[quote who="mickeko" reply="6" id="2021655"]Quoting dmantione, reply 5 Hahaha! You're kidding, right? Windows is used professionally by millions of people every day... I'm assuming most do it successfully too, or we'd have seen alternatives on the desktop a LONG time ago. [/quote] I'm not kidding at all. In the 70's people were happily using long play records, because they didn't know better. As soon as people started to learn about the compact
[quote who="mickeko" reply="24" id="2020246"]If everyone can improve on the OS, Linux will be gone from the desktops within weeks. [/quote] [quote who="db0" reply="25" id="2020254"] Eh, don't be so sure. The Windows source code is insanely bloated and the Free Software developer base will have to retrain themselves to get on it. [/quote] Bloat is not the problem. The problem is that Windows is so completely 
That should not stop us customers telling what products we are prepared to put our money in, no? [e digicons]:)[/e] It's a matter of time. Many reports show Windows market share to be below 90% now, already below the 95% of the market that is considered comfortable in business. I believe a few extra % drop in Windows market share will make the business case for many software vendors.
I agree, and I'm not claiming at all I know how much work it would be to port GC2. Actually I believe it is a lot of work. What I am pointing at, is that multi-platform code, and I have seen quite a bit of it, including games, tends to have very little platform specific code, often a few kilobytes max. Given this information I conclude that the extra work cannot be the reason why game developers decide to code Windows-only.
It's not uncommon that a codebase of 500 KLOC has something like 200 lines of platform specific code. That's less than 1% of the work and sales do increase by more than 1%. So, the amount of work cannot be the reason. Very often, as in the case of GC2, it is the desire to code platform specific and nothing else.
Well done! A question, what I have been reading in the various posts about this topic is that the issues were directly attributable to the localizations. As you may know I am doing a localization by means of modding, and I find GC2 much better localizable than many games I have seen before. The only technical problem I have encountered so far is that in DA, some fields are not in the checksum ignore lists and cause a cheat flag. As localizati
[quote]I wonder if anyone ever measured the amount of various green house gasses released by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens., or Visouvious, etc. I think it is far more than anything humans have ever put up in our history combined--meaning from a single eruption.[/quote] Volcanic usually consist of water and sulfurdioxide. Carbondioxide is a component of volcanic eruptions, though. So you are claiming the measurable increase in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is caused by
[quote who="mickeko" reply="6" id="2017002"] Actually, *all* people I know (would be around 30-50 people in total) who use Linux as their one and only OS are sticking to ONLY support companies that release free software for Linux. They are commercially challenge folks.... [/quote] Some Linux users share the FSF position that proprietary sotware is unethical and will never support anything under a non-free license. Most however, are simply voting with their wallets. A compan
[quote]That having been said, IMO it's not necessarily something the government should be responsible for managing directly either; government involvement tends to introduce excessive bureaucracy, among other things.[/quote] Hola! This point is frequently made by proponents of privatization and is false. On the free market, there is an incentive to reduce bureaucracy when it is a cost factor. At the same time there is an incentive to introduce bureaucracy when it has
Hmmm.... You make claims of misinformation based on authority, but an undergraduate medical student that has authoritative knowledge about healthcare systems elsewhere in the world leaves a few questions. What healthcare systems did you study?
[quote]The one difference is that I feel that the only possibilty for real change is for a strong leader backed by a strong congress to come out and say, we think country X's healthcare system is the best in the world and our plan is to do just what X does. [/quote] A problem that I forsee in such an approach is that a healthcare system for one country may not fit in the system of another country. Taking the MRI scanners as an example, giving yours hospitals a fixed budget is not enou
[quote]If I may ask some people from outside the states, how long does it take to schedule an MRI or other tests common in the US? I heard an average 4-6 week wait list for an MRI in Canada, but haven't been able to confirm. Wait, I see this was addressed in a post I hadn't read yet. [/quote] I had an MRI scan once in my right knee, and the waiting time for it was 5 days. I think you are too much afraik that wait times of many months would become normal. They are not, it'
[quote who="tetleytea" reply="17" id="2013202"]Now, how do we overhaul the health care system so the pharma companies stop puttong up all these lame commercials with the pretty music playing in the background, scenes of nature, serenity, and some guy's voice saying, "Please take Propecia. Side effects are heart failure, kidney failure, and brain seizures. You might die from taking it, or wish you were dead. Other studies have shown you might sprout three arms or explode from
[quote who="Mumblefratz" reply="7" id="2013005"] So are you saying that you would trade the system that you have in .nl for the one we have in .us? Let me anticipate your response and say, "I didn't think so".[/quote] You are fully correct. I think I would be insured if I lived in the U.S., but I'm not sure of it. However, an academically educated computer scientist like me should be able to find a job where he can afford a health insurance. But even then, I am not convin
[quote]However if you want Liposuction,[/quote] Hmmm... Liposuction isn't really the right example. Let's take an example that a doctor diagnoses that someone needs a conorary atery bypass surgery. While someone needing it is in a somewhat dangerous condition, he is not in a life-threathening condition. Here in .nl someone needs to wait for his turn for that. Typicial is 2-4 weeks. While this is almost always reasonable (no doctor will let someone wait if his condition doesn't
[quote]The philosophy behind privatized healthcare is that the private sector can usually do things more efficiently than government. We've convincingly proven that this philosophy doesn't work for healthcare if we want everybody, or even most people, to have access to good quality healthcare. I'm still skeptical that a 100% socialized healthcare service is the right way to go, though; the only countries capable of sustaining such systems are the ones with magic money wells, as kryo put it.[/
Time to take a look at Windows from a Linux user point of view. Installing Windows Let's start with the installation. You boot from a Windows XP CD and text mode installer pops up. The installer cannot find a a usable partition. Alas, all space of the hard disk is in use by Linux partitions. The Windows installer has no functionality to reduce a partition in size. How pathetic. So you try to reboot to Linux, but you are una
Guys, find someone with a GP2X, take a look at it and think again wether Linux is unsuitable for games. I never had so much fun with a handheld as with my GP2X. And yes, there exist commercial closed source games for the GP2X (which allthough marketed for the GP2X are technically generic Linux games for the ARM processor).
Holymo! [e digicons]8(|[/e] I pay EUR 114 per month for my health insurance and that is already including some kind of "plus" package. I know US and Europe are not comparable, taxes are higher here, but still...
[quote who="kryo" reply="5" id="2010462"]It'll be interesting to see what happens to that system when Norway's considerable natural resource exports eventually dry up, and they find they can't so easily afford it. [/quote] The price of healthcare is a serious problem for any country, but keep in mind the most expensive healthcare system in the world is that of the U.S. Regarding exports drying up, remember that Norway does not just export oil and gas, but also hydro power. No
[quote who="WIllythemailboy" reply="25" id="2010367"] That hardly means they are completely unbiased. Frankly, when anyone starts calling for changes with massive worldwide political and economic repercussions, we should be questioning their motives, even if their credentials and conflicts of interest appear clean. At least as many people stand to gain from upsetting the status quo as do from maintaining it.[/quote] Of course scientists may not be unbiased. But let me restate the
Well, fixing/improving Wine's DirectX emulation on top of OpenGL by programmers that are unknown to the Wine source code, doesn't sound an easy port, and therefore, it won't be cheap. It would be a different thing if Galciv2 ran close to perfect under Wine, but alas it does not. But basically the choice you have is reimplement the engine in OpenGL, or link against Wine's Direct3D implementation. The Wine route would probably still be the most realistic one for a game like Galciv2.
The development of a game is a big "loss" and every sale contributes to turn that "loss" into a profit. Linux sales don't contribute any less to this than Windows sales. The question is how much additional costs have to be made to get these additional sales in. If middleware like OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL and so on has been used to write the game, the additional development effort can be negligible. In such case, it can become a very good business decision to release Linux and Mac versions,
The 29 million number does not specifically target desktop users and the number is outdated from 2005, which was before the Linux market size wrote numbers in billions of $$. I think web browser statistics are more realiable, which show the Linux market share to be around 1%. As the total PC desktop market is something in the order of 600 million desktop users, the number of Linux desktop users should be about 6 million. The issue about supportability is already well tested in the pro
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