Has Flash fixed any problems? Flash plugin is currenlty the only reason left why my computer gets unresponsive. Even OpenOffice seems to be less resource-hungry than browser with several heavy Flash-based sites open.
It's not a matter of control but of platform stability. It's much more costly to support PC games because of numerous hardware configurations, OS versions + service packs, and all the shit that users install on their computers: third party tools that "boost" CPU/GPU performance, anti-viruses that are more like rootkits etc etc etc. Also, the game data is much more expensive to create than code, and if you design with "least common denominator" in mind you can share the data across all platforms, a major gain. It's more profitable to release for three platforms and have average sales on each than to target only one, no matter which one.
GP probably meant that "server" role for something that draws "client"'s output is inappropriate. Consider a typical 3D game: server is what executes the game logic, and client is what paints the screen. X has it backwards, forcing remote application take a client role and initiate the connection to it, that's weird and illogical.
It would have probably make more sense if X had a server part running on the remote machine that executed the application and sent its output to a thin client part that would draw it. This way, implementing persistent sessions (e.g. changing X terminals while application is being run) would have been easier.
Well... loading to RAM is kind of copying. Or you could possibly (theoretically) use network-mounted disk with an installed OS image to circumvent the EULA. Although this is hypothetical (EULAs are usually per CPU, don't know about Apple's one) and not applicable to this particular case (OS X is probably not capable of this), but I can understand the reasoning behind this.
After reading this thread I conclude that old communist propaganda might have had a point. It seems to me that visiting (at least entering) USSR in the peak of Cold War for an American was easier, than entering US for a Russian now, in peaceful times.
Thank you for the answer:) It was an interesting reading. As early as 1998 I heard the rumours that Linux was used for CGI in Titanic movie, but I never read a first-person account on actual Linux usage in CG industry.
Just curious (I'm honestly not trolling!): you mention that using Linux workstations was cheaper than SGIs. But were they capable of replacing the SGIs? As far as I remember, it was hard to find and configure a decent 2D card for use in Linux back then (1998-1999), and OpenGL support wasn't mature enough for professional use (at least in my opinion). And software support... well, don't know much about SGI's software, but given the current state of Linux software support, I doubt that Linux had anything comparable to (presumably) mature SGI offerings. Could you please elaborate on those topics?
Well, Microsoft has been quite successful in fighting copyright violations of its own products by Russian government and affiliated entities. Right now they all pay large license fees (that's why they dream to build nationwide Linux distro and already started converting schools to Linux).
So the "creators" (an institute, affiliated to Ministry of Defense) aren't considered to be distributors in GPL sense when they ship their systems to another Ministry of Defense-affiliated entities?
P.S. Prior to 2009, they used to have an "order" form on their site, presumably for everyone - but right now it's gone.
What's worse, they change copyright notices of existing programs to their employees and do not include GPL license text in their "distribution".
Is it a GPL violation? They don't distribute MSVS outside of MoD and its numerous branches (state companies) - you can't neither buy nor download the system. Is it Ok to do the aforementioned things then?
Further, the Kremlin has recognized the occupied territory -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- as independent nations although the entire family of Western nations has not.
On a side note, why Abkhazs and Ossetians, nations with distinct language, culture and history from both Georgians and Russians, have such a bad luck (especially compared to Kosovo citizens)?
Just because they happen to align themselves with Russia?
But hey, thugs as they are, they invested money in socialist way. Apart from large military spendings, which I agree have nothing to do with socialism, Soviet state's main problem was losing the feedback between producers and consumers.
Everyone has been guaranteed a job, no matter the productivity, and efficiency has been continuously lowering down to the level when "people pretended that they are working and the state pretended that it pays the salaries".
I did not compare unemployment rates - I told that "sense of entitlement" is a lot more common in Europe.
Few other writers have mistaken me for the American. No, I'm Russian, but living abroad, and I know pretty damn well when I'm saying that nowadays Europe is socialist, in some ways (e.g. welfare) even more socialist than USSR was.I was born in a socialist country, and fully experienced the long-term consequences of tax money being invested in "proper education, healthcare and welfare" - consequences that you'll be experiencing in 15, 20 or maybe 50 years. Good luck further going the road that Russia and China took U-turn from.
P.S. I'm not implying that US is going to be Ok in the long term. They have better changes, though.
P.P.S. By the way, your data seems to come from pre-crisis period, right now both Latvia and Estonia have more than 15% unemployment. I have relatives in Latvia, and I'm speaking first hand.
Well, let me explain. Availability of higher education raises the expectations among the people about their future jobs. Someone who has been taught philosophy or so-called "business administration" is not going to accept the job of a receptionist or waiter.
Higher education surely does not create unemployment by itself. But now it looks like there's a social stigma imposed on those who chose to start working early - either by skipping the education altogether or by going to so called "professional schools"
That stigma results in artificial demand on degrees from universities - right now there's a lot of low-quality "degree mills" (especially in Eastern Europe) that are market response to precisely that demand.
That's "degree mills" graduates who join the ranks of the unemployed and not willing to take "menial labour" jobs (living off social security in wealthier countries).
About this being an anti-socialism rant... I'm Russian (though I'm working abroad), so yes, I'm rather anti-socialist - just take a look on anomalies socialism created in my mother country.
I'm not saying that uneducated people have better chances to find the job. What I'm saying is that high expectations, raised by (relatively easy) availability of higher education make sense of entitlement pretty common in Europe.
Almost every Western European I know complains about his salary, his working conditions, his employer, etc etc. A lot of people just register themselves in different Arbeitsamt-s (work departments) around the Europe and do nothing to find the job (living off social security).
Europe, as seen through the eyes of an immigrant (I'm Russian, technically also an European, but I'm one of migrants), is a society of overpaid people, who think that they are entitled to good wages and white-collar jobs just because they graduated from something with "management" in the name - and if they are not getting that, they blame government for not providing them with adequate "living standards".
To be fair, that's also true for Russia. USA, where there's no social stigma related to menial labour, are much more competetive IMHO.
God, the sense of entitlement in the US is making me sick...
It's even more frequent in socialist-minded Europe (Russia included), where more than half of population have higher education (because it's mostly free, especially in post-communist countries). Then everyone expects to get an "advanced" job and despises menial labour or "low-level" technical jobs (like say, a car technician).
It all results in high unemployment ("advanced" jobs are rare by definition) for European "aborigines", while uneducated (but willing to work everywhere) migrants fill the labour market gap.
If developers work on whatever they feel is important, Free Software eventually wins, just like the zombies. If people don't like new things, then they pay attention to old things, and work from the old version to fix things. Free Software can never get worse. Old versions never get discontinued. Free Software is an always expanding ecosystem, and it grows with every line of code that is shared with the public.
Oh, come on, fork KDE 3 and go on with its development. Or fork KDE 4 and bring it back to be more KDE 3-ish.
What you are missing is that certain level of organization is required to manage projects as large as that. And if you don't like the direction that some Free Software project is heading in, you cannot fork it without forking the entire organization behind it. And it's so much easier to just switch to something else.
On the other hand, Visual C++ still has the most reliable C++ code completion of all IDEs that I've seen, and it's got even better in VS2010.
How come? Intellisense does not like macros (e.g. it has troubles finding functions that are declared inside macros), it often fails for me on not-that-large code base (about 750k LOC in about 10 thousand files) even for simple functions. It does not like forward declarations as well, leaving me without hint if some class was only defined, but not #include'd. If Visual Studio were that superb, there would be no market for tools like VisualAssist (try it, it fixes a lot of Intellisense flaws).
If you design a set of standard underpinnings that are the same across the Linux landscape, and that stay backwards compatible so that they can "write once, use forever" like they do on Windows they WILL release binary blob drivers and binary applications that support your OS. Because all businesses like making money and like having lots of customers. if all they have to do is add a "Linux 32/64" folder to the Windows ones to add you as a customer? or simply make a SINGLE version of Photoshop and know that this version will work until they are ready to release version 5 or whatever? They WILL support you.
Backward compatibility is not something that comes without effort. Your OS will have bugs, and applications will depend on these bugs even if it's not part of the spec. Being backward compatible means keeping those bugs, designing things around them, and - the most important - testing a lot of existing applications prior to making a new release.
That thing does not scale well.Even Microsoft is starting to treat it with less priority than before, because it would take them another 6 or more years to release next OS version (NOT counting Windows 7 which is Vista re-launched) otherwise.
For a volunteer project where testers are the most scarce resource (finding/submitting/re-checking bugs is a tedious and not rewarding job) long-term backward compatibility is not an option. It'll transform it into an inflexible piece of software that is not fun to develop or even maintain. As someone said, "People paint for free. People do not tend to clean toilets for free".
That is why I think that FOSS software will always remain a niche for those who want to trade knowledge for ease of use.
In parts of the world like Poland (an EU country, by the way) and Russia people still buy desktop computers as independent parts and just pay (usually the seller) for building them. And that's what most people do (situation with laptops is different though).
180 USD for an OS adds about 40% to cost of an average computer bought here. Considering that in Poland there are a lot of people who make less than 500 USD a month (and in Russia 500 USD/month is above average), you may probably understand, why piracy cannot and will not be eliminated in Eastern Europe in foreseeable future.
(And no, mass switching to Linux is even less likely than in "civilized world", because Windows is essentially free (as in beer) software here. There are even several Windows distros, available for download).
Being recognizable by a large group of people is a capital itself. Artists are special because millions of human lemmings declare themselves "fans", pay money for performance/records, and even sacrifice their lives sometimes...
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You forgot about the Chineese who invented rocket propulsion :>
You are obviously not coding stuff that pushes hardware to its limit. But well, clerks of the programming are also needed and are probably well paid.
Has Flash fixed any problems? Flash plugin is currenlty the only reason left why my computer gets unresponsive. Even OpenOffice seems to be less resource-hungry than browser with several heavy Flash-based sites open.
It's not a matter of control but of platform stability. It's much more costly to support PC games because of numerous hardware configurations, OS versions + service packs, and all the shit that users install on their computers: third party tools that "boost" CPU/GPU performance, anti-viruses that are more like rootkits etc etc etc. Also, the game data is much more expensive to create than code, and if you design with "least common denominator" in mind you can share the data across all platforms, a major gain. It's more profitable to release for three platforms and have average sales on each than to target only one, no matter which one.
GP probably meant that "server" role for something that draws "client"'s output is inappropriate. Consider a typical 3D game: server is what executes the game logic, and client is what paints the screen. X has it backwards, forcing remote application take a client role and initiate the connection to it, that's weird and illogical.
It would have probably make more sense if X had a server part running on the remote machine that executed the application and sent its output to a thin client part that would draw it. This way, implementing persistent sessions (e.g. changing X terminals while application is being run) would have been easier.
Well... loading to RAM is kind of copying. Or you could possibly (theoretically) use network-mounted disk with an installed OS image to circumvent the EULA. Although this is hypothetical (EULAs are usually per CPU, don't know about Apple's one) and not applicable to this particular case (OS X is probably not capable of this), but I can understand the reasoning behind this.
No it does not.
/lib/libc.so.7 (0x29322000)
[rcl@dellgx260 ~]$ ldd `which gnome-panel` | grep libc
libc.so.7 =>
After reading this thread I conclude that old communist propaganda might have had a point. It seems to me that visiting (at least entering) USSR in the peak of Cold War for an American was easier, than entering US for a Russian now, in peaceful times.
Thank you for the answer :) It was an interesting reading. As early as 1998 I heard the rumours that Linux was used for CGI in Titanic movie, but I never read a first-person account on actual Linux usage in CG industry.
Just curious (I'm honestly not trolling!): you mention that using Linux workstations was cheaper than SGIs. But were they capable of replacing the SGIs? As far as I remember, it was hard to find and configure a decent 2D card for use in Linux back then (1998-1999), and OpenGL support wasn't mature enough for professional use (at least in my opinion). And software support... well, don't know much about SGI's software, but given the current state of Linux software support, I doubt that Linux had anything comparable to (presumably) mature SGI offerings. Could you please elaborate on those topics?
Well, Microsoft has been quite successful in fighting copyright violations of its own products by Russian government and affiliated entities. Right now they all pay large license fees (that's why they dream to build nationwide Linux distro and already started converting schools to Linux).
But again, Microsoft has got a lot of money...
So the "creators" (an institute, affiliated to Ministry of Defense) aren't considered to be distributors in GPL sense when they ship their systems to another Ministry of Defense-affiliated entities?
P.S. Prior to 2009, they used to have an "order" form on their site, presumably for everyone - but right now it's gone.
They use customized Linux ([archived page with details]) and don't even bother to provide the source with each copy.
What's worse, they change copyright notices of existing programs to their employees and do not include GPL license text in their "distribution".
Is it a GPL violation? They don't distribute MSVS outside of MoD and its numerous branches (state companies) - you can't neither buy nor download the system. Is it Ok to do the aforementioned things then?
Further, the Kremlin has recognized the occupied territory -- Abkhazia and South Ossetia -- as independent nations although the entire family of Western nations has not.
On a side note, why Abkhazs and Ossetians, nations with distinct language, culture and history from both Georgians and Russians, have such a bad luck (especially compared to Kosovo citizens)?
Just because they happen to align themselves with Russia?
But hey, thugs as they are, they invested money in socialist way. Apart from large military spendings, which I agree have nothing to do with socialism, Soviet state's main problem was losing the feedback between producers and consumers.
Everyone has been guaranteed a job, no matter the productivity, and efficiency has been continuously lowering down to the level when "people pretended that they are working and the state pretended that it pays the salaries".
I did not compare unemployment rates - I told that "sense of entitlement" is a lot more common in Europe.
Few other writers have mistaken me for the American. No, I'm Russian, but living abroad, and I know pretty damn well when I'm saying that nowadays Europe is socialist, in some ways (e.g. welfare) even more socialist than USSR was.I was born in a socialist country, and fully experienced the long-term consequences of tax money being invested in "proper education, healthcare and welfare" - consequences that you'll be experiencing in 15, 20 or maybe 50 years. Good luck further going the road that Russia and China took U-turn from.
P.S. I'm not implying that US is going to be Ok in the long term. They have better changes, though.
P.P.S. By the way, your data seems to come from pre-crisis period, right now both Latvia and Estonia have more than 15% unemployment. I have relatives in Latvia, and I'm speaking first hand.
Well, let me explain. Availability of higher education raises the expectations among the people about their future jobs. Someone who has been taught philosophy or so-called "business administration" is not going to accept the job of a receptionist or waiter.
Higher education surely does not create unemployment by itself. But now it looks like there's a social stigma imposed on those who chose to start working early - either by skipping the education altogether or by going to so called "professional schools" That stigma results in artificial demand on degrees from universities - right now there's a lot of low-quality "degree mills" (especially in Eastern Europe) that are market response to precisely that demand.
That's "degree mills" graduates who join the ranks of the unemployed and not willing to take "menial labour" jobs (living off social security in wealthier countries).
About this being an anti-socialism rant... I'm Russian (though I'm working abroad), so yes, I'm rather anti-socialist - just take a look on anomalies socialism created in my mother country.
I'm not saying that uneducated people have better chances to find the job. What I'm saying is that high expectations, raised by (relatively easy) availability of higher education make sense of entitlement pretty common in Europe.
Almost every Western European I know complains about his salary, his working conditions, his employer, etc etc. A lot of people just register themselves in different Arbeitsamt-s (work departments) around the Europe and do nothing to find the job (living off social security).
Europe, as seen through the eyes of an immigrant (I'm Russian, technically also an European, but I'm one of migrants), is a society of overpaid people, who think that they are entitled to good wages and white-collar jobs just because they graduated from something with "management" in the name - and if they are not getting that, they blame government for not providing them with adequate "living standards".
To be fair, that's also true for Russia. USA, where there's no social stigma related to menial labour, are much more competetive IMHO.
God, the sense of entitlement in the US is making me sick...
It's even more frequent in socialist-minded Europe (Russia included), where more than half of population have higher education (because it's mostly free, especially in post-communist countries). Then everyone expects to get an "advanced" job and despises menial labour or "low-level" technical jobs (like say, a car technician).
It all results in high unemployment ("advanced" jobs are rare by definition) for European "aborigines", while uneducated (but willing to work everywhere) migrants fill the labour market gap.
Oh, come on, fork KDE 3 and go on with its development. Or fork KDE 4 and bring it back to be more KDE 3-ish.
What you are missing is that certain level of organization is required to manage projects as large as that. And if you don't like the direction that some Free Software project is heading in, you cannot fork it without forking the entire organization behind it. And it's so much easier to just switch to something else.
On the other hand, Visual C++ still has the most reliable C++ code completion of all IDEs that I've seen, and it's got even better in VS2010.
How come? Intellisense does not like macros (e.g. it has troubles finding functions that are declared inside macros), it often fails for me on not-that-large code base (about 750k LOC in about 10 thousand files) even for simple functions. It does not like forward declarations as well, leaving me without hint if some class was only defined, but not #include'd. If Visual Studio were that superb, there would be no market for tools like VisualAssist (try it, it fixes a lot of Intellisense flaws).
If you design a set of standard underpinnings that are the same across the Linux landscape, and that stay backwards compatible so that they can "write once, use forever" like they do on Windows they WILL release binary blob drivers and binary applications that support your OS. Because all businesses like making money and like having lots of customers. if all they have to do is add a "Linux 32/64" folder to the Windows ones to add you as a customer? or simply make a SINGLE version of Photoshop and know that this version will work until they are ready to release version 5 or whatever? They WILL support you.
Backward compatibility is not something that comes without effort. Your OS will have bugs, and applications will depend on these bugs even if it's not part of the spec. Being backward compatible means keeping those bugs, designing things around them, and - the most important - testing a lot of existing applications prior to making a new release.
That thing does not scale well.Even Microsoft is starting to treat it with less priority than before, because it would take them another 6 or more years to release next OS version (NOT counting Windows 7 which is Vista re-launched) otherwise.
For a volunteer project where testers are the most scarce resource (finding/submitting/re-checking bugs is a tedious and not rewarding job) long-term backward compatibility is not an option. It'll transform it into an inflexible piece of software that is not fun to develop or even maintain. As someone said, "People paint for free. People do not tend to clean toilets for free".
That is why I think that FOSS software will always remain a niche for those who want to trade knowledge for ease of use.
In parts of the world like Poland (an EU country, by the way) and Russia people still buy desktop computers as independent parts and just pay (usually the seller) for building them. And that's what most people do (situation with laptops is different though).
180 USD for an OS adds about 40% to cost of an average computer bought here. Considering that in Poland there are a lot of people who make less than 500 USD a month (and in Russia 500 USD/month is above average), you may probably understand, why piracy cannot and will not be eliminated in Eastern Europe in foreseeable future.
(And no, mass switching to Linux is even less likely than in "civilized world", because Windows is essentially free (as in beer) software here. There are even several Windows distros, available for download).
Once upon a time, there was quite a diverse world of OSes... but market ruled them out, leaving a single monopoly.
Being recognizable by a large group of people is a capital itself. Artists are special because millions of human lemmings declare themselves "fans", pay money for performance/records, and even sacrifice their lives sometimes...