With a thin client I'd presume the X session (or GDI, or whatever) is running entirely on the client. As SVG is already using XML format, it's almost ideally suited as a format for downloading the icons to the thin client, where it is rendered locally (as you suggested.)
LGPL is compatible with both GPL and MPL software, you are just required to leave the LGPL code in a shared library or DLL rather than embedding it in the application.
The only people who'd want to move it over to MPL would be those who want to embrace and extend from a corporate perspective. SVG is simple and small enough that the few surviving corporates who need to implement such a library can do so with relatively few resources if they aren't willing to live with the LGPL requirements.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned a key benefit of SVG desktops: session migration.
Ever notice how primitive systems like WinXX have some serious layout problems with a network login user moving from their "usual" 1280x1024 desktop to a temporary workstation that is set for 800x600? The icons get repositioned to be visible, destroying any custom layout the user had -- and that is assuming they were all in the upper/left of the screen. Heaven forbid the user had bothered with placing any of them on the right hand edge of their screen!
Deploying a "thin client" desktop is even worse, as you need to be able to scale the virtual desktop to fit the physical screen being used at the time. As PCs become more innocuous (think payphones), it will be natural for people to expect to have an identical session no matter what they are using to link with their home server session.
Sure we're still 5-10 years from the point where those facilities are "needed", but without a solid foundation in place we can't even think about deploying those kind of systems efficiently.
HTTP was designed to be efficient for cases where a relatively simple request is going to result in a relatively large result dataset. Distributed services don't follow that pattern. You often have a relatively complex request (save changes to customer information) producing a simple result (changes saved/lost.)
HTTP also was also designed as a stateless protocol, and does not have the facilities to ensure any time or order based serialization of requests and results. (Yes it can be cobbled in via back-end stateful servers and session context data, but it isn't used by the HTTP server itself to serialize anything.)
Abusing a simple protocol in order to make life "easier" for the network configuration and administration team is just a bass-ackwards way of dealing with things. Networks are an infrastructure service for providing information systems to business, as are databases, file servers, application servers, programming services, etc. Nothing ever seems to end up "easy" except with a loss of functionality, efficiency, or scalability.
On a related note, can anyone tell me how to get Pure-FTPd to support transfers of files larger than 2 gigs?
You can't unless you rebuild with support for large file systems, and even then you might have issues as I think the FTP protocol itself uses 32-bit signed values to indicate offsets. (I could be wrong, it's been over 15 years since I had to look at the specs.)
Far easier to just "cut" the file into smaller chunks.
Assuming, of course, that you still have a system after the network admins notice your usage spike and determine it's from serving up illegal content.
Originally I'd just been trying to find a build of Evolution that supported SSL and TLS (ATT email requires encrypted links; a good idea for email security.) The only way I could resolve the dependencies was to refresh the whole environment via Ximian's RedCarpet installer. As Red Carpet also had the option of pulling in SuSE updates, it's become the central update engine for my SuSE development box.
I spent many years as a KDE fan, and still like the product a lot, but Gnome has stabilized nicely and with a bit of work you can make the UI more familiar than the default installation is. If you're developing pure (L)GPL, then KDE is the nicer dev kit. If you need to produce products that could be enhanced by your clients, then there are few options other than GTK+mm which don't cost thousands of dollars to support WinXX and Linux clients.
Trolltech has to be paid up-front to do non-GPL development with KDE, which I can't afford. I have no issue with rolling license costs in to any commercial sales in the future, but I can't buy licenses for initial prototyping because it's all spec work -- I have no guarantees I'll ever have a paying client for the work. (Don't get me wrong, Trolltech's licensing fees are very reasonable, I just don't have the cash to spare right now.)
"Out of pocket" expenses are completely misleading. Just because I use a corporate account to pay for the software or hardware I order does not mean that the money in that account is "free." When I spend corporate funds, there is that much less money available for paying me for the work I've done.
Out of my billables to a client, I have to pay not only my own salary, but the accountant's fees, bookkeeping fees, corporate taxes (federal and provincial), corporate-side personal income tax "contributions" (federal and provincial), corporate contributions on health care, unemployment insurance, etc. In Canada, by the time you're done you'll see about 35-45% of your gross income as an incorporated consultant bled off before you can even think about spending it on your own salary or hardware/software purchases for the corporation.
After all that, I then have to pay personal income taxes and contributions out of my paycheque, the same as anyone sees on their normal payroll cheque. It's just the way business is, and not a complaint per-se, but I do wish people would stop fantasizing that "consultant" means "unlimited budget". (Try getting incorporated and working independantly some time -- the main reason small businesses usually fail is that gap between reality and people's fantasy about how "rich" they'll become running their own business.)
In no way do I expect a product to be supported "forever" without costs, but I do expect some sort of reasonable for-pay option to be available without negotiating a specific support license. Nor do I want "special treatment" from RedHat to get that support -- anyone who is doing software development needs to have product available for a reasonable price in order to keep their skills up to date for servicing clients, not just those of us who bitch about the issue.
Mentioning the rather serious noise issue on page 5 is hardly "prominent".
On a side note, I don't understand why your response was modded down -- you reference the correct page and other useful links. (I didn't bother chasing your links of the fan noise -- I'd listened to the ones at the Anandtech site many hours before.)
Large clients (e.g. banks) have the clout to ensure that once they select a hardware platform with a large provider like IBM, Dell, or Compaq, they will continue to get identical hardware on subsequent orders, even after the regular consumer can no longer order the components.
The same applies to the software they run. End of life to a large corporation only means that the general public can't get support for the product and is forced to upgrade; corps keep getting support for as long as they are paying enough.
Most corps I've worked for are running software that no one would even think of buying or installing anywhere else. It's all about maintaining compatability, and lock-stepped upgrades of entire farms of corporate systems. Even applying a software patch for the OS requires regression testing of third-party and internally-developed software that the OS vendor often does not have access to.
The last large client I worked for takes about three months to determine if an OS patch can be rolled out. Until then, you live with the problems caused by the OS bug, even if that means getting paged every morning to restart servers, or that users are going to have to put up with periodic dead sessions.
Absolutely nothing is more important to a large corp than data integrity. Not the sanity of the support staff, the profit margins of the vendors, or the "improvements" of a newer OS release. Nothing is allowed to change that might risk the data, and making changes without proper verification and authorization is a firing offense -- no matter whether they eventualy apply the update you forced or not.
You missed a key point: I'm a consultant. I have to support what clients are using, which is largely WinNT/2K/XP and RedHat's distribution of Linux. I cannot afford to pay their corporate level pricing because I am a self-emplyed individual, not a consulting group that can leverage and distribute the costs among the profits from several consultants in the field.
I follow a lot of products I don't believe in and don't use, because it's my job to stay informed about the marketplace and the products my clients are going to be asking about.
Most clients are not well informed. They've heard about Linux, they've heard about RedHat. They don't know enough to realize that because I work with a couple other distros on a daily basis I'll have no trouble working with RedHat -- they'll just see I don't run the specific older release of RedHat they have support for, and assume I can't do the job.
Why won't I be running their release?
Because I won't be able to afford to run the releases they're using, because I can't drop several thousand dollars to maintain multiple AS releases, even multibooting the same hardware. And without the corporate updates provided to AS, it won't be an option to just run outdated software -- I wouldn't be running the same patch levels, which means I wouldn't be able to replicate and isolate the software problems the client is having.
Not the intro page. Not the summaries or conclusions. Where was the one line you mention "prominently" included in Tom's review? I've been searching for the case-insensitive word "noise" and can only find it mentioned in a sidebar that I ignore as I would anything else that looks like an advertisement.
If you're trying to purchase a few dozen (much less a hundred or a thousand) desktop machines for corporate rollout, it's going to take you a few months to get the budget approved. Then you spend a month or two on the RFQ and RFPs, another month or so going through them, and another month or so finalizing the decision. Add on the order time, receiving time, and software installation/configuration time, and you're hitting 9-12 months before they're even hitting a user's desktop.
So you've got a good chance that by the time your users first turn on a RedHat desktop, the support has been dropped.
Congratulations, RedHat, you just knocked yourself out of competition for the corporate desktop. With Mandrake dead, that leaves SuSE as the only real contender for a corporate solution on the desktop.
On the server side, consider that it typically takes at least a year for third-party vendors to certify a distro as "supported" for their products. Sometimes it even matters -- Sybase 12.5 would only run on a certain patch level of RedHat 7.1 last time I tried it (Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, and SuSE 8.0 could not even prepare the storage space for the database without crashing, much less run a server.)
I know that most corps are going to have special contracts set up for support, but that doesn't help those of us on the development or consulting side of things who don't have the budget to pay for full AS licenses just to get a system that doesn't need to be rebuilt annually.
If I want to rebuild systems annually, I'll go back to Microsoft-based development -- there's more work supporting that junk anyhow.
I do buy full distros to support the vendors -- and end up spending far more on Linux distros per year than I ever did on Microsoft products as a result. I have RH 5.2, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, 8.1, SuSE 8.0 and 8.1 -- all full box sets at $75-100 each. Even when I don't install them, I buy kits just to help keep the companies I believe in afloat.
I sure don't appreciate RH trying to rip me off as payback. Even with RH normal pricing, who in their right mind is going to pay $150 for a full current release of RH, for which you only get a few months update support, vs. buying a generic copy of the disks for $20 plus shipping and paying less than $150 for a full year of RH update support? Such nonsense would be why RH 7.1 was the last distro of theirs I bought or installed -- I don't believe in their model anymore.
Those are the models where they stop playing games and the video card becomes the mobo that the CPU, memory, et. al. plug into. Hell, it's already over 40% of the cost of a decent gaming system!
I was also dissappointed that Tom didn't mention just how noisy the NVidia is. I've heard of people comparing it to a Dustbuster, but a friend of mine just sent me an email pointing out that only the biggest Black & Decker Dustbuster is as noisy as NVidia's latest card. (He'd sent a link to B&D's website, but I've already deleted the email.)
I spend a lot of time and money keeping my systems quiet. For that reason alone NVidia has lost any hope of getting in the next box I need to set up (a couple weeks -- one was destroyed when my car was rear-ended while moving to the new place.)
Still, I'm glad to see the reviews before I go ahead and buy the ATI as I'd planned.
It's this kind of "lawsuit" that is turning the US into a joke and killing it's industry.
I've said it before in this thread, and got modded as flamebait. Go ahead and mod me down again. Karma is useless, and I don't give a rat's fat ass whether I offend the so-called "lawyer" involved.
Any societal leech who thinks this kind of lawsuit deserves anything but being laughed out of court with court costs levied against the suitor deserves to suffer the economic damages the US is working it's way up to.
Here's one finger on high for the lawyer who initiated this case. Another for those who were offended that I challenge the useless sack of flesh to try such a lawsuit outside the US. And a third for anyone stupid enough to think this is an anti-American rant. And a pair for anyone else wasting society's time through such frivolous self-serving bullshit lawsuits.
Let him come and sue me next. I'd love to see some whining pathetic excuse for a "lawyer" try and succeed with a bullshit case like that outside the US.
Not quite true -- but there is a lot more profit margin in a $900USD G520 (21") than in a $500 G420 (19"), as the only real difference is the tube and the plastic casing.
I love my G520, but the only reason I have one is that I could not find anyone who had the G420 in stock -- they were perpetually sold out as soon as they'd come in. Maybe because they were a real nice price/performance/resolution/quality balance?
As to LCD's, no freakin' way. Poor black level management, poor color control, poor multi-resolution signal management. Basically not much good for anything other than standard office work -- which is not what I do.
I watched every episode they aired, hoping beyond hope that it would turn into something worthwhile. The only ep that was actually good was the one where the captain was being tortured by the old geezer pissed off by an incomplete contract a couple episodes before.
Hearing that Firefly was cancelled was the first time I thought there might actually be some functioning brain cells in TV executive land.
The overuse of multi-camera framing, weak plot, poor scripting, and general "made for video" feel of "Dragon Fighter" left me surfing after I'd suffered through the first hour. Whoever did the edits wasn't qualified to cut a home movie, much less a feature-length flick. (All they needed to complete the home-edit feel is have the camera constantly zooming in and out. Never give your parents a camera with zoom capability!)
Unfortunately, that is the kind of drek that SciFi pumps out now. Schlock horror that isn't even worth a video rental.
Personally I don't care what ad companies target a show -- I fast forward through the crap unless it catches my interest anyhow.
Here's a hint for the advertisers: make it amusing. I'll actually watch an amusing ad, even if I have no interest in the product. IBM, Blockbuster, and a few others seem to have grasped that; corps like GM, Chrysler, Ford, etc. are still under the misguided belief that their ads have anything to do with which vehicle I end up buying.
Idiot refers to anyone who wants to bloat a site just to make it pretty without adding value.
What, precisely, do you want XFree86.org to provide for "structure and meaningful information"? What kbase or wike do you need that isn't served by hitting google?
"Learn a little bit about usability and community building..." is about the most unhelpful of your comments so far. If you have a beef with the way things are done, you have to tell people why it's a problem, not just gripe about "a mess".
Your lack of information in your complaints puts you at barely above the level who calls me for support and says "Application Foo is broken." When pressed, they often can't identify what they were doing, what they expected to happen, and can't replicate the problem. Programmers need information if anything is to be done about a perceived problem, not just a complaint that it's "broken" or "a mess".
/usr/X11R6/bin contains all GUI applications and support utilites that work with X11. It's far more organized than WinXX "Windows" and "Program Files" directories. You have to put the programs somewhere, so where else would you want them to go, and why would you want them moved there?
/** * Do not accept contracts from D. Smith, as * it will lead to a tedious, boring, mind- * numbing term in the ninth level of hell. * 2002.01.04 MSS */
What, precisely, is a "patched together mess" in XFree86? Do you seriously think you'd find anything better if you got a look at the source code for DXn? Just because WinXX hides the grunge and cruft doesn't mean it isn't there.
Go wade through the stacks of DLLs installed by your display card drivers, the DLLs installed by Microsoft, and the registry entries that "configure" it. When you can explain what each of those DLLs and entries actually does, then you can gripe about how "patched" XFree86 is.
As to the website, you are absolutely correct. They should put up a 2-3MB Flash animation for me to have to suffer through before I can do a 10MB source code download, maybe some annoying midi music in the background, and some gaudy graphics. It's much more important that some wannabe artiste get to do flash graphics than it is to provide useful information and downloads like they do now.
By adding the flash animations, graphics, and sound, they should be able to boost their traffic volume by at least 20-30%. The system and network resources required are free, so why not make use of them? And everyone has broadband, so it's not like users will have to wait 10-15 minutes for the flash animations to download.
Slashdot Mirror
With a thin client I'd presume the X session (or GDI, or whatever) is running entirely on the client. As SVG is already using XML format, it's almost ideally suited as a format for downloading the icons to the thin client, where it is rendered locally (as you suggested.)
LGPL is compatible with both GPL and MPL software, you are just required to leave the LGPL code in a shared library or DLL rather than embedding it in the application.
The only people who'd want to move it over to MPL would be those who want to embrace and extend from a corporate perspective. SVG is simple and small enough that the few surviving corporates who need to implement such a library can do so with relatively few resources if they aren't willing to live with the LGPL requirements.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned a key benefit of SVG desktops: session migration.
Ever notice how primitive systems like WinXX have some serious layout problems with a network login user moving from their "usual" 1280x1024 desktop to a temporary workstation that is set for 800x600? The icons get repositioned to be visible, destroying any custom layout the user had -- and that is assuming they were all in the upper/left of the screen. Heaven forbid the user had bothered with placing any of them on the right hand edge of their screen!
Deploying a "thin client" desktop is even worse, as you need to be able to scale the virtual desktop to fit the physical screen being used at the time. As PCs become more innocuous (think payphones), it will be natural for people to expect to have an identical session no matter what they are using to link with their home server session.
Sure we're still 5-10 years from the point where those facilities are "needed", but without a solid foundation in place we can't even think about deploying those kind of systems efficiently.
HTTP was designed to be efficient for cases where a relatively simple request is going to result in a relatively large result dataset. Distributed services don't follow that pattern. You often have a relatively complex request (save changes to customer information) producing a simple result (changes saved/lost.)
HTTP also was also designed as a stateless protocol, and does not have the facilities to ensure any time or order based serialization of requests and results. (Yes it can be cobbled in via back-end stateful servers and session context data, but it isn't used by the HTTP server itself to serialize anything.)
Abusing a simple protocol in order to make life "easier" for the network configuration and administration team is just a bass-ackwards way of dealing with things. Networks are an infrastructure service for providing information systems to business, as are databases, file servers, application servers, programming services, etc. Nothing ever seems to end up "easy" except with a loss of functionality, efficiency, or scalability.
On a related note, can anyone tell me how to get Pure-FTPd to support transfers of files larger than 2 gigs?
You can't unless you rebuild with support for large file systems, and even then you might have issues as I think the FTP protocol itself uses 32-bit signed values to indicate offsets. (I could be wrong, it's been over 15 years since I had to look at the specs.)
Far easier to just "cut" the file into smaller chunks.
Assuming, of course, that you still have a system after the network admins notice your usage spike and determine it's from serving up illegal content.
Originally I'd just been trying to find a build of Evolution that supported SSL and TLS (ATT email requires encrypted links; a good idea for email security.) The only way I could resolve the dependencies was to refresh the whole environment via Ximian's RedCarpet installer. As Red Carpet also had the option of pulling in SuSE updates, it's become the central update engine for my SuSE development box.
I spent many years as a KDE fan, and still like the product a lot, but Gnome has stabilized nicely and with a bit of work you can make the UI more familiar than the default installation is. If you're developing pure (L)GPL, then KDE is the nicer dev kit. If you need to produce products that could be enhanced by your clients, then there are few options other than GTK+mm which don't cost thousands of dollars to support WinXX and Linux clients.
Trolltech has to be paid up-front to do non-GPL development with KDE, which I can't afford. I have no issue with rolling license costs in to any commercial sales in the future, but I can't buy licenses for initial prototyping because it's all spec work -- I have no guarantees I'll ever have a paying client for the work. (Don't get me wrong, Trolltech's licensing fees are very reasonable, I just don't have the cash to spare right now.)
No, I didn't see it last time I looked at RedHat's site (about 2 months ago.) Thanks for the link.
"Out of pocket" expenses are completely misleading. Just because I use a corporate account to pay for the software or hardware I order does not mean that the money in that account is "free." When I spend corporate funds, there is that much less money available for paying me for the work I've done.
Out of my billables to a client, I have to pay not only my own salary, but the accountant's fees, bookkeeping fees, corporate taxes (federal and provincial), corporate-side personal income tax "contributions" (federal and provincial), corporate contributions on health care, unemployment insurance, etc. In Canada, by the time you're done you'll see about 35-45% of your gross income as an incorporated consultant bled off before you can even think about spending it on your own salary or hardware/software purchases for the corporation.
After all that, I then have to pay personal income taxes and contributions out of my paycheque, the same as anyone sees on their normal payroll cheque. It's just the way business is, and not a complaint per-se, but I do wish people would stop fantasizing that "consultant" means "unlimited budget". (Try getting incorporated and working independantly some time -- the main reason small businesses usually fail is that gap between reality and people's fantasy about how "rich" they'll become running their own business.)
In no way do I expect a product to be supported "forever" without costs, but I do expect some sort of reasonable for-pay option to be available without negotiating a specific support license. Nor do I want "special treatment" from RedHat to get that support -- anyone who is doing software development needs to have product available for a reasonable price in order to keep their skills up to date for servicing clients, not just those of us who bitch about the issue.
Mentioning the rather serious noise issue on page 5 is hardly "prominent".
On a side note, I don't understand why your response was modded down -- you reference the correct page and other useful links. (I didn't bother chasing your links of the fan noise -- I'd listened to the ones at the Anandtech site many hours before.)
Large clients (e.g. banks) have the clout to ensure that once they select a hardware platform with a large provider like IBM, Dell, or Compaq, they will continue to get identical hardware on subsequent orders, even after the regular consumer can no longer order the components.
The same applies to the software they run. End of life to a large corporation only means that the general public can't get support for the product and is forced to upgrade; corps keep getting support for as long as they are paying enough.
Most corps I've worked for are running software that no one would even think of buying or installing anywhere else. It's all about maintaining compatability, and lock-stepped upgrades of entire farms of corporate systems. Even applying a software patch for the OS requires regression testing of third-party and internally-developed software that the OS vendor often does not have access to.
The last large client I worked for takes about three months to determine if an OS patch can be rolled out. Until then, you live with the problems caused by the OS bug, even if that means getting paged every morning to restart servers, or that users are going to have to put up with periodic dead sessions.
Absolutely nothing is more important to a large corp than data integrity. Not the sanity of the support staff, the profit margins of the vendors, or the "improvements" of a newer OS release. Nothing is allowed to change that might risk the data, and making changes without proper verification and authorization is a firing offense -- no matter whether they eventualy apply the update you forced or not.
You missed a key point: I'm a consultant. I have to support what clients are using, which is largely WinNT/2K/XP and RedHat's distribution of Linux. I cannot afford to pay their corporate level pricing because I am a self-emplyed individual, not a consulting group that can leverage and distribute the costs among the profits from several consultants in the field.
I follow a lot of products I don't believe in and don't use, because it's my job to stay informed about the marketplace and the products my clients are going to be asking about.
Most clients are not well informed. They've heard about Linux, they've heard about RedHat. They don't know enough to realize that because I work with a couple other distros on a daily basis I'll have no trouble working with RedHat -- they'll just see I don't run the specific older release of RedHat they have support for, and assume I can't do the job.
Why won't I be running their release?
Because I won't be able to afford to run the releases they're using, because I can't drop several thousand dollars to maintain multiple AS releases, even multibooting the same hardware. And without the corporate updates provided to AS, it won't be an option to just run outdated software -- I wouldn't be running the same patch levels, which means I wouldn't be able to replicate and isolate the software problems the client is having.
Not the intro page. Not the summaries or conclusions. Where was the one line you mention "prominently" included in Tom's review? I've been searching for the case-insensitive word "noise" and can only find it mentioned in a sidebar that I ignore as I would anything else that looks like an advertisement.
If you're trying to purchase a few dozen (much less a hundred or a thousand) desktop machines for corporate rollout, it's going to take you a few months to get the budget approved. Then you spend a month or two on the RFQ and RFPs, another month or so going through them, and another month or so finalizing the decision. Add on the order time, receiving time, and software installation/configuration time, and you're hitting 9-12 months before they're even hitting a user's desktop.
So you've got a good chance that by the time your users first turn on a RedHat desktop, the support has been dropped.
Congratulations, RedHat, you just knocked yourself out of competition for the corporate desktop. With Mandrake dead, that leaves SuSE as the only real contender for a corporate solution on the desktop.
On the server side, consider that it typically takes at least a year for third-party vendors to certify a distro as "supported" for their products. Sometimes it even matters -- Sybase 12.5 would only run on a certain patch level of RedHat 7.1 last time I tried it (Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, and SuSE 8.0 could not even prepare the storage space for the database without crashing, much less run a server.)
I know that most corps are going to have special contracts set up for support, but that doesn't help those of us on the development or consulting side of things who don't have the budget to pay for full AS licenses just to get a system that doesn't need to be rebuilt annually.
If I want to rebuild systems annually, I'll go back to Microsoft-based development -- there's more work supporting that junk anyhow.
I do buy full distros to support the vendors -- and end up spending far more on Linux distros per year than I ever did on Microsoft products as a result. I have RH 5.2, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, 8.1, SuSE 8.0 and 8.1 -- all full box sets at $75-100 each. Even when I don't install them, I buy kits just to help keep the companies I believe in afloat.
I sure don't appreciate RH trying to rip me off as payback. Even with RH normal pricing, who in their right mind is going to pay $150 for a full current release of RH, for which you only get a few months update support, vs. buying a generic copy of the disks for $20 plus shipping and paying less than $150 for a full year of RH update support? Such nonsense would be why RH 7.1 was the last distro of theirs I bought or installed -- I don't believe in their model anymore.
Those are the models where they stop playing games and the video card becomes the mobo that the CPU, memory, et. al. plug into. Hell, it's already over 40% of the cost of a decent gaming system!
I was also dissappointed that Tom didn't mention just how noisy the NVidia is. I've heard of people comparing it to a Dustbuster, but a friend of mine just sent me an email pointing out that only the biggest Black & Decker Dustbuster is as noisy as NVidia's latest card. (He'd sent a link to B&D's website, but I've already deleted the email.)
I spend a lot of time and money keeping my systems quiet. For that reason alone NVidia has lost any hope of getting in the next box I need to set up (a couple weeks -- one was destroyed when my car was rear-ended while moving to the new place.)
Still, I'm glad to see the reviews before I go ahead and buy the ATI as I'd planned.
It's this kind of "lawsuit" that is turning the US into a joke and killing it's industry.
I've said it before in this thread, and got modded as flamebait. Go ahead and mod me down again. Karma is useless, and I don't give a rat's fat ass whether I offend the so-called "lawyer" involved.
Any societal leech who thinks this kind of lawsuit deserves anything but being laughed out of court with court costs levied against the suitor deserves to suffer the economic damages the US is working it's way up to.
Here's one finger on high for the lawyer who initiated this case. Another for those who were offended that I challenge the useless sack of flesh to try such a lawsuit outside the US. And a third for anyone stupid enough to think this is an anti-American rant. And a pair for anyone else wasting society's time through such frivolous self-serving bullshit lawsuits.
Let him come and sue me next. I'd love to see some whining pathetic excuse for a "lawyer" try and succeed with a bullshit case like that outside the US.
Not quite true -- but there is a lot more profit margin in a $900USD G520 (21") than in a $500 G420 (19"), as the only real difference is the tube and the plastic casing.
I love my G520, but the only reason I have one is that I could not find anyone who had the G420 in stock -- they were perpetually sold out as soon as they'd come in. Maybe because they were a real nice price/performance/resolution/quality balance?
As to LCD's, no freakin' way. Poor black level management, poor color control, poor multi-resolution signal management. Basically not much good for anything other than standard office work -- which is not what I do.
I watched every episode they aired, hoping beyond hope that it would turn into something worthwhile. The only ep that was actually good was the one where the captain was being tortured by the old geezer pissed off by an incomplete contract a couple episodes before.
Hearing that Firefly was cancelled was the first time I thought there might actually be some functioning brain cells in TV executive land.
The overuse of multi-camera framing, weak plot, poor scripting, and general "made for video" feel of "Dragon Fighter" left me surfing after I'd suffered through the first hour. Whoever did the edits wasn't qualified to cut a home movie, much less a feature-length flick. (All they needed to complete the home-edit feel is have the camera constantly zooming in and out. Never give your parents a camera with zoom capability!)
Unfortunately, that is the kind of drek that SciFi pumps out now. Schlock horror that isn't even worth a video rental.
Personally I don't care what ad companies target a show -- I fast forward through the crap unless it catches my interest anyhow.
Here's a hint for the advertisers: make it amusing. I'll actually watch an amusing ad, even if I have no interest in the product. IBM, Blockbuster, and a few others seem to have grasped that; corps like GM, Chrysler, Ford, etc. are still under the misguided belief that their ads have anything to do with which vehicle I end up buying.
Idiot refers to anyone who wants to bloat a site just to make it pretty without adding value.
What, precisely, do you want XFree86.org to provide for "structure and meaningful information"? What kbase or wike do you need that isn't served by hitting google?
"Learn a little bit about usability and community building..." is about the most unhelpful of your comments so far. If you have a beef with the way things are done, you have to tell people why it's a problem, not just gripe about "a mess".
Your lack of information in your complaints puts you at barely above the level who calls me for support and says "Application Foo is broken." When pressed, they often can't identify what they were doing, what they expected to happen, and can't replicate the problem. Programmers need information if anything is to be done about a perceived problem, not just a complaint that it's "broken" or "a mess".
If you make me miserable and unhappy on the job, I am unlikely to make many mistakes because I'll be gone as soon as the notice period is up.
What, precisely, is a "patched together mess" in XFree86? Do you seriously think you'd find anything better if you got a look at the source code for DXn? Just because WinXX hides the grunge and cruft doesn't mean it isn't there.
Go wade through the stacks of DLLs installed by your display card drivers, the DLLs installed by Microsoft, and the registry entries that "configure" it. When you can explain what each of those DLLs and entries actually does, then you can gripe about how "patched" XFree86 is.
As to the website, you are absolutely correct. They should put up a 2-3MB Flash animation for me to have to suffer through before I can do a 10MB source code download, maybe some annoying midi music in the background, and some gaudy graphics. It's much more important that some wannabe artiste get to do flash graphics than it is to provide useful information and downloads like they do now.
By adding the flash animations, graphics, and sound, they should be able to boost their traffic volume by at least 20-30%. The system and network resources required are free, so why not make use of them? And everyone has broadband, so it's not like users will have to wait 10-15 minutes for the flash animations to download.
Idiot.