To SanityInAnarchy: Your bills don't go towards building infrastructure. The reason Comcast and other Telecoms are whining about bandwidth is because they did not put their money back into infrastructure.
True. I should have been more clear: The money which would be used for building infrastructure, in a sane world, would come from our respective bills.
Also, for your tax do you propose raising money and giving to the Telecoms and hoping they invest it infrastructure?
No, I don't mean giving them a blank check. I mean attaching legal strings, such that they are forced to put it into infrastructure.
AFAIK the best way to fix this would be to turn internet service into a public utility, but that would be damn hard.
I'm not entirely sure what that means, here. Do you mean making it a government-run service entirely, like the Post Office? I'm not sure that's a good idea, and I do agree it would be hard.
I think the main things which could be done to spark some real competition here are:
Enforce net neutrality, in some sense.
All traffic shaping/altering/blocking, including spam filtering, must be completely optional (and opt-in).
The source must be made available for public review.
Enforce truth in advertising.
In the above example, you can't have a "spam filter" which does anything other than filter email -- source code availability in this case is mainly so that this can be proven.
At the very least, ads must not be misleading (specifically, words like "unlimited" should carry strict restrictions).
All information regarding rates, fees, and limits must be available, and in appropriate units, clarified to the bit.
That "to the bit" is important. Not only are you not allowed to specify limits in some arbitrary number of photos, songs, etc, but if you are using real gigabytes (and not gibibytes) to cap bandwidth, it will say so very clearly.
Perhaps we could even get a Surgeon General style warning: "There are eight bits in a byte, and additional protocol overhead may apply. The total number of kilobits, megabits, or gigabits per second advertised is roughly one tenth what modern operating systems will report when downloading a file. Additionally, modern software likes to interpret a gigabyte as having 2^30 bytes, or 1073741824, while many hard drives and bandwidth packages like to interpret a gigabyte as having 10^9 bytes, or one billion. You may be getting roughly 7% less than you think you are."
there are many reasons I wouldn't consider Second Life a VRML successor.
My point here is that the main public desire for VRML is eliminated with Second Life, and with World of Warcraft. And I can only shudder as I imagine what VRML must actually look like -- there has got to be a better way of serializing a game world in a portable way.
If YouTube, Veoh, et. al. goes down for maintenance or other reasons, videos are unavailable.
At which point you watch other things.
Flash video compared to downloaded video is like comparing on-demand movie channels to DVDs.
No, it's like comparing TV to DVDs. It's still possible (though not easy) to download a YouTube video, but most people won't bother, for the same reason that most people won't bother to tape every show that comes on.
Bittorrent is nice, but the epitome of inconvenience.
I click the file, I click somewhere to save. Done. What's inconvenient about that?
Ok, yes, it does have to have some seeds, but that is true in a general sense. Most torrents which have no seeds would have also lost their webhost a long time ago, were they an HTTP link. And in any case, it proves that the issue of downloading hi-def video is solvable, and is already solved, in many cases.
The annoyance factor is a really important reason.... tons of jackasses out there who would cry about how their freedom of speech is being infringed
Oh, god forbid you should ever be annoyed!
Hey everyone! Bill of rights is off! It's more important that cowscows not be annoyed!
My example in my previous comment was about playing music over your computer's speakers. That certainly doesn't create any sort of interference with the aircraft's systems, but they'll still tell you to stop, because it's not fair to the other passengers to subject them to that noise.
Then be honest about it, if that is really the reason.
Or how are they able to get us to turn our speakers off, if we're all such jackasses that we need the government to lie to us to stop us from talking on the phone? Seriously, if they can tell us "Please turn your speakers off, you're annoying other passengers", they can do the same for a phone call -- although with the noise of the plane, I'm not sure I'd notice or care, in either case.
And in 1998 we had VRML with people announcing that we were on the verge of the internet being a 3-Dimensional landscape.
In 1998, we thought it was a good idea.
That said, today we have things like Second Life. I suppose what's more disturbing to me about that trend is not the lack of technology, but the centralization of control -- Second Life is run by one company. The client is open source, but there is no network, and if Linden ever goes out of business, that VR world is gone.
We also had 320x240 pixelated video, but I thought that was just temporary.
We've got high def downloads, just most of them aren't legit. But the technology is there -- just head over to your friendly neighborhood BitTorrent tracker.
Now instead of it being an application, it's even more pixelated and embedded directly in a web page, just in case downloading content was too convenient.
Downloading is less convenient. I do wish it was an option, but the Web is far more convenient for a number of other things.
Let me put it this way: Would you manually download a webpage before opening it in a browser, if you didn't absolutely have to? Of course not! That's what YouTube is -- the bastard child of channel surfing and web surfing.
And while Flash does suck for video playback, it at least does real fullscreen now (finally!), and I believe it can use hardware acceleration in that mode. It supports h.264 video now,
The reason you download now is not because it's convenient, but because you want a better quality version, or because you want it on another device. And the process of doing that, over BitTorrent, is far more convenient than anything we had in 1998. (Remember: In 1998, we were on dialup (if that), and there was a chance we'd lose our connection halfway through -- and unless you'd installed additional software, you wouldn't be able to resume that download. It was gone.)
You have thirty (30) seconds to explain how this adds value for the shareholder, then I'm calling security. Go.
It raises the value of that type of service, for anyone who implements it, including us. It also ensures that no one will ever move to another service because they want the more open one -- and no one ever deliberately chose a service because it was closed.
How'd I do? Under 30 seconds?
It's also worth mentioning that Yahoo does implement OpenID -- poorly, but they're trying. (And so does AOL, and VeriSign, and a few others.)
It would be great, but the dominant player in a market doesn't usually have an incentive to stop vendor lock in practices, and the companies that would benefit from customer mobility don't have the leverage to force it upstream.
Fortunately, there are usually enough other players to make a dent, if they start working together. There's always room for someone to take over, as MySpace shows (pretty much killed Friendster and Facebook), and if that "someone" is every competitor in the world on an open platform...
Consider, also, that we're talking about videos and photos. This isn't exactly the kind of service that makes it hard to be mobile in the first place, and the only decisive winner at the moment seems to be YouTube for video.
This is essentially the same argument raised by those who are truly anti net neutrality -- not just "don't let the government interfere", but "why, yes, I do think Google should pay Comcast's bills."
Look, it's simple: Google pays Google's bandwidth bill. I pay mine. Both of them go towards building the infrastructure. If it's not enough, raise taxes to pay for it, I don't care.
What you do not get to do is raise the bar for the next Google, and continue to let ISPs deceptively advertise "unlimited" Internet access. Yes, technically, the advertising is truthful, but it is intentionally misleading, and we are all paying the price for it.
The technology that you use to make that call isn't really relevant.
Then what, exactly, is relevant?
I thought the whole point of not allowing cell phones was that they cause interference. If wifi doesn't, and I can send VoIP over that wifi, how would that magically start causing interference?
If you are Google, or the BBC, and you notice an ISP intentionally degrading service, redirect all traffic from that ISP to a page explaining the situation, with a link to the "contact us" page of the ISP.
If Google ever did this, I imagine neutrality issues would be resolved in days. The BBC should have a decent shot, right?
If cell phones are banned, they can still charge you a dollar a minute for the official in-flight phone service.
I really don't think there's any safety-related reason, even your "control of information" theory, especially if Oceana^WEurope is allowing them. Seriously, Britain seems almost more paranoid about terrorism than the US.
Why aren't we using several gpg keys for everything?
Mostly because users won't put up with it. They'd much rather be comforted by everything their bank is doing (or claims to be doing) to protect them from identity theft, and by the fact that the bank assumes responsibility for fraud.
That, and there are easier ways to do this -- those RSA random-number-generator keys, for one, which generate a predictable number every 30 seconds -- you enter that number, and if it matches what the server generates, you're authorized. Bonus of that method is that it's much, much more difficult to defeat with simple spyware -- any software on your computer can rip off your private key, with the assistance of a keylogger if you've bothered with a password. (And consider that a password is unrecoverable, meaning normal users will write them on post-it notes.)
I still dearly wish that such measures were at least an option.
Gpg to sign into email
Gpg to log into computer
Ok, never mind, apparently you don't understand how GPG works?
GPG is to sign individual emails. The point is that if enough people are checking your signatures, and sending encrypted email to you, it doesn't particularly matter where it's actually hosted, or what kind of security it takes to get into the account.
And GPG to log into the computer?...How, exactly, were you proposing to do this?
And shit like Pidgin plain text passwords piss me off to no end, you just know something is going to harvest those..
Just about all services which you use Pidgin with are sending your password in plaintext over the wire. But if it really bothers you that much, use Kopete; you can encrypt all your passwords with KDEWallet. Or just encrypt your entire hard drive.
Of course, the real solution there is, again, use real crypto for your IMs, at which point, the authentication itself isn't particularly useful.
Well, first, an account is probably still useful if there's less in the account -- and in the real world, people apparently do often have less than $1k in the account.
And second, it's probably a lot less risky to sell information about a bank account -- even to obtain such information -- than to actually clean the money out. We can do all sorts of tricks on the Internet to make ourselves hard to trace, and with a sufficiently large, sufficiently decentralized botnet, it could pretty much be impossible. But as soon as you actually take the money out of the account, there's a money trail for the law to follow. Selling the information means you're only involved in one legitimate-looking transaction, and you probably have a bit more time to move that money somewhere safe -- and there's not really much incentive for the guy who gets caught to give you up, nor really much of a way to prove that it was payment for the account.
That is also probably why "stock tip" scams are so popular -- they're about the only way to make the money harder to trace than the spam; even if you catch someone who made a ton of money off that tip, they could always be some sucker who followed the tip and got lucky -- or even someone who guessed it was a spam, but figured they'd be faster than everyone else, and still manage to make some money. The best you can do is hope that the imaginary company that everyone bought has some tie to some real-life person -- but it's still likely that they'd be just another dupe.
And even if the above is irrelevant, and it's perfectly possible to track everyone involved, the guy who actually accesses the account is going to be the one doing the laundering to avoid getting caught. Laundering itself is a service, so I can see an account harvester wanting to pay someone else to do it.
Google already has a very simple button to mark a message as spam, or as not spam.
Google also has the Google Cluster to throw at the problem of figuring out which messages (reported as spam) are actually spam, and which ones aren't, and what patterns they can glean from this to block future spam.
I'm really not sure what your solution gains in terms of additional UI. I think most of your ideas either could be implemented, or already are, with the simple "report spam" or "not spam" buttons.
I tested this on Google Apps for my (company's) domain.
Turns out that yes, they will drop it on the floor if you give them an invalid address. It's probably not gmail.com, and definitely not yourdomain.com -- but rather, blogger.com and googlegroups.com -- which seem to be accepting mail and bouncing, rather than rejecting via SMTP.
A quick demonstration:
david@biostar:~$ host -t MX scribestorm.com scribestorm.com mail is handled by 0 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.com. david@biostar:~$ nc -vv aspmx.l.google.com 25 DNS fwd/rev mismatch: aspmx.l.google.com != qb-in-f27.google.com aspmx.l.google.com [72.14.205.27] 25 (smtp) open 220 mx.google.com ESMTP z21si10855881qbc.21 helo slashdot.org 250 mx.google.com at your service mail from: anonymous_coward@slashdot.org 555 5.5.2 Syntax error. z21si10855881qbc.21 mail from: <anonymous_coward@slashdot.org> 250 2.1.0 OK rcpt to: <bogus@scribestorm.com> 550-5.1.1 This Gmail user does not exist. Please try double-checking 550-5.1.1 the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. 550-5.1.1 Learn more at 550 5.1.1 http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6596 z21si10855881qbc.21 rcpt to: <david.masover@scribestorm.com> 250 2.1.5 OK quit 221 2.0.0 mx.google.com closing connection z21si10855881qbc.21 sent 181, rcvd 518 david@biostar:~$
As you can see, it not only dropped my message on the floor, it also demanded brackets around the address -- something Postfix and Exim do for me, and I think even Qmail tolerated addresses without brackets.
I imagine it works pretty much the same way for gmail.com, so if you're going to take advantage of the bouncing to have Google DoS Google, keep that in mind. Send mail from bogus_01234@blogger.com to alsobogus_56789@googlegroups.com. (I think adding a GUID to it would be a nice touch, thus guaranteeing that it will never match an actual address.)
And why would you want to do that when there are better codecs (some free), in places where sequenced music might be better anyway...
In short, why would you use MP3 when you have total control over the software on which the music (or other sound) will be played back? In particular, why would you pay a license to use MP3, when you can use Vorbis for free?
The sound card and drivers magically remix positional DirectSound events into a Dolby Digital bitstream.
Which, again, isn't going to be supported by all games. Not all games are using DirectSound, for one -- or DirectX at all. I realize that's a minority...
Even if the sound quality was terrible I'd want to know if there was a level 3 sentry behind me. Surround sound makes games more enjoyable.
I've found that headphones are generally just as good, especially considering how fast I can turn around to check in FPS games. And you kind of need a headset for team games, anyway -- I'm not entirely sure how you'd integrate that into a good surround system.
I've got a 6600, and yes, it did. Not as fast as on Windows, but it did, in fact, just work.
And in the context of kids on laptops, that's really good enough. Or if it isn't, they'll all play Warcraft III with Dota mod, or they'll find something else that does work -- Quake 3 is ported and open source, and Quake 4 is ported, and in both cases, the Linux installation instructions are along the lines of "install this thing from the Internet (or with your package manager), then copy some files off the CD" -- which means all they have to do now is, copy files to iPod, then to laptop, or pirate it.
I'm not arguing that Linux is a viable gaming platform, but rather, that if these kids have to use Linux with no optical drive, they'll make it work anyway. My little brother, who is in high school, did get Warcraft III running on his EEE PC, with no help from me. And anything which can run Vista is a lot more powerful than the EEE.
However, this new driver does support the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) family... Don't expect any miracles from this driver just yet. At this point, the RadeonHD driver is really targeted for developers and those wanting to use the experimental driver whether it is due to problems using the fglrx driver on the system or just wishing to test out the driver to see if it works for you. As long as AMD sticks to their word on delivering the rest of their documentation, there will not be too much (if any) reverse engineering that needs to take place for the R500 and R600 series. However, the driver is still likely a few months out from a stable point for 2D users (perhaps in time for X.Org 7.4) and then the 3D work after that.
I don't have time to help develop a driver, which means I'm willing to hold off another year or two on actually buying a new video card, but nVidia is still going to work better until this open driver is finished.
I mean, yes, it's awesome that we have specs, but apparently, they didn't deliver source code.
Well, onboard sound is getting better, for what that's worth. And surround can be physically a pain to setup, assuming it's supported in the games you want to play.
But I think the real problem here is that just about every sound you're going to be listening to is already compressed mp3, range-compressed to hell. It's kind of like suggesting upgrading your monitor or video card if you're only going to be watching YouTube. Hopefully at least a few developers are using high quality sounds in their games...
The day that a "kid" is able to run WOW or Counterstrike in WINE without an optical drive is the day that I'll fart dust and piss rust.
Now that I've got you on record...
WoW works, out of the box, on Wine, with maybe one small tweak -- and kids tend to tweak out their WoW anyway, as it's somewhat scriptable, in a few small, deliberate ways.
It is possible, though unlikely, that a kid wouldn't be able to figure out how to install it from an ISO. Were that the case, all it takes is copying the.wine directory to wherever you need it to be, because once installed, it doesn't check for the CD -- being an MMO is much better copy protection than any CD scheme they could do.
And remember, it only takes one kid to do that, throw it on his iPod, and teach the other kids the three or so steps that it'll take to copy it to the laptop's hard drive.
If they really don't want people to play games, they should just give it a crappy video card... Oh wait, they plan to have a Vista model. Never mind.
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True. I should have been more clear: The money which would be used for building infrastructure, in a sane world, would come from our respective bills.
No, I don't mean giving them a blank check. I mean attaching legal strings, such that they are forced to put it into infrastructure.
I'm not entirely sure what that means, here. Do you mean making it a government-run service entirely, like the Post Office? I'm not sure that's a good idea, and I do agree it would be hard.
I think the main things which could be done to spark some real competition here are:
That "to the bit" is important. Not only are you not allowed to specify limits in some arbitrary number of photos, songs, etc, but if you are using real gigabytes (and not gibibytes) to cap bandwidth, it will say so very clearly.
Perhaps we could even get a Surgeon General style warning: "There are eight bits in a byte, and additional protocol overhead may apply. The total number of kilobits, megabits, or gigabits per second advertised is roughly one tenth what modern operating systems will report when downloading a file. Additionally, modern software likes to interpret a gigabyte as having 2^30 bytes, or 1073741824, while many hard drives and bandwidth packages like to interpret a gigabyte as having 10^9 bytes, or one billion. You may be getting roughly 7% less than you think you are."
My point here is that the main public desire for VRML is eliminated with Second Life, and with World of Warcraft. And I can only shudder as I imagine what VRML must actually look like -- there has got to be a better way of serializing a game world in a portable way.
At which point you watch other things.
No, it's like comparing TV to DVDs. It's still possible (though not easy) to download a YouTube video, but most people won't bother, for the same reason that most people won't bother to tape every show that comes on.
I click the file, I click somewhere to save. Done. What's inconvenient about that?
Ok, yes, it does have to have some seeds, but that is true in a general sense. Most torrents which have no seeds would have also lost their webhost a long time ago, were they an HTTP link. And in any case, it proves that the issue of downloading hi-def video is solvable, and is already solved, in many cases.
Oh, god forbid you should ever be annoyed!
Hey everyone! Bill of rights is off! It's more important that cowscows not be annoyed!
Then be honest about it, if that is really the reason.
Or how are they able to get us to turn our speakers off, if we're all such jackasses that we need the government to lie to us to stop us from talking on the phone? Seriously, if they can tell us "Please turn your speakers off, you're annoying other passengers", they can do the same for a phone call -- although with the noise of the plane, I'm not sure I'd notice or care, in either case.
In 1998, we thought it was a good idea.
That said, today we have things like Second Life. I suppose what's more disturbing to me about that trend is not the lack of technology, but the centralization of control -- Second Life is run by one company. The client is open source, but there is no network, and if Linden ever goes out of business, that VR world is gone.
We've got high def downloads, just most of them aren't legit. But the technology is there -- just head over to your friendly neighborhood BitTorrent tracker.
Downloading is less convenient. I do wish it was an option, but the Web is far more convenient for a number of other things.
Let me put it this way: Would you manually download a webpage before opening it in a browser, if you didn't absolutely have to? Of course not! That's what YouTube is -- the bastard child of channel surfing and web surfing.
And while Flash does suck for video playback, it at least does real fullscreen now (finally!), and I believe it can use hardware acceleration in that mode. It supports h.264 video now,
The reason you download now is not because it's convenient, but because you want a better quality version, or because you want it on another device. And the process of doing that, over BitTorrent, is far more convenient than anything we had in 1998. (Remember: In 1998, we were on dialup (if that), and there was a chance we'd lose our connection halfway through -- and unless you'd installed additional software, you wouldn't be able to resume that download. It was gone.)
Don't you mean 2018?
How about OpenID, so that you don't have to remember a login for any one video site -- or any one site, period?
It raises the value of that type of service, for anyone who implements it, including us. It also ensures that no one will ever move to another service because they want the more open one -- and no one ever deliberately chose a service because it was closed.
How'd I do? Under 30 seconds?
It's also worth mentioning that Yahoo does implement OpenID -- poorly, but they're trying. (And so does AOL, and VeriSign, and a few others.)
Fortunately, there are usually enough other players to make a dent, if they start working together. There's always room for someone to take over, as MySpace shows (pretty much killed Friendster and Facebook), and if that "someone" is every competitor in the world on an open platform...
Consider, also, that we're talking about videos and photos. This isn't exactly the kind of service that makes it hard to be mobile in the first place, and the only decisive winner at the moment seems to be YouTube for video.
This is essentially the same argument raised by those who are truly anti net neutrality -- not just "don't let the government interfere", but "why, yes, I do think Google should pay Comcast's bills."
Look, it's simple: Google pays Google's bandwidth bill. I pay mine. Both of them go towards building the infrastructure. If it's not enough, raise taxes to pay for it, I don't care.
What you do not get to do is raise the bar for the next Google, and continue to let ISPs deceptively advertise "unlimited" Internet access. Yes, technically, the advertising is truthful, but it is intentionally misleading, and we are all paying the price for it.
And 100's of in-use wifi cards can? It's not just the router that's generating a signal...
Then what, exactly, is relevant?
I thought the whole point of not allowing cell phones was that they cause interference. If wifi doesn't, and I can send VoIP over that wifi, how would that magically start causing interference?
If you are Google, or the BBC, and you notice an ISP intentionally degrading service, redirect all traffic from that ISP to a page explaining the situation, with a link to the "contact us" page of the ISP.
If Google ever did this, I imagine neutrality issues would be resolved in days. The BBC should have a decent shot, right?
If cell phones are banned, they can still charge you a dollar a minute for the official in-flight phone service.
I really don't think there's any safety-related reason, even your "control of information" theory, especially if Oceana^WEurope is allowing them. Seriously, Britain seems almost more paranoid about terrorism than the US.
Mostly because users won't put up with it. They'd much rather be comforted by everything their bank is doing (or claims to be doing) to protect them from identity theft, and by the fact that the bank assumes responsibility for fraud.
That, and there are easier ways to do this -- those RSA random-number-generator keys, for one, which generate a predictable number every 30 seconds -- you enter that number, and if it matches what the server generates, you're authorized. Bonus of that method is that it's much, much more difficult to defeat with simple spyware -- any software on your computer can rip off your private key, with the assistance of a keylogger if you've bothered with a password. (And consider that a password is unrecoverable, meaning normal users will write them on post-it notes.)
I still dearly wish that such measures were at least an option.
Ok, never mind, apparently you don't understand how GPG works?
GPG is to sign individual emails. The point is that if enough people are checking your signatures, and sending encrypted email to you, it doesn't particularly matter where it's actually hosted, or what kind of security it takes to get into the account.
And GPG to log into the computer? ...How, exactly, were you proposing to do this?
Just about all services which you use Pidgin with are sending your password in plaintext over the wire. But if it really bothers you that much, use Kopete; you can encrypt all your passwords with KDEWallet. Or just encrypt your entire hard drive.
Of course, the real solution there is, again, use real crypto for your IMs, at which point, the authentication itself isn't particularly useful.
Well, first, an account is probably still useful if there's less in the account -- and in the real world, people apparently do often have less than $1k in the account.
And second, it's probably a lot less risky to sell information about a bank account -- even to obtain such information -- than to actually clean the money out. We can do all sorts of tricks on the Internet to make ourselves hard to trace, and with a sufficiently large, sufficiently decentralized botnet, it could pretty much be impossible. But as soon as you actually take the money out of the account, there's a money trail for the law to follow. Selling the information means you're only involved in one legitimate-looking transaction, and you probably have a bit more time to move that money somewhere safe -- and there's not really much incentive for the guy who gets caught to give you up, nor really much of a way to prove that it was payment for the account.
That is also probably why "stock tip" scams are so popular -- they're about the only way to make the money harder to trace than the spam; even if you catch someone who made a ton of money off that tip, they could always be some sucker who followed the tip and got lucky -- or even someone who guessed it was a spam, but figured they'd be faster than everyone else, and still manage to make some money. The best you can do is hope that the imaginary company that everyone bought has some tie to some real-life person -- but it's still likely that they'd be just another dupe.
And even if the above is irrelevant, and it's perfectly possible to track everyone involved, the guy who actually accesses the account is going to be the one doing the laundering to avoid getting caught. Laundering itself is a service, so I can see an account harvester wanting to pay someone else to do it.
Google already has a very simple button to mark a message as spam, or as not spam.
Google also has the Google Cluster to throw at the problem of figuring out which messages (reported as spam) are actually spam, and which ones aren't, and what patterns they can glean from this to block future spam.
I'm really not sure what your solution gains in terms of additional UI. I think most of your ideas either could be implemented, or already are, with the simple "report spam" or "not spam" buttons.
That is, you're right, this won't get them paid.
It also costs them very little to try.
And they aren't trying on purpose.
More importantly, what possible legitimate reason could there be for doing this, other than sheer incompetency?
I tested this on Google Apps for my (company's) domain.
Turns out that yes, they will drop it on the floor if you give them an invalid address. It's probably not gmail.com, and definitely not yourdomain.com -- but rather, blogger.com and googlegroups.com -- which seem to be accepting mail and bouncing, rather than rejecting via SMTP.
A quick demonstration:
As you can see, it not only dropped my message on the floor, it also demanded brackets around the address -- something Postfix and Exim do for me, and I think even Qmail tolerated addresses without brackets.
I imagine it works pretty much the same way for gmail.com, so if you're going to take advantage of the bouncing to have Google DoS Google, keep that in mind. Send mail from bogus_01234@blogger.com to alsobogus_56789@googlegroups.com. (I think adding a GUID to it would be a nice touch, thus guaranteeing that it will never match an actual address.)
And why would you want to do that when there are better codecs (some free), in places where sequenced music might be better anyway...
In short, why would you use MP3 when you have total control over the software on which the music (or other sound) will be played back? In particular, why would you pay a license to use MP3, when you can use Vorbis for free?
Which, again, isn't going to be supported by all games. Not all games are using DirectSound, for one -- or DirectX at all. I realize that's a minority...
I've found that headphones are generally just as good, especially considering how fast I can turn around to check in FPS games. And you kind of need a headset for team games, anyway -- I'm not entirely sure how you'd integrate that into a good surround system.
I've got a 6600, and yes, it did. Not as fast as on Windows, but it did, in fact, just work.
And in the context of kids on laptops, that's really good enough. Or if it isn't, they'll all play Warcraft III with Dota mod, or they'll find something else that does work -- Quake 3 is ported and open source, and Quake 4 is ported, and in both cases, the Linux installation instructions are along the lines of "install this thing from the Internet (or with your package manager), then copy some files off the CD" -- which means all they have to do now is, copy files to iPod, then to laptop, or pirate it.
I'm not arguing that Linux is a viable gaming platform, but rather, that if these kids have to use Linux with no optical drive, they'll make it work anyway. My little brother, who is in high school, did get Warcraft III running on his EEE PC, with no help from me. And anything which can run Vista is a lot more powerful than the EEE.
It looks like that article is out of date.
How's the 3D acceleration? What about desktop effects and compositing (compiz)?
If there's a video decoder on the card (h.264), can you use it?
It's not fglrx I'm interested in comparing this to, it's this vs nVidia's binary drivers, and vs Windows on the same card.
Or at least, it's correctly refusing to accept mail for accounts that don't exist at my domain. (We're using Gmail for corporate email.)
So it's googlegroups.com and blogger.com, but not Gmail? Interesting.
Android has the backing of Google.
Who's backing OpenMoko? Or Qtopia?
Which one are we more likely to actually get a usable version of, anytime soon?
Getting closer, but still no cigar:
I don't have time to help develop a driver, which means I'm willing to hold off another year or two on actually buying a new video card, but nVidia is still going to work better until this open driver is finished.
I mean, yes, it's awesome that we have specs, but apparently, they didn't deliver source code.
Well, onboard sound is getting better, for what that's worth. And surround can be physically a pain to setup, assuming it's supported in the games you want to play.
But I think the real problem here is that just about every sound you're going to be listening to is already compressed mp3, range-compressed to hell. It's kind of like suggesting upgrading your monitor or video card if you're only going to be watching YouTube. Hopefully at least a few developers are using high quality sounds in their games...
Now that I've got you on record...
WoW works, out of the box, on Wine, with maybe one small tweak -- and kids tend to tweak out their WoW anyway, as it's somewhat scriptable, in a few small, deliberate ways.
It is possible, though unlikely, that a kid wouldn't be able to figure out how to install it from an ISO. Were that the case, all it takes is copying the .wine directory to wherever you need it to be, because once installed, it doesn't check for the CD -- being an MMO is much better copy protection than any CD scheme they could do.
And remember, it only takes one kid to do that, throw it on his iPod, and teach the other kids the three or so steps that it'll take to copy it to the laptop's hard drive.
If they really don't want people to play games, they should just give it a crappy video card... Oh wait, they plan to have a Vista model. Never mind.