Linux actually has pretty amazing support for some legacy hardware, although configuration can be kind of opaque and most newer distributions don't know what to do with it. There is support remaining in the kernel for ancient ISA cards that haven't been properly supported under ANY Microsoft OS since MS-DOS.
I agree that modern desktop Linux is not the best choice for older systems, but I think the reasons have to do more with software bloat than hardware support.
Support for new hardware that the manufacturers are loath to release specifications for is IMO much more of a problem.
There has been a whole spate of these "I bought a Mac Mini, found out it really was a cheap, low-end computer, and then spent additional money to bring it up to a barely usable level" articles recently. Most of them involve either major, warranty-voiding modifications to the chassis, or as is the case here, ugly external peripherals that negate the main attraction of the Mini, its external appearance.
People seem to be buying these things as fashion accessories rather than making a serious decision based on their computer needs. It has one DIMM slot, a relatively slow CPU, and a notebook hard drive -- if thats not what you want, you should look for something else rather than expecting the rest of the world to salute your cleverness in partially addressing its shortcomings. If you don't really need a Mac, you can put together a PC for under $500 with a real hard drive and much better expandability. If you want a $500 computer to run OS X on, you can get a used G4 with specifications similar to a Mini, except again with useful internal expansion capacity. And if you want to spend more than that, well, you have the entire rest of the current Apple lineup.
The core functionality for most of the onboard components is now built right into the chipset. It costs at most a couple of bucks to add the connectors and the rest of the hardware (a sound codec, ethernet transciever, etc.) needed to fully support it, and the added value is more than that.
A lot of stuff that is now integrated on literally every motherboard used to be an add on card. 10 years ago you would be whining "why do I have to get a motherboard with an IDE controller and onboard parallel ports, I already have a multi-IO card". But things change and for the most part the integrated hardware is adequate, and it isn't economically viable to not provide it.
I think the original article clearly refers to the entire federal government, not just the Federal Reserve. So the references to "The Fed" in the Slashdot story are misleading.
The nice thing here is that they wrote a probably neat NLG (natural language generation) system to write the paper - it seems to be more practical than previous multimodal NLG systems that are much more domain/application-dependent, but generate stuff that makes sense.
Nah, it just looks impressive precisely because of the level of specialization. The system they used is really, really simple, if I am correct. I haven't looked at their code but I am pretty familiar with one of the systems on their "Related Work" list, which you can see in action here.
It just takes a grammar, and starts expanding from the start symbol, picking at random when there are multiple possible expansions, until all branches terminate. There also might be some limited conditional/substitution rules to allow for some semantic consistency (so it can pick some string as the topic, and mention it again and again, for instance). The only trick to it is designing the grammar itself. But you can get amusing results even with fairly simple ones.
I can think of this piece of news being bought up at least 6 months ago and everyone moving over to using replacements like Dropline GNOME etc.
Pat basically stopped updating it after that first announcement, and the version included had gotten rather old (it was 2.6-something and 2.10 is out now), but it was still there and it was included in the Slackware 10.1 release. All this new announcement means is that the old, out of date, unsupported packages that were there have been removed.
Notes for MS Bigots: The Atari ST shipped with a two-button mouse years before PCs even had mice.
I don't think this is right. PC mice were available at least as early as 1983; the first Microsoft mouse came out then and it was even supported in the first DOS version of Word. There may have even been some available earlier than that. Mice were also available in that time span for the Apple II and other early architectures. The ST did not arrive until 1985.
Re:Been involved with this before, on a smaller sc
on
The Super Superhighway
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Today, the Express Lanes are owned by the regional transportation authority. Why? Because politicians didn't like the fact that they didn't own the road and couldn't use it as a political football.
Thats not quite correct. The problem with the 91 Express Lanes was that the contract with the private operator prevented expansion of the free roadway until 2035. Since the toll lanes did not substantially reduce mainline congestion (as it was assumed they would), once OCTA had the money to widen the main roadway and actually improve congestion, it was in the public interest to buyout the operator's contract in order to allow for the widening.
In ontinued government regulation is absolutely intrinsic in any plan to grant "owners" exclusive usage rights to their "property". At whose expense? Well, any non-commercial, public use of radio spectrum that might not be able to afford to participate in your Communications Ministry's fundraising program.
Incidentally, the UK is in no way "ahead of the curve" relative to the US FCC in this regard. The FCC has been auctioning off massive amounts of spectrum to the highest bidder for at least the last ten years, especially to cell phone companies, although there are some mode restrictions attached to the licenses.
Ham radio exploited by corporate interests? Maybe some technologies developed originally by hams are, but there are pretty strict rules in most countries preventing commercial activities by amateur operators. Broadcasting is strictly prohibited. When I was an active ham operator, it was considered illegal even to order a pizza over a phone patch from your radio (they might have loosened this since then, I don't remember). And of course, it is off limits if you don't have a license. So while as a ham you might be able to hack, say, off the shelf 802.11 equipment to operate on ham bands, and legally use it at much higher power levels and with better antennae than you can on their normal unlicensed frequencies, accessing much (most?) internet content over such a connection would be of questionable legality, selling access would be clearly illegal, and using it without a license would be absolutely verboten.
In fact, the amateur service is under constant threat of losing frequencies to commercial uses, especially the marginally used microwave bands where most of the interesting experimentation goes on now. Most commercial radio frequency users are more interested in destroying ham radio than embracing and extending it (which, as discussed above, is pretty difficult).
If they were selling the x86 box as well, they could get away with it. That way, they'd be able to graduallly expand the hardware they support out of the box while manufacturers catch up. They'd be supporting the hardware that they put out, and eventually supporting other hardware as well.
Its true that if they were only supporting a small set of hardware, it would be easier to support. But as long as it is publicly available and runs on commodity hardware, there is an expectation that it will work on most systems, and if it doesn't it could potentially do a great deal of damage to Apple's reputation and even hurt their hardware sales (whether their hardware was PPC or x86). After all, one of Apple's great selling points, dating back practically to the introduction of the Macintosh, is of products that "just work" out of the box without any hassle.
Now think of a typical mainstream review of a Linux distribution, wherein the reviewer ends by whining about how their Windows partition was deleted, their proprietary modem and printer don't work, and they can't find a decent money management program, and imagine the damage if Apple came to be associated with such a product. In fact, Apple would have to invest a lot of energy porting drivers and begging vendors just to get to the level of support for PC hardware that Linux distributions have now (compared to the current Darwin situation). A "defective" x86 Mac OS release could ruin them both as a hardware and software maker.
Of course, if it was free, or could be easily pirated, and it worked as well on my computer as Linux currently does, I would switch. But thats not accurate.
First of all, if it ever came to be, it would have to be hideously expensive. Don't think about the $100 cost of OS X upgrades now. Those are for people who have already paid their dues to Apple by buying a Mac. If it was any good, an x86 Mac OS port would wipe out a fair share of Apple's current hardware sales. Even if they could, say, double their current OS market share by running on cheaper commodity hardware, they would still need to make half the profit on each new, non-upgrade copy of x86 Mac OS that they currently make on the average new Macintosh sold. I would be very surprised if they could make this up with a retail price under $400. I definitely wouldn't pay $400 or more for it, as slick as it is, and compared to free Linux and "free" preloaded Windows I doubt many other current PC users would, and it would never be a market success for Apple if only existing Mac users bought it.
And thats all supposing that the product is every bit as good as the current version of Mac OS for Apple hardware. That means that they would have to support seamlessly every possible combination of PC components that could show up on a computer made in the last 3 or 4 years. Darwin x86 certainly can't do that now, and even if they could port over every current FreeBSD driver, plus support every video chipset they support on Macintoshes now, it would be far from universal, although it would be good enough for me. Microsoft spends a lot of money on testing and driver development to ensure Windows works on every wacky system they claim it will run on, and that is even given that most of the device drivers are written by vendors.
Given these constraints, I don't think Apple can bring a viable x86 Mac OS port to market at a price low enough to be successful, so no matter how cool you think it would be to have OS X on your computer, it isn't going to happen.
As far as I am concerned, he is an unethical shmuck who bears principal responsibility for the suicide of Gary Kildall. Search on "Gary Kildall" if you do not know who he is.
Maybe if you tried a different search engine you would know that the popular legend that he killed himself is not true. He was killed in a fight at a bar, and by all accounts it wasn't the least bit deliberate.
Don't leave it out of your sight in public areas. Seriously, that is the only thing you can do. If you want to leave it lying around unsupervised, you should expect someone to steal it. There is absolutely no way to stop a determined thief, and they are not unfamiliar with measures people take to lock or hide valuable items.
As for your dorm room, close and lock the door when you or your roommate is not there. Your room has an effective lock and if it doesn't work they will fix it for free. Trying to protect your stuff if the room is open to anyone is a lost cause, but it is very simple if it isn't.
You realise people are overclocking your previous line of cards instead of buying the new faster range of cards. So you try to disable overclocking in the driver (presumably by making the driver reclock the card to the correct frequencies, thus undoing the work of any overclocking software). If you release open source drivers, it'd be pretty easy for hacked drivers to be released that allow people to overclock, even though you dont want them to.
The number of people who overclock their hardware is probably far below even the number of linux users at this point. I have never seen any evidence it has impacted sales of high-end products. The main concern CPU manufacturers have with overclocking is remarking, where an overclockable slower chip is relabled by a third party as a faster chip and then resold. That is both illegal and damaging to the company's reputation (because the remarked chips are going to be, on average, less reliable) so they take measures to prevent it. Thats not a problem with video cards since the only practical means to overclock them is via software.
I think the precise reason that OEMs are releasing closed source drivers for Linux is so that they can get in before someone tries to reverse engineer their hardware and pass off some shoddy drivers that cast their hardware or their development team in a bad light.
This is partly true, but it also represents a valid response to customer demand: They have customers who want to use their products under Linux, and they are providing semi-official drivers in the only legal way they can (see below).
The only drivers regular profit-making companies can support are closed source drivers developed in-house. As soon as you implement the code of other people or allow some random guy you don't know access to your CVS to do a few check-ins, you cannot claim to offer any support for the product whatsoever, because people who have worked on it are not your employees and you are not responsible for anything they do, and are consequently no longer responsible for work done on your own driver, which you would like to be able to legally own, support, endorse and distribute with your product as your own
This isn't a big deal really. You can require third parties to contribute code under a license giving you either outright ownership or very broad redistribution rights, and carefully control outside code contributions (see Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.); there is no reason that model can't be applied to drivers. There are two other main reason that drivers are not released as open-source: First, often times the driver contains source code which the manufacturer licensed from a third party and has no right to redistribute (this is the case with NVIDIA). Second, the driver can contain some highly proprietary intellectual property, possibly representing most of the value of the product (this is the case with most software modems). There is no way around the first case unless the manufacturer wants to completely rewrite their existing driver, and no way at all around the second.
What is most discouraging, generally, is not that hardware companies don't open-source their drivers; the driver is the hardware company's property and if they don't want to port it to Linux or release source for it, that is their right. The problem is when vendors won't even release specifications to their hardware to open-source developers. There are people who are willing to sign all sorts of restrictive NDAs to get access to specifications and write open-source drivers for hardware; a hardware company does not have to release the full specifications to be released to the public, only allow the final driver to be released as open source. In the past this was how most drivers for Linux were written, but, especially graphics card companies, are providing much less access than they were 5 years ago, even as more companies are paying lip service to Linux support.
I submit my #9 Imagine128 graphics card, which I never did get to work under RH9, despite it being in the list of supported cards. Oh well.
Those should be supported. I am using an old Revolution 3D in one of my computers, which uses the same driver, and it works fine. I don't know how they cope with autoconfiguration, but using simple text-mode tools to generate an XF86Config/xorg.conf file worked fine for me.
Here is the documentation for the i128 driver in X11R6.7.
When I was starting linux for the first time, without no previous experience, 1 year ago, following the manual up to the last slash*, it took me only 1 reformating and 2 days total. Nowdays, it's less than 24 hours on my P4, for the critical stuff
To put that in perspective, it took me about two hours to install Slackware 3.3 on my totally obsolete 386SX when I started using Linux. That was installing off of a parallel port Zip drive on a machine with 4 megabytes of RAM. Even then, to install on that limited of a machine, you had to mount the root floppy directly rather than loading it into a ramdisk, and setup a swap partition before even being able to run the installer.
24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.
Unless they have licensed rights to redistribute the copyrighted ROMs from HP and TI, they probably shouldn't tout its ability to emulate the HP-48 and TI-89, since the emulators they are using almost certainly require a ROM to work. If they distribute pirated ROMs with the calculator they will be sued out of existence in a very short time. If they don't, it will come across to most people (who don't know where to download pirated ROMs, and either don't own a TI/HP calculator or don't want to deal with extracting a copy of the ROM to their PC) as false or misleading advertising.
Every time I use a different web browser, whether its Mozilla/Seamonkey, Firefox, Opera, or even IE on Windows, I'm sure it feels faster than whatever I was using before. It doesn't matter what it is or how slow it is (unless it is really, really slow, like old Mozilla versions -- but even with them, I had myself convinced that some versons were dramatically improved from the last one, when they really weren't).
This was bothering me the last time I was playing around with Firefox. There is no reason for there to be any difference in rendering performance at all between any Gecko browsers using the same version of the rendering engine. A different user interface will not change that.
I decided to test this for certain. I got Seamonkey, Firefox, Galeon, and Epiphany, all running of of the same Mozilla version (okay, Firefox was actually a somewhat newer trunk snapshot, and had some optimizations, so if anything it should have been faster). I opened them at the same time, and in sequence, went to the same sites and watched them render. I loaded sites repeatedly from cache, and tried other sites I knew weren't cached. There was no difference at all. Every time I thought I noticed a difference, I went back to the other browser and loaded the same thing. It took the same amount of time.
I didn't see a "many percentage point" difference. All of the percentage points of difference were within the margin of error of my ability to distinguish differences in time, and while that could be a problem, all of the things I checked took long enough on my computer that if there were a significant proportional difference between browsers, it would manifest itself as a subjectively perceptible slowdown.
As for rendering, if you see any rendering quality differences between gecko browsers you need to check your font/screen dpi settings, because they ought to be exactly alike.
Firefox might be a nice browser, and it has its merits in terms of UI feel and features, but it won't succeed by being faster than Mozilla/Seamonkey, because it isn't.
Its common knowledge that becoming a superior gaming platform is the best way for a platform to gain mainstream acceptance. Thats why the Amiga has become the dominant computing platform today.
KMix: Properly save volumes on exit so volumes are correctly restored on next login.
Wow, that seems like a pretty big bug. I wonder how people lived with their volume not staying the same.
Standard behavior for most distributions is to save/restore sound settings at system halt/startup in the init scripts. So it is not exactly normal for the desktop or any other program to handle this itself, and I would guess that only a small minority of KDE users actually require KMix to work in this way. Which is probably why nobody caught the bug in the first place. Personally I use KDE and don't even have the mixer app installed.
We need companies to write device drivers, since the complexity of something like an nVidia GeForce GPU is simply too much for a small team of people to reverse engineer.
You have created a false binary opposition here. From reading this one would assume that the only alternatives were a reverse-engineered driver written by hobbyists, or a proprietary binary-only driver from the vendor. They are both bad choices, and the vast majority of kernel drivers are built on neither model. They are written as free software either by the manufacturer, or by outside developers based on specifications provided by the manufacturer. A driver from nvidia is only "necessary" because for 5 years they have refused to release any kind of meaningful specifications to driver developers, and they can't really release the source to their own driver because they don't own most of it.
This is actually a step backwards from the historic pattern of support for graphics cards under Linux. Since the first accelerated X11 server for S3 chipsets from 1992 or so most manufacturers were willing either to release specifications, or actually commision outside developers to write open-source drivers for their hardware. When almost all major video chipset makers (with the exception of nvidia) supported Precision Insight's work developing the DRI infrastructure, there was actually a short time where a large fraction of common video hardware was completely supported, out of the box, including accelerated 3D, by a typical Linux distribution. This was BETTER than the typical support pattern for Windows; no need to mess around with downloading drivers or loading them off of vendor CDs, if the distribution had a properly configured kernel you just installed it and it worked. Unfortunately most of the cards with working DRI drivers are basically obsolete now, aside from some low-end ATI Radeon models. This is how hardware should work in Linux, and for some things like ethernet cards and SCSI adapters it basically does.
The problem is that ATI and nvidia do not understand how to properly support free operating systems, and until they do this "problem" is going to persist. Developers are willing to sign NDAs to gain access to these specifications, and if hardware companies would agree to this there would be no need to port their own precious code at all, much less put up with constant whining to open-source it.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux actually has pretty amazing support for some legacy hardware, although configuration can be kind of opaque and most newer distributions don't know what to do with it. There is support remaining in the kernel for ancient ISA cards that haven't been properly supported under ANY Microsoft OS since MS-DOS.
I agree that modern desktop Linux is not the best choice for older systems, but I think the reasons have to do more with software bloat than hardware support.
Support for new hardware that the manufacturers are loath to release specifications for is IMO much more of a problem.
There has been a whole spate of these "I bought a Mac Mini, found out it really was a cheap, low-end computer, and then spent additional money to bring it up to a barely usable level" articles recently. Most of them involve either major, warranty-voiding modifications to the chassis, or as is the case here, ugly external peripherals that negate the main attraction of the Mini, its external appearance.
People seem to be buying these things as fashion accessories rather than making a serious decision based on their computer needs. It has one DIMM slot, a relatively slow CPU, and a notebook hard drive -- if thats not what you want, you should look for something else rather than expecting the rest of the world to salute your cleverness in partially addressing its shortcomings. If you don't really need a Mac, you can put together a PC for under $500 with a real hard drive and much better expandability. If you want a $500 computer to run OS X on, you can get a used G4 with specifications similar to a Mini, except again with useful internal expansion capacity. And if you want to spend more than that, well, you have the entire rest of the current Apple lineup.
The core functionality for most of the onboard components is now built right into the chipset. It costs at most a couple of bucks to add the connectors and the rest of the hardware (a sound codec, ethernet transciever, etc.) needed to fully support it, and the added value is more than that.
A lot of stuff that is now integrated on literally every motherboard used to be an add on card. 10 years ago you would be whining "why do I have to get a motherboard with an IDE controller and onboard parallel ports, I already have a multi-IO card". But things change and for the most part the integrated hardware is adequate, and it isn't economically viable to not provide it.
Umm...
I think the original article clearly refers to the entire federal government, not just the Federal Reserve. So the references to "The Fed" in the Slashdot story are misleading.
The nice thing here is that they wrote a probably neat NLG (natural language generation) system to write the paper - it seems to be more practical than previous multimodal NLG systems that are much more domain/application-dependent, but generate stuff that makes sense.
Nah, it just looks impressive precisely because of the level of specialization. The system they used is really, really simple, if I am correct. I haven't looked at their code but I am pretty familiar with one of the systems on their "Related Work" list, which you can see in action here.
It just takes a grammar, and starts expanding from the start symbol, picking at random when there are multiple possible expansions, until all branches terminate. There also might be some limited conditional/substitution rules to allow for some semantic consistency (so it can pick some string as the topic, and mention it again and again, for instance). The only trick to it is designing the grammar itself. But you can get amusing results even with fairly simple ones.
I can think of this piece of news being bought up at least 6 months ago and everyone moving over to using replacements like Dropline GNOME etc.
Pat basically stopped updating it after that first announcement, and the version included had gotten rather old (it was 2.6-something and 2.10 is out now), but it was still there and it was included in the Slackware 10.1 release. All this new announcement means is that the old, out of date, unsupported packages that were there have been removed.
Notes for MS Bigots: The Atari ST shipped with a two-button mouse years before PCs even had mice.
I don't think this is right. PC mice were available at least as early as 1983; the first Microsoft mouse came out then and it was even supported in the first DOS version of Word. There may have even been some available earlier than that. Mice were also available in that time span for the Apple II and other early architectures. The ST did not arrive until 1985.
Today, the Express Lanes are owned by the regional transportation authority. Why? Because politicians didn't like the fact that they didn't own the road and couldn't use it as a political football.
Thats not quite correct. The problem with the 91 Express Lanes was that the contract with the private operator prevented expansion of the free roadway until 2035. Since the toll lanes did not substantially reduce mainline congestion (as it was assumed they would), once OCTA had the money to widen the main roadway and actually improve congestion, it was in the public interest to buyout the operator's contract in order to allow for the widening.
Actually, Caldera DOS (now renamed back to DR-DOS) is now independent of SCO and still available.
Ack. First sentence should begin "In fact, continued government regulation..."
In ontinued government regulation is absolutely intrinsic in any plan to grant "owners" exclusive usage rights to their "property". At whose expense? Well, any non-commercial, public use of radio spectrum that might not be able to afford to participate in your Communications Ministry's fundraising program.
Incidentally, the UK is in no way "ahead of the curve" relative to the US FCC in this regard. The FCC has been auctioning off massive amounts of spectrum to the highest bidder for at least the last ten years, especially to cell phone companies, although there are some mode restrictions attached to the licenses.
Ham radio exploited by corporate interests? Maybe some technologies developed originally by hams are, but there are pretty strict rules in most countries preventing commercial activities by amateur operators. Broadcasting is strictly prohibited. When I was an active ham operator, it was considered illegal even to order a pizza over a phone patch from your radio (they might have loosened this since then, I don't remember). And of course, it is off limits if you don't have a license. So while as a ham you might be able to hack, say, off the shelf 802.11 equipment to operate on ham bands, and legally use it at much higher power levels and with better antennae than you can on their normal unlicensed frequencies, accessing much (most?) internet content over such a connection would be of questionable legality, selling access would be clearly illegal, and using it without a license would be absolutely verboten.
In fact, the amateur service is under constant threat of losing frequencies to commercial uses, especially the marginally used microwave bands where most of the interesting experimentation goes on now. Most commercial radio frequency users are more interested in destroying ham radio than embracing and extending it (which, as discussed above, is pretty difficult).
If they were selling the x86 box as well, they could get away with it. That way, they'd be able to graduallly expand the hardware they support out of the box while manufacturers catch up. They'd be supporting the hardware that they put out, and eventually supporting other hardware as well.
Its true that if they were only supporting a small set of hardware, it would be easier to support. But as long as it is publicly available and runs on commodity hardware, there is an expectation that it will work on most systems, and if it doesn't it could potentially do a great deal of damage to Apple's reputation and even hurt their hardware sales (whether their hardware was PPC or x86). After all, one of Apple's great selling points, dating back practically to the introduction of the Macintosh, is of products that "just work" out of the box without any hassle.
Now think of a typical mainstream review of a Linux distribution, wherein the reviewer ends by whining about how their Windows partition was deleted, their proprietary modem and printer don't work, and they can't find a decent money management program, and imagine the damage if Apple came to be associated with such a product. In fact, Apple would have to invest a lot of energy porting drivers and begging vendors just to get to the level of support for PC hardware that Linux distributions have now (compared to the current Darwin situation). A "defective" x86 Mac OS release could ruin them both as a hardware and software maker.
Of course, if it was free, or could be easily pirated, and it worked as well on my computer as Linux currently does, I would switch. But thats not accurate.
First of all, if it ever came to be, it would have to be hideously expensive. Don't think about the $100 cost of OS X upgrades now. Those are for people who have already paid their dues to Apple by buying a Mac. If it was any good, an x86 Mac OS port would wipe out a fair share of Apple's current hardware sales. Even if they could, say, double their current OS market share by running on cheaper commodity hardware, they would still need to make half the profit on each new, non-upgrade copy of x86 Mac OS that they currently make on the average new Macintosh sold. I would be very surprised if they could make this up with a retail price under $400. I definitely wouldn't pay $400 or more for it, as slick as it is, and compared to free Linux and "free" preloaded Windows I doubt many other current PC users would, and it would never be a market success for Apple if only existing Mac users bought it.
And thats all supposing that the product is every bit as good as the current version of Mac OS for Apple hardware. That means that they would have to support seamlessly every possible combination of PC components that could show up on a computer made in the last 3 or 4 years. Darwin x86 certainly can't do that now, and even if they could port over every current FreeBSD driver, plus support every video chipset they support on Macintoshes now, it would be far from universal, although it would be good enough for me. Microsoft spends a lot of money on testing and driver development to ensure Windows works on every wacky system they claim it will run on, and that is even given that most of the device drivers are written by vendors.
Given these constraints, I don't think Apple can bring a viable x86 Mac OS port to market at a price low enough to be successful, so no matter how cool you think it would be to have OS X on your computer, it isn't going to happen.
As far as I am concerned, he is an unethical shmuck who bears principal responsibility for the suicide of Gary Kildall. Search on "Gary Kildall" if you do not know who he is.
Maybe if you tried a different search engine you would know that the popular legend that he killed himself is not true. He was killed in a fight at a bar, and by all accounts it wasn't the least bit deliberate.
Don't leave it out of your sight in public areas. Seriously, that is the only thing you can do. If you want to leave it lying around unsupervised, you should expect someone to steal it. There is absolutely no way to stop a determined thief, and they are not unfamiliar with measures people take to lock or hide valuable items.
As for your dorm room, close and lock the door when you or your roommate is not there. Your room has an effective lock and if it doesn't work they will fix it for free. Trying to protect your stuff if the room is open to anyone is a lost cause, but it is very simple if it isn't.
You realise people are overclocking your previous line of cards instead of buying the new faster range of cards. So you try to disable overclocking in the driver (presumably by making the driver reclock the card to the correct frequencies, thus undoing the work of any overclocking software). If you release open source drivers, it'd be pretty easy for hacked drivers to be released that allow people to overclock, even though you dont want them to.
The number of people who overclock their hardware is probably far below even the number of linux users at this point. I have never seen any evidence it has impacted sales of high-end products. The main concern CPU manufacturers have with overclocking is remarking, where an overclockable slower chip is relabled by a third party as a faster chip and then resold. That is both illegal and damaging to the company's reputation (because the remarked chips are going to be, on average, less reliable) so they take measures to prevent it. Thats not a problem with video cards since the only practical means to overclock them is via software.
I think the precise reason that OEMs are releasing closed source drivers for Linux is so that they can get in before someone tries to reverse engineer their hardware and pass off some shoddy drivers that cast their hardware or their development team in a bad light.
This is partly true, but it also represents a valid response to customer demand: They have customers who want to use their products under Linux, and they are providing semi-official drivers in the only legal way they can (see below).
The only drivers regular profit-making companies can support are closed source drivers developed in-house. As soon as you implement the code of other people or allow some random guy you don't know access to your CVS to do a few check-ins, you cannot claim to offer any support for the product whatsoever, because people who have worked on it are not your employees and you are not responsible for anything they do, and are consequently no longer responsible for work done on your own driver, which you would like to be able to legally own, support, endorse and distribute with your product as your own
This isn't a big deal really. You can require third parties to contribute code under a license giving you either outright ownership or very broad redistribution rights, and carefully control outside code contributions (see Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.); there is no reason that model can't be applied to drivers. There are two other main reason that drivers are not released as open-source: First, often times the driver contains source code which the manufacturer licensed from a third party and has no right to redistribute (this is the case with NVIDIA). Second, the driver can contain some highly proprietary intellectual property, possibly representing most of the value of the product (this is the case with most software modems). There is no way around the first case unless the manufacturer wants to completely rewrite their existing driver, and no way at all around the second.
What is most discouraging, generally, is not that hardware companies don't open-source their drivers; the driver is the hardware company's property and if they don't want to port it to Linux or release source for it, that is their right. The problem is when vendors won't even release specifications to their hardware to open-source developers. There are people who are willing to sign all sorts of restrictive NDAs to get access to specifications and write open-source drivers for hardware; a hardware company does not have to release the full specifications to be released to the public, only allow the final driver to be released as open source. In the past this was how most drivers for Linux were written, but, especially graphics card companies, are providing much less access than they were 5 years ago, even as more companies are paying lip service to Linux support.
I submit my #9 Imagine128 graphics card, which I never did get to work under RH9, despite it being in the list of supported cards. Oh well.
Those should be supported. I am using an old Revolution 3D in one of my computers, which uses the same driver, and it works fine. I don't know how they cope with autoconfiguration, but using simple text-mode tools to generate an XF86Config/xorg.conf file worked fine for me.
Here is the documentation for the i128 driver in X11R6.7.
When I was starting linux for the first time, without no previous experience, 1 year ago, following the manual up to the last slash*, it took me only 1 reformating and 2 days total. Nowdays, it's less than 24 hours on my P4, for the critical stuff
To put that in perspective, it took me about two hours to install Slackware 3.3 on my totally obsolete 386SX when I started using Linux. That was installing off of a parallel port Zip drive on a machine with 4 megabytes of RAM. Even then, to install on that limited of a machine, you had to mount the root floppy directly rather than loading it into a ramdisk, and setup a swap partition before even being able to run the installer.
24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.
Unless they have licensed rights to redistribute the copyrighted ROMs from HP and TI, they probably shouldn't tout its ability to emulate the HP-48 and TI-89, since the emulators they are using almost certainly require a ROM to work. If they distribute pirated ROMs with the calculator they will be sued out of existence in a very short time. If they don't, it will come across to most people (who don't know where to download pirated ROMs, and either don't own a TI/HP calculator or don't want to deal with extracting a copy of the ROM to their PC) as false or misleading advertising.
Every time I use a different web browser, whether its Mozilla/Seamonkey, Firefox, Opera, or even IE on Windows, I'm sure it feels faster than whatever I was using before. It doesn't matter what it is or how slow it is (unless it is really, really slow, like old Mozilla versions -- but even with them, I had myself convinced that some versons were dramatically improved from the last one, when they really weren't).
This was bothering me the last time I was playing around with Firefox. There is no reason for there to be any difference in rendering performance at all between any Gecko browsers using the same version of the rendering engine. A different user interface will not change that.
I decided to test this for certain. I got Seamonkey, Firefox, Galeon, and Epiphany, all running of of the same Mozilla version (okay, Firefox was actually a somewhat newer trunk snapshot, and had some optimizations, so if anything it should have been faster). I opened them at the same time, and in sequence, went to the same sites and watched them render. I loaded sites repeatedly from cache, and tried other sites I knew weren't cached. There was no difference at all. Every time I thought I noticed a difference, I went back to the other browser and loaded the same thing. It took the same amount of time.
I didn't see a "many percentage point" difference. All of the percentage points of difference were within the margin of error of my ability to distinguish differences in time, and while that could be a problem, all of the things I checked took long enough on my computer that if there were a significant proportional difference between browsers, it would manifest itself as a subjectively perceptible slowdown.
As for rendering, if you see any rendering quality differences between gecko browsers you need to check your font/screen dpi settings, because they ought to be exactly alike.
Firefox might be a nice browser, and it has its merits in terms of UI feel and features, but it won't succeed by being faster than Mozilla/Seamonkey, because it isn't.
Its common knowledge that becoming a superior gaming platform is the best way for a platform to gain mainstream acceptance. Thats why the Amiga has become the dominant computing platform today.
KMix: Properly save volumes on exit so volumes are correctly restored on next login.
Wow, that seems like a pretty big bug. I wonder how people lived with their volume not staying the same.
Standard behavior for most distributions is to save/restore sound settings at system halt/startup in the init scripts. So it is not exactly normal for the desktop or any other program to handle this itself, and I would guess that only a small minority of KDE users actually require KMix to work in this way. Which is probably why nobody caught the bug in the first place. Personally I use KDE and don't even have the mixer app installed.
We need companies to write device drivers, since the complexity of something like an nVidia GeForce GPU is simply too much for a small team of people to reverse engineer.
You have created a false binary opposition here. From reading this one would assume that the only alternatives were a reverse-engineered driver written by hobbyists, or a proprietary binary-only driver from the vendor. They are both bad choices, and the vast majority of kernel drivers are built on neither model. They are written as free software either by the manufacturer, or by outside developers based on specifications provided by the manufacturer. A driver from nvidia is only "necessary" because for 5 years they have refused to release any kind of meaningful specifications to driver developers, and they can't really release the source to their own driver because they don't own most of it.
This is actually a step backwards from the historic pattern of support for graphics cards under Linux. Since the first accelerated X11 server for S3 chipsets from 1992 or so most manufacturers were willing either to release specifications, or actually commision outside developers to write open-source drivers for their hardware. When almost all major video chipset makers (with the exception of nvidia) supported Precision Insight's work developing the DRI infrastructure, there was actually a short time where a large fraction of common video hardware was completely supported, out of the box, including accelerated 3D, by a typical Linux distribution. This was BETTER than the typical support pattern for Windows; no need to mess around with downloading drivers or loading them off of vendor CDs, if the distribution had a properly configured kernel you just installed it and it worked. Unfortunately most of the cards with working DRI drivers are basically obsolete now, aside from some low-end ATI Radeon models. This is how hardware should work in Linux, and for some things like ethernet cards and SCSI adapters it basically does.
The problem is that ATI and nvidia do not understand how to properly support free operating systems, and until they do this "problem" is going to persist. Developers are willing to sign NDAs to gain access to these specifications, and if hardware companies would agree to this there would be no need to port their own precious code at all, much less put up with constant whining to open-source it.
I don't think a single university publically displays the stats of student reviews after a semester with a prof.
How much would you bet on that?