Their argument was against this fantasy that the GC is outselling the Xbox worldwide. There didn't seem to be any argument that the GC is a failure, was there?
Yeah, you're right--my comment in that post was really to address the (numerous) threads which had sprung up debating the Gamecube's success, whether or not Nintendo would be the next Sega, that sort of thing. Including it in that post was a bit confusing.
Playstation 2
70 million
Gamecube
13.94 million
Xbox
13.7 million
Now, those numbers are pretty old, so let's try to find something more recent, like sales statistics for 2004. Now the playing field looks a bit like this:
Playstation 2
81.39 million
Gamecube
18.03 million
Xbox
19.9 million
So you're correct in saying that the Gamecube didn't outsell the Xbox as of the end of 2004, but that's relatively recent, and the Gamecube is certainly much closer to the Xbox in terms of sales than either of them are to the Playstation 2. You can draw your own conclusions at this point--I don't have a preference either way--but I think it would be somewhat unfair and short-sighted to say that the Gamecube was a failure.
As an aside, I suppose that "Nintendo makes money on Gamecube sales" is a somewhat salient point because, after all, if they're still making money, they'll most likely keep on making consoles.
While I agree that it makes no real sense, you have to admit that there's a certain standard of politeness found in languages and this is just part of it.
Take this for example:
"Hey, get the hell outta my way!"
vs.
"Excuse me, but could you step to the side, please?"
Both of those statements mean the same thing, but one is clearly more polite (and will likely be better received) than the other. That's just how human beings work and it's difficult to change it because it's so ingrained. I mean, it's all well and good to think to yourself "well, I won't be offended by fuck and shit and all those other naughty words," but can you really say that? Wouldn't you be upset if someone came up to you and called your significant other a "fucking cunt" (or a "cocksucking fag," or an appropriate insult, whatever)?
Language is a funny thing, but we really have to accept that there are certain standards of decency that are imposed on us by modern society and it behooves us to follow them. This is not to say that I promote censorship on a private medium--on the contrary, I feel fully that you should be allowed to say, view, or hear whatever you want, provided you go looking for it. Personally, I think that modern standards of decency are pretty bizarre, but I think that we simply have to shrug our shoulders at that and move on.
Just so you know, by default, Thunderbird only checks the Inbox folder for new messages.
This can be adjusted by right-clicking on each folder, selecting properties, and ticking the 'Check this folder for new messages' box. That's pretty stupid, in my opinion, and it doesn't actually work that well in my experience. For example, when I receive a new mail in my inbox and get a tray notification, if I go to the inbox, read the mail, and classify it as junk, Thunderbird will move it to my junk mail folder (which is also set to 'check for new messages') and cause another tray notification despite the fact that the mail it just received has already been read (and is flagged as such).
Otherwise, yes, I totally agree with you about the local vs. remote preferences.
I've only received that initial ad myself, but if you look in the Steam preferences under 'Messages,' it does appear that Valve will send you instant messages (using their 'friends' network, I presume) about games you own and titles that they release in the future.
You can, of course, uncheck the two boxes and then never get bothered again (in theory, anyways). As I said, I've never received any messages to that effect. I'm just guessing based on the preferences and these vague complaints of "it shows ads."
The way suprnova.org survives is, I imagine, the same justification that other sites like thepiratebay.org survive.
To use thepiratebay.org as an example, in Sweden it's not illegal to run a site like that because all the site hosts is torrents and a tracker for the torrents. The torrents themselves aren't copyrighted material--that's all on the users' machines--but really just text telling you where to go to find it. So they can't be sued for hosting the torrents any more than you can sue someone for shouting "hey, you can usually buy stolen stuff in that alley over there".
I don't know if that's really appropriate under the law of Sweden (or whereever suprnova.org is), but thepiratebay.org seems confident enough in it to ignore any legal threats they've received and, well, they haven't been shut down yet.
There are supposedly significant compiler optimizations for the AMD64 architecture in GCC 3.4; I don't have the details and I'm too lazy to look them up at the moment, but that's what I've heard.
However, addressing the grandparent's original issue, I think that GCC 3.4 has been the default for AMD64 for a while now (maybe even in 2004.2?) so it's not really an issue.
Yes. All you have to do (not in Gentoo at the moment, so forgive my lack of specifics) is change the make.profile symlink to the new profile (the one which corresponds to the liveCD release using x.org) and do an emerge -uvD world.
No, if you really don't want to support them, don't buy it and don't play it.
You look like nothing more than an opportunistic thief if you're willing to break the law and then justify it by saying "I'm trying to stick it to the man! If Blizzard wasn't such a bastard company, I would've bought the game instead of pirating it!" The bottom line is that if you don't want to support a company whose practices you don't approve of, don't use their products (which means, gasp, you have to suffer a bit because you don't have them).
I know I'm not going to be buying another EA game soon, but it's not hard for me because I don't like sports games and I've got more than enough versions of SimCity kicking around.
You might have a point if this were, say, an independent organization of concerned citizens and EA employees (former and current) running a website supporting a campaign to improve workers' rights.
But it's not. It's entirely unremarkable that a site which covers news and has no vested interest in seeing a story go one way or another would run ads for a company covered in the story.
If Winzip isn't "shareware" but is instead "nagware", what the hell is shareware then?
Basically, you're saying that they're supposed to release a product for people to download that is feature complete, then expect people to pay for it (if they like it, of course), all without ever telling them that it's not actually free (because that would make it "nagware" and not "shareware")?
Re:Emphasis on AGAIN
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 2, Informative
vehicles - first game I know of that you could DRIVE vehicles in an FPS game.
Ah, yes, because, you know, silly games like Tribes 1 (and 2!) didn't have real vehicles, not like Halo.
Although I believe his accusation is still tripe, it's funny that you should mention millions of dollars in donations...
The charts for 2000 and 2002 show AT&T donating a total of $4.1 million to the Republican party.
Obligatory disclaimer: I just grabbed those numbers from Google so don't place all manner of faith in them (though the site claims they came from the Federal Election Commission), they didn't donate nearly so much in the 2004 cycle, and I'm sure they probably donated a similar amount to the Democrats.
To repeat: Nothing happens during a Gentoo install that can't be duplicated by simply installing the same software from source. Gentoo's problem is that it makes you wait hours while it compiles and optimizes programs that you either won't use or won't notice are faster unless you run a benchmark program.
So, yes, you did say that nothing happens during a Gentoo install which can't be duplicated. You'll also note that I didn't argue this point. What I was addressing was your next claim, that "Gentoo's problem is that it makes you wait hours while it compiles..." (emphasis mine). Gentoo doesn't make you wait any more than any other source-based distribution does (the waiting implicit in all source-based distributions is, of course, the compiling). As I said in my post, you can skip through pretty much all of that compilation during the install (with a stage3 install) and during actual use (by utilizing binary package repositories). Therefore, your statement is incorrect.
You will also note that nowhere in my post did I state that the process behind what Gentoo is doing is unique. You may refute that argument as much as you wish (I won't stand in your way, don't worry), but it will have no bearing on what I've said. Additionally, I did not say that you argued that the compilations took too long. From my original post:
You
can argue that compiling software in general takes too long...
I was attempting to address another common concern with Gentoo, one which relates to what you said ("Why should I spend hours waiting..."), but not actually implying that you had a serious issue with it. My apologies if it appeared as though I was trying to put words in your mouth.
I also argued, correctly, that Slackware does not "force" me to install software I don't want to use.
I never argued that Slackware forced you into installing software you don't want to use or that Gentoo offers more choice than Slackware (or innumerable other distributions). I said that Gentoo, like Slackware, doesn't force things on you either, be it package selection or having to sit through a bunch of compiles during an install.
In my opinion, the City of Heroes engine actually seemed to work pretty well, from a performance perspective. My Athlon64 3000 and Radeon 9800 Pro give me acceptable framerates without slowdowns, but that's with two things: world detail and character detail at 100% (definite slowdown at 200%) and no AA/AF. Your mileage may vary if you prefer higher quality settings (oh, I run it at 1280x1024 before that comes up), but it seems to run appreciably better than, say, FFXI on my machine.
However, I totally hear you on complaints about the netcode. If you incur any packet loss (it's not uncommon for my university connection to hit 3-5% loss, which doesn't disturb Quake 3, FFXI, or Guild Wars very much) the game tends to have serious issues handling it; many times, it will just crash repeatedly rather than lose connection. You can get an ingame ping to the servers with the netgraph (/net_graph 1) but I'm pretty sure they're all on the east coast. I'm in the Midwest and I ping 130-150 on average.
WoW's engine had some key design decisions that grant it pretty good performance all over (the cartoonish style, which I personally dislike, allows them to lower polygon counts a bit), and I do agree that it's probably better coded.
Oh well, City of Heroes is decent fun when it's getting along with my connection.
I will admit that the base install of Gentoo is quite sparse, but as you said, that's only intended to give you the option to populate your drive with programs you really do want.
However, it also doesn't take particularly long to install--if you do a stage3 install. Stage3 will avoid compiling and optimizing "all those programs you won't use or won't notice" (this includes, say, gcc) and only require you to compile a syslogger, cron daemon (if you wish), and the kernel. From that point on, any compilation is for programs you presumably (since you told it to install them) will use.
You can argue that compiling software in general takes too long (possibly true, but if that's not your bag, there's always Debian) and that optimizations don't really do very much (also quite true, but in my case, for example, I use Gentoo because I like its 'feel' and I prefer Portage to apt), but the Gentoo install in no way forces you to sit through all the compilation and optimization that stage1 and 2 do.
Also, there are binary repositories out there for Gentoo (not run by the Gentoo folks, mind you, but by independent third parties), so you can enjoy the benefits of running Gentoo without all that damn compiling, if you trust random fellows on the internet. The bottom line is that yes, Gentoo compiles a lot, being a source-based distribution, but they don't tend to force you into anything that the other source-based distributions don't require.
I would be willing to bet that piracy would occur even if prices for PC games were cut drastically. Serious Sam (and its sequel) were both introduced at a budget price of $20 and they're probably available for less than $10 at many retailers, but I would suspect that if you went to the big torrent sites, you'd see at least a few people leeching them. In this situation, if you are upset with the industry's pricing, don't spend your money on the game. That doesn't give you a free license to pirate it, either; the developer loses your money and you give up the enjoyment you would've gained from playing the game. That's how the laws are written and how the system works; if enough people do this, the prices will drop. I honestly hate telling people that this is their only option, but it's the only way to do it legally and attempting to legitimize your options by saying "oh, well, they charge too much, those fuckers, so I'm going to get back at them by pirating it!"
All that being said, you've vastly misrepresented the pricing scheme for Half-Life 2. As you see on the Steam website, Half-Life 2 with CS: Source is $50. The silver package (which includes all of Valve's games plus Day of Defeat: Source) is $60. Now, granted, the collector's edition is priced at a whopping $90 on their website, but many other retailers have it listed for $70-80. This gives you everything that the previous packages had (on DVD, if you buy the retail version rather than the Steam copy) plus a bunch of other crap (soundtrack, T-shirt, 'making of' DVD, fancy box, etc). You're hardly being forced into paying $80.
Isn't most of this stuff a bit.. well.. obvious? The gist of the article appears to be "find a laptop with a small hard drive? upgrade it (through some unmentioned means of salvage from your friends who happen to have old laptop hard drives) or use things that don't require a lot of space!" and "have a laptop with a low resolution screen? run things that are low resolution!"
I mean, the suggestions as to what to run in which situation are helpful, but I like to think that if I were dealing with those problems, I'd be able to figure those solutions out as well.
Oh well, it killed a few minutes.
Re:Only need IE to get past 'unknown browser' scre
on
Redmondmag on Dumping IE
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But then the administrator of that page sees these articles about how alternative browsers are gaining momentum in the vacuum left by a lack of IE updates, checks his logs, sees that (amazingly) almost everyone who visits his page is using a version of IE, and decides that there's no reason to spend the time making it render properly in the other browsers or to even remove the browser ID check.
If the site isn't crucial (and personally I've never encountered a crucial site, corporate intranet or otherwise), then it's better to make your impression in the logs as a frustrated Mozilla/Opera user. Additionally, sending a polite email to the webmaster asking them to change their page wouldn't be a bad idea. If enough people do that, perhaps the site will be changed and the internet will be a little better for all of us.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the "big driver push" will give us drivers that work on X.org 6.8.1 without crashing whenever you attempt to use the GL features.
I predict that these drivers will be available around the time that 6.9.0 comes out.
I'm certainly no taxonomist, but when I took a course in zoology, the preferred name was Felis sylvestris catus. Of course, even then, some people used sylvestris and others used silvestris essentially interchangeably.
The Straight Dope suggests that this derives from the wild-type progenitor, Felis sylvestris lybica. Honestly, you could probably get away with any of them but the second.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times do you intend to keep posting that Longhorn rant?
Their argument was against this fantasy that the GC is outselling the Xbox worldwide. There didn't seem to be any argument that the GC is a failure, was there?
Yeah, you're right--my comment in that post was really to address the (numerous) threads which had sprung up debating the Gamecube's success, whether or not Nintendo would be the next Sega, that sort of thing. Including it in that post was a bit confusing.
Gamecube outsold Xbox in worldwide totals
Uh... source? No, it didn't.
Well, let's take a little look at Google and find out, shall we?
According to console sales statistics for 2003, worldwide sales for the three consoles looked a bit like this:
Playstation 2 70 million Gamecube 13.94 million Xbox 13.7 millionNow, those numbers are pretty old, so let's try to find something more recent, like sales statistics for 2004. Now the playing field looks a bit like this:
Playstation 2 81.39 million Gamecube 18.03 million Xbox 19.9 millionSo you're correct in saying that the Gamecube didn't outsell the Xbox as of the end of 2004, but that's relatively recent, and the Gamecube is certainly much closer to the Xbox in terms of sales than either of them are to the Playstation 2. You can draw your own conclusions at this point--I don't have a preference either way--but I think it would be somewhat unfair and short-sighted to say that the Gamecube was a failure.
As an aside, I suppose that "Nintendo makes money on Gamecube sales" is a somewhat salient point because, after all, if they're still making money, they'll most likely keep on making consoles.
While I agree that it makes no real sense, you have to admit that there's a certain standard of politeness found in languages and this is just part of it.
Take this for example:
"Hey, get the hell outta my way!"
vs.
"Excuse me, but could you step to the side, please?"
Both of those statements mean the same thing, but one is clearly more polite (and will likely be better received) than the other. That's just how human beings work and it's difficult to change it because it's so ingrained. I mean, it's all well and good to think to yourself "well, I won't be offended by fuck and shit and all those other naughty words," but can you really say that? Wouldn't you be upset if someone came up to you and called your significant other a "fucking cunt" (or a "cocksucking fag," or an appropriate insult, whatever)?
Language is a funny thing, but we really have to accept that there are certain standards of decency that are imposed on us by modern society and it behooves us to follow them. This is not to say that I promote censorship on a private medium--on the contrary, I feel fully that you should be allowed to say, view, or hear whatever you want, provided you go looking for it. Personally, I think that modern standards of decency are pretty bizarre, but I think that we simply have to shrug our shoulders at that and move on.
Just so you know, by default, Thunderbird only checks the Inbox folder for new messages.
This can be adjusted by right-clicking on each folder, selecting properties, and ticking the 'Check this folder for new messages' box. That's pretty stupid, in my opinion, and it doesn't actually work that well in my experience. For example, when I receive a new mail in my inbox and get a tray notification, if I go to the inbox, read the mail, and classify it as junk, Thunderbird will move it to my junk mail folder (which is also set to 'check for new messages') and cause another tray notification despite the fact that the mail it just received has already been read (and is flagged as such).
Otherwise, yes, I totally agree with you about the local vs. remote preferences.
I've only received that initial ad myself, but if you look in the Steam preferences under 'Messages,' it does appear that Valve will send you instant messages (using their 'friends' network, I presume) about games you own and titles that they release in the future.
You can, of course, uncheck the two boxes and then never get bothered again (in theory, anyways). As I said, I've never received any messages to that effect. I'm just guessing based on the preferences and these vague complaints of "it shows ads."
We'll see how Steam looks in another year or two.
Actually, that's Valve you're thinking of--you know, the company distributing games over Steam.
Blizzard is the one using bittorrent to distribute its patches, and their implementation of it is exceedingly poor.
The way suprnova.org survives is, I imagine, the same justification that other sites like thepiratebay.org survive.
To use thepiratebay.org as an example, in Sweden it's not illegal to run a site like that because all the site hosts is torrents and a tracker for the torrents. The torrents themselves aren't copyrighted material--that's all on the users' machines--but really just text telling you where to go to find it. So they can't be sued for hosting the torrents any more than you can sue someone for shouting "hey, you can usually buy stolen stuff in that alley over there".
I don't know if that's really appropriate under the law of Sweden (or whereever suprnova.org is), but thepiratebay.org seems confident enough in it to ignore any legal threats they've received and, well, they haven't been shut down yet.
There are supposedly significant compiler optimizations for the AMD64 architecture in GCC 3.4; I don't have the details and I'm too lazy to look them up at the moment, but that's what I've heard.
However, addressing the grandparent's original issue, I think that GCC 3.4 has been the default for AMD64 for a while now (maybe even in 2004.2?) so it's not really an issue.
Yes. All you have to do (not in Gentoo at the moment, so forgive my lack of specifics) is change the make.profile symlink to the new profile (the one which corresponds to the liveCD release using x.org) and do an emerge -uvD world.
No, if you really don't want to support them, don't buy it and don't play it.
You look like nothing more than an opportunistic thief if you're willing to break the law and then justify it by saying "I'm trying to stick it to the man! If Blizzard wasn't such a bastard company, I would've bought the game instead of pirating it!" The bottom line is that if you don't want to support a company whose practices you don't approve of, don't use their products (which means, gasp, you have to suffer a bit because you don't have them).
I know I'm not going to be buying another EA game soon, but it's not hard for me because I don't like sports games and I've got more than enough versions of SimCity kicking around.
Yeah, nice justification! They did something wrong so that means I can do it too!
You might have a point if this were, say, an independent organization of concerned citizens and EA employees (former and current) running a website supporting a campaign to improve workers' rights.
But it's not. It's entirely unremarkable that a site which covers news and has no vested interest in seeing a story go one way or another would run ads for a company covered in the story.
If Winzip isn't "shareware" but is instead "nagware", what the hell is shareware then?
Basically, you're saying that they're supposed to release a product for people to download that is feature complete, then expect people to pay for it (if they like it, of course), all without ever telling them that it's not actually free (because that would make it "nagware" and not "shareware")?
Ah, yes, because, you know, silly games like Tribes 1 (and 2!) didn't have real vehicles, not like Halo.
</sarcasm>Although I believe his accusation is still tripe, it's funny that you should mention millions of dollars in donations...
The charts for 2000 and 2002 show AT&T donating a total of $4.1 million to the Republican party.
Obligatory disclaimer: I just grabbed those numbers from Google so don't place all manner of faith in them (though the site claims they came from the Federal Election Commission), they didn't donate nearly so much in the 2004 cycle, and I'm sure they probably donated a similar amount to the Democrats.
Apparently not, yourself included.
From the post I replied to:
So, yes, you did say that nothing happens during a Gentoo install which can't be duplicated. You'll also note that I didn't argue this point. What I was addressing was your next claim, that "Gentoo's problem is that it makes you wait hours while it compiles ..." (emphasis mine). Gentoo doesn't make you wait any more than any other source-based distribution does (the waiting implicit in all source-based distributions is, of course, the compiling). As I said in my post, you can skip through pretty much all of that compilation during the install (with a stage3 install) and during actual use (by utilizing binary package repositories). Therefore, your statement is incorrect.
You will also note that nowhere in my post did I state that the process behind what Gentoo is doing is unique. You may refute that argument as much as you wish (I won't stand in your way, don't worry), but it will have no bearing on what I've said. Additionally, I did not say that you argued that the compilations took too long. From my original post:
I was attempting to address another common concern with Gentoo, one which relates to what you said ("Why should I spend hours waiting ..."), but not actually implying that you had a serious issue with it. My apologies if it appeared as though I was trying to put words in your mouth.
I never argued that Slackware forced you into installing software you don't want to use or that Gentoo offers more choice than Slackware (or innumerable other distributions). I said that Gentoo, like Slackware, doesn't force things on you either, be it package selection or having to sit through a bunch of compiles during an install.
In my opinion, the City of Heroes engine actually seemed to work pretty well, from a performance perspective. My Athlon64 3000 and Radeon 9800 Pro give me acceptable framerates without slowdowns, but that's with two things: world detail and character detail at 100% (definite slowdown at 200%) and no AA/AF. Your mileage may vary if you prefer higher quality settings (oh, I run it at 1280x1024 before that comes up), but it seems to run appreciably better than, say, FFXI on my machine.
However, I totally hear you on complaints about the netcode. If you incur any packet loss (it's not uncommon for my university connection to hit 3-5% loss, which doesn't disturb Quake 3, FFXI, or Guild Wars very much) the game tends to have serious issues handling it; many times, it will just crash repeatedly rather than lose connection. You can get an ingame ping to the servers with the netgraph (/net_graph 1) but I'm pretty sure they're all on the east coast. I'm in the Midwest and I ping 130-150 on average.
WoW's engine had some key design decisions that grant it pretty good performance all over (the cartoonish style, which I personally dislike, allows them to lower polygon counts a bit), and I do agree that it's probably better coded.
Oh well, City of Heroes is decent fun when it's getting along with my connection.
I will admit that the base install of Gentoo is quite sparse, but as you said, that's only intended to give you the option to populate your drive with programs you really do want.
However, it also doesn't take particularly long to install--if you do a stage3 install. Stage3 will avoid compiling and optimizing "all those programs you won't use or won't notice" (this includes, say, gcc) and only require you to compile a syslogger, cron daemon (if you wish), and the kernel. From that point on, any compilation is for programs you presumably (since you told it to install them) will use.
You can argue that compiling software in general takes too long (possibly true, but if that's not your bag, there's always Debian) and that optimizations don't really do very much (also quite true, but in my case, for example, I use Gentoo because I like its 'feel' and I prefer Portage to apt), but the Gentoo install in no way forces you to sit through all the compilation and optimization that stage1 and 2 do.
Also, there are binary repositories out there for Gentoo (not run by the Gentoo folks, mind you, but by independent third parties), so you can enjoy the benefits of running Gentoo without all that damn compiling, if you trust random fellows on the internet. The bottom line is that yes, Gentoo compiles a lot, being a source-based distribution, but they don't tend to force you into anything that the other source-based distributions don't require.
I would be willing to bet that piracy would occur even if prices for PC games were cut drastically. Serious Sam (and its sequel) were both introduced at a budget price of $20 and they're probably available for less than $10 at many retailers, but I would suspect that if you went to the big torrent sites, you'd see at least a few people leeching them. In this situation, if you are upset with the industry's pricing, don't spend your money on the game. That doesn't give you a free license to pirate it, either; the developer loses your money and you give up the enjoyment you would've gained from playing the game. That's how the laws are written and how the system works; if enough people do this, the prices will drop. I honestly hate telling people that this is their only option, but it's the only way to do it legally and attempting to legitimize your options by saying "oh, well, they charge too much, those fuckers, so I'm going to get back at them by pirating it!"
All that being said, you've vastly misrepresented the pricing scheme for Half-Life 2. As you see on the Steam website, Half-Life 2 with CS: Source is $50. The silver package (which includes all of Valve's games plus Day of Defeat: Source) is $60. Now, granted, the collector's edition is priced at a whopping $90 on their website, but many other retailers have it listed for $70-80. This gives you everything that the previous packages had (on DVD, if you buy the retail version rather than the Steam copy) plus a bunch of other crap (soundtrack, T-shirt, 'making of' DVD, fancy box, etc). You're hardly being forced into paying $80.
It's worth noting that http://mail.google.com actually does take you to gmail.
Isn't most of this stuff a bit.. well.. obvious? The gist of the article appears to be "find a laptop with a small hard drive? upgrade it (through some unmentioned means of salvage from your friends who happen to have old laptop hard drives) or use things that don't require a lot of space!" and "have a laptop with a low resolution screen? run things that are low resolution!"
I mean, the suggestions as to what to run in which situation are helpful, but I like to think that if I were dealing with those problems, I'd be able to figure those solutions out as well.
Oh well, it killed a few minutes.
But then the administrator of that page sees these articles about how alternative browsers are gaining momentum in the vacuum left by a lack of IE updates, checks his logs, sees that (amazingly) almost everyone who visits his page is using a version of IE, and decides that there's no reason to spend the time making it render properly in the other browsers or to even remove the browser ID check.
If the site isn't crucial (and personally I've never encountered a crucial site, corporate intranet or otherwise), then it's better to make your impression in the logs as a frustrated Mozilla/Opera user. Additionally, sending a polite email to the webmaster asking them to change their page wouldn't be a bad idea. If enough people do that, perhaps the site will be changed and the internet will be a little better for all of us.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the "big driver push" will give us drivers that work on X.org 6.8.1 without crashing whenever you attempt to use the GL features.
I predict that these drivers will be available around the time that 6.9.0 comes out.
I'm certainly no taxonomist, but when I took a course in zoology, the preferred name was Felis sylvestris catus. Of course, even then, some people used sylvestris and others used silvestris essentially interchangeably.
The Straight Dope suggests that this derives from the wild-type progenitor, Felis sylvestris lybica. Honestly, you could probably get away with any of them but the second.