🚀 go-pugleaf

"Ińaki Silanes" <isilanes@bluebottle.com> wrote in message
news:dmhd3d$o1n$1@localhost.localdomain...
> EvilBill wrote:
>
> > "Ińaki 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.
>


That's cool :) I play a lot of games both 3D and otherwise, it's nice to
know that at least some of them can be made to run on Linux.

> > 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!
>


I'm not blaming the OS at all. Just outlining the main reason why most
people are still stuck with Windows. ;)

> 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!
>


I agree. I know Linux does now have a large hardware support base...
winmodems and USB ADSL modems notwithstanding <g>

> 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.
>


Well, id usually release Linux and Mac binaries for their games and games
that use their engines; sadly, there aren't many other developers who do the
same. (Blizzard make Mac versions of their games IIRC, but not Linux.)

> 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!
>


Oh, that's simple: Micro$uck wanting to hang onto their precious little
corporate secrets so they can continue to sell M$ Office at exorbitant
prices (some editions cost over Ł1000 here!!)

> 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.
>


Sweet. :)
I use Winamp for all my media-playing needs, although it does seem to have
difficulty with some WMV files... no doubt M$ trying to ensure they only get
played with Media Player. Bah.

-- 
-- 
EvilBill - http://www.evilbill.org.uk