Darl's already heading to Japan to try to bully the many companies interested in embedded Linux (including Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu...). I guess the Japanese government wasn't too impressed.
Given this, for basic domestic security we either examine every student visa applicant in detail (and delay their studies for at least a year) or we keep track of them while they're here. Even the xenophobes around here don't want to restrict access by foreign students to our Universities, so this system was developed several years ago. 9/11 simply gave an boost the the implementation (though apparently not to the programmers.)
Unfortunately, this is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. I've seen firsthand how badly the State department has screwed this up. One brilliant scientist where I work was stuck in China for nearly a year because he foolishly let his visa run out. Although he was working on a very large NIH-funded project and was clearly intent on making a life for himself in the US, his application was held indefinitely because the bureaucrats were too lazy or stupid to do anything about it. His boss couldn't find out what was wrong because State refuses to comment on individual cases.
A classmate of mine had the misfortune of being a young Arab male, and had to start grad school a semester late. Somehow they never noticed that he was a Catholic, or that he had a degree from a prestigious university where anyone who knew him would have vouched for his character. He applied well in advance of starting school, but hadn't counted on them taking eight months to approve the visa.
I think this movie shows what a *real* totalitarian state would look like: the danger to our freedoms is not from corruption but from incompetence. Programs like TIA creep me out because I'm absolutely certain that the Feds will find a way to fuck it up and throw some poor guy in detention because the computer skipped a byte and came up with his name. Ditto for the PATRIOT Act. Few people have recognized this, but what's frightening about Ashcroft is not that he's a fundamentalist autocrat, but that he's an incompetent fool. If innocent people suffer from the government's extension of powers, it won't be due to the GOP taking out its enemies but because some FBI secretary got a virus on her computer.
I'm not a libertarian; the government indirectly pays a large portion of my salary. However, the extension of government power worries me, because the more control they have, the more opportunities to fuck our lives up.
I always liked Irix, and everyone I ever talked to who used Irix liked it. The GUI is about 500x more usable than the horrors of OpenWindows or CDE on Solaris.. bleugh.
I vastly prefer 4DWM to GNOME or KDE as well. I'm helping a coworker set up a Dell inspiron 7500 (P3-700) with Linux, and he immediately complained that KDE was far too slow. I switched to WindowMaker, and he immediately noticed the difference. This is a three-year-old machine, with tons of memory and a reasonable processor, and it crawls with KDE3. Pathetic.
Meanwhile, you can run the latest version of Irix on a seven-year-old SGI box (and even older) and it'll still be smooth. My Indy at home feels just as responsive as any PC I've ever used. I wouldn't call it *fast* by any stretch of the imagination, but the OS alone does not cripple the computer. I'm a huge Linux fan, but there are tons of examples like this where it just hasn't caught up to the more polished offerings.
Do you actually have any experience with this or are you just regurgitating all the propoganda US-ians were fed during the '80s?
Quite a bit of experience, yes, both from
1) personal visits 2) friends' and coworkers' experiences (some of whom, um, come from the countries in question) 3) lots of reading, none of it from "official" news sources
I actually have no idea how things were before the fall of Communism- I wasn't old enough yet to pay good attention, and there wasn't as much information. I'm referring to what took place afterwards, when these nations attempted to transition to a market economy.
My point was merely that most of these countries took it in the ass when the USSR collapsed, and that some of them were pillaged by the Soviets and haven't recovered yet.
I think you are confusing Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has always been one of the better organized of the Baltic republics, even in the era of the USSR, and one of the first to define and push towards a new west-facing economy thereafter.Dramatise if you must, but get your facts right.
I imagine every nation in that area was a crumbling bankrupt mess ten years ago. The fiction that supported their economic system had been ruined, and the Russians sort of abandoned their former colonies. Some seem to have dealt with it better than others: Belarus is apparently quite a shithole, and most of the Asian states are in awful shape. (To be fair, there's really not much that any of them could do to improve things.) If Estonia is doing well, it's partly because it was too small for the Soviets to truly fuck up.
In addition, don't forget that Estonia, as well as Latvia and Lithuania, had long histories as independent sovereign nations before being occupied by the Soviets.
Lithuania used to be a large kingdom around the middle of the last millenium, but it was eventually subsumed into Poland and Russia. It hadn't existed as a distinct political entity for more than two hundred years when the Russian empire finally imploded. Latvia and Estonia, unfortunately, were pretty much always at the mercy of the other Baltic states- I don't think they were ever independent before that brief period in the 1920s, at least not in any recognizable form.
Tasteful, too. Somehow I'm unable to conjure up the appropriate amount of hysteria to imaging the RIAA lobbying team herding Kazaa-using college students into cattle cars. I realize that "piracy" has entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for IP theft, but I'm pretty sure "genocide" is still reserved for really serious stuff like mass murder.
How about doing it in a public place, and letting the populace watch you face the (theoretically unjust) consequences of your actions? That's how protest/civil disobedience is *supposed* to work.
Exactly! Go out to your local record store and stand in front handing out free copies of the latest Metallica album! Spread free music to the world! Remember, you're not "stealing" if you're not taking something physical. That's what civil disobedience is supposed to be about, not hiding behind your ISP like a total pussy.
By the twisted reasoning I'm seeing posted here, I should view the guy I saw selling DVDs of "Finding Nemo" and "The Matrix Reloaded" in the NYC subway last week as a noble hero fighting the scourge of the RIAA.
Seriously, if enough people blatanly disobey copyright laws, if there is enough civil disobedience, it almost HAS to force a change in the law.
Please don't try to muddy the argument by conflating mass illegal distribution of copyrighted material with civil disobedience. There may be a few Slashdot readers who are immature enough to download and redistribute music they have no interest in just to "stick it to the man", but everyone else who pirates music does so because they do not have to face the consequences of their actions, either economic or legal. There is nothing noble or courageous about that.
If you want to strike back at the RIAA, all you have to do is boycott their product. I think pop music sucks anyway, so I already don't buy any mainstream recordings. Only the occasional classical album, where I'm actually getting 50-70 minutes of good music, all of which I listen to, rather than a couple of radio singles and a bunch of filler. As for the MPAA, well, I like big dumb movies and I'm happy to pay for a reasonable viewing experience. I do watch DVDs (which I have paid for) on Linux (don't have anything else), but I'm not personally breaking any law in doing so and I do not consider this "civil disobedience" of any form.
This could all just go away if SCO said, "We think lines xx - xxx of the Linux kernel violate our contracts/licenses/copyrights." Then it would be easy. The Linux community looks at the code and traces it back to who put it there. The problem is solved (as far as Linux goes) once the code is removed and SCO has their "violator" if there even is one.
This is called "discovery phase". It will be years away at this rate, unless IBM's lawyers decide to clusterfuck SCO with various motions. (I'm surprised this hasn't happened already.)
As I've said before. SCO isn't in this to do the right thing. SCO wants money and power.
I suspect what they're really after is some collateral damage. They'll never win against IBM, but they can ruffle enough feathers in the Linux-using corporate world to either boost their pathetic sales or to score some phat licensing deals from witless CTOs. The case doesn't even have to make it to trial: Darl just needs to continue making noise, and some idiots will think he's for real. SCO may not win <dr_evil>one billion dollars</dr_evil>, but they'll make enough and quietly drop the case.
I know paranoid theories are in vogue here, but I don't think it's that loopy. The parade of apparently clueless analysts who have been attesting to SCO's honor and victimhood are worthless for impressing the tech community or from a legal perspective, but very good at setting a precedent for eventual licen$e fee$. . .
I saw what appeared to be a word-for-word copy of about every third line of code in the central module of the Linux kernel," said Enderle of Giga Information Group, who viewed the alleged code violations two weeks ago. "The lines of code contained typos, misspellings and even copyright disclaimers. It appeared to constitute a violation of the license."
Hmmmm. . . whose copyright disclaimers, exactly? Like, say "Copyright (c) 1985, 1986 The Regents of the University of California."? Puh-lease. Unless the Linux kernel contains code that is clearly labelled as "Copyright AT&T", this particular nugget of wisdom mostly just suggests that SCO copied someone else's code. (FYI: there are a few bits of kernel 2.4 labelled with AT&T, but they're also identified as being freely usable.) How fucking stupid do they think we are? And what is the "central module"?
I guess on the bright side this means that all we need to do is hunt down every copyright notice in Linux and we'll prove or disprove the code copying... anyone? anyone? Bueller?
The NY Times review joked about a potential political run:
Mr. Schwarzenegger, whose main contribution to American culture has been inspiring wicked parodies on "Saturday Night Live" and "The Simpsons," acts (if you can call it that) with his usual leaden whimsy, manifesting the gift for uttering hard-to-forget, meaningless catchphrases that is most likely the wellspring of his blossoming reported desire to seek elective office in California.
Actually, I'm about to move to California, and from what I hear about Davis I may have to vote for Ahnuld (partly on the theory that he's nowhere near the worst candidate the GOP could throw at us).
100% of the interviewers asked "do you know MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Access."
So fucking what? Lie through your teeth, and tell them "oh, yeah, sure." You'll never be put into a situation where they're testing your prowess with the Word table wizard, and timing you. I never actually use Word or Excel, but I put them on my resume anyway because it's buzzword-compliant and because I'm confident that I can figure out how to do anything quickly enough that no one will notice I'm winging it. It's not like padding your resume with C++ or Fortran - I've seen this done.
If you're technically competent, you should be able to pick up any application like Word in seconds. The problem with the tech industry is that people learn an interface rather than concepts, sort of like Pavlovian training rather than actual learning. I've worked as a full-time programmer and as a senior tech-support goon, and I've seen many people who were fine as long as they didn't stray from what they knew. There's nothing more pathetic than a Windows support technician sitting down in front of a Macintosh (OS 9!) and looking helpless. I'd far rather have someone less knowledgeable but willing and able to learn anything.
I was asking about Mobility performance yesterday and could not get a clear answer. I need a laptop with full 3D acceleration under Linux - unless I decide to buy a Mac - and my impression continues to be that performance of ATI laptop chips still sucks here. Has anyone seriously compared acceleration of the Radeon Mobility under both Linux and Windows? I know the GeForce series is *slightly* faster on Windows, but NVidia's Linux support has generally been first-rate for their entire product line (though occasional bugs do pop up). It's unfortunate that the GeForce 4Go only appears on a few relatively costlier laptops now.
Given that ATI only "officially" supports a select few high-end cards under Linux, I'm not sure I want to give them my business. I don't really care about open/closed source - I want something that works.
This statement is false. The Mobility Radeon has been supported since Xfree 4.2.
By "supported", I meant "with full hardware acceleration for OpenGL applications". NVidia cards are "supported" by the open-source 'nv' driver, but I wouldn't use that for the applications I need to run. Do the Mobility chipsets meet these criteria? I tried Googling for this and didn't find anything remotely informative, except that you can *buy* Xig's drivers.
Thanks for the link, at any rate - that's good to know about. I'll need to look around. . . do any of the other manufacturers have comparable deals? I like the idea of buying direct from the maker.
Another win for informed opinions, eh? Just what Linux advocacy needs!
I have no interest in advocacy. Windows works for most people, and I have no problem with that as long as they don't make my job more difficult. All I care about is using the software that lets me be as productive as possible. Given financial constraints, this means Linux.
FYI, none of the people I've ever work with who advocated Windows did so for technical reasons - it was because a) they couldn't use anything else and b) they felt that it was the "de facto standard" and resistance was futile. The lack of a start menu really seems to terrify some people. This would be amusing if I didn't work in IT with people who are supposed to be computer experts.
Is anyone still buying Nvidia cards any more these days
Hi! Yes, we buy them at work all the time. We do a lot of 3D graphics work on Linux, and support for ATI cards under Linux was pretty pathetic until very recently. I'm told this has improved, but it's still not as easy as using the NVidia drivers, and we don't really trust ATI's software now. (Apparently the Radeon Mobility is not supported under Linux either - this has made my search for a new laptop very difficult.)
Why do Linux users always have to profess their fate to Linus & Stallman and in the same breath say something, ANYTHING, about Windows?
Why do BSD users have to brag about how l33t they are? I'm sure the BSDs rock, but they are still much harder to leap into. It's all about momentum and developer mindshare. I'm not using Linux because of the philosophy, but because it suits my needs and I know how to use it.
I run FreeBSD & NetBSD because I love UNIX and its capabilities and its features and EVERYTHING. It has nothing to do with Windows.
Good for you. This may come as a shock, but many of us use Linux for the same reason.
As for the Windows-bashing, I grew up on Macintoshes, and never touched a PC, with the result that Windows has always seemed like a model of how not to design an OS. At some point in college I switched to Linux (then Solaris, then Irix) because I was tired of my iMac crashing all the time (this was long before OS X). Now that I'm a full-time programmer, many of the people I work with use Windows and love it. Unfortunately, they expect me to love it too, and help them with it, and read their.doc files, and help them pirate the expensive proprietary software they can't do without. Pardon me if I sound bitter.
So, it's all a matter of circumstances - I bash Windows because it is the bane of my existence and because I can't avoid it no matter how hard I try. I don't give a shit what platform others prefer, but where Microsoft is concerned people usually force their preferences on me.
One true windows path? Where does the path lead to? Podunk, Nebraska?
Redmond, WA, dude!;-)
And their address in Redmond is "One Microsoft Way", which many commentators have pointed out fits excellently with their vision for the computing industry.
The idea is similar for the logic behind keeping Los Alamos labs functioning.
Los Alamos does a hell of a lot more than purely nuclear weapons development - same goes for the other big government labs. They're some of the largest supercomputing centers in the world, and a hell of a lot of cutting-edge biology research is being done at these places. LANL is more defense-oriented than most of the rest, but it's hardly a holding tank for nuclear physicists. Another example: Oak Ridge was originally used exclusively for plutonium refinement, but is now doing quite a bit of genomics, and PVM was developed there.
Say, for example, that Microsoft made some clever algorithm that improved their.DOC file format and patented it. This effectively gives them a complete, legally mandated monopoly on word processing for the lifetime of the patent (which is huge compared to the lifetime of software). Nobody can produce an interoperating program without violating the patent or paying a huge licensing fee. How does this help anyone other than Microsoft?
This is already happening, even in Europe. Read the FFII's horror stories about software patents being used in exactly this fashion, several of them owned by Microsoft. Anyone who still thinks software patents are a good idea should read through this entire page.
Slashdot Mirror
Darl's already heading to Japan to try to bully the many companies interested in embedded Linux (including Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu...). I guess the Japanese government wasn't too impressed.
How do you say "Suck it, bitch!" in Japanese?
Given this, for basic domestic security we either examine every student visa applicant in detail (and delay their studies for at least a year) or we keep track of them while they're here. Even the xenophobes around here don't want to restrict access by foreign students to our Universities, so this system was developed several years ago. 9/11 simply gave an boost the the implementation (though apparently not to the programmers.)
Unfortunately, this is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. I've seen firsthand how badly the State department has screwed this up. One brilliant scientist where I work was stuck in China for nearly a year because he foolishly let his visa run out. Although he was working on a very large NIH-funded project and was clearly intent on making a life for himself in the US, his application was held indefinitely because the bureaucrats were too lazy or stupid to do anything about it. His boss couldn't find out what was wrong because State refuses to comment on individual cases.
A classmate of mine had the misfortune of being a young Arab male, and had to start grad school a semester late. Somehow they never noticed that he was a Catholic, or that he had a degree from a prestigious university where anyone who knew him would have vouched for his character. He applied well in advance of starting school, but hadn't counted on them taking eight months to approve the visa.
Yeah, war sure sucks, doesn't it? Thanks for missing the point entirely.
I think this movie shows what a *real* totalitarian state would look like: the danger to our freedoms is not from corruption but from incompetence. Programs like TIA creep me out because I'm absolutely certain that the Feds will find a way to fuck it up and throw some poor guy in detention because the computer skipped a byte and came up with his name. Ditto for the PATRIOT Act. Few people have recognized this, but what's frightening about Ashcroft is not that he's a fundamentalist autocrat, but that he's an incompetent fool. If innocent people suffer from the government's extension of powers, it won't be due to the GOP taking out its enemies but because some FBI secretary got a virus on her computer.
I'm not a libertarian; the government indirectly pays a large portion of my salary. However, the extension of government power worries me, because the more control they have, the more opportunities to fuck our lives up.
I always liked Irix, and everyone I ever talked to who used Irix liked it. The GUI is about 500x more usable than the horrors of OpenWindows or CDE on Solaris.. bleugh.
I vastly prefer 4DWM to GNOME or KDE as well. I'm helping a coworker set up a Dell inspiron 7500 (P3-700) with Linux, and he immediately complained that KDE was far too slow. I switched to WindowMaker, and he immediately noticed the difference. This is a three-year-old machine, with tons of memory and a reasonable processor, and it crawls with KDE3. Pathetic.
Meanwhile, you can run the latest version of Irix on a seven-year-old SGI box (and even older) and it'll still be smooth. My Indy at home feels just as responsive as any PC I've ever used. I wouldn't call it *fast* by any stretch of the imagination, but the OS alone does not cripple the computer. I'm a huge Linux fan, but there are tons of examples like this where it just hasn't caught up to the more polished offerings.
Do you actually have any experience with this or are you just regurgitating all the propoganda US-ians were fed during the '80s?
Quite a bit of experience, yes, both from
1) personal visits
2) friends' and coworkers' experiences (some of whom, um, come from the countries in question)
3) lots of reading, none of it from "official" news sources
I actually have no idea how things were before the fall of Communism- I wasn't old enough yet to pay good attention, and there wasn't as much information. I'm referring to what took place afterwards, when these nations attempted to transition to a market economy.
My point was merely that most of these countries took it in the ass when the USSR collapsed, and that some of them were pillaged by the Soviets and haven't recovered yet.
Betcha their national pastime isn't driving around in a circle or fake combat either (Nascar and wrestling for the international reader).
On the other hand, I've never heard of NASCAR or WWF fans crushing eachother to death in stadiums.
I think you are confusing Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has always been one of the better organized of the Baltic republics, even in the era of the USSR, and one of the first to define and push towards a new west-facing economy thereafter.Dramatise if you must, but get your facts right.
I imagine every nation in that area was a crumbling bankrupt mess ten years ago. The fiction that supported their economic system had been ruined, and the Russians sort of abandoned their former colonies. Some seem to have dealt with it better than others: Belarus is apparently quite a shithole, and most of the Asian states are in awful shape. (To be fair, there's really not much that any of them could do to improve things.) If Estonia is doing well, it's partly because it was too small for the Soviets to truly fuck up.
In addition, don't forget that Estonia, as well as Latvia and Lithuania, had long histories as independent sovereign nations before being occupied by the Soviets.
Lithuania used to be a large kingdom around the middle of the last millenium, but it was eventually subsumed into Poland and Russia. It hadn't existed as a distinct political entity for more than two hundred years when the Russian empire finally imploded. Latvia and Estonia, unfortunately, were pretty much always at the mercy of the other Baltic states- I don't think they were ever independent before that brief period in the 1920s, at least not in any recognizable form.
"Genocidal Litigation" nice
Tasteful, too. Somehow I'm unable to conjure up the appropriate amount of hysteria to imaging the RIAA lobbying team herding Kazaa-using college students into cattle cars. I realize that "piracy" has entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for IP theft, but I'm pretty sure "genocide" is still reserved for really serious stuff like mass murder.
How about doing it in a public place, and letting the populace watch you face the (theoretically unjust) consequences of your actions? That's how protest/civil disobedience is *supposed* to work.
Exactly! Go out to your local record store and stand in front handing out free copies of the latest Metallica album! Spread free music to the world! Remember, you're not "stealing" if you're not taking something physical. That's what civil disobedience is supposed to be about, not hiding behind your ISP like a total pussy.
By the twisted reasoning I'm seeing posted here, I should view the guy I saw selling DVDs of "Finding Nemo" and "The Matrix Reloaded" in the NYC subway last week as a noble hero fighting the scourge of the RIAA.
Seriously, if enough people blatanly disobey copyright laws, if there is enough civil disobedience, it almost HAS to force a change in the law.
Please don't try to muddy the argument by conflating mass illegal distribution of copyrighted material with civil disobedience. There may be a few Slashdot readers who are immature enough to download and redistribute music they have no interest in just to "stick it to the man", but everyone else who pirates music does so because they do not have to face the consequences of their actions, either economic or legal. There is nothing noble or courageous about that.
If you want to strike back at the RIAA, all you have to do is boycott their product. I think pop music sucks anyway, so I already don't buy any mainstream recordings. Only the occasional classical album, where I'm actually getting 50-70 minutes of good music, all of which I listen to, rather than a couple of radio singles and a bunch of filler. As for the MPAA, well, I like big dumb movies and I'm happy to pay for a reasonable viewing experience. I do watch DVDs (which I have paid for) on Linux (don't have anything else), but I'm not personally breaking any law in doing so and I do not consider this "civil disobedience" of any form.
This could all just go away if SCO said, "We think lines xx - xxx of the Linux kernel violate our contracts/licenses/copyrights." Then it would be easy. The Linux community looks at the code and traces it back to who put it there. The problem is solved (as far as Linux goes) once the code is removed and SCO has their "violator" if there even is one.
This is called "discovery phase". It will be years away at this rate, unless IBM's lawyers decide to clusterfuck SCO with various motions. (I'm surprised this hasn't happened already.)
As I've said before. SCO isn't in this to do the right thing. SCO wants money and power.
I suspect what they're really after is some collateral damage. They'll never win against IBM, but they can ruffle enough feathers in the Linux-using corporate world to either boost their pathetic sales or to score some phat licensing deals from witless CTOs. The case doesn't even have to make it to trial: Darl just needs to continue making noise, and some idiots will think he's for real. SCO may not win <dr_evil>one billion dollars</dr_evil>, but they'll make enough and quietly drop the case.
I know paranoid theories are in vogue here, but I don't think it's that loopy. The parade of apparently clueless analysts who have been attesting to SCO's honor and victimhood are worthless for impressing the tech community or from a legal perspective, but very good at setting a precedent for eventual licen$e fee$. . .
Wow, it just keeps getting more bizarre:
I saw what appeared to be a word-for-word copy of about every third line of code in the central module of the Linux kernel," said Enderle of Giga Information Group, who viewed the alleged code violations two weeks ago. "The lines of code contained typos, misspellings and even copyright disclaimers. It appeared to constitute a violation of the license."
Hmmmm. . . whose copyright disclaimers, exactly? Like, say "Copyright (c) 1985, 1986 The Regents of the University of California."? Puh-lease. Unless the Linux kernel contains code that is clearly labelled as "Copyright AT&T", this particular nugget of wisdom mostly just suggests that SCO copied someone else's code. (FYI: there are a few bits of kernel 2.4 labelled with AT&T, but they're also identified as being freely usable.) How fucking stupid do they think we are? And what is the "central module"?
I guess on the bright side this means that all we need to do is hunt down every copyright notice in Linux and we'll prove or disprove the code copying... anyone? anyone? Bueller?
The NY Times review joked about a potential political run:
Mr. Schwarzenegger, whose main contribution to American culture has been inspiring wicked parodies on "Saturday Night Live" and "The Simpsons," acts (if you can call it that) with his usual leaden whimsy, manifesting the gift for uttering hard-to-forget, meaningless catchphrases that is most likely the wellspring of his blossoming reported desire to seek elective office in California.
Actually, I'm about to move to California, and from what I hear about Davis I may have to vote for Ahnuld (partly on the theory that he's nowhere near the worst candidate the GOP could throw at us).
Too bad no one had a permonition in 1970 to go assassinate a certain geek that was about to ruin the tech industry.
That's not funny, it's sick. Besides, I'm not particularly worried about Microsoft products becoming self-aware anytime soon.
100% of the interviewers asked "do you know MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Access."
So fucking what? Lie through your teeth, and tell them "oh, yeah, sure." You'll never be put into a situation where they're testing your prowess with the Word table wizard, and timing you. I never actually use Word or Excel, but I put them on my resume anyway because it's buzzword-compliant and because I'm confident that I can figure out how to do anything quickly enough that no one will notice I'm winging it. It's not like padding your resume with C++ or Fortran - I've seen this done.
If you're technically competent, you should be able to pick up any application like Word in seconds. The problem with the tech industry is that people learn an interface rather than concepts, sort of like Pavlovian training rather than actual learning. I've worked as a full-time programmer and as a senior tech-support goon, and I've seen many people who were fine as long as they didn't stray from what they knew. There's nothing more pathetic than a Windows support technician sitting down in front of a Macintosh (OS 9!) and looking helpless. I'd far rather have someone less knowledgeable but willing and able to learn anything.
I was asking about Mobility performance yesterday and could not get a clear answer. I need a laptop with full 3D acceleration under Linux - unless I decide to buy a Mac - and my impression continues to be that performance of ATI laptop chips still sucks here. Has anyone seriously compared acceleration of the Radeon Mobility under both Linux and Windows? I know the GeForce series is *slightly* faster on Windows, but NVidia's Linux support has generally been first-rate for their entire product line (though occasional bugs do pop up). It's unfortunate that the GeForce 4Go only appears on a few relatively costlier laptops now.
Given that ATI only "officially" supports a select few high-end cards under Linux, I'm not sure I want to give them my business. I don't really care about open/closed source - I want something that works.
This statement is false. The Mobility Radeon has been supported since Xfree 4.2.
By "supported", I meant "with full hardware acceleration for OpenGL applications". NVidia cards are "supported" by the open-source 'nv' driver, but I wouldn't use that for the applications I need to run. Do the Mobility chipsets meet these criteria? I tried Googling for this and didn't find anything remotely informative, except that you can *buy* Xig's drivers.
Thanks for the link, at any rate - that's good to know about. I'll need to look around. . . do any of the other manufacturers have comparable deals? I like the idea of buying direct from the maker.
Another win for informed opinions, eh? Just what Linux advocacy needs!
I have no interest in advocacy. Windows works for most people, and I have no problem with that as long as they don't make my job more difficult. All I care about is using the software that lets me be as productive as possible. Given financial constraints, this means Linux.
FYI, none of the people I've ever work with who advocated Windows did so for technical reasons - it was because a) they couldn't use anything else and b) they felt that it was the "de facto standard" and resistance was futile. The lack of a start menu really seems to terrify some people. This would be amusing if I didn't work in IT with people who are supposed to be computer experts.
Is anyone still buying Nvidia cards any more these days
Hi! Yes, we buy them at work all the time. We do a lot of 3D graphics work on Linux, and support for ATI cards under Linux was pretty pathetic until very recently. I'm told this has improved, but it's still not as easy as using the NVidia drivers, and we don't really trust ATI's software now. (Apparently the Radeon Mobility is not supported under Linux either - this has made my search for a new laptop very difficult.)
Why do Linux users always have to profess their fate to Linus & Stallman and in the same breath say something, ANYTHING, about Windows?
.doc files, and help them pirate the expensive proprietary software they can't do without. Pardon me if I sound bitter.
Why do BSD users have to brag about how l33t they are? I'm sure the BSDs rock, but they are still much harder to leap into. It's all about momentum and developer mindshare. I'm not using Linux because of the philosophy, but because it suits my needs and I know how to use it.
I run FreeBSD & NetBSD because I love UNIX and its capabilities and its features and EVERYTHING. It has nothing to do with Windows.
Good for you. This may come as a shock, but many of us use Linux for the same reason.
As for the Windows-bashing, I grew up on Macintoshes, and never touched a PC, with the result that Windows has always seemed like a model of how not to design an OS. At some point in college I switched to Linux (then Solaris, then Irix) because I was tired of my iMac crashing all the time (this was long before OS X). Now that I'm a full-time programmer, many of the people I work with use Windows and love it. Unfortunately, they expect me to love it too, and help them with it, and read their
So, it's all a matter of circumstances - I bash Windows because it is the bane of my existence and because I can't avoid it no matter how hard I try. I don't give a shit what platform others prefer, but where Microsoft is concerned people usually force their preferences on me.
And their address in Redmond is "One Microsoft Way", which many commentators have pointed out fits excellently with their vision for the computing industry.
The idea is similar for the logic behind keeping Los Alamos labs functioning.
Los Alamos does a hell of a lot more than purely nuclear weapons development - same goes for the other big government labs. They're some of the largest supercomputing centers in the world, and a hell of a lot of cutting-edge biology research is being done at these places. LANL is more defense-oriented than most of the rest, but it's hardly a holding tank for nuclear physicists. Another example: Oak Ridge was originally used exclusively for plutonium refinement, but is now doing quite a bit of genomics, and PVM was developed there.
Say, for example, that Microsoft made some clever algorithm that improved their .DOC file format and patented it. This effectively gives them a complete, legally mandated monopoly on word processing for the lifetime of the patent (which is huge compared to the lifetime of software). Nobody can produce an interoperating program without violating the patent or paying a huge licensing fee. How does this help anyone other than Microsoft?
This is already happening, even in Europe. Read the FFII's horror stories about software patents being used in exactly this fashion, several of them owned by Microsoft. Anyone who still thinks software patents are a good idea should read through this entire page.