🚀 go-pugleaf

EvilBill wrote:

> "Iñaki Silanes" <isilanes@bluebottle.com> wrote in message
> news:dmfqmf$73l$1@localhost.localdomain...

[snip]

> Linux does run bugger-all in the way of games though. Doom and the Quakes,
> and that's about it. I never heard of Linux binaries for, say, Age of
> Empires, or Diablo II, or Serious Sam... or even DirectX for that matter.

For the record, I play Diablo II (with the CDs I bought for Windows) under
Linux with Wine (not WineX), which is freely available. Any non-3D game has
a fair chance of being supported by Wine.

> Less bugs and better on the desktop, sure. But as a gaming OS it still has
> a long way to go.

That's the same complain always: proprietary software, games and commercial
programs...

Once and for all: what the heck do the capabilities of an OS have to do with
the (commercial) software it runs!!!??? Linux can't run many games, sure.
But that's only _commercial_ strategy of game makers. If you don't want to
use Linux because you don't have your favorite games ported, that's fine.
But blame the game makers, NOT the OS, for God's sake!

MS has a dominant position in the s/w market, and, guess what, they put
pressure into the game makers not to produce versions for other OSs (Mac,
Linux, BSD). So do they into the h/w makers. Yes, MS does shit in the
driver part of an OS. The h/w makers have to make the drivers for Windows
themselves (NOT the programmers at Redmond) because otherwise people will
not buy their modem, screen, keyboard or printer... since, hell, everyone
has Windows. Guess what, most Linux drivers for h/w that require it have
been reverse-engineered by volunteers... and still some of them are better
than the Win-natives!

The only thing necessary to have more games on Linux is to have a bigger
customer base. If commercial games are worth producing for Linux, they will
be, like big games are available for Mac, because they are sold, but small
ones are not, because there aren't enough Mac users that would buy them.

Two anecdotes on Windows and its desktop capabilities:

1) MS Word (also Access, Excel...) is based on a closed standard, meaning
that no-one knows the format of the .doc file itself, except MS. One can
use Word to open a .doc, but how can one make a .doc reader, if the
underlying format is unknown? 

Conversely, all the Linux formats (e.g. OpenOffice.org formats) are open,
like HTML is, for example. Anyone can buy (or download for free) a manual
that says how to write a tilde with HTML, and with OpenOffice.org documents
it is the same: the instructions to make OOo readers are openly available,
and so are the instructions to make OOo formatted text writers.

So, how come the Linux volunteers have reverse-engineered the .doc format,
so that OOo can read and write them, whereas MS Word is incapable, to date,
of even reading, let alone writing, OOo documents? And still people
complain that OOo .doc compliance is not 100%! That would be indeed amazing
in a reverse-engineered product! But still more amazing is the inability of
Word to read OOo documents!

2) Video editing is better supported in Windows... yeah, sure. Some weeks
ago a conference was held in San Sebastian (Spain), conmemorating the 100th
anniversary of the publication of five important articles by Albert
Einstein. Among the speakers there were some Nobel laureates, and one of
them was Dudley Herschbach. Dr. Hershbach did appear on the Simpsons
(Treehouse of Horror XIV, season 15), and I did have the episode recorded
from the TV. So, I edited (with Linux), the part where he appeared, and
gave it in a usb pendrive to the organizers, so that they could show it in
the little presentation Dr. Hershbach would get before his talk.

The conference presentations were all run from a Windows laptop (of course)
and the organizers had the good sense of trying the video first. They
couldn't make it run under Windows Media Player, or some other rubbish MS
passes as a player, so they called me. There was a problem with the codecs
(fair enough), and finally they d/l-ed some video codecs that would make it
run... at least the image part. The sound, they couldn't get it going for
the life of them. We perused many a page of Windows warez and d/l-ed all
kind of (illegal) cracked commercial s/w that would convert the audio to
another format... to no avail. In the end, I took over and said... "I know
of an open source video editor for Linux... maybe there is a Windows
version" Ten seconds later, I had d/l-ed and installed the nifty program
(its name is AviDemux, first entry at Google, go to Downloads section, look
for "Windows", currently version 2.0.42). Fifteen seconds later, I was
editing the video, and saving its sound content into some of the bunch of
different codecs AviDemux offers, until we found one (the third or fourth
try) that WMP would be able to play. And that happened ten minutes before
Dr. Herschbach began his talk... open source s/w saved the day, certainly.

Bottom line is: AviDemux uses only (legally) freely available codecs, so WMP
should be able to play ALL the videos made with codecs AviDemux can handle.
However, MS and his s/w maker friends try to sell us programs that do it
for free in the open-source world. And sometimes, it's hard to find such a
Windows program, even paying (or illegally d/l-ing cracked copies).

-- 
Iñaki Silanes / Chemistry Faculty UPV-EHU Donostia
http://www.sc.ehu.es/powgep99/dcytp/teoricos/staff/inaki/inaki.htm
On Intelligent Design: http://www.venganza.org/