[geeks] HD/IDE question

Wed Sep 27 00:20:14 CDT 2006

On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 08:00:55PM -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > IMHO don't waste your money, Linux is not a good gaming platform. 
> 
> Just some nitpicking:
> 
> Linux is an *EXCELLENT* gaming platform, better than Windows.
> 
> Publishers simply don't support it.
> 
> Every game that has been ported runs better under Linux.

That certainly is a nit. Games ported to it run better, but no one
ports games. From a user's point of view, not much, if any, difference.

> Must be something about Israel, because in the USA Microsoft does this
> all the time.

I have lots of old hardware and there are two things I have that no
longer work under Windows. One is as a class of devices, ISA busmaster
devices because they won't work with more than 16meg of RAM. Some of
them had Windows 95 drivers that worked, they made sure there was never
any I/O above "the line", but most stopped working and the drivers were
dropped when you needed more memory to boot the OS than 16m.

The other was a serial port smartcard reader which was dropped in XP SP2.

Lots of other devices no longer have support for them included, but 
Windows 2000 drivers still work. 

On the other hand look at the TV cards with the Phillips SAA chipset and
similar ones. They used the original sound system drivers, which were dropped
from the kernel around 2.16. In the early 2.16 kernels there was a compatability
mode for ALSA drivers, but that was later dropped. In 2.17 a compatability
mode was put back in as a compile time option (but not included in most
pre-compiled kernels) and it only works part of the time.

For example, mencoder works with it, but VLC and more importantly MythTV 
does not. So here I sit with a system running MythTV that won't work because
I can't go back to the 2.15 kernel, the developer of MythTV, may or may not
change (email went unanswered) and if I'm lucky, the "linux people" will
put back something that was not broken when they fixed it.

The same card works fine on Windows XP and has not been "broken" by a
fix. 

> Windows does not have any best uses at all. 

> The *ONLY* reason to use it is when you are forced to.

Sorry, but to me that's wrong. Windows best uses are for things that are
available for Windows and not anywhere else. My son who is a gamer
(the 11 year old) would take great exception to that, none of his games
run on Linux.

My wife would not use it either, she uses Word, I.E. Outlook, etc for both
work and at home. They don't run well if at all under Linux. 

Personaly, I find Window's GUI tolerable, KDE incomprehensible, and GNOME
anoying. I do use several KDE based programs, such as K3b, but I start
them from the command line.

I use FireFox because I like the security add ons, but it's as anoying
and bloated on Linux as it is on Windows. Maybe that's just the web sites :-) 

> Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, MVS, etc... they all have truly useful
> properties that make them uniquely useful.

That's another issue. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of BAL
code, spent so much time inside MVS that when I see a button that says
open/close I still read it as open/close/EOV, but since I no longer do
anything that involved I haven't touched it except for a brief flirtation
with Hercules in 10 years or more. 

If I were a millionare, I'd probably have an MVS system because I could,
but I'm not and can't.

> Actually, buying a decent copy of Windows sets you back $300 these days.

That's about 30%, but on a new machine, it's $100-$150 	dollars. It's
also that price if you install a known bootleg and then pay the money
to get a legal key. Here in Israel, you can buy the OEM version for
$150, without a new machine purchase.
> 
> That's a huge fraction of good gaming hardware these days.

On a $1,000 system, it's what 15%? 1-2 games? The average gamer in the
U.S. and the E.U. is an adult (2/3 men, 1/3 women) in their thirties
that buys at least one new game a month. 

> It's also a matter of comparitive value.

That's a loaded question. For use as a mail server, file server, web
server, database server, etc Linux shines, as a gaming platform it
would be good if you could get any games for it. 

For the home user, cost matters, for commerical users it does not.
If it mattered, no one would buy RHEL. 

> Compare the price of Windows to MacOS X or the more expensive Linux
> systems.

MacOS is cheaper, $150 for a single user license, $200 for a family
(but not an office) 5 system license. How much is RHEL, MacOSX server?

> Windows offers a fraction of the features, but has roughly three times
> the price.

If that fraction of the features are unique to Windows and you want those
features, who cares? Do I care if there are 10 different MTAs for Linux,
and only 4 or 5 for Windows? Not if the one I want to run is not one
of the Linux ones, but is a Windows one.  

I happen to use sendmail, procmail, spamassain, demime, and mutt. Except
for mutt they all run very nicely under Windows, MacOS, Solaris, xBSD,
and a lot other operating systems. If I wanted/needed to run an exchange
server, I have one choice, Windows. 

There are many features of Microsoft Word for Windows that are not supported by
any other platform. Not Word for MacOS, not OpenOffice, not any of the other
Word processors. If I want those features, Windows is the better choice
for me. 

This could go on for years. 

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM
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