Honestly, we all know that there are things like "taking things too seriously" and "taking things too lightly". Depression isn't there as a cruel joke to make miserable people more miserable, it's to make sure that in a grave situation you take a honest look at the situation and deal with it. It's a natural self-defense mechanism that for example you probably wouldn't want to have sex, get pregnant and have a child in a bad situation, being a leftover from before contraception. Of course some people get too much of it, just like others want to cuddle the cute grizzly bear and don't see a problem until they make a Darwin award of themselves. Very few aspects of typical human behavior is really that irrational, though it can be really out of place in the modern world.
FSF won the hearts and minds of the developers writing GPL code. Oh sure, there might have been some open source at Berkeley with BSD, but I'm sure many had improvements they kept to themselves. Either because they didn't want to give it away to everyone or as proprietary forks or both. Same goes for companies, just recently there was a big paper on all the contributors to the Linux kernel. I think the breakdown for BSD would look quite different.
However, as a public figure for people just using the system RMS is terrible. He'd do much better if he could just talk FLOSS software up without talking closed source software down so extremely. Sure you may not modify the software but you do have choices like voting with your wallet, and if there's noone worthy of your money then not buying at all. There's monopolies but they're bad under any circumstances and they're the exceptions to the rule.
For some things, yes there are good points about open formats, forced upgrades and future access. But in many cases there's also not really. I buy closed source games which can have bugs that I'd like to fix in an ideal world, but I can't. But it's somewhat like going to a restaurant, either you return it to the kitchen or you eat it. RMS insists I'm not free unless I get to go into the kitchen and give the dish a do-over. Don't tip, don't return and give bad reviews seems to work for the rest of the world.
I really like the idea of the GPL, share alike and how you get incremental improvement. If a software does 98% of what you want you can supply the 2%. Then it becomes someone else's 98% project. Slowly you end up with a system that can run on everything from cell phones to supercomputers because many different people pulled it in many different directions. It's good. But you don't need to pretend that with FLOSS software I have all the choices and with closed source none.
Because it has so many forks, it needs another. The truth is that it doesn't need a fork, it needs a full workthrough with a new pixel format and workflow abstraction. At least the latter GEGL was supposed to be since 2000 or something now and support for other color spaces than RGB like CMYK, Pantone etc. that is used for printed material is still vastly lacking. If your target is the web alone then GIMP is just fine, but then so is many tools for that job...
Of course it's illegal. It has always been illegal for a special interest group to attempt to run the country. That's true in every society that makes any claim to be "democratic".
What kind of insane statement is that? Everything from the EFF and ACLU to RIAA and MPAA are special interest groups trying to "run the country", at least within their field of interest. Hell, even grass root organizations are lobbying groups as much as the astroturfers. Which is by the way another form of lobbying, trying to change the public opinion or at least our representatives' impression of it. Everyone that's ever written or talked to a representative or their staff have tired to be a lobbyist. Maybe you can manage to scope down some precise kind of backdoor lobbying bordering on corruption as illegal but your general statement makes absolutely no sense.
You can think of it a little like an application and memory protection - yeah if the process could suddenly circumvent the virtualized address space and access kernel memory the machine is rooted, but otherwise it can only trash its own memory space. Yes, a compromised VM can do anything to the virtualized block devices but unless it can disable the translation and access the real block devices it can only trash its own disk. In both cases there's some fairly simple, solid and well understood locks in place to ensure that this sort of thing just doesn't happen.
Of course there are some scenarios for the paranoid, like it was shown how on a multi-core machine one process could deduct another process' private SSH key by manipulating the CPU cache and timing attempt. Obviously there are similar threats with virtual machines running on same hardware, but I'd say the pracitcal threat is minor. I think it's well with in the same probability of other threats where you need a disaster recovery plan like the server room roof collapsing, your senior system administrator going postal on your systems or whatever.
You were even clearly warned and missed the clue. Do we really need to bring back the <blink> in big red letters to warn people that the post may contain irony?
What if you need to have a purchase history of different books from different publishers? Yeah, it's also limiting the pool of reviewers but it'd also raise the cost of astroturfing.
This number is of course taken out of thin air, but you can be fairly certain that for every person that asks around, there's 100 that either didn't or thought "wow, that's lame" and returned to Windows. It's not at all obvious that you should not play it from dvd in linux, when that works just fine in Windows. Regardless that not playing it from dvd is the better option in both cases.
Most of the valid criticisms of the ISS are of the utility of having a LEO space station, not as the ability of the ISS to perform that function.
Meh, it's full of stupid political decisions like its orbit being far from optimal so the russians could reach it. Under the current climate of world peace they would have told the russians to STFU and get a base close to the equator like everyone else. Still, I guess it has given a lot of experience on long time stays in space which would be vital for a Mars flight.
Even in Star Trek you don't make alliances with everyone, only those that behave get to join the Federation. It's not like you need one global world order, I really don't think you can do it on a global scale as long as there's places people really want to get to and really want to get from but EU is fairly close in a mini-format. The germans can visit the french and vice versa but it's not like there are mass relocations, they have national laws but things still float fairly freely. The United States has 50 states which I understand are somewhat different even though there's federal law. It's not that hard to imagine that sort of thing being extended to a world model where basically people move to and work in whatever country they please. Perhaps not exactly unified in that sense but it would mean war makes a lot less sense.
Why? It's exactly the same problem as health care. Kids (and parents) who eat their way into a diabetes-induced amputation, costing more in health care than it would cost to provide basic services to a dozen other families, aren't a bit different than kids (and parents) who slack their way through school and become parasites on every other system. What on earth makes you think that more of a Nanny State is going to produce kids who are more responsible for their own lives? It's all part of the same wider cultural problem. And government policies that amount to nothing more than just raising taxes (more!) on the productive people to increase the number of Nannies aimed at the non-productive people are all of a kind.
Whether it's a national health care, the kid has health insurance or not would probably make about zero difference for someone stupid enough to do that in the first place. And if it's a kid, WTF is child protection services when you need them... what's wrong with Americans, but I digress. I can only tell you from experience that people aren't getting themselves sick and injured for the privilege of having a free treatment. So it's really about getting away with you paying less for your lower risk compared to their higher risk, but it leads to the "let's inspect your life" game for both of you.
Got lung cancer? You a smoker? No, never you say. Lord help you if they dig up a picture from 20 years ago when you were 16 and tried it to be cool. Or if you got back problems, who's going to know if you just have or if you tried lifting that 50kg whatever all by yourself? 24/7 video surveilance? Everything becomes a game of being measured and prodded and poked to find something in your history so they can avoid paying you. And if you got any kind of medical history where they think you will or might need expensive treatment in the future, watch your premium skyrocket and noone else will insure you. Even if it's a completely natural condition that you can't reasonably be blamed for inflicting upon yourself. There's many ways you can be screwed or treated like a fraudster without being to blame.
Even once you get past that, they're only likely to cover the cheapest treatment at the hospital cutting the most corners. I suppose you could win a little, but I don't think much considering the overhead. You're probably paying as much or more to have a good insurance that gets you into good hospitals as footing the universal healthcare would. Here it's like if you need an amputation, you get it without a whole insurance company in your way. It's not like people keep coming back for more anyways. The things that you are to look out for are not the treatments, it's fraud with these:
No, power saving is all about very detailed specs on how a chip can be powered down while in different states. Oh sure from the user side it might look like a simple low-high slider but in practise it's dynamically changing clock speeds, voltages, disabling parts of the chip and so on. I've been following the AMD open source driver development and basicly for full power management you'll need a whole new documentation package. They're still working on making it work right under full speed before power management will be a big priority.
Wikipedia's designed intent is to accurately reflect the consensus culture's view of knowledge. Seems like it's doing that just fine. In cases where that culture itself is bitterly divided, and holders of various positions sling names at each other in the media, from governmental pulpits, and in published scientific journals, were you expecting Wikipedia to somehow magically rise above this and achieve perfect truth?
I guess the difference is between "The culture is bitterly divided" and "A small cult with an agenda is bitterly divided from everyone else". Like in this case, where they're trying desperately to claim that a technique to force information out of prisoners isn't torture when torture almost by definition is the only way of doing that. Very often here on slashdot I see the advice "Don't talk to the police. Get a lawyer." to which you'd get a comfy cell while waiting and they'd be sent to Gitmo for waterboarding. Add 2+2.
Perfect truth is a straw man because it's not about divining some absolute truth - even the courts only say beyond a reasonable doubt. The point is that wikipedia sometimes differ significantly from the popular opinion if you were to make a poll with representative selection. True consensus you might get on the weight of the hydrogen atom, on everything else there's small anti-groups like neonazis or scientologists or creationists or whatever that strongly oppose the common understanding of things.
What wikipedia ideally needs is a set of neutral arbitrators that act something like judges in the court system, according to wikipedia policy. What you in many cases got are people that have done "service" keeping wikipedia clean, and have now been granted power and is on a power trip to enforce their POV on the matters they care about. It's a huge incentive challenge because ideally you should only arbitrate things you don't care about, but who does things they don't care about for free in their spare time? Too few, certainly.
Because if you could bottle an algorithm for doing that, you'd get the Nobel Peace Prize. Or be assassinated, or both.
Only if you get the prize first, it's not awarded posthumously. Probably the most famous example is Gandhi which was allegedly supposed to get it in 1948 before he was assassinated. That he hadn't gotten it earlier is also a big disgrace, but that's another story.
Whatever trouble GGF is in, it's not because of TPB. Not yet, anyway. This sounds like a classic last-ditch attempt business model of "Let's announce how we'll take over the world and secure VC funding for it on the hype". Kinda like how SCO announced they were suing IBM and licensing Linux, which both were puffs of smoke. As the house of cards appears to collapse a little too fast, I'd be very surprised if the deal ever happens.
By impressive you mean 'terrifying', and by useful you mean 'terrifying'
Lets look at the capabilities demonstrated here:
1. Ability to move faster than a human 2. Ability to throw things accurately at a human 3. Ability to tie up a human 4. Ability to perform delicate procedures on a human
Why be delicate when you can be crude? The robot doesn't need to sit in a tank, it could be the tank. With hydraulics for both small and large arms and IR cameras it could kill you quite easily as long as it doesn't need to care about collateral damage. Tie you up? More liker tazer and bag you, much easier. And you definately don't need much delicacy to make a torturebot, so what here is really terrifying? We already know they can be damn destructive, delicacy is what we need to have a robot whip up an omelet for me without making a mess.
What was the reason behind binary blob drivers again? Evil competitors stealing x86 code? What competitor really? It is just ATI and Nvidia left. ATI already went open ,
ATI went open specs, but they never released any of their high-performance optimized code and there are still more people writing the Catalyst driver than the open source one. It reminds me more of id releasing old engines, yes it's definately nice to have a decently performing open source 3D driver (the guesstimate is that the open source driver will reach 60-70% performance eventually) but the exact tuning of the formula one drivers is still kept tight.
Only a Linux diehard would pay for those massively overpriced old games. Any cost-concious person would buy them used or off steam for 10-20% the price. So add DRM on top of that? Yeah right, not for my money.
If only Video Card makers would open up their standards so open source drivers can be used for them.
*cough*. Oh wait, you expect them to write the drivers for you as well, using their own specs? Actually they are doing that too, but they need lots of help because most of their resources are tied up in the closed source FPS battle with nVidia. But your excuse is certainly outdated....
Nvidia didn't just write a regualr binary driver, they had to rewrite a large chunk of Xwindow and package the resulting mess in a large drop-in binary blob, unstable and heavily dependant on the kernel version.
This part you got backwards. Because they did a pretty clear cut that depends little on kernel versions, they've constantly been much faster at supporting the latest kernels than AMD, like for example kernel 2.6.29 was released in March and supported only by Catalyst in the August release from a few days ago.
(...) windows (non)emulation can not keep up with Microsofts technical progress on directx. So many recent AAA games in every genre are listed as 'bronze' or 'garbage'.
Yes, they are. However, very few of these are related to the Direct3D part of WINE and if they are they're usually solved by installing the d3d dlls. However closed source is very prone to crashing if anything else isn't as it should, particularly Microsoft's Live services have been a big problem. Games that actually get past that like World In Conflict have quite decent performance on par with Windows, same with King's Bounty that's a fairly 3D intensive non-FPS.
The PC gaming market is small enough to justify p[orting to a platform that is a tiny fraction (about 1%) of users.
Yep, this is what it is about. Not just Linux users, but the intersection between those Linux users interested in a high-end FPS having the hardware and willingness to pay with the market that isn't already getting it somewhere on Windows. Don't get me wrong, I get what's native when I can, what's running in WINE when it works, but there's no competing with a Wintendo box...
Sounds like somebody's been flying business or full-flex economy. The regular tickets definately either don't let you do that at all or against a high fee.
I'd say the primary reason to get things like that up in the media is the war over the "public meaning" of things. For example, I think in my country the consumer protection agency would be all over them and say "Well, if you're delivering Internet subscription at 1/3rd the speed, you have to advertise it as such. You can't say 'up to' but only on specific protocols, sites and on friday the 13th under a full moon". If they have to instead say "2Mbit Internet, up to 6Mbit on selected websites" it'll pretty much kill the advantage of promising something you're not delivering.
I care, because I pay the electricity bill. Mother Earth cares, because of the millions and millions gamers out there.
Well yes, but to be honest... I'm fairly sure the 42" TV I'm pulling the Wii up on consumes lots more power than the Wii itself, probably in the 100-150W range. In any case, for $/hour of entertainment isn't exactly breaking the bank anyway.
So, not special trials per se, but a process that rules out anyone with domain knowledge relevant to the trial is fundamentally broken. The number of really bad car analogies that get made here everyday among the relatively technically astute should be proof enough that requiring the issues to be dumbed down for an uneducated jury is not a very good way to run the system.
So in a medical misconduct trial you want 12 doctors on the jury, able to understand the medical evidence? In a copyright infringement trial, you want 12 copyright experts which inevitably have tight links to the copyright industry on the jury? I certainly don't think you'd want 12 policemen with domain knowledge on what police work involves in a trial about excessive police violence.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's better than any other system we've tried. Honestly, if you compare it to the 1700s when they decided this was how US trials should look like (ok, the jury system is probably older and inherited somewhere) then the people on the jury certainly weren't educated. Honestly, if you can't dumb down the essence of the case to where normal people understand it, there's something very wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the third option - the orbit it has now isn't the original orbit. Plenty possibilities here.
Honestly, we all know that there are things like "taking things too seriously" and "taking things too lightly". Depression isn't there as a cruel joke to make miserable people more miserable, it's to make sure that in a grave situation you take a honest look at the situation and deal with it. It's a natural self-defense mechanism that for example you probably wouldn't want to have sex, get pregnant and have a child in a bad situation, being a leftover from before contraception. Of course some people get too much of it, just like others want to cuddle the cute grizzly bear and don't see a problem until they make a Darwin award of themselves. Very few aspects of typical human behavior is really that irrational, though it can be really out of place in the modern world.
FSF won the hearts and minds of the developers writing GPL code. Oh sure, there might have been some open source at Berkeley with BSD, but I'm sure many had improvements they kept to themselves. Either because they didn't want to give it away to everyone or as proprietary forks or both. Same goes for companies, just recently there was a big paper on all the contributors to the Linux kernel. I think the breakdown for BSD would look quite different.
However, as a public figure for people just using the system RMS is terrible. He'd do much better if he could just talk FLOSS software up without talking closed source software down so extremely. Sure you may not modify the software but you do have choices like voting with your wallet, and if there's noone worthy of your money then not buying at all. There's monopolies but they're bad under any circumstances and they're the exceptions to the rule.
For some things, yes there are good points about open formats, forced upgrades and future access. But in many cases there's also not really. I buy closed source games which can have bugs that I'd like to fix in an ideal world, but I can't. But it's somewhat like going to a restaurant, either you return it to the kitchen or you eat it. RMS insists I'm not free unless I get to go into the kitchen and give the dish a do-over. Don't tip, don't return and give bad reviews seems to work for the rest of the world.
I really like the idea of the GPL, share alike and how you get incremental improvement. If a software does 98% of what you want you can supply the 2%. Then it becomes someone else's 98% project. Slowly you end up with a system that can run on everything from cell phones to supercomputers because many different people pulled it in many different directions. It's good. But you don't need to pretend that with FLOSS software I have all the choices and with closed source none.
Because it has so many forks, it needs another. The truth is that it doesn't need a fork, it needs a full workthrough with a new pixel format and workflow abstraction. At least the latter GEGL was supposed to be since 2000 or something now and support for other color spaces than RGB like CMYK, Pantone etc. that is used for printed material is still vastly lacking. If your target is the web alone then GIMP is just fine, but then so is many tools for that job...
Of course it's illegal. It has always been illegal for a special interest group to attempt to run the country. That's true in every society that makes any claim to be "democratic".
What kind of insane statement is that? Everything from the EFF and ACLU to RIAA and MPAA are special interest groups trying to "run the country", at least within their field of interest. Hell, even grass root organizations are lobbying groups as much as the astroturfers. Which is by the way another form of lobbying, trying to change the public opinion or at least our representatives' impression of it. Everyone that's ever written or talked to a representative or their staff have tired to be a lobbyist. Maybe you can manage to scope down some precise kind of backdoor lobbying bordering on corruption as illegal but your general statement makes absolutely no sense.
You can think of it a little like an application and memory protection - yeah if the process could suddenly circumvent the virtualized address space and access kernel memory the machine is rooted, but otherwise it can only trash its own memory space. Yes, a compromised VM can do anything to the virtualized block devices but unless it can disable the translation and access the real block devices it can only trash its own disk. In both cases there's some fairly simple, solid and well understood locks in place to ensure that this sort of thing just doesn't happen.
Of course there are some scenarios for the paranoid, like it was shown how on a multi-core machine one process could deduct another process' private SSH key by manipulating the CPU cache and timing attempt. Obviously there are similar threats with virtual machines running on same hardware, but I'd say the pracitcal threat is minor. I think it's well with in the same probability of other threats where you need a disaster recovery plan like the server room roof collapsing, your senior system administrator going postal on your systems or whatever.
*whooooooosh*
You were even clearly warned and missed the clue. Do we really need to bring back the <blink> in big red letters to warn people that the post may contain irony?
What if you need to have a purchase history of different books from different publishers? Yeah, it's also limiting the pool of reviewers but it'd also raise the cost of astroturfing.
This number is of course taken out of thin air, but you can be fairly certain that for every person that asks around, there's 100 that either didn't or thought "wow, that's lame" and returned to Windows. It's not at all obvious that you should not play it from dvd in linux, when that works just fine in Windows. Regardless that not playing it from dvd is the better option in both cases.
Most of the valid criticisms of the ISS are of the utility of having a LEO space station, not as the ability of the ISS to perform that function.
Meh, it's full of stupid political decisions like its orbit being far from optimal so the russians could reach it. Under the current climate of world peace they would have told the russians to STFU and get a base close to the equator like everyone else. Still, I guess it has given a lot of experience on long time stays in space which would be vital for a Mars flight.
Even in Star Trek you don't make alliances with everyone, only those that behave get to join the Federation. It's not like you need one global world order, I really don't think you can do it on a global scale as long as there's places people really want to get to and really want to get from but EU is fairly close in a mini-format. The germans can visit the french and vice versa but it's not like there are mass relocations, they have national laws but things still float fairly freely. The United States has 50 states which I understand are somewhat different even though there's federal law. It's not that hard to imagine that sort of thing being extended to a world model where basically people move to and work in whatever country they please. Perhaps not exactly unified in that sense but it would mean war makes a lot less sense.
Why? It's exactly the same problem as health care. Kids (and parents) who eat their way into a diabetes-induced amputation, costing more in health care than it would cost to provide basic services to a dozen other families, aren't a bit different than kids (and parents) who slack their way through school and become parasites on every other system. What on earth makes you think that more of a Nanny State is going to produce kids who are more responsible for their own lives? It's all part of the same wider cultural problem. And government policies that amount to nothing more than just raising taxes (more!) on the productive people to increase the number of Nannies aimed at the non-productive people are all of a kind.
Whether it's a national health care, the kid has health insurance or not would probably make about zero difference for someone stupid enough to do that in the first place. And if it's a kid, WTF is child protection services when you need them... what's wrong with Americans, but I digress. I can only tell you from experience that people aren't getting themselves sick and injured for the privilege of having a free treatment. So it's really about getting away with you paying less for your lower risk compared to their higher risk, but it leads to the "let's inspect your life" game for both of you.
Got lung cancer? You a smoker? No, never you say. Lord help you if they dig up a picture from 20 years ago when you were 16 and tried it to be cool. Or if you got back problems, who's going to know if you just have or if you tried lifting that 50kg whatever all by yourself? 24/7 video surveilance? Everything becomes a game of being measured and prodded and poked to find something in your history so they can avoid paying you. And if you got any kind of medical history where they think you will or might need expensive treatment in the future, watch your premium skyrocket and noone else will insure you. Even if it's a completely natural condition that you can't reasonably be blamed for inflicting upon yourself. There's many ways you can be screwed or treated like a fraudster without being to blame.
Even once you get past that, they're only likely to cover the cheapest treatment at the hospital cutting the most corners. I suppose you could win a little, but I don't think much considering the overhead. You're probably paying as much or more to have a good insurance that gets you into good hospitals as footing the universal healthcare would. Here it's like if you need an amputation, you get it without a whole insurance company in your way. It's not like people keep coming back for more anyways. The things that you are to look out for are not the treatments, it's fraud with these:
1) Disabilities pension
2) Drugs for resale
3) Fake sick leave
All three often more than willingly helped by corrupt doctors and something to look just as much out for in the private health sector.
No, power saving is all about very detailed specs on how a chip can be powered down while in different states. Oh sure from the user side it might look like a simple low-high slider but in practise it's dynamically changing clock speeds, voltages, disabling parts of the chip and so on. I've been following the AMD open source driver development and basicly for full power management you'll need a whole new documentation package. They're still working on making it work right under full speed before power management will be a big priority.
Wikipedia's designed intent is to accurately reflect the consensus culture's view of knowledge. Seems like it's doing that just fine. In cases where that culture itself is bitterly divided, and holders of various positions sling names at each other in the media, from governmental pulpits, and in published scientific journals, were you expecting Wikipedia to somehow magically rise above this and achieve perfect truth?
I guess the difference is between "The culture is bitterly divided" and "A small cult with an agenda is bitterly divided from everyone else". Like in this case, where they're trying desperately to claim that a technique to force information out of prisoners isn't torture when torture almost by definition is the only way of doing that. Very often here on slashdot I see the advice "Don't talk to the police. Get a lawyer." to which you'd get a comfy cell while waiting and they'd be sent to Gitmo for waterboarding. Add 2+2.
Perfect truth is a straw man because it's not about divining some absolute truth - even the courts only say beyond a reasonable doubt. The point is that wikipedia sometimes differ significantly from the popular opinion if you were to make a poll with representative selection. True consensus you might get on the weight of the hydrogen atom, on everything else there's small anti-groups like neonazis or scientologists or creationists or whatever that strongly oppose the common understanding of things.
What wikipedia ideally needs is a set of neutral arbitrators that act something like judges in the court system, according to wikipedia policy. What you in many cases got are people that have done "service" keeping wikipedia clean, and have now been granted power and is on a power trip to enforce their POV on the matters they care about. It's a huge incentive challenge because ideally you should only arbitrate things you don't care about, but who does things they don't care about for free in their spare time? Too few, certainly.
Because if you could bottle an algorithm for doing that, you'd get the Nobel Peace Prize. Or be assassinated, or both.
Only if you get the prize first, it's not awarded posthumously. Probably the most famous example is Gandhi which was allegedly supposed to get it in 1948 before he was assassinated. That he hadn't gotten it earlier is also a big disgrace, but that's another story.
Whatever trouble GGF is in, it's not because of TPB. Not yet, anyway. This sounds like a classic last-ditch attempt business model of "Let's announce how we'll take over the world and secure VC funding for it on the hype". Kinda like how SCO announced they were suing IBM and licensing Linux, which both were puffs of smoke. As the house of cards appears to collapse a little too fast, I'd be very surprised if the deal ever happens.
In RL, there is no anonymity
British?
By impressive you mean 'terrifying', and by useful you mean 'terrifying'
Lets look at the capabilities demonstrated here:
1. Ability to move faster than a human
2. Ability to throw things accurately at a human
3. Ability to tie up a human
4. Ability to perform delicate procedures on a human
Why be delicate when you can be crude? The robot doesn't need to sit in a tank, it could be the tank. With hydraulics for both small and large arms and IR cameras it could kill you quite easily as long as it doesn't need to care about collateral damage. Tie you up? More liker tazer and bag you, much easier. And you definately don't need much delicacy to make a torturebot, so what here is really terrifying? We already know they can be damn destructive, delicacy is what we need to have a robot whip up an omelet for me without making a mess.
What was the reason behind binary blob drivers again? Evil competitors stealing x86 code? What competitor really? It is just ATI and Nvidia left. ATI already went open ,
ATI went open specs, but they never released any of their high-performance optimized code and there are still more people writing the Catalyst driver than the open source one. It reminds me more of id releasing old engines, yes it's definately nice to have a decently performing open source 3D driver (the guesstimate is that the open source driver will reach 60-70% performance eventually) but the exact tuning of the formula one drivers is still kept tight.
Only a Linux diehard would pay for those massively overpriced old games. Any cost-concious person would buy them used or off steam for 10-20% the price. So add DRM on top of that? Yeah right, not for my money.
If only Video Card makers would open up their standards so open source drivers can be used for them.
*cough*. Oh wait, you expect them to write the drivers for you as well, using their own specs? Actually they are doing that too, but they need lots of help because most of their resources are tied up in the closed source FPS battle with nVidia. But your excuse is certainly outdated....
Nvidia didn't just write a regualr binary driver, they had to rewrite a large chunk of Xwindow and package the resulting mess in a large drop-in binary blob, unstable and heavily dependant on the kernel version.
This part you got backwards. Because they did a pretty clear cut that depends little on kernel versions, they've constantly been much faster at supporting the latest kernels than AMD, like for example kernel 2.6.29 was released in March and supported only by Catalyst in the August release from a few days ago.
(...) windows (non)emulation can not keep up with Microsofts technical progress on directx. So many recent AAA games in every genre are listed as 'bronze' or 'garbage'.
Yes, they are. However, very few of these are related to the Direct3D part of WINE and if they are they're usually solved by installing the d3d dlls. However closed source is very prone to crashing if anything else isn't as it should, particularly Microsoft's Live services have been a big problem. Games that actually get past that like World In Conflict have quite decent performance on par with Windows, same with King's Bounty that's a fairly 3D intensive non-FPS.
The PC gaming market is small enough to justify p[orting to a platform that is a tiny fraction (about 1%) of users.
Yep, this is what it is about. Not just Linux users, but the intersection between those Linux users interested in a high-end FPS having the hardware and willingness to pay with the market that isn't already getting it somewhere on Windows. Don't get me wrong, I get what's native when I can, what's running in WINE when it works, but there's no competing with a Wintendo box...
Sounds like somebody's been flying business or full-flex economy. The regular tickets definately either don't let you do that at all or against a high fee.
I'd say the primary reason to get things like that up in the media is the war over the "public meaning" of things. For example, I think in my country the consumer protection agency would be all over them and say "Well, if you're delivering Internet subscription at 1/3rd the speed, you have to advertise it as such. You can't say 'up to' but only on specific protocols, sites and on friday the 13th under a full moon". If they have to instead say "2Mbit Internet, up to 6Mbit on selected websites" it'll pretty much kill the advantage of promising something you're not delivering.
I care, because I pay the electricity bill.
Mother Earth cares, because of the millions and millions gamers out there.
Well yes, but to be honest... I'm fairly sure the 42" TV I'm pulling the Wii up on consumes lots more power than the Wii itself, probably in the 100-150W range. In any case, for $/hour of entertainment isn't exactly breaking the bank anyway.
So, not special trials per se, but a process that rules out anyone with domain knowledge relevant to the trial is fundamentally broken. The number of really bad car analogies that get made here everyday among the relatively technically astute should be proof enough that requiring the issues to be dumbed down for an uneducated jury is not a very good way to run the system.
So in a medical misconduct trial you want 12 doctors on the jury, able to understand the medical evidence? In a copyright infringement trial, you want 12 copyright experts which inevitably have tight links to the copyright industry on the jury? I certainly don't think you'd want 12 policemen with domain knowledge on what police work involves in a trial about excessive police violence.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's better than any other system we've tried. Honestly, if you compare it to the 1700s when they decided this was how US trials should look like (ok, the jury system is probably older and inherited somewhere) then the people on the jury certainly weren't educated. Honestly, if you can't dumb down the essence of the case to where normal people understand it, there's something very wrong.