Insurance companies don't provide services, they pay for them, or rather do everything in their power to not pay for them. The insurance company is generally not involved until after the doctor issues the bill for a given service.
It's rare that a person is denied service in the US, unless it is an elective procedure rather than a life-saving procedure. It is in fact illegal for a hospital to deny a person emergency care.
The up side to our system is primo health care, there is none better and because of that the US is the source of a large percentage of medical and pharmaceutical innovations. The down side to our system is you can easilly be ruined financially if insurance can get away with not paying for a service.
Sounds to me like the guy has his chops busted by Amazon for violating a Terms of Service agreement.
Bullshit, he licenses his stuff legally, if Amazon doesn't want to license it he doesn't use it. Unlike these other guys, who flatout ignore copyright and get defended here on slashdot, even though this is a clear case of why copyright is necessary.
I think it's more about, you know, someone else illegaly using his art.
If you've ever known an artist, you'd already know that even excellent artists don't make shit for their work. Stealing copyright is a very big deal because artists need every little red cent they can get to survive. This is what copyright was designed for, protecting people in situations like this so they will have a reason to create more. Granted this guy is probably doing just fine, but he is simply one of the ones who has made it.
If we start allowing people to get away with copyright infringement on legitimate works, fewer people will make art, and the world will be poorer for it.
I still can't understand why you people don't get that this is exactly why copyright was invented in the first place. This, right here. This is it.
This has nothing to do with plagiarism, it's about an iPhone app that uses a texture (a copyrighted image) illegaly. It's licensed under Creative Commons, which does not allow for commercial use, and I believe it also requires attribution. To use his image legally, they needed to get a separate commercial license from the artist. They did not do this, so it is a copyright violation.
What part of that is NOT about copyright? And where the hell did you get plagiarism from?
He also had his own iPhone app, but got all the images from Amazon (like his desktop app), but Amazon pulled the plug on licensing the pics for the mobile version. So these guys created what amounts to an exact duplicate, down to the very same texture, but I'm assuming they don't get their pictures from Amazon, and if they screwed up on the texture I'm imagining all the other images they use are used illegaly also.
In other words, this guy gets screwed because he actually follows copyright correctly, and here on slashdot we have people defending the assholes who stole his work.
Did they simply decide that they didn't want to pay for a texture, and maliciously rip yours off? Maybe. But I find it just as likely that they may have simply assumed that it was a public domain texture.
Ignorance of the law is no defense. The picture was clearly marked with the Creative Commons license, which means it is free for non-commercial use. That means these guys were not allowed to use it, and they should have contacted the artist for a license to use it in their application, or found a public domain texture (which likely does not exist), or hired an artist to make one for them (probably more expensive than just licensing).
This is exactly the situation that copyright is needed for. Some guys stole his art (intentionally or no) and made money off it. He has limited monopoly on that texture, and by not licensing with the artist first they are breaking the law. If this is not the situation you want to see copyright for, I dont' know what the hell you want it for at all. This is not some kids downloading movies that they wouldn't buy anyway, it's an artist who has been ripped off.
Most artists don't make enough for their work as it is, yet you think this is petty?
Outing someone for infringing your copyright is akin to vigilante justice.
WTF? No it's not, not at all.
Vigilante justice would be breaking into his house and stealing stuff worth what you consider to be the value of a license to use your copyrighted work.
Beating him up would also be vigilante justice.
Do you even know what "vigilante" means? Holy cow man. Yelling "Stop! Thief!" is not vigilantism, and neither is calling someone who steals your picture a copyright infringer.
If it does turn out it's similar but not his texture then he's opened himself up for law suits for defamation.
Not really, do you understand what defamation is? It's damaging one's reputation, character, or good name by slander or libel.
Now, slander is a false statement injurious to a person's reputation. Libel is essentially the same with print.
All that to say, if the person saying/writing it believes it to be the truth, then it is not slander or libel and therefor not defamation. Slander and Libel, and therefore defamation, are notoriously difficult to prove. Else we would not have the political system we have.
His photoshop job of the original MacBook picture is certainly an original composition, even though he uses several copyrighted photos, he adds enough to it that it is almost certainly legal.
Now, copying his photo for your own, commercial use in no way adds to the composition, or changes the original, and it's just plain copyright infringement.
We have rules for the way these things work, and though they tend to be judgement calls we have pretty well worked things out in these cases. Borderline cases are always iffy, but this doesn't seem that borderline. Though he used many copyrighted photos, the new photo is certainly unique.
we're more interested in punishing people for wrongdoing than we are in doing what is most beneficial to society.
There is absolutely no motivation for an insurance company to punish anybody for wrongdoing. That only happens when the motive is "bettering society" rather than profit. You end up with some bureaucrat's opinion (or worse, a politician's opinion) of what someone deserves or does not deserve. As insurance companies value profit above virtually everything else, punishment never enters the equation. In this way they can often be more fair in a certain sense than a socialised health system. Where they become unfair is with payment for services, and they are undescriminatorily unfair in this regard.
Fraud may be quantifiable, but that doesn't give you the money back that was stolen via fraud. If someone defrauds you out of $500, you will never see that money again, because it will cost more than $500 to get that money back. That is why insurance companies would rather stick with clunky, expensive devices that only have one function and nobody really wants except those who can't get by without it. It may cost them 20x more, but if they switched to the cheaper device they would be defrauded an order of magnitude more often.
If you don't think it happens, look at how big of a problem prescription drug abuse is. The -only- way to get prescription drugs long after you need them is for a doctor to write you up a prescription, and yet hundreds of thousands of people abuse prescription. Hell my own aunt is one of them, it isn't exactly uncommon. Why do the doctors do it? Because a lot of time they'd rather take a few bucks and write that piece of paper than deal with an upset patient, plus some of them are simply unscrupulous.
And when the object in question is worth less than the cost to pursue the issue, it becomes difficult to prevent the fraud without losing incredible amounts of money. They are better off not paying for the phones for this purpose, since human reaction is quite predictable in these circumstances.
...it's good to develop a complementary technique......though I don't quite agree with his or the editors spelling!;) "it's always good to have complimentary approaches,"
You are quite correct, I hadn't paid any attention to that before, from Grammatically Correct:
In its verb form, the word complement refers to emphasizing the good qualities of another person or thing by adding something.
In its verb form, the word compliment refers to the act of praising someone or something.
It's kinda odd to have homophones that have nearly, but not quite, the same meanings, but that's English for you.
Electrons don't exist as such. They are just manifestations of vibration modes in certain energy fields.
Ahh, gotcha. So since they don't exist they don't have mass then, ok. Wait, what? They certainly do exist, and they certainly are particles. They just behave very, very strangly, just like -everything- at the sub-atomic level.
What the hell did you think Quantum Mechanics was all about?
It is not event consistent with itself: how can you have those electrons orbiting in the same shell and never bumping into each other or crashing into the nucleus?
Now you're trying to apply logic to something that has, frankly, never been logical. We've got mathematical models that work, but they certainly don't make any sense in a way the average joe (I'm including myself in that category) would see as logical. Valence theory never made sense, but it worked. The atomic structure doesn't make much sense (positive nucleus surrounded by negative electrons and it never collapses? WTH?) but it is certainly true. It doesn't make electrons any less particles, or less negatively charged and moving around a positive core.
They are actually very similar to Electro-Magnetic radiation, which consists of photons moving in a sort of intersecting wave pattern. Very strange, and yet it's true. The particle nature of light has been proven, and the wave nature of light is even easier to prove.
For probably 99.9% of chemistry, valence shells work predictably and simply. Same with Newtonian physics for 99.9% of gravity problems. It's only when you get to extreme scales that these theories break down. Frankly, probability clouds are useless to a chemist most of the time, as it's easier to accurately predict how a molecule will behave with the valence electron models.
Basically, probability clouds are useless until you start working on RWS (Really Weird Shit).
Meh, just because it is well known doesn't mean it is any good. You're arguing against personal feelings in an industry that is 100% subjective. Shit is shit, that some people are tittilated by shit isn't really any surprise, but it doesn't mean it's worth much. People buy what they want though, so more power to him.
What is backwards is the fact that a rather benign picture of a pair of breasts will be banned, while a man shoving his fist up a woman's anus is a-ok.
He's only one of the most famous photographers in history.
He shouldn't be, I've seen a lot of amature stuff that is frankly, quite a bit better than his work.
It's a sad state of society when what amounts to a fetish porno photographer is considered a top photographer.
Why is his crap artistic? Because he shot in black and white? Seriously, there is a lot of stuff like his out there, and in color. Most people wouldn't consider it "high art". Is it the B&W that makes it art? If so, artsy people are idiots.
Everybody knows that if you take a photo in black and white, it's artistic, be it a man shoving a finger into his penis, going elbow deep into a woman's ass, or what have you.
Totally art.
Excuse me, I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.
You're thinking of the PG-13 rating or the R rating. PG is the second lowest rating, and movies rated such are considered harmless by most. Also not that the rating system only actually applies to movies, they are set by a secret group of "parents" in the MPAA, but the structure is so well known it often gets applied to other things, like photographs and web sites and such.
In the US the ratings are as follows: G - General audiences, PG - Parental Guidance, PG-13 - parents strongly cautioned, no admittance under age 13 without parental consent, R - Restricted, no admittance under 17 without parental consent and in the company of an adult, and NC-17 - No Children under 17, kids under 17 can't get in, parents or no.
It's rare for a movie to be rated NC-17 that isn't a porno, in which case they tend to go all out for the X-XXX ratings, as an NC-17 rating for a non-porn is generally a death sentance unless you have a following before the movie even airs.
It's likely something else, as one of dA's most popular add-ons is FireFox only, and I know there is a huge portion of deviants who use FF. Were it anything but a problem local to your machine there would be an outcry, and of course there isn't.
Seriously, try a little troubleshooting to figure out what the actual problem is. I'm 99.9% sure both dA and their advertising affiliates test their ads on FireFox to make sure they work, FF has 30% of the browser market and nobody would be dumb enough to cut themselves off from that.
I thought the need to store information then write it in buffer was kind of important especially with writing as fast as SAS is supposed to be able to transfer it.
What's the point of a buffer if SAS can barely keep up with the drive's IO speed? All writes will be at the limit of the SAS. Surely you don't think they put the cache buffers in hard drives for data integrity do you? That makes no sense, the cache is more volatile than the storage medium, by definition.
Think of it this way, slow drives need lots and lots of cache, fast drives need very little cache. Does your RAM have some other cache before it sends stuff off to the CPU? Same thing here, except its going to and from RAM to the SSD.
Only every time something in the driver APIs changes or the hardware vendor in question otherwise can't be bothered to do their part properly. Which, of course, is simply unheard of.
In the Windows world, a change that could alter an API to the degree that it would break compatibility with a driver or program only comes along once every 4-8 years or so, unless there was some major security vulnerability discovered or the vendor of the particular product was using some hackjob way of calling the API. The Linux equivalent happens every few months or sooner, depending on how bleeding edge the idiot developing the code you use likes to be. Seriously, why the hell do I need the latest dev release of a frickin python library to do anything? What the hell is so groundbreaking that you absolutely MUST have it to write your program? Frickin assholes. That was not for a dev release product either, and of course in Linux, they usually assume you have the latest and greatest and don't include it for you, even when "the latest and greatest" isn't in any repositories yet. So instead you end up using versions of the software that are months out of date, just because you don't feel like manually updating the libraries (which fails about 1/3 of the time).
The system on Linux (nvidia notwithstanding - my next card, which should be in the post by now, is a Radeon, because AMD have been nice people and released specs) where the OS generally comes with nearly every driver you need is arguably superior to the rather odd Windows system of having every hardware company (who often can't write working software) write little bits of kernel code.
Honestly, it's rare to find a driver that you cannot download for Windows. Very rare. Rare enough that if you can't find a driver for it, they probably have piss poor customer service and you'd be better off without them. Also, once you have the drivers, if it takes more than 5 minutes to get them working correctly I'd be shocked. 5 minutes to get -anything- that wasn't already working to work in Linux would be amazing, and I'd probably still be using it if that were the case.
With Linux though, if the driver isn't there, then you're probably shit out of luck, and every new Linux kernel release drops support for a few legacy bits of hardware to keep the kernel from becoming over-sized. Linux works wonderfully on hardware it works wonderfully on, but on everything else it sucks. Unless you're keen to write your own drivers (I actually work with a guy who writes his own drivers, he's insane) you'd better do your research before upgrading your hardware or even the Linux kernel.
It's also worth noting that BSODs are rare in Windows these days, I work with Windows for 8-12 hours every day and I've on seen maybe a dozen BSODs since XP SP2 came out, and 99% of issues that cause them (including driver issues) can be fixed with a system restore, which Windows was kind enough to save a restore point for before it installed that new driver or software for you. It's anecdotal, sure, and ONE of those BSODs was on the first boot of my brand new Vista laptop, but that was the only one I ever had in Vista (I was pissed too, but it was a one time issue).
Seriously, Linux has nothing on Windows as far as hardware compatibility goes, not by a long shot.
It should be, they created a new imaging software tool (sorta like Ghost, but better in 90%+ cases) specifically for installing Vista, and it's the same tool they use for Windows 7. I use it in a corporate environment to push out custom PC images, and man is it slick. It will lay down an image in 1/4 the time a Ghost image will, and it has none of the downsides of the standard Windows setup install (like the mass amounts of custom.cab files and scripts to go through and pull components out of).
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance companies don't provide services, they pay for them, or rather do everything in their power to not pay for them. The insurance company is generally not involved until after the doctor issues the bill for a given service.
It's rare that a person is denied service in the US, unless it is an elective procedure rather than a life-saving procedure. It is in fact illegal for a hospital to deny a person emergency care.
The up side to our system is primo health care, there is none better and because of that the US is the source of a large percentage of medical and pharmaceutical innovations. The down side to our system is you can easilly be ruined financially if insurance can get away with not paying for a service.
Sounds to me like the guy has his chops busted by Amazon for violating a Terms of Service agreement.
Bullshit, he licenses his stuff legally, if Amazon doesn't want to license it he doesn't use it. Unlike these other guys, who flatout ignore copyright and get defended here on slashdot, even though this is a clear case of why copyright is necessary.
I think it's more about, you know, someone else illegaly using his art.
If you've ever known an artist, you'd already know that even excellent artists don't make shit for their work. Stealing copyright is a very big deal because artists need every little red cent they can get to survive. This is what copyright was designed for, protecting people in situations like this so they will have a reason to create more. Granted this guy is probably doing just fine, but he is simply one of the ones who has made it.
If we start allowing people to get away with copyright infringement on legitimate works, fewer people will make art, and the world will be poorer for it.
I still can't understand why you people don't get that this is exactly why copyright was invented in the first place. This, right here. This is it.
Ummm... yes it did?
This has nothing to do with plagiarism, it's about an iPhone app that uses a texture (a copyrighted image) illegaly. It's licensed under Creative Commons, which does not allow for commercial use, and I believe it also requires attribution. To use his image legally, they needed to get a separate commercial license from the artist. They did not do this, so it is a copyright violation.
What part of that is NOT about copyright? And where the hell did you get plagiarism from?
He also had his own iPhone app, but got all the images from Amazon (like his desktop app), but Amazon pulled the plug on licensing the pics for the mobile version. So these guys created what amounts to an exact duplicate, down to the very same texture, but I'm assuming they don't get their pictures from Amazon, and if they screwed up on the texture I'm imagining all the other images they use are used illegaly also.
In other words, this guy gets screwed because he actually follows copyright correctly, and here on slashdot we have people defending the assholes who stole his work.
Typical.
Did they simply decide that they didn't want to pay for a texture, and maliciously rip yours off? Maybe. But I find it just as likely that they may have simply assumed that it was a public domain texture.
Ignorance of the law is no defense. The picture was clearly marked with the Creative Commons license, which means it is free for non-commercial use. That means these guys were not allowed to use it, and they should have contacted the artist for a license to use it in their application, or found a public domain texture (which likely does not exist), or hired an artist to make one for them (probably more expensive than just licensing).
This is exactly the situation that copyright is needed for. Some guys stole his art (intentionally or no) and made money off it. He has limited monopoly on that texture, and by not licensing with the artist first they are breaking the law. If this is not the situation you want to see copyright for, I dont' know what the hell you want it for at all. This is not some kids downloading movies that they wouldn't buy anyway, it's an artist who has been ripped off.
Most artists don't make enough for their work as it is, yet you think this is petty?
He's not selling anybody's images, the photos are downloaded after the fact from a presumably public source.
It's the program that he is selling.
Outing someone for infringing your copyright is akin to vigilante justice.
WTF? No it's not, not at all.
Vigilante justice would be breaking into his house and stealing stuff worth what you consider to be the value of a license to use your copyrighted work.
Beating him up would also be vigilante justice.
Do you even know what "vigilante" means? Holy cow man. Yelling "Stop! Thief!" is not vigilantism, and neither is calling someone who steals your picture a copyright infringer.
If it does turn out it's similar but not his texture then he's opened himself up for law suits for defamation.
Not really, do you understand what defamation is? It's damaging one's reputation, character, or good name by slander or libel.
Now, slander is a false statement injurious to a person's reputation. Libel is essentially the same with print.
All that to say, if the person saying/writing it believes it to be the truth, then it is not slander or libel and therefor not defamation. Slander and Libel, and therefore defamation, are notoriously difficult to prove. Else we would not have the political system we have.
His photoshop job of the original MacBook picture is certainly an original composition, even though he uses several copyrighted photos, he adds enough to it that it is almost certainly legal.
Now, copying his photo for your own, commercial use in no way adds to the composition, or changes the original, and it's just plain copyright infringement.
We have rules for the way these things work, and though they tend to be judgement calls we have pretty well worked things out in these cases. Borderline cases are always iffy, but this doesn't seem that borderline. Though he used many copyrighted photos, the new photo is certainly unique.
we're more interested in punishing people for wrongdoing than we are in doing what is most beneficial to society.
There is absolutely no motivation for an insurance company to punish anybody for wrongdoing. That only happens when the motive is "bettering society" rather than profit. You end up with some bureaucrat's opinion (or worse, a politician's opinion) of what someone deserves or does not deserve. As insurance companies value profit above virtually everything else, punishment never enters the equation. In this way they can often be more fair in a certain sense than a socialised health system. Where they become unfair is with payment for services, and they are undescriminatorily unfair in this regard.
Fraud may be quantifiable, but that doesn't give you the money back that was stolen via fraud. If someone defrauds you out of $500, you will never see that money again, because it will cost more than $500 to get that money back. That is why insurance companies would rather stick with clunky, expensive devices that only have one function and nobody really wants except those who can't get by without it. It may cost them 20x more, but if they switched to the cheaper device they would be defrauded an order of magnitude more often.
If you don't think it happens, look at how big of a problem prescription drug abuse is. The -only- way to get prescription drugs long after you need them is for a doctor to write you up a prescription, and yet hundreds of thousands of people abuse prescription. Hell my own aunt is one of them, it isn't exactly uncommon. Why do the doctors do it? Because a lot of time they'd rather take a few bucks and write that piece of paper than deal with an upset patient, plus some of them are simply unscrupulous.
And when the object in question is worth less than the cost to pursue the issue, it becomes difficult to prevent the fraud without losing incredible amounts of money. They are better off not paying for the phones for this purpose, since human reaction is quite predictable in these circumstances.
...it's good to develop a complementary technique... ...though I don't quite agree with his or the editors spelling! ;) "it's always good to have complimentary approaches,"
You are quite correct, I hadn't paid any attention to that before, from Grammatically Correct:
In its verb form, the word complement refers to emphasizing the good qualities of another person or thing by adding something.
In its verb form, the word compliment refers to the act of praising someone or something.
It's kinda odd to have homophones that have nearly, but not quite, the same meanings, but that's English for you.
Electrons don't exist as such. They are just manifestations of vibration modes in certain energy fields.
Ahh, gotcha. So since they don't exist they don't have mass then, ok. Wait, what? They certainly do exist, and they certainly are particles. They just behave very, very strangly, just like -everything- at the sub-atomic level.
What the hell did you think Quantum Mechanics was all about?
It is not event consistent with itself: how can you have those electrons orbiting in the same shell and never bumping into each other or crashing into the nucleus?
Now you're trying to apply logic to something that has, frankly, never been logical. We've got mathematical models that work, but they certainly don't make any sense in a way the average joe (I'm including myself in that category) would see as logical. Valence theory never made sense, but it worked. The atomic structure doesn't make much sense (positive nucleus surrounded by negative electrons and it never collapses? WTH?) but it is certainly true. It doesn't make electrons any less particles, or less negatively charged and moving around a positive core.
They are actually very similar to Electro-Magnetic radiation, which consists of photons moving in a sort of intersecting wave pattern. Very strange, and yet it's true. The particle nature of light has been proven, and the wave nature of light is even easier to prove.
Don't get your panties in a bunch over semantics, of course the equation doesn't create the behavior. Jeeze.
For probably 99.9% of chemistry, valence shells work predictably and simply. Same with Newtonian physics for 99.9% of gravity problems. It's only when you get to extreme scales that these theories break down. Frankly, probability clouds are useless to a chemist most of the time, as it's easier to accurately predict how a molecule will behave with the valence electron models.
Basically, probability clouds are useless until you start working on RWS (Really Weird Shit).
Meh, just because it is well known doesn't mean it is any good. You're arguing against personal feelings in an industry that is 100% subjective. Shit is shit, that some people are tittilated by shit isn't really any surprise, but it doesn't mean it's worth much. People buy what they want though, so more power to him.
What is backwards is the fact that a rather benign picture of a pair of breasts will be banned, while a man shoving his fist up a woman's anus is a-ok.
Do you see the disconnect there?
He's only one of the most famous photographers in history.
He shouldn't be, I've seen a lot of amature stuff that is frankly, quite a bit better than his work.
It's a sad state of society when what amounts to a fetish porno photographer is considered a top photographer.
Why is his crap artistic? Because he shot in black and white? Seriously, there is a lot of stuff like his out there, and in color. Most people wouldn't consider it "high art". Is it the B&W that makes it art? If so, artsy people are idiots.
It's "high art" because it's in black and white.
Everybody knows that if you take a photo in black and white, it's artistic, be it a man shoving a finger into his penis, going elbow deep into a woman's ass, or what have you.
Totally art.
Excuse me, I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.
You're thinking of the PG-13 rating or the R rating. PG is the second lowest rating, and movies rated such are considered harmless by most. Also not that the rating system only actually applies to movies, they are set by a secret group of "parents" in the MPAA, but the structure is so well known it often gets applied to other things, like photographs and web sites and such.
In the US the ratings are as follows: G - General audiences, PG - Parental Guidance, PG-13 - parents strongly cautioned, no admittance under age 13 without parental consent, R - Restricted, no admittance under 17 without parental consent and in the company of an adult, and NC-17 - No Children under 17, kids under 17 can't get in, parents or no.
It's rare for a movie to be rated NC-17 that isn't a porno, in which case they tend to go all out for the X-XXX ratings, as an NC-17 rating for a non-porn is generally a death sentance unless you have a following before the movie even airs.
No kidding, have you tried browsing a porn site without ABP turned on? Holy Shit Batman, it's a nightmare!
It's likely something else, as one of dA's most popular add-ons is FireFox only, and I know there is a huge portion of deviants who use FF. Were it anything but a problem local to your machine there would be an outcry, and of course there isn't.
Seriously, try a little troubleshooting to figure out what the actual problem is. I'm 99.9% sure both dA and their advertising affiliates test their ads on FireFox to make sure they work, FF has 30% of the browser market and nobody would be dumb enough to cut themselves off from that.
I thought the need to store information then write it in buffer was kind of important especially with writing as fast as SAS is supposed to be able to transfer it.
What's the point of a buffer if SAS can barely keep up with the drive's IO speed? All writes will be at the limit of the SAS. Surely you don't think they put the cache buffers in hard drives for data integrity do you? That makes no sense, the cache is more volatile than the storage medium, by definition.
Think of it this way, slow drives need lots and lots of cache, fast drives need very little cache. Does your RAM have some other cache before it sends stuff off to the CPU? Same thing here, except its going to and from RAM to the SSD.
Only every time something in the driver APIs changes or the hardware vendor in question otherwise can't be bothered to do their part properly. Which, of course, is simply unheard of.
In the Windows world, a change that could alter an API to the degree that it would break compatibility with a driver or program only comes along once every 4-8 years or so, unless there was some major security vulnerability discovered or the vendor of the particular product was using some hackjob way of calling the API. The Linux equivalent happens every few months or sooner, depending on how bleeding edge the idiot developing the code you use likes to be. Seriously, why the hell do I need the latest dev release of a frickin python library to do anything? What the hell is so groundbreaking that you absolutely MUST have it to write your program? Frickin assholes. That was not for a dev release product either, and of course in Linux, they usually assume you have the latest and greatest and don't include it for you, even when "the latest and greatest" isn't in any repositories yet. So instead you end up using versions of the software that are months out of date, just because you don't feel like manually updating the libraries (which fails about 1/3 of the time).
The system on Linux (nvidia notwithstanding - my next card, which should be in the post by now, is a Radeon, because AMD have been nice people and released specs) where the OS generally comes with nearly every driver you need is arguably superior to the rather odd Windows system of having every hardware company (who often can't write working software) write little bits of kernel code.
Until you need to upgrade your Ubuntu repostitory servers, that is.
Honestly, it's rare to find a driver that you cannot download for Windows. Very rare. Rare enough that if you can't find a driver for it, they probably have piss poor customer service and you'd be better off without them. Also, once you have the drivers, if it takes more than 5 minutes to get them working correctly I'd be shocked. 5 minutes to get -anything- that wasn't already working to work in Linux would be amazing, and I'd probably still be using it if that were the case.
With Linux though, if the driver isn't there, then you're probably shit out of luck, and every new Linux kernel release drops support for a few legacy bits of hardware to keep the kernel from becoming over-sized. Linux works wonderfully on hardware it works wonderfully on, but on everything else it sucks. Unless you're keen to write your own drivers (I actually work with a guy who writes his own drivers, he's insane) you'd better do your research before upgrading your hardware or even the Linux kernel.
It's also worth noting that BSODs are rare in Windows these days, I work with Windows for 8-12 hours every day and I've on seen maybe a dozen BSODs since XP SP2 came out, and 99% of issues that cause them (including driver issues) can be fixed with a system restore, which Windows was kind enough to save a restore point for before it installed that new driver or software for you. It's anecdotal, sure, and ONE of those BSODs was on the first boot of my brand new Vista laptop, but that was the only one I ever had in Vista (I was pissed too, but it was a one time issue).
Seriously, Linux has nothing on Windows as far as hardware compatibility goes, not by a long shot.
That makes no sense at all, but it sounds like it was a bios/driver issue with the DVI (some BIOS do silly things when DVI is connected).
Weird.
It should be, they created a new imaging software tool (sorta like Ghost, but better in 90%+ cases) specifically for installing Vista, and it's the same tool they use for Windows 7. I use it in a corporate environment to push out custom PC images, and man is it slick. It will lay down an image in 1/4 the time a Ghost image will, and it has none of the downsides of the standard Windows setup install (like the mass amounts of custom .cab files and scripts to go through and pull components out of).
Hehe, this is what I was talking about, it was the post after yours in the Ubuntu forum, by PorkyPie:
Hi again. Sorry that my previous solutions didn't work, but have you tried pressing F6 twice at the cd boot menu, and adding
at the end?
Or... if you have a usb memory stick handy, use Unetbootin to install it.
If you tried that and it didn't do anything for you, well, I dunno man. Apparently others are having the same issue.