Remember another case, in which a rigged demo was presented as "evidence" on behalf of Microsoft? Remember how Boies managed to antagonize the judge so much that the verdict was overturned, and Gates won.
Amazing how people refuse to shut up, especially when they are right?
I notice you failed to address any of the conflict of interest issues. Not to mention failing to provide anything other than smoke re the ballot issues.
Fortunately for you, some Americans are worried about the breakdown of democracy in their country. And oh yes, I do expect some flag-waver to mod this down. Much better to close your eyes to this stuff, oh yes.
Re:Patents not adversarial like other courts...
on
Browser Cookie Patent
·
· Score: 1
When you go for a patent, you're not under such a heavy burden to prove you're worthy of it. And it's not the government's job to prove you're not, or even to put up a challenge. Other courts are adversarial by design. Each side does whatever it can to prove they're right and the other is wrong. Out of this emerges a winner and a loser. The patent system is not like that.
You are right: with the patent system, everybody who patents is a winner, and everybody else is a loser, never mind whether they show up in court or not.
Good luck competing in todays PC gaming market (hope you have the cash to buy a good game engine instead of taking the time to make one from scratch).
Check out neoengine out. It's already a good engine, and getting better. The main author is a pro who makes his living doing character animation, so mesh animation isn't in the code base. But you can add it, and I suppose the author will take it, and if not, that's ok too.
Obviously, if copying was not illegal, it could not become a source of funds for criminals. Conversely, the more illegal it is, the higher the profits are.
SDL is the cross-platform answer to DirectX, and its only serious competition. Blizzard employs Sam Latinga, who originally developed SDL and whose fulltime job is to continue to develop it. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will allow Blizzard to continue to develop SDL by employing Sam, unless they are subjected to a serious amount of scrutiny about it. It is obviously in Blizzard's interest as a game company to support SDL, but that will certainly change if Microsoft controls them, and given that Microsoft has understandably not shown the slightest fear of trustbusters lately, I expect them to act fairly promptly to rid themselves of this little thorn.
What happened to it? The last time this worked was around 0.95 or so. Having to restart to change themes is, for one thing, primitive, and another, a pain in the butt.
> > > VM's, by the way, go back at least 20 years in the literature > > > > More like 60 years, oh my. Ever heard of a turing machine? > > Turing Machines are a mathematical model. VMs are implementations of a less general and less > powerful type. BTW, no computer so far has been able to match the capability of a TM.
What kind of drugs are you smoking, can I have some? Turing defined the "turing machine" as a simple machine suitable for proving theorums about. However, this does not mean that turing machines could not or have not been built (they have). Turing used the turing machine model to show that any so-called turing-complete machine could emulate any other. The machine being emulated is usually called the "virtual" machine, and the machine doing the emulating is the "real" or physical machine. Except for the small detail of not having infinite memory, every modern computer is equivalent to a turing machine in power, i.e., can both emulate a turing machine or be emulated by one. Turing machines are often built or emulated for sport.
The bottom line is, if you want to call a turing machine a mathematical model, you'd better call your PC a mathematical model as well, because the two are provably equivalent.
Could real time medical rendering be whizzier than Id?
No, because if it was worthwhile, John would have already used it. It's hardly an unknown technique. I forget the name of the company, but it was used about about 8 years ago by a french company in a 3D beat-em-up. The game mags described the effect as 'wibbly'.
It's really hard to beat boring old polygons to get a reasonably convincing and solid look for not too much processor. Maybe something like this could be used to add detail around the silhouette edges so you don't see so much angularity there, which is and has been for a while, the weakest part of realtime renderings.
Just to note, I agree that stopping the application in mid-run, changing it, and continue running is impressive. But MS (the only one I know of, at least) has achived it quite a long time ago for C/C++ (much more impressive, I think you'll agree) and for.NET
IBM does that in VAJ - Visual Age Java - along with a lot of other nice thinks, such as automatically compiling code every time you change the source (yes this works out fine) and the really smooth handling of error conditions. They also had a built-in revision control system, which I never got around to trying. By the way, VAJ is written in Smalltalk, or it was at the time I last used it.
OCAML [ocaml.org] is a very practical functional programming language with excellent compilers. A number of Linux utilities are written in it.
Out of interest, which utilities?
The benchmark reports I've seen of compiled OCAML programs are quite amazing, considering the functional model and heavy use of lisp-like garbage-collected structures. There are oddities, like 31 bit integers. I suppose one of the bits is used for garbage collection, and there you have to realize you're really not in Kansas anymore. This is one of the languages on my list of things I need to try, in the interest of learning new, useful paradigms. Plus I want to know first hand what OCAML brings to the party in terms of design and rapid prototyping capabilities. By all accounts, you can't complain about the speed. It's just a few tens of percent behind C/C++, even doing the things that C is good at.
"Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios"
One thing I can't figure out is how, if your flashed LinuxBIOS is broken, how you can even necessarily boot back to FreeDOS to flash your BIOS again back to the vendor's BIOS. I'm not one of those fortunates with a BIOS-in-ROM that I can revert to by just closing a jumper...
Yes, important question.
1) Make sure your bios is socketed, not soldered onto the motherboard when you buy your computer. If it isn't socketed, you don't want that computer because the manufacturer doesn't care about you. 2) Get this thingy. 3) Get a new flash chip and verify you can make/boot a backup bios 4) You can relax now.
There are other ways to get around bios re-flash disasters, for example, you can use a running PC as a crude kind of flash writer by hot plugging a bios flash chip, being careful not to short anything. But the dual-socket approach abover is really the easy and safe way to go. I'd say, whether or not you indend to reflash your bios, it's well worth grabbing one of those dual flash sockets just in case you ever need it.
Yes but isn't the problem if you do screw the BIOS you can't boot your PC in order to reflash it?
Usually the only alternative open is to boot another PC and remove the BIOS whilst the PC is running and insert the corrupted one then flash the old corrupted bios on this PC.
This has always seemed a tad risky to me.
Good point, and good workaround. Another, perhaps better, workaround is to get a functional bios out of a working machine and stick it in. This is easy if you have access to another, identical motherboard, which is a very good thing anyway IMHO, even if "access" means going down the the street to your local screwdriver shop.
Third workaround: write the bios in a bios-writer. It's a standard flash chip after all, and if it isn't, you do not want to buy that computer. Flash writers are not expensive.
The idea that an OS doesn't need the BIOS after it boots is a myth. There are still a couple places where the BIOS is called once the machine is running. APM is the obvious example, and I think there are a couple more obscure ones.
Actually, ACPI has the potential to get around the power management problem becuase it gives the OS complete control over the power management code. At least, if there are bugs, it will be in the ACPI code in a nice, easy to find place, instead of buried way down inside endless bios crap.
There are other miscellaneous annoyances such as proprietary laptop configuration secrets, but IMHO, manfacturers who like to rely on such easter eggs for differentiation are manufacturers you don't want to buy from. It always bites you eventually. (E.g., my last three laptops were Sony, but never again. Too much pure crap that plain doesn't work, never mind keyboards constantly breaking down and batteries timed to die immediately after the warrantee expires. Recommendation: Samsung, as a company that consciously tries to build sensible machines without weird secrets or fragile components.)
How "supported" is "supported"? Can I change all the parameters that I can now? Does the OS get back the right sizes of drives when it asks about them? Are there issues with setting stuff like the RTC? What is broken? How about temperature sensors and other stuff on the I2C bus?
The answer to this is clear when you know that Linux almost completely ignores the bios after it boots. The emphatically includes hard drive configuration. To prove this to yourself, go into your bios and set all your hard drives, CDRoms etc. *except* your boot disk to "none". Boot Linux. Hey, it works just the same as it did before, amazing. The reason for this is, Linux is perfectly capable of ignoring the configuration information returned by the bios, because too often that information is just plain wrong. So Linux has been forced to discover that information for itself by directly querying buses, controllers etc, and basically, knowing about every hardware device in the world. Impressive achievement, when you think about it.
Linux now knows a lot of temperature sensors and the like, in spite of the reluctance of companies like Intel to release the technical specifications. I believe we're either at the point or close to it where Linux does a better job on the sensors than the bios does. Some other items are still sore points, such as processor speed configuration, which again has been kept as a deep dark secret by Intel and others. Another item in this category is power management, and then there is SMM - system management mode. All this is in various stages of reverse engineering. At some point, Intel will even get a clue and realize it's to their advantage to release these specs openly, instead of thinking they can exert some kind of control over the industry by keeping it secret. They can't, which has been proved time and again. All they can do is make things so that the code is not peer-reviewed, and therefore buggy and unreliable. (Don't tell me your power management isn't buggy, I won't believe you.) Another bad effect is that when your manufacturer goes under or EOLs the product you no longer get bios upgrades, too damm bad.
Because I'm willing to be that "we can boot BSD" is a long way from "this is a complete, end-user ready product that supports all the functionality of the hardware."
So? As soon as you get a new computer, the first thing you should do is make sure you can reflash the bios with the vendor's latest bios upgrade. If you don't do that, I can assure you that you will regret it a few years down the road, when you are forced to upgrade the bios for some reason, larger hard disks being a perennial example of such a reason. So, once you've done that, put aside a floppy disk with the bios upgrade image and a copy of FreeDos on it, and you are safe (unless the vendor's bios flasher messes up on you, in which case you needed to return that PC anyway). Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios (which you already verified works correctly, right?) If it does work, you will have a clean, cool boot and endless source of upgrades. No longer will you have to worry about your bios ever going obsolete or bios bugs going unfixed forever. Never mind the fact it boots faster.
Bios development has stagnated. Actually, it stagnated immediately after the Phoenix, Award etc bioses came out in 1982. Since then, bioses have stayed essentially as awkward, feature-limited and buggy as ever. Minor improvements: guess the hard drive geometry, whoopie. Choices of and control over boot devices are still pathetically limited, and the way bios extensions are integrated (e.g., Intel boot agent, yuck) is user-offensive.
1) I want to boot off my compact flash reader for crying out loud, how hard is that? Will you show me an Award or Phoenix bios that can do it?
2) I want just one pause at boot where I can select either which OS configuration to boot, or alternatively, bios configuration. Not endless droning sequences of "now you can hit F2 to configure bios", "now you can hit Ctrl-S to configure PXE", "now you can hit Ctrl-R to configure raid". As a user interface that's just miserable. You have to sit their staring at the monitor waiting for just the right 2 seconds to hit exactly the right key, and if you miss, it's back to the beginning for you. With some boots taking two minutes that turns into a major timewaster. How hard is it to provide a framework so the OS boot selection and bios configuration are on the same menu? Answer: not hard, unless your name is Award or Phoenix.
The Bios used to be a convenient place for OEMs to hide crucial configuration details, keeping it all in the familly so to speak, but since that stuff has been largely decoded by OSS hordes and is ignored by Windows in favor built-in drivers, it's become increasing pointless. The bios has gone back to being what it always should have been: a way to boot. But the bioses served up to us by the incumbent manufacturers aren't even good at that.
Hence the need for OSS to invade that bastion of proprietary, closed code which once seemed to mysterious. It's not any more, simply because of the relentless pressure for components to standardize. It's now possible to write a bios that relies on such standard features as pci topology discovery to do its work.
At the very least, the general availablity of community-developed, peer-reviewed bioses will force the leading bios vendors to get off their tails and fix up their code to be less pathetically unusable than it is at present. At best, we're shortly arriving at the time where reflashing your bios is the very next thing you do after loading in the Linux installation CD.
Except for my gaming needs, I'd like a small (physically), extensible, *low-noise* little PC, with a comfortable screen and a decent keyboard.
My big noisy SMP box sits in the closet. I run a nice quiet laptop with WiFi as an X Terminal. This works great for everything except for 3D and video, which is handled by a cheap Athlon box with upgraded, quiet fans and hard disk spun down most of the time since it gets its files over the network at 12.5 MB/s.
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Can we seriously cool it with the 'OMG Lockdown!' claims?
No, not unless it magically becomes not locked down.
Strawman!
Oh... Sorry. I got a little excited there. Eveyone else on Slashdot misuses that word. I didn't want to be left out.
You are close. He actually made an "argument by analogy", yet another common form of logical fallacy.
Remember another case, in which a rigged demo was presented as "evidence" on behalf of Microsoft? Remember how Boies managed to antagonize the judge so much that the verdict was overturned, and Gates won .
Who modded this rubbish insightful?
Learn the difference between a criminal and a material witness, and we'll talk. K?
First, you much learn the meaning of "due process of law." Then learn what "loophole" means. Finally, study the notion of "above the law".
The kernel modules sytem was revamped, and is much nicer. But loading modules is now so easy to do...
Oh? In what way?
Oh great. Here we go again.
Amazing how people refuse to shut up, especially when they are right?
I notice you failed to address any of the conflict of interest issues. Not to mention failing to provide anything other than smoke re the ballot issues.
Fortunately for you, some Americans are worried about the breakdown of democracy in their country. And oh yes, I do expect some flag-waver to mod this down. Much better to close your eyes to this stuff, oh yes.
When you go for a patent, you're not under such a heavy burden to prove you're worthy of it. And it's not the government's job to prove you're not, or even to put up a challenge. Other courts are adversarial by design. Each side does whatever it can to prove they're right and the other is wrong. Out of this emerges a winner and a loser. The patent system is not like that.
You are right: with the patent system, everybody who patents is a winner, and everybody else is a loser, never mind whether they show up in court or not.
This issue and a number of those before it show that Linux has as many opportunities for exploitation as any other OS.
You're talking out of your ass. This is a local root exploit, the black hat has to get a shell first.
Good luck competing in todays PC gaming market (hope you have the cash to buy a good game engine instead of taking the time to make one from scratch).
Check out neoengine out. It's already a good engine, and getting better. The main author is a pro who makes his living doing character animation, so mesh animation isn't in the code base. But you can add it, and I suppose the author will take it, and if not, that's ok too.
Obviously, if copying was not illegal, it could not become a source of funds for criminals. Conversely, the more illegal it is, the higher the profits are.
SDL is the cross-platform answer to DirectX, and its only serious competition. Blizzard employs Sam Latinga, who originally developed SDL and whose fulltime job is to continue to develop it. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will allow Blizzard to continue to develop SDL by employing Sam, unless they are subjected to a serious amount of scrutiny about it. It is obviously in Blizzard's interest as a game company to support SDL, but that will certainly change if Microsoft controls them, and given that Microsoft has understandably not shown the slightest fear of trustbusters lately, I expect them to act fairly promptly to rid themselves of this little thorn.
What happened to it? The last time this worked was around 0.95 or so. Having to restart to change themes is, for one thing, primitive, and another, a pain in the butt.
Anybody know what's going on here?
> > > VM's, by the way, go back at least 20 years in the literature
> >
> > More like 60 years, oh my. Ever heard of a turing machine?
>
> Turing Machines are a mathematical model. VMs are implementations of a less general and less
> powerful type. BTW, no computer so far has been able to match the capability of a TM.
What kind of drugs are you smoking, can I have some? Turing defined the "turing machine" as a simple machine suitable for proving theorums about. However, this does not mean that turing machines could not or have not been built (they have). Turing used the turing machine model to show that any so-called turing-complete machine could emulate any other. The machine being emulated is usually called the "virtual" machine, and the machine doing the emulating is the "real" or physical machine. Except for the small detail of not having infinite memory, every modern computer is equivalent to a turing machine in power, i.e., can both emulate a turing machine or be emulated by one. Turing machines are often built or emulated for sport.
The bottom line is, if you want to call a turing machine a mathematical model, you'd better call your PC a mathematical model as well, because the two are provably equivalent.
Could real time medical rendering be whizzier than Id?
No, because if it was worthwhile, John would have already used it. It's hardly an unknown technique. I forget the name of the company, but it was used about about 8 years ago by a french company in a 3D beat-em-up. The game mags described the effect as 'wibbly'.
It's really hard to beat boring old polygons to get a reasonably convincing and solid look for not too much processor. Maybe something like this could be used to add detail around the silhouette edges so you don't see so much angularity there, which is and has been for a while, the weakest part of realtime renderings.
VM's, by the way, go back at least 20 years in the literature -- I studied them in college in the late 80's
More like 60 years, oh my. Ever heard of a turing machine?
Just to note, I agree that stopping the application in mid-run, changing it, and continue running is impressive. .NET
But MS (the only one I know of, at least) has achived it quite a long time ago for C/C++ (much more impressive, I think you'll agree) and for
IBM does that in VAJ - Visual Age Java - along with a lot of other nice thinks, such as automatically compiling code every time you change the source (yes this works out fine) and the really smooth handling of error conditions. They also had a built-in revision control system, which I never got around to trying. By the way, VAJ is written in Smalltalk, or it was at the time I last used it.
Recommended.
OCAML [ocaml.org] is a very practical functional programming language with excellent compilers. A number of Linux utilities are written in it.
Out of interest, which utilities?
The benchmark reports I've seen of compiled OCAML programs are quite amazing, considering the functional model and heavy use of lisp-like garbage-collected structures. There are oddities, like 31 bit integers. I suppose one of the bits is used for garbage collection, and there you have to realize you're really not in Kansas anymore. This is one of the languages on my list of things I need to try, in the interest of learning new, useful paradigms. Plus I want to know first hand what OCAML brings to the party in terms of design and rapid prototyping capabilities. By all accounts, you can't complain about the speed. It's just a few tens of percent behind C/C++, even doing the things that C is good at.
"Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios"
One thing I can't figure out is how, if your flashed LinuxBIOS is broken, how you can even necessarily boot back to FreeDOS to flash your BIOS again back to the vendor's BIOS. I'm not one of those fortunates with a BIOS-in-ROM that I can revert to by just closing a jumper...
Yes, important question.
1) Make sure your bios is socketed, not soldered onto the motherboard when you buy your computer. If it isn't socketed, you don't want that computer because the manufacturer doesn't care about you. 2) Get this thingy. 3) Get a new flash chip and verify you can make/boot a backup bios 4) You can relax now.
There are other ways to get around bios re-flash disasters, for example, you can use a running PC as a crude kind of flash writer by hot plugging a bios flash chip, being careful not to short anything. But the dual-socket approach abover is really the easy and safe way to go. I'd say, whether or not you indend to reflash your bios, it's well worth grabbing one of those dual flash sockets just in case you ever need it.
Yes but isn't the problem if you do screw the BIOS you can't boot your PC in order to reflash it?
Usually the only alternative open is to boot another PC and remove the BIOS whilst the PC is running and insert the corrupted one then flash the old corrupted bios on this PC.
This has always seemed a tad risky to me.
Good point, and good workaround. Another, perhaps better, workaround is to get a functional bios out of a working machine and stick it in. This is easy if you have access to another, identical motherboard, which is a very good thing anyway IMHO, even if "access" means going down the the street to your local screwdriver shop.
Third workaround: write the bios in a bios-writer. It's a standard flash chip after all, and if it isn't, you do not want to buy that computer. Flash writers are not expensive.
The idea that an OS doesn't need the BIOS after it boots is a myth. There are still a couple places where the BIOS is called once the machine is running. APM is the obvious example, and I think there are a couple more obscure ones.
Actually, ACPI has the potential to get around the power management problem becuase it gives the OS complete control over the power management code. At least, if there are bugs, it will be in the ACPI code in a nice, easy to find place, instead of buried way down inside endless bios crap.
There are other miscellaneous annoyances such as proprietary laptop configuration secrets, but IMHO, manfacturers who like to rely on such easter eggs for differentiation are manufacturers you don't want to buy from. It always bites you eventually. (E.g., my last three laptops were Sony, but never again. Too much pure crap that plain doesn't work, never mind keyboards constantly breaking down and batteries timed to die immediately after the warrantee expires. Recommendation: Samsung, as a company that consciously tries to build sensible machines without weird secrets or fragile components.)
Like fuckin hell I'd replace my perfectly working BIOS with some lame-ass hack bios that is likely to lock up and prevent me from booting my PC....
If you have a perfectly working bios, I will eat this floppy disk. (If it has a bug, you will eat the floppy disk instead.)
How "supported" is "supported"? Can I change all the parameters that I can now? Does the OS get back the right sizes of drives when it asks about them? Are there issues with setting stuff like the RTC? What is broken? How about temperature sensors and other stuff on the I2C bus?
The answer to this is clear when you know that Linux almost completely ignores the bios after it boots. The emphatically includes hard drive configuration. To prove this to yourself, go into your bios and set all your hard drives, CDRoms etc. *except* your boot disk to "none". Boot Linux. Hey, it works just the same as it did before, amazing. The reason for this is, Linux is perfectly capable of ignoring the configuration information returned by the bios, because too often that information is just plain wrong. So Linux has been forced to discover that information for itself by directly querying buses, controllers etc, and basically, knowing about every hardware device in the world. Impressive achievement, when you think about it.
Linux now knows a lot of temperature sensors and the like, in spite of the reluctance of companies like Intel to release the technical specifications. I believe we're either at the point or close to it where Linux does a better job on the sensors than the bios does. Some other items are still sore points, such as processor speed configuration, which again has been kept as a deep dark secret by Intel and others. Another item in this category is power management, and then there is SMM - system management mode. All this is in various stages of reverse engineering. At some point, Intel will even get a clue and realize it's to their advantage to release these specs openly, instead of thinking they can exert some kind of control over the industry by keeping it secret. They can't, which has been proved time and again. All they can do is make things so that the code is not peer-reviewed, and therefore buggy and unreliable. (Don't tell me your power management isn't buggy, I won't believe you.) Another bad effect is that when your manufacturer goes under or EOLs the product you no longer get bios upgrades, too damm bad.
Because I'm willing to be that "we can boot BSD" is a long way from "this is a complete, end-user ready product that supports all the functionality of the hardware."
So? As soon as you get a new computer, the first thing you should do is make sure you can reflash the bios with the vendor's latest bios upgrade. If you don't do that, I can assure you that you will regret it a few years down the road, when you are forced to upgrade the bios for some reason, larger hard disks being a perennial example of such a reason. So, once you've done that, put aside a floppy disk with the bios upgrade image and a copy of FreeDos on it, and you are safe (unless the vendor's bios flasher messes up on you, in which case you needed to return that PC anyway). Go ahead and flash in LinuxBios and try it out. Either it works or it doesn't. If it doesn't work, just reload the Vendor's bios (which you already verified works correctly, right?) If it does work, you will have a clean, cool boot and endless source of upgrades. No longer will you have to worry about your bios ever going obsolete or bios bugs going unfixed forever. Never mind the fact it boots faster.
Bios development has stagnated. Actually, it stagnated immediately after the Phoenix, Award etc bioses came out in 1982. Since then, bioses have stayed essentially as awkward, feature-limited and buggy as ever. Minor improvements: guess the hard drive geometry, whoopie. Choices of and control over boot devices are still pathetically limited, and the way bios extensions are integrated (e.g., Intel boot agent, yuck) is user-offensive.
1) I want to boot off my compact flash reader for crying out loud, how hard is that? Will you show me an Award or Phoenix bios that can do it?
2) I want just one pause at boot where I can select either which OS configuration to boot, or alternatively, bios configuration. Not endless droning sequences of "now you can hit F2 to configure bios", "now you can hit Ctrl-S to configure PXE", "now you can hit Ctrl-R to configure raid". As a user interface that's just miserable. You have to sit their staring at the monitor waiting for just the right 2 seconds to hit exactly the right key, and if you miss, it's back to the beginning for you. With some boots taking two minutes that turns into a major timewaster. How hard is it to provide a framework so the OS boot selection and bios configuration are on the same menu? Answer: not hard, unless your name is Award or Phoenix.
The Bios used to be a convenient place for OEMs to hide crucial configuration details, keeping it all in the familly so to speak, but since that stuff has been largely decoded by OSS hordes and is ignored by Windows in favor built-in drivers, it's become increasing pointless. The bios has gone back to being what it always should have been: a way to boot. But the bioses served up to us by the incumbent manufacturers aren't even good at that.
Hence the need for OSS to invade that bastion of proprietary, closed code which once seemed to mysterious. It's not any more, simply because of the relentless pressure for components to standardize. It's now possible to write a bios that relies on such standard features as pci topology discovery to do its work.
At the very least, the general availablity of community-developed, peer-reviewed bioses will force the leading bios vendors to get off their tails and fix up their code to be less pathetically unusable than it is at present. At best, we're shortly arriving at the time where reflashing your bios is the very next thing you do after loading in the Linux installation CD.
I'm going to call you out on this.
I have a friend that uses KDE 3 on an 800Mhz Athlon, and the delay on *that* is enough to bother me.
Something is grossly wrong then. I suppose he has selected a high resolution, but not configured 2D acceleration (i.e., no accelerated X Server).
Trust me, I did not exaggerate in the slightest. Get independent confirmation if you like.
Except for my gaming needs, I'd like a small (physically), extensible, *low-noise* little PC, with a comfortable screen and a decent keyboard.
My big noisy SMP box sits in the closet. I run a nice quiet laptop with WiFi as an X Terminal. This works great for everything except for 3D and video, which is handled by a cheap Athlon box with upgraded, quiet fans and hard disk spun down most of the time since it gets its files over the network at 12.5 MB/s.