That's a link to an Ars Technica article which mentions that at Ars Technica Firefox/Mozilla usage is up more than 75%. Do you really think that Ars Technica readers are a representative sample of computer users?
MS pre-selecting IE does not preclude others from competing. That's a blatantly untrue statement. It makes it more difficult. That's a big difference.
"More difficult" covers a lot of territory. It's more difficult to walk up a hill than to walk on level ground. It's also more difficult to climb Mount Everest than to walk on level ground. Equating the two, however, isn't legitimate.
Sigh. Creationists are like Uri Geller, thinking that if they rub Paley's Watch enough it will start ticking again. "Intelligent design" is just the latest variant.
Actually, I take that back in part. On the Hauppauge web site, you can find a page talking about Linux and referring you to third-party drivers. That page also has a blurb on it for the NEW Red Hat 6.0 distribution!
Couldn't there be a startup project to get existing windows-compatible HDTV cards to work within Linux? I mean, there's a good sized community out there, and with the right motivation (recorded HD for all?) couldn't this be done?
Well, let's see. I have a Hauppauge WinTV Go card. Evidently they've changed the tuner chip to something that bttv doesn't know about (it reports "tuner=<NULL> (-1)" in dmesg), and thus I am SOL, at least for the time being. If Hauppauge supports Linux in any way, I'm unaware of it. You might also inquire with the folks at the GATOS project how much help ATI has been to them.
In other words, while David Hume blew a hole in the philosophical respectability of induction, I don't see any evidence that the folks who make TV cards for PClones are going to have a change of heart.
I'm hoping to see a bunch of responses proving me wrong on this, of course.
That's nice to hear. What would be nicer to hear, and is a precondition of my ever buying an ATI card again, is that part of that "Linux driver push" is feature parity with their Windows drivers, including full support of the AIW cards and the HDTV Wonder.
There never was unbiased news, and there can't be. If the mainstream media would just drop their facade, there'd be no reason to gripe; just recognize the bias and seek out other sources so that you have a decent shot at getting the whole story.
But speaking of biases, I couldn't help noticing yours. The chairman of Viacom was giving his opinion; if his opinion really had anything to do with the news reporting of Viacom-owned media, how is it that Viacom owns Simon & Schuster, which has published a number of anti-Bush books (that in turn got extensive advertising masquerading as news on 60 Minutes, and CBS, whose personnel let their obsession with bringing down Bush blind them to forged memos as obviously fake as a child's attempt to write a parental excuse note, and MTV, which can hardly be said to be leaning to the right?
The moral of the story? We need some Free^2, good, cross-platform fonts specifically designed for the web. Especially useful is bundled with our OS, or browser, or something.
Aside from the tu quoque aspect of your post, it's based on a false premise. As documented here, Fox News said that the fake photos were fake. Not the same as CBS, its forged memos, and the ridiculous "fake but accurate" spin they're trying to put on it.
"Can you prove it didn't happen?" --Criswell, Plan Nine from Outer Space
How is it that you can feel safe buying toasters, extension cords, etc.? I'm not aware of a government agency regulating them...but there is a non-governmental group, Underwriters Laboratories, that tests such things and lets those items that pass its tests use the UL logo. They can't coerce anyone into testing their products, but OTOH people who have come to trust UL vote with their pocketbooks, and anyone who doesn't submit their stuff for testing and make sure it is up to snuff will find themselves losing.
Why can't there be such groups to do the jobs done by the SEC, or the FDA? If they don't have the coercive power of government, they can't gain the consumer's trust save by being open with their testing methods and honest in their evaluations.
I get it. Bias and deceit don't matter; the higher concepts do. Sort of like the way Dan Rather insists that what's important are the questions raised by the forged memos...
Even peace-loving hippy folks take marital arts self-defence courses from time to time.
Would that be like learning to fend your mate off with a copy of the Kama Sutra?
You missed the real reason for this tactic: to `encourage' hardware manufacturers to play nice and release the source code to their drivers by making open source drivers the path of least resistance.
And we all see how well that's worked for many inkjet printers, essentially any graphics card, those Philips webcams that were recently mentioned on/., ad nauseam et infinitum.
My source on that is a Mario Pei book I read back in junior high, whose title I can't recall...so I will definitely defer to a more knowledgeable source!
I don't know why it would scare the crap out of you; aside from Frisian, Dutch is as close a language to English as you'll find. (We'll see, I guess, how long it takes for an Englishman or Englishwoman to say that I should've written "Aside from American and Frisian...")
That said, Dutch wasn't subject to the major changes that English underwent largely thanks to those Normans back in 1066. Dutch still has a word order that German speakers would find more natural than English speakers ("I have my Uncle Jan a pen bought," "You must him teach that he that must do"), and Dutch is sprinkled with the sort of compound words that German has, e.g. the Dutch tourism organization called the VVV (Verenigingen voor Vreemdelingenverkeer). I've read that the Dutch refer to them humorously as staathuiswoorden, literally "city hall words."
Aaargh! And a few hours earlier, I decided I'd finally had enough of ATI and took advantage of rebates at CompUSA to get an nVidia card and a Win TV for $10 and $30 respectively (at least in the limit as t->infinity....).
Ah, well...I'll just put the ATI AIW Radeon in a bag and save it to put in my remaining TV-less computer on that fine day that it will just work. It's still great news, and sic transit XFree86.
It's more like lack of staff, I believe. They've got something like roughly 4% as many developers doing Linux development as they do Windows developers- and these are developers dedicated to Linux driver development.
OK, now I'm puzzled. If they design things reasonably, won't the OS-specific part of a driver be a pretty darned small portion of the code, or are there sufficiently different models of how things work between Windows and X that you can't do that? (If there are FMs I should R, pointers would be much appreciated.)
Considering that the "documented" links to a post that links to an ATI page that doesn't exist, I think I know which it is. (Having an AIW Radeon, which ATI's new drivers don't support, and finding that ATI points you at the GATOS project if you want to use the TV tuner on your AIW card, is more on the order of "finding a trout in the milk" evidence.)
I'd be happy to leave feedback, but the ATI card I have (AIW Radeon) isn't among those the driver supports. I don't expect you to go back and redo a driver for the 2Mbyte PCI mach64 ATI card I have sitting around in a box, but would it be too much to ask for full support for the AIW Radeon?
Apart from the question of "purity," there's also a question of security. How am I to know that there's not a back door of some sort planted in a binary-only driver?
("Nobody's going to take the time to look at the source," you say? I'm sure someone will... and if people are sufficiently worried about security, then it may be profitable for someone to do the Linux equivalent of Underwriters Laboratories, and certify software.)
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IE is losing marketshare at an amazing rate.
That's a link to an Ars Technica article which mentions that at Ars Technica Firefox/Mozilla usage is up more than 75%. Do you really think that Ars Technica readers are a representative sample of computer users?
MS pre-selecting IE does not preclude others from competing. That's a blatantly untrue statement. It makes it more difficult. That's a big difference.
"More difficult" covers a lot of territory. It's more difficult to walk up a hill than to walk on level ground. It's also more difficult to climb Mount Everest than to walk on level ground. Equating the two, however, isn't legitimate.
You're right; it's Uri Geller's victims that rub the watch, isn't it? My mistake.
Sigh. Creationists are like Uri Geller, thinking that if they rub Paley's Watch enough it will start ticking again. "Intelligent design" is just the latest variant.
Actually, I take that back in part. On the Hauppauge web site, you can find a page talking about Linux and referring you to third-party drivers. That page also has a blurb on it for the NEW Red Hat 6.0 distribution!
Couldn't there be a startup project to get existing windows-compatible HDTV cards to work within Linux? I mean, there's a good sized community out there, and with the right motivation (recorded HD for all?) couldn't this be done?
Well, let's see. I have a Hauppauge WinTV Go card. Evidently they've changed the tuner chip to something that bttv doesn't know about (it reports "tuner=<NULL> (-1)" in dmesg), and thus I am SOL, at least for the time being. If Hauppauge supports Linux in any way, I'm unaware of it. You might also inquire with the folks at the GATOS project how much help ATI has been to them.
In other words, while David Hume blew a hole in the philosophical respectability of induction, I don't see any evidence that the folks who make TV cards for PClones are going to have a change of heart.
I'm hoping to see a bunch of responses proving me wrong on this, of course.
Could make for a good Thunderbirds parody. Interspecies Rescue... yeah, that's it.
That's nice to hear. What would be nicer to hear, and is a precondition of my ever buying an ATI card again, is that part of that "Linux driver push" is feature parity with their Windows drivers, including full support of the AIW cards and the HDTV Wonder.
There never was unbiased news, and there can't be. If the mainstream media would just drop their facade, there'd be no reason to gripe; just recognize the bias and seek out other sources so that you have a decent shot at getting the whole story.
But speaking of biases, I couldn't help noticing yours. The chairman of Viacom was giving his opinion; if his opinion really had anything to do with the news reporting of Viacom-owned media, how is it that Viacom owns Simon & Schuster, which has published a number of anti-Bush books (that in turn got extensive advertising masquerading as news on 60 Minutes, and CBS, whose personnel let their obsession with bringing down Bush blind them to forged memos as obviously fake as a child's attempt to write a parental excuse note, and MTV, which can hardly be said to be leaning to the right?
That's why there are apps on the distro to hook you up to play online, and a database of annotated games.
The moral of the story? We need some Free^2, good, cross-platform fonts specifically designed for the web. Especially useful is bundled with our OS, or browser, or something.
Like the Bitstream Vera fonts?
No, no...the Democrat finds someone using a 20 yard rope, takes it away from him, and throws it to the man.
s/Democrat/Republican/
s/20/10/
Aside from the tu quoque aspect of your post, it's based on a false premise. As documented here, Fox News said that the fake photos were fake. Not the same as CBS, its forged memos, and the ridiculous "fake but accurate" spin they're trying to put on it.
"Can you prove it didn't happen?" --Criswell, Plan Nine from Outer Space
How is it that you can feel safe buying toasters, extension cords, etc.? I'm not aware of a government agency regulating them...but there is a non-governmental group, Underwriters Laboratories, that tests such things and lets those items that pass its tests use the UL logo. They can't coerce anyone into testing their products, but OTOH people who have come to trust UL vote with their pocketbooks, and anyone who doesn't submit their stuff for testing and make sure it is up to snuff will find themselves losing.
Why can't there be such groups to do the jobs done by the SEC, or the FDA? If they don't have the coercive power of government, they can't gain the consumer's trust save by being open with their testing methods and honest in their evaluations.
I get it. Bias and deceit don't matter; the higher concepts do. Sort of like the way Dan Rather insists that what's important are the questions raised by the forged memos...
Even peace-loving hippy folks take marital arts self-defence courses from time to time.
Would that be like learning to fend your mate off with a copy of the Kama Sutra?
You missed the real reason for this tactic: to `encourage' hardware manufacturers to play nice and release the source code to their drivers by making open source drivers the path of least resistance.
/., ad nauseam et infinitum.
And we all see how well that's worked for many inkjet printers, essentially any graphics card, those Philips webcams that were recently mentioned on
My source on that is a Mario Pei book I read back in junior high, whose title I can't recall...so I will definitely defer to a more knowledgeable source!
As many have said, it's Dutch, not German.
I don't know why it would scare the crap out of you; aside from Frisian, Dutch is as close a language to English as you'll find. (We'll see, I guess, how long it takes for an Englishman or Englishwoman to say that I should've written "Aside from American and Frisian...")
That said, Dutch wasn't subject to the major changes that English underwent largely thanks to those Normans back in 1066. Dutch still has a word order that German speakers would find more natural than English speakers ("I have my Uncle Jan a pen bought," "You must him teach that he that must do"), and Dutch is sprinkled with the sort of compound words that German has, e.g. the Dutch tourism organization called the VVV (Verenigingen voor Vreemdelingenverkeer). I've read that the Dutch refer to them humorously as staathuiswoorden, literally "city hall words."
The use of a plural verb form with a corporation also points to an English origin for the title.
We think we can do a good job since the Slashdot editors represent a diverse spectrum of political ideologies.
Perhaps some examples are in order.
it is a increase of 100% in response time, aka a redution of 50%.
If response time increases by 100%, they've succeeded in making it twice as slow.
Aaargh! And a few hours earlier, I decided I'd finally had enough of ATI and took advantage of rebates at CompUSA to get an nVidia card and a Win TV for $10 and $30 respectively (at least in the limit as t->infinity....).
Ah, well...I'll just put the ATI AIW Radeon in a bag and save it to put in my remaining TV-less computer on that fine day that it will just work. It's still great news, and sic transit XFree86.
It's more like lack of staff, I believe. They've got something like roughly 4% as many developers doing Linux development as they do Windows developers- and these are developers dedicated to Linux driver development.
OK, now I'm puzzled. If they design things reasonably, won't the OS-specific part of a driver be a pretty darned small portion of the code, or are there sufficiently different models of how things work between Windows and X that you can't do that? (If there are FMs I should R, pointers would be much appreciated.)
Considering that the "documented" links to a post that links to an ATI page that doesn't exist, I think I know which it is. (Having an AIW Radeon, which ATI's new drivers don't support, and finding that ATI points you at the GATOS project if you want to use the TV tuner on your AIW card, is more on the order of "finding a trout in the milk" evidence.)
I'd be happy to leave feedback, but the ATI card I have (AIW Radeon) isn't among those the driver supports. I don't expect you to go back and redo a driver for the 2Mbyte PCI mach64 ATI card I have sitting around in a box, but would it be too much to ask for full support for the AIW Radeon?
Apart from the question of "purity," there's also a question of security. How am I to know that there's not a back door of some sort planted in a binary-only driver?
("Nobody's going to take the time to look at the source," you say? I'm sure someone will... and if people are sufficiently worried about security, then it may be profitable for someone to do the Linux equivalent of Underwriters Laboratories, and certify software.)