There are "standards". Don't troll and lie to everyone that there are not.
http://www.linuxbase.org/
In addition, each desktop has standards as well. KDE has its own. Gnome has its own. What you call a "lack of standards" is called choice to others.
In addition, any properly designed program should work accross any distribution of Linux assuming the libraries, for which it was designed, are included as well. Only idiots design software that won't work this way. You make a claim that has no basis, really. Opera Software, for instance, seems to have no problem making a closed-source browser that works across all distributions of Linux. And for those systems that don't contain QT (any KDE-less sytem), they include a build that has the QT libraries linked and included.
The problem is that Internet multimedia is being controlled by one party. One can question the legality of WMV playback mechanisms through open source media players (MPlayer or XINE, for instance), but has there been an alternative? You aren't locked to a single provider for KDE or Gnome, nor do either of those desktops have a single media format, let alone one that is nearly exclusive to itself. Nor are you forced into buying a notebook PC with KDE or Gnome in most cases (unless you buy an unbranded notebook from a shady Internet PC company). At any point, what would happen if Microsoft pushed a button, and their media format could no longer play on your machine unless you ran Windows with WMP?
Should you be locked out of the majority of media content on the web because you aren't using Windows with Media Player version 52? I'm not even talking about DRM enabled content. I'm talking about all media in a Windows Media format. This is where the problem lies. It isn't so much the player, but rather the codecs that it includes.
I have my facts straight. Konqueror is GPL. It's not that Apple gave back to KHTML out of goodwill. They are required to present the source for their "fork" of KHTML.
Yeah... Brilliant Apple, who could have much more control over media distribution on the web, require that users pay extra for a halfway decent version of Quicktime. Brilliant Apple, who neglects every other Unix-like OS or other alternatives by forcing them to write their own "hacks" that allow Quicktime files to be played through MPlayer and XINE via Winelib. Brilliant Apple, who took years to develop a suitable alternative to MSIE (Safari), taking a rendering engine (KHTML) that was designed for an OS (Linux, or any other KDE capable OS) in which they show *no* support.
It's amazing that a company that comes up with cool notebooks, ipods, and lots of other innovative ideas, could be so stupid when it comes to media and the web.
For starters, you can use rpm2tgs, alien, or any of those other programs an they work fine.
Second, this article is very misleading. ATI's been releasing drivers for a LONG TIME now, so saying that they have "finally relased drivers for X 4.3.0" is ridiculous. The 3.7.0 driver set was released MONTHS AGO. 3.7.1 just came out a few days ago, but 3.7.0 was out in late-December. I've been using 3.7.0 for months on my X 4.3.0 system (Slackware 9.1).
Though the performance could be better, the drivers have been quite stable on my machine.
Perhaps... This is the evidence that shows that SCO is just Microsoft's "SCOpegoat" to aid them in their attempt to destroy something that they can't own. It must be frightening, actually, to be a company that's become so wealthy in a market in which you nearly have a monopoly, only to have someone's pet project turn in to a world-class operating system that gets better and better every day. What do you do when your traditional "embrace and extend" tactics don't work? It must be frightening to know that something is sneaking up on your market share, stealing a small bit of it every day... And you can't own it. Scare tactics are the only option. I know which companies and groups I would trust after all of this... And it certainly isn't Microsoft or SCO.
Good job, guys. You've only made things worse for yourselves. I guess it doesn't really matter if the justice system does anything about these questionable transactions, because these companies are ruining their reputations and business relationships without any help.
Great, Macromedia. Glad you are taking the cheap way out with WINE.
By the way. Where is Flash Player 7? Your last Linux release, 6.0 r79, is 12 months old now, and several sites now *require* Flash 7.
If they don't take Linux more seriously, they'll eventually see some SVG browser plugins pop up with similar (better) features, and better native Linux support.
Runs great on my Radeon 9500 PRO on Linux. It's a modern game, so I wouldn't expect it to run exceptionally well on anything lower than today's midrange cards.
UT2004 has a lot of new game modes and features. In general, it's just a more polished version of UT2003 with new stuff. In addition, the OpenGL render on Linux is *much* more refined, and seems to run very well with videocards from nVidia and ATI alike. Most people experience substantial speed improvements over UT2003.
It's a better game. If you weren't quite sure about UT2003, suggest you try UT2004. It seems to be a good upgrade. I didn't buy UT2003, but I'll probably pick up this one, especially since I now have a better system and the game runs with all of the details cranked.
Tunneling works pretty well. Almost all corporate servers leave port 443 open for secure http (as well as many others) that can easily be set up for SSH tunneling from a local port, out to a service which allows you redirect ports (Freeshell does this for MetaARPA members). Works very well. The best thing is that everything is encrypted with SSH from your machine to the machine that you are SSHing into.
The "Headsurfer" needs to turn his surfboard around and drift out to sea.
He claims to be supporting his customers, but in reality he's done nothing more than strengthen SCO so that they can carry on with these ridiculous claims and lawsuits a little longer. My hosting provider is an EV1 customer, and I'm already shopping for another provider.
SCO has yet to present proof of their allegations. Numerous other countries' legal systems are essentially telling SCO to screw off because they are unable to present proof. Isn't that good enough, EV1? We all know that there is no "SCO IP" in Linux, and there never will be. EV1 made a mistake in supporting these criminals. Now, in my eyes, EV1 is a criminal company as well.
Screw off, EV1. Hope your new data center gets wasted from lack of business.
My server runs off an EV1 box (via another shared provider), and it's not showing any signs of stress. It may just be that Slashdot is hammering on a single box that runs the forums, which also is the same server that runs the main website (which generates a lot of traffic itself).
Needless to say, I'm pretty pissed with their decision to pay MY MONEY to SCO. In a sense, I've paid SCO by proxy, and I'm not happy about it.
Pretty much any cheapie Conexant HSF PCI modem should work. The problem that you'll need to face is that Conexant, who formerly provided free Linux drivers, is now going through Linuxant to provide $15.00 drivers that utilize their "Driver Loader" technology. It's up to you if you want to pay a price for drivers. Winmodems are not a good solution on Linux. External are certainly an option, because they are essentially driverless. There is nothing particularly unique about Micro ATX that would make it not work on Linux. Other parts should function just fine as well. Most network chipsets have closed source drivers, if not kernel drivers that are open source.
This is a funny post, but I feel that it is the truth. This license change is just what the community needed to take back X and rework it for more desktop-oriented improvements. The 4.4Pre is under the old license, and it is very usable. The numerous Freedesktop.org changes can, and are, being applied, and in the end there is going to be very few problems with this transition. I, personally, feel that this is a good thing for us.
You're right. Why don't they just can Windows XP and go back to Windows ME. I'm sure that lots of people felt that it was just "good enough."
By the way. OSS is a piece of shit. ALSA is a professional-grade, expandable audio subsystem that is fast and extremely capable of using plugins and other stuff that you couldn't do with OSS.
People need to stop thinking about shit like Transgaming and focus thier $$$ to prople that actually care about Linux games, like LGP, Epic, Icculus, id.
This is exactly what pisses me off about IBM/HitachiGST. I've got a 60 GXP and sure, I could RMA it, and pay to send it out, and wait for a few weeks for a replacement. Maxtor sent me a replacement via *next-day air* for free, and even included a shipping tag to send my old drive back in the same box.
Now that's service. My next drives will probably be Maxtor.
I've purchased at least 6 of the 60GXP line. I've had a single failed drive in the past three years. I still need to RMA that thing, but I've just been lazy about it.
I'm not sure that the 60GXP fall victim to the same failured that the 75GXP did. It seems to be that when IBM went to the 20GB platter sizes, and redisigned their drives, things got better.
I have in the past had data corruptions on one or two occasions. I'm pretty sure that this was from my Highpoint RAID controller though. After I stopped using it, I never had another problem with the drive.
I still can't help but believe that this is why IBM sold off the mechanical storage division to Hitachi. IBM claimed that they were going to work on some newer types of storage, but we've seen very little so far.
I lucked out into getting a Radeon 9500 PRO for a mere $100 a few months ago. It plays all of the latest games with the settings maxed, and even runs very niceley on Linux.
By the time AGP has depreciated, it will be a great time to upgrade. For now, my new KT600 based board will do the job fine for the current line of AGP cards. All together, the upgrade, with new CPU and RAM, only ran me about $400-$500 dollars. I can't imagine paying that amount for a videocard alone, since the performance increase over the 9500 PRO (which I can hack to operate as a 9700) is very minimal. Besides... Who needs anything better when all of the current games play perfectly with the settings maxed out? If I upgrade every 2-3 years with the best $100-$150 card I can find, the $500 card users that need to have the "best toys on the block" have no real edge over anyone else... And I end up saving $700+ over what they spent.
The 8500 cores are pretty well supported with the DRI and Gatos drivers. ATI's proprietary drivers support the newer cores. I am getting 3000+ FPS in GLXGEARS with my 9500 PRO and the drivers still aren't optimized. I expect that, when they improve the drivers a bit more, that they will perform much better. ATI mentioned that they intend to update their drivers for Linux at least every two months.
They won't ever be supporting the older cores though, since the DRI drivers are quite sufficient. ATI has given programming documentation to the DRI project for this task. In most respects, the DRI drivers work pretty well. I am using them with some of my ATI cards at work.
Slashdot Mirror
There are "standards". Don't troll and lie to everyone that there are not.
http://www.linuxbase.org/
In addition, each desktop has standards as well. KDE has its own. Gnome has its own. What you call a "lack of standards" is called choice to others.
In addition, any properly designed program should work accross any distribution of Linux assuming the libraries, for which it was designed, are included as well. Only idiots design software that won't work this way. You make a claim that has no basis, really. Opera Software, for instance, seems to have no problem making a closed-source browser that works across all distributions of Linux. And for those systems that don't contain QT (any KDE-less sytem), they include a build that has the QT libraries linked and included.
The problem is that Internet multimedia is being controlled by one party. One can question the legality of WMV playback mechanisms through open source media players (MPlayer or XINE, for instance), but has there been an alternative? You aren't locked to a single provider for KDE or Gnome, nor do either of those desktops have a single media format, let alone one that is nearly exclusive to itself. Nor are you forced into buying a notebook PC with KDE or Gnome in most cases (unless you buy an unbranded notebook from a shady Internet PC company). At any point, what would happen if Microsoft pushed a button, and their media format could no longer play on your machine unless you ran Windows with WMP?
Should you be locked out of the majority of media content on the web because you aren't using Windows with Media Player version 52? I'm not even talking about DRM enabled content. I'm talking about all media in a Windows Media format. This is where the problem lies. It isn't so much the player, but rather the codecs that it includes.
I have my facts straight. Konqueror is GPL. It's not that Apple gave back to KHTML out of goodwill. They are required to present the source for their "fork" of KHTML.
Yeah... Brilliant Apple, who could have much more control over media distribution on the web, require that users pay extra for a halfway decent version of Quicktime. Brilliant Apple, who neglects every other Unix-like OS or other alternatives by forcing them to write their own "hacks" that allow Quicktime files to be played through MPlayer and XINE via Winelib. Brilliant Apple, who took years to develop a suitable alternative to MSIE (Safari), taking a rendering engine (KHTML) that was designed for an OS (Linux, or any other KDE capable OS) in which they show *no* support.
It's amazing that a company that comes up with cool notebooks, ipods, and lots of other innovative ideas, could be so stupid when it comes to media and the web.
For starters, you can use rpm2tgs, alien, or any of those other programs an they work fine.
Second, this article is very misleading. ATI's been releasing drivers for a LONG TIME now, so saying that they have "finally relased drivers for X 4.3.0" is ridiculous. The 3.7.0 driver set was released MONTHS AGO. 3.7.1 just came out a few days ago, but 3.7.0 was out in late-December. I've been using 3.7.0 for months on my X 4.3.0 system (Slackware 9.1).
Though the performance could be better, the drivers have been quite stable on my machine.
Perhaps... This is the evidence that shows that SCO is just Microsoft's "SCOpegoat" to aid them in their attempt to destroy something that they can't own. It must be frightening, actually, to be a company that's become so wealthy in a market in which you nearly have a monopoly, only to have someone's pet project turn in to a world-class operating system that gets better and better every day. What do you do when your traditional "embrace and extend" tactics don't work? It must be frightening to know that something is sneaking up on your market share, stealing a small bit of it every day... And you can't own it. Scare tactics are the only option. I know which companies and groups I would trust after all of this... And it certainly isn't Microsoft or SCO.
Good job, guys. You've only made things worse for yourselves. I guess it doesn't really matter if the justice system does anything about these questionable transactions, because these companies are ruining their reputations and business relationships without any help.
Great, Macromedia. Glad you are taking the cheap way out with WINE.
By the way. Where is Flash Player 7? Your last Linux release, 6.0 r79, is 12 months old now, and several sites now *require* Flash 7.
If they don't take Linux more seriously, they'll eventually see some SVG browser plugins pop up with similar (better) features, and better native Linux support.
Runs great on my Radeon 9500 PRO on Linux. It's a modern game, so I wouldn't expect it to run exceptionally well on anything lower than today's midrange cards.
UT2004 has a lot of new game modes and features. In general, it's just a more polished version of UT2003 with new stuff. In addition, the OpenGL render on Linux is *much* more refined, and seems to run very well with videocards from nVidia and ATI alike. Most people experience substantial speed improvements over UT2003.
It's a better game. If you weren't quite sure about UT2003, suggest you try UT2004. It seems to be a good upgrade. I didn't buy UT2003, but I'll probably pick up this one, especially since I now have a better system and the game runs with all of the details cranked.
Tunneling works pretty well. Almost all corporate servers leave port 443 open for secure http (as well as many others) that can easily be set up for SSH tunneling from a local port, out to a service which allows you redirect ports (Freeshell does this for MetaARPA members). Works very well. The best thing is that everything is encrypted with SSH from your machine to the machine that you are SSHing into.
The "Headsurfer" needs to turn his surfboard around and drift out to sea.
He claims to be supporting his customers, but in reality he's done nothing more than strengthen SCO so that they can carry on with these ridiculous claims and lawsuits a little longer. My hosting provider is an EV1 customer, and I'm already shopping for another provider.
SCO has yet to present proof of their allegations. Numerous other countries' legal systems are essentially telling SCO to screw off because they are unable to present proof. Isn't that good enough, EV1? We all know that there is no "SCO IP" in Linux, and there never will be. EV1 made a mistake in supporting these criminals. Now, in my eyes, EV1 is a criminal company as well.
Screw off, EV1. Hope your new data center gets wasted from lack of business.
My server runs off an EV1 box (via another shared provider), and it's not showing any signs of stress. It may just be that Slashdot is hammering on a single box that runs the forums, which also is the same server that runs the main website (which generates a lot of traffic itself).
Needless to say, I'm pretty pissed with their decision to pay MY MONEY to SCO. In a sense, I've paid SCO by proxy, and I'm not happy about it.
Pretty much any cheapie Conexant HSF PCI modem should work. The problem that you'll need to face is that Conexant, who formerly provided free Linux drivers, is now going through Linuxant to provide $15.00 drivers that utilize their "Driver Loader" technology. It's up to you if you want to pay a price for drivers. Winmodems are not a good solution on Linux. External are certainly an option, because they are essentially driverless. There is nothing particularly unique about Micro ATX that would make it not work on Linux. Other parts should function just fine as well. Most network chipsets have closed source drivers, if not kernel drivers that are open source.
You should check here for modem info:
http://www.linmodems.org/
This is a funny post, but I feel that it is the truth. This license change is just what the community needed to take back X and rework it for more desktop-oriented improvements. The 4.4Pre is under the old license, and it is very usable. The numerous Freedesktop.org changes can, and are, being applied, and in the end there is going to be very few problems with this transition. I, personally, feel that this is a good thing for us.
That's not "Freedesktop". It's XF86 with Gnome 2 and a generic Mac skin on top of it.
Speak for yourself. For me it IS about having native Linux games. I don't run WineX. Have you got your copy of Gorky 17 or Ballistics preordered?
You're right. Why don't they just can Windows XP and go back to Windows ME. I'm sure that lots of people felt that it was just "good enough."
By the way. OSS is a piece of shit. ALSA is a professional-grade, expandable audio subsystem that is fast and extremely capable of using plugins and other stuff that you couldn't do with OSS.
People need to stop thinking about shit like Transgaming and focus thier $$$ to prople that actually care about Linux games, like LGP, Epic, Icculus, id.
Corbis: Aren't you glad that Microsoft owns your history?
Besides... When you have a steady job and a computer, there is always emulation. ;)
Go back and play ANY of these new titles that you mention...
F-Zero, Metroid, and Zelda are part of my collection, and they are COMPLETELY different than any incarnation of these franchises than we've ever seen.
At best, you can compare Mario and Zelda to the N64 games, but each one offers enough new tricks to keep the games fresh and fun.
You're unfortunately denying yourself the pleasure of playing some of the greatest games that have been made in the last 2-3 years.
Your loss.
And:
F-ZeroGX
Eternal Darkness
Pikmin
Mario Kart DD
And loads of others.
This is exactly what pisses me off about IBM/HitachiGST. I've got a 60 GXP and sure, I could RMA it, and pay to send it out, and wait for a few weeks for a replacement. Maxtor sent me a replacement via *next-day air* for free, and even included a shipping tag to send my old drive back in the same box.
Now that's service. My next drives will probably be Maxtor.
I've purchased at least 6 of the 60GXP line. I've had a single failed drive in the past three years. I still need to RMA that thing, but I've just been lazy about it.
I'm not sure that the 60GXP fall victim to the same failured that the 75GXP did. It seems to be that when IBM went to the 20GB platter sizes, and redisigned their drives, things got better.
I have in the past had data corruptions on one or two occasions. I'm pretty sure that this was from my Highpoint RAID controller though. After I stopped using it, I never had another problem with the drive.
I still can't help but believe that this is why IBM sold off the mechanical storage division to Hitachi. IBM claimed that they were going to work on some newer types of storage, but we've seen very little so far.
I lucked out into getting a Radeon 9500 PRO for a mere $100 a few months ago. It plays all of the latest games with the settings maxed, and even runs very niceley on Linux.
By the time AGP has depreciated, it will be a great time to upgrade. For now, my new KT600 based board will do the job fine for the current line of AGP cards. All together, the upgrade, with new CPU and RAM, only ran me about $400-$500 dollars. I can't imagine paying that amount for a videocard alone, since the performance increase over the 9500 PRO (which I can hack to operate as a 9700) is very minimal. Besides... Who needs anything better when all of the current games play perfectly with the settings maxed out? If I upgrade every 2-3 years with the best $100-$150 card I can find, the $500 card users that need to have the "best toys on the block" have no real edge over anyone else... And I end up saving $700+ over what they spent.
The 8500 cores are pretty well supported with the DRI and Gatos drivers. ATI's proprietary drivers support the newer cores. I am getting 3000+ FPS in GLXGEARS with my 9500 PRO and the drivers still aren't optimized. I expect that, when they improve the drivers a bit more, that they will perform much better. ATI mentioned that they intend to update their drivers for Linux at least every two months.
They won't ever be supporting the older cores though, since the DRI drivers are quite sufficient. ATI has given programming documentation to the DRI project for this task. In most respects, the DRI drivers work pretty well. I am using them with some of my ATI cards at work.