The solution has been staring everyone in the face since 9/11, and nobody wants to do it because, geez, we'd have to add $10 to every airticket, and that's taxation, and everyone hates taxes right? It's the air marshall system - put an armed guard on every flight, well trained, no nonsense, plain clothed for what extra security that gives. And while you're at it, train the crews.
I don't know, it seems odd to me for a publicly traded company to post a notice like that asking for financial support in the form of donations. That seems like it would panic the shareholders and hurt them even more in the long run. The sensible thing would be to lay off those emplyees not contributing to the core of Mandrake's business and save some money in those non revenue generating areas.
It sounds to me like they're not so much asking for donations as asking people to subscribe to a service. They call it a "club", but basically it's an add-on to the OS -- access to extra tech support, extra programs to download, etc. I guess you can call it asking for donations, but it sounds to me more like they're trying to boost revenue from one product (the club) until they can get a boost from another product (the soon-to-be-released new distro).
Linux gamers flocked to these forums pleading with people -- even non-gamers -- to buy something from Loki so they could stay afloat. Hopefully this will show that blind loyalty to a platform (Linux, Windows, who cares? They're all OSes, not religions) is sometimes misguided.
Sure, because obviously if a company is broke, the way to help them is to not buy their products. Obviously.
Seriously, does anyone think that any of this would have happened if Loki had been profitable? Okay, actually that's a complicated question. Still, may I suggest an alternative scenario? Perhaps if people had bought more Loki games over the years, not only would Loki still be around, but those employees would have been paid as well? It's easy to assume the worst once the worst has actually happened. That doesn't mean that it couldn't have turned out different.
As a player of Loki games, I benefitted from the existence of the company. I got to play games more easily than if I had to dual-boot or deal with Wine. And of course, the Linux community (and thus myself, indirectly) benefitted from OpenAL and SDL development. Why should I support a company whose existence benefits me? Do I even have to answer that question?
So what do I think of Loki now? Good products, glad I bought them. Yes, I feel sorry for those employees who were screwed. I (like they?) wish this hadn't happened. Perhaps Draeker would have sunk the company no matter what. Or perhaps if more people had bought Loki games (instead of pirating them, perhaps?) then things would have been better.
It costs too much politically to wage a war that gets attention for too long.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't recall having ever heard anyone say that WWII "went on too long". Vietnam, on the other hand...
I suspect that it really depends on the justification for the war. When another nation attacks you, that one thing. That's an honest-to-god war. When you attack another nation with a vague goal (such as "stop the spread of Communism"), then you're going to suffer politically. When a small organization attacks you and this results in a war, that's something really weird (and hard to call).
Imagine if egyption hyroglifics had been encrypted too.
Remember the Navajo code-talkers of WWII? In the casual sense, "encrypted" just means "obfuscated". In that sense, all languages are "encrypted" -- to non-speakers, that is.
When certain people I work with want to have a private conversation with each other, they speak Spanish. An encrypted communications channel? Not in the technical sense, but it works!
We can not allow Congress to do this. The Constitution prohibits them from regulating this industry.
Actually, I would have guessed that the Internet is about the ultimate in "Interstate Commerce", which Congress is not only allowed to regulate according to the Consitution, but is actually expected to regulate (because who else can, the states?)
And Samurai Jack, for example (the animation is more interesting than the plots, though).
And what about Spike and Mike's animation festivals? It's not all good stuff, but I've discovered some stuff there that I sure like (such as Don Hertzfeldt's work)
Every single incoming freshman, regardless of race, creed, color, or any of that other BS, enthusiastically sang "Kill the wabbit. Kill the WABBIT. KILL the WABBIT."
And people say there's no common cultural heritage anymore.
I hope this doesn't come off sounding too grouchy, but I have to say one thing. Chuck Jones' cartoons are our common cultural heritage because of all-pervasiveness of television (They're not shown before feature films any more!) And that is definately a double-edged sword.
I hate to bring this up, since they probably don't like it, but some news servers still accept postings by e-mail. So you could try alt.net.abuse@your.mailserver (or whatever anti-spam newsgroup you choose). Of course, this is terribly rude, and is probably obvious enough to be filtered out by the spammers, but who knows? As an alternative, wasn't there an e-mail address mentioned on SlashDot not so long ago for reporting spam? What was that e-mail again?
Programmers either need deterministic response in their applications or they don't. If they do, then Linux is not their OS. If they don't, then these half-baked solutions to reduce context switching time and interrupt latency are probably going to be fun to play with, but will cause nightmares in the long run.
Well, if this patch makes X more responsive (as was mentioned in the article, I believe), then it's useful just for that reason. Programmers may not "need" it, but lots of Linux users will sure be appreciative:)
On the other hand, couldn't such a patch be useful for systems which are recording data at a specific sample rate? For example, if a system needs to read data from some input device at 250Hz, wouldn't 1.5ms worst-case latency be enough to guarantee that no data samples are missed?
But like the "Tick" guy said in his interview, the whole letter-writing campaign thing has been played to death.
Funny, I though the whole "letter writing" thing was based on the known statistical bias built into the Neilsen system. Single 18-30 year olds don't have Neilsen boxes. Families of four do. So if you can prove that a valuable (to advertisers) demographic is actually watching the show, you might convince the network to keep it on the air. The point is to prove that an audience is there, but that they aren't reflected in the Neilsens. If we give those Fox execs something to show potential advertisers other than mediocre Neilsens, they might just be able to make some money by keeping the show on the air. Fox execs may be complete morons otherwise, but I'm willing to bet they know something about selling advertising.
I think your conclusion is a bit too strong. From the original:
This is useful if you want to run Linux and not run the monitor, or if your monitor is broken.
I do believe I see the word "or" in there. The post is not all about Linux. There's a specific mention of a way that knowing how to disconnect the display could be useful for non-Linux users. Presumably the reason for mentioning Linux first is that the post was submitted by a Linux user. There seem to be a lot of those around here.
As for your general complaint, yes, there do seem to be more Linux-related stories on SlashDot than stories which focus (at least in a positive manner) on any other OS. (We'll ignore all the other topics like DVDs and Anime and so on). *BSD fans also complain about this sometimes:) What it boils down to is this: either more Linux-related stories get submitted, or more get selected. If the former, then the Linux bias could be due to more input coming from the Linux users. Or perhaps there are just more Linux users on SlashDot than any other group. Either way, it's hard to complain when the majority is getting majority representation. You want to see stories on other OSes? Submit them!
If the latter, then you might have something to complain about. You know who to complain to:)
The story says that there are more BugTraq entries for Linux than Windows 2000. QED.
Yeah, and likewise, according to the full stats, there were three times as many NT/2000 bugs as Win98/95/3.1 bugs. Thus, Windows 3.1 is three times more secure than Windows 2000!
The reality, of course, is that we don't know what they mean by "Linux (aggr)". They have separate lists for SUSE, RedHat, Debian, etc. Ony RedHat had more vulnerabilities than Windows 2000. Even then, "RedHat" means the entire distro. That means that they're counting far more software (i.e. three different ftp servers) than for Windows 2000.
So in summary, if you don't tell the whole truth, you can support just about any claim...:)
Another example -- it sounds like Unreal Tournament greatly outsold Quake III. UT can be played unaccelerated (don't laugh, I know people who do this and have fun), and it played fine on the shitty i810 PC I had at an old job. QIII barely played on the hardware that was out at the time of it's release (PII, TNT2, for example)
Every review I've seen says that UT is heavily CPU bound (including that Anandtech video card review posted eariler today). High-end CPUs are probably far more common than high-end video cards. You can't buy less than 700Mhz nowadays, but you can still get crappy onboard video. If UT framerates really tie in so well to CPU performance, that might explain its popularity.
On the other hand, I remember getting 30FPS from a K6-2 333 and a Matrox G200 in QIII, then seeing that jump up to 50-60 with a Celeron 533, then up to 120 or so with a GeForce DDR (all at 640x480, but 32-bit color and all special effects). So I'm not so confident about your claim that QIII needs serious hardware. I bet that a PII and a TNT2 would be playable. The problem is, you can still buy computers even today with Trident Cyberblade UMA-based video, which isn't even as good as that:)
What we got from Linux users were not sales, but tons of email demanding that we put up the binary executeables on an ftp site for free so they could download them and use them with their Windows version of the game.
This goes back to the dual-booting problem. Linux and Windows both run on x86 hardware, while MacOS and AmigaOS do not (I assume most gamers are using x86 CPUs, not SPARCs:). Thus dual-booting to play games is an option for the Linux crowd only. Then there's Wine and (especially!) WineX, the latter being x86-Linux-only right now. My point being, most Linux users have the option to run Windows games somehow, awkward and unpleasant though it may be.
Meanwhile, Linux gamers had to wait an awfully long time for most games to come out after the Windows version was released. When they did, they cost twice as much as the Windows game because the Linux game was "new". If they already bought the Windows (or Mac) version, tough, they get to pay again. Given all this, I'm not surprised that the Linux game market didn't work out. There were some pretty strange economic models involved. Linux gamers have options that users of other OSes don't have. Yet they were being asked to put up with long delays and higher prices just so that they could have The Linux Version of a game. Of course it didn't work. If Linux users had no options, maybe they'd put up with this stuff. But alas, we do, and thus we tend to demand our games more-or-less on time and more-or-less reasonably priced. If they're not, we buy the Windows version. (In general... I personally own 6 Loki games, plus UT bought from TuxGames).
So now, let's look at those complaints from the perspective of someone who can dual-boot or use WineX. You got complaints from people who already had the Windows version. That is, they already paid for the game once. (I assume they could pirate the Linux version just as easily as the Windows one, so let's assume they have legit copies) There's a good chance they could get that game running on dual-booted Windows, or barring that, Wine/WineX. Isn't it obvious why they don't want to have to buy the game again? "Free beer"? Not from their point of view! They figure that they paid once already, so why pay again ("I'll just dual-boot instead until I can get WineX working...")? Obviously, this doesn't work for Hyperion:) But you see my point, right? The Linux market just wasn't going to work as well as other non-Windows markets, because we tend to have access to Windows. Yes, this may be terrible for Linux; but as far as the mob is concerned, second-class treatment just won't cut it.
I do want to thank you and Hyperion for porting some commercial games to Linux. Thanks for helping us out, especially given that it didn't work out financially for you. (Hindsight is 20-20 and all...) Good luck with the MacOS and AmigaOS markets.
Maybe it's because a lot of Linux users have a Win partition and rather than wait for 'Awesome Game X' to get ported, they buy the Win version...
Or they wait until the Linux version comes out, then they realize that they can buy the Windows version for about half the price (and in some cases, they can download a Linux binary!)
There are many reasons why the Linux game market is failing. They fact that it's an afterthought to most people is one of them.
Well a 1.1 Celeron is not really equal to a Duron 1.1 after all. In the real world you run a 1.1 duron on a kt266a with DDR getting you a "200"Mhz bus speed.
You're assuming that the Duron is matched with a high-end chipset. Didn't Anandtech do a review once that showed that on a cheaper motherboard (the kind found in the "budget" systems which generally contain Celerons and Durons) the Duron and Celeron performed about the same? Ah yes, here it is (link to the summary page). Note though that this old review involves the older Celeron and Duron cores, so it may not be 100% applicable to the present. Still, I would guess that most OEM Duron systems do not have kt266a boards in them. They have cheaper chipsets, like the SiS 735, perhaps paired with SDR memory. This is the "real world" for most computer buyers. People who know how to overclock are a special case (note, though, that Tom says that he wasn't able to unlock the 1.3Ghz Duron!)
In Tom's 1.3Ghz Duron review, the Duron generally (not always!) beats the Celeron, but it needs a more expensive motherboard and more expensive (DDR) memory to do it. Who knows what performance a cheaper OEM system would get? Perhaps the Duron would still be faster in this more typical configuration, but perhaps not.
Re:README, Release notes, etc.
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
but I want to step away from the crowd for a minute and ask: why Red Hat?
Well, "name recognition" comes right to mind.
Also, isn't Mandrake a French company? And SUSE is German... Perhaps merging with an American company would simply be easier?
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if an AOL version of RedHat would be used in a specialized device, like an AOL Internet Computer or an AOL PDA, not as a general-purpose OS that consumers can tinker with. Users are just supposed to use the GUI that AOL puts on top of it. So the present focus of the OS may not matter so much.
Then again, perhaps AOL might want a server OS of their own as well? If so, RedHat is probably better suited for the job than Mandrake, if only for reasons of stability.
While AOL could provide a huge shot in the arm to Linux (it wont make a huge jump to the desktop without being able to run AOL, sad but true), what geek wants to run an AOL OS?? Would AOL/TW put their icons everywhere, or try to include DRM in it?? AOL/TW isn't much better than MS after all, they cater to the lowest common denominator.
There's nothing wrong with a "lowest common denominator" version of Linux. Why should Linux be just for geeks? This will just be another distro, and there can be as many Linux distros as are needed. The geeks will just use a different one (Slackware, Debian, etc.)
Even the people who are presently using RedHat wouldn't be hurt much by this. I bet that if AOL bought RedHat, some community-supported distro based on the last release of RedHat would emerge (minus any proprietary software, of course) and fans of the "old" RedHat would just shift over to using that.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution has been staring everyone in the face since 9/11, and nobody wants to do it because, geez, we'd have to add $10 to every airticket, and that's taxation, and everyone hates taxes right? It's the air marshall system - put an armed guard on every flight, well trained, no nonsense, plain clothed for what extra security that gives. And while you're at it, train the crews.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that's been suggested (see the last two bullets).
I don't know, it seems odd to me for a publicly traded company to post a notice like that asking for financial support in the form of donations. That seems like it would panic the shareholders and hurt them even more in the long run. The sensible thing would be to lay off those emplyees not contributing to the core of Mandrake's business and save some money in those non revenue generating areas.
It sounds to me like they're not so much asking for donations as asking people to subscribe to a service. They call it a "club", but basically it's an add-on to the OS -- access to extra tech support, extra programs to download, etc. I guess you can call it asking for donations, but it sounds to me more like they're trying to boost revenue from one product (the club) until they can get a boost from another product (the soon-to-be-released new distro).
Linux gamers flocked to these forums pleading with people -- even non-gamers -- to buy something from Loki so they could stay afloat. Hopefully this will show that blind loyalty to a platform (Linux, Windows, who cares? They're all OSes, not religions) is sometimes misguided.
Sure, because obviously if a company is broke, the way to help them is to not buy their products. Obviously.
Seriously, does anyone think that any of this would have happened if Loki had been profitable? Okay, actually that's a complicated question. Still, may I suggest an alternative scenario? Perhaps if people had bought more Loki games over the years, not only would Loki still be around, but those employees would have been paid as well? It's easy to assume the worst once the worst has actually happened. That doesn't mean that it couldn't have turned out different.
As a player of Loki games, I benefitted from the existence of the company. I got to play games more easily than if I had to dual-boot or deal with Wine. And of course, the Linux community (and thus myself, indirectly) benefitted from OpenAL and SDL development. Why should I support a company whose existence benefits me? Do I even have to answer that question?
So what do I think of Loki now? Good products, glad I bought them. Yes, I feel sorry for those employees who were screwed. I (like they?) wish this hadn't happened. Perhaps Draeker would have sunk the company no matter what. Or perhaps if more people had bought Loki games (instead of pirating them, perhaps?) then things would have been better.
It costs too much politically to wage a war that gets attention for too long.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't recall having ever heard anyone say that WWII "went on too long". Vietnam, on the other hand...
I suspect that it really depends on the justification for the war. When another nation attacks you, that one thing. That's an honest-to-god war. When you attack another nation with a vague goal (such as "stop the spread of Communism"), then you're going to suffer politically. When a small organization attacks you and this results in a war, that's something really weird (and hard to call).
With this new version, Macromedia has added an accessibility object that will allow developers to specify alternate content for screen readers.
Lemme guess, this fancy new "accessibility object" lets you add text to your all-Flash webpages.
Ain't progress grand?
Imagine if egyption hyroglifics had been encrypted too.
Remember the Navajo code-talkers of WWII? In the casual sense, "encrypted" just means "obfuscated". In that sense, all languages are "encrypted" -- to non-speakers, that is.
When certain people I work with want to have a private conversation with each other, they speak Spanish. An encrypted communications channel? Not in the technical sense, but it works!
We can not allow Congress to do this. The Constitution prohibits them from regulating this industry.
Actually, I would have guessed that the Internet is about the ultimate in "Interstate Commerce", which Congress is not only allowed to regulate according to the Consitution, but is actually expected to regulate (because who else can, the states?)
Hrm... I might spend 500% more, but that means I'm 500% cooler than you!
Sorry guy, but 500% of zero is still zero...
And Samurai Jack, for example (the animation is more interesting than the plots, though).
And what about Spike and Mike's animation festivals? It's not all good stuff, but I've discovered some stuff there that I sure like (such as Don Hertzfeldt's work)
Every single incoming freshman, regardless of race, creed, color, or any of that other BS, enthusiastically sang "Kill the wabbit. Kill the WABBIT. KILL the WABBIT."
And people say there's no common cultural heritage anymore.
I hope this doesn't come off sounding too grouchy, but I have to say one thing. Chuck Jones' cartoons are our common cultural heritage because of all-pervasiveness of television (They're not shown before feature films any more!) And that is definately a double-edged sword.
I hate to bring this up, since they probably don't like it, but some news servers still accept postings by e-mail. So you could try alt.net.abuse@your.mailserver (or whatever anti-spam newsgroup you choose). Of course, this is terribly rude, and is probably obvious enough to be filtered out by the spammers, but who knows? As an alternative, wasn't there an e-mail address mentioned on SlashDot not so long ago for reporting spam? What was that e-mail again?
Programmers either need deterministic response in their applications or they don't. If they do, then Linux is not their OS. If they don't, then these half-baked solutions to reduce context switching time and interrupt latency are probably going to be fun to play with, but will cause nightmares in the long run.
:)
Well, if this patch makes X more responsive (as was mentioned in the article, I believe), then it's useful just for that reason. Programmers may not "need" it, but lots of Linux users will sure be appreciative
On the other hand, couldn't such a patch be useful for systems which are recording data at a specific sample rate? For example, if a system needs to read data from some input device at 250Hz, wouldn't 1.5ms worst-case latency be enough to guarantee that no data samples are missed?
But like the "Tick" guy said in his interview, the whole letter-writing campaign thing has been played to death.
Funny, I though the whole "letter writing" thing was based on the known statistical bias built into the Neilsen system. Single 18-30 year olds don't have Neilsen boxes. Families of four do. So if you can prove that a valuable (to advertisers) demographic is actually watching the show, you might convince the network to keep it on the air. The point is to prove that an audience is there, but that they aren't reflected in the Neilsens. If we give those Fox execs something to show potential advertisers other than mediocre Neilsens, they might just be able to make some money by keeping the show on the air. Fox execs may be complete morons otherwise, but I'm willing to bet they know something about selling advertising.
Yes, but pornographic movies will play SO much smoother...
I think your conclusion is a bit too strong. From the original:
:) What it boils down to is this: either more Linux-related stories get submitted, or more get selected. If the former, then the Linux bias could be due to more input coming from the Linux users. Or perhaps there are just more Linux users on SlashDot than any other group. Either way, it's hard to complain when the majority is getting majority representation. You want to see stories on other OSes? Submit them!
:)
This is useful if you want to run Linux and not run the monitor, or if your monitor is broken.
I do believe I see the word "or" in there. The post is not all about Linux. There's a specific mention of a way that knowing how to disconnect the display could be useful for non-Linux users. Presumably the reason for mentioning Linux first is that the post was submitted by a Linux user. There seem to be a lot of those around here.
As for your general complaint, yes, there do seem to be more Linux-related stories on SlashDot than stories which focus (at least in a positive manner) on any other OS. (We'll ignore all the other topics like DVDs and Anime and so on). *BSD fans also complain about this sometimes
If the latter, then you might have something to complain about. You know who to complain to
The story says that there are more BugTraq entries for Linux than Windows 2000. QED.
:)
Yeah, and likewise, according to the full stats, there were three times as many NT/2000 bugs as Win98/95/3.1 bugs. Thus, Windows 3.1 is three times more secure than Windows 2000!
The reality, of course, is that we don't know what they mean by "Linux (aggr)". They have separate lists for SUSE, RedHat, Debian, etc. Ony RedHat had more vulnerabilities than Windows 2000. Even then, "RedHat" means the entire distro. That means that they're counting far more software (i.e. three different ftp servers) than for Windows 2000.
So in summary, if you don't tell the whole truth, you can support just about any claim...
Actually, I probably didn't get 50-60 FPS with a G200. I think I put in the GeForce video card first. My bad. My point remains the same, though.
Another example -- it sounds like Unreal Tournament greatly outsold Quake III. UT can be played unaccelerated (don't laugh, I know people who do this and have fun), and it played fine on the shitty i810 PC I had at an old job. QIII barely played on the hardware that was out at the time of it's release (PII, TNT2, for example)
:)
Every review I've seen says that UT is heavily CPU bound (including that Anandtech video card review posted eariler today). High-end CPUs are probably far more common than high-end video cards. You can't buy less than 700Mhz nowadays, but you can still get crappy onboard video. If UT framerates really tie in so well to CPU performance, that might explain its popularity.
On the other hand, I remember getting 30FPS from a K6-2 333 and a Matrox G200 in QIII, then seeing that jump up to 50-60 with a Celeron 533, then up to 120 or so with a GeForce DDR (all at 640x480, but 32-bit color and all special effects). So I'm not so confident about your claim that QIII needs serious hardware. I bet that a PII and a TNT2 would be playable. The problem is, you can still buy computers even today with Trident Cyberblade UMA-based video, which isn't even as good as that
What we got from Linux users were not sales, but tons of email demanding that we put up the binary executeables on an ftp site for free so they could download them and use them with their Windows version of the game.
:). Thus dual-booting to play games is an option for the Linux crowd only. Then there's Wine and (especially!) WineX, the latter being x86-Linux-only right now. My point being, most Linux users have the option to run Windows games somehow, awkward and unpleasant though it may be.
:) But you see my point, right? The Linux market just wasn't going to work as well as other non-Windows markets, because we tend to have access to Windows. Yes, this may be terrible for Linux; but as far as the mob is concerned, second-class treatment just won't cut it.
This goes back to the dual-booting problem. Linux and Windows both run on x86 hardware, while MacOS and AmigaOS do not (I assume most gamers are using x86 CPUs, not SPARCs
Meanwhile, Linux gamers had to wait an awfully long time for most games to come out after the Windows version was released. When they did, they cost twice as much as the Windows game because the Linux game was "new". If they already bought the Windows (or Mac) version, tough, they get to pay again. Given all this, I'm not surprised that the Linux game market didn't work out. There were some pretty strange economic models involved. Linux gamers have options that users of other OSes don't have. Yet they were being asked to put up with long delays and higher prices just so that they could have The Linux Version of a game. Of course it didn't work. If Linux users had no options, maybe they'd put up with this stuff. But alas, we do, and thus we tend to demand our games more-or-less on time and more-or-less reasonably priced. If they're not, we buy the Windows version. (In general... I personally own 6 Loki games, plus UT bought from TuxGames).
So now, let's look at those complaints from the perspective of someone who can dual-boot or use WineX. You got complaints from people who already had the Windows version. That is, they already paid for the game once. (I assume they could pirate the Linux version just as easily as the Windows one, so let's assume they have legit copies) There's a good chance they could get that game running on dual-booted Windows, or barring that, Wine/WineX. Isn't it obvious why they don't want to have to buy the game again? "Free beer"? Not from their point of view! They figure that they paid once already, so why pay again ("I'll just dual-boot instead until I can get WineX working...")? Obviously, this doesn't work for Hyperion
I do want to thank you and Hyperion for porting some commercial games to Linux. Thanks for helping us out, especially given that it didn't work out financially for you. (Hindsight is 20-20 and all...) Good luck with the MacOS and AmigaOS markets.
Maybe it's because a lot of Linux users have a Win partition and rather than wait for 'Awesome Game X' to get ported, they buy the Win version...
Or they wait until the Linux version comes out, then they realize that they can buy the Windows version for about half the price (and in some cases, they can download a Linux binary!)
There are many reasons why the Linux game market is failing. They fact that it's an afterthought to most people is one of them.
considering the state of the US economy at the moment the fact that amazon made a profit is even better.
Ironically, the $5mil can be traced back to surprisingly strong sales of "How To Find A Job In A Struggling Economy... For Dummies!"
Well a 1.1 Celeron is not really equal to a Duron 1.1 after all. In the real world you run a 1.1 duron on a kt266a with DDR getting you a "200"Mhz bus speed.
You're assuming that the Duron is matched with a high-end chipset. Didn't Anandtech do a review once that showed that on a cheaper motherboard (the kind found in the "budget" systems which generally contain Celerons and Durons) the Duron and Celeron performed about the same? Ah yes, here it is (link to the summary page). Note though that this old review involves the older Celeron and Duron cores, so it may not be 100% applicable to the present. Still, I would guess that most OEM Duron systems do not have kt266a boards in them. They have cheaper chipsets, like the SiS 735, perhaps paired with SDR memory. This is the "real world" for most computer buyers. People who know how to overclock are a special case (note, though, that Tom says that he wasn't able to unlock the 1.3Ghz Duron!)
In Tom's 1.3Ghz Duron review, the Duron generally (not always!) beats the Celeron, but it needs a more expensive motherboard and more expensive (DDR) memory to do it. Who knows what performance a cheaper OEM system would get? Perhaps the Duron would still be faster in this more typical configuration, but perhaps not.
Driver status is actually at:
Driver status
but I want to step away from the crowd for a minute and ask: why Red Hat?
Well, "name recognition" comes right to mind.
Also, isn't Mandrake a French company? And SUSE is German... Perhaps merging with an American company would simply be easier?
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if an AOL version of RedHat would be used in a specialized device, like an AOL Internet Computer or an AOL PDA, not as a general-purpose OS that consumers can tinker with. Users are just supposed to use the GUI that AOL puts on top of it. So the present focus of the OS may not matter so much.
Then again, perhaps AOL might want a server OS of their own as well? If so, RedHat is probably better suited for the job than Mandrake, if only for reasons of stability.
While AOL could provide a huge shot in the arm to Linux (it wont make a huge jump to the desktop without being able to run AOL, sad but true), what geek wants to run an AOL OS?? Would AOL/TW put their icons everywhere, or try to include DRM in it?? AOL/TW isn't much better than MS after all, they cater to the lowest common denominator.
There's nothing wrong with a "lowest common denominator" version of Linux. Why should Linux be just for geeks? This will just be another distro, and there can be as many Linux distros as are needed. The geeks will just use a different one (Slackware, Debian, etc.)
Even the people who are presently using RedHat wouldn't be hurt much by this. I bet that if AOL bought RedHat, some community-supported distro based on the last release of RedHat would emerge (minus any proprietary software, of course) and fans of the "old" RedHat would just shift over to using that.