Page 2 - Microsoft's Business Practices

It's all going metric over here in the UK - store holders can be arrested if they sell in pounds and ounces but not kilograms and grams - doubt that happens in the States.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2188301.stm

Mac

holy sheet. if the article wasn't posted on 8/02 i wouldn't've believed it (today being 4/1 and all). crazy.

Wow!!! I've been wanting to stay go to UK ever since, but from this, I am starting to think twice.

Just to ask a question, not relevant to the topic, is it also true that discrimination in the UK is apparent?

What difference does that make?

Might seem ridiculous, but I don't like the idea of people getting arrested for using the English system. It's not about what they use, it's about the freedom to make a choice.

15 Votes, 14 of it says 'No.' Dang! That must mean sumt'n.

gee, i couldnt imagine what? i know! we all happened to press the wrong button

SDL and OpenGL takes care of everything and is the standard used for commecial game development. Quake 3, Quake 2 and UT (all SDL and opengl) all play at about the same fps as windows.

The refresh rate is just fine, the thing is that you can't just guess the values. I use the values written in the book and I get the best possible hsync and vsync. I remember back then when I had win95 at 1024 it woudn't go past 60hz but under Linux I pushed it to 70hz and since that day I was in love with my monitor.

Another thing, one must focus on the root of the problem. We all know but seem to forget that Linux is just a kernel, nothing more and nothing less. We must address the issue and importance of distributions because they are the one who make the whole difference. Like the editing job for a movie, the final cut. People must be educated on the distro of choice rather than how to use a GNU\Linux system first.

Some people seem to complain about how hard it is to install and remove programs. Again, depending on the distro it can be cumbersome or easy. If I take Gentoo for example, all I got to do if I wan't Mozilla is to type emerge mozilla and it will merge all of the necesery packages, including X, GTK, etc. It will download them and do everything for you, all you have to do really is to wait. Removing package is just another cmd line (there's at least 3 or 4 portage GUI frontends for the 'others').

riv -

That point about package managers is exactly what I'm talking about. People who complain about how hard it is to install programs tend to be forgetting that, if you're using the system as a true desktop, you're not going to be installing things like mod_perl, apache, etc. Almost all of the programs that fall under the "end user" category are available via binaries that can be installed via package managers. Take rpm or aptget, for example... it's really not much different than using installshield.

And like I said, trying to manually remove an application from Windoze is a HUGE bear just like trying to manually remove an application from Linux (for example... my drivers for my modem are totally munged and rpm can't remove them no matter what. It can't update them, and I can't --force re-install them... so I'll have to go through at some point and manually remove the actual rpm pacakage... this is a VERY Bad Thing and will cause TONS of problems... a lot like, say, registry editing).

Also, I forgot all about SDL. Between SDL and OpenGL, I've had a fairly pleasant gaming experience with Linux. The only problem? Lack of commercial games.... but frankly, I think things like Chromium B.S.U. are better than a lot of commercial offerings anyway. I guess it's perspective. When I installed my very first Linux system (Mandrake 6.0 back in the day... god I hated that system), only an idiot would think of gaming on it. Now, I feel safe in saying that Linux has a shot in the near future at taking that title away from Wintendo too.

Metric system being enforced in the UK: I think that's a good thing. If the government wouldn't enforce this, then both would exist. Having two different measuring systems in the same country is just stupid. And the metric system is fairly superiour to that other one. I'm sure the new law that one has to work in the metric system was announced well before it was enforced, so that storekeeper who got arrested wasn't a totally innocent victim of the fascists.


Direct3D is the standard. OpenGL is just "an extra" which some software houses such as id build in. I'm not saying D3D is better... I have no clue if it is or is not. I just know that 99.99% of relatively new games who use 3D APIs support D3D, and only maybe a fifth of them support OpenGL.

Gentoo... somebody I know uses that and likes it a lot. He didn't really tell me a lot about it, or why he loves it. Any better than RedHat for beginners?

Ctb, I agree that manually uninstalling software on Windows is a PITA (pain in the @$$), but InstallShield hasn't ever failed me since I've upgraded to using WinXP (I sometimes had some problems on Win95+, but I didn't know how to keep my harddisk clean and tidy back then, so maybe I just messed stuff up...).

riv, I wrote down the max v/h sync values of my monitor and inputted them in the X configuration (after the RedHat installation), but that didn't help. X just ran at 60Hz (o_O <-- that's what my eyes look like when I look at a 60Hz screen for over 3 seconds). After I installed the nVidia drivers, I got 85Hz, which is better, but still not perfect.

I don't really use Linux for "normal" things such as browsing the web, writing essays or doing some coding. Atm I use Linux for things such as Apache/PHP/MySQL and some game servers (CS, might add some other stuff soon). Because those things are superiour on Linux, I prefer running them on Linux. Also, it gives me the chance to learn more about Linux (yeah, yeah, I rant about Linux every now and then, but I still like it - I guess it's a love/hate relationship ). But installing / uninstalling those "more advanced" things is still a bit easier on Windows, imho.

Yea - because 90% of the API is top secret thus forcing software developers to write narrow, limited applications with little or no functionality That's definitely not a + . Unfortuntately, the fact of the matter is that to truly run things like Apache, PHP, mod_perl, etc. etc. you have to have some technical inclination. If you don't you probably shouldn't be running them

Other stuff, however, like end user software, typically installs just fine with your tried and true:

rpm -ivh package-name

Although, granted, it can be a pain in the arse to get deps cleared up from time to time. There's a guy that floats around here now and then, think his name is Hero Zzyzzx or something like that. He seems to really like this software management thing called Ximian Red Carpet for Red Hat. I never did get around to trying it out, but I think this guy might know what he's talking about from time to time - maybe