Ok, you are right, I guess for a second I forgot how drivers had to be written at such a low level (I program mostly in python...) and yes that would make porting drivers a pain.
As for the licensing, I was assuming that VIA would release most code under some license other then the GPL (such as the BSD license) that would allow use in proprietary products. And, as in true/. fashion, I didn't read TFA.
Well, Windows 95 can run on less then an original Pentium, with 4 MB of RAM, and assuming that you have say 8 MB of RAM even DSL won't work well as that is the bare minimum where for Windows 95 8 MB of RAM would be twice as much as needed. And DSL seems to be the smallest distro for day-to-day work.
Open source products though, have more documentation open, for a larger company that has a tech guy, he/she can usually work around issues much better then with a proprietary product.
Well, yes banking software would be supported most likely but as for a "generic" office, it is the OS that is the key part that usually breaks (because most software can either be run in a VM or emulated via DOSbox or WINE allowing you to get around hardware issues) and causes the most problems.
but a product made for a niche market surely wouldn't have quite the same stability.
What do you mean by stability? If you mean "will this run on a machine made in 2008?" the answer would be yes, because the source is open and you can compile it, along with how you can change the source to make it work if you have to use, say Windows whose framework changes enough to break many applications between releases. If you mean "will this not crash and delete all our data?" then the answers would be mixed, as it depends on the skill of the programmer.
In addition, Windows Vista 64-bit requires that all drivers that include a kernel-mode component be published by an established company, or the operating system will display unhideable "Test mode" banners in the four corners of the screen.
So in other words it is a MS problem? It would have nothing to do with VIA supporting or not supporting the graphics card, it is a Windows problem and MS could fix it (though, given how broken most other parts of their OS is, I doubt that they would).
As for the patents, they don't apply to some parts of the world so distros such as Ubuntu would include the drivers anyways, though it would be a pain it would be do-able.
Now it would be nice for VIA to support the drivers, but if not, its not the end of the world.
Look forward to documentation and X.org drivers from VIA as well in the near future
And so they are releasing the docs. As for why a Linux driver? Linux is by far the most popular OSS OS. *BSD is nice, but it can use most Linux things because Linux is open source as are the drivers. So why would VIA support *BSD over Linux when more VIA products run on Linux by default and not *BSD (gPC, Cloudbook, Etc.) and other then *BSD there aren't a lot of OSes that are OSS and popular (About the only other one I can think of is ReactOS and that isn't very stable yet....)
That may be true for proprietary products, but for free software most of the older releases will still be supported. Think of the Linux kernel, while almost everyone uses the 2.6 branch, they still support the 2.4 branch. Also, for example Firefox in the 2.X branch started using up more memory so some minimal Linux distros still stuck with the 1.5.X branch. There sometimes is a need for older software even if it is proprietary too, for example Windows 95. Most computers made for Windows 95 wouldn't run as well even with an ultra-minimalistic Linux distros at the same level as Windows 95 (it might work as a firewall or similar but as for running say Firefox, there is no way it would happen), and if you have say 50 desktops (still running well) with Windows 95, you might still want to keep them as 50 computers running XP could cost 15,000 (figuring at $300 per computer). So yes, there is a need many times to keep old software/hardware around. For example, the Windows 95 solution, even if say 50% of the computers break, it might be cheaper to buy some $25 Windows 95 era computers on Ebay rather then upgrade to say an XP-level computer.
How many copies of that were sold to OEMs? I assume most of them were. How many were wiped and put XP or Linux on? Chances are a good amount. Vista is a failure in perception too, ask the general person what they think of Vista and even those who just get on the computer to check their e-mail find that Vista is noticeably slower then XP, if you ask how many people would rather have XP, I am sure that the number would be very high. If any other OS replaced Vista in the OEM sector you could say that they have "sold" 140,000,000 copies, no matter how good/bad the OS is. Vista may sell well, but thats just because its what most computers have by default, it still is a failure for MS because people don't like it.
Well, I was trying to avoid a flamebait mod, but it happened anyways (as it seems like any comment that involves MS is either an instant flamebait or +5 insightful depending on who mods the comments)
Actually, with the current technology, such as 900 MHZ CPUs, 1 gig of RAM and Linux, things are selling. I am referring to the eeePC along with the other UMPCs that are growing in use. The slowing US economy has made computer makers adapt to lower spending incomes or face lower sales. Other computers such as the gPC reflect this. Along with the growing use of Linux (which is free) helps make the computers cheaper so they sell better. MS has been failing lately due to Vista's high-priced hardware need, compare that to Linux which can run on a Pentium II or III. New technology doesn't sell well in this economy, cheap, older technology does.
Though DDR3 is nice and all with it being much faster, computer speed hits quite a few bottlenecks outside of the RAM speed.
1) Hard disk speed, until SSDs become very common this is one of the causes of decreased speed because a HD can only run so fast
2) The OS. Vista is much much slower then other versions of Windows and as it is the main OS (For now) the fact that it struggles on a 1.6 GHZ dual-core CPU and 1 GB of RAM, only begins to tell you the sluggishness of the OS. And until MS fails and Linux becomes the top OS or MS manages to create a decently fast OS, this will be a problem
3) Connection speed. Its becoming where the Internet is nearly as important as the computer itself. And if you are still on dial-up (and in many places in the US thats all the connection choices offered) even a supercomputer will struggle with sites such as YouTube.
Until those problems get fixed, faster RAM won't make a bit of difference to the end-user.
How many people have looked through all the lines in a recipe and understand all the chemical reactions? Seriously, whats with people having faith in how somehow someone wouldn't slip in something that would be poisonous that the maintainers of the recipe wouldn't notice? Compare recipe to SELinux and you get the general picture.
And why would Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Fedora have it if it were malicious? Despite the fact that the US government could have made Red Hat put it in for Red Hat and Fedora, that still leaves Debian which is community (and is quite good about making sure its systems are secure) and Ubuntu which is based in the UK and is community much like Debian.
Sure, healthy suspicion is good, but really, its just as stupid as saying because not everyone knows what the chemical reactions are when you are cooking it suddenly leaves you open to poison yourself with it.
So some people don't understand the code very well. Thats why the 1% of people look for malicious changes and fix them. How many open-source projects have malware in them compared to all the Windows Freeware/Shareware/Adware that has it in them? Its like saying just because a recipe isn't verified by a chemist it must be designed to either A) Poison you or B) affect your mind to buy less of a competitors product. Source code can be compared to a recipe, and how many people who cook really know the science behind why they add in everything to bake a cake? I'm sure very few but how many die from incorrect recipes that were changed? I'm sure very very very few ton none.
The code is open, anyone can review it. SELinux is open source, you can even edit the source code itself. Now had this been a proprietary product you would have no clue what is in the binary, but with Linux you can be assured that you can look it over. Compare that to Windows where you don't even know who is editing the source code. And really, how can you put in hidden code in the source code? You can't. Now granted, I hate SELinux for other reasons but it being developed by the NSA isn't one of them.
A spam filter usually is user-added/removable. Most of the time you can even read your messages deemed as "spam". If your marked as "away" it is the person choosing to not receive messages. With this neither the sender nor the receiver can do anything about it. It is all about choice, with MS's way you get no choice, therefore it is more likely to be on the illegal side then the legal side.
Seeing as how Windows already works on 90% of the machines in the world.
What do you mean 90%? Can it run on a PowerPC architecture? No. ARM? Not really (Ok, Windows mobile probably can but its not as much Windows as a new OS similar to Windows). SPARC? Nope. Can (current versions XP/Vista) run on old hardware? Not very well.
Can Linux work on almost any CPU architecture known to mankind? Yes. Can it run on old hardware on current versions? Yes. Is it as easy to attack as Windows? No. Can (and does) Linux run on many cell phones? Yes. UMPCs? Yes.
To say that Windows works on 90% of devices (and implying that Linux or any other OS has only a marginal lead) is false. Even game consoles can run Linux, most cannot run Windows (natively).
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Ok, you are right, I guess for a second I forgot how drivers had to be written at such a low level (I program mostly in python...) and yes that would make porting drivers a pain.
/. fashion, I didn't read TFA.
As for the licensing, I was assuming that VIA would release most code under some license other then the GPL (such as the BSD license) that would allow use in proprietary products. And, as in true
Well, Windows 95 can run on less then an original Pentium, with 4 MB of RAM, and assuming that you have say 8 MB of RAM even DSL won't work well as that is the bare minimum where for Windows 95 8 MB of RAM would be twice as much as needed. And DSL seems to be the smallest distro for day-to-day work.
Open source products though, have more documentation open, for a larger company that has a tech guy, he/she can usually work around issues much better then with a proprietary product.
Well, yes banking software would be supported most likely but as for a "generic" office, it is the OS that is the key part that usually breaks (because most software can either be run in a VM or emulated via DOSbox or WINE allowing you to get around hardware issues) and causes the most problems.
but a product made for a niche market surely wouldn't have quite the same stability.
What do you mean by stability? If you mean "will this run on a machine made in 2008?" the answer would be yes, because the source is open and you can compile it, along with how you can change the source to make it work if you have to use, say Windows whose framework changes enough to break many applications between releases. If you mean "will this not crash and delete all our data?" then the answers would be mixed, as it depends on the skill of the programmer.
So in other words it is a MS problem? It would have nothing to do with VIA supporting or not supporting the graphics card, it is a Windows problem and MS could fix it (though, given how broken most other parts of their OS is, I doubt that they would).
As for the patents, they don't apply to some parts of the world so distros such as Ubuntu would include the drivers anyways, though it would be a pain it would be do-able.
Now it would be nice for VIA to support the drivers, but if not, its not the end of the world.
And so they are releasing the docs. As for why a Linux driver? Linux is by far the most popular OSS OS. *BSD is nice, but it can use most Linux things because Linux is open source as are the drivers. So why would VIA support *BSD over Linux when more VIA products run on Linux by default and not *BSD (gPC, Cloudbook, Etc.) and other then *BSD there aren't a lot of OSes that are OSS and popular (About the only other one I can think of is ReactOS and that isn't very stable yet....)
That may be true for proprietary products, but for free software most of the older releases will still be supported. Think of the Linux kernel, while almost everyone uses the 2.6 branch, they still support the 2.4 branch. Also, for example Firefox in the 2.X branch started using up more memory so some minimal Linux distros still stuck with the 1.5.X branch. There sometimes is a need for older software even if it is proprietary too, for example Windows 95. Most computers made for Windows 95 wouldn't run as well even with an ultra-minimalistic Linux distros at the same level as Windows 95 (it might work as a firewall or similar but as for running say Firefox, there is no way it would happen), and if you have say 50 desktops (still running well) with Windows 95, you might still want to keep them as 50 computers running XP could cost 15,000 (figuring at $300 per computer). So yes, there is a need many times to keep old software/hardware around. For example, the Windows 95 solution, even if say 50% of the computers break, it might be cheaper to buy some $25 Windows 95 era computers on Ebay rather then upgrade to say an XP-level computer.
How many copies of that were sold to OEMs? I assume most of them were. How many were wiped and put XP or Linux on? Chances are a good amount. Vista is a failure in perception too, ask the general person what they think of Vista and even those who just get on the computer to check their e-mail find that Vista is noticeably slower then XP, if you ask how many people would rather have XP, I am sure that the number would be very high. If any other OS replaced Vista in the OEM sector you could say that they have "sold" 140,000,000 copies, no matter how good/bad the OS is. Vista may sell well, but thats just because its what most computers have by default, it still is a failure for MS because people don't like it.
Well, I was trying to avoid a flamebait mod, but it happened anyways (as it seems like any comment that involves MS is either an instant flamebait or +5 insightful depending on who mods the comments)
Actually, with the current technology, such as 900 MHZ CPUs, 1 gig of RAM and Linux, things are selling. I am referring to the eeePC along with the other UMPCs that are growing in use. The slowing US economy has made computer makers adapt to lower spending incomes or face lower sales. Other computers such as the gPC reflect this. Along with the growing use of Linux (which is free) helps make the computers cheaper so they sell better. MS has been failing lately due to Vista's high-priced hardware need, compare that to Linux which can run on a Pentium II or III. New technology doesn't sell well in this economy, cheap, older technology does.
Though DDR3 is nice and all with it being much faster, computer speed hits quite a few bottlenecks outside of the RAM speed.
1) Hard disk speed, until SSDs become very common this is one of the causes of decreased speed because a HD can only run so fast
2) The OS. Vista is much much slower then other versions of Windows and as it is the main OS (For now) the fact that it struggles on a 1.6 GHZ dual-core CPU and 1 GB of RAM, only begins to tell you the sluggishness of the OS. And until MS fails and Linux becomes the top OS or MS manages to create a decently fast OS, this will be a problem
3) Connection speed. Its becoming where the Internet is nearly as important as the computer itself. And if you are still on dial-up (and in many places in the US thats all the connection choices offered) even a supercomputer will struggle with sites such as YouTube.
Until those problems get fixed, faster RAM won't make a bit of difference to the end-user.
How many people have looked through all the lines in a recipe and understand all the chemical reactions? Seriously, whats with people having faith in how somehow someone wouldn't slip in something that would be poisonous that the maintainers of the recipe wouldn't notice? Compare recipe to SELinux and you get the general picture.
And why would Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Fedora have it if it were malicious? Despite the fact that the US government could have made Red Hat put it in for Red Hat and Fedora, that still leaves Debian which is community (and is quite good about making sure its systems are secure) and Ubuntu which is based in the UK and is community much like Debian.
Sure, healthy suspicion is good, but really, its just as stupid as saying because not everyone knows what the chemical reactions are when you are cooking it suddenly leaves you open to poison yourself with it.
So some people don't understand the code very well. Thats why the 1% of people look for malicious changes and fix them. How many open-source projects have malware in them compared to all the Windows Freeware/Shareware/Adware that has it in them? Its like saying just because a recipe isn't verified by a chemist it must be designed to either A) Poison you or B) affect your mind to buy less of a competitors product. Source code can be compared to a recipe, and how many people who cook really know the science behind why they add in everything to bake a cake? I'm sure very few but how many die from incorrect recipes that were changed? I'm sure very very very few ton none.
The code is open, anyone can review it. SELinux is open source, you can even edit the source code itself. Now had this been a proprietary product you would have no clue what is in the binary, but with Linux you can be assured that you can look it over. Compare that to Windows where you don't even know who is editing the source code. And really, how can you put in hidden code in the source code? You can't. Now granted, I hate SELinux for other reasons but it being developed by the NSA isn't one of them.
A spam filter usually is user-added/removable. Most of the time you can even read your messages deemed as "spam". If your marked as "away" it is the person choosing to not receive messages. With this neither the sender nor the receiver can do anything about it. It is all about choice, with MS's way you get no choice, therefore it is more likely to be on the illegal side then the legal side.
What do you mean 90%? Can it run on a PowerPC architecture? No. ARM? Not really (Ok, Windows mobile probably can but its not as much Windows as a new OS similar to Windows). SPARC? Nope. Can (current versions XP/Vista) run on old hardware? Not very well.
Can Linux work on almost any CPU architecture known to mankind? Yes. Can it run on old hardware on current versions? Yes. Is it as easy to attack as Windows? No. Can (and does) Linux run on many cell phones? Yes. UMPCs? Yes.
To say that Windows works on 90% of devices (and implying that Linux or any other OS has only a marginal lead) is false. Even game consoles can run Linux, most cannot run Windows (natively).