I want to use my data and my applications in the way I feel like, not be forced to a single method just because someone else thought it was the best one. But that is true for all operating systems and no special "enemy."
That's not true for any of the Free OSes, like Linux and FreeBSD, where you can do anything, in any way you can think of. It's just that for most methods, there's a step involving "sitting down and writing a metric fuckton of code", but still...
If you want even more quality you're someone who thinks 5000 bucks is not too much to spend on a new sound system and thus aren't representative for the average listener.
But on the other hand, you're part of the market segment that spends the most money per capita in music, so you're still pretty f'in important to the music industry.
I've seen Magnatune.com being recommended plenty of times in not-techy sites just because of their huge classical collection available in FLAC (though it's also available on MP3s and OGGs if you care). It's kinda like Apple: you can do quite well catering to a niche, if it also happens to be the richest one.
In many places, the word "MP3" has become synonymous with "digital music file", and people expect any such file, regardless of format, to play in the same places a regular MP3 does. Which is why most "MP3"s are, in fact, MP3s, and DRM'ed audio files are rarer than Linux-using grandmas.
This is only a marketing campaign trying to bring the same understanding to cultures where the iPod became more notorious than the little format that started it all.
Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Wrong. Maybe every consumer-level device you can buy today, but I have a nice shiny network card around that needs tweaking to work in Linux, doesn't work at all in Windows (yes, I tried, for more than a day), and only works flawlessly in FreeBSD and Solaris. Dunno where it came from, probably a server somewhere. And don't even get me started on PPC, SPARC et al, where Windows dearest fails to run at all. Which is kinda unfortunate for my Powerbook, but alas, we do have Linux.
People sometimes forget that, despite their ~95% marketshare, not all devices in the world are Windows-compatible, or were ever meant to be.
The beauty of features like LINQ being added to.NET is that they're case studies on FOSS double standards, because if that had been added to Java or Python, everyone and their little sister would be screaming to the four winds how totally cool it is and LOLOL, Microsoft doesn't have it.
Well, duh. Nothing gets a woman crankier than when you "finish up" inside her with no warning whatsoever. It's just human nature to react as such with unexpected changes.
I decided to revitilize my grandparent's old Celeron 500 w/ 128MB of RAM with Xubuntu. I couldn't install it with the live CD, but I got it on there. And it ran like crap. Very, very slow and sluggish...I was kind of suprised So I was about to throw it out, and figured, what the hell, and put XP on it. I turned off the Fisher Price UI, and it ran a HELL of a lot better than Xubuntu. Enough that it turned from unusuable to usable. I was stunned.
Xubuntu running like crap on a system with 128 MBs of RAM, I can believe. Their particular version of Xfce somehow seems to be slower than stock, 'cause on my P1 166 with 80 MBs of RAM, Xfce on Debian it was slow, but not *that* bad (still unusable, though, glad IceWM was fine). Still, the processor isn't the bottleneck, with another 128-256 MBs of RAM Xubuntu would've run like a champ on that thing. I know, I'm typing this on a P3 with 256 MBs of RAM running Xubuntu 8.10, and it's just *beautiful*.
But Windows XP usable on only 128 MBs? and on a 500mhz Celeron? now *that* smells fishy. I've done support on PCs like that, and the only way of getting something usable on those things is Windows 2000, fisher price or not XP chokes on under-Ghz Celerons, and dies a slow, painful death without at least 256 MBs of RAM.
Alas, I know the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", but I just had to mention it.
Now let's say 10% of BluRay watchers use a PC, so reduce your project sales by 10% but remove the sharp drop due to piracy, take the integral of both graphs and see if the difference is positive. If it's big enough it might be worth abandoning PC playback to avoid the piracy (or shift that sales cliff to a point where sales were low anyway).
Not really. Media formats are one of those markets where network effect has a very strong effect, so while all those PC Blu-Ray owners may prefer ThePirateBay for all their needs instead of Blockbuster, they still help maintain the perception that Blu-Ray is a solid format with strong lasting power, which in turn increases sales of both players and media.
There's a reason why Economics is its own special field, y'know. It's completely fucking nuts.
And do you really need to kill kids to enjoy a game?
Define "need". I enjoy Tetris, so I clearly don't need a plot to enjoy a game. I enjoy adventure games, so I clearly don't need good, responsive controls to enjoy a game. I enjoy Pong, so I clearly don't need deep gameplay to enjoy a game. I enjoy Nethack, so I clearly don't need good graphics or fancy presentation to enjoy a game.
But if you expect me to play only games with shitty controls, awful graphics, poor presentation, uninspired gameplay, and absolutely no trace of plot, well, you can go fsck yourself.
What you need to ask is: does killing children make sense in a game with the gameplay and setting of Fallout? and for that, the answer is "yes, yes it does".
I remember when Fallout 1 was released and people bitched that it wasn't as good as Wasteland and that it didn't capture the feel that made Wasteland unique.
Then again, given that most people say "Fallout 1 & 2" and don't mention Wasteland at all, it was probably true and that if it succeeded it was on its own merits, as its own series, instead of a continuation of what Wasteland had started.
A sister post mentions GTA3 too, and having played almost all of the GTA games, I can say that while the originals and 3-plus-sequels are all great games, they're both very distinct game series, very different from each other in feel and design.
Me, I'm waiting for a sequel for DooM2, and hopefully another one for DooM3.
So, you claim to know the final solution to push Linux onto the masses, strangely related to the one problem you've been having with Linux yourself, yet you claim that *HE'S* the one sitting on a pedestal?
So, same thing but slower, with higher system requirements, and a much uglier interface? and you're saying that people will embrace it, instead of Vista?
People skipped 2000 for the same reasons they say they're skipping Vista.
Not really. People skipped Windows 2000 because it was advertised as a business OS, like WinNT, instead of a "home-friendly" one like 98 and XP. People skipped *ME* for the same reasons they're skipping Vista, and ME was the end of that line of OSes, if you don't remember.
Why bother even playing with other people screwy stuff.
Because it's not. If you can't see that, your loss.
I program C, C++. It works everywhere! Does everything almost. the few places it's can't go is downloadable browser code.
Yeah, but the fact that it *can* do almost everywhere doesn't mean it should. Writing GUI apps in C in particular is a PITA, and C++ is still the ugliest, kludgiest language I've ever used, *far* worse than Perl. So, for GUI stuff, I use C# or Python and so far so good.
After some time you start to realize the different between real things with substance and shiny new objects that are being shoved down your throat.
C# being in the latter category.
Well, to you, to me it's one of the most enjoyable languages I've ever used, one that manages to extend it's "parent" language (Java, in this case) in ways that are actually useful to me and not just random cruft, as with poor C's bastard children. But alas, there's still people that enjoy C++ and Obj-C, and I can understand and accept that, even if I don't share the sentiment.
a) Because it's better. Even though VS sucks donkey balls compared to Eclipse, and I'd rather program with 'cat' commands than ever use Monodevelop again, C# is the superior language, IMNSHO. And b) because it's not closed-source. The.NET Framework seems to be a patent minefield, but if you don't live in a country with retarded patent laws, Mono is an excellent way to develop applications in C#, and comes with full source-code.
There are many problems with the current architecture of the internet, but if there's something that the original engineers got right was the idea of putting the cables properly in place, and letting the users worry about what's transmitted over them.
Some things could be better, of course, nobody anticipated that someday there'd be more net-enabled devices on a typical household than actual human beings, which led us to the IPv4 address problem, and in my not-very-knowledgeable opinion I think that some crypto being part of email from the beginning would've only been a good thing. But dammit, yesterday we were transmitting text and images, today it's music and movies, tomorrow we could be transmitting gzipped thoughts for all we know and it shouldn't matter one bit to the underlying architecture.
But my personal, pet change? IPv8. Two reasons, mostly: one, eight is a prettier number than six, and two, I dream of a day where even my shirt can have it's own unique IP address. And hey, if we're changing it anyways, we may as well increase our namespace by a couple extra orders of magnitude, right?
How is having all browsers being free not capitalistic? Capitalism predicts that as a product market matures, the costs will tend towards a minimum, which is exactly what happened here, since there's enough people willing to write a browser for free that the minimum is zero (see also: Netscape and Opera).
I can't understand why people think that capitalism means "try to get as much money as you can, by any means necessary". That'd be closer to fascism, but even that is stretching things a bit.
There's a matching set of quotes floating around the 'net that are apropos:
There is no complexity problem in programming that cannot be solved by adding a layer of abstraction.
There is no performance problem in programming that cannot be solved by removing a layer of abstraction.
Now, it's easy to see why newer software is usually slower. First you start with a simple converter, say, from txt to rtf. Then you want to accept HTML files as input. Abstraction. Then output to PDF. Abstraction. Then separate the CLI from a library, so you can write a GUI in the future. Abstraction. Then a spell checker, just because everything has one now. Abstraction. And now, to do the one thing you originally could in a single step, your program has to go through a bazillion layers of abstraction, with the obvious performance hit.
But on the other hand, your little program can do a lot more than it originally could, and if someone wanted to extend it to output to, say, PNG images, it'd be *much* easier for him now than if he were to start with the original codebase.
Me, I'll take the performance hit. Computers are getting faster, and my list of "must-have" features is only getting bigger, but YMMV, depending on both the type of software and hardware in question.
Probably, most routers in my experience include some sort of firewall functionality, and even without it the worms would have trouble with the NAT, I think.
Well, you could always unplug your router and give it a try;)
13) Download antivirus without connection to the network. Pixies and leprechauns are helpful here.
Which is why you should always install XP with at least one of the following:
a) Behind a firewall (may not be completely safe, though). b) With a laptop besides you. c) With an Ubuntu LiveCD.
Option c) is specially funny though, all things considered, but it's the one I usually recommend. In fact, many of my friends' PCs used to have a relatively small FAT32 partition for LinuxWindows file exchange during install/troubleshooting, before Linux got reliable NTFS support.
That's right. That's why with only 1 major desktop O/S for PCs business and consumers alike have abandoned PCs entirely.
That's a secondary market. The closest analogy is that of OSes themselves, and besides Macs (which live in their own world anyways) and the Free UNIXen, how much activity has there been on that front for, ohh, the last 15 years? fuckin' active industry, right.
While what you say is technically true, WOW is just one example. It may be an outlier but PC gaming is not dead.
No one has said that it's dead. Only that it may be in danger of becoming so, and if the current trends towards pervasive DRM continue unchecked, I wouldn't be sad nor surprised to see that.
The simple fact of the matter is, DRM isn't currently applied to *just* music and movies, but also to software, which is at the core of most of the world's companies, and books, which have always played a vital part in education.
*I* don't give a fuck about what happens with entertainment, if not having a sequel for Transformers or another Britney CD is the price I have to pay to ensure my computer keeps working for as long as I maintain it, and people around me are free to learn as much as they'd like from any subject they'd like with only a basic computer and a basic internet connection, I'll gladly pay that price, many times over.
Fuck entertainment, and fuck those who would take away our freedom to learn and work. Open Source or not, fuck DRM.
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I want to use my data and my applications in the way I feel like, not be forced to a single method just because someone else thought it was the best one. But that is true for all operating systems and no special "enemy."
That's not true for any of the Free OSes, like Linux and FreeBSD, where you can do anything, in any way you can think of. It's just that for most methods, there's a step involving "sitting down and writing a metric fuckton of code", but still...
If you want even more quality you're someone who thinks 5000 bucks is not too much to spend on a new sound system and thus aren't representative for the average listener.
But on the other hand, you're part of the market segment that spends the most money per capita in music, so you're still pretty f'in important to the music industry.
I've seen Magnatune.com being recommended plenty of times in not-techy sites just because of their huge classical collection available in FLAC (though it's also available on MP3s and OGGs if you care). It's kinda like Apple: you can do quite well catering to a niche, if it also happens to be the richest one.
In many places, the word "MP3" has become synonymous with "digital music file", and people expect any such file, regardless of format, to play in the same places a regular MP3 does. Which is why most "MP3"s are, in fact, MP3s, and DRM'ed audio files are rarer than Linux-using grandmas.
This is only a marketing campaign trying to bring the same understanding to cultures where the iPod became more notorious than the little format that started it all.
linux failed on 2 of my laptops and i know plenty of people who have given up on wifi.
Care to tell me how to install Windows on my PPC-based Powerbook? Right, and you're crying about wifi.
Call me again when Windows supports anything other than x86 and AMD64, 'kay?
Every device you can buy has a windows driver included with it.
Wrong. Maybe every consumer-level device you can buy today, but I have a nice shiny network card around that needs tweaking to work in Linux, doesn't work at all in Windows (yes, I tried, for more than a day), and only works flawlessly in FreeBSD and Solaris. Dunno where it came from, probably a server somewhere. And don't even get me started on PPC, SPARC et al, where Windows dearest fails to run at all. Which is kinda unfortunate for my Powerbook, but alas, we do have Linux.
People sometimes forget that, despite their ~95% marketshare, not all devices in the world are Windows-compatible, or were ever meant to be.
The beauty of features like LINQ being added to .NET is that they're case studies on FOSS double standards, because if that had been added to Java or Python, everyone and their little sister would be screaming to the four winds how totally cool it is and LOLOL, Microsoft doesn't have it.
Prove it.
Well, duh. Nothing gets a woman crankier than when you "finish up" inside her with no warning whatsoever. It's just human nature to react as such with unexpected changes.
I decided to revitilize my grandparent's old Celeron 500 w/ 128MB of RAM with Xubuntu. I couldn't install it with the live CD, but I got it on there. And it ran like crap. Very, very slow and sluggish...I was kind of suprised So I was about to throw it out, and figured, what the hell, and put XP on it. I turned off the Fisher Price UI, and it ran a HELL of a lot better than Xubuntu. Enough that it turned from unusuable to usable. I was stunned.
Xubuntu running like crap on a system with 128 MBs of RAM, I can believe. Their particular version of Xfce somehow seems to be slower than stock, 'cause on my P1 166 with 80 MBs of RAM, Xfce on Debian it was slow, but not *that* bad (still unusable, though, glad IceWM was fine). Still, the processor isn't the bottleneck, with another 128-256 MBs of RAM Xubuntu would've run like a champ on that thing. I know, I'm typing this on a P3 with 256 MBs of RAM running Xubuntu 8.10, and it's just *beautiful*.
But Windows XP usable on only 128 MBs? and on a 500mhz Celeron? now *that* smells fishy. I've done support on PCs like that, and the only way of getting something usable on those things is Windows 2000, fisher price or not XP chokes on under-Ghz Celerons, and dies a slow, painful death without at least 256 MBs of RAM.
Alas, I know the plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", but I just had to mention it.
Now let's say 10% of BluRay watchers use a PC, so reduce your project sales by 10% but remove the sharp drop due to piracy, take the integral of both graphs and see if the difference is positive. If it's big enough it might be worth abandoning PC playback to avoid the piracy (or shift that sales cliff to a point where sales were low anyway).
Not really. Media formats are one of those markets where network effect has a very strong effect, so while all those PC Blu-Ray owners may prefer ThePirateBay for all their needs instead of Blockbuster, they still help maintain the perception that Blu-Ray is a solid format with strong lasting power, which in turn increases sales of both players and media.
There's a reason why Economics is its own special field, y'know. It's completely fucking nuts.
You blew it up! damn you! damn you all to hell!
And do you really need to kill kids to enjoy a game?
Define "need". I enjoy Tetris, so I clearly don't need a plot to enjoy a game. I enjoy adventure games, so I clearly don't need good, responsive controls to enjoy a game. I enjoy Pong, so I clearly don't need deep gameplay to enjoy a game. I enjoy Nethack, so I clearly don't need good graphics or fancy presentation to enjoy a game.
But if you expect me to play only games with shitty controls, awful graphics, poor presentation, uninspired gameplay, and absolutely no trace of plot, well, you can go fsck yourself.
What you need to ask is: does killing children make sense in a game with the gameplay and setting of Fallout? and for that, the answer is "yes, yes it does".
I remember when Fallout 1 was released and people bitched that it wasn't as good as Wasteland and that it didn't capture the feel that made Wasteland unique.
Then again, given that most people say "Fallout 1 & 2" and don't mention Wasteland at all, it was probably true and that if it succeeded it was on its own merits, as its own series, instead of a continuation of what Wasteland had started.
A sister post mentions GTA3 too, and having played almost all of the GTA games, I can say that while the originals and 3-plus-sequels are all great games, they're both very distinct game series, very different from each other in feel and design.
Me, I'm waiting for a sequel for DooM2, and hopefully another one for DooM3.
So, you claim to know the final solution to push Linux onto the masses, strangely related to the one problem you've been having with Linux yourself, yet you claim that *HE'S* the one sitting on a pedestal?
Glass houses, stones, and all that.
7 is to Vista as XP was to 2000.
So, same thing but slower, with higher system requirements, and a much uglier interface? and you're saying that people will embrace it, instead of Vista?
People skipped 2000 for the same reasons they say they're skipping Vista.
Not really. People skipped Windows 2000 because it was advertised as a business OS, like WinNT, instead of a "home-friendly" one like 98 and XP. People skipped *ME* for the same reasons they're skipping Vista, and ME was the end of that line of OSes, if you don't remember.
Yeah, but the difference is, in those encryption mechanisms it's assumed that the attacker and the recipient aren't the same person.
Simply put, DRM is cryptographically stupid, and no amount of OSS devs will ever be able to change that.
Why bother even playing with other people screwy stuff.
Because it's not. If you can't see that, your loss.
I program C, C++. It works everywhere! Does everything almost. the few places it's can't go is downloadable browser code.
Yeah, but the fact that it *can* do almost everywhere doesn't mean it should. Writing GUI apps in C in particular is a PITA, and C++ is still the ugliest, kludgiest language I've ever used, *far* worse than Perl. So, for GUI stuff, I use C# or Python and so far so good.
After some time you start to realize the different between real things with substance and shiny new objects that are being shoved down your throat.
C# being in the latter category.
Well, to you, to me it's one of the most enjoyable languages I've ever used, one that manages to extend it's "parent" language (Java, in this case) in ways that are actually useful to me and not just random cruft, as with poor C's bastard children. But alas, there's still people that enjoy C++ and Obj-C, and I can understand and accept that, even if I don't share the sentiment.
So then why bother with something closed source?
a) Because it's better. Even though VS sucks donkey balls compared to Eclipse, and I'd rather program with 'cat' commands than ever use Monodevelop again, C# is the superior language, IMNSHO. And b) because it's not closed-source. The .NET Framework seems to be a patent minefield, but if you don't live in a country with retarded patent laws, Mono is an excellent way to develop applications in C#, and comes with full source-code.
Probably the latter, but that doesn't mean we can't decrease our (as in the world's) military budget while still maintaining a sane world.
There's always a point where looking for an even bigger stick is just compensating for something else.
There are many problems with the current architecture of the internet, but if there's something that the original engineers got right was the idea of putting the cables properly in place, and letting the users worry about what's transmitted over them.
Some things could be better, of course, nobody anticipated that someday there'd be more net-enabled devices on a typical household than actual human beings, which led us to the IPv4 address problem, and in my not-very-knowledgeable opinion I think that some crypto being part of email from the beginning would've only been a good thing. But dammit, yesterday we were transmitting text and images, today it's music and movies, tomorrow we could be transmitting gzipped thoughts for all we know and it shouldn't matter one bit to the underlying architecture.
But my personal, pet change? IPv8. Two reasons, mostly: one, eight is a prettier number than six, and two, I dream of a day where even my shirt can have it's own unique IP address. And hey, if we're changing it anyways, we may as well increase our namespace by a couple extra orders of magnitude, right?
How is having all browsers being free not capitalistic? Capitalism predicts that as a product market matures, the costs will tend towards a minimum, which is exactly what happened here, since there's enough people willing to write a browser for free that the minimum is zero (see also: Netscape and Opera).
I can't understand why people think that capitalism means "try to get as much money as you can, by any means necessary". That'd be closer to fascism, but even that is stretching things a bit.
There's a matching set of quotes floating around the 'net that are apropos:
There is no complexity problem in programming that cannot be solved by adding a layer of abstraction.
There is no performance problem in programming that cannot be solved by removing a layer of abstraction.
Now, it's easy to see why newer software is usually slower. First you start with a simple converter, say, from txt to rtf. Then you want to accept HTML files as input. Abstraction. Then output to PDF. Abstraction. Then separate the CLI from a library, so you can write a GUI in the future. Abstraction. Then a spell checker, just because everything has one now. Abstraction. And now, to do the one thing you originally could in a single step, your program has to go through a bazillion layers of abstraction, with the obvious performance hit.
But on the other hand, your little program can do a lot more than it originally could, and if someone wanted to extend it to output to, say, PNG images, it'd be *much* easier for him now than if he were to start with the original codebase.
Me, I'll take the performance hit. Computers are getting faster, and my list of "must-have" features is only getting bigger, but YMMV, depending on both the type of software and hardware in question.
Probably, most routers in my experience include some sort of firewall functionality, and even without it the worms would have trouble with the NAT, I think.
Well, you could always unplug your router and give it a try ;)
13) Download antivirus without connection to the network. Pixies and leprechauns are helpful here.
Which is why you should always install XP with at least one of the following:
a) Behind a firewall (may not be completely safe, though).
b) With a laptop besides you.
c) With an Ubuntu LiveCD.
Option c) is specially funny though, all things considered, but it's the one I usually recommend. In fact, many of my friends' PCs used to have a relatively small FAT32 partition for LinuxWindows file exchange during install/troubleshooting, before Linux got reliable NTFS support.
That's right. That's why with only 1 major desktop O/S for PCs business and consumers alike have abandoned PCs entirely.
That's a secondary market. The closest analogy is that of OSes themselves, and besides Macs (which live in their own world anyways) and the Free UNIXen, how much activity has there been on that front for, ohh, the last 15 years? fuckin' active industry, right.
While what you say is technically true, WOW is just one example. It may be an outlier but PC gaming is not dead.
No one has said that it's dead. Only that it may be in danger of becoming so, and if the current trends towards pervasive DRM continue unchecked, I wouldn't be sad nor surprised to see that.
The simple fact of the matter is, DRM isn't currently applied to *just* music and movies, but also to software, which is at the core of most of the world's companies, and books, which have always played a vital part in education.
*I* don't give a fuck about what happens with entertainment, if not having a sequel for Transformers or another Britney CD is the price I have to pay to ensure my computer keeps working for as long as I maintain it, and people around me are free to learn as much as they'd like from any subject they'd like with only a basic computer and a basic internet connection, I'll gladly pay that price, many times over.
Fuck entertainment, and fuck those who would take away our freedom to learn and work. Open Source or not, fuck DRM.