> I don't understand why anyone still buys anything at Amazon.
It is cheaper than almost every other computer store in the UK for the same parts, deliver next day and they don't tend to shaft you on delivery cost (if it costs anything at all).
Unless you are near one of the large online shops and need something delivered next day there is no other option than Amazon.
I use https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/ as a guide when building out a new system. A browse across some parts there seldom shows Amazon as cheapest. It's usually competitive, but in some cases it's quite a ways behind.
It sometimes makes sense to spread the parts buy across a couple of vendors to save costs - of course too many vendors and delivery costs eat into the savings. But it's quite rare that I've ended up buying anything other than monitors and the occasional component from Amazon.
They aren't always cheaper. I often (but not always) find hardware cheaper elsewhere - and I don't have to worry do much about counterfeits/refurbs with other suppliers.
Run your next purchasing decision through Google shopping. You may be surprised.
Been wanting one of these machines for years, but they are sooo pricey it is insane. Mainline Linux support will be good, but I tbh I would be running IRIX as intended.
That is an interesting problem. In the 00's they were cheap and plentiful. Buying old SGI hardware to play with was pretty affordable. Now people want thousands. Same with old x86 hardware.
Older x86 hardware is incredibly cheap and plentiful in my experience. Of course stuff goes up in price as it ages and gets rarer, but that's just expected.
I think it's just low supply. They were quite expensive so not that many existed to begin with, and then the last generation of SGI MIPS machines were largely cleared out by companies and academia in the mid-late 2000s. Anything left for sale now is either from hobbyists, surplus sellers hoping to cash in on the few niche markets that still use these, or just really late clearouts.
I bought my Octane on eBay in 2008 (it was previously used at Ford), I think it was around $80 and shipping was more than half of that (an Octane weighs ~80 lbs).
In the late 90s a lot of these machines were being abandoned. Properetary Unix was dying due to Linux, and non-intel CPUs were also getting crushed. Plus there was the dotcom crash meaning defunct companies got rid of gear.
In those days I got an extremely cheap Sun workstation on ebay as an example.
Anyway, I guess supply is low but there are still nerdy people who think an old Unix machine is cool. (I'd take one running Irix just to play with for sure.)
That is more true of old x86 hardware and older micro-computers (Amigas, Ataris etc).
The SGI machines are difficult to get hold of in the UK to begin with plus they are as other said short supply. There is one Octane in the country and it is the machine only (even though the monitor and keyboard are pictured) and it is going for about £800 on ebay.
If it was everything I would have said "that probably the best deal I am going to get" and went for it.
I believe they are used in certain models of CT scanner, MRI or some such expensive medical equipment. That probably drives at least some of the demand.
I had two Octanes in the mid 00s. One of them got damaged by a water leak and the other I sold for £5. The 21 inch Trinitron CRT I had with it sold for £20!
I remember saving for what seemed like an eternity, then buying a used (and only slightly defective) Trinitron from a friend's dad (who was a draughtsman) round about '97.
I don't recall what size it was, but the point was it was big for the day, like 24" - it was so heavy that me and my dad could barely lift it! When we got it home, it bowed my wooden desk in a very threatening way, but managed to sit there for a couple of months before it finally broke through the desk!
When I finally got rid of it round about 2010, it was still working as it always had. But it was hard to justify keeping that massive, heavy box around forever (IIRC, it was something like 40kg!)
Whenever this point is brought up it’s suspiciously blind to the concept of per-capita emissions.
China and India have enormous populations. Their per-capita emissions are low.
Unless you’re arguing a position that some folks in the world are inherently more deserving of a better quality of their life beyond mere circumstance, it doesn’t make sense to raise the ‘per-nation’ measure of emissions over the per-person measure.
There is greatest scope for emissions reduction in nations where per-capita emissions are highest. American citizens need to be converned primarily about how to reduce America’s emissions. Chinese citizens need to be concerned primarily about how to reduce China’s emissions. Everyone is already best placed to exert political pressure and carry out grassroots change on their respective home turf.
Targets for nations have already been established in inter-governmental negotiations and re-litigating the basic figures in individual citizen discussion is pointless at best, actively distracting at worst.
There are also issues of how to account for the same set of carbon emissions.
Suppose a Chinese factory uses electricity supplied by coal to manufacture a product. The product is shipped to the United States aboard a Korean container ship before being shipped by diesel train to Seattle, where it is delivered to a retailer by truck, purchased, plugged into the wall and powered by a combination of hydroelectric and natural gas energy. In this scenario, many of the carbon emissions can be counted as Korean or Chinese even though the end consumer is American.
The flip side of this is that the United States can also directly affect Chinese carbon emissions by simply buying fewer Chinese products.
Edit: Also, since China is a totalitarian dictatorship, it’s not like Chinese people can pressure their government very much.
CO2 doesn't decay in the short term so talking about current production is meaningless. You have to consider cumulative emissions [0] if you want to talk about fairness.
These are cumulative figures since 1751. In other words over 200 years of emissions before anyone knew what the consequences would be, and decades after that when the consequences weren’t widely understood. At least current figures are fair in the sense of accounting for who’s making it worse.
I was going to come back and change "conservatives will say the public" to "conservatives will say the public and other countries", but you beat me to it.
I would like to know Why I should contribute to Open Source when Microsoft is a massive company that has plenty of resources to fix its own bugs.
Sure if you are at Uni, Just starting out or something that not likely to be commercial (console emulator, hobbyist projects etc) it might be a good way to get some experience and something to put on the CV. Otherwise you are just giving your hard work away for free to companies that have plenty of money to to put plenty of developers to work on it.
I've watched with great interest over time how Microsoft has evolved from closed source to open source. IMHO, Much of their motivation derives from huge demand from the community to open source their software. Developers benefit in several ways by being able to quickly fix bugs, possibility (depends on project) of adding a feature, and desire to contribute to the community on software they like. There has also been several products that Microsoft has decided to stop providing, but have lived on through community adoption, which is huge if developers have dedicated their own time to learn and integrate the software with their own projects over time. Open source also gives developers a say in the development of products, watching it being built in the open, influencing direction/features, and making it easier to understand what the code does under the hood. Additionally, Microsoft has embraced and supported 3rd party open source for a number of years, building on their relationship with the community.
> I've watched with great interest over time how Microsoft has evolved from closed source to open source. IMHO, Much of their motivation derives from huge demand from the community to open source their software.
I am not a Microsoft hater but that is half true. The fact of the matter is that in 2010-2012ish their tech stack basically wasn't cool anymore and back then if you had cut me I would have bled Microsoft blue. The fact of the matter is that newest Juniors don't like working with the old Microsoft stack. Outside of .NET core everything release (including the newer versions of Visual Studio since 2010) hasn't really been adopted.
> Developers benefit in several ways by being able to quickly fix bugs, possibility (depends on project) of adding a feature, and desire to contribute to the community on software they like.
Is this a copy and paste answer of the "benefits of open source"?
The point I was making was that these huge companies (all of the large companies) have taken open source software and put most of the useful bits to tie it all together and put it behind pay walls (PaaS).
If a patch or a set of patches is not in <insert big companies interest> it probably won't be allowed in the project. Forks of these projects generally die because there isn't a dedicated resource unlike <insert large company can provide>.
> There has also been several products that Microsoft has decided to stop providing, but have lived on through community adoption, which is huge if developers have dedicated their own time to learn and integrate the software with their own projects over time.
Which ones? Almost everything that isn't officially in the Microsoft repos for the most part is dead. The few things that are .NET that have survived are quite small tbh.
> Open source also gives developers a say in the development of products, watching it being built in the open, influencing direction/features, and making it easier to understand what the code does under the hood. Additionally, Microsoft has embraced and supported 3rd party open source for a number of years, building on their relationship with the community.
I am from the UK. But the last movie I watched in the Cinema was in 2014. It is expensive and unnecessary. I bought in the new year a 60inch 4k HDR TV for less than £400 from toshiba.
Why would you bother when you can get a similar experience at home without the hassle?
I've been doing .NET dev for the last decade. I have no idea how to get the whole browser part of the toolchain working with Visual Studio. I just don't bother. The client side debugging is done with a browser that is basically Chrome (Brave these days). You can set up everything to go through VS but there I don't see any benefit in doing so.
This is a shame in some ways. Internet explorer was always very strict on how it works.
Anything before 8 was a challenge due to some atrocious bugs.
This had it problems but it really taught you not to write sloppy CSS and JS as it would usually just wouldn't work.
Versions After 7 basically anything that wasn't in the spec supported wasn't implemented so you had to write code pretty much bang on the spec.
Just this Friday I solved a rendering problem with IE where SVG TEXT elements weren't being rendered correctly, I was calling element.innerHTML to set the text which was incorrect. I should have been element.textContent. Using element.innerHTML is incorrect as SVG elements shouldn't have a innerHTML property (they are not HTML). IE11 was actually working correctly, where the latest Chrome behaviour was incorrect.
So spending time making it work in IE has improved my code.
>Using element.innerHTML is incorrect as SVG elements shouldn't have a innerHTML property
Is that definitely the case? Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all return a value for the innerHTML property of an element in an SVG document.
This W3C spec [0] specifically mentions XML documents in addition to HTML documents. And as I understand it, it seems like embedded SVG elements also inherit from the Element interface which includes InnerHTML.
IE11 might also be correct, following an older spec, but I don't think you can jump to the conclusion that Chrome is wrong just because the property is called innerHTML.
I assumed that innerHTML must have been wrong because textContent works in all the browsers I have tried it on whereas innerHTML doesn't work. A cursory search textContent vs innerHTML seemed to suggest textContent was the correct way.
It looks like it isn't a simple case of IE11 (I haven't had a chance to test on 9 & 10 yet) being correct and the others being incorrect. Thanks for the info.
Totally agree with your conclusion. I remember generating a JavaScript array in a server-side loop, and the code wouldn't work (at first) because of a trailing comma on the last element before a bracket. Firefox would ignore it, but IE 8 wanted a perfect no-extraneous-commas code.
Nah, it means "people being mean and awful, by a reasonable person's standards." Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but abstracting it into "things I don't approve of" misses the point.
So why is it almost every-time I here it mentioned in regards to this topic it is by those who act pious and pompous as a way of shutting down legitimate criticism?
If you’re referring to my use of “toxicity” I definitely don’t mean that. In fact I support the crazier subreddits (you know which I mean).
And I agree it gets way overused by many. And maybe toxicity is a stretch for reddit front page but I think you still know what I’m talking about: the shallow, mindless/hivemind garbage. It brings down everything and everyone else to primal attitudes and people go straight for the shock value in order to get internet points.
Most of the interesting sub-reddits have been shutdown or are in quarantine for having "wrong think", though hardcore pornography, discussions about disgusting and dangerous sexual fetishes are just fine.
> And I agree it gets way overused by many.
It isn't just overused. The language itself and other terms and phrases that usually accompanies it gets used as a stick to beat legitimate criticism. By using their language which redefines what is commonly meant you are promoting such an ideology.
That isn't true. Windows does provide something that other platforms don't. The APIs and program compatibility are supported forever in Windows.
I can run the original Quake and DOOM on Windows 10 without any problems. A friend of mine like playing GTA 3, it didn't work properly with Windows 8.1. In an update this incompatibility (I forget the exact reason why) was fixed.
You do realise that Proton and similar technologies decrease the incentive for developers to port their game to Linux?
Why bother porting it when you can count on someone fixing it for you.
As for playing any game under the sun. No it doesn't. A lot of things fail and don't work quite right. Also a lot of mods don't work which is half the reason to play games on PC.
There would be little incentive to port games to Linux without an existing gamer pool which can buy them, and there would be no gamer pool without an initial range of games...
The only practical way to break that vicious circle was the emulation option. Linux gamers play on emulation, but appreciate native ports and form the (initial) buyer pool for Linux games.
So Proton and co are the only reason there's any viable Linux gaming at all. Without Proton, every Linux gamer would have had a Windows install and play with that alone.
> There would be little incentive to port games to Linux without an existing gamer pool which can buy them, and there would be no gamer pool without an initial range of games...
There isn't much of a gamer pool anyway. This may surprise you the number of people who like to play PC games and really care about Open Source I would wager isn't very many.
> So Proton and co are the only reason there's any viable Linux gaming at all. Without Proton, every Linux gamer would have had a Windows install and play with that alone.
Anyone I know who plays games and uses Linux Dual boots. Some people have spoken about some GPU pass-through nonsense with a VMWare which just seems like a faff.
It just easier to buy a drive, slap Windows on it and Steam and be done with it. Until it is easier and more reliable with my whole catalogue I will be sticking with Windows.
>There isn't much of a [Linux] gamer pool anyway. This may surprise you the number...
It doesn't surprise me at all. That number would have been zero without emulation like wine/Proton though.
> Anyone I know who plays games and uses Linux Dual boots.
As for myself, I don't play a lot, but a Linux version (native or emulated) plays a big role in deciding which games to buy when I do. It's not due to 'Open Source' reasons though.
Dual boot is too much of a mess for me, I have a separate Windows laptop which I barely use otherwise (it does have a few Windows-only games), it's a bit of an hassle too. I don't feel like booting it and discovering it needs to install 10000 updates. I have already had to reinstall Windows 10 once so I can run a game (the game didn't support the old Windows 10 build, and the in-place upgrade crashed). It's much easier when I can just take a break and run a game on the same Linux system I use regularly.
> Dual boot is too much of a mess for me, I have a separate Windows laptop which I barely use otherwise (it does have a few Windows-only games), it's a bit of an hassle too. I don't feel like booting it and discovering it needs to install 10000 updates. I have already had to reinstall Windows 10 once so I can run a game (the game didn't support the old Windows 10 build, and the in-place upgrade crashed). It's much easier when I can just take a break and run a game on the same Linux system I use regularly.
It is odd. I run Windows at work and the machine rarely gets rebooted. No problems what-so-ever. I run a Windows at home and in my Office (I do a lot of SQL SERVER and .NET dev), I rarely have crashes (once or twice a year). I work in a very large office with many other developers and the machines run fine for years on end.
Yet when someone is complaining about Windows on the internet and they like Linux it always has thousands of updates and they need to reinstall the whole OS to play one game. Odd how that comes about. I don't know quite how people manage it. Yet I use the same windows installation for half a decade with almost no problems. It almost sounds like it is operator error.
I run Windows at $WORK too, and it runs fine (there were minor issues which would probably have been worse on Linux). Also much of my work is with the MS stack, which is pretty fine too.
It's just I have little use for it at home, so I run and upgrade it rarely. It turns out upgrading from the nearly oldest Windows 10 build to the latest (at the time) crashed the upgrade process on my setup. This is hardly a regular process - I am sure 99% of people upgrade more regularly, and do not skip as many builds.
It's a cycle too, I guess. The less I use Windows the more upgrades the system accurres which makes me dread turning it on more....
> It doesn't surprise me at all. That number would have been zero without emulation like wine/Proton though.
No it wouldn't - there would still be people who like playing games and use Linux even if they couldn't play those games under Linux. Proton doesn't add anything to that.
These people would have had to make the effort to get another system - Windows or a console, at which point most of them would have little reason to bother with Linux gaming.
Under SteamPlay, any game played using proton counts as a Linux sale. Therefore from a developer point of view Linux sales are getting more visibility and it becomes more attractive (or more justifiable) to invest in Linux development and maintenance.
It like you didn't read my comment. If I could count on customers or Valve just fixing it with a wrapper for me, why bother making a Linux version at all? You wouldn't.
I read your comment. I just think that a large number of Linux sales is seen as a large 'pie'. I can't imagine that if there are 20-30% Linux sales that many will be thinking "Well most of those are Proton, we don't have to do anything to keep support up there!". They will be thinking "20-30% of our sales are Linux and we're beholden to the tech debt of one of Valve's vanity projects and the effort of one volunteer who has just burned out and put his project into maintenance mode? We need to take control! We need official Linux support".
Comments like yours make me angry. Your whole attitude makes me angry. You're extremely offhand and dismissive of all possible Linux paths. I would accept that a 1% market share isn't an attractive proposition at the current time, that's a fair comment. I would accept that for the time being if Proton is filling a gap that developers currently aren't interested in or can't justify, but I absolutely refuse to accept that a larger player base who are willing to pay for a Linux first platform are going to be blithely brushed aside as not the developer's problem.
> I read your comment. I just think that a large number of Linux sales is seen as a large 'pie'. I can't imagine that if there are 20-30% Linux sales that many will be thinking "Well most of those are Proton, we don't have to do anything to keep support up there!". They will be thinking "20-30% of our sales are Linux and we're beholden to the tech debt of one of Valve's vanity projects and the effort of one volunteer who has just burned out and put his project into maintenance mode? We need to take control! We need official Linux support".
But there isn't 20%-30% of the sales are Linux. It is a literally a 1%. It is very niche.
> Comments like yours make me angry. Your whole attitude makes me angry. You're extremely offhand and dismissive of all possible Linux paths.
I am sorry that basic facts make you angry, your feelings are your own responsibility. I've been using Linux now for about 20 years. There was Cedega before proton (remember them?) . While the desktop situation is now okay e.g. I can normally get something serviceable without the headaches of the past. Generally everything is still a mess. Jaron Lanier in his book "You are not a gadget" explains why this will always be the case. Open source anything is very much like herding cats.
> I would accept that a 1% market share isn't an attractive proposition at the current time, that's a fair comment. I would accept that for the time being if Proton is filling a gap that developers currently aren't interested in or can't justify, but I absolutely refuse to accept that a larger player base who are willing to pay for a Linux first platform are going to be blithely brushed aside as not the developer's problem.
There no evidence that there is a large player base for this Linux first platform. Many companies have tried. A lot of Linux users in the past used (look at older phpBB forums such as JustLinux and LinuxForums) that constantly to boast about "not paying for software".
> I've been using Linux now for about 20 years. There was Cedega before proton (remember them?) . While the desktop situation is now okay e.g. I can normally get something serviceable without the headaches of the past. Generally everything is still a mess. Jaron Lanier in his book "You are not a gadget" explains why this will always be the case. Open source anything is very much like herding cats.
Sure, I can get behind this. I do, however, think that you're underestimating how much bad will Microsoft is building with its userbase these days. Sure, I don't think we're headed for 20-30%, but I do think there is a higher proportion of tech savvy users who, all else being equal (granted, big if), would prefer something like Linux that they will have control over. MS have pulled some amazingly ballsy moves with their latest iterations that have absolutely not been present in previous incarnations. Forced updates, ads, gaslighting Cortana setting, re-appearing icons, mandatory new apps, telemetry, forced Windows accounts, Candy Crush ads, lock screen ads - the list continues. What's more is that previous frustrations (blue screen of death) were a limit of the technology. All of the aforementioned are deliberate and arguably cynical decisions from MS. This makes a certain percentage of the population angry, and while the main playerbase is made up of those who are willing to make a compromise, if we make the compromise more attractive then you WILL see higher users. This time is different.
>There no evidence that there is a large player base for this Linux first platform. Many companies have tried. A lot of Linux users in the past used (look at older phpBB forums such as JustLinux and LinuxForums) that constantly to boast about "not paying for software".
Apart from the countless reports being made to ProtonDB? Or the 120k subscribers to the Linux_gaming subreddit? Or the increasing Linux Steam Survey stats? There is evidence.
>But there isn't 20%-30% of the sales are Linux. It is a literally a 1%. It is very niche.
It's like you didn't read my comment.
>I am sorry that basic facts make you angry, your feelings are your own responsibility.
> I do, however, think that you're underestimating how much bad will Microsoft is building with its userbase these days. Sure, I don't think we're headed for 20-30%, but I do think there is a higher proportion of tech savvy users who, all else being equal (granted, big if), would prefer something like Linux that they will have control over. MS have pulled some amazingly ballsy moves with their latest iterations that have absolutely not been present in previous incarnations. Forced updates, ads, gaslighting Cortana setting, re-appearing icons, mandatory new apps, telemetry, forced Windows accounts, Candy Crush ads, lock screen ads - the list continues. What's more is that previous frustrations (blue screen of death) were a limit of the technology. All of the aforementioned are deliberate and arguably cynical decisions from MS. This makes a certain percentage of the population angry, and while the main playerbase is made up of those who are willing to make a compromise, if we make the compromise more attractive then you WILL see higher users. This time is different.
While I agree that is all garbage a lot of it is more of a minor annoyance rather and almost all of it can
> Apart from the countless reports being made to ProtonDB? Or the 120k subscribers to the Linux_gaming subreddit? Or the increasing Linux Steam Survey stats? There is evidence.
120k vs how many PC gamers? Doing a cursory search put the number near about 1 billion. There is at least about 2 orders of magnitude between the two.
Whether I am one or not doesn't change the fact that it is up to you whether it upsets you. I haven't gone out of my way to upset anyone. I've just argued my point.
>While I agree that is all garbage a lot of it is more of a minor annoyance rather and almost all of it can [be solved with minor config/tweaking?]
It builds. It's the sort of negligence that leads to bubbles bursting or coup d'etats. Or mass migrations from Zynga games. It just needs for the alternative to be viable.
>120k vs how many PC gamers? Doing a cursory search put the number near about 1 billion. There is at least about 2 orders of magnitude between the two.
PC gaming has been viable for 30 years. Linux gaming for 18 months and it still missing some key titles. If we get Fortnite and PUBG, we will have more.
>Whether I am one or not doesn't change the fact that it is up to you whether it upsets you. I haven't gone out of my way to upset anyone. I've just argued my point.
True. I do think you are someone who takes great pride in their arguments, the infallibility of their logic and drawing on what is quite clearly a great breadth of both personal and professional experience, however I feel that this is somewhat undermined by your rhetoric, your tone and your phrasing. Not terrible in and of themselves, but I think it has lead to blind spots that has meant this encounter has taken the path it has.
If the game works without problems and is performant I don't particularly care if it's native or Wine.
It would be nice if more games shipped in some type of officially-supported wrapper, but that's basically where Valve is going anyway with Proton. (I just wish it wasn't tied to Steam, because I'm the one person who dislikes using Steam.)
This is different than for native applications, where the UI inconsistency Wine introduces can be quite annoying.
It is cheaper than almost every other computer store in the UK for the same parts, deliver next day and they don't tend to shaft you on delivery cost (if it costs anything at all).
Unless you are near one of the large online shops and need something delivered next day there is no other option than Amazon.