I'm not convinced here. Everyone is crying about their IP these days, but I honestly don't see a lot of real damage being done to business. Piracy of books and movies just don't seem like a real problem to me, most people don't know you can play divx files on their TV, and lack the technical understanding how to do so anyway. Books... even reading ebooks on a laptop rapidly becomes a literal pain in the neck. Books are best on paper.
But I do see a ton of potential for abuses with DRM, and you know if there is potential there is always abuse. The plain and simple fact of DRM is.. its a mechanism designed to restrict what I do with my own stuff. DRM is more then just stuff to prevent people from pirating movies, it'll be hardware soon -- when you buy a piece of DRM hardware, understand that you will -never- -own- that item, it'll belong to the company who made it unless you can crack that DRM away. Consequently, if you can just crack the DRM away, it becomes useless and only a hinderence to the legitimate owner.
Frankly, the pirates are going to crack this stuff anyway, just like they've always done. There are smart people on both sides of this fence, only, the illegal side of the fence has -way- more guys on it, with a lot less things to take up their time.
It seems to me that no matter what argument anyone comes up with, or talk about protecting peoples copyrights, etc, the fact is DRM will make my computer -less my computer-, and give some remote company control over something I *purchased*. Its not about protecting copyrights, its about control. Linus is my homeboy forever, but he is wrong about this one, he just doesn't see the big picture.
Really?? You think a gig a day is a lot? My roomies and I go through about 300 gigs a month. Honestly, its mostly my roomies since I work most of the time and there isn't a lot of warez for linux;P
Anyway, my current ISP SaskTel gives me 7mbits down and 640kbits up. Reasonably fast, and I can fill the pipe all I want -- its their pipes so they don't care what I do with it, I can max it 24/7/365 and they don't care.
Living on 1 gig a day... I donno what i'd do;P --SD
Nice to see that Debian is down with GPL3 -- I know that I personally am all for the new license. If Debian's cool with it, that should help a lot of people to accept it since Debian's well known as one of the most politically strict of all linux communities.
Looking at the changes, from what I understand, I don't think it should be much of a problem for the -real- free software people. We'll have to wait and see for the other guys -- but honestly, they can stick with GPL2 and thats ok too. Everyone points to the "or later version at your option", but that part can actually be removed from the GPL2 license IIRC.
From COPYING: "Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation."
Thats form the current GPL2 that ships with the Linux kernel. So the user can specify strictly GPL2 if they choose too, or do not fully comply with GPL3.
Man, I hope this is real so much. I've always hated dark matter. You know what dark matter reminds me of? Aether. The whole idea of dark matter reminds me of a stupid hack -- which I suppose you have to deal with when it comes to topics like physics now and then.. its not like we can just go and look so readily;P
Anyway, these "Gavitons".. I think I've had them in computer games for a while now, its about time we 'discovered' them. Aethe-- I mean Dark Matter was such a cranks idea anyway... anything has to be better then "OOoooh! There must be... some.. uh, invisible undetectable matter.. that uh, has mass. But you can't see it, because.. its dark! yeah thats the ticket." Given an unlimited choice of possibilities I could have came up with something better, and it probably would have been about as scientifically valid too.:)
Hurray for gavitons! Prepare the graviton pulse cannons!:D --SD
Your dancing around the point, and setting up a straw man.
You said win2k had wireless support, it doesn't, its added by 3rd party vendors.
The 3rd party wireless support includes more then just the drivers, it does the whole thing. The OS doesn't supply any of the functionality aside from TCPIP. Its comparable, say, to using an ipw2200 driver on linux. iwconfig and the like are seperate tools from the os not supplied by what the OS normally ships with. It would be like using ipw2200 drivers, but not using the wireless-tools package -- fine, you have a working "NIC" but can't connect for find any AP's. Win2K without the custom tools supplied by the vendor has the same situation.
Even if SG is a flaming idiot, that doesn't mean he isn't or can't be right. Even a stopped clock has the right time twice a day, as the saying goes. Crank or not, he could be on the money in this case and since those who have read the article seem to think he is on to something at least worth looking at... it seems ignorant to just dismiss him outright.
Win2k and below only support wireless with 3rd party applications -- generally supplied by the hardware vendor, the OS itself doesn't have any support for the devices. Go ahead and plug in a wireless pci card into a win2k box, if you don't use the vendor's software you won't be able to connect to a damn thing.
We have good drivers for Intel's other cards, the ipw2100 and ipw2200 available. It did sort of take them a while to get their fat asses moving.. but hopefully since they are already moving it won't take them tooooo long to get something similiar to the above drivers out.
Would be fucking nice if they sent the specs to the ipw21/2200 guy BEFORE the hardware was out so that a non-microsoft platform could work with these.
That way, you can get a laptop thats twice as expensive as other models, uses all the exact same equipment.... but comes with a WHITE CASE, and half the mouse buttons.
Wow, a white case, for only like twice as much. I work in a Apple certified service providor (although I don't work on the Apple equipment myself, I do Toshiba and IBM/Lenovo) and I can tell you that Apple equipment is no more reliable then any other vendor. The warranty service isn't as good as Toshiba or IBM's -- no one on this planet can touch IBM/Lenovo for the quality and speed of their warranty service, without question -- Apple's warranty just isn't as good. It is better then HP, Asus, Acer, etc, who want you to mail your laptop to them, mind you.
So listen, when you go buy one of those overpriced Apple-Intel laptops, your paying purely for the white case and a copy of OSX. Perhaps the "Look at me, I'm different!" appeal that apple has to some people.
These products are not going to be a good deal. --SD
ATI's drivers are painfully unstable, there are lots of ways to hardlock a linux system with ATI's buggy shit drivers. An easy one is to use xinerama and kdm, at least from my experience. A whole lot of features of standard X11 drivers are missing (Composite, for example) and the performance is still a good 30% slower then it is on windows. The regular unaccelerated drivers from Xorg are way faster for regular 2d rendering and support all the usual features.
You call that great? Its fuckin not. ATI's linux support is -improving slowly-, but it is improving. But there is no way its great, or even good. Or even mediocre. It sucks. Binary drivers *SUCK ASS*, and I hate having to put up with them for 3D acceleration;(
If these guys had been watching Mission Impossible (1966-1973 tv show) instead of playing violent video games as kids we might get some more creative solutions.
This is, essentially, a steaming pile of horseshit. We are not talking about changing to OpenOffice here, we are in fact, talking about changing to an open format -- accessibility remains dependent on the OS and the application just like it always has -- it has nothing to do with the format.
Its annoying this is getting as much press as it is, its totally non-issue. Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed on the accessibility front. --SD
Here is why: we generally know how our hardware works. We know how to use it enough to make our software run on it. Its a physical object. As well, we can do pretty much anything we want with the stuff already... with some exceptions (graphics cards).
Provided we know how to solder we can modify it, fix it, upgrade it whatever. We can even give it away if we like.
With windows things are different. Here, the criticism is that porting to windows is helping the enemy -- true or not.
I don't see a reason to work on a OSS implementation of Monad -- which is a great name incidently, Liebniz is a good read. It was pretty sad to see scores of "lol, monad... gonad.. lolz, whats a book?" posts when it was first announced.
Anyway, I digress.
Monad exists to catch up with unix shells. We've already got them. Monad doesn't really offer us anything we don't already have. Monad has its own ways of doing things that are different from ours, but the end results are pretty much the same. Python's shell has the whole OO thing going for it anyway, if thats an appealing idea.
If someone clones Monad to linux, then its because they are a very strange person. Since very strange people exist, it'll probably happen, but it'll never catch on with the rest of the linux community, except possibly in some of the crazy windows-a-like-linux distros.
Application level audio control! You will be able to raise the volume for the movie you are watching (that was no doubt ripped from a DVD and has low volume) and not go deaf when someone IM's you.
yawn
I've been able to do this for years with 4Front OSS. Mind you, linux's truly free [freedom] sound drivers are generally pretty lousy... 4Front's stuff is pWN. Its available for free [no money] now, so linux people might want to check it out.
On the topic of sound, check this out X.org's sound server thingy I believe its supposed to have all sorts of features like that. If only the damn thing would COME OUT -- argh, like so many awesome linux things, always "soon" always "soon" soon soon soon! blaagh!
And true professionalism means telling an idiot when he's being an idiot, not yes-manning the customer because they're the customer. That's what unscrupulous profiteers do.
What fuckin job do you have buddy?
In the -real world- where us real people with real jobs live and work, we do what our unscrupulous profiteer bosses tell us to do or we become fired in a fast and unpleasent way. Our customers are very often total idiots, they don't know their hands from their asses, but if we told them that, they'd call up our bosses and complain -- and boom -- your fired. The customer will occasionally get a retarded idea you just have to let him implement his stupidity before he realizes the error of his ways. Then, and only then, can you implement the correct way without losing your job.
Thats the way things work in reality. "Professionalism" as you describe it, is a luxury of upper management, the rest of us have to content ourselves with the knowledge that we are doing the best we can with the bullshit that we have.
What exactly is the bright side of having your obnoxious spoilt sister living forever, and having super powers to boot. Worse, she'll only visit at night now, like you don't have a job and might need to sleep.
Fuck me, that would SUCK.
I can tell you, if my sister was a vampire, she'd be seeing the bright side pretty quick I'll tell you what.
Some of this post is good, some of it is silly. The monitor is pretty legitimate, although its been a while since i've had problems of that nature. Then again, I've been using linux since 94, so by now, I sort of solve little problems like that on autopilot and just remember it magically working.
Hardware support is always going to be a problem with linux, and its not linux's fault. You n00bs keep saying that "Linux is never gonna get anywhere until everything works like it does in windows, blah blah blah" well, here is the problem with that...
People make the hardware so that it does work in windows, not the other way around.
Now read that again and understand it, when a manufacturer makes a camera, they make the camera and software so that it will work in windows. Microsoft DOES NOT make Windows so it works with Canons cameras. So we are just plain fucked when it comes to that stuff and nothing -we can do- will ever fix it because we are not the root of the problem. Canon and to a lesser extent microsoft is the problem. If that prevents you from using linux -- I actually understand and sympathize with you -- but the answer is 'too bad' because although we would love to have manufacturers make their devices work with linux, or at least give us specs (actually, give us the specs -- better!), its essentially impossible.
Its sad, because we out number, In My Opinion, Mac users by heaps and heaps. But Apple can pull strings to get hardware support. Who does it for Linux? Just a guy who wants to write a driver. As legitimate as that coder may be, for some reason he doesn't pull the same weight as Apple. Its unfair, but thats life.
Lastly. How does the user know that GAIM is a MSN client? Beats me. But I know we can't call it "MSN ICQ AIM JABBER YAHOO client". See, it used to be gAIM, right? For like gtk-AIM when it was just an AIM messenger. It made sense then, but honestly, its not like you can just change the name. The solution here is really to have the distro re-label it "Instant messenger" in the menu.
The ATI cards work fine, if a bit slow in linux. ATI's fglrx drivers are functional, if not optimal. If you don't use 3d then the xorg radeon driver is excellent. Serial ATA works just fine, thats well supported in linux. And audigy? Audigy's work great in linux --!? Hardware mixing, the works, audigy's are good linux soundcards.
The problem with ATI cards is not the installation, its the performance. You get a good 33% less FPS in linux then you do in windows. nVidia performance is generally neck to neck in linux as it is in windows, but ATI is a good deal slower. Also, the ATI drivers are missing basic functionality, like Xinerama support that works just fine with nVidia's drivers (TwinView). The ATI dual monitor support in linux is very broken -- it works, but its hackish, ie, two X11 screens, two drivers, can't move programs between the two monitors, or one big screen like Xinerama -- but its read as a single -very- WIDE screen so all your fonts are messed up, and programs maximize between the two screens giving you a very messed up size ratio. Basically, its totally ganked.
Other then the lousy performance and the lack of Xinerama support the drivers are 'ok' -- and if you don't play games the regular, Xorg drivers are actually a lot better. Too bad you buy a video card like that for spreadsheets;)
Slashdot Mirror
Er, not like Doom 3 or Quake 4 right? Those are not high end games?
--SD
Hi there,
:)
I'm not convinced here. Everyone is crying about their IP these days, but I honestly don't see a lot of real damage being done to business. Piracy of books and movies just don't seem like a real problem to me, most people don't know you can play divx files on their TV, and lack the technical understanding how to do so anyway. Books... even reading ebooks on a laptop rapidly becomes a literal pain in the neck. Books are best on paper.
But I do see a ton of potential for abuses with DRM, and you know if there is potential there is always abuse. The plain and simple fact of DRM is.. its a mechanism designed to restrict what I do with my own stuff. DRM is more then just stuff to prevent people from pirating movies, it'll be hardware soon -- when you buy a piece of DRM hardware, understand that you will -never- -own- that item, it'll belong to the company who made it unless you can crack that DRM away. Consequently, if you can just crack the DRM away, it becomes useless and only a hinderence to the legitimate owner.
Frankly, the pirates are going to crack this stuff anyway, just like they've always done. There are smart people on both sides of this fence, only, the illegal side of the fence has -way- more guys on it, with a lot less things to take up their time.
It seems to me that no matter what argument anyone comes up with, or talk about protecting peoples copyrights, etc, the fact is DRM will make my computer -less my computer-, and give some remote company control over something I *purchased*. Its not about protecting copyrights, its about control. Linus is my homeboy forever, but he is wrong about this one, he just doesn't see the big picture.
IMO anyway.
Really?? You think a gig a day is a lot? My roomies and I go through about 300 gigs a month. Honestly, its mostly my roomies since I work most of the time and there isn't a lot of warez for linux ;P
;P
Anyway, my current ISP SaskTel gives me 7mbits down and 640kbits up. Reasonably fast, and I can fill the pipe all I want -- its their pipes so they don't care what I do with it, I can max it 24/7/365 and they don't care.
Living on 1 gig a day... I donno what i'd do
--SD
Nice to see that Debian is down with GPL3 -- I know that I personally am all for the new license. If Debian's cool with it, that should help a lot of people to accept it since Debian's well known as one of the most politically strict of all linux communities.
Looking at the changes, from what I understand, I don't think it should be much of a problem for the -real- free software people. We'll have to wait and see for the other guys -- but honestly, they can stick with GPL2 and thats ok too. Everyone points to the "or later version at your option", but that part can actually be removed from the GPL2 license IIRC.
From COPYING: "Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation."
Thats form the current GPL2 that ships with the Linux kernel. So the user can specify strictly GPL2 if they choose too, or do not fully comply with GPL3.
Easy as pie.
Man, I hope this is real so much. I've always hated dark matter. You know what dark matter reminds me of? Aether. The whole idea of dark matter reminds me of a stupid hack -- which I suppose you have to deal with when it comes to topics like physics now and then.. its not like we can just go and look so readily ;P
:)
:D
Anyway, these "Gavitons".. I think I've had them in computer games for a while now, its about time we 'discovered' them. Aethe-- I mean Dark Matter was such a cranks idea anyway... anything has to be better then "OOoooh! There must be... some.. uh, invisible undetectable matter.. that uh, has mass. But you can't see it, because.. its dark! yeah thats the ticket." Given an unlimited choice of possibilities I could have came up with something better, and it probably would have been about as scientifically valid too.
Hurray for gavitons! Prepare the graviton pulse cannons!
--SD
Wait till Jack Thompson finds out -- he'll put a stop to the internet! :(!
Your dancing around the point, and setting up a straw man.
You said win2k had wireless support, it doesn't, its added by 3rd party vendors.
The 3rd party wireless support includes more then just the drivers, it does the whole thing. The OS doesn't supply any of the functionality aside from TCPIP. Its comparable, say, to using an ipw2200 driver on linux. iwconfig and the like are seperate tools from the os not supplied by what the OS normally ships with. It would be like using ipw2200 drivers, but not using the wireless-tools package -- fine, you have a working "NIC" but can't connect for find any AP's. Win2K without the custom tools supplied by the vendor has the same situation.
--SD
--SD
You know,
Even if SG is a flaming idiot, that doesn't mean he isn't or can't be right. Even a stopped clock has the right time twice a day, as the saying goes. Crank or not, he could be on the money in this case and since those who have read the article seem to think he is on to something at least worth looking at... it seems ignorant to just dismiss him outright.
This is what is called having an open mind.
--SD
Win2k and below only support wireless with 3rd party applications -- generally supplied by the hardware vendor, the OS itself doesn't have any support for the devices. Go ahead and plug in a wireless pci card into a win2k box, if you don't use the vendor's software you won't be able to connect to a damn thing.
--SD
We have good drivers for Intel's other cards, the ipw2100 and ipw2200 available. It did sort of take them a while to get their fat asses moving.. but hopefully since they are already moving it won't take them tooooo long to get something similiar to the above drivers out.
Would be fucking nice if they sent the specs to the ipw21/2200 guy BEFORE the hardware was out so that a non-microsoft platform could work with these.
Oh well!
--SD
Right!
That way, you can get a laptop thats twice as expensive as other models, uses all the exact same equipment.... but comes with a WHITE CASE, and half the mouse buttons.
Wow, a white case, for only like twice as much. I work in a Apple certified service providor (although I don't work on the Apple equipment myself, I do Toshiba and IBM/Lenovo) and I can tell you that Apple equipment is no more reliable then any other vendor. The warranty service isn't as good as Toshiba or IBM's -- no one on this planet can touch IBM/Lenovo for the quality and speed of their warranty service, without question -- Apple's warranty just isn't as good. It is better then HP, Asus, Acer, etc, who want you to mail your laptop to them, mind you.
So listen, when you go buy one of those overpriced Apple-Intel laptops, your paying purely for the white case and a copy of OSX. Perhaps the "Look at me, I'm different!" appeal that apple has to some people.
These products are not going to be a good deal.
--SD
No, it doesn't work great.
;(
ATI's drivers are painfully unstable, there are lots of ways to hardlock a linux system with ATI's buggy shit drivers. An easy one is to use xinerama and kdm, at least from my experience. A whole lot of features of standard X11 drivers are missing (Composite, for example) and the performance is still a good 30% slower then it is on windows. The regular unaccelerated drivers from Xorg are way faster for regular 2d rendering and support all the usual features.
You call that great? Its fuckin not. ATI's linux support is -improving slowly-, but it is improving. But there is no way its great, or even good. Or even mediocre. It sucks. Binary drivers *SUCK ASS*, and I hate having to put up with them for 3D acceleration
Man....
If only we listened to Jack Thompson ;(
Stop complaining,
;)
Just use it as an excuse to write some hardcore gangsta rap.
Thats everyone else who lives in a slumtown does
--SD
If your upset that your pet OS isn't getting enough headlines to make you feel cool, you can edit out the linux stuff in your profile.
In the mean time, I think its neat to see multimedia stuff on linux -- a lot of people still think its a server os.
Besides, we do have news for linux nerds, etc, its linux.slashdot.org.
--SD
This is, essentially, a steaming pile of horseshit. We are not talking about changing to OpenOffice here, we are in fact, talking about changing to an open format -- accessibility remains dependent on the OS and the application just like it always has -- it has nothing to do with the format.
Its annoying this is getting as much press as it is, its totally non-issue. Nothing, absolutely nothing has changed on the accessibility front.
--SD
No.
.. with some exceptions (graphics cards).
Apples to oranges.
Here is why: we generally know how our hardware works. We know how to use it enough to make our software run on it. Its a physical object. As well, we can do pretty much anything we want with the stuff already.
Provided we know how to solder we can modify it, fix it, upgrade it whatever. We can even give it away if we like.
With windows things are different. Here, the criticism is that porting to windows is helping the enemy -- true or not.
Hi there,
I don't see a reason to work on a OSS implementation of Monad -- which is a great name incidently, Liebniz is a good read. It was pretty sad to see scores of "lol, monad... gonad.. lolz, whats a book?" posts when it was first announced.
Anyway, I digress.
Monad exists to catch up with unix shells. We've already got them. Monad doesn't really offer us anything we don't already have. Monad has its own ways of doing things that are different from ours, but the end results are pretty much the same. Python's shell has the whole OO thing going for it anyway, if thats an appealing idea.
If someone clones Monad to linux, then its because they are a very strange person. Since very strange people exist, it'll probably happen, but it'll never catch on with the rest of the linux community, except possibly in some of the crazy windows-a-like-linux distros.
--SD
Dude!
173600 gallons of beer?!
Whats your fuckin contact email?
WHATS YOUR EMAIL GODDAMIT I WILL HELP IF I HAVE TO HAUL IT ON MY BACK !!!!
With that much beer I could live out my lifelong dream of drowning in booze.
Application level audio control! You will be able to raise the volume for the movie you are watching (that was no doubt ripped from a DVD and has low volume) and not go deaf when someone IM's you.
yawn
I've been able to do this for years with 4Front OSS. Mind you, linux's truly free [freedom] sound drivers are generally pretty lousy... 4Front's stuff is pWN. Its available for free [no money] now, so linux people might want to check it out.
On the topic of sound, check this out X.org's sound server thingy I believe its supposed to have all sorts of features like that. If only the damn thing would COME OUT -- argh, like so many awesome linux things, always "soon" always "soon" soon soon soon! blaagh!
--SD
*LOL*
And true professionalism means telling an idiot when he's being an idiot, not yes-manning the customer because they're the customer. That's what unscrupulous profiteers do.
What fuckin job do you have buddy?
In the -real world- where us real people with real jobs live and work, we do what our unscrupulous profiteer bosses tell us to do or we become fired in a fast and unpleasent way. Our customers are very often total idiots, they don't know their hands from their asses, but if we told them that, they'd call up our bosses and complain -- and boom -- your fired. The customer will occasionally get a retarded idea you just have to let him implement his stupidity before he realizes the error of his ways. Then, and only then, can you implement the correct way without losing your job.
Thats the way things work in reality. "Professionalism" as you describe it, is a luxury of upper management, the rest of us have to content ourselves with the knowledge that we are doing the best we can with the bullshit that we have.
--SD
Tell me.
What exactly is the bright side of having your obnoxious spoilt sister living forever, and having super powers to boot. Worse, she'll only visit at night now, like you don't have a job and might need to sleep.
Fuck me, that would SUCK.
I can tell you, if my sister was a vampire, she'd be seeing the bright side pretty quick I'll tell you what.
--SD
Some of this post is good, some of it is silly. The monitor is pretty legitimate, although its been a while since i've had problems of that nature. Then again, I've been using linux since 94, so by now, I sort of solve little problems like that on autopilot and just remember it magically working.
;)
Hardware support is always going to be a problem with linux, and its not linux's fault. You n00bs keep saying that "Linux is never gonna get anywhere until everything works like it does in windows, blah blah blah" well, here is the problem with that...
People make the hardware so that it does work in windows, not the other way around.
Now read that again and understand it, when a manufacturer makes a camera, they make the camera and software so that it will work in windows. Microsoft DOES NOT make Windows so it works with Canons cameras. So we are just plain fucked when it comes to that stuff and nothing -we can do- will ever fix it because we are not the root of the problem. Canon and to a lesser extent microsoft is the problem. If that prevents you from using linux -- I actually understand and sympathize with you -- but the answer is 'too bad' because although we would love to have manufacturers make their devices work with linux, or at least give us specs (actually, give us the specs -- better!), its essentially impossible.
Its sad, because we out number, In My Opinion, Mac users by heaps and heaps. But Apple can pull strings to get hardware support. Who does it for Linux? Just a guy who wants to write a driver. As legitimate as that coder may be, for some reason he doesn't pull the same weight as Apple. Its unfair, but thats life.
Lastly. How does the user know that GAIM is a MSN client? Beats me. But I know we can't call it "MSN ICQ AIM JABBER YAHOO client". See, it used to be gAIM, right? For like gtk-AIM when it was just an AIM messenger. It made sense then, but honestly, its not like you can just change the name. The solution here is really to have the distro re-label it "Instant messenger" in the menu.
Anyway,
back to work
What are you talking about?
The ATI cards work fine, if a bit slow in linux. ATI's fglrx drivers are functional, if not optimal. If you don't use 3d then the xorg radeon driver is excellent. Serial ATA works just fine, thats well supported in linux. And audigy? Audigy's work great in linux --!? Hardware mixing, the works, audigy's are good linux soundcards.
What year do you think it is dude?
--SD
Hi there,
;)
:)
The problem with ATI cards is not the installation, its the performance. You get a good 33% less FPS in linux then you do in windows. nVidia performance is generally neck to neck in linux as it is in windows, but ATI is a good deal slower. Also, the ATI drivers are missing basic functionality, like Xinerama support that works just fine with nVidia's drivers (TwinView). The ATI dual monitor support in linux is very broken -- it works, but its hackish, ie, two X11 screens, two drivers, can't move programs between the two monitors, or one big screen like Xinerama -- but its read as a single -very- WIDE screen so all your fonts are messed up, and programs maximize between the two screens giving you a very messed up size ratio. Basically, its totally ganked.
Other then the lousy performance and the lack of Xinerama support the drivers are 'ok' -- and if you don't play games the regular, Xorg drivers are actually a lot better. Too bad you buy a video card like that for spreadsheets
--SD (Mod me informative, bitches!