The strange thing is, both of those acronyms provide a better description of their current (apparent) business model than anything to do with the music industry. Perhaps I should charge a consultancy fee...
if [ user_desires_different_apps ]; then
kmail && korganizer elseif [ !user_desires_different_apps ]; then
kontact fi
Use Kontact, and you have the choice of using seperate apps, or one whole "integrated" app. This is something that KDE gets amazingly right, and thanks to kparts, you can fire up your mail client, calendar and address book as seperate applications and they're STILL integrated. Best of all worlds IMHO, but then I'm a KDE fanboy;)
I agree with you on Outlook though - it is seamless. I just find it an utterly horrible mail client, and without Exchange it's unbearable (quite hom some/.'ers can say it's a great mail client I don't know, but each to their own). The sooner the FOSS world comes out with a nice easy-to-set-up end-to-end Exchange/Outlook replacement, the better because if you ask me it's the one huuuuuuge gap in the FOSS PIM stack. Heck, it needn't even be compatible with Exchange from the off for all I care...
Disclaimer: Before you all shout "But linux already HAS millions of groupware solutions!" at me, I've set up several groupware servers and clients and, as much as I hate to say it, nothing is as simple as Exchange. I'm currently using Kolab at home, and the installation was an absolute and utter pain in the arse.
It's ticked my "I would like to test slashdot's new broken threading system" which doesn't want to work properly in Opera, it won't let me revert back to the older style (if I untick the box, page refreshes and the box is still ticked), if I change my threshold in one thread it affects my threshold in other threads, styupid floating javascript window obscures parts of the page.
Since when did/. force us to be beta testers when it seems apparent that very little cross-platform testing has occurred? I thought that was Microsoft's job!
P.S. I like that way the/. FAQ says "you should know the emails of the people to contact if you find a bug". Very user-friendly I'm sure...
Heh, I'm another Opera user who switches to FF when he has to.
Whilst I agree that IE7's interface is irritating, it's a shitload better than the fustercluck of sploits (albeit with a more "standard" interface) that's IE6. That said, I'm 95% Linux at home these days so IE is rarely even an option for me.
I'm just hope I can get promoted to project/acquisition management in the near future so I can veto company apps that require certain flavours of IE to work properly.
Same problem at my work. Loads of shitty web-based corporate apps rely on IE6-isms that won't work in IE7, resulting in the entire enterprise being forced to use IE6 (plus severe update lags due to inefficient and ineffective testing of patches). As such, we've had a couple of breaches via 0-day exploits targetting unpatched IE6 installs.
Yay for the Intranet Microsoft Built.
Oddity: IT staff don't eat their own dog food, and everyone uses FF whilst telling the users they can't have it because intranet apps "don't work with firefox". However, bring IE into the equation and the same staff will tell you "the app is shit and won't work with IE". Odd how such a pro-MS shop changes the burden of proof depending on whether the target is asociated with Linux or not
...wouldn't have known it was there. The WGA requirement means that you actively have to log into Windows Update and say "yes, I want IE7" or actively locate an IE7 installer. Your average computer user won't even know which version of IE they're using, much less will have any idea there's a new version out and why they should bother installing it.
If IE7 doesn't have the WGA thing, then presumably it's going to be automatically installed with the rest of the updates whihc most users have set to automatic (since that's how the computer came configured).
So yes, expect the installed base to increase significantly, and I imagine a reasonably increase in usage as well - alot of people will find it better than any other browser they're using (stupid, uncustomisable button layout notwithstanding).
True, but I'm not quite sure what this had to do with people picking cockles in a notoriously dangerous area (you can't outrun the incoming tide in Morecambe Bay)... but then I gave up trying to understand the media cartels a long time ago. Logic is a closed book to them. Actually, no, to them logic is more like a DRM'd eBook where the authorisation servers have been closed down.
Ranting on/. is always good and cathartic, but it doesn't tell the cinema how pissed off you are.
Next time you get patronised to hell by one of these appallingly insulting adverts, walk out of the cinema and demand a refund because the content they're showing you is offensive to your nature. The next time your DVD tells you you're a stinking criminal financing heroin dealers and condoning child labour, return it to the store and demand a refund.
Will people hate you, and think you're weird? Sure. Will all of this be a pain in the arse? Of course it will. But no-one ever acheived anything by sitting back and letting themselves be treated like a sack of fucking shit.
Disclaimer: yes, these adverts annoy me to, which is why I no longer go to the cinema. I'm lucky enough to not have encountered a media player that won't let me skip the shitty intros (I love you Xine:))
The final straw for me was a pamphlet that came with my DVD of A Scanner Darkly that told me that the people who died in Morecambe Bay in 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Liang_Ren were there, bizarrely enough, due to DVD piracy. I think the idea was that, being a bunch of chinese immigrants, at least *some* of them were bound to be sellign dodgy DVD's on street corners. I'm not quite sure how this spruious assertion had anything to do with anything, but the undertone was of course to associate pirate DVD's with killing people. When I have just spent not inconsiderable amounts of money to have non-pirated DVD's of all my favourite movies delievered to my door. If you want to treat me like a fucking idiotic simpleton that's incapable of understanding cause and effect, fine (although I would say you'd need an IQ slightly greater than that of a slug to understand even a sanitised version of anything by PKD) but don't expect me to just sit there and take it. Fuck you and your profit margins, because I no longer give a shit about your wellbeing. Or maybe I can force movie execs to sit through trailers telling them how much humanity they are going to suck out of us today? "You wouldn't sue a disabled single mother... so why are you suing disabled single mothers?"... actually, I quite like that idea.
Yeah, after lowerin gmy threshold and reading some more of the techy replies I'm inclined to agree with you - it does seem that these docs are only equivalent to using the card as a dumb framebuffer at the moment - admittedly, probably a better framebuffer than is currently implemented, but not much better than raw VESA for a desktop.
I just hope to hell ATI *do* release more useful docs, and that this supposed "alpha quality" driver marks a considerable performance/reliability improvement from the current FOSS driver(s).
And don't worry, I've only eaten my starter words at the moment. I'll only buy an ATI card/IGP when I've finished my humble pie dessert and am sipping on an irish coffee of strained meal metaphors:D
When ATI were making their first murmurings of releasing specs a few weeks ago, I have to say I wasn't convinced - I've been burned by ATI's shoddy Linux support in the past, and it was going to take alot of convincing that AMD (traditionally very friendly to FOSS) was trying to steer the ship in a different direction.
And now they've released scads of docs - kudos. This was probably the only way to make a FOSS driver a reality without violating reams of licensed IP. On top of that, I believe their latest set of Linux drivers fix a number of long standing issues, as well as vastly increasing 3D performance (although obviously there are still are QA problems).
Granted, it's almost all 2D stuff at the moment, but being able to ship a functional, fast and non-crash-prone driver for ATI cards with every modern distro will be another win for Linux in general.
I'm quite interested to hear about advanced features though - will implementing things like iDCT in XvMC for MPEG2, MPEG4 ASP and H.264 be a reality? Can these things be implemented with 2D registers or do these things need to be run through the 3D shaders nowadays? The low end ATI cards, including the IGP's, would be ideal for HTPC boxes, espcially with Intel dragging their feet on similar support/documentation for their (admittedly otherwise excellent) GMA X3xxx series.
Correct. Some of them just try harder than others.
Like KDE, you mean?;)
I think your entire argument seems to boil down to GNOME being better because it's default out-of-the-box is closest to what you see as the most "efficient" configuration. This is different strokes for different folks, because I could disagree with you until the cows come home about who has the best opinion on the matter.
But to say that KDE is less usable because it has more twiddly options and hance takes longer for Mr. Discerning User to set up (which seemed to me to the crux of your argument) is a false dichotomy. One doesn't neccesarily exclude the other.
The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.
By that rationelle, in my case neither KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Windows, OSX, BeOS, OS/2, Fluxbox or indeed any other windowing system I have ever seen has "got it right" out of the box. Every "power user" has their own little bunch of tweaks that help them work better - for instance, I find windows unusable without X-mouse from TweakUI. This doesn't mean that windows is shit - I'm perfectly happy to accept I'm not a default user.
The OP's point was that, with DE's like KDE, actually give you the OPTION to change the default behaviour in a reasonably simple manner. Yes, there's alot of buttons to press, and 99% of users will never need to bother setting up a special rule that opens all Konsole windows on virtual desktop 4, xinerama screen 2 - but for the users who DO desire that functionality it's an absolute godsend. Last time I set up a GNOME desktop for myself I couldn't find a way of doing this, but when you know what you want KDE makes it pretty simple.
What *would* be good is if both KDE and GNOME adopted "beginner/advanced" toggle buttons in their configuration dialogues. To a novice user, KDE has too many options, to a power user GNOME has too few.
...the vast majority of the British public won't give a shit.
On the one hand, they're spoonfed endless pseudo-forensic schpiel that give the (false) impression of DNA being nigh-infallible. On the other hand, they're stuffed full of political propaganda telling us how DNA sampling will make $random_crime a thing of the past, how it'll mean that "paedophiles can no longer pretend to be teachers!" and on the third, weirdly mutant hand (broken index in the DNA database I think), years of being taught not to think critically and not to question authority (gubmint knows best!). All you need to do to pass a draconian law is to fawn to the Daily Mail-reading "Middle England" about paedophiles and illegal immigrants (is it rascist to say the Brits are sterotypically xeonphobic? That was certainly my impression growing up) and all of a sudden people can't vote for you quickly enough.
Disclaimer: yes, I am a British citizen. I don't believe the majority of our public could stand up to a wet paper bag. I would love to be proved wrong. UK is in a race to be the first "democratic" police state, who wants to join us and finish second?
...more proficient in programming than me explain why OOo uses its own inbuilt font rendering and toolkit? Aren't these things already provided by all modern guest OS's?
IANAPBPKEAITBD [I Am Not A Programmer But Probably Know Enough About It To Be Dangerous] but if cross-platform-ness is a big thing, would it not be easier to have a series of OS-independent libs in the background with native frontends in win32, GTK, Qt, etc? This would also make it easier to make the user interface more "friendly" by way of familiarity and not sticking out like a sore thumb? To my mind the problems users see with OOo, aside from some user unfriendliness in some sections such as mail merge, are that it's slow as hell to start up, even from warm, the GUI is sometimes unresponsive/laggy and it looks (superfically) different from most apps they're used to (apparently this is "allowed" for stupid flashy apps, but a big no-no for "serious" apps).
Chances are I'm barking up the wrong tree and my knowledge of OOo is hopelessly wrong, but for non-developers these things can be tricky to understand.
For the most part I'd agree with you - but IMHO the appalling treatment of customers starts the second you walk through the door.
PC World employees are, by and large, not the sharpest tools in the box, and their managers are typically worse. They flat out LIE to cusomters about the products they're pushing, and use FUD to cajole people into buying things. Their components sales are horrifically overpriced. Last time I bought a network cable there it was £12 (~$25) for a 3m Cat5. I've heard someone tell a customer that you need "at least" a 3GHz CPU (and 256MB of RAM, no less!) to "surf interweb pages", or how iPods don't work properly with windows, or any number of made-up-on-the-spot bullshit.
And like the parent says, they've caused alot of the smaller geek-run computer stores (which usually contained knowledgable people) to close down.
...but how does doing anything non-productive ADD value to an economy? Look at it this way:
Joe spends $1000 a year on media Therefore $1000 of his money re-enters the economy, going the the record labels and the stores he bought his music from
Joe spends $500 a year on media, and copies $500 "worth" of media from friends, etc Therefore $500 of his money re-enters the economy, going the the record labels and the stores he bought his music from. The $500 he WOULD have spent does not vanish from the economy - it'll be spent on somethign else instead. Joe now has $500 of disposable income that'll only be "lost" to the economy if he takes his Benjamins and burns them.
Joe spends $0 a year on media and is a prolific internet pirate. $300 dollars a year goes to his ISP for a fast internet connection, $200 a year go to hard drive and DVD-R manufacturers, and yet again we have an "extra" $500 that Joe will spend on something other than a media cartel. Perhaps he'll buy an Xbox, or enroll on a mechanics course. Perhaps he'll blow it on beer. But at no point is him not spending money on $a_product destroying his ability to spend it on $b_product instead.
The only difference between any of these scenarios is the amount of money that goes to any particular industry (Joe's pyromaniac tendencies notwithstanding). All of these arguments that $activity will [add|subtract] $dollars from the economy are specious.
If, at the end of the day, nVidia up the ante even more, then it's all good for us Linux users.
I've been crying out for HD XvMC acceleration for my Intel and nVidia cards for at least a year now, be interesting to see if ATI manage to beat them to the punch...
TBH any system that's designed to shoot its own nads off if you look at it funny was going to sterilise itself sooer rather than later. Blame the people who mandate DRM, not the code monkeys (well not entirely anyway).
I know you're joking, but bear in mind that nVidia has a huge chunk of the Linux workstation/rendering market which is a highly profitable and competitive - better graphics drivers for ATI cards could be a blow to nVidia here and it'll be interestng to see how they react.
Just cos there's comparitively few games for Linux doesn't mean that decent 3D/OGL isn't important.
To be fair, they do update their legacy releases to some degree. I think the major stumbling block now is that, with different legacy "versions" knocking about, many users don't want to have to grep through a "here's the supported cards for this driver" list to find out which driver they need to install. Be nice if $distro_package_manager could be made to figure this out for themselves...
ATI have really, really dragged their heels on this. There was a time when I'd have jumped to ATI in a flash, but support for their Linux drivers has been so terrible I have serious doubts of them being able to maintain a decent release. ATM I'm recommending Intel to everyone that doesn't need gaming performance.
Still no word on when accelerated H.264 playback will be supported on either nVidia or Intel hardware, both of which are capable of it...
Since the beginning of the year? Hell, I've been hearing murmuring for years on "support for XYZ will be coming soon!" - and yet today the disparity between the ATI/nVidia feature set and stability under Linux are still huge. How long since nVidia got support for AIGLX? ATI only just adds it now?
You'll also note that, GeForce 8x00 series notwithstanding (which are marginally slower under Linux), nVidia maintain a very small performance delta between the Linux and windows version of their drivers. ATI's performance delta can sometimes be as much as 50% (top-of-my-head BTW, Phoronix had another full-of-crappy-graphs article about it a while back).
I'm hoping AMD can pull some weight and at least get better support for laptop chipsets and IGP's in their otherwise pretty nice chipsets. Until then, I have to stick to Intel or nVidia for graphics, and since I only need the one gaming box, I'm getting through alot of Intel motherboards. Guess what CPU goes in an Intel motherboard, AMD? Despite me wanting to use X2's for their lower idle power envelope, I find it hard to justify.
As I think someone else has said, nVidia maintain a "legacy" driver for older GPU's. Unfortunately this keep changing - damnit, I wish someone would come up with an app that can install the correct driver based on an lspci output... (unless the nVidia installer already does this, but IIRC it doesn't).
I also had problems with my venerable Ti4200 until I installed the legacy driver, after which it worked fine.
You are better off using the Intel onboard though - solid for 2D stuff and good for light OGL stuff too. The GMA 3000 series are especially capable little GPU's.
Slashdot Mirror
Damnit, should have used preview.
RIAA Is An Ass?
The strange thing is, both of those acronyms provide a better description of their current (apparent) business model than anything to do with the music industry. Perhaps I should charge a consultancy fee...
RIAA sues self?
Recursive Indictment Aggregating Association?
if [ user_desires_different_apps ]; then
;)
/.'ers can say it's a great mail client I don't know, but each to their own). The sooner the FOSS world comes out with a nice easy-to-set-up end-to-end Exchange/Outlook replacement, the better because if you ask me it's the one huuuuuuge gap in the FOSS PIM stack. Heck, it needn't even be compatible with Exchange from the off for all I care...
kmail && korganizer
elseif [ !user_desires_different_apps ]; then
kontact
fi
Use Kontact, and you have the choice of using seperate apps, or one whole "integrated" app. This is something that KDE gets amazingly right, and thanks to kparts, you can fire up your mail client, calendar and address book as seperate applications and they're STILL integrated. Best of all worlds IMHO, but then I'm a KDE fanboy
I agree with you on Outlook though - it is seamless. I just find it an utterly horrible mail client, and without Exchange it's unbearable (quite hom some
Disclaimer: Before you all shout "But linux already HAS millions of groupware solutions!" at me, I've set up several groupware servers and clients and, as much as I hate to say it, nothing is as simple as Exchange. I'm currently using Kolab at home, and the installation was an absolute and utter pain in the arse.
It's ticked my "I would like to test slashdot's new broken threading system" which doesn't want to work properly in Opera, it won't let me revert back to the older style (if I untick the box, page refreshes and the box is still ticked), if I change my threshold in one thread it affects my threshold in other threads, styupid floating javascript window obscures parts of the page.
/. force us to be beta testers when it seems apparent that very little cross-platform testing has occurred? I thought that was Microsoft's job!
/. FAQ says "you should know the emails of the people to contact if you find a bug". Very user-friendly I'm sure...
Since when did
P.S. I like that way the
Heh, I'm another Opera user who switches to FF when he has to.
Whilst I agree that IE7's interface is irritating, it's a shitload better than the fustercluck of sploits (albeit with a more "standard" interface) that's IE6. That said, I'm 95% Linux at home these days so IE is rarely even an option for me.
I'm just hope I can get promoted to project/acquisition management in the near future so I can veto company apps that require certain flavours of IE to work properly.
Same problem at my work. Loads of shitty web-based corporate apps rely on IE6-isms that won't work in IE7, resulting in the entire enterprise being forced to use IE6 (plus severe update lags due to inefficient and ineffective testing of patches). As such, we've had a couple of breaches via 0-day exploits targetting unpatched IE6 installs.
Yay for the Intranet Microsoft Built.
Oddity: IT staff don't eat their own dog food, and everyone uses FF whilst telling the users they can't have it because intranet apps "don't work with firefox". However, bring IE into the equation and the same staff will tell you "the app is shit and won't work with IE". Odd how such a pro-MS shop changes the burden of proof depending on whether the target is asociated with Linux or not
...wouldn't have known it was there. The WGA requirement means that you actively have to log into Windows Update and say "yes, I want IE7" or actively locate an IE7 installer. Your average computer user won't even know which version of IE they're using, much less will have any idea there's a new version out and why they should bother installing it.
If IE7 doesn't have the WGA thing, then presumably it's going to be automatically installed with the rest of the updates whihc most users have set to automatic (since that's how the computer came configured).
So yes, expect the installed base to increase significantly, and I imagine a reasonably increase in usage as well - alot of people will find it better than any other browser they're using (stupid, uncustomisable button layout notwithstanding).
True, but I'm not quite sure what this had to do with people picking cockles in a notoriously dangerous area (you can't outrun the incoming tide in Morecambe Bay)... but then I gave up trying to understand the media cartels a long time ago. Logic is a closed book to them. Actually, no, to them logic is more like a DRM'd eBook where the authorisation servers have been closed down.
Ranting on /. is always good and cathartic, but it doesn't tell the cinema how pissed off you are.
:))
:)
Next time you get patronised to hell by one of these appallingly insulting adverts, walk out of the cinema and demand a refund because the content they're showing you is offensive to your nature. The next time your DVD tells you you're a stinking criminal financing heroin dealers and condoning child labour, return it to the store and demand a refund.
Will people hate you, and think you're weird? Sure. Will all of this be a pain in the arse? Of course it will. But no-one ever acheived anything by sitting back and letting themselves be treated like a sack of fucking shit.
Disclaimer: yes, these adverts annoy me to, which is why I no longer go to the cinema. I'm lucky enough to not have encountered a media player that won't let me skip the shitty intros (I love you Xine
The final straw for me was a pamphlet that came with my DVD of A Scanner Darkly that told me that the people who died in Morecambe Bay in 2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Liang_Ren were there, bizarrely enough, due to DVD piracy. I think the idea was that, being a bunch of chinese immigrants, at least *some* of them were bound to be sellign dodgy DVD's on street corners. I'm not quite sure how this spruious assertion had anything to do with anything, but the undertone was of course to associate pirate DVD's with killing people. When I have just spent not inconsiderable amounts of money to have non-pirated DVD's of all my favourite movies delievered to my door. If you want to treat me like a fucking idiotic simpleton that's incapable of understanding cause and effect, fine (although I would say you'd need an IQ slightly greater than that of a slug to understand even a sanitised version of anything by PKD) but don't expect me to just sit there and take it. Fuck you and your profit margins, because I no longer give a shit about your wellbeing. Or maybe I can force movie execs to sit through trailers telling them how much humanity they are going to suck out of us today? "You wouldn't sue a disabled single mother... so why are you suing disabled single mothers?"... actually, I quite like that idea.
Anger is an energy. Use it
Yeah, after lowerin gmy threshold and reading some more of the techy replies I'm inclined to agree with you - it does seem that these docs are only equivalent to using the card as a dumb framebuffer at the moment - admittedly, probably a better framebuffer than is currently implemented, but not much better than raw VESA for a desktop.
:D
I just hope to hell ATI *do* release more useful docs, and that this supposed "alpha quality" driver marks a considerable performance/reliability improvement from the current FOSS driver(s).
And don't worry, I've only eaten my starter words at the moment. I'll only buy an ATI card/IGP when I've finished my humble pie dessert and am sipping on an irish coffee of strained meal metaphors
When ATI were making their first murmurings of releasing specs a few weeks ago, I have to say I wasn't convinced - I've been burned by ATI's shoddy Linux support in the past, and it was going to take alot of convincing that AMD (traditionally very friendly to FOSS) was trying to steer the ship in a different direction.
And now they've released scads of docs - kudos. This was probably the only way to make a FOSS driver a reality without violating reams of licensed IP. On top of that, I believe their latest set of Linux drivers fix a number of long standing issues, as well as vastly increasing 3D performance (although obviously there are still are QA problems).
Granted, it's almost all 2D stuff at the moment, but being able to ship a functional, fast and non-crash-prone driver for ATI cards with every modern distro will be another win for Linux in general.
I'm quite interested to hear about advanced features though - will implementing things like iDCT in XvMC for MPEG2, MPEG4 ASP and H.264 be a reality? Can these things be implemented with 2D registers or do these things need to be run through the 3D shaders nowadays? The low end ATI cards, including the IGP's, would be ideal for HTPC boxes, espcially with Intel dragging their feet on similar support/documentation for their (admittedly otherwise excellent) GMA X3xxx series.
Correct. Some of them just try harder than others.
;)
Like KDE, you mean?
I think your entire argument seems to boil down to GNOME being better because it's default out-of-the-box is closest to what you see as the most "efficient" configuration. This is different strokes for different folks, because I could disagree with you until the cows come home about who has the best opinion on the matter.
But to say that KDE is less usable because it has more twiddly options and hance takes longer for Mr. Discerning User to set up (which seemed to me to the crux of your argument) is a false dichotomy. One doesn't neccesarily exclude the other.
The fact that you had to hunt around and make changes to make the desktop simple and sane enough to use means that KDE failed to get it right in the first place.
By that rationelle, in my case neither KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Windows, OSX, BeOS, OS/2, Fluxbox or indeed any other windowing system I have ever seen has "got it right" out of the box. Every "power user" has their own little bunch of tweaks that help them work better - for instance, I find windows unusable without X-mouse from TweakUI. This doesn't mean that windows is shit - I'm perfectly happy to accept I'm not a default user.
The OP's point was that, with DE's like KDE, actually give you the OPTION to change the default behaviour in a reasonably simple manner. Yes, there's alot of buttons to press, and 99% of users will never need to bother setting up a special rule that opens all Konsole windows on virtual desktop 4, xinerama screen 2 - but for the users who DO desire that functionality it's an absolute godsend. Last time I set up a GNOME desktop for myself I couldn't find a way of doing this, but when you know what you want KDE makes it pretty simple.
What *would* be good is if both KDE and GNOME adopted "beginner/advanced" toggle buttons in their configuration dialogues. To a novice user, KDE has too many options, to a power user GNOME has too few.
...the vast majority of the British public won't give a shit.
On the one hand, they're spoonfed endless pseudo-forensic schpiel that give the (false) impression of DNA being nigh-infallible. On the other hand, they're stuffed full of political propaganda telling us how DNA sampling will make $random_crime a thing of the past, how it'll mean that "paedophiles can no longer pretend to be teachers!" and on the third, weirdly mutant hand (broken index in the DNA database I think), years of being taught not to think critically and not to question authority (gubmint knows best!). All you need to do to pass a draconian law is to fawn to the Daily Mail-reading "Middle England" about paedophiles and illegal immigrants (is it rascist to say the Brits are sterotypically xeonphobic? That was certainly my impression growing up) and all of a sudden people can't vote for you quickly enough.
Disclaimer: yes, I am a British citizen. I don't believe the majority of our public could stand up to a wet paper bag. I would love to be proved wrong. UK is in a race to be the first "democratic" police state, who wants to join us and finish second?
...more proficient in programming than me explain why OOo uses its own inbuilt font rendering and toolkit? Aren't these things already provided by all modern guest OS's?
IANAPBPKEAITBD [I Am Not A Programmer But Probably Know Enough About It To Be Dangerous] but if cross-platform-ness is a big thing, would it not be easier to have a series of OS-independent libs in the background with native frontends in win32, GTK, Qt, etc? This would also make it easier to make the user interface more "friendly" by way of familiarity and not sticking out like a sore thumb? To my mind the problems users see with OOo, aside from some user unfriendliness in some sections such as mail merge, are that it's slow as hell to start up, even from warm, the GUI is sometimes unresponsive/laggy and it looks (superfically) different from most apps they're used to (apparently this is "allowed" for stupid flashy apps, but a big no-no for "serious" apps).
Chances are I'm barking up the wrong tree and my knowledge of OOo is hopelessly wrong, but for non-developers these things can be tricky to understand.
For the most part I'd agree with you - but IMHO the appalling treatment of customers starts the second you walk through the door.
PC World employees are, by and large, not the sharpest tools in the box, and their managers are typically worse. They flat out LIE to cusomters about the products they're pushing, and use FUD to cajole people into buying things. Their components sales are horrifically overpriced. Last time I bought a network cable there it was £12 (~$25) for a 3m Cat5. I've heard someone tell a customer that you need "at least" a 3GHz CPU (and 256MB of RAM, no less!) to "surf interweb pages", or how iPods don't work properly with windows, or any number of made-up-on-the-spot bullshit.
And like the parent says, they've caused alot of the smaller geek-run computer stores (which usually contained knowledgable people) to close down.
...but how does doing anything non-productive ADD value to an economy? Look at it this way:
Joe spends $1000 a year on media
Therefore $1000 of his money re-enters the economy, going the the record labels and the stores he bought his music from
Joe spends $500 a year on media, and copies $500 "worth" of media from friends, etc
Therefore $500 of his money re-enters the economy, going the the record labels and the stores he bought his music from. The $500 he WOULD have spent does not vanish from the economy - it'll be spent on somethign else instead. Joe now has $500 of disposable income that'll only be "lost" to the economy if he takes his Benjamins and burns them.
Joe spends $0 a year on media and is a prolific internet pirate. $300 dollars a year goes to his ISP for a fast internet connection, $200 a year go to hard drive and DVD-R manufacturers, and yet again we have an "extra" $500 that Joe will spend on something other than a media cartel. Perhaps he'll buy an Xbox, or enroll on a mechanics course. Perhaps he'll blow it on beer. But at no point is him not spending money on $a_product destroying his ability to spend it on $b_product instead.
The only difference between any of these scenarios is the amount of money that goes to any particular industry (Joe's pyromaniac tendencies notwithstanding). All of these arguments that $activity will [add|subtract] $dollars from the economy are specious.
If, at the end of the day, nVidia up the ante even more, then it's all good for us Linux users.
I've been crying out for HD XvMC acceleration for my Intel and nVidia cards for at least a year now, be interesting to see if ATI manage to beat them to the punch...
TBH any system that's designed to shoot its own nads off if you look at it funny was going to sterilise itself sooer rather than later. Blame the people who mandate DRM, not the code monkeys (well not entirely anyway).
I know you're joking, but bear in mind that nVidia has a huge chunk of the Linux workstation/rendering market which is a highly profitable and competitive - better graphics drivers for ATI cards could be a blow to nVidia here and it'll be interestng to see how they react.
Just cos there's comparitively few games for Linux doesn't mean that decent 3D/OGL isn't important.
To be fair, they do update their legacy releases to some degree. I think the major stumbling block now is that, with different legacy "versions" knocking about, many users don't want to have to grep through a "here's the supported cards for this driver" list to find out which driver they need to install. Be nice if $distro_package_manager could be made to figure this out for themselves...
ATI have really, really dragged their heels on this. There was a time when I'd have jumped to ATI in a flash, but support for their Linux drivers has been so terrible I have serious doubts of them being able to maintain a decent release. ATM I'm recommending Intel to everyone that doesn't need gaming performance.
Still no word on when accelerated H.264 playback will be supported on either nVidia or Intel hardware, both of which are capable of it...
Since the beginning of the year? Hell, I've been hearing murmuring for years on "support for XYZ will be coming soon!" - and yet today the disparity between the ATI/nVidia feature set and stability under Linux are still huge. How long since nVidia got support for AIGLX? ATI only just adds it now?
You'll also note that, GeForce 8x00 series notwithstanding (which are marginally slower under Linux), nVidia maintain a very small performance delta between the Linux and windows version of their drivers. ATI's performance delta can sometimes be as much as 50% (top-of-my-head BTW, Phoronix had another full-of-crappy-graphs article about it a while back).
I'm hoping AMD can pull some weight and at least get better support for laptop chipsets and IGP's in their otherwise pretty nice chipsets. Until then, I have to stick to Intel or nVidia for graphics, and since I only need the one gaming box, I'm getting through alot of Intel motherboards. Guess what CPU goes in an Intel motherboard, AMD? Despite me wanting to use X2's for their lower idle power envelope, I find it hard to justify.
Sigh.
As I think someone else has said, nVidia maintain a "legacy" driver for older GPU's. Unfortunately this keep changing - damnit, I wish someone would come up with an app that can install the correct driver based on an lspci output... (unless the nVidia installer already does this, but IIRC it doesn't).
I also had problems with my venerable Ti4200 until I installed the legacy driver, after which it worked fine.
You are better off using the Intel onboard though - solid for 2D stuff and good for light OGL stuff too. The GMA 3000 series are especially capable little GPU's.
Dude, did you not watch your 2 minute hate today? That would have told you which things you were supposed to be persecuting.