Do you think Microsoft will make Linux illegal?

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Jono
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11 Jul 2010, 5:00 pm

Fuzzy, do you think that computer game companies will start porting more game to Linux? I'm sort of hoping they will if games that make use of Opengl become more common.



Fuzzy
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11 Jul 2010, 5:54 pm

Jono wrote:
Fuzzy, do you think that computer game companies will start porting more game to Linux? I'm sort of hoping they will if games that make use of Opengl become more common.


Jono, I already know they are preparing to port to OSX. Valve already offers a steam client.

http://www.dailytech.com/Steam+Client+f ... e18365.htm

and as for linux, the answer seems a little more shaky, but there is a beta client for steam as well.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... ript&num=1

Now whats interesting is that the non valve companies will be watching closely for signs of viability in OSX and linux. However, if the results of a recent experiment by wolfire games is any indication, there is a market hungry for games.

http://www.wolfire.com/humble

If you scroll down you can see how the various operating systems break down as far as paying for these games. Despite being a mere 0.1 percent as some people claim, Linux users somehow contributed a quarter of the revenues over week of the event. They should rethink those claims, eh?


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Orwell
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11 Jul 2010, 6:22 pm

Fuzzy wrote:
Your numbers are a bit off. OSX alone has about 8% of the computer market. Its the real risk to windows. Linux follows that with between 1-3% (10-30% more credit than you give).

10-30x, actually, which would be 1000-3000%.

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Currently windows is losing on the server side, the embedded side, mobile devices and consoles.

Not losing, lost. Windows Server is probably used as a desktop OS more often than it is as a server. Embedded devices basically all run some *nix variant. Consoles... is Xbox Windows or something else? I think all the consoles have their own proprietary software environment, even if it is possible to install Linux on a PS2.


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Fuzzy
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11 Jul 2010, 6:32 pm

Orwell wrote:
Fuzzy wrote:
Your numbers are a bit off. OSX alone has about 8% of the computer market. Its the real risk to windows. Linux follows that with between 1-3% (10-30% more credit than you give).

10-30x, actually, which would be 1000-3000%.


Ack. Good eye, thanks.
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Quote:
Currently windows is losing on the server side, the embedded side, mobile devices and consoles.

Not losing, lost. Windows Server is probably used as a desktop OS more often than it is as a server. Embedded devices basically all run some *nix variant. Consoles... is Xbox Windows or something else? I think all the consoles have their own proprietary software environment, even if it is possible to install Linux on a PS2.


xbox is some windows beast, yes. as for the consoles, it doesn't matter what they run: its not windows. Its not Microsoft. Thats the point.


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Orwell
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11 Jul 2010, 7:01 pm

Fuzzy wrote:
xbox is some windows beast, yes.

I wasn't sure if they had made a port of Windows for the Xbox or if they just made a new environment specially for gaming. Obviously whatever it is comes from MS.

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as for the consoles, it doesn't matter what they run: its not windows. Its not Microsoft. Thats the point.

Well, it does somewhat matter. In the desktop and server computing worlds, "not-Windows" means "UNIX/Linux." Not so in the console world. And whatever software the Wii uses, I'm pretty sure it's not GPL. We still have to regard that as a loss, even if it is also a loss for MS. The enemy of your enemy is sometimes just another enemy.


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kc8ufv
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11 Jul 2010, 9:59 pm

Orwell wrote:
Fuzzy wrote:
xbox is some windows beast, yes.

I wasn't sure if they had made a port of Windows for the Xbox or if they just made a new environment specially for gaming. Obviously whatever it is comes from MS.


AFIK, the original xbox was an intel compatible PC, with custom bios, running a heavily modified version of Win2k. I believe the 360 is just an evolution of the xbox, with bigger hard drive and ram, better video card and processor, upgraded optical drive, and updated OS



LordoftheMonkeys
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11 Jul 2010, 10:48 pm

t0 wrote:
2) I'd like to see a source for your CSS comment. IE "won the browser wars" back in the 90s, and now has the burden of backwards compatibility vs CSS standardization. I believe IE8 is much better in this regard - they try to be CSS compliant but if they detect certain markup - it offers to show the page in compatibility view. What more do you want? I develop web pages for IE and Firefox and I find them both to be just about as horrible as one another when it comes to CSS standardization, speed, frustration, etc.


Whenever I build a web page that does anything remotely fancy with CSS, it renders perfectly in every browser except Internet Explorer. When I made a page that puts gold borders around images when you click on them, it worked in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Konqueror, and Epyphany, but when I tried it in IE8, it didn't work. Of course there's no way for me to prove this to you other than to send you the source code for the page and hope you have access to all seven of the browsers I mentioned, so I will only tell you to just look up "criticism of internet explorer". I believe Wikipedia goes over some of its problems.


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Fuzzy
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11 Jul 2010, 11:50 pm

Orwell wrote:
Fuzzy wrote:
xbox is some windows beast, yes.

I wasn't sure if they had made a port of Windows for the Xbox or if they just made a new environment specially for gaming. Obviously whatever it is comes from MS.

Quote:
as for the consoles, it doesn't matter what they run: its not windows. Its not Microsoft. Thats the point.

Well, it does somewhat matter. In the desktop and server computing worlds, "not-Windows" means "UNIX/Linux." Not so in the console world. And whatever software the Wii uses, I'm pretty sure it's not GPL. We still have to regard that as a loss, even if it is also a loss for MS. The enemy of your enemy is sometimes just another enemy.


I'm looking at it differently. Just stating the fact that MS in no way dominates, and most games are written(outside of the desktop environ) for something other than windows. That is huge incentive to discard directx. The watershed is closer than people assume. It wont be the point where windows is less than 50% of the desktops. More like when they still have as much as 75%.


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Jookia
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12 Jul 2010, 2:39 am

Speaking as a game developer here, I can't see why you'd make your code win32 only. It's ALWAYS a good idea to write abstraction layers.

As for DirectX.. Why the hell would I want to use something like it? It requires an installer for the end user, and playing old games and whatnot requires multiple installations of different versions. It does what OpenGL does, but a few less features and won't give me access to raw graphic extensions that could be provided by some video cards.

I've spoken to loads of gamers while playing online games, and occasionally the subject of operating systems pops up. I can't remember an instance where a guy hasn't gone 'If games were on [GNU/Linux], I'd switch, but..'

It's not about the market as it is now, it's about what it could be if games ran on the platforms. Valve is possibly going to pursue this and change the game industry as we know it.

I hate Windows in every way. I'm on it now, it sucks. There's no package managers, terminal or snapping windows to corners of the screen like I can do in Xfce.

If you want a humorous and incorrect explanation of what Steam is taking so long to be ported to GNU/Linux, it's because Valve is using raw X libraries to build their own framework for Steam's GUI.

Microsoft is still cutting OpenGL support on Windows, though. A bug plagued a video game (Blockland, using OpenGL as a renderer on the Windows-only Torque Game Engine 1.3) where the triangles would stretch to the screen. Now, when the game was run in WINE, the bug was gone. Why? Because Microsoft is cutting support. Eventually Windows will be DirectX only (which they attempted to pull in Vista, but got a backlash) or OpenGL will work like crap and game developers will have to go with DirectX on Windows, which is especially bad if they don't want to use multiple APIs, they'd have to chose between no or crappy OpenGL support in Windows or full OpenGL support in GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or UNIX. It's obvious that they'd use DirectX in that case, Windows being the dominant.

Ugh, did I just describe Microsoft's plans?