If this is upheld and catches on, it could have pretty horrid implications world-wide, especially with how willing people are to litigate against companies (such as Google) that are actually based in a different country but have presense in the litigator's country by virtue of internet access....
Having a weak password is more like having a dinky combination lock on your front door, not like leaving it open. If someone comes up to your house and cracks your $2.98 Walmart combo lock, they're still robbing you.
Also, how can you call someone who's ID is well over 600,000 lower than yours a junior? It defies all reason! By common sense, DerekLyons is 3 times your age.
Unless I totally misunderstood your post, Fedora Core *is* a free distro.... If I totally misunderstood your post, it's *still* a free distro, but then that information is irrelevant.
It's in part that exact attitude that allowed somewhere between 3 and 60 million (citation: Wikipedia article for "Joseph Stalin") people to die under the Soviet regime. How exactly do you expect an unarmed, suppressed peoples to take over an armed, trained, and extremely well-funded government? Sure, it happens sometimes, but rarely does it happen without external support or out-of-the-ordinary circumstances (say, like the bad government being based halfway around the world in the case of the US revolution, not to mention the French support).
From personal experience, the people in those oppressive regimes oftentimes root for the enemy. At least, I know this was the case in the Soviet Union and is the case in Iran.
So it's quite easy to say "It's not our culture, why do we have the right to fault them for silencing and killing their citizens," but in the end that's just a really lame way to avoid the reality: you're sitting by and doing nothing while people are being oppressed and killed. It doesn't necessarily make you evil, as there's nothing that necessarily obligates you to care, but it does make you less good than the people that are at least trying to do something about it. And in this case, in some tiny little way, Google is at least trying to do something.
Personally, I love the ASCII. I do have plenty of friends who refuse to give the ASCII a try, though. I liken this with insane statements such as "I really like Halo 3, but I just refuse to have to learn how to use a remote control to turn on the TV."
It's how the game is; it's part of its charm. They're not THAT scary, jeez! Think of it as a very stylized look: most people aren't deathly scared of cell shading, why are you so scared of some extra stylization?
Heck yeah! I would say that, compensating for nostalgia, Dwarf Fortress is probably the best game ever created, on any platform. It's also the most ambitious. Seriously, anyone that hasn't played it yet needs to do so immediately.
That's pretty cool. Did you get those 45ms with a Wii or with a 360? My Wii had higher lag than my 360 because the Wii's signal had to be upscaled before displaying, whereas the 360 outputted in 1080p already.
I guess it's also possible that I just noticed it more on the Wii. I didn't have anything as fast-paced as Smash on the 360. I didn't have rock band on the Wii to test it out, so it's pretty much anecdotal evidence for me.
I hear sentiments like this quite a lot, but the fact is that you're wrong.
Smash Bros is a game that exhibits a very strong "best-in-my-school" syndrome. That is, lots of people you meet are either the best in their school, the best in their group of friends, best in their town, etc. All those people might claim to be 'competitive' in the game, and they generally all suck pretty bad.
The real skill comes from the top players of the greater community, the ones that aren't just the best in their school or something retarded like that, but are actually good. We hold a few tournaments every month, for money and prestige, and I can guarantee that memorization alone isn't going to get you anywhere. You need to know the game and the moves and the meta-game of the characters involved, sure, but the match comes down to being able to read your opponent and devise successful strategies against them. The memorization level is what I call the "sub-competitive" level. Autopilot-based players might win the first match (if that) from the momentum of a novel and well-memorized strategy, but after that, against a good player, they're done. They'll never win again.
As for the stupid rules, there are three real rules that influence actually playing the game: banned stages, banned infinites, and no items.
Banned stages are something that's very necessary. For example, no matter how good you are, with most characters if Dedede grabs you on Shadow Moses Island or Bridge of Eldin, that's a stock. For that reason, those stages are banned. I play Bridge of Eldin a lot with my friends, sure, cause it's a fun stage, but if one of them went Dedede all the time and chain grabbed me off the edge over and over, I would certainly consider banning it. With money and status on the line, the competitive community has decided to ban that stage in standard tournaments. Other stages are banned for other reasons -- WarioWare has no place in a Smash match. People want to actually play, not jump around popping party hats or stand around doing nothing.
Even then, it's far from only Final Destination. Off the top of my head, here are the stages that generally be played in tournaments: FD, Battlefield, Smashville, Brinstar, Green Greens (in doubles), Pokemon Stadium, Rainbow Cruise, Pictochat, Yoshi's Island, Lylat Cruise, Castle Siege, Halberd, Frigate Orpheon, Jungle Japes, Luigi's Mansion, and Isle Delphino. That's 16 stages, a far cry from just FD. The people that play FD-only are generally the best-in-my-school smashers, and they'd get destroyed, and horribly so, in actual competitive play. Even those stages offer certain characters great advantages. You don't want to fight Falco on Jungle Japes, for example; that's his house and he doesn't want you in there.
There are a (very) few banned infinites, as well. Most stalling tactics, like Sonic hiding under FD or Metaknight's infinite cape glitch is out, and with good reason. Likewise, the crazy Ice Climbers grab-fly-kill off the top glitch is either going to be or already is banned. Banning those moves is an obvious decision and I'm not sure what reasonable arguments you could make against it...
The no items rule is a bit more controversial. The vast majority of competitive players will agree that they add an unwanted randomness variable, but I personally like playing with items. However, certain new items like the Final Smash ball and some of the trophies are ridiculous. The final smash ball stops play every freaking minute and the players spend like 20 second chasing the stupid thing. It's retarded. Some of the trophies are just too powerful. A lot of the time when I play with my friends, we'll turn just those two off. They also hate food and hearts and tomatoes for some reason, though I like those.
However, you could argue that items give faster characters an advantage because those characters can get to the items faster, for example. You could argue that bombs spawning on top of you (which happens surprisingly often) is too random and not skill-determined,
Oh, come on. You can make a case that almost any holiday is derived from either some Christian or some other religious-specific or culture-specific rite. Until this bullshit got going, I never really thought that it had anything to do with God at all, just about thankfulness. Yet now it's somehow a Christian offensive event. This insanity is exactly what I'm talking about. Another purely-secular holiday, Columbus Day, has also been annihilated completely due to political correctness. Columbus might have been a jerk, but that holiday had no religious basis. There's another part of our culture gone, leaving the US just that much sorrier that it exists.
Wasting resources on this, because of some crazy adherence to political correctness (despite you saying otherwise, this is the cause) is retarded. Hypersensitivity, whether to a word, someone's hypothetical feelings, or pretty much anything except actual, tangible harm, is stupid.
Plasmas will lag as well, dude. Anything that upscales the image and does any sort of post-processing nowadays is going to lag; the TV industry just has no interest for some strange reason in making it lag less, outside of only-partially-effective "game mode"s on some TVs...
If you're running Ubuntu, once the malware can run code as the user, it could download a spare, compromised set of all the system tools that require a password (ie, setting your clock, configuring any sort of system settings, etc) and modify the System menu to use them instead. At that point, it can just wait patiently until you need the functionality, steal your password when you enter it, and sudo to root normally. Alternatively, it could sneakily break something (ie, have the hacked clock applet display the wrong time) and when you go to fix it, sniff your password then, though that risks tipping off the user.
If you have it properly configured, with the user you use every day not having such great sudo powers, then it's much safer. That's far from the default config, though. Likewise, noexec set on your/home would prevent such hacked applets from running unless they rewrite them in a scripting language, I guess. That's a lot of work, but far from impossible.
And anyways, that's all overkill. No one needs root access if the real treasure is what you type into the browser and store online and so forth. A piece of malware could just as easily install some Firefox plugin into the user's mozilla plugins folder, and that plugin could do anything they needed it to, including launching connections elsewhere and following orders. Good luck finding that via ps. You'd need to look at about:plugins and hope that you can figure it out from there. As a safeguard, the malware could infect your.bash_profile and.bash_logout to give itself some re-infecting insurance when you start up (or close down) a shell to fix the issue. And there's more than just Firefox that takes user-installed plugins -- any application that runs user-configurable code at any point can be used for this purpose. The gnome session startup config won't help you in any of these instances, and the average user's Linux-savvy friend probably wouldn't be enough to get out of this mess. It's like a rootkit without root -- a userkit if you will.
/etc might not be the same as the Windows registry (I agree with this statement,/etc is much more manageable), but the gconf registry is looking more and more like it every month. You can say gnome isn't an integral part of Linux, but it's installed on the majority of end-users systems nowadays so for these purposes, it pretty much is...
Something as huge as 200ms is insanely easy to discern with accuracy. You should see competitive Smash Bros Brawl players -- they suffer with HDTVs that introduce any lag at all, even as much as 2 frames (60ms or so).
I host Smash Bros tournaments here in Tempe, AZ, and I've had to amass a collection of SDTVs because of all the complaints, and because I started noticing the lag myself. Luckily SDTVs are super cheap (or free in a lot of cases) now.
Ok, I see what you're saying, yes. Saying blatantly offensive things is obviously going to lead to people reacting negatively to you, and it's crazy to expect different.
However, that can be taken way too far. A friend of mine related to me a message that he was sent by his kid's school, asking people who came to their "autumn party" not to mention the word "Thanksgiving" for fear of offending people of different cultures. When we start killing off parts of our culture due to some abstract fear of the chance of offending someone somewhere, it becomes insane. I'm not even from the US originally (and have no personal stake in the Thanksgiving holiday, which I see as a strange celebration of gluttony and a sickening launch into the insanity of holiday shopping), and I think this situation is ridiculous.
I think a culture that errs towards offending people sometimes is much healthier than a culture, like our current one, that is essentially slowly and willingly committing suicide. One of the things that defines various cultures are the differences and even clashes between them, and repressing things that can possibly offend is going to eventually wipe our culture clean of any uniqueness. Sorry, but political correctness is not worth that.
Can you clarify what you're saying, cause I think there's some meaning being lost between our replies here?
If by "call them out", you mean "censor", then yes, it's censorship. If by "call them out" you mean bitch at them then of course it's perfectly acceptable. But the fact is that "I don't find offensive what you find offensive, so your arguments are invalid", I would argue, is a required attitude in order to have decent free speech. Censoring yourself in fear of offending any third party, be it human or government, is still censoring...
I'm pretty sure you're consistently mis-understanding what he's saying, cromar. He doesn't appear to think "black" is a bad word, that's exactly his point...
I would agree that closed drivers aren't the solution, in principle. In practice, so many of the technologies involved are proprietary/patented (ie, S3 Texture Compression, which was one of the big reasons the weather channel's open source driver was non-viable IIRC), that any open source drivers are going to be hopelessly incomplete. I'd support a change to this paradigm, but it'd take a push from the hardware side of things as well as the software side. That doesn't appear to be happening in either camp.
For now, I'll gladly take functional, well-supported (heck, even my Geforce2s and TNT2s still work!) 3D drivers.
It's not a matter of switching back, it's a matter of switching at all. Any chips I had before 2000 were coincidental (ie, I didn't pick them, they happened to come with the comp). I think I had one ATI Rage3D and I didn't even realize I had that until much later when I went back and rebuilt the box as a file server. So I don't see nVidia as something I had to switch to cause I couldn't use good old ATI due to driver issues, I see them as the right choice and there is really no incentive to switch.
But to answer your question, probably not. nVidia deserves a lot of thanks for their 9+ years of amazing Linux support, IMO, and I'm not going to jump ship just because ATI happened to *finally* get their asses in gear. For those nine years, nVidia's been building good-will and it'll take a lot for ATI to catch up with that. Companies should be rewarded for correct decisions. Very, very few (if any) other hardware companies can claim such solid Linux support.
Besides, ATI has been "helpful with open-source drivers" for ages now, and they've been "progressing at a great rate" for even longer. ATI driver support always seems to be "almost usable" and the Linux users accept the crappy support because "it'll get better soon". It's not going to get better. It didn't get better with the weather channel's open source driver attempt, it didn't get better with ATI's horrid, buggy closed-source drivers, and the trend suggests that it's not going to get better with their newfound helpfulness, either. They're late to the party, and at least in my case, they've missed the chance to get my business (or the business of any friends and family that I recommend laptops or desktops or components to).
Of course, if nVidia starts beating babies or something, it might be a different story:-)
I'll chime in on nVidia's side. Been using them ever since I switched to Linux, and thanks to their 100% consistent, solid Linux support since like 2000 or something, I will almost certainly never switch away. Out of the probably more than a dozen nVidia cards I've had, each one has worked flawlessly with great 3D in Linux and Windows alike.
In contrast to that, my friend who used to be an ATI fanboy had nothing but issues with both the open source and the ATI-provided Linux drivers until like 2006, when he finally gave up and switched to nVidia chipsets on everything.
The performance leader seems to trade off between nVidia and ATI depending on generation, but nVidia always has the driver support. There's just no reason to risk the driver issues by going with ATI.
It sucks when you have to install Adblock just to have web pages load in without lagging at those "making connection to ads" screens, even when I otherwise wouldn't mind the ads. Advertisers suffer directly as a result of that even more than they do from people blocking ads cause they hate them, IMO. In the latter case, the person wouldn't click on ads anyways, but in the former case, they might have.
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If this is upheld and catches on, it could have pretty horrid implications world-wide, especially with how willing people are to litigate against companies (such as Google) that are actually based in a different country but have presense in the litigator's country by virtue of internet access....
Probably.
Having a weak password is more like having a dinky combination lock on your front door, not like leaving it open. If someone comes up to your house and cracks your $2.98 Walmart combo lock, they're still robbing you.
Also, how can you call someone who's ID is well over 600,000 lower than yours a junior? It defies all reason! By common sense, DerekLyons is 3 times your age.
Unless I totally misunderstood your post, Fedora Core *is* a free distro.... If I totally misunderstood your post, it's *still* a free distro, but then that information is irrelevant.
It's in part that exact attitude that allowed somewhere between 3 and 60 million (citation: Wikipedia article for "Joseph Stalin") people to die under the Soviet regime. How exactly do you expect an unarmed, suppressed peoples to take over an armed, trained, and extremely well-funded government? Sure, it happens sometimes, but rarely does it happen without external support or out-of-the-ordinary circumstances (say, like the bad government being based halfway around the world in the case of the US revolution, not to mention the French support).
From personal experience, the people in those oppressive regimes oftentimes root for the enemy. At least, I know this was the case in the Soviet Union and is the case in Iran.
So it's quite easy to say "It's not our culture, why do we have the right to fault them for silencing and killing their citizens," but in the end that's just a really lame way to avoid the reality: you're sitting by and doing nothing while people are being oppressed and killed. It doesn't necessarily make you evil, as there's nothing that necessarily obligates you to care, but it does make you less good than the people that are at least trying to do something about it. And in this case, in some tiny little way, Google is at least trying to do something.
Double-braided beard indeed.
Personally, I love the ASCII. I do have plenty of friends who refuse to give the ASCII a try, though. I liken this with insane statements such as "I really like Halo 3, but I just refuse to have to learn how to use a remote control to turn on the TV."
It's how the game is; it's part of its charm. They're not THAT scary, jeez! Think of it as a very stylized look: most people aren't deathly scared of cell shading, why are you so scared of some extra stylization?
Heck yeah! I would say that, compensating for nostalgia, Dwarf Fortress is probably the best game ever created, on any platform. It's also the most ambitious. Seriously, anyone that hasn't played it yet needs to do so immediately.
That's pretty cool. Did you get those 45ms with a Wii or with a 360? My Wii had higher lag than my 360 because the Wii's signal had to be upscaled before displaying, whereas the 360 outputted in 1080p already.
I guess it's also possible that I just noticed it more on the Wii. I didn't have anything as fast-paced as Smash on the 360. I didn't have rock band on the Wii to test it out, so it's pretty much anecdotal evidence for me.
I hear sentiments like this quite a lot, but the fact is that you're wrong.
Smash Bros is a game that exhibits a very strong "best-in-my-school" syndrome. That is, lots of people you meet are either the best in their school, the best in their group of friends, best in their town, etc. All those people might claim to be 'competitive' in the game, and they generally all suck pretty bad.
The real skill comes from the top players of the greater community, the ones that aren't just the best in their school or something retarded like that, but are actually good. We hold a few tournaments every month, for money and prestige, and I can guarantee that memorization alone isn't going to get you anywhere. You need to know the game and the moves and the meta-game of the characters involved, sure, but the match comes down to being able to read your opponent and devise successful strategies against them. The memorization level is what I call the "sub-competitive" level. Autopilot-based players might win the first match (if that) from the momentum of a novel and well-memorized strategy, but after that, against a good player, they're done. They'll never win again.
As for the stupid rules, there are three real rules that influence actually playing the game: banned stages, banned infinites, and no items.
Banned stages are something that's very necessary. For example, no matter how good you are, with most characters if Dedede grabs you on Shadow Moses Island or Bridge of Eldin, that's a stock. For that reason, those stages are banned. I play Bridge of Eldin a lot with my friends, sure, cause it's a fun stage, but if one of them went Dedede all the time and chain grabbed me off the edge over and over, I would certainly consider banning it. With money and status on the line, the competitive community has decided to ban that stage in standard tournaments. Other stages are banned for other reasons -- WarioWare has no place in a Smash match. People want to actually play, not jump around popping party hats or stand around doing nothing.
Even then, it's far from only Final Destination. Off the top of my head, here are the stages that generally be played in tournaments: FD, Battlefield, Smashville, Brinstar, Green Greens (in doubles), Pokemon Stadium, Rainbow Cruise, Pictochat, Yoshi's Island, Lylat Cruise, Castle Siege, Halberd, Frigate Orpheon, Jungle Japes, Luigi's Mansion, and Isle Delphino. That's 16 stages, a far cry from just FD. The people that play FD-only are generally the best-in-my-school smashers, and they'd get destroyed, and horribly so, in actual competitive play. Even those stages offer certain characters great advantages. You don't want to fight Falco on Jungle Japes, for example; that's his house and he doesn't want you in there.
There are a (very) few banned infinites, as well. Most stalling tactics, like Sonic hiding under FD or Metaknight's infinite cape glitch is out, and with good reason. Likewise, the crazy Ice Climbers grab-fly-kill off the top glitch is either going to be or already is banned. Banning those moves is an obvious decision and I'm not sure what reasonable arguments you could make against it...
The no items rule is a bit more controversial. The vast majority of competitive players will agree that they add an unwanted randomness variable, but I personally like playing with items. However, certain new items like the Final Smash ball and some of the trophies are ridiculous. The final smash ball stops play every freaking minute and the players spend like 20 second chasing the stupid thing. It's retarded. Some of the trophies are just too powerful. A lot of the time when I play with my friends, we'll turn just those two off. They also hate food and hearts and tomatoes for some reason, though I like those.
However, you could argue that items give faster characters an advantage because those characters can get to the items faster, for example. You could argue that bombs spawning on top of you (which happens surprisingly often) is too random and not skill-determined,
Oh, come on. You can make a case that almost any holiday is derived from either some Christian or some other religious-specific or culture-specific rite. Until this bullshit got going, I never really thought that it had anything to do with God at all, just about thankfulness. Yet now it's somehow a Christian offensive event. This insanity is exactly what I'm talking about. Another purely-secular holiday, Columbus Day, has also been annihilated completely due to political correctness. Columbus might have been a jerk, but that holiday had no religious basis. There's another part of our culture gone, leaving the US just that much sorrier that it exists.
Wasting resources on this, because of some crazy adherence to political correctness (despite you saying otherwise, this is the cause) is retarded. Hypersensitivity, whether to a word, someone's hypothetical feelings, or pretty much anything except actual, tangible harm, is stupid.
Plasmas will lag as well, dude. Anything that upscales the image and does any sort of post-processing nowadays is going to lag; the TV industry just has no interest for some strange reason in making it lag less, outside of only-partially-effective "game mode"s on some TVs...
If you're running Ubuntu, once the malware can run code as the user, it could download a spare, compromised set of all the system tools that require a password (ie, setting your clock, configuring any sort of system settings, etc) and modify the System menu to use them instead. At that point, it can just wait patiently until you need the functionality, steal your password when you enter it, and sudo to root normally. Alternatively, it could sneakily break something (ie, have the hacked clock applet display the wrong time) and when you go to fix it, sniff your password then, though that risks tipping off the user.
If you have it properly configured, with the user you use every day not having such great sudo powers, then it's much safer. That's far from the default config, though. Likewise, noexec set on your /home would prevent such hacked applets from running unless they rewrite them in a scripting language, I guess. That's a lot of work, but far from impossible.
And anyways, that's all overkill. No one needs root access if the real treasure is what you type into the browser and store online and so forth. A piece of malware could just as easily install some Firefox plugin into the user's mozilla plugins folder, and that plugin could do anything they needed it to, including launching connections elsewhere and following orders. Good luck finding that via ps. You'd need to look at about:plugins and hope that you can figure it out from there. As a safeguard, the malware could infect your .bash_profile and .bash_logout to give itself some re-infecting insurance when you start up (or close down) a shell to fix the issue. And there's more than just Firefox that takes user-installed plugins -- any application that runs user-configurable code at any point can be used for this purpose. The gnome session startup config won't help you in any of these instances, and the average user's Linux-savvy friend probably wouldn't be enough to get out of this mess. It's like a rootkit without root -- a userkit if you will.
/etc might not be the same as the Windows registry (I agree with this statement, /etc is much more manageable), but the gconf registry is looking more and more like it every month. You can say gnome isn't an integral part of Linux, but it's installed on the majority of end-users systems nowadays so for these purposes, it pretty much is...
You're just getting old, dude :-)
Something as huge as 200ms is insanely easy to discern with accuracy. You should see competitive Smash Bros Brawl players -- they suffer with HDTVs that introduce any lag at all, even as much as 2 frames (60ms or so).
I host Smash Bros tournaments here in Tempe, AZ, and I've had to amass a collection of SDTVs because of all the complaints, and because I started noticing the lag myself. Luckily SDTVs are super cheap (or free in a lot of cases) now.
Ok, I see what you're saying, yes. Saying blatantly offensive things is obviously going to lead to people reacting negatively to you, and it's crazy to expect different.
However, that can be taken way too far. A friend of mine related to me a message that he was sent by his kid's school, asking people who came to their "autumn party" not to mention the word "Thanksgiving" for fear of offending people of different cultures. When we start killing off parts of our culture due to some abstract fear of the chance of offending someone somewhere, it becomes insane. I'm not even from the US originally (and have no personal stake in the Thanksgiving holiday, which I see as a strange celebration of gluttony and a sickening launch into the insanity of holiday shopping), and I think this situation is ridiculous.
I think a culture that errs towards offending people sometimes is much healthier than a culture, like our current one, that is essentially slowly and willingly committing suicide. One of the things that defines various cultures are the differences and even clashes between them, and repressing things that can possibly offend is going to eventually wipe our culture clean of any uniqueness. Sorry, but political correctness is not worth that.
Can you clarify what you're saying, cause I think there's some meaning being lost between our replies here?
If by "call them out", you mean "censor", then yes, it's censorship. If by "call them out" you mean bitch at them then of course it's perfectly acceptable. But the fact is that "I don't find offensive what you find offensive, so your arguments are invalid", I would argue, is a required attitude in order to have decent free speech. Censoring yourself in fear of offending any third party, be it human or government, is still censoring...
I'm pretty sure you're consistently mis-understanding what he's saying, cromar. He doesn't appear to think "black" is a bad word, that's exactly his point...
I would agree that closed drivers aren't the solution, in principle. In practice, so many of the technologies involved are proprietary/patented (ie, S3 Texture Compression, which was one of the big reasons the weather channel's open source driver was non-viable IIRC), that any open source drivers are going to be hopelessly incomplete. I'd support a change to this paradigm, but it'd take a push from the hardware side of things as well as the software side. That doesn't appear to be happening in either camp.
For now, I'll gladly take functional, well-supported (heck, even my Geforce2s and TNT2s still work!) 3D drivers.
It's not a matter of switching back, it's a matter of switching at all. Any chips I had before 2000 were coincidental (ie, I didn't pick them, they happened to come with the comp). I think I had one ATI Rage3D and I didn't even realize I had that until much later when I went back and rebuilt the box as a file server. So I don't see nVidia as something I had to switch to cause I couldn't use good old ATI due to driver issues, I see them as the right choice and there is really no incentive to switch.
But to answer your question, probably not. nVidia deserves a lot of thanks for their 9+ years of amazing Linux support, IMO, and I'm not going to jump ship just because ATI happened to *finally* get their asses in gear. For those nine years, nVidia's been building good-will and it'll take a lot for ATI to catch up with that. Companies should be rewarded for correct decisions. Very, very few (if any) other hardware companies can claim such solid Linux support.
Besides, ATI has been "helpful with open-source drivers" for ages now, and they've been "progressing at a great rate" for even longer. ATI driver support always seems to be "almost usable" and the Linux users accept the crappy support because "it'll get better soon". It's not going to get better. It didn't get better with the weather channel's open source driver attempt, it didn't get better with ATI's horrid, buggy closed-source drivers, and the trend suggests that it's not going to get better with their newfound helpfulness, either. They're late to the party, and at least in my case, they've missed the chance to get my business (or the business of any friends and family that I recommend laptops or desktops or components to).
Of course, if nVidia starts beating babies or something, it might be a different story :-)
I'll chime in on nVidia's side. Been using them ever since I switched to Linux, and thanks to their 100% consistent, solid Linux support since like 2000 or something, I will almost certainly never switch away. Out of the probably more than a dozen nVidia cards I've had, each one has worked flawlessly with great 3D in Linux and Windows alike.
In contrast to that, my friend who used to be an ATI fanboy had nothing but issues with both the open source and the ATI-provided Linux drivers until like 2006, when he finally gave up and switched to nVidia chipsets on everything.
The performance leader seems to trade off between nVidia and ATI depending on generation, but nVidia always has the driver support. There's just no reason to risk the driver issues by going with ATI.
It sucks when you have to install Adblock just to have web pages load in without lagging at those "making connection to ads" screens, even when I otherwise wouldn't mind the ads. Advertisers suffer directly as a result of that even more than they do from people blocking ads cause they hate them, IMO. In the latter case, the person wouldn't click on ads anyways, but in the former case, they might have.
What you said doesn't necessarily contradict what he said...
Most people don't keep that on their email accounts...
I wish "Flamebait" wasn't a -1 moderation :-(