I think language is as much choice as it is something that just happens. Like some people hide their dialect, others deliberately talk different to distance themselves from others. Most typically parents and children - I don't there's ever been any generation that haven't felt the need to invent their own sub-language but also other subcultures. I figure that during slavery and shortly after there was a want to prove that they were not dumb slaves, they could be as literate as their masters. That was the stick with which they were measured. Only later when they feel it is more "equal but distinct" and to assert their own identity do they create a dialect of their own. I wouldn't put too much weight on it being just the migration.
Another way of thinking about it: which is easier for your average Standard English speaker to understand: AAVE or a cell phone contract?
Given that most people I know have never understood the contract much beyond "how much must I pay, how long am I stuck with you and what would I have to pay to get out early?" I don't think you made a good point.
I guess it all depends if any console dares to not be a console and say here's a keyboard and mouse for those kinds of games. You might say that PC hardware will jump ahead but ultra-high resolution displays have never caught on and hardly anyone has over 1920x1200. A few expensive 30" displays have 2560x1600 and if you got $50k to splurge you can get a 3840x2160 TV, but they're so rare as to be ignored. What it in practice means is that the shader/pixel ratio is going up and is hitting a point of diminishing returns. Game requirements aren't keeping up with hardware development, and it's not just because of consoles. Huge amounts of detail and realistic motion costs lots of money, money that isn't translating to higher sales. You can look at it the other way around, if consoles started to look really dated they'd announce a new one. The xbox360 is from 2005, PS3 and Wii from 2006 and none have even hinted at a new generation yet. That's evidence to suggest they don't think the PC has gotten far enough ahead, nott he opposite.
As far as I know, there was never an official Linux build anywhere. If you decompiled it you found some instances of cross-platform scripts that specificly mentioned Linux. Somebody managed to hack it into attempt launching on Linux, which I think worked long enough for it to draw the splash screen. That was all, the rest was rumor built on rumor.
Huh? Sure they can, many paid versions of Linux have come with closed source tools. What may be an exception are kernel modules, which comes back to the age old question if they're derivates of the kernel and must be GPL'd or not. I would not think that line goes at "installed by default" either way. But even if they could ship it installed, I would require a check box for Ubuntu's own sake saying "This is closed source software, we can't support it, if you have problems with it contact the producer of your wireless card". It is important both for you to know and them to tell you. Honestly, if the average issue users had was this small we'd all be running Linux by now...
Where do you sanely put the limit on that though? If I go for an hour's walk into the forest, lose my footing and sprain my ancle I'm not going anywhere. Oh I might crawl to civilization if no help was coming, but normally I'd call in a rescue. Or people that are only going for a short trip, but lose their direction and start going all wrong? Practically you'd want that kind of insurance almost everywhere you go outside public roads, but the risk would vary greatly.
And it would really only move the problem to be between would-be abusers and the insurance company. I'd give people quite a bit benefit of the doubt, if people are afraid to call the emergency services because they're worried it won't be emergency "enough" then lives could be lost. Insurance companies looking for a profit are likely to swing too far in that direction, covering as little as possible and with as few and minimally trained people as possible if you do call on them.
I actually in this case think it makes more sense with fines, ranging from none to full cost coverage depending on how much of an idiot they've been. I'd leave the punitative damages out of it though, unless you were really making prank calls or things like that.
Well, I think you can start at the legal culture. Most US businesses seem to be extremely paranoid about lawsuits and rightfully so. That is not to say we don't have them in Europe, but nobody's going to get millions of dollars because somebody was watching porn at work. The fundamental difference is that in Europe very many are concerned that you do your work - slacking is frowned upon but we're not robots and few care exactly how you slack. While in the US they're extremely concerned with what it is you're doing when you're slacking because it might cause huge liability.
For example, Iran is primarily Shiite. So is a large proportion of the population of Iraq which is next door. Therefore it is natural for the nation of Iraq to form close ties with Iran.
Heh, Iran and Iraq was at war for 8 years in the 1980s including chemical warfare. Saddam was no friend of Iran either, for as long as he was in power. They're both muslims like most of the Middle East but I don't think they're all that close. Ahmadinejad seems like the last with any real military ambition, which is what makes him scary. Oh there's dictatorships other places but they seem mostly content with ruling their own little patch of land. And him alone I wouldn't worry much about either, what I do fear is if he manages to trigger some sort of christian-muslim war instead of just Iraq vs Israel or whatever.
It's a plant in Iran also operated by many Iranians. How about for example siphoning off a little material and blame it on reactor inefficiency? 3% enriched uranium isn't exactly a commodity good, if they get a weapons program going they could secretly have a lot more nukes than anyone expects. So risk-free is probably exaggerating.
I've written this too many times to take the long version. A lot of people working on various details (i.e. not just trying to determine if file X fits on medium Y) need units with powers of 2. Just because you don't, doesn't make that any less true. The smartest thing we could do is have one base 10 unit (MB etc.) and one base 2 unit (MiB etc.), rather than trying to make everyone agree on an either-or, because it's not going to work.
In the US, there is no hate speech laws, the 1st amendment of the US constitution broadly prohibits regulation of the content of speech.
It's called "hate crime" not "hate speech". And yes something you say can be counted as a "hate crime". (...) So if you combine all these, you end up with intimidation being a severely punishable offence if the person is a minority. Since 'intimidation' is extremely vague the law can punish you for libel or slander if it is 'intimidating' in nature. Bye freedom of speech.
Hypothetical mob: "This place ain't for the likes of you, get the fuck out of here before we beat the crap out of you. If you or any of your n*gger friends ever show their ugly face here again you're dead meat. I'll give you to the count of ten. One. Two. Three..."
Not all speech is protected, death threats are not. Combine that with hate directed at a minority you've got a pretty clear case of hate crime if you ask me. "Intimidation" is not a general insult, it's a threat of harm and I can't really imagine the courts having much trouble telling those apart.
No citizen should be held liable to a legislature where he/she has NO representation. If I sell ebay goods to a Chinese person, I am not liable to their law. If they don't like these goods for some reason, let them block the good at the border (and arrest the Chinese purchaser for breaking the law). But me? No jurisdiction without representation.
By that logic Osama bin Laden can not be held liable to US law for the 9/11 attack because he wasn't in the US. Even though you are not in China they can consider you to be conspiring with someone in China to break Chinese law. Now China probably won't ask for and won't get you extradited, but I have no problem seeing how they could consider you an accomplice to the crime. Otherwise mail order companies could e.g. send you illegal prescription drugs with impunity, as long as they're not illegal where they came from.
I consider Internet servers do be different. I do not generally know where any IP is from nor what route it takes, and GeoIP databases are a costly and inaccurate extra service that is generally not available with most hosting solutions nor generally implemented as a filter. I consider that equal to packing a delivery for shipment, then some courier will come pick it up and take it by smoe unknown route to an unknown destination. If that happens to be smuggling it into China, it's not my fault and not my problem.
Prioritizing based on source or destination would be a problem under Net Neutrality but prioritizing based on protocol etc isn't necessarily
Since most games run their own protocol, it's effectively the same. So the WoW protocol gets prioritized and the Age of Conan protocol does not, it works out to exactly the same as a src/dst filter.
Do you really want to have a gaming fee and a voip fee and a youtube fee and whatever "extra charges" tacked onto your bill for each service you want to work well? The way technology is evolving, you can effectively make gaming worse but not upgrading the normal connections and only upgrade those that pay extra, pretty soon it's almost a requirement. Yes, this is part of delivering an "Internet service", if access to one part of the Internet - in this case game servers - is too poor you must upgrade everyone. You can't charge people extra for getting decent rates to EU or Japan or Australia or the WoW server. They can't say "Well if you want good access to THESE servers you must pay extra."
There should be some room within Net Neutrality legislation to prioritize classes of traffic, I'd say three is sufficient: 1. Realtime (VoIP, gaming etc.) 2. Interactive (Web etc.) 3. Bulk (P2P, FTP etc.)
They should not be able to collect additional fees, but they should be allowed, but not required to prioritize up the first and prioritize down the last. What I am concerned about is that this won't be simply a "gaming" fee, next up it'll be by what game it is. Suddenly you have a "World of Warcraft" fee or "Warhammer online" fee or "Age of Conan" fee. All priced to fit supply and demand so they can profit as much as possible. Would you like that? I wouldn't.
They need to ditch the inane "mascot" and other drivel and market it as the OS equivalent of aerospace engineering.
On this point I beg to differ. Apple's well... apple is hardly more serious, a penguin is not offensive to anyone AFAIK and is a unifying symbol among all the Linux distributions, who all have their own logo. It's the easiest way to identify anything Linux or Linux-friendly. You may want to talk to GNOME and the people behind the GIMP though, and if the BSDs haven't completely toiled in obscurity already then the daemon. But then, you'd only be the 32523532th person to suggest that, I think it's become some sort of sport to show that no matter how many complain they can choose not to give a fuck. After all, it's a brilliant way to be lecturing about how other people should feel in a condescending way. Try talking about the GIMP if there's some visibly handicapped person in the meeting or audience, and it's extremely awkward. It's like trying to talk about the Classic Unified Neutrality Theorem with a female present (yes, I made that up on the spot since it seems nobody's been stupid enough). Sometimes I get this image of 14 year olds sitting around in a basement snorting and giggling at the idea, that's how mature it is.
I agree on a market share basis it's pretty much stalled. On NetApplication's stats their July 2010 0.93% rating is the lowest since November 2008, that's basically 1.5 years with no growth or even possibly a slight dip. On the other hand, if you look at it in absolute numbers the desktop market is still growing very fast worldwide. In 2005, 1% of the market would be 9 million people today it's 14 million people. Microsoft and Apple's number of developers is based on their employees, while developers for open source very much depends on the number of users. In that sense, Linux is still growing.
I guess where it's going largely depends if you think that software evolves infinitely or if it's just approaching some state of "done". Or maybe conversely, if the users have infinite demand for features or if something becomes "good enough" and they don't really value anything more. If it's the former then Linux is not catching up any time soon. If it's the latter then eventually Linux will catch up from behind as Microsoft and Apple struggle to find new things that give value.
Personally I must admit I don't know enough about OS X or really using Windows 7 (I just launch games there) to know how they're doing, but I can tell that using Linux is getting better and easier and has been on a fairly steady trend in that direction. I'd only start to worry if I felt it was falling behind, though I'll gladly admit there are things that needs improving...
I don't know why there are so big regional differences, but SUSE is big in Europe, not unlike Red Hat in the US. Whenever there was talk of enterprise support, there was either RHEL or SLES. If I would wager a guess, it's because US companies tend to primarily care about US/English everything. With SUSE being German, they're much more used to the challenges of internationalization and localization. Hell, even in 2010 I know of products that suffer bugs from such things, not surprisingly from a US company. Ubuntu is still the new kid on the block in that market, I'm not sure how well Ubuntu LTS picks up as a server. As a desktop it's quite ok at least, could be better but I've tried some of the others too, they all have their own warts...
And you're also subsidizing the user who can't tell his cable plug from a hole in the ground or complains his internet connection is slow because his computer is utterly virus infected or has some issue wtih his physical line or whatnot. Not every customer you have is going to profitable, but usually it's more trouble than it's worth to actually get rid of them. Near as I can tell, by the time you hit user #10 you should be breaking even. If those are the only unprofitable customers they have, this would be golden...
mode="Devil's advocate'. And I say this as the owner of a HD5850...
The driver will be longer supported then AMD or Nvidia ever would do;
Can be. Will be implies that there are people that would, but there's no abundance of volunteers.
KMS is nice to have;
nVidia's drivers don't use KMS, and are very well featured. Why would a closed driver need KMS?
3D effects like Compiz or Kwin should run better because they can fix any bugs in the driver faster;
Assuming those projects will bother to fix drivers and not just say "fix your driver, it works with software rendering".
someone can port the driver to *BSD or Heiku or BeOS or some other system;
We could also have OpenGL 3/4 support by now. But we don't, not even in mesa... Still, I suppose in theory it's nice.
you don't need to install the driver again and again only because of an kernel update;
With DKMS this does not seem to be an issue unless the kernel interfaces have changed. Actually xorg updates are a much bigger headache.
you don't have to install the driver at all and your system will just run;
True. But modern distros have made this as easy as checking off a tickbox, it's no longer a complicated procedure.
Code from the driver can be reused and the driver itself can reuse other code, that means less bloat and more security and stability in the kernel;
I would not be touting the horn too much about that one. Closed source drivers share code between all three platforms (Win, Mac, Linux) so they draw upon far more resources than all the OSS work on Linux combined.
Unfortunately, those specific bits are only part of the impact that DRM has. They also have to protect all the underlying systems too, like memory management. They can't release an implementation that would easily let people find:
1. Allocating memory for compressed frame 2. [magic loading frame] 3. Allocating memory for uncompressed frame 4. [magic decoding frame]
If they did, people could easily grab those from GPU memory. Also, part is not handled by UVD hardware but rather by shaders, so while we have the instruction set they will not give us their exact internal format for shader programs. Because if they did, we could find where and how it's being called and grab the frames from there. And even such things as basic DVI/HDMI output, they have to be very careful to teach us how to output an image, but not capture any HDCP protected frames while they're being output.
DRM is not just one walled off area with "here be dragons". It's a poison all over the system that makes it really, really hard for AMD to be open about anything.
You forgot probably the most important large scale way of war profiteering, which applies to all whose business is war and more war means more profits. That is to intentionally not make the best effort to end the war, but rather to extend the conflict and make their services more needed. I guess the most clear cut example is being an arms dealer selling to both sides of the war, but there are many subtler ways to rack up excessive war profits. I don't see how that applies to any game developers though since I don't see how they'd have any impact, but you can question a few of the others...
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I think language is as much choice as it is something that just happens. Like some people hide their dialect, others deliberately talk different to distance themselves from others. Most typically parents and children - I don't there's ever been any generation that haven't felt the need to invent their own sub-language but also other subcultures. I figure that during slavery and shortly after there was a want to prove that they were not dumb slaves, they could be as literate as their masters. That was the stick with which they were measured. Only later when they feel it is more "equal but distinct" and to assert their own identity do they create a dialect of their own. I wouldn't put too much weight on it being just the migration.
Another way of thinking about it: which is easier for your average Standard English speaker to understand: AAVE or a cell phone contract?
Given that most people I know have never understood the contract much beyond "how much must I pay, how long am I stuck with you and what would I have to pay to get out early?" I don't think you made a good point.
I guess it all depends if any console dares to not be a console and say here's a keyboard and mouse for those kinds of games. You might say that PC hardware will jump ahead but ultra-high resolution displays have never caught on and hardly anyone has over 1920x1200. A few expensive 30" displays have 2560x1600 and if you got $50k to splurge you can get a 3840x2160 TV, but they're so rare as to be ignored. What it in practice means is that the shader/pixel ratio is going up and is hitting a point of diminishing returns. Game requirements aren't keeping up with hardware development, and it's not just because of consoles. Huge amounts of detail and realistic motion costs lots of money, money that isn't translating to higher sales. You can look at it the other way around, if consoles started to look really dated they'd announce a new one. The xbox360 is from 2005, PS3 and Wii from 2006 and none have even hinted at a new generation yet. That's evidence to suggest they don't think the PC has gotten far enough ahead, nott he opposite.
As far as I know, there was never an official Linux build anywhere. If you decompiled it you found some instances of cross-platform scripts that specificly mentioned Linux. Somebody managed to hack it into attempt launching on Linux, which I think worked long enough for it to draw the splash screen. That was all, the rest was rumor built on rumor.
Huh? Sure they can, many paid versions of Linux have come with closed source tools. What may be an exception are kernel modules, which comes back to the age old question if they're derivates of the kernel and must be GPL'd or not. I would not think that line goes at "installed by default" either way. But even if they could ship it installed, I would require a check box for Ubuntu's own sake saying "This is closed source software, we can't support it, if you have problems with it contact the producer of your wireless card". It is important both for you to know and them to tell you. Honestly, if the average issue users had was this small we'd all be running Linux by now...
Yes, but trying to run Steam with different games requiring different WINE settings is a giant pain in the ass.
Where do you sanely put the limit on that though? If I go for an hour's walk into the forest, lose my footing and sprain my ancle I'm not going anywhere. Oh I might crawl to civilization if no help was coming, but normally I'd call in a rescue. Or people that are only going for a short trip, but lose their direction and start going all wrong? Practically you'd want that kind of insurance almost everywhere you go outside public roads, but the risk would vary greatly.
And it would really only move the problem to be between would-be abusers and the insurance company. I'd give people quite a bit benefit of the doubt, if people are afraid to call the emergency services because they're worried it won't be emergency "enough" then lives could be lost. Insurance companies looking for a profit are likely to swing too far in that direction, covering as little as possible and with as few and minimally trained people as possible if you do call on them.
I actually in this case think it makes more sense with fines, ranging from none to full cost coverage depending on how much of an idiot they've been. I'd leave the punitative damages out of it though, unless you were really making prank calls or things like that.
Well, I think you can start at the legal culture. Most US businesses seem to be extremely paranoid about lawsuits and rightfully so. That is not to say we don't have them in Europe, but nobody's going to get millions of dollars because somebody was watching porn at work. The fundamental difference is that in Europe very many are concerned that you do your work - slacking is frowned upon but we're not robots and few care exactly how you slack. While in the US they're extremely concerned with what it is you're doing when you're slacking because it might cause huge liability.
For example, Iran is primarily Shiite. So is a large proportion of the population of Iraq which is next door. Therefore it is natural for the nation of Iraq to form close ties with Iran.
Heh, Iran and Iraq was at war for 8 years in the 1980s including chemical warfare. Saddam was no friend of Iran either, for as long as he was in power. They're both muslims like most of the Middle East but I don't think they're all that close. Ahmadinejad seems like the last with any real military ambition, which is what makes him scary. Oh there's dictatorships other places but they seem mostly content with ruling their own little patch of land. And him alone I wouldn't worry much about either, what I do fear is if he manages to trigger some sort of christian-muslim war instead of just Iraq vs Israel or whatever.
It's a plant in Iran also operated by many Iranians. How about for example siphoning off a little material and blame it on reactor inefficiency? 3% enriched uranium isn't exactly a commodity good, if they get a weapons program going they could secretly have a lot more nukes than anyone expects. So risk-free is probably exaggerating.
I've written this too many times to take the long version. A lot of people working on various details (i.e. not just trying to determine if file X fits on medium Y) need units with powers of 2. Just because you don't, doesn't make that any less true. The smartest thing we could do is have one base 10 unit (MB etc.) and one base 2 unit (MiB etc.), rather than trying to make everyone agree on an either-or, because it's not going to work.
In the US, there is no hate speech laws, the 1st amendment of the US constitution broadly prohibits regulation of the content of speech.
It's called "hate crime" not "hate speech". And yes something you say can be counted as a "hate crime". (...) So if you combine all these, you end up with intimidation being a severely punishable offence if the person is a minority. Since 'intimidation' is extremely vague the law can punish you for libel or slander if it is 'intimidating' in nature. Bye freedom of speech.
Hypothetical mob: "This place ain't for the likes of you, get the fuck out of here before we beat the crap out of you. If you or any of your n*gger friends ever show their ugly face here again you're dead meat. I'll give you to the count of ten. One. Two. Three..."
Not all speech is protected, death threats are not. Combine that with hate directed at a minority you've got a pretty clear case of hate crime if you ask me. "Intimidation" is not a general insult, it's a threat of harm and I can't really imagine the courts having much trouble telling those apart.
No citizen should be held liable to a legislature where he/she has NO representation. If I sell ebay goods to a Chinese person, I am not liable to their law. If they don't like these goods for some reason, let them block the good at the border (and arrest the Chinese purchaser for breaking the law). But me? No jurisdiction without representation.
By that logic Osama bin Laden can not be held liable to US law for the 9/11 attack because he wasn't in the US. Even though you are not in China they can consider you to be conspiring with someone in China to break Chinese law. Now China probably won't ask for and won't get you extradited, but I have no problem seeing how they could consider you an accomplice to the crime. Otherwise mail order companies could e.g. send you illegal prescription drugs with impunity, as long as they're not illegal where they came from.
I consider Internet servers do be different. I do not generally know where any IP is from nor what route it takes, and GeoIP databases are a costly and inaccurate extra service that is generally not available with most hosting solutions nor generally implemented as a filter. I consider that equal to packing a delivery for shipment, then some courier will come pick it up and take it by smoe unknown route to an unknown destination. If that happens to be smuggling it into China, it's not my fault and not my problem.
Prioritizing based on source or destination would be a problem under Net Neutrality but prioritizing based on protocol etc isn't necessarily
Since most games run their own protocol, it's effectively the same. So the WoW protocol gets prioritized and the Age of Conan protocol does not, it works out to exactly the same as a src/dst filter.
Do you really want to have a gaming fee and a voip fee and a youtube fee and whatever "extra charges" tacked onto your bill for each service you want to work well? The way technology is evolving, you can effectively make gaming worse but not upgrading the normal connections and only upgrade those that pay extra, pretty soon it's almost a requirement. Yes, this is part of delivering an "Internet service", if access to one part of the Internet - in this case game servers - is too poor you must upgrade everyone. You can't charge people extra for getting decent rates to EU or Japan or Australia or the WoW server. They can't say "Well if you want good access to THESE servers you must pay extra."
There should be some room within Net Neutrality legislation to prioritize classes of traffic, I'd say three is sufficient:
1. Realtime (VoIP, gaming etc.)
2. Interactive (Web etc.)
3. Bulk (P2P, FTP etc.)
They should not be able to collect additional fees, but they should be allowed, but not required to prioritize up the first and prioritize down the last. What I am concerned about is that this won't be simply a "gaming" fee, next up it'll be by what game it is. Suddenly you have a "World of Warcraft" fee or "Warhammer online" fee or "Age of Conan" fee. All priced to fit supply and demand so they can profit as much as possible. Would you like that? I wouldn't.
It won't become a mainstream OS until it's widely available in brick stores, and I mean like in every store.
95% of the population will not install their own OS. Ever. If you had said preinstalls, that might have made sense.
They need to ditch the inane "mascot" and other drivel and market it as the OS equivalent of aerospace engineering.
On this point I beg to differ. Apple's well... apple is hardly more serious, a penguin is not offensive to anyone AFAIK and is a unifying symbol among all the Linux distributions, who all have their own logo. It's the easiest way to identify anything Linux or Linux-friendly. You may want to talk to GNOME and the people behind the GIMP though, and if the BSDs haven't completely toiled in obscurity already then the daemon. But then, you'd only be the 32523532th person to suggest that, I think it's become some sort of sport to show that no matter how many complain they can choose not to give a fuck. After all, it's a brilliant way to be lecturing about how other people should feel in a condescending way. Try talking about the GIMP if there's some visibly handicapped person in the meeting or audience, and it's extremely awkward. It's like trying to talk about the Classic Unified Neutrality Theorem with a female present (yes, I made that up on the spot since it seems nobody's been stupid enough). Sometimes I get this image of 14 year olds sitting around in a basement snorting and giggling at the idea, that's how mature it is.
I agree on a market share basis it's pretty much stalled. On NetApplication's stats their July 2010 0.93% rating is the lowest since November 2008, that's basically 1.5 years with no growth or even possibly a slight dip. On the other hand, if you look at it in absolute numbers the desktop market is still growing very fast worldwide. In 2005, 1% of the market would be 9 million people today it's 14 million people. Microsoft and Apple's number of developers is based on their employees, while developers for open source very much depends on the number of users. In that sense, Linux is still growing.
I guess where it's going largely depends if you think that software evolves infinitely or if it's just approaching some state of "done". Or maybe conversely, if the users have infinite demand for features or if something becomes "good enough" and they don't really value anything more. If it's the former then Linux is not catching up any time soon. If it's the latter then eventually Linux will catch up from behind as Microsoft and Apple struggle to find new things that give value.
Personally I must admit I don't know enough about OS X or really using Windows 7 (I just launch games there) to know how they're doing, but I can tell that using Linux is getting better and easier and has been on a fairly steady trend in that direction. I'd only start to worry if I felt it was falling behind, though I'll gladly admit there are things that needs improving...
I don't know why there are so big regional differences, but SUSE is big in Europe, not unlike Red Hat in the US. Whenever there was talk of enterprise support, there was either RHEL or SLES. If I would wager a guess, it's because US companies tend to primarily care about US/English everything. With SUSE being German, they're much more used to the challenges of internationalization and localization. Hell, even in 2010 I know of products that suffer bugs from such things, not surprisingly from a US company. Ubuntu is still the new kid on the block in that market, I'm not sure how well Ubuntu LTS picks up as a server. As a desktop it's quite ok at least, could be better but I've tried some of the others too, they all have their own warts...
And you're also subsidizing the user who can't tell his cable plug from a hole in the ground or complains his internet connection is slow because his computer is utterly virus infected or has some issue wtih his physical line or whatnot. Not every customer you have is going to profitable, but usually it's more trouble than it's worth to actually get rid of them. Near as I can tell, by the time you hit user #10 you should be breaking even. If those are the only unprofitable customers they have, this would be golden...
mode="Devil's advocate'. And I say this as the owner of a HD5850...
The driver will be longer supported then AMD or Nvidia ever would do;
Can be. Will be implies that there are people that would, but there's no abundance of volunteers.
KMS is nice to have;
nVidia's drivers don't use KMS, and are very well featured. Why would a closed driver need KMS?
3D effects like Compiz or Kwin should run better because they can fix any bugs in the driver faster;
Assuming those projects will bother to fix drivers and not just say "fix your driver, it works with software rendering".
someone can port the driver to *BSD or Heiku or BeOS or some other system;
We could also have OpenGL 3/4 support by now. But we don't, not even in mesa... Still, I suppose in theory it's nice.
you don't need to install the driver again and again only because of an kernel update;
With DKMS this does not seem to be an issue unless the kernel interfaces have changed. Actually xorg updates are a much bigger headache.
you don't have to install the driver at all and your system will just run;
True. But modern distros have made this as easy as checking off a tickbox, it's no longer a complicated procedure.
Code from the driver can be reused and the driver itself can reuse other code, that means less bloat and more security and stability in the kernel;
I would not be touting the horn too much about that one. Closed source drivers share code between all three platforms (Win, Mac, Linux) so they draw upon far more resources than all the OSS work on Linux combined.
Unfortunately, those specific bits are only part of the impact that DRM has. They also have to protect all the underlying systems too, like memory management. They can't release an implementation that would easily let people find:
1. Allocating memory for compressed frame
2. [magic loading frame]
3. Allocating memory for uncompressed frame
4. [magic decoding frame]
If they did, people could easily grab those from GPU memory. Also, part is not handled by UVD hardware but rather by shaders, so while we have the instruction set they will not give us their exact internal format for shader programs. Because if they did, we could find where and how it's being called and grab the frames from there. And even such things as basic DVI/HDMI output, they have to be very careful to teach us how to output an image, but not capture any HDCP protected frames while they're being output.
DRM is not just one walled off area with "here be dragons". It's a poison all over the system that makes it really, really hard for AMD to be open about anything.
According to the Radeon feature page, not yet. The R600 and R700 cards has it, but Evergreen doesn't.
You forgot probably the most important large scale way of war profiteering, which applies to all whose business is war and more war means more profits. That is to intentionally not make the best effort to end the war, but rather to extend the conflict and make their services more needed. I guess the most clear cut example is being an arms dealer selling to both sides of the war, but there are many subtler ways to rack up excessive war profits. I don't see how that applies to any game developers though since I don't see how they'd have any impact, but you can question a few of the others...
Gee, thanks. I never would have thought of that myself. Good that are still oldtimers around to help us newbies settle in.