I have no mod points so you'll have to settle for kudos. That made me laugh pretty hard.

What perplexes me though is why anyone would bother to click on the pictures (or even include more than one picture in an article like this) to begin with. It's not a Miss Teen USA pageant where I need hi-res closeups of the participants to make my judgment on their 'moral character'.

Unless what you mean by 'distribution issues' is that there is more than one distribution, then it is certainly not just a distribution issue.

The real issue is when a developer goes to develop a sound application for Linux, and he has absolutely no idea what sound interface his users may be using. So he either attempts to support them all, which is a nightmare when he's getting bug reports from users of 5 different sound interfaces which have 3 different major revisions possible each, that have 30 different distribution specific patches each, and so on.

Or he picks one and supports only that, which means some % of his users won't even have it in their package repositories. Some % will again have some distribution specific patches applied, some % will have some hacked version that translates to a different API, some % won't even by able to use the one he chose to support because it doesn't play nice with one or more of the others. It is just a mess and he hasn't even gotten to the user interface yet.

This is precisely Google's complaint, and it is a fair one.

Because at the moment Chrome has about 1-2% of browser market share, while Firefox has between 20-30%.

People don't use Firefox because of the Google integration; so unless Chrome starts making some headway, Mozilla can still count on their check from Google.

Yeah, if only SOE had open sourced the Matrix world...

Where Morpheus makes Neo read the matrix mailing list archives instead of giving him the pill.

And instead of the climactic battle with Agent Smith, watch as Neo instead goes to the Matrix bugzilla and files a dupe bug report of an Agent attempting to kill him that's been open since the first alpha.

In the exciting conclusion, the bug is patched but Neo doesn't have the right version of the new sound library they threw in with the bugfix release.

Will he track down the new library version, compile and install the new dependencies that aren't in his package manager, install the library, and compile the new Matrix in time?!

Stay tuned.

And I should be safe to walk the streets wherever I please in my country but that's not true either.

I don't want to pay 100x the taxes so there's a cop on every corner; so I live with the fact that I can't take a late night stroll around Compton.

I don't want to wait 10 years in between OS releases or pay out the nose for them either, so you compromise. This is what is commonly referred to as reality.

Right, because every other software company ports their products to *nix.

It couldn't possibly be that it makes perfect sense to not spend tremendous time and effort porting and maintaining a desktop application for an OS that holds at best 1% of the desktop market.

Where'd you get the idea they have the WoW server source code?

And your needs are exactly the same as everyone elses.

Sounds like you need to approach computing with a more open mind because not everyone is like you.

Some people require Windows applications. Some people have hardware that has no Linux driver. Some people don't give a crap about what license their driver/software is released under as long as it works. Some people like PC games. Some people like Windows.

You are not a representative sample of computer users. The sooner you come to terms with this, the better.

If you get the rated speed and it's reliable, need we delve further?

Do we have to go through this EVERY TIME?

An operating system is complex. There are millions of lines of code here. An operating system also performs a critical role in the functioning of your computer, thus its stability is a high priority (incoming snarky comment about win95/98/ME).

These things take longer to be sure of than KWobblyWindow 0.0.4 RC.

(And please don't give me that Ubuntu ships a new release every year crap, because we both know the portion of the OS that makes it Ubuntu is less than 5% of the actual codebase. These guys lean heavily on the efforts of the maintainers of the thousands of packages they use in their releases.)

Umm, when have they ever done so? Unless you count offering a means of playing back DRM'd media; and if faced with a choice of being able to play it or not, MS knows people prefer play. It's quite simple really. No bogey man under your OS. You can come out from under the covers.

But of course you don't care, you're just trying to spread FUD anyway. So, carry on my wayward son.

http://lifehacker.com/5144757/first-look-at-windows-7s-backup-and-restore-center

Wow..

Seriously, what is it about the gameplay of these old JRPGs is so awesome to you?

Is it the turn-based battle system where you arm 2-4 characters with items from progressively better item shops to fight progressively stronger enemies that award progressively better abilities?

Or perhaps how you navigate the main characters through world map, town, and dungeon to reach the next town/dungeon.

The only real difference in gameplay is that instead of cutscenes and FMV there are dialog bubbles I read and press through. This leads me to believe that you are perhaps quickly frustrated in new games because cutscenes are generally paced for you, which make them much longer than they would be simply spelled out in dialog bubbles.

Is this the crucial difference that makes or breaks a JRPG for you? If not, please be specific what the hell these old games have that new ones don't aside from the lack of adequate technology to use anything but chat bubbles to present dialog and the in-game engine to present events.

This is just a simple failure to realize that things can be improved upon. Offering complementary gameplay to a good story makes it better than a passive watching experience. You may not agree, but there are many who would and do. This is simply a matter of taste.

'Jarring incongruency' of poor lip sync ?? While that blatant over-dramatization would have served you well on the evening news it doesn't help your case here. Only recently has lip sync come anywhere close to being done well in an in game engine, and it still frequently fails miserably even on native english titles. If this is still a shock to you, then you've probably been living in a cave for the last 10 years in which case I'd suggest a shower and some perspective.

Yes, the voice acting was bad. Voice acting in games generally is. I've been hoping for an option to turn off voice acting ever since it was introduced. This is not game breaking to me, but I can see how it may be for some.

Those are action-RPGs, people like you is what this genre is for.

To summarize, please explain why the gameplay of old JRPGs is superior to the newer ones, because the simple lack of cutscenes doesn't suffice.

Ugh, so you're suggesting taking out the cutscenes (story) from a JRPG? This is why current JRPGs like FFXII and Last Remnant are total garbage.

Hate to break it to you (and Square for that matter), but JRPGs are supposed to be story-driven games. That means you must, from time to time, take a break from smashing the controller against your forehead for dialog and events to take place.

It seems like you'd be better served playing (For Square: developing) a MMORPG, because that is basically what a JRPG with the story gutted would be, except without what makes MMORPGs fun: cooperative and competitive gameplay.

Shining examples: FFXII and Last Remnant - not surprisingly the two most recent Square-Enix attempts at the JRPG genre. What did I do in the first hours of Last Remnant? Well, I ran the same dungeons over and over gathering materials to make my guys stronger. Well goddamn that's exactly what I'd be doing in a MMO.

These types of games are fundamentally incompatible and that is how it should be. Fuck these 'next-gen' JRPGs that are trying to prove otherwise. You don't play MMOs for the story just like you don't play JRPGs for the battle system. In both cases they are there as seasoning only, and like seasoning will spoil the dish if overemphasized.

Maybe there is a misunderstanding by you of what your companies' needs are. Most of the time more is involved in running a corporate network than hooking computer to router with NAT like at home. Many companies utilize Active Directory to administer their network and switching workstations to Linux makes that somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible.

Second, companies are averse to changing anything that currently works adequately because there are (usually significant) costs involved in moving to a new platform in the form of testing, rollout, training, and support time.

Finally, even outside of corporate environments you need to provide a compelling reason to switch to something else from what's been in use for a long period of time. Debatable feature parity simply does not qualify.