Re: [LUG] buying a laptop, and some m$ talk

Hi,

With regards to PC-buying, any decent supplier offers
a custom-building service. You can thus ensure that
its hardware will work out-of-box with Linux, and save
yourself some cash by not getting a copy of *that
other OS* forced onto it.

yeah, this is how i'd do it, but what i mean is, what
about people who want to buy a computer, but don't
know how a hdd is different from motherboard. I'm not
in the business of installing os for other people, so
i'm not gonna check components and whatnot.
Don't some cheapo supermarket pcs have linspire?

That is irrelevant, since we really don't want to inflict linspire on people. Neil will back me up here: they change all the instances of the word "gaim" in gaim to "linspire instant messaging suite" and sell it for money via CNR

This has actually become even more of an issue because
the lady in question now wants to buy a desktop pc for
her son, and won't so much as look at a page of
html... :)

heavy pc gamers will need to upgrade to vista,

get a console, or not bother. Is this vendor-lock?

What do you think? However, Microsoft are partly
justified in not wanting to unneccessarily backport a
highly complex technology to an outdated version of
their operating system.

In think that its a way off, and stuff can happen.
Personally, i think games don't need directx10, and
that the industry could carry on making titles with
what they have.

Well, of course DX10 will be backward-compatible, just as DX9 can run Theme Hospital.

Will open source ever truly challenge m$ in the pc
gaming api arena? Will openGL ever be as good and well

used as directx?

OpenGL is already as good afaik (on most platforms),
but the Microsoft implementation of OpenGL (they
haven't done anything to it since Win95's varying 3d
screensavers) is so shocking, everyone thought "nah,
we'll go with DirectX". Microsoft stunts OpenGL
deliberately because it was open and cross-platform.
They now get a pot of cash daily from people buying
licenses to use DirectX in their games, people buying
copies of Visual C++... etc.

any comments? I'd like to learn nothing but open
source, but for gaming/3d/animation the proprietary
tools just kinda suck you in

Blender3D is more than adequate for animation and
modelling, and there are tons of game engines, one of
the best being CrystalSpace. Blender has a game
engine, but it requires Python knowledge.

I've been trying blender out, but am not really in a
position to judge. The price is certainly alright!
Do you animate Ben?

I don't, because I find that blender's user interface is so god-awful that it's difficult to model anything, let alone animate. However, Blender is like Mac OS 9: once you've learnt how, it's very easy to do anything with it.