New in Linux? Coming from Windows? Please read this.

Greetings. You are coming into a new territory. But contrary to the space you used to inhabit, that didn't belong to you, this new territory has a piece of free land with your name on it.

It sounds a little too good to be true, but it is true. There are some things we must make clear, though. This piece of land, your piece of land, is inside a really big terrain of millions of free pieces of land, each one with it's owner.

That's why now that you are moving into our neighborhood, ours, of every one of us, yourselves included, I want to tell you to pay a little attention to the way we tend to act, because if you adapt you'll have a really good time here. And we will be adapting too, you are not the only ones supposed to do so. We will also learn from your habits, and if we find some we like, we'll make it our own.

This is a weird neighborhood, in it we share our tools, and build together. It's something we do freely, without obligation, and that has a lot of benefits. We also like to teach how to use the tools, though you might want to forgive us because we sometimes use a technical language, it's what suits us more. The manuals that come with the tools are sometimes written too technically, but don't worry, there are some neighbors that are able to translate things to more human languages, you'll only have to find them.

This is a really special neighborhood, where the better builders are listened to, a sort of meritocracy. As we have one mouth and two ears, we believe it's common sense to hear twice as much as we speak, because that benefits us. We just have to remember that sometimes they don't want to talk, and that they talk for people that understand them. Once more, please don't complain. Instead, search for the neighbors that are capable of lowering that information to a more human language. That's the best for us all, this way everyone has it's own.

Please, don't demand. Nobody here owes something to you. Just ask nicely for help and you'll receive. We tend to consider important that you tried yourself to build the bed, even when now it seems no mattress will fit it's weird triangular shape. This is important, because by showing you tried and made an effort, you just climbed a few steps in this meritocracy ladder, and you helped establish some common ground to start talking, and talking leads to helping. And helping leads to a good bed to dream on.

Please, help us help you. Let's make this territory a place where every one of us can live in peace and liking it.

A pair of news and laughter attack

Yesterday at the office one coworker showed me a news, and suddenly I started laughing. It wasn't a simple laughter. It was a laugh attack, the kind that leaves us breathless, like the ones that puts tears on our eyes.

To explain why this happened I need to fill you with some background information. Without it, this isn't funny at all. Some time ago Nvidia purchased the Ageia Physx technology that allows to develop hardware specialized in calculating physics model data. It used that technology to bulti it in their video cards.

While this technology was developed to assist in the processing of game data, soon it became clear that there was another area where it could help a lot. So Nvidia developed a new series of drivers called CUDA, allowing people to use that technology and the massive paralel processing power of modern video cards to process scientific information. This added a lot of power to the distributed computing systems.

The news my coworker showed me yesterday commented that they were developing a technology to use the extra processors of multiple core chips to process graphics.

Think about it. Let it sink in. Why would a processor need to process the graphical data? Because the video card is executing the processor processes. When I thought that, I just couldn't stop myself from laughing.

Of course, that's not the real reason why this technology is being developed. Some talk with my friends and some later thinking showed me at least two other reasons why this could be useful.

One: lower power video cards, as the ones found in office computers and some laptops. In this case, an alternative to this card using one of the cores of multiple core processors some of this machines are equiped with might prove interesting.

Two: even more interesting. Windows XP doesn't have DX10, but if one can emulate DX10 in one of the cores and let the video card use that DX10, it might be that the speed advantage of Windows XP over Vista could help to run DX10 games at a decent speed in a XP box.

Of course, a part of me is still laughing while I write this, and another part insists in making me say that this type of trickery wouldn't be necessary if DX10 were open source technology. In this case one would be able to simply port the packages from one Operating System to another.

Sign of the times: Windows Devolution

A few days ago, something extremely important happened. An Israeli citizen became the first person in the whole world to achieve two things at the same time.

1) Devolution of the money paid for a Windows license included inside the price of a computer, after taking Windows off his computer in favor of Linux.

2) He was not forced to sign a NDA (non disclosure agreement), so he's free to talk about it.

There are several people that already took Windows of their computers, so this development will surely make the request the refund of the license money. This is the main reason why, until now, Microsoft requested those NDAs while refunding money.

It's curious that this can be linked to another news, in which we are informed that Windows has fallen below the 90% figure in the PC market. I want to state something very clearly. A little below 90% is still a good figure, but it isn't quite as good when you had 99% of the market before. Microsoft is loosing share, and that little change in the Ten's figure it's a really significant break point.

We aren't the only ones that think like this. In several sites across the web I've seen us Linux Users being accused of magnifying this kind of news. In truth, we see this news and simply write about them adding our insight into it, we write about what we see with the only point of view we have, ourselves. But we aren't alone.

Until now, in every Wall Street misstep or fall, Microsoft was one of the big companies that fell a lot less that the rest. This meant that investors (people who trust a company and it's way of doing business to the point of translating that trust into invested money) didn't sell because the still trusted in Redmond's capacity of continuing to produce record earnings, even inside a crisis.

But this last fall, Microsoft fell as much as the average of the market, showing to the world that Linux Users aren't alone in thinking that we see something working a little wrong in the giant corporation.

In this comment about reality, from this page of Too Much Information, I want to express the wish that Microsoft doesn't disappear, that they start producing real quality software, and can maintain a reasonable market share. It's just that I'm not opposed to Microsoft making business. I'm opposed to Microsoft making business with me.

In case you were wondering about the idea mentioned in the first post, here it is.

There's a game studio made by only two people, that released an excellent game for Windows, called World of Goo. I recently saw that the piracy on this game is over 95%, and it's only a 20 dollars game.

This game is being pirated because it's really good, but with the same mindlessness that they pirate big chain's 40 or 60 dollar games. And that's something that's completely unfair, because this isn't some impersonal game chain, here they are going against a pair of extremely imaginative programmers that released an addictive, intelligent and anything but monotonous game,

The game also features a generous whole chapter demo, so you can't complain that you can't test it before buying it.

Now, the fun begins. Some of you will ask, what does this have to do with Linux anyway? Easy to answer. Lately this programmers are working in a Linux native port, and that gives us an amazing opportunity.

Imagine for a moment what would happen if Linux users bought more original copies than Windows users. I can answer what could happen. Those innovative programmers will make next game for Linux, and not Windows.

Even more, when the Linux version of World of Goo is released and we buy a lot of copies, this will bring a press release of enormous importance "There are more Original copies of a Linux version of a game sold than for Windows". This sends three important messages: There are games for Linux, there's money to be made programming for Linux and, more important of all, there's no need for anticopy systems under Linux to make people buy the games.

This is why I make this political declaration: I'm now saving the 20 dollars to buy the game once it's released for Linux. I strongly suggest you all do the same.

Now, following my own license, I say that this idea originally appeared on
Demasiado Personal, and as long as that credit is given this can be freely copied.