I'm not saying Redhat did deny you any kind of choice. If you read the post that was parent to mine, he was saying we should all line up like good little lemmings behind Redhat's decision of the One True Desktop. Redhat is free to choose whatever they want to do, but the rest of us should not have to follow suit. Not that Redhat is trying to make us follow suit, but the parent would very much like this.
And who is Redhat to decide this? They can do whatever they want to their distro, it's theirs. But I'll be damned if they choose what happens to everyone else. Mandrake, if faced with the choice, would more than likely choose KDE, as would SuSE.
And what about Debian or Slack, quite arguably the two most "pure" distros of all? What gives Redhat the power to dictate the desktop environment for them?
The fact is, for most desktop developers, having Linux take over the mainstream desktop isn't the priority. It's providing the best desktop software on the planet for themselves and their users. This whole "Linux vs. The World" is just some childish notion that attempts to shoehorn people. A big part of Linux is that it is Free Software, and with that comes the freedom to choose what you want. Distros have their default desktop, but that shouldn't interfere with me in any way.
Whereas the low end (kernel developers, compiler writers, etc.) and high end (clustering software, 3D modelling and rendering, etc.) of development is led by strong, well-organised teams of well-trained developers with vision and understanding, the middle ground of the Linux world is polluted with warring egos and silly spats like this. There are myriad competing, mutually incompatible yet separately inadequate office suites (Star Office, KOffice, Applix,...), desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, CDE, UDE, ROX,...), and X servers (XFree86, MetroX, XiG).
That's funny, you must never read the LKML if you think there's no bickering going on. Perhaps you're too young to know about the gcc/egcs split of a few years back. How about the emacs/xemacs feud? Even stable, mature projects have their splits and their differences, including those on the lower levels of the tool chain.
And even the lower levels have their problems. There might be one Linux kernel (excepting -ac and other myriad branches and patches), but there's also BSD, Mach, Darwin, and the Hurd out there.
As for "simple" things like reading Word documents, you try reading a document that's really and collection of embedded COM objects and see how well you do with it. Things like that aren't easy. On the other hand, I can read and write my windows partition, as well as many other file systems, quite easily in Linux, which is something Windows can't do now. I also have virtual desktops, which is simple to implement in your WM using X, but Windows can't do this "simple" thing by default. Every environment has its advantages and disadvantages.
All those diseparate projects like KDE/Gnome, OO/KOffice, etc. will either learn to cooperate or one will die out. KDE and Gnome have very very slowly been taking steps to meet on some levels, and distros can step in at other levels (like Debian's excellent menu system). OO and Koffice are working towards using the same file format, or at least being able to read and write the same formats. Things will get there, just be patient.
Oh, and incidentally, I get better frames in Q3 on Linux than I do in Windows.
Interesting. You're right, there it is. AOL client 7.0 sneak preview.
So my next question is how do they do this? Is the client fully native? Compiled with winelib? Just run through wine? Will this work on my debian setup?
Still, thank you for pointing this out. This is great news, especially if it can run in Mandrake and the like. Hopefully we'll know more soon.
AOL uses a proprietary login scheme. You can't log in to their servers unless you've got the application layer lying well above the ethernet card to allow it. I've never been to Europe, let alone tried to access AOL there without a client, but I'd imagine it's much the same.
And don't act like the days of modems are dead. The majority of people in the US still use them. We may be backwards, but it's still a fact.
It's dwindled a lot over the years, especially as a lot of the content has moved on to public webservers. But basically a lot of media companies pay for the privledge to be a part of AOL, and they often provide some content to AOL users that they don't give to the outside world.
I personally rarely use AOL for anything but email and AIM now that the web has grown so much. The real benefit would be the ability to admin my email account and the like, which I can't do without a real AOL app.
But I'm a really clued user. There's millions who aren't. A lot of people stay right there within the bounds that AOL sets. It's very organized and fairly well set up. Every portal site you've ever seen is basically a rip off of the AOL model of organizing information for the user, and occasionally personalizing something. It's passe to do that on the web now, but it was once a very nice thing.
And as for the ISP part, you can't connect to AOL if they're your primary ISP through Linux. They don't use standard ppp or the like, but something proprietary.
I'll give you one example. My family, until the last two weeks, used AOL as their primary ISP. They have tons of hard drive space, and I could have potentially set up a partition with Linux on it for when I come home, and for my little brothers to experiment and play on.
However, I know from a lot of experience that Linux is really difficult to learn if you don't either have someone right there teaching you or an internet connection, and I wasn't going to be there all the time for my brothers. So I didn't bother with Linux because it wouldn't have been that useful or comfortable for me. With an AOL client, someone like me could get their internet connection on Linux.
Another example is a friend who was curious about Linux after I had talked it up so much. So I installed Mandrake as a dual boot for him to experiment with. His family uses AOL as their only ISP. He couldn't really stay in Linux very long before he found he needed the internet for something. The best way to learn Linux is to use it, and he wasn't really able to use it to learn it.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. The ability to move over slowly to Linux is important, and it's much harder to experiment when you can't get help online (IRC, google, discussion boards are critical resources). An AOL client would help those millions of people with curious kids and AOL as an ISP to try Linux.
Man, what a piss-poor headline. I was actually excited for a second, hoping that there really would be a client for AOL *the service* bundled with Lindows. But no... it's just Netscape 7, which isn't any more functionally than Mozilla really (less in some areas).
I would have personally loved an AOL client on Linux. My family has used AOL for years, both as a primary ISP and a secondary service. I've had the same email account on AOL for years (yes, it's spam-ridden, but a lot of my friends still use it) and it would be nice to be able to access it via some method other than their (once crappy, now much better) webmail interface.
In addition to that, there's the fact that having AOL for Linux would give it another crucial app for desktop migration. Not that I'd expect it to work nearly as nicely in setting up your internet connection on Linux as it does on Windows or Mac, which is where AOL really shines, but the ability to access their full service would be nice.
But no. We get Netscape, something the whole of Unix has pretty much outgrown with Konqueror, Opera, Mozilla, and its spinoffs. Too bad, back to waiting.
Not if he can give us another monkeyboy video. All apologies to Iliad, but that thing is way better than anything the Free Software community has come up with for humor.
Sort of interesting, but not really relevant because the article only takes in to account server license shipments, which makes up only a fraction of actual Linux deployments.
This will go down in history right beside the many memorable, thrilling, and compelling Simpsons games for the NES and SNES, as well as nearly every other license-based game ever made. I can hardly contain myself.
I care about Linux's reputation as well, but only to the extent that it deserves it. If there isn't a market for ports of new Linux games, then there isn't a market for ports of new Linux games. If there were, Tribes 2 would have likely sold a lot better for Loki, and quite possibly Q3 (although I think 3d acceleration was severely lacking at the time of Q3's release). Let's face it, Loki's plan sucked and that's why they didn't do well. They sold ports of year old games at year old prices. No one except die hard Linux fans will buy that, and quite frankly given Linux's actual cost that number is few and far between.
Once again, I'll point out the likelyhood of having Linux lying around on the old computer is far greater than having it as the sole OS on a brand new home desktop system. Linux has a wonderful reputation for being a fun and practical way to resurrect old boxes, and this wasn't gained for nothing. The old cheap game port idea could leverage this quite well. And yes, the market isn't huge, but it's no smaller than the market for new games that are only made for Linux out of the box. People will buy the cheaper windows version to avoid the porting costs and the possible hassle of distro incompatibilities simply because most new desktops will have some form of windows on them, and rebooting for a gaming session isn't a big deal.
Plunking down $50 dollars for yesteryear's game isn't going to help the Linux gaming market at all if you're looking to have it taken seriously as a platform for new games. It's not going to be much of a platform for new games until it really starts showing large numbers of desktop installs.
I understand perfectly well why Myth II was priced at $50, but that's the problem with the business plan. A very small number of people are going to pay the relatively high price for an old game that won't even run on their toy Linux system (but will run great on their Windows side). Companies can be motivated to allow ports of older games though because it's old news. They'd be wringing a few extra bucks out of an old product that they thought they were all done with. The cost that the porting house would have to pay would be much lower because it is an older game, and the original developers wouldn't feel the need to charge the massive price to port their latest hit (i.e. Tribes 2). What you obviously don't understand is that porting houses pay the developers to be allowed to port their games, not vice versa. In turn, the porting house expects to make some income on the game to pay off the costs for porting it. If the fee that the company charges is high, then the retail price would be high. If Loki had decided to port Bungie's Marathon series (before the release of the engine source) it probably would have cost them very little, and thus the product itself would have been cheaper and would have run on far more Linux installs.
Of course, I could be wrong about the idea that people are interested in old games on Linux, but there's a lot of projects that back me up. ScummVM, X-MAME, SNES9x, various NES emulators, FreeSCI, and of course, Freeciv. I can already hear you complaining that these are all free, which is true, but they do show that there is obvious interest in old gaming on Linux. And free is cheap, is it not? It's a little bit sad that the various companies like Lucasarts and Sierra didn't see that people might want to play their older titles under Linux, or they might have gone ahead with the projects themselves. But the community just implemented what they really wanted.
The community also wanted new games, and that's why we have WineX. Gamers wanted it all, so that's why Transgaming is still around but Loki is not. Porting just isn't good enough (I know this, having been a Mac person for years). I'm just as willing to support Transgaming as Loki. If they provide a service that's useful to me, then I'll purchase their product. Anything more or less is doing the Linux community, as well as the company in question, a disservice. If the reputation of Linux is really your concern, then you shouldn't be advocating artificially buoying poor business plans. If Transgaming survives, it will be because they provided what the Linux gaming community really wanted. And what the community wants is what should actually give Linux its reputation, not some feeling of needing to support some people just becuase they made something on Linux.
Firstly, the target market is tiny. It consists of people who want to play old games, who only run Linux. There is no sense in targeting a tiny market with a low price good. There would be no profit.
Secondly, this would just give Linux a reputation of getting 'budget' games after the sell-by date.
The only beneficiary in this equation is you, who wants cheap, old games. Good luck persuading everyone else.
The market isn't tiny. Half-life is still selling like mad. Myst sold for years. Starcraft Battlechest is still on the shelves, as is the individual game and expansion. Rainbow Six gold is still there. UT and Quake3 are still on the shelves. Good older games don't die, they just get repackaged. Hell, there's a huge section (1/4 the size of the total PC games section at my Best Buy) devoted to bargain CD games like Redneck Rampage and Fallout 1 and 2. Even the PS1 and gameboy color have substantial sections devoted to them in most game stores.
You're also forgetting the used game section of stores like EB, which are nearly all older games sold at a discount. If I were the only one buying these older games, this would not be the case at all.
And who cares if the reputation for Linux is budget games? If that's what the market actually consists of, then that's what is going to sell. I can guarantee you that there's at least as many Linux installs on older machines than newer ones. The people who most often "need" the fastest and newest machines are the gamers, and thus aren't going to be running Linux except on a server (which is most likely their old machine that they don't need for gaming any more). If people run Linux on older hardware and can only run older games or newer ones with low requirements then that's what can potentially sell.
That Myth II port was out years ago, by the way. But you buy it in the liquidation sale. Thanks for supporting Loki.
I know the port was out years ago. I couldn't afford it at the full price, and even if I could have I wouldn't have sprung for it. There's only two games I've ever paid full price for: Quake III and Civ III. I bought the Windows version of Quake because I couldn't get 3d acceleration running on my machine at the time in Linux (it took more than a year to get it working in fact). I didn't want to wait for a month or more to buy the Linux version, and obviously I wasn't alone in that. I only pay full price for what I consider the best, and none of Loki's titles (other than Q3, which was late and didn't work for me) were what I considered the best. I had absolutely no responsibility to support Loki or anyone else. I didn't pirate their software but I also didn't buy it because I thought the price was too high. Obviously, so did others or they might still be here today. Like I said, older games at a bargain price. I would have easily paid $20 for Myth II and others, but not $50. They got half the equation right but priced themselves out of my range. I'm sorry if that's not good enough for the likes of you, but that's your problem.
I mean, let's see here: Kingpin, Descent, Quake 1,2 and 3, Soldier of Fortune, the last version of UT, Tribes.... if all those ran as Linux clients, why is it a huge leap to think the new UT wouldn't also do so?
Because, like he said, UT2003 comes with it in the exact same box. None of these games did. The only example that you could even use the same files for was Q3, and even that didn't come in the same box. You had to know about it and go download it.
Having right there alongside it means that suddenly Linux is much more valid. It's not something you have to go out of your way to download and know about, it's right there for you. It's not in some separate section of the store either, right next to the keyboard extension cables, it's in the box at the front of the store underneath the giant poster. It's not a huge leap that UT2003 has a linux client, it is a huge leap that it's right there alongside the windows client out of the box. NWN was supposed to have this too, but backed out. It's a very important step.
Yeah, I'm in the exact same boat. I've got my old PII 400 with an ATI Rage Fury. It serves me just fine for everything else, and I can't justify buying a whole new computer just to play games (a Gamecube on the other hand...)
And as for the old games, there's plenty of great ones out there. I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with new ones when there's so many great old ones out there. I just picked up a copy of Loki's Myth II port this last weekend, so I can finally get some linux gaming in outside of Quake 3. Ports of older games sold cheap are the way to go for Linux, if the company can afford to do it. Loki's dying idea to do Postal was a good idea in that vein I think, although the game choice was crappy. I'd love to see some more older stuff ported and sold cheap. Maybe one day.
But you'd be a fool not to notice that the linux desktop situation has improved dramatically over the past few years. Just because it's not ready today for you doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow.
the most basic tools for Windows (Outlook, for one) don't exist in a usable form on Linux.
Patience my lad. Remember the days when you could put things like "A plausible office suite" and "a fully functional web browser" in those parentheses?
Or even further back, "A GUI install", "a desktop environment", "a decent GUI mail client", "Hardware OpenGL acceleration", and hell, why not bring it up, "a TCP/IP stack".
Just be patient. If the present trends continue, the functionality you need will appear in time.
A very famous man once said something along the lines of "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security".
You are giving up features for temporary security. Anything Microsoft does will be a temporary fix. There are enough hackers out there that hate microsoft that no matter what, they will find a new way to exploit the software.
There's a gross misconception here. Liberty and features are not the same thing.
The essential problem isn't one so much of open vs. closed here, but of monopoly vs competition. Microsoft has a monopoly on office suites, and as such they have no compelling reason to fix their program's older versions. If they weren't a monopoly, this wouldn't be as much of an issue because people could easily choose another well-known product or preassure an inevitably more pliant Microsoft to fix it.
Now, if the software was Free Software (like Open Office or Abiword) this flaw in older versions could be fixed by third parties if they wanted. Or they could upgrade. This is the option offered by the likes of Debian, who backport security fixes from the newest software versions. The problem is that in this case the choice isn't even offered to the users. If Microsoft decides to not fix the bug then there's nothing anyone can do about it.
This is freedom. I don't care that 99% of users can't fix the bug. There's one that can. That one has a choice. Hell, even those out of the 99% have a choice to learn how to program and go about it if they want. Sure, 99.9% of these previously helpless users will choose not to do this, but maybe 0.1% will, which empowers even more people.
This is also security. It's got nothing to do with how many parks and welfare programs a government has, the same way it doesn't matter how many levels of undo you have, features do not provide you with freedom. The essence of your quote is that saftey is a matter of the choices we are able to make in how to live our own lives. The more you sacrifice in your personal freedoms, the less safe you are.
This is also why, to answer your question, open source developers are often more responsible about these matters than closed developers. They have made a choice to be and they know their users have a choice. Freedoms require responsibility. For all your bluster about Apache, it is still deployed on more sites than IIS, and it still has less vulerabilities.
In a closed world, there is no choice, no matter how many features are lumped in to the program.
That article is from March 2001, which is very out of date. Since then, a lot of development has occurred, most notably the development of supernodes by Limewire, gnucleus, et al. In addition, a new ping and pong scheme has been proposed.
It exists to preserve the wealth creation potential of artists and content providers.
But is it doing this? No one can really say for sure, as the issue is very complex even without going in to the individual liberties issue.
The same is also true of the two parties who brought this frivolous action against Adobe, neither or which I have even heard of. There is nothing at stake in the economy if these clowns get their way.
Just because you haven't heard of these companies doesn't mean that they're small. These are two big design groups, and a lot of the typefaces that you see every day in print, on billboards, on TV, and on your own monitor came out of them.
Presumably, when you go home tonight, you're going to fix yourself a meal to eat. Consider this: the employees of Adobe would like to do the very same thing.
So would the Agfa and ITC employees. So would the designers who use these fonts every day. Everyone out there is trying to make a buck, but doing it by screwing over other people isn't the way it's supposed to be done. Granted, this is a messed up dog eat dog world, but that doesn't excuse laws like the DMCA which will harm us all in the long run. Just because someone like Skylarov didn't contribute to the annual GDP as much as the collective of Adobe doesn't mean that he should be valued any less. Remember, corporations are supposed to be counted as individuals legally, and thus they should have no more privledge and status than any other individual, no matter how much wealth they create.
And just remember that all companies that grew in to these wealth-creating machines had to start small. Two guys in a garage. A guy in a wharehouse. Two men and a woman with an idea. Everyone and everything has to start somewhere, but they never will get the chance to grow if they are squashed prematurely by the big guys. If you really want to see wealth, and if you really want to see growth then you've got to allow for enough freedom for people to do their work. The DMCA allows the big guys to deny that. If you're really for capitalism then you should be against the DMCA.
Um... I'm not a customer of the government, I'm one of its bosses. That's what a republic is about. I pay taxes. I vote. "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people" and all that stuff, you know? Thus, as one of the bosses and owners of the government, I get a say in how it's run.
Well, they obviously do support open standards with their suites. Word supports rtf (although I don't think that one's truly open), plain text, and html, all of which are open. The problem is that most people choose to use.doc, which isn't open. Supporting open standards is fine. Why shouldn't someone be able to use MS Word to read and write text files? Just because it can handle.doc, doesn't mean it handles.rtf any worse.
So long as only open formats are used, using Word and its ilk isn't going to be a problem. And that's what this is about. I think it'd be great if MS started shipping "Word for Governments" with rtf as the default. I wouldn't be surprised if the practice spread in to the private sector too.
It's by the Talking Heads, and the song is called "Once in a Lifetime", on the "Remain in Light" album. And it's not from the 70's, it's from the 80's.
And somehow, I get the feeling, that they were deliberately referencing it. I know I've seen the editors use the phrase before.
Oh, and I don't have an MP3 of the song either, but I did rip the whole album to ogg when I first got it;-)
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I'm not saying Redhat did deny you any kind of choice. If you read the post that was parent to mine, he was saying we should all line up like good little lemmings behind Redhat's decision of the One True Desktop. Redhat is free to choose whatever they want to do, but the rest of us should not have to follow suit. Not that Redhat is trying to make us follow suit, but the parent would very much like this.
And who is Redhat to decide this? They can do whatever they want to their distro, it's theirs. But I'll be damned if they choose what happens to everyone else. Mandrake, if faced with the choice, would more than likely choose KDE, as would SuSE.
And what about Debian or Slack, quite arguably the two most "pure" distros of all? What gives Redhat the power to dictate the desktop environment for them?
The fact is, for most desktop developers, having Linux take over the mainstream desktop isn't the priority. It's providing the best desktop software on the planet for themselves and their users. This whole "Linux vs. The World" is just some childish notion that attempts to shoehorn people. A big part of Linux is that it is Free Software, and with that comes the freedom to choose what you want. Distros have their default desktop, but that shouldn't interfere with me in any way.
And even the lower levels have their problems. There might be one Linux kernel (excepting -ac and other myriad branches and patches), but there's also BSD, Mach, Darwin, and the Hurd out there.
As for "simple" things like reading Word documents, you try reading a document that's really and collection of embedded COM objects and see how well you do with it. Things like that aren't easy. On the other hand, I can read and write my windows partition, as well as many other file systems, quite easily in Linux, which is something Windows can't do now. I also have virtual desktops, which is simple to implement in your WM using X, but Windows can't do this "simple" thing by default. Every environment has its advantages and disadvantages.
All those diseparate projects like KDE/Gnome, OO/KOffice, etc. will either learn to cooperate or one will die out. KDE and Gnome have very very slowly been taking steps to meet on some levels, and distros can step in at other levels (like Debian's excellent menu system). OO and Koffice are working towards using the same file format, or at least being able to read and write the same formats. Things will get there, just be patient.
Oh, and incidentally, I get better frames in Q3 on Linux than I do in Windows.
Interesting. You're right, there it is. AOL client 7.0 sneak preview.
So my next question is how do they do this? Is the client fully native? Compiled with winelib? Just run through wine? Will this work on my debian setup?
Still, thank you for pointing this out. This is great news, especially if it can run in Mandrake and the like. Hopefully we'll know more soon.
AOL uses a proprietary login scheme. You can't log in to their servers unless you've got the application layer lying well above the ethernet card to allow it. I've never been to Europe, let alone tried to access AOL there without a client, but I'd imagine it's much the same.
And don't act like the days of modems are dead. The majority of people in the US still use them. We may be backwards, but it's still a fact.
It's dwindled a lot over the years, especially as a lot of the content has moved on to public webservers. But basically a lot of media companies pay for the privledge to be a part of AOL, and they often provide some content to AOL users that they don't give to the outside world.
I personally rarely use AOL for anything but email and AIM now that the web has grown so much. The real benefit would be the ability to admin my email account and the like, which I can't do without a real AOL app.
But I'm a really clued user. There's millions who aren't. A lot of people stay right there within the bounds that AOL sets. It's very organized and fairly well set up. Every portal site you've ever seen is basically a rip off of the AOL model of organizing information for the user, and occasionally personalizing something. It's passe to do that on the web now, but it was once a very nice thing.
And as for the ISP part, you can't connect to AOL if they're your primary ISP through Linux. They don't use standard ppp or the like, but something proprietary.
I'll give you one example. My family, until the last two weeks, used AOL as their primary ISP. They have tons of hard drive space, and I could have potentially set up a partition with Linux on it for when I come home, and for my little brothers to experiment and play on.
However, I know from a lot of experience that Linux is really difficult to learn if you don't either have someone right there teaching you or an internet connection, and I wasn't going to be there all the time for my brothers. So I didn't bother with Linux because it wouldn't have been that useful or comfortable for me. With an AOL client, someone like me could get their internet connection on Linux.
Another example is a friend who was curious about Linux after I had talked it up so much. So I installed Mandrake as a dual boot for him to experiment with. His family uses AOL as their only ISP. He couldn't really stay in Linux very long before he found he needed the internet for something. The best way to learn Linux is to use it, and he wasn't really able to use it to learn it.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. The ability to move over slowly to Linux is important, and it's much harder to experiment when you can't get help online (IRC, google, discussion boards are critical resources). An AOL client would help those millions of people with curious kids and AOL as an ISP to try Linux.
Man, what a piss-poor headline. I was actually excited for a second, hoping that there really would be a client for AOL *the service* bundled with Lindows. But no... it's just Netscape 7, which isn't any more functionally than Mozilla really (less in some areas).
I would have personally loved an AOL client on Linux. My family has used AOL for years, both as a primary ISP and a secondary service. I've had the same email account on AOL for years (yes, it's spam-ridden, but a lot of my friends still use it) and it would be nice to be able to access it via some method other than their (once crappy, now much better) webmail interface.
In addition to that, there's the fact that having AOL for Linux would give it another crucial app for desktop migration. Not that I'd expect it to work nearly as nicely in setting up your internet connection on Linux as it does on Windows or Mac, which is where AOL really shines, but the ability to access their full service would be nice.
But no. We get Netscape, something the whole of Unix has pretty much outgrown with Konqueror, Opera, Mozilla, and its spinoffs. Too bad, back to waiting.
Sort of interesting, but not really relevant because the article only takes in to account server license shipments, which makes up only a fraction of actual Linux deployments.
This will go down in history right beside the many memorable, thrilling, and compelling Simpsons games for the NES and SNES, as well as nearly every other license-based game ever made. I can hardly contain myself.
I care about Linux's reputation as well, but only to the extent that it deserves it. If there isn't a market for ports of new Linux games, then there isn't a market for ports of new Linux games. If there were, Tribes 2 would have likely sold a lot better for Loki, and quite possibly Q3 (although I think 3d acceleration was severely lacking at the time of Q3's release). Let's face it, Loki's plan sucked and that's why they didn't do well. They sold ports of year old games at year old prices. No one except die hard Linux fans will buy that, and quite frankly given Linux's actual cost that number is few and far between.
Once again, I'll point out the likelyhood of having Linux lying around on the old computer is far greater than having it as the sole OS on a brand new home desktop system. Linux has a wonderful reputation for being a fun and practical way to resurrect old boxes, and this wasn't gained for nothing. The old cheap game port idea could leverage this quite well. And yes, the market isn't huge, but it's no smaller than the market for new games that are only made for Linux out of the box. People will buy the cheaper windows version to avoid the porting costs and the possible hassle of distro incompatibilities simply because most new desktops will have some form of windows on them, and rebooting for a gaming session isn't a big deal.
Plunking down $50 dollars for yesteryear's game isn't going to help the Linux gaming market at all if you're looking to have it taken seriously as a platform for new games. It's not going to be much of a platform for new games until it really starts showing large numbers of desktop installs.
I understand perfectly well why Myth II was priced at $50, but that's the problem with the business plan. A very small number of people are going to pay the relatively high price for an old game that won't even run on their toy Linux system (but will run great on their Windows side). Companies can be motivated to allow ports of older games though because it's old news. They'd be wringing a few extra bucks out of an old product that they thought they were all done with. The cost that the porting house would have to pay would be much lower because it is an older game, and the original developers wouldn't feel the need to charge the massive price to port their latest hit (i.e. Tribes 2). What you obviously don't understand is that porting houses pay the developers to be allowed to port their games, not vice versa. In turn, the porting house expects to make some income on the game to pay off the costs for porting it. If the fee that the company charges is high, then the retail price would be high. If Loki had decided to port Bungie's Marathon series (before the release of the engine source) it probably would have cost them very little, and thus the product itself would have been cheaper and would have run on far more Linux installs.
Of course, I could be wrong about the idea that people are interested in old games on Linux, but there's a lot of projects that back me up. ScummVM, X-MAME, SNES9x, various NES emulators, FreeSCI, and of course, Freeciv. I can already hear you complaining that these are all free, which is true, but they do show that there is obvious interest in old gaming on Linux. And free is cheap, is it not? It's a little bit sad that the various companies like Lucasarts and Sierra didn't see that people might want to play their older titles under Linux, or they might have gone ahead with the projects themselves. But the community just implemented what they really wanted.
The community also wanted new games, and that's why we have WineX. Gamers wanted it all, so that's why Transgaming is still around but Loki is not. Porting just isn't good enough (I know this, having been a Mac person for years). I'm just as willing to support Transgaming as Loki. If they provide a service that's useful to me, then I'll purchase their product. Anything more or less is doing the Linux community, as well as the company in question, a disservice. If the reputation of Linux is really your concern, then you shouldn't be advocating artificially buoying poor business plans. If Transgaming survives, it will be because they provided what the Linux gaming community really wanted. And what the community wants is what should actually give Linux its reputation, not some feeling of needing to support some people just becuase they made something on Linux.
You're also forgetting the used game section of stores like EB, which are nearly all older games sold at a discount. If I were the only one buying these older games, this would not be the case at all.
And who cares if the reputation for Linux is budget games? If that's what the market actually consists of, then that's what is going to sell. I can guarantee you that there's at least as many Linux installs on older machines than newer ones. The people who most often "need" the fastest and newest machines are the gamers, and thus aren't going to be running Linux except on a server (which is most likely their old machine that they don't need for gaming any more). If people run Linux on older hardware and can only run older games or newer ones with low requirements then that's what can potentially sell.
I know the port was out years ago. I couldn't afford it at the full price, and even if I could have I wouldn't have sprung for it. There's only two games I've ever paid full price for: Quake III and Civ III. I bought the Windows version of Quake because I couldn't get 3d acceleration running on my machine at the time in Linux (it took more than a year to get it working in fact). I didn't want to wait for a month or more to buy the Linux version, and obviously I wasn't alone in that. I only pay full price for what I consider the best, and none of Loki's titles (other than Q3, which was late and didn't work for me) were what I considered the best. I had absolutely no responsibility to support Loki or anyone else. I didn't pirate their software but I also didn't buy it because I thought the price was too high. Obviously, so did others or they might still be here today. Like I said, older games at a bargain price. I would have easily paid $20 for Myth II and others, but not $50. They got half the equation right but priced themselves out of my range. I'm sorry if that's not good enough for the likes of you, but that's your problem.
Having right there alongside it means that suddenly Linux is much more valid. It's not something you have to go out of your way to download and know about, it's right there for you. It's not in some separate section of the store either, right next to the keyboard extension cables, it's in the box at the front of the store underneath the giant poster. It's not a huge leap that UT2003 has a linux client, it is a huge leap that it's right there alongside the windows client out of the box. NWN was supposed to have this too, but backed out. It's a very important step.
Yeah, I'm in the exact same boat. I've got my old PII 400 with an ATI Rage Fury. It serves me just fine for everything else, and I can't justify buying a whole new computer just to play games (a Gamecube on the other hand...)
And as for the old games, there's plenty of great ones out there. I don't know why everyone is so obsessed with new ones when there's so many great old ones out there. I just picked up a copy of Loki's Myth II port this last weekend, so I can finally get some linux gaming in outside of Quake 3. Ports of older games sold cheap are the way to go for Linux, if the company can afford to do it. Loki's dying idea to do Postal was a good idea in that vein I think, although the game choice was crappy. I'd love to see some more older stuff ported and sold cheap. Maybe one day.
Update now. 1.1 is is in unstable as of yesterday, although I don't know about the bugfix.
But you'd be a fool not to notice that the linux desktop situation has improved dramatically over the past few years. Just because it's not ready today for you doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow.
Or even further back, "A GUI install", "a desktop environment", "a decent GUI mail client", "Hardware OpenGL acceleration", and hell, why not bring it up, "a TCP/IP stack".
Just be patient. If the present trends continue, the functionality you need will appear in time.
The essential problem isn't one so much of open vs. closed here, but of monopoly vs competition. Microsoft has a monopoly on office suites, and as such they have no compelling reason to fix their program's older versions. If they weren't a monopoly, this wouldn't be as much of an issue because people could easily choose another well-known product or preassure an inevitably more pliant Microsoft to fix it.
Now, if the software was Free Software (like Open Office or Abiword) this flaw in older versions could be fixed by third parties if they wanted. Or they could upgrade. This is the option offered by the likes of Debian, who backport security fixes from the newest software versions. The problem is that in this case the choice isn't even offered to the users. If Microsoft decides to not fix the bug then there's nothing anyone can do about it.
This is freedom. I don't care that 99% of users can't fix the bug. There's one that can. That one has a choice. Hell, even those out of the 99% have a choice to learn how to program and go about it if they want. Sure, 99.9% of these previously helpless users will choose not to do this, but maybe 0.1% will, which empowers even more people.
This is also security. It's got nothing to do with how many parks and welfare programs a government has, the same way it doesn't matter how many levels of undo you have, features do not provide you with freedom. The essence of your quote is that saftey is a matter of the choices we are able to make in how to live our own lives. The more you sacrifice in your personal freedoms, the less safe you are.
This is also why, to answer your question, open source developers are often more responsible about these matters than closed developers. They have made a choice to be and they know their users have a choice. Freedoms require responsibility. For all your bluster about Apache, it is still deployed on more sites than IIS, and it still has less vulerabilities.
In a closed world, there is no choice, no matter how many features are lumped in to the program.
That article is from March 2001, which is very out of date. Since then, a lot of development has occurred, most notably the development of supernodes by Limewire, gnucleus, et al. In addition, a new ping and pong scheme has been proposed.
Just because you haven't heard of these companies doesn't mean that they're small. These are two big design groups, and a lot of the typefaces that you see every day in print, on billboards, on TV, and on your own monitor came out of them.
So would the Agfa and ITC employees. So would the designers who use these fonts every day. Everyone out there is trying to make a buck, but doing it by screwing over other people isn't the way it's supposed to be done. Granted, this is a messed up dog eat dog world, but that doesn't excuse laws like the DMCA which will harm us all in the long run. Just because someone like Skylarov didn't contribute to the annual GDP as much as the collective of Adobe doesn't mean that he should be valued any less. Remember, corporations are supposed to be counted as individuals legally, and thus they should have no more privledge and status than any other individual, no matter how much wealth they create.
And just remember that all companies that grew in to these wealth-creating machines had to start small. Two guys in a garage. A guy in a wharehouse. Two men and a woman with an idea. Everyone and everything has to start somewhere, but they never will get the chance to grow if they are squashed prematurely by the big guys. If you really want to see wealth, and if you really want to see growth then you've got to allow for enough freedom for people to do their work. The DMCA allows the big guys to deny that. If you're really for capitalism then you should be against the DMCA.
Um... I'm not a customer of the government, I'm one of its bosses. That's what a republic is about. I pay taxes. I vote. "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people" and all that stuff, you know? Thus, as one of the bosses and owners of the government, I get a say in how it's run.
Well, they obviously do support open standards with their suites. Word supports rtf (although I don't think that one's truly open), plain text, and html, all of which are open. The problem is that most people choose to use .doc, which isn't open. Supporting open standards is fine. Why shouldn't someone be able to use MS Word to read and write text files? Just because it can handle .doc, doesn't mean it handles .rtf any worse.
So long as only open formats are used, using Word and its ilk isn't going to be a problem. And that's what this is about. I think it'd be great if MS started shipping "Word for Governments" with rtf as the default. I wouldn't be surprised if the practice spread in to the private sector too.
It's by the Talking Heads, and the song is called "Once in a Lifetime", on the "Remain in Light" album. And it's not from the 70's, it's from the 80's.
;-)
And somehow, I get the feeling, that they were deliberately referencing it. I know I've seen the editors use the phrase before.
Oh, and I don't have an MP3 of the song either, but I did rip the whole album to ogg when I first got it