One of the strengths of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions is their software repositories which contains a wast number of diverse applications. This makes installing and updating applications very easy for the user. However, this is also one of the challenges from the provider of the Linux distribution because these repositories need to be kept up-to-date.
I have for a long time been using LaTeX on Ubuntu without any particular problems. However, I ran into a problem with the hyperref package. The problem was a bug which was fixed but not included in the version available through Ubuntu’s repositories.
When I recently reinstalled Ubuntu I decided to install the most recent version of TeX Live manually. This was very easy. Just download the most recent release, extract it, and follow these instructions for installing it. There you go.
Project properties
I have previously written about how I set up a LaTeX template by using Eclipse and Texlipse. To activate the TeX Live binaries in Eclipse you must select the properties for one of your projects, select “Latex Project Properties”, and “Setup build tools”.
Build tool setup
Next, you have to find the TeX Live binary folder (default: /usr/local/texlive/2008/bin/[Platform]) and press apply.
Fan boys all over the Internet are claiming that their platform is the best one and that their platform has the best games. I recently read this rather inconclusive article on a Norwegian gaming site and I decided to put these claims to the test myself.
It is impossible to test whether a game is better than another game in an objective way. So the best way to do this is to base the comparison on as many subjective reviews as possible. I went over to Metacritics and extracted the data for the PC, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360. Since the 360 was released in 2005, I will only include the years 2005-2008. The total number of titles is found in the table below.
2005
2006
2007
2008
Total
PC
234
244
219
204
901
PS3
22
103
158
283
Wii
33
124
210
367
Xbox 360
33
106
192
224
555
Total
267
405
638
796
2106
We see that the PC has consistently had over 200 games per year but that both the 360 and the Wii have catched up, the PS3 is lagging a bit behind when it comes to the number of games per year. However, quantity is as we see below not necessarily quality.
All games
The PS3 has the highest average game score for any of the platforms, the PC and 360 are not that far behind while the Wii is struggeling quite a log way behind the others. The high number of games for the Wii did not do it any good when it comes to the average game score.
2005
2006
2007
2008
Total
PC
69,3
66,8
67,7
67,6
67,8
PS3
71,4
71,9
69,8
70,7
Wii
63,4
60,1
61,8
61,4
Xbox 360
74,8
69,6
67,2
66,3
67,7
Total
69,9
67,5
66,7
66,1
67,1
The scores above are found through calculating the average of all the game scores for all the games on the individual platforms. This includes both platform exclusives and cross platform games. The average game score does not count much for most people. Few have time to play all the around 200 games a year per platform anyway. The most important thing to me is the number of good, great and in particular outstanding games on the platform I have. If the platform has a lot of outstanding games why would I care if it has some crappy ones as well?
Range
Platform
2005
2006
2007
2008
Total
Good
PC
70
59
51
49
229
PS3
6
30
35
71
Wii
10
21
34
65
Xbox 360
15
22
48
47
132
Good Total
85
97
150
165
497
Great
PC
45
48
36
43
172
PS3
7
29
42
78
Wii
2
7
25
34
Xbox 360
9
28
33
41
111
Great Total
54
85
105
151
395
Outstanding
PC
6
5
10
4
25
PS3
3
6
9
Wii
1
3
4
8
Xbox 360
3
8
8
19
Outstanding Total
6
9
24
22
61
Total
145
191
279
338
953
As we see in the table above, the PC and the 360 has the highest number of good games (game score 70-79). The number of great games (80-89) is a tie between the 360, PC and the PS3, while the PC and the 360 is perhaps slighly in front of the PS3 for the humber of outstanding games (>89). The Wii is again struggeling behind the others by a significant margin. The PC, 360 and the PS3 provided its users with about 50 great or outstanding games in 2008 and this should be enough for anyone.
Platform Exclusive
Then we are down to the platform exclusive games to really see which has the best games, just for itself. The number of exlusive games for each platform are listed below and we see that the PC has had the highest number of exclusive games all years but 2008. The Wii had in 2008 more than 150 exclusive games. The PS3 on the other hand has had quite few exclusive games so far.
2005
2006
2007
2008
Total
PC
222
202
153
134
711
PS3
12
32
48
92
Wii
21
85
154
260
Xbox 360
22
55
96
98
271
Total
244
290
366
434
1334
We see similar results for the average scores as we did when counting cross platform games as well. The PS3 has the highest average score but we must have in mind that it had less hand half of the exclusive games the other platforms had. The difference between the PS3 and the 360 is however somewhat larger now.
2005
2006
2007
2008
Total
PC
68,7
65,7
66,7
66,6
67
PS3
66,3
71,8
72,5
71,4
Wii
64,3
59,2
60,7
60,5
Xbox 360
73,4
65,2
63,8
62,7
64,4
Total
69,2
65,6
64,6
64,3
65,5
When looking at the number of good, great, and outstanding games one could argue that the PC has the highest variety of platform exclusive games, while the PS3 has the lowest number of good and outstanding games. The lack of truly outstanding exclusives on the PS3 could perhaps explain why it has sold a bit lower than expected (by Sony).
Platform
2005
2006
2007
2008
Total
Good
PC
66
48
33
33
180
PS3
1
11
12
24
Wii
8
15
25
48
Xbox 360
10
10
20
18
58
Good Total
76
67
79
88
310
Great
PC
39
34
24
24
121
PS3
3
8
16
27
Wii
1
5
16
22
Xbox 360
4
8
11
11
34
Great Total
43
46
48
67
204
Outstanding
PC
6
4
7
2
19
PS3
2
2
Wii
1
3
2
6
Xbox 360
3
4
7
Outstanding Total
6
5
13
10
34
Total
125
118
140
165
548
Conclusions
The total number of good, great, and outstanding games for each platform between 2005 to 2008
The total number of exclusive good, great, and outstanding games on each platform between 2005 to 2008
The PS3 has the highest average score for its games. This is however mainly caused by the lack of crappy games for the platform. The Wii on the other hand seems to have plenty of those crappy games. The 360 and the PC have the higheste number of good, great, and outstanding exclusive and cross platform games. Nevertheless, regardless of which platform you have or decide to pick up it will have plenty of good games. It will however be interesting to see how 2009 turns out as the PS3 is really starting to get up to pace with some strong exclusives like Killzone 2, Gran Turismo 5, God of War 3, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2 and so on.
Everyone knows that there are a lot of ignorant people in the movie/music industry. It has for a long time annoyed me and most other customer of the movie/music industry that the industry’s only response to piracy is legal prosecution of downloaders instead of actually providing the digital global, DRM-free, and platform independent services we want. Actually improving their business model and listening to their customers seem to be alien ideas to the business.
I knew they didn’t care but I was really surprised when I read this. Even Sanvold Roland complained in his blog that he could not by the pre-order the new Dave Matthews Band record through iTunes. The response he got from Warner Music‘s Terje Pedersen (on myspace) through Twitter was rather incredible: “I think you should steal it and brag about the process on your brat blog afterwards. Don’t want you to be angry.” (translated from Norwegian)
First, he incouraged him to steal the music and second he insulted him. What kind of customer relation is that? Even though Terje Pedersen apologized a bit later it illustrates how much (some) people in the music/movie industry actually care about what we, their customers want. The music/movie industry has climed up too high and totally lost touch with its customers the last ten years (Napster anyone?), now they are taking the fall for not opening their eyes.
Edit: I found another English article on the topic. You should digg it to spreat the word.
The news that Oracle is going to acquire Sun Microsystems surprised me quite a bit when I read it in the Norwegian news the day before yesterday. Everyone knew that IBM was lurking in the scenes looking to get their hands on Sun but their offer was apparently too low. IBM has similarly to Sun included open source as a significant part of their business model. Sun’s brag list of projects they support is quite long including the likes of GlassFish, GNOME, Java, Mozilla, MySQL, NetBeans, OpenOffice.org, X.Org and so on. Personally I use many of these products every day and I hope to continue using them.
While I do not think these products will dissappear it would be sad if they lost some of its support in the software industry. Oracle on their hand has also supported several open source initiatives but you never know the consequences of a merger between two large companies. In particular, I wonder what this will mean for all the open source projects Sun has supported. It could be very positive if Oracle continue and increase their support to open source.The new Oracle+Sun would be a serious player in the software industry and in particular in the open source world. I beleive that the open source community depend on having the support from the industry, and in particular the large flagship companies like IBM, Sun, Oracle and so on. However, you must break some eggs to make an omelet and merging two large software companies is one big omelet (something which we already see speculations about). I just don’t hope the broken eggs will be open source ones. I wish the two good luck and hope that they will continue supporting open source even stronger.
I had this strangest problem with my mouse on Ubuntu. When using the left mouse button in a window, for instance Thunderbird, it was grabbing and moving the whole window rather than selecting things within the window. If I pressed the thumb button on the side of the mouse and the left button at the same time, the mouse performed as I would have expected the left button to do alone. Moreover, if I pressed “alt” and the left button it also worked propperly.
I do not know what the problem was but I know what I did to solve it. I went to “System->Preferences->Windows” in the menu in Ubuntu. In the “Windos Preferences” I reselected “alt” as the “movement key” and everything was back to normal. Apparently I must have reset some of the configuration options for the mouse/keyboard when reselecting “alt” as the movement key. As my knowledege about Xorg (the window system in Ubuntu) is limited I am glad I was able to fix it without any further configuration.
