Have WoW's 10+ million subscribers suddenly decided to abandon PC gaming?
One game does not an industry make.
Seriously, when has PC gaming been a bigger industry than in the last few years?
The issue, I believe, is not about size per se but rather the fact that DRM is pissing off enough customers that the *stability* of it is in question. And once the market is deemed too unstable, the shrinking customer base is almost sure to follow.
Therefore the primary competition between companies, the sole focus, was on the actual game premise. As a result, they rocked (well, mostly. ET for the Atari2600, I'm talking to you). Now there are so many other aspects that the designers' attention is divided, and the games themselves suffer. In a nutshell, the spell is broken.
Care to name the SNES-era shooter on par with Half-Life 2? a football game with gameplay comparable to Winning Eleven 9? or the racing game comparable to Gran Turismo 5, let alone GTR2? or something, *anything*, like Shadow of the Collosus?
Yeah, yeah, Madden sucks, so what, so did General Custer's Revenge. Shit has been made since the beginning of the eras, and shit shall be made 'til the end of times, deal with it.
Perhaps the particular genres you care about have progressed nothing during these last decades, or perhaps you're just seeing the past through rose-colored glasses, but it's undeniable that there are plenty of games that have used the extra technology to improve the gaming experience *way* past anything that could've been made on a SNES, let alone a fuckin' Atari.
We have Offoce 2000 at work. Does Office 2007 do anything Office 2003 doesn't? Or even anything Office 2000 doesn't? What makes it worth the extra Five hundred dollars per license????
The fact that's still being sold. Now you know how we, Windows 2000 users, have felt for the past few years whenever we buy a new computer.
But, seriously, I doubt that there's anything useful that a non-research-geneticist could do with the data, even if it was public.
Well, we won't know unless we try, right?
Plus as Linus once said, real men upload their stuff to FTP and let the world mirror it, so having your own DNA copied all around the world is bound to be the pinnacle of manliness.
Except that by your use of Linux you're increasing it's value by the network effect. Granted, the same is also true for Britney, but for OSes the effect is much stronger than for mere music, so even if you never intended to pay for it, Linux is better off with you than without.
The market for hardware is rich and diverse, with multiple providers for just about any hardware component you can think of.
Oh, really? how many providers have you got for computers (legally) capable of running OSX? well, we *used* to have Psystar but...
But in which area does Apple have a monopoly? Neither. No monopoly means no anti-trust violations.
IANAL, but as far as I know, anti-trust law deals not only with monopolies but also with unfair business practices that may lead to one, and tying through purely legal means their software to their hardware products could easily fall under the latter.
Wrong. It's pretty much accepted that the most efficient form of government is that of a Benevolent Dictatorship For Life, AKA what Linus has over the Linux kernel. Democracy is simply the best way we've found to trade some of that efficiency in favor of having some measures against corruption.
Marxism, however, is about as corruption-proof as a BDFL while being no more efficient than Democracy, essentially the worst of both worlds.
just like the iPhone (/iPod touch) platform is supposedly used more for reading eBooks than all the eBook readers together, I think the same is happening for games.
You're not serious, are you? the Nintendo DS is various orders of magnitude more popular than the Kindle, and that's leaving aside the PSP versus whatever eBook reader is second-best right now (case in point, I can't remember any besides the Kindle).
Fuck, it wouldn't surprise me if a single Palm model would be used more for reading eBooks than all eBook readers combined, that's simply too low of a barrier. But Apple will sooner beat Microsoft on the desktop than surpass (or even be able to directly compete with) Nintendo and Sony on the portable gaming market, and we all know the chances of *that*.
Does it mean that 94% of websites did not find the standard useful?
Or perhaps that the standard is poorly presented, causing fewer people to be aware of it?
Or perhaps that a large percentage of people behind that 94% of websites are inept. Or do you think that Joe Average checks for standards-compliance before uploading his Donut-loving webpage to Geocities?
Plus there's the fact that almost all free hosts put ads on your webpage, never in ways that comply with any standard.
The only real thing most web devs care about is 'does my site/application run as required in the browsers I need it to?'
The thing is, with so many different browsers using so many different engines, and the popularity of phone/PDA web browsers, the only way devs can have *any* expectation for their pages to work as required in all of them is by following the standards. And thankfully, more and more devs seem to be realizing that, because the number of idiot-coded websites I've seen has decreased dramatically in the last 3 years.
So yeah, it's only 4.1%, but I imagine that if they had ignored relatively minor errors (like forgetting to close a bold tag, or not putting the / in br tags), and compensated in some way for advertiser's shit code, the percentage would be *much* higher than that.
When was the last time that you needed to upgrade, configure or recompile something to watch a show on a consumer television set? Yes, the signal goes digital so you ditch the old box and get on with the shinies. Exactly as in the Mac world.
And exactly as it is in the Windows and Linux works. 'Til something fails horribly, and you have to "get under the hood". And contrary to what the hardcore Apple loyalists may claim, that *also* happens on Macs.
Automakers don't cater to blingers, modders and assorted $YOURHOBBY$ers, those are a niche markets serviced by niche players.
*cough* *cough* umm... yeah. Sure. I mean, the Nissan GT-R is clearly aimed at Aunt Tilly for her to go buy some groceries. Or maybe Nissan is just a "niche" player, like Toyota and Ford, yeah, that's probably it.
I only wish they'd change the name to G-Imp or Imp/G or even GNU-Imp because most of the time the stupid name is the biggest objection people cite to not even give it a chance. English being my second language, the name means jack to me, but I've encountered the argument often enough...
From *actual* photographers and designers, or just your average OSX-obsessed Slashdot troll? because if we discount the latter, I don't think I've ever heard it. Lack of power compared to Photoshop (specially with respect to adjustment layers and 16-bit editing), unconventional interface, yes, but never "the name sounds funny". YMMV, tho'.
Unfortunately, you're probably a software developer and name your applications "vi" or "fsck" because you don't bother that much to improve your image.
Please tell us, what exactly is wrong with the name "vi"?
In other words: Application names are a lot more important than you might think.
Yeah. Sweet thing that applications with stupid names like Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat, Oracle or Vista never got popular enough to be known outside geek circles.
If there's one thing worse than devs who ignore what the Average Joe thinks, are marketing guys who overreact with respect to what the Average Joe may think. Names mean shit in the real world as long as you've got enough money for marketing, and the importance of coherency in application names is specially irrelevant to all but the most paranoid marketing drone, sorry.
Why would anyone who's happy with Windows have a desire to switch in the first place?
Because it's not hard, and it'll save them money, as I mentioned below.
When I say "If someone is happy using, say, Word and Photoshop... ", it suggests they already own Word and Photoshop.
But only their current versions, so they're fscked as far as new functionality goes if they don't pay again. Which, in the case of Photoshop, includes "compatibility with the latest version of the plugin needed to open your camera's RAW files", a pretty significant piece of functionality if you ask me.
Linux is going to save my motherboard? Hmm.
No, but you'll be able to get away with changing only the motherboard, not the entire computer.
The fact that Vista is overfed, that Linux is more secure, and that Linux is often available gratis are not things that would motivated a satisified Windows user to switch. You're essentially arguing that Linux users should switch because Linux is better. That's not enough.
So, having a free, secure OS that needs only a fraction of the money investment to run well as their current one *isn't* a good reason to switch? what *would* then be a good reason, world peace, a perpetual motion device and a pony?
But it is naive to expect people to willingly throw away their investment in Windows (time and money) simply to learn an OS that allows them to keep on doing the same things.
Why? anyone who's ever browsed the 'net on their cellphones already has (and no, Windows Mobile is different enough from vanilla Windows that they'll still need to be "retrained"). Simply put, it's not that big of a deal, it just requires the desire to do so.
If someone is happy using, say, Word and Photoshop, what's attractive in hearing that Linux can't run Word and Photoshop but they can do pretty much the same things with Openoffice and Gimp, once they take the time to learn how to use them? Why should they do that when they can keep on using Word and Photoshop?
Because, one imagines, they'd appreciate the $1000 saved by not buying either Office or Photoshop.
Why should I care if Linux allows me to do the same things once I learn how to use it and a bunch of new programs? Where's the incentive?
For your Mac, it's easy, and you'll know it when your motherboard decides to give up the ghost. For Windows, well, security first, performance second, and price third. The amount of time you need to learn how to use Linux from a user's POV isn't dramatically different than that of learning how to secure Windows, and the price difference between a computer that can run Ubuntu acceptably and one that can run Vista can be anything between "big" and "fucking huge", depending on your definition of "acceptably", and of "computer".
Dude... have you actually played any of those? I applaud the efforst of those teams, and I admit that many of them have potential, but they aren't even on par with a lot of the 3rd party hl (let alone hl2) mods in terms of graphics and playability... and that bar is pretty damned low.
Have you tried the latest version of Warsow? it's style is pretty unique so it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison but visually I'd easily put it on par with UT2004, at least. Nexuiz and Tremulous may not look as good, but they're also above your average Q3A mod, and therefore way above anything ever made for HL.
And that's without considering commercial FPSs, like the aforementioned UT2004, Wolf:ET and Q3A, and all mods made for them (particularly interesting are Tactical Ops, True Combat, and Urban Terror respectively). So no, I don't think that Linux's FPS offerigs are weak, it may not be as strong as Windows', but it's far from weak either.
Right now the ONLY logical reasons to move to a Linux based PC is 1) cost and 2) boot time when run in minimalist mode. Otherwise an XP machine is far better for the availability of apps and consistency of experience.
and 3) performance in low-end PCs and 4) ease of programming and 5) ability to reuse skills learned on it on any of the commercial UNIXen and 6) total lack of DRM and...
Well, you get the idea. I agree with your main point, that it's entirely possible that for some of these customers Linux simply wasn't the right choice, but gosh, your last paragraph is trollish, flamebait, ignorant, and wrong, sorry.
You know the first thing I did when I first got a digital camera? I learned photography. Not just "how to turn the camera on", but aperture, shutter speeds, exposure, rules of composition, etc. Yeah, I "could" have let the camera handle most of that stuff, but I know that unless I know what's it doing on the background even on the Auto modes, I have no right to expect something other than shitty results.
I simply can't understand why people don't do the same with computers... I mean, do you go to a guitar store, buy a $600 guitar, and then return it the next day because you didn't sound like Jimi Hendrix? I seriously hope not.
Every time Blizzard releases a game it is game of the year
ORLY? I thought 2002's GoTY was widely considered to have been GTA3, not Warcraft 3, 2004's to have been Half-Life 2, not World of Warcraft, and 2007's to have been BioShock, not The Burning Crusade.
Speaking of which, while BioShock got famous for it's annoyingly idiotic DRM, both Rockstar and Valve have been much, *much* friendlier to the gaming community at large, and to their customers in particular, than Blizzard has been so *they* shall get my money. They, and Epic who also competed on all three years with UT2003, 2004 and UT3 respectively, beating Blizzard at quality at every one IMNSHO while also refraining from misusing copyright law to sue their own customers.
I'm sorry if this sounds, dunno, trollish or something, but your problem clearly lies in Windows' horrid window management. Ideally, Alt+Tab'ing to TheGIMP should bring back all of your GIMP-related windows in the order they were when you last Alt+Tab'ed out of them, and that's how Photoshop (and MS Word;) works on a Mac, IIRC, and how it should work now on Linux with TheGIMP if I understand correctly, but I haven't tried it yet.
GIMP is destined to always conjure images about either: a) that disturbing dude from pulp fiction as you mentioned, or b) children who have some affliction or disability that causes them difficulty when walking.
Apparently, Google disagrees. The first link that's *not* related to The GNU Image Manipulation Program is on page 3, about some "Gimp Parade" or something, then another one on page 4, but overall they're pretty rare.
But oh well, if a large car company can name their SUV after the act of masturbation and still sell 'em like hotcakes, I can't see why someone would have a problem with TheGIMP.
Re:Any chance we can draw circles and boxes now
on
GIMP 2.6 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Example: Take a family photograph and circle somebody. Or add a cartoon speech bubble.
These things should be single step operations from the main control pane.
...of Inkscape, as should be obvious given the relative complexity of a "cartoon speech bubble", and the obvious problems that'll occur when you try to resize it if you did it in a raster editor.
Photoshop needs to have everything and the kitchen sink, because Adobe can't expect normal people to pay more than $700 for their image editing needs. F/OSS has no such obligation, and is therefore free to follow UNIX's philosophy of "do one thing, and one thing well", and *drawing* is the domain of Inkscape and Xara.
The solution: GIMP should ditch GTK/GDK and use GNUStep/Cocoa. This provides a number of advantages - free CMYK and pantone support,
Wow, GNUStep has pantone support?
better font rendering,
How? from what I've seen, GTK's font rendering is as good as X's itself, same as GNUStep. Care to mention any difference?
an improved UI,
You can improve an UI solely by porting an app to a different toolkit? and one that's designed around UI conventions that don't apply to any other desktop in existence?
and direct access to artistic types.
Artists use GNUStep?
An OS X native GIMP would kick it's ass.
Ohh, that explains it, you want TheGIMP to switch from being a multiplatform application to one designed around an OS that's neither Free nor dominant in the desktop market. Sorry, not gonna happen.
Studying wealth-generation techniques does not make me power-hungry or greedy, in the same way that the people working on the Manhattan project were not monsters who wanted to extinguish life.
True, but what the GP seems to be getting at is, if scientists in general and mathematicians in particular would think about the potential ethical ramifications of their work before doing it, perhaps the world would be a nicer place. A philosophy I'd tend to agree with, BTW, specially with regards to the US' NSA and DoD.
I'm not doing this out of personal greed, I'm doing it because the mathematics involved is elegant and interesting.
Best of lucks, then, and I hope I ever get the chance of looking at your work, the math involved *does* sound interesting from what little I've seen.
Maybe you're happy working away on your abstract nonsense
You just *had* to ruin a perfectly good comment by flaming anyone who thinks differently than you do.
but I think I'd prefer to work on something which might actually make a difference to people's lives
Perhaps you should've gone into engineering, then?
Just because an application has potential for abuse doesn't make it inherently evil, as you seem to suggest.
True, but I'd be careful when dealing with the US government. That paranoid theory that the NSA has already broken most encryption algorithms but just hasn't disclosed how yet, sounds a bit less paranoid once you see how many mathematicians are employed by them, and it's better to be safe than in Gitmo.
Actually you can, under very specific definitions of "negative";) whether it's applicable to the GP's request is debatable, however.
Math is not invented. It is discovered.
Whether math is discovered or invented is an ongoing philosophical debate in the mathematical community, so unless you know something the rest of the world doesn't, you can't state that as a fact.
DRM is a business decision. It's not there because they hate your freedom, it's there because they think it will help stop or at least slow piracy.
They think wrong then, and there's plenty of evidence to that effect.
The only successful DRM comes from hardware makers (read: Apple) who balance the power to govern sales without extortion prices and without runaway piracy, because their interests are aligned with both consumers and intellectual property content producers.
Under *which* definition of "successful" is Apple's iTMS a success and Valve's Steam a failure?
Apple carries DRM like the Ring.
Agreed. Alas, poor Smeagol has long ago turned into Gollum, and no Mount of Doom nearby...
1. Linux has no viruses. Why would we need something like this?
Because Linux has vulnerabilities which can be (and have been in the past) used to take control of a system, and this is an attempt to fight that. All viruses are malware but not all malware are viruses.
2. If they're going to make a list of the behaviour of _every_ program, then that list would be HUGE, and take petabytes. A blacklist is a lot easier to make and keep up.
Unless I'm mistaken, this only needs a whitelist for the software installed on the system, so itwon't be that big and a whitelist is safer from a security point of view (uptime may be problematic, though, depending on the number of false positives).
3. This still wouldn't protect the weakest link: the user. If a virus asks the user:" Add IAmATrojan.exe to the whitelist ", a lot of people wouldn't do it. Heck, if you need even need a normal anti-virus, you're to stupid to work with computers.
Because this is primarily aimed at servers, and if someone with access to your server's whitelist is clueless enough to fall for that, you have *MUCH* bigger problems than a piece of malware, believe me.
Slashdot Mirror
Have WoW's 10+ million subscribers suddenly decided to abandon PC gaming?
One game does not an industry make.
Seriously, when has PC gaming been a bigger industry than in the last few years?
The issue, I believe, is not about size per se but rather the fact that DRM is pissing off enough customers that the *stability* of it is in question. And once the market is deemed too unstable, the shrinking customer base is almost sure to follow.
Therefore the primary competition between companies, the sole focus, was on the actual game premise. As a result, they rocked (well, mostly. ET for the Atari2600, I'm talking to you). Now there are so many other aspects that the designers' attention is divided, and the games themselves suffer. In a nutshell, the spell is broken.
Care to name the SNES-era shooter on par with Half-Life 2? a football game with gameplay comparable to Winning Eleven 9? or the racing game comparable to Gran Turismo 5, let alone GTR2? or something, *anything*, like Shadow of the Collosus?
Yeah, yeah, Madden sucks, so what, so did General Custer's Revenge. Shit has been made since the beginning of the eras, and shit shall be made 'til the end of times, deal with it.
Perhaps the particular genres you care about have progressed nothing during these last decades, or perhaps you're just seeing the past through rose-colored glasses, but it's undeniable that there are plenty of games that have used the extra technology to improve the gaming experience *way* past anything that could've been made on a SNES, let alone a fuckin' Atari.
We have Offoce 2000 at work. Does Office 2007 do anything Office 2003 doesn't? Or even anything Office 2000 doesn't? What makes it worth the extra Five hundred dollars per license????
The fact that's still being sold. Now you know how we, Windows 2000 users, have felt for the past few years whenever we buy a new computer.
But, seriously, I doubt that there's anything useful that a non-research-geneticist could do with the data, even if it was public.
Well, we won't know unless we try, right?
Plus as Linus once said, real men upload their stuff to FTP and let the world mirror it, so having your own DNA copied all around the world is bound to be the pinnacle of manliness.
Except that by your use of Linux you're increasing it's value by the network effect. Granted, the same is also true for Britney, but for OSes the effect is much stronger than for mere music, so even if you never intended to pay for it, Linux is better off with you than without.
The market for hardware is rich and diverse, with multiple providers for just about any hardware component you can think of.
Oh, really? how many providers have you got for computers (legally) capable of running OSX? well, we *used* to have Psystar but...
But in which area does Apple have a monopoly? Neither. No monopoly means no anti-trust violations.
IANAL, but as far as I know, anti-trust law deals not only with monopolies but also with unfair business practices that may lead to one, and tying through purely legal means their software to their hardware products could easily fall under the latter.
Wrong. It's pretty much accepted that the most efficient form of government is that of a Benevolent Dictatorship For Life, AKA what Linus has over the Linux kernel. Democracy is simply the best way we've found to trade some of that efficiency in favor of having some measures against corruption.
Marxism, however, is about as corruption-proof as a BDFL while being no more efficient than Democracy, essentially the worst of both worlds.
just like the iPhone (/iPod touch) platform is supposedly used more for reading eBooks than all the eBook readers together, I think the same is happening for games.
You're not serious, are you? the Nintendo DS is various orders of magnitude more popular than the Kindle, and that's leaving aside the PSP versus whatever eBook reader is second-best right now (case in point, I can't remember any besides the Kindle).
Fuck, it wouldn't surprise me if a single Palm model would be used more for reading eBooks than all eBook readers combined, that's simply too low of a barrier. But Apple will sooner beat Microsoft on the desktop than surpass (or even be able to directly compete with) Nintendo and Sony on the portable gaming market, and we all know the chances of *that*.
Does it mean that 94% of websites did not find the standard useful?
Or perhaps that the standard is poorly presented, causing fewer people to be aware of it?
Or perhaps that a large percentage of people behind that 94% of websites are inept. Or do you think that Joe Average checks for standards-compliance before uploading his Donut-loving webpage to Geocities?
Plus there's the fact that almost all free hosts put ads on your webpage, never in ways that comply with any standard.
The only real thing most web devs care about is 'does my site/application run as required in the browsers I need it to?'
The thing is, with so many different browsers using so many different engines, and the popularity of phone/PDA web browsers, the only way devs can have *any* expectation for their pages to work as required in all of them is by following the standards. And thankfully, more and more devs seem to be realizing that, because the number of idiot-coded websites I've seen has decreased dramatically in the last 3 years.
So yeah, it's only 4.1%, but I imagine that if they had ignored relatively minor errors (like forgetting to close a bold tag, or not putting the / in br tags), and compensated in some way for advertiser's shit code, the percentage would be *much* higher than that.
When was the last time that you needed to upgrade, configure or recompile something to watch a show on a consumer television set? Yes, the signal goes digital so you ditch the old box and get on with the shinies. Exactly as in the Mac world.
And exactly as it is in the Windows and Linux works. 'Til something fails horribly, and you have to "get under the hood". And contrary to what the hardcore Apple loyalists may claim, that *also* happens on Macs.
Automakers don't cater to blingers, modders and assorted $YOURHOBBY$ers, those are a niche markets serviced by niche players.
*cough* *cough* umm... yeah. Sure. I mean, the Nissan GT-R is clearly aimed at Aunt Tilly for her to go buy some groceries. Or maybe Nissan is just a "niche" player, like Toyota and Ford, yeah, that's probably it.
I only wish they'd change the name to G-Imp or Imp/G or even GNU-Imp because most of the time the stupid name is the biggest objection people cite to not even give it a chance. English being my second language, the name means jack to me, but I've encountered the argument often enough...
From *actual* photographers and designers, or just your average OSX-obsessed Slashdot troll? because if we discount the latter, I don't think I've ever heard it. Lack of power compared to Photoshop (specially with respect to adjustment layers and 16-bit editing), unconventional interface, yes, but never "the name sounds funny". YMMV, tho'.
Unfortunately, you're probably a software developer and name your applications "vi" or "fsck" because you don't bother that much to improve your image.
Please tell us, what exactly is wrong with the name "vi"?
In other words: Application names are a lot more important than you might think.
Yeah. Sweet thing that applications with stupid names like Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat, Oracle or Vista never got popular enough to be known outside geek circles.
If there's one thing worse than devs who ignore what the Average Joe thinks, are marketing guys who overreact with respect to what the Average Joe may think. Names mean shit in the real world as long as you've got enough money for marketing, and the importance of coherency in application names is specially irrelevant to all but the most paranoid marketing drone, sorry.
Why would anyone who's happy with Windows have a desire to switch in the first place?
Because it's not hard, and it'll save them money, as I mentioned below.
When I say "If someone is happy using, say, Word and Photoshop... ", it suggests they already own Word and Photoshop.
But only their current versions, so they're fscked as far as new functionality goes if they don't pay again. Which, in the case of Photoshop, includes "compatibility with the latest version of the plugin needed to open your camera's RAW files", a pretty significant piece of functionality if you ask me.
Linux is going to save my motherboard? Hmm.
No, but you'll be able to get away with changing only the motherboard, not the entire computer.
The fact that Vista is overfed, that Linux is more secure, and that Linux is often available gratis are not things that would motivated a satisified Windows user to switch. You're essentially arguing that Linux users should switch because Linux is better. That's not enough.
So, having a free, secure OS that needs only a fraction of the money investment to run well as their current one *isn't* a good reason to switch? what *would* then be a good reason, world peace, a perpetual motion device and a pony?
But it is naive to expect people to willingly throw away their investment in Windows (time and money) simply to learn an OS that allows them to keep on doing the same things.
Why? anyone who's ever browsed the 'net on their cellphones already has (and no, Windows Mobile is different enough from vanilla Windows that they'll still need to be "retrained"). Simply put, it's not that big of a deal, it just requires the desire to do so.
If someone is happy using, say, Word and Photoshop, what's attractive in hearing that Linux can't run Word and Photoshop but they can do pretty much the same things with Openoffice and Gimp, once they take the time to learn how to use them? Why should they do that when they can keep on using Word and Photoshop?
Because, one imagines, they'd appreciate the $1000 saved by not buying either Office or Photoshop.
Why should I care if Linux allows me to do the same things once I learn how to use it and a bunch of new programs? Where's the incentive?
For your Mac, it's easy, and you'll know it when your motherboard decides to give up the ghost. For Windows, well, security first, performance second, and price third. The amount of time you need to learn how to use Linux from a user's POV isn't dramatically different than that of learning how to secure Windows, and the price difference between a computer that can run Ubuntu acceptably and one that can run Vista can be anything between "big" and "fucking huge", depending on your definition of "acceptably", and of "computer".
Dude... have you actually played any of those? I applaud the efforst of those teams, and I admit that many of them have potential, but they aren't even on par with a lot of the 3rd party hl (let alone hl2) mods in terms of graphics and playability... and that bar is pretty damned low.
Have you tried the latest version of Warsow? it's style is pretty unique so it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison but visually I'd easily put it on par with UT2004, at least. Nexuiz and Tremulous may not look as good, but they're also above your average Q3A mod, and therefore way above anything ever made for HL.
And that's without considering commercial FPSs, like the aforementioned UT2004, Wolf:ET and Q3A, and all mods made for them (particularly interesting are Tactical Ops, True Combat, and Urban Terror respectively). So no, I don't think that Linux's FPS offerigs are weak, it may not be as strong as Windows', but it's far from weak either.
Right now the ONLY logical reasons to move to a Linux based PC is 1) cost and 2) boot time when run in minimalist mode. Otherwise an XP machine is far better for the availability of apps and consistency of experience.
and 3) performance in low-end PCs and 4) ease of programming and 5) ability to reuse skills learned on it on any of the commercial UNIXen and 6) total lack of DRM and...
Well, you get the idea. I agree with your main point, that it's entirely possible that for some of these customers Linux simply wasn't the right choice, but gosh, your last paragraph is trollish, flamebait, ignorant, and wrong, sorry.
Then please refrain from using a computer.
You know the first thing I did when I first got a digital camera? I learned photography. Not just "how to turn the camera on", but aperture, shutter speeds, exposure, rules of composition, etc. Yeah, I "could" have let the camera handle most of that stuff, but I know that unless I know what's it doing on the background even on the Auto modes, I have no right to expect something other than shitty results.
I simply can't understand why people don't do the same with computers... I mean, do you go to a guitar store, buy a $600 guitar, and then return it the next day because you didn't sound like Jimi Hendrix? I seriously hope not.
Every time Blizzard releases a game it is game of the year
ORLY? I thought 2002's GoTY was widely considered to have been GTA3, not Warcraft 3, 2004's to have been Half-Life 2, not World of Warcraft, and 2007's to have been BioShock, not The Burning Crusade.
Speaking of which, while BioShock got famous for it's annoyingly idiotic DRM, both Rockstar and Valve have been much, *much* friendlier to the gaming community at large, and to their customers in particular, than Blizzard has been so *they* shall get my money. They, and Epic who also competed on all three years with UT2003, 2004 and UT3 respectively, beating Blizzard at quality at every one IMNSHO while also refraining from misusing copyright law to sue their own customers.
I'm sorry if this sounds, dunno, trollish or something, but your problem clearly lies in Windows' horrid window management. Ideally, Alt+Tab'ing to TheGIMP should bring back all of your GIMP-related windows in the order they were when you last Alt+Tab'ed out of them, and that's how Photoshop (and MS Word ;) works on a Mac, IIRC, and how it should work now on Linux with TheGIMP if I understand correctly, but I haven't tried it yet.
GIMP is destined to always conjure images about either: a) that disturbing dude from pulp fiction as you mentioned, or b) children who have some affliction or disability that causes them difficulty when walking.
Apparently, Google disagrees. The first link that's *not* related to The GNU Image Manipulation Program is on page 3, about some "Gimp Parade" or something, then another one on page 4, but overall they're pretty rare.
But oh well, if a large car company can name their SUV after the act of masturbation and still sell 'em like hotcakes, I can't see why someone would have a problem with TheGIMP.
Example: Take a family photograph and circle somebody. Or add a cartoon speech bubble.
These things should be single step operations from the main control pane.
...of Inkscape, as should be obvious given the relative complexity of a "cartoon speech bubble", and the obvious problems that'll occur when you try to resize it if you did it in a raster editor.
Photoshop needs to have everything and the kitchen sink, because Adobe can't expect normal people to pay more than $700 for their image editing needs. F/OSS has no such obligation, and is therefore free to follow UNIX's philosophy of "do one thing, and one thing well", and *drawing* is the domain of Inkscape and Xara.
The solution: GIMP should ditch GTK/GDK and use GNUStep/Cocoa. This provides a number of advantages - free CMYK and pantone support,
Wow, GNUStep has pantone support?
better font rendering,
How? from what I've seen, GTK's font rendering is as good as X's itself, same as GNUStep. Care to mention any difference?
an improved UI,
You can improve an UI solely by porting an app to a different toolkit? and one that's designed around UI conventions that don't apply to any other desktop in existence?
and direct access to artistic types.
Artists use GNUStep?
An OS X native GIMP would kick it's ass.
Ohh, that explains it, you want TheGIMP to switch from being a multiplatform application to one designed around an OS that's neither Free nor dominant in the desktop market. Sorry, not gonna happen.
As a math student...
Studying wealth-generation techniques does not make me power-hungry or greedy, in the same way that the people working on the Manhattan project were not monsters who wanted to extinguish life.
True, but what the GP seems to be getting at is, if scientists in general and mathematicians in particular would think about the potential ethical ramifications of their work before doing it, perhaps the world would be a nicer place. A philosophy I'd tend to agree with, BTW, specially with regards to the US' NSA and DoD.
I'm not doing this out of personal greed, I'm doing it because the mathematics involved is elegant and interesting.
Best of lucks, then, and I hope I ever get the chance of looking at your work, the math involved *does* sound interesting from what little I've seen.
Maybe you're happy working away on your abstract nonsense
You just *had* to ruin a perfectly good comment by flaming anyone who thinks differently than you do.
but I think I'd prefer to work on something which might actually make a difference to people's lives
Perhaps you should've gone into engineering, then?
Just because an application has potential for abuse doesn't make it inherently evil, as you seem to suggest.
True, but I'd be careful when dealing with the US government. That paranoid theory that the NSA has already broken most encryption algorithms but just hasn't disclosed how yet, sounds a bit less paranoid once you see how many mathematicians are employed by them, and it's better to be safe than in Gitmo.
Because you can't prove a negative
Actually you can, under very specific definitions of "negative" ;) whether it's applicable to the GP's request is debatable, however.
Math is not invented. It is discovered.
Whether math is discovered or invented is an ongoing philosophical debate in the mathematical community, so unless you know something the rest of the world doesn't, you can't state that as a fact.
DRM is a business decision. It's not there because they hate your freedom, it's there because they think it will help stop or at least slow piracy.
They think wrong then, and there's plenty of evidence to that effect.
The only successful DRM comes from hardware makers (read: Apple) who balance the power to govern sales without extortion prices and without runaway piracy, because their interests are aligned with both consumers and intellectual property content producers.
Under *which* definition of "successful" is Apple's iTMS a success and Valve's Steam a failure?
Apple carries DRM like the Ring.
Agreed. Alas, poor Smeagol has long ago turned into Gollum, and no Mount of Doom nearby...
1. Linux has no viruses. Why would we need something like this?
Because Linux has vulnerabilities which can be (and have been in the past) used to take control of a system, and this is an attempt to fight that. All viruses are malware but not all malware are viruses.
2. If they're going to make a list of the behaviour of _every_ program, then that list would be HUGE, and take petabytes. A blacklist is a lot easier to make and keep up.
Unless I'm mistaken, this only needs a whitelist for the software installed on the system, so itwon't be that big and a whitelist is safer from a security point of view (uptime may be problematic, though, depending on the number of false positives).
3. This still wouldn't protect the weakest link: the user. If a virus asks the user :" Add IAmATrojan.exe to the whitelist ", a lot of people wouldn't do it. Heck, if you need even need a normal anti-virus, you're to stupid to work with computers.
Because this is primarily aimed at servers, and if someone with access to your server's whitelist is clueless enough to fall for that, you have *MUCH* bigger problems than a piece of malware, believe me.