed at a certain audience.
However, in almost every regard I find openSUSE to be a better distro. Their sane defaults are even better. They put out a quality Gnome desktop, a quality KDE 3 desktop and a quality KDE 4 desktop. Their package manager is on par with Ubuntu, if not better these days. The installer is superb. Yast is a great "control panel" and makes configuration a breeze.
openSUSE 11.1 is coming out in December or so. I am running the beta of it at the moment, as well as openSUSE 11.0. I highly recommend checking it out.
You do have a point though that no one company or person is Linux. There are difficulties sometimes figuring out if a bug is with one package, another package, the distro, or what. However the advantage of OSS development, even though it is splintered, is that anyone can take responsibility. If I see a usability problem with Windows, I can't fix it. Heck, I can't even report it to Microsoft. They don't listen. Apple refuses to take customer suggestions and even threatens you with their lawyers if you attempt to. With Linux, not only can I make suggestions and bug reports, but I can also just fix it myself.
If Ubuntu can't uninstall packages, that is Ubuntu's fault, not KDE's. Ubuntu has some terrible KDE packages, and their package manager is responsible for cleanly removing them.
Apparently you haven't used KDE 4 in a while. It works just fine. I recommend the openSUSE packages especially since they backport so many fixes and features.
Honestly, the ability to tie Exchange into your PBX seamlessly and reply to email from your phone, and check your voicemails from your email is pretty nifty.
There are issues with QT apps running really slow on boxes that use the proprietary Nvidia driver because that driver can't handle xrender calls very well. Yesterday Nvidia released a new driver that is supposed to fix the xrender issue. People are reporting that KDE 4 apps now fly on their boxes.
Conversely, I've seen people with low-end systems claim that KDE 4 flies on their boxes if they have onboard Intel graphics, because that driver is so good with xrender calls.
That is the reality that they have laws to recognize IP, but they won't enforce them to protect American IP. However I was responding to a poster that said the world doesn't believe in IP. China believes in IP. They just don't believe in paying for ours.
Funny, China went out of their way to have a major crackdown on distribution and marketing rights to the Olympics, while being one of the biggest nations to pirate IP. You can't have it both ways.
Some distros do have unique features. For instance Fedora 9 had kernel-mode setting if you had an Intel video card. At the time, it was only one of a few, if not the only installers to offer full disk encryption in the installer, etc. Ubuntu offers Wubi.
Yes, but when writing an article reviewing the distro, shouldn't they talk about the unique features rather than just states, "hey, our release has Gnome!"
Each distro includes OpenOffice.org, Gnome, KDE, etc. I can get Gnome 2.24 by upgrading packages within my existing distro. openSUSE 11.1 and Fedora 9 will ship with it. So what actually sets this apart? I haven't used Mandriva since it was Mandrake, and I'm curious.
I hear they got a great "Control Panel" that rivals Yast. What is it like? What unique features does the distro have?
Wouldn't that be the pertinent information to have?
Well, we have net neutrality today without government restrictions. McCain hasn't taken much of a stance that I've seen on net neutrality, rather he doesn't think government should regulate business on principle.
It would be nice to see net neutrality protected, but I'm not sure I want Congress involved, because they are just as likely to screw it up. Telcos are pushing senators to go in the opposite direction and establish government regulation that would destroy net neutrality. So perhaps non-regulation isn't so bad.
Both Digg and Slashdot noted that all specific promises of net neutrality disappeared. When people threw a fit, his site changed yet again adding in promises to protect the open nature of the internet.
That's good to know. However the specific references to net neutrality and many of the promises did disappear from the site. Slashdot ran an article on it. When Digg and Slashdot went nuts, then they decided to recommit on some of those policies. If you check the site regularly, you'll notice that the policies change all the time.
I noticed FactCheck.org said that McCain made no plans at all in his energy plan to produce any clean energy. However, that same day I ran both energy plans to compare them, and saw that McCain made tons of specific promises to create clean energy. I contacted FactCheck.org and they said the policies on the site change all the time to the point that it is hard to keep up with what each candidate is standing by daily.
Slashdot Mirror
People have demonstrated via DLC they are happy to spend $2 a song. If you get 80 new songs with a game for $50-$60, then that is a bargain. Not to mention that with each new game they also add new gameplay such as guitar battles, online co-op, online battles, etc. The new guitar hero is adding quite a bit, such as music authoring, a new guitar slide bar, drums, full band gameplay modes, battle of the bands game modes, etc.
I've never seen Neversoft claim they were the first full band game. If they made the statement, then it was inane because everyone knows it isn't remotely true. They were however the first to do guitars and start the genre to begin with.
I will say having played Rock Band and Guitar Hero, I prefer Guitar Hero for a couple reasons. The guitar portion of Rock Band is far too easy. I sit there all day waiting for notes to play, where as drums provides a reasonable challenge. There is a great disparity there. Next, Rock Band added drums, but it didn't do much in creating gameplay around the instruments.
Guitar Hero: World Tour has developed a better guitar, better drums, and has better gameplay to boot.
Not to mention everyone I know with Rock Band has complained about cheap instruments breaking, especially the drums.
The one advantage Rock Band had (and might have with the next generation) was more DLC. Guitar Hero says they are going to step up here and offer more DLC. We'll see.
I think this will be huge. Guitar Hero: World Tour lets you actually put new music in the game. Plenty of people will be putting in covers of copyrighted music, but I'm think small local bands will use Guitar Hero to promote their music in grassroots type of way. I'd love to see the first band that gets a record contract because their song was a top download through Guitar Hero. It will happen.
Out of that population, how many don't have the income to purchase games? How many our outside the age bracket to purchase games? How many live in countries where rampant piracy means they don't really have a proper retail market for American games?
I've tried reporting desktop usability issues.
I don't think RedHat has ever concerned themselves with average desktop users. Novell is still aiming at the enterprise market with SLES/SLED, but openSUSE is an attempt at a community distro. They united several fan-run forums into an official openSUSE community forum. They have a good wiki and decent documentation. You can buy a retail box of openSUSE with a thick manual, case badges, and a DVD featuring both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.
I wouldn't say that openSUSE has the best community. It isn't near the size that Ubuntu is. But openSUSE has a passable community for support.
I also still enjoy the Gentoo forums, even though I moved away from Gentoo (the lack of package maintainers is killing Gentoo).
Honestly, I understand how people would feel that way. I think Novell's patent deal enables MS fud. I'm not sure I would give Novell a single dime. However, openSUSE is free and largely community driven. The openSUSE build tools are aimed at the entire Linux community, and allow anyone to compile anything for any distro.
There are other quality distros like Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Arch, etc. I just happen to really like openSUSE for a couple of reasons.
Yast obviously, but the biggest thing is that Novell pays tons of developers to patch upstream bugs, backport features, etc. I find openSUSE just has great packages. Novell's go-oo fork of OOo has been pushing innovation, and largely forced OOo to adopt features they were slow to adopt.
Almost every time I say this I get modded troll, but really it is the truth. Ubuntu is doing a very good job at increasing visibility for Linux on the whole, but in many ways, it is far from the best Linux has to offer. It frustrates me that people have bad experiences with Ubuntu and then assume that Linux is bad on the whole.
Ubuntu is supposed to be very simple. It is designed for people who want a working, basic desktop out of the box with sane defaults. It is marketed at a certain audience.
However, in almost every regard I find openSUSE to be a better distro. Their sane defaults are even better. They put out a quality Gnome desktop, a quality KDE 3 desktop and a quality KDE 4 desktop. Their package manager is on par with Ubuntu, if not better these days. The installer is superb. Yast is a great "control panel" and makes configuration a breeze.
openSUSE 11.1 is coming out in December or so. I am running the beta of it at the moment, as well as openSUSE 11.0. I highly recommend checking it out.
You do have a point though that no one company or person is Linux. There are difficulties sometimes figuring out if a bug is with one package, another package, the distro, or what. However the advantage of OSS development, even though it is splintered, is that anyone can take responsibility. If I see a usability problem with Windows, I can't fix it. Heck, I can't even report it to Microsoft. They don't listen. Apple refuses to take customer suggestions and even threatens you with their lawyers if you attempt to. With Linux, not only can I make suggestions and bug reports, but I can also just fix it myself.
If Ubuntu can't uninstall packages, that is Ubuntu's fault, not KDE's. Ubuntu has some terrible KDE packages, and their package manager is responsible for cleanly removing them.
Apparently you haven't used KDE 4 in a while. It works just fine. I recommend the openSUSE packages especially since they backport so many fixes and features.
Didn't the Nigerian government expose how Microsoft was bribing them to move away from Linux on Classmate PCs?
Being able to check your email by calling your voice mail extension from anywhere is pretty damned nice.
Mind you we have smart phones, so we don't need the functionality, but the functionality is still nice for some users.
Honestly, the ability to tie Exchange into your PBX seamlessly and reply to email from your phone, and check your voicemails from your email is pretty nifty.
That being said, Zimbra is damned impressive.
Gmail would be the simplest solution.
Creighton University just switched to it.
There are issues with QT apps running really slow on boxes that use the proprietary Nvidia driver because that driver can't handle xrender calls very well. Yesterday Nvidia released a new driver that is supposed to fix the xrender issue. People are reporting that KDE 4 apps now fly on their boxes.
Conversely, I've seen people with low-end systems claim that KDE 4 flies on their boxes if they have onboard Intel graphics, because that driver is so good with xrender calls.
That is the reality that they have laws to recognize IP, but they won't enforce them to protect American IP. However I was responding to a poster that said the world doesn't believe in IP. China believes in IP. They just don't believe in paying for ours.
I'm not anti-copyright. For one I argued against piracy, and for protecting IP. Next time, read my post.
Funny, China went out of their way to have a major crackdown on distribution and marketing rights to the Olympics, while being one of the biggest nations to pirate IP. You can't have it both ways.
Some distros do have unique features. For instance Fedora 9 had kernel-mode setting if you had an Intel video card. At the time, it was only one of a few, if not the only installers to offer full disk encryption in the installer, etc. Ubuntu offers Wubi.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/FeatureList
That is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. When reviewing distros, write about what makes that distro unique.
Yes, but when writing an article reviewing the distro, shouldn't they talk about the unique features rather than just states, "hey, our release has Gnome!"
Each distro includes OpenOffice.org, Gnome, KDE, etc. I can get Gnome 2.24 by upgrading packages within my existing distro. openSUSE 11.1 and Fedora 9 will ship with it. So what actually sets this apart? I haven't used Mandriva since it was Mandrake, and I'm curious.
I hear they got a great "Control Panel" that rivals Yast. What is it like? What unique features does the distro have?
Wouldn't that be the pertinent information to have?
First off, the entire world does purchase US music, movies, games, software, etc. This isn't even remotely debatable.
The fact that you think South Park is the height of culture also speaks volumes about your definition of culture.
Well, we have net neutrality today without government restrictions. McCain hasn't taken much of a stance that I've seen on net neutrality, rather he doesn't think government should regulate business on principle.
It would be nice to see net neutrality protected, but I'm not sure I want Congress involved, because they are just as likely to screw it up. Telcos are pushing senators to go in the opposite direction and establish government regulation that would destroy net neutrality. So perhaps non-regulation isn't so bad.
Both Digg and Slashdot noted that all specific promises of net neutrality disappeared. When people threw a fit, his site changed yet again adding in promises to protect the open nature of the internet.
That's good to know. However the specific references to net neutrality and many of the promises did disappear from the site. Slashdot ran an article on it. When Digg and Slashdot went nuts, then they decided to recommit on some of those policies. If you check the site regularly, you'll notice that the policies change all the time.
I noticed FactCheck.org said that McCain made no plans at all in his energy plan to produce any clean energy. However, that same day I ran both energy plans to compare them, and saw that McCain made tons of specific promises to create clean energy. I contacted FactCheck.org and they said the policies on the site change all the time to the point that it is hard to keep up with what each candidate is standing by daily.
Those numbers assume the rest of the galaxy isn't buying our movies because they pirate them. Damn those bastards on Alpha Centauri!
47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.