X really is a pain in the ass to deal with. Ever tried to get dual monitors working? OK, ever tried to get dual monitors with differing resolutions working? My standard work configuration when at my desk is two widescreen monitors, one 1280x800 (my laptop panel--I don't use a desktop right now) and a 1440x900 LCD monitor, oriented vertically (great for reading or code listings, I can't recommend that enough!). I spent far too much time trying to make this system work under Linux. All indications were that it's just not possible. Which is a shame, because I find it to be the best way for me to work.
(X is also a huge problem for numerous other reasons--a friend of mine worked for nVidia and related horror stories very similar to Linux Hater's blog on the topic. Mesa, as an open-source OpenGL solution, is preposterous and while there might someday actually be accelerated 3D drivers on a level of performance with closed-source drivers, I really wouldn't bet on it. Don't give me any bullshit about patents or "they have people working just on this"--I know and I do not care. It's so unfortunate that they have a problem. Emphasis on "they" have a problem. I'm an end user. I don't give a damn about their problems, I give a damn about their solutions.
And whoever thinks DRI is still relevant today needs their fucking head examined. You can't run Compiz and a 3D-accelerated application at the same time under DRI, but it works just fine under nVidia, because nVidia's "drivers" in reality rip out most of the lower third of the X stack in order to bypass some of the X braindead failures. The DRI architecture cannot be fixed, either, which makes this even more fun. It's not like any of this is novel, though: SGI had a workable rendering system in IRIX in the late 90's. X? Still waiting!)
Moving upward: while GNOME has made some pretty significant strides over the last two years, it's still just plain not very good. It's clunky--although much of this comes from GTK+ being nearly impossible to theme in an attractive manner, and the widget set's propensity for obnoxious amounts of padding, compare MonoDevelop and Visual Studio regardless of the theme on the Linux machine using MD and you'll see what I mean. The HCI for GNOME is bugfuck retarded (are you sure? [No] [Yes]). The applications, while often functional, lack polish and the sort of pleasantness to use that you find on OS X or even Windows. (The GIMP is a prime example. Nice backend. Horrible, horrible frontend, and a community of developers who are incapable of understanding that programmers don't understand users.)
KDE used to be my preferred desktop. It was fairly good-looking (although, and I hate to say it, Vista makes 3.5.x look really crap and 4.x not much better), and was relatively pleasant to use. It was obvious that people actually put some thought into HCI, even if their conclusions were not always right. Then KDE4 happened, and made me start wishing a bus to hit Aaron Seigo. 4.x is a departure of what KDE is as far as I'm concerned, and the cavalier attitude of their developers toward their users will prevent me from going back to it.
The suggestion of WINE for anything is preposterous. While WINE is quite an impressive project (and has delived good results), it simply should not be needed. If you're pimping Linux as an alternative to Windows, you'd better have all the applications people want (and that includes games as well as Photoshop--I'd say Office, but I won't be that unreasonable).
Bringing us to games, I would argue that the lack of an organized, coherent framework for media is hurting Linux as much as anything. Where's the DirectX equivalent? Where's the one-stop-shop-for-all-your-needs? Game developers aren't going to fuck around trying to find the best solutions for a project. On Windows, it's pretty much DirectX or bust because DirectX is good enough and convenient. Convenience cannot be underrated as a factor of importance. W
Oh, no, I know that. I was just mentioning what can happen if you do it.:) I don't think either is a good idea, especially with computers regularly having multiple gigabytes of memory.
And, IIRC, Windows does, these days, operate similarly with regard to file handles, doesn't it?
This is basically the reason, yes. Windows itself is not subject to being unable to move or replace a code image on-disk, of course (although it can cause some weird issues if forced--I've seen applications supposedly paged to disk try to hit up the new image from disk rather than from the page file and puke all over themselves), but really, for most uses it's just not worth the risk..NET applications can, however, leverage the GAC to do essentially the same thing. As we see more and more movement toward the use of managed languages in the Windows ecosystem (it's going to happen), we'll see fewer and fewer reboots from updates.
How about applications people want and desktops that aren't user-hostile? (And no, that's not a troll. I'd love to see Linux do better on the desktop. But, uh, it sure ain't making much progress. People are too busy shoving sand into their vaginas over Mono and wasting time wanking about meaningless crap rather than making it better.)
And, again: the scales are too different. You are not going to make Half-Life 2 off T-shirt sales (after all, without copyright and trademark, anybody can use your work--what's to stop anyone from selling them at cut-rate prices below what you can profit off of?) and web ads.
You're absolutely right. One nasty side effect of getting diabetes is that you can't eat the really sugary stuff. Though you may be able to sneak one once in a while.
Oh, horseshit. Having complex and high-quality entertainment isn't "diabetes." This is an absolutely retarded idea.
If you want everything to be free, the quality and scope is going to tank. Simple as that.
And most of it isn't very good. What is good (and, certainly, there's plenty of it) is of small scope. I mean--and no disrespect to the developers involved, because I know them and like them and their projects--compare Warsow (based off an originally for-profit engine whose development and popularity was based off the Quake series of for-pay games) with Half-Life 2. Do you really think we'll see something of the quality, technical acumen, and scope of Half-Life 2, for free?
I can idealize a point in which communities fund projects based on their needs and interests while corporate ventures monetize consumer good will, advertising, improved efficiencies, improved tangible products, merchandising, and/or plenty of other possible revenue sources.
With no disrespect intended: I can "idealize" a lot of things. I can idealize world peace. That doesn't mean you're going to see it.
A community's never going to fund Half-Life 2 ahead of time.
I appreciate you actually making an effort to flesh out the idea, rather than just continue the freetard hurp-durp. That said, I don't think that you've thought this through.
* one can subsidize the creation of the product (such as many websites do with ad space)
And yet advertising is going into the toilet. The scales are wrong, too: you aren't going to subsidize, say, a video game (which, even in terms of just labor cost and time, can run into the tens of thousands of dollars) with advertising on a website. You can say that somebody (the ever-mythical somebody) will pay for it because they want it, but frankly I don't see that happening in the modern society. The Renaissance was a long time ago. Patronage is dead.
* "cross subsidize" the free item with sales of another (the King Gillette "sell blades, not razors" model)
So an author needs to be a carpenter too? Package the book with a table?
OK, that's not really a particularly good example, but the point remains: authors, video game developers, musicians, etc. put a lot of time into the work. They don't have time to be selling concrete items at the same time. (The webcomic model of selling T-shirts is, if you think about it, not at all a good one: the effort spent in creating the comics vastly outstrips the T-shirts, and the T-shirts likewise don't bring in a similar amount of money. That's why you only see a few of them able to quit their day jobs on their popularity.)
* use the "free" item as a loss leader to sell some other service (as many businesses do with promotional items)
Same deal. An author has no other goods to sell but his words. Musicians don't make much at all from merch (personal experience speaking), and a video game is the product, and the tchotchkes some developers tuck in aren't what sell the game.
Except that university professors are paid by an externality to that relationship (the school). The only similar possible model for intellectual property is patronage--and for a lot of reasons I don't see that ever coming back. (One person with money isn't going to want to pay $200,000 for, say, a video game, when the alternative is 10,000 people paying $20.)
And what, exactly, business model supports the creation of digital content for free? Yes, duplication costs nothing. Creation costs a very large amount.
Except they're not forcing people to install non-preferred stuff in any way. If they start doing that, you have a point, but until then, you're just spewing crap.
(And I categorically reject the idea that something released for free is tainted because the R&D costs are paid for by applications in other markets. It's a stupid idea.)
It's not even bundled with the OS. You have to go download it. Your reasoning completely sucks, and smacks of (stupid) knee-jerk anti-Microsoft sentiment. Unsurprising among Slashbots, but still.
If Microsoft can do it better than the antivirus vendors (and given how absolutely execrable the antivirus vendors are at doing their jobs, I don't see that as much of a stretch), then they are entirely welcome to do so. I'll still use Avast or Avira if theirs isn't up to snuff, and so will plenty of other people.
For-pay antivirus (especially the new subscription model foisted on consumers by Symantec and McAfee, among others) needs to go the fuck away. If Microsoft releasing a free antivirus (and I categorically reject your retarded assertion that it's a cost built into Windows) gets rid of that, then I'll throw 'em a fuckin' parade.
People don't allege that Homo sapiens came from the Fertile Crescent. The thinking is that what we recognize as civilization came from there. Which, anthropologically and archaeologically speaking, seems to be correct.
The backend stuff isn't really where you need a hard-nose--and yes, all of those are fine people, but their projects are either of narrow scope (python, glibc) or largely targeted toward people just like them (OpenBSD).
The "Linux Desktop" pony-wishing necessitates a very wide function base (look at how much crap Ubuntu has to herd around) and, in addition, targets the Linux desktop toward people who are not just like them. Neither are good functions for building consensus.
If you are seriously going to put Java against.NET and MySQL against SQL Server (which is dishonest, because Oracle is the kickass proprietary database at the top of the heap), you have clearly never used either of the latter. Shit, MySQL barely even counts as a database.
If you'd said PostgreSQL you'd have looked a little more credible (because PostgreSQL is actually a very good database!), but I'm going to put my money on "you're a fucking idiot."
It's ironic, then, that you are whining like a little crybaby now. You are raging so badly that you just threw a childish fit, and had some childish fantasy about Google beating up the mean Opera for innovating. LOL.
No, I'd like to see it because Opera is a pissant company who's never been able to actually compete with anyone else and I wish nothing but failure on them.
Opera is currently the dominant mobile browser,
Give it time. The non-Blackberry smartphones are going to Webkit and it's not going to be close. Opera's mobile version isn't even tolerable compared to the G1 browser or the iPhone's version of Safari. It's shit.
and the revenue growth from the desktop version is more than 100% each quarter, with a user base more than doubling in less than 2 years. Sounds pretty successful to me.
And yet after, what, thirteen years, their desktop version has less than half of what Google Chrome's is--and Google Chrome has been out less than a year.
Unfortunately for Linux (which I'd love to see kick ass and take names), Shuttleworth is interested in consensus over quality too often. To do what you're saying, you need a hard-nosed, damn-near-messianic figure who is willing to fight tooth and nail to realize exactly what he wants. This is not really very compatible with open source to begin with, and Shuttleworth is not that guy anyway.
Hasn't changed? The hell it hasn't. My new Dell Studio 15, with the standard battery (6-cell, I think), gets three hours and forty-five minutes under regular usage (i.e., not playing Dwarf Fortress or doing something graphically intensive). It'd get more with Aero Glass off.
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Well, OK. Let's start with X.
X really is a pain in the ass to deal with. Ever tried to get dual monitors working? OK, ever tried to get dual monitors with differing resolutions working? My standard work configuration when at my desk is two widescreen monitors, one 1280x800 (my laptop panel--I don't use a desktop right now) and a 1440x900 LCD monitor, oriented vertically (great for reading or code listings, I can't recommend that enough!). I spent far too much time trying to make this system work under Linux. All indications were that it's just not possible. Which is a shame, because I find it to be the best way for me to work.
(X is also a huge problem for numerous other reasons--a friend of mine worked for nVidia and related horror stories very similar to Linux Hater's blog on the topic. Mesa, as an open-source OpenGL solution, is preposterous and while there might someday actually be accelerated 3D drivers on a level of performance with closed-source drivers, I really wouldn't bet on it. Don't give me any bullshit about patents or "they have people working just on this"--I know and I do not care. It's so unfortunate that they have a problem. Emphasis on "they" have a problem. I'm an end user. I don't give a damn about their problems, I give a damn about their solutions.
And whoever thinks DRI is still relevant today needs their fucking head examined. You can't run Compiz and a 3D-accelerated application at the same time under DRI, but it works just fine under nVidia, because nVidia's "drivers" in reality rip out most of the lower third of the X stack in order to bypass some of the X braindead failures. The DRI architecture cannot be fixed, either, which makes this even more fun. It's not like any of this is novel, though: SGI had a workable rendering system in IRIX in the late 90's. X? Still waiting!)
Moving upward: while GNOME has made some pretty significant strides over the last two years, it's still just plain not very good. It's clunky--although much of this comes from GTK+ being nearly impossible to theme in an attractive manner, and the widget set's propensity for obnoxious amounts of padding, compare MonoDevelop and Visual Studio regardless of the theme on the Linux machine using MD and you'll see what I mean. The HCI for GNOME is bugfuck retarded (are you sure? [No] [Yes]). The applications, while often functional, lack polish and the sort of pleasantness to use that you find on OS X or even Windows. (The GIMP is a prime example. Nice backend. Horrible, horrible frontend, and a community of developers who are incapable of understanding that programmers don't understand users.)
KDE used to be my preferred desktop. It was fairly good-looking (although, and I hate to say it, Vista makes 3.5.x look really crap and 4.x not much better), and was relatively pleasant to use. It was obvious that people actually put some thought into HCI, even if their conclusions were not always right. Then KDE4 happened, and made me start wishing a bus to hit Aaron Seigo. 4.x is a departure of what KDE is as far as I'm concerned, and the cavalier attitude of their developers toward their users will prevent me from going back to it.
The suggestion of WINE for anything is preposterous. While WINE is quite an impressive project (and has delived good results), it simply should not be needed. If you're pimping Linux as an alternative to Windows, you'd better have all the applications people want (and that includes games as well as Photoshop--I'd say Office, but I won't be that unreasonable).
Bringing us to games, I would argue that the lack of an organized, coherent framework for media is hurting Linux as much as anything. Where's the DirectX equivalent? Where's the one-stop-shop-for-all-your-needs? Game developers aren't going to fuck around trying to find the best solutions for a project. On Windows, it's pretty much DirectX or bust because DirectX is good enough and convenient. Convenience cannot be underrated as a factor of importance. W
Oh, no, I know that. I was just mentioning what can happen if you do it. :) I don't think either is a good idea, especially with computers regularly having multiple gigabytes of memory.
And, IIRC, Windows does, these days, operate similarly with regard to file handles, doesn't it?
This is basically the reason, yes. Windows itself is not subject to being unable to move or replace a code image on-disk, of course (although it can cause some weird issues if forced--I've seen applications supposedly paged to disk try to hit up the new image from disk rather than from the page file and puke all over themselves), but really, for most uses it's just not worth the risk. .NET applications can, however, leverage the GAC to do essentially the same thing. As we see more and more movement toward the use of managed languages in the Windows ecosystem (it's going to happen), we'll see fewer and fewer reboots from updates.
Yeah, great. No restarts.
How about applications people want and desktops that aren't user-hostile? (And no, that's not a troll. I'd love to see Linux do better on the desktop. But, uh, it sure ain't making much progress. People are too busy shoving sand into their vaginas over Mono and wasting time wanking about meaningless crap rather than making it better.)
And, again: the scales are too different. You are not going to make Half-Life 2 off T-shirt sales (after all, without copyright and trademark, anybody can use your work--what's to stop anyone from selling them at cut-rate prices below what you can profit off of?) and web ads.
You're absolutely right. One nasty side effect of getting diabetes is that you can't eat the really sugary stuff. Though you may be able to sneak one once in a while.
Oh, horseshit. Having complex and high-quality entertainment isn't "diabetes." This is an absolutely retarded idea.
If you want everything to be free, the quality and scope is going to tank. Simple as that.
And most of it isn't very good. What is good (and, certainly, there's plenty of it) is of small scope. I mean--and no disrespect to the developers involved, because I know them and like them and their projects--compare Warsow (based off an originally for-profit engine whose development and popularity was based off the Quake series of for-pay games) with Half-Life 2. Do you really think we'll see something of the quality, technical acumen, and scope of Half-Life 2, for free?
I can idealize a point in which communities fund projects based on their needs and interests while corporate ventures monetize consumer good will, advertising, improved efficiencies, improved tangible products, merchandising, and/or plenty of other possible revenue sources.
With no disrespect intended: I can "idealize" a lot of things. I can idealize world peace. That doesn't mean you're going to see it.
A community's never going to fund Half-Life 2 ahead of time.
I appreciate you actually making an effort to flesh out the idea, rather than just continue the freetard hurp-durp. That said, I don't think that you've thought this through.
* one can subsidize the creation of the product (such as many websites do with ad space)
And yet advertising is going into the toilet. The scales are wrong, too: you aren't going to subsidize, say, a video game (which, even in terms of just labor cost and time, can run into the tens of thousands of dollars) with advertising on a website. You can say that somebody (the ever-mythical somebody) will pay for it because they want it, but frankly I don't see that happening in the modern society. The Renaissance was a long time ago. Patronage is dead.
* "cross subsidize" the free item with sales of another (the King Gillette "sell blades, not razors" model)
So an author needs to be a carpenter too? Package the book with a table?
OK, that's not really a particularly good example, but the point remains: authors, video game developers, musicians, etc. put a lot of time into the work. They don't have time to be selling concrete items at the same time. (The webcomic model of selling T-shirts is, if you think about it, not at all a good one: the effort spent in creating the comics vastly outstrips the T-shirts, and the T-shirts likewise don't bring in a similar amount of money. That's why you only see a few of them able to quit their day jobs on their popularity.)
* use the "free" item as a loss leader to sell some other service (as many businesses do with promotional items)
Same deal. An author has no other goods to sell but his words. Musicians don't make much at all from merch (personal experience speaking), and a video game is the product, and the tchotchkes some developers tuck in aren't what sell the game.
I'm sorry, but none of these begin to make sense.
Except that university professors are paid by an externality to that relationship (the school). The only similar possible model for intellectual property is patronage--and for a lot of reasons I don't see that ever coming back. (One person with money isn't going to want to pay $200,000 for, say, a video game, when the alternative is 10,000 people paying $20.)
And what, exactly, business model supports the creation of digital content for free? Yes, duplication costs nothing. Creation costs a very large amount.
Except they're not forcing people to install non-preferred stuff in any way. If they start doing that, you have a point, but until then, you're just spewing crap.
(And I categorically reject the idea that something released for free is tainted because the R&D costs are paid for by applications in other markets. It's a stupid idea.)
It's not even bundled with the OS. You have to go download it. Your reasoning completely sucks, and smacks of (stupid) knee-jerk anti-Microsoft sentiment. Unsurprising among Slashbots, but still.
If Microsoft can do it better than the antivirus vendors (and given how absolutely execrable the antivirus vendors are at doing their jobs, I don't see that as much of a stretch), then they are entirely welcome to do so. I'll still use Avast or Avira if theirs isn't up to snuff, and so will plenty of other people.
For-pay antivirus (especially the new subscription model foisted on consumers by Symantec and McAfee, among others) needs to go the fuck away. If Microsoft releasing a free antivirus (and I categorically reject your retarded assertion that it's a cost built into Windows) gets rid of that, then I'll throw 'em a fuckin' parade.
They're not charging for it.
People don't allege that Homo sapiens came from the Fertile Crescent. The thinking is that what we recognize as civilization came from there. Which, anthropologically and archaeologically speaking, seems to be correct.
Apple is pretty good in the sense that they don't appear to criticise the competition (or if they do it doesn't make the news).
They certainly do.
I write and run my own code on the iPhone every day, asshat. Go die in a fire.
The backend stuff isn't really where you need a hard-nose--and yes, all of those are fine people, but their projects are either of narrow scope (python, glibc) or largely targeted toward people just like them (OpenBSD).
The "Linux Desktop" pony-wishing necessitates a very wide function base (look at how much crap Ubuntu has to herd around) and, in addition, targets the Linux desktop toward people who are not just like them. Neither are good functions for building consensus.
A Steve Jobs for Linux would be the best possible way to come up with a Linux desktop worth using, yes.
But it can't and won't happen.
If you are seriously going to put Java against .NET and MySQL against SQL Server (which is dishonest, because Oracle is the kickass proprietary database at the top of the heap), you have clearly never used either of the latter. Shit, MySQL barely even counts as a database.
If you'd said PostgreSQL you'd have looked a little more credible (because PostgreSQL is actually a very good database!), but I'm going to put my money on "you're a fucking idiot."
This is really a staggeringly awesome troll. Hats off, AC.
Ars Technica's forums tend to be pretty good, both for technical and other discussion.
It's ironic, then, that you are whining like a little crybaby now. You are raging so badly that you just threw a childish fit, and had some childish fantasy about Google beating up the mean Opera for innovating. LOL.
No, I'd like to see it because Opera is a pissant company who's never been able to actually compete with anyone else and I wish nothing but failure on them.
Opera is currently the dominant mobile browser,
Give it time. The non-Blackberry smartphones are going to Webkit and it's not going to be close. Opera's mobile version isn't even tolerable compared to the G1 browser or the iPhone's version of Safari. It's shit.
and the revenue growth from the desktop version is more than 100% each quarter, with a user base more than doubling in less than 2 years. Sounds pretty successful to me.
And yet after, what, thirteen years, their desktop version has less than half of what Google Chrome's is--and Google Chrome has been out less than a year.
Unfortunately for Linux (which I'd love to see kick ass and take names), Shuttleworth is interested in consensus over quality too often. To do what you're saying, you need a hard-nosed, damn-near-messianic figure who is willing to fight tooth and nail to realize exactly what he wants. This is not really very compatible with open source to begin with, and Shuttleworth is not that guy anyway.
Hasn't changed? The hell it hasn't. My new Dell Studio 15, with the standard battery (6-cell, I think), gets three hours and forty-five minutes under regular usage (i.e., not playing Dwarf Fortress or doing something graphically intensive). It'd get more with Aero Glass off.