This says that Gecko browsers overall have been growing in popularity every month. In fact, all major browser engines, including IE6, have been gaining share at the expense of IE5.
My last X crash was the result of a video driver bug, the bug being that the driver trusted information provided by the bios, which was buggy. And it wasn't so much an X crash as it was a system crash.
Generally, the function of X is too narrow for it to have many serious bugs at its old age.
On Linux, it can get even more vague: kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 21 on CPU 0. kernel: Dazed and confused, but trying to continue kernel: Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?
These just start showing up in the log, sometimes hours before the system dies. Most of the time, it has nothing to do with power saving, but has long been considered a sign of failing ram.
There's very little you can do with IE6 that you can't easily do with Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari without difficulty. Cross browser development used to be a burden, but that was like like 6+ years ago. The development speed advantage to only supporting one browser is minimal, and is quickly eaten away if/when you change your mind.
A police officer just needs to say they saw you speeding, and that's enough for a judge to find you guilty of a traffic violation. If you say "prove it", you'll just get laughed at. Speeding fines have been dished out for almost a century without officers being able to prove a thing. In this case, you can just assume the camera wasn't tampered with by some person who has nothing better to do than fabricate flawless photos of your car speeding and use a supercomputer to match the MD5 hash, while still producing a jpeg image which has no superfluous random data in the comments or at the end of the file, because 99.99999% of the time the photo will be authentic and it's just a traffic violation.
It's not just a color/BW issue. I distinctly remember Google Maps originally showing my city in high resolution color. Now it's a green blob. The pixels are bigger than houses.
I can't see this forcing the UnixWare kernel to be relicensed under the GPL though, especially since some of the code couldn't be GPL'd even if they wanted. It'd just make them quite a bit more liable for copyright infringement than they already were. Since the offending code was supposedly removed over 2 years ago, they could easily claim the infringement was accidental and they made a best effort to remedy it, short of notifying the copyright owners.
Installing libdvdcss seems to be enough to play DVD's in xine and totem. I also had a skipping problem, which required me to edit/etc/hdparm.conf to enable dma on the dvd drive. With that, it worked like a regular dvd player with menus and such.
The company that makes PowerDVD also has a PowerCinema for Linux, but I think it's targeted more toward manufacturers than end users. Someone should make a list of top "Windows features" not created or supported by Microsoft, just like there's a list of top "Weird Al" songs not by Weird Al. So far DVD playback, accelerated OpenGL, and extensive driver support are on the list.
Make a spreadsheet of all expected/likely purchases for the next year. Give rough min and max ranges for quantity and price for each line item. Include things like new systems, servers, upgrades, replacements, software licensing, network hardware, the unexpected, etc. Try to keep IT wages and contract work seperate from hardware/licensing costs. Then use the spreadsheet totals to figure out a good range of expected costs for the year.
Somehow, cooltechzone managed to stay up throughout the "Is it wrong to love Microsoft?" article, but they can't handle the traffic generated by their inkjet printer buyer's guide. Maybe people are RTFA this time.
Windows XP didn't come with hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers at all. You got a cheap old software renderer. OEM's usually installed the accelerated drivers themselves, or users had to download the driver from the video card manufacturer. Now, with Vista, you still don't get a full OpenGL driver, but you get an OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D, like GLDirect or AltOGL, which is almost as good, but still evil. No doubt, OEM's will still install full OpenGL drivers so that users won't call up asking why Doom 3 performs like crap on their new PC, and everyone who doesn't buy the expensive boxed Windows Vista will be happy with their 3D gaming experience.
Up to 50% slower isn't that bad anyway. "Up to" is just something you say to make your argument sound stronger. Something can be both up to 50% slower and up to 50% faster at the same time. If 50% slower is the worst case, I doubt we can expect the average to be much worse than 20-30% slower, which is pretty impressive for an OpenGL wrapper. Plus, if the wrapper is written well, you can promise that if Direct3D works, OpenGL should work too. I've seen too many instances where a card had good Direct3D support and OpenGL simply crashed the system after so many minutes.
The extremely bad part is, the wrapper will lead some manufacturers to stop supporting OpenGL, so there will be nothing for them to port to Linux. So by embracing OpenGL, while at the same time eliminating the need for driver level support, Microsoft will weaken manufacturer support for OpenGL on Linux. If you're a Windows user, you'll benefit from Microsoft making their wrapper as good as possible to kill manufacturer support. Microsoft has an incentive to not make the wrapper buggy. If you're a Linux user like me, this'll suck ass.
Use whatever works for you, since money always comes first. I think you overestimate the difficulty of most OSS though. People rarely migrate just for the hell of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Flashblock is a must-have. You can still play flash, but instead of it loading immediately you see a "play" button in its place.
This says that Gecko browsers overall have been growing in popularity every month. In fact, all major browser engines, including IE6, have been gaining share at the expense of IE5.
Just don't use CSS for the things it's not very good for, like replacing a variable width, variable height table layout.
My last X crash was the result of a video driver bug, the bug being that the driver trusted information provided by the bios, which was buggy. And it wasn't so much an X crash as it was a system crash.
Generally, the function of X is too narrow for it to have many serious bugs at its old age.
On Linux, it can get even more vague:
kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 21 on CPU 0.
kernel: Dazed and confused, but trying to continue
kernel: Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?
These just start showing up in the log, sometimes hours before the system dies. Most of the time, it has nothing to do with power saving, but has long been considered a sign of failing ram.
There's very little you can do with IE6 that you can't easily do with Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari without difficulty. Cross browser development used to be a burden, but that was like like 6+ years ago. The development speed advantage to only supporting one browser is minimal, and is quickly eaten away if/when you change your mind.
Abiword is much better.
Conservationism != Environmentalism
A police officer just needs to say they saw you speeding, and that's enough for a judge to find you guilty of a traffic violation. If you say "prove it", you'll just get laughed at. Speeding fines have been dished out for almost a century without officers being able to prove a thing. In this case, you can just assume the camera wasn't tampered with by some person who has nothing better to do than fabricate flawless photos of your car speeding and use a supercomputer to match the MD5 hash, while still producing a jpeg image which has no superfluous random data in the comments or at the end of the file, because 99.99999% of the time the photo will be authentic and it's just a traffic violation.
The licensing alone will set them back at least 100 million dollars.
Where do you believe Linux *isn't*?
My grandmother plays solitaire on a 486 running Windows 95.
It's not just a color/BW issue. I distinctly remember Google Maps originally showing my city in high resolution color. Now it's a green blob. The pixels are bigger than houses.
I'm sure we'll see it eventually. Even back when they released the free edition of Google Earth, their site had a screenshot of it running in KDE.
There are 8 pages missing. I'm guessing that part's still confidential or someone doesn't know how to work a scanner.
Now they'll be sued into oblivion, some more.
I can't see this forcing the UnixWare kernel to be relicensed under the GPL though, especially since some of the code couldn't be GPL'd even if they wanted. It'd just make them quite a bit more liable for copyright infringement than they already were. Since the offending code was supposedly removed over 2 years ago, they could easily claim the infringement was accidental and they made a best effort to remedy it, short of notifying the copyright owners.
Their survival rate has so far been 98%.
"Free cellphone with paid membership." Seriously, I've been seeing them for years.
A tab doesn't open unless I middle-click a link.
Installing libdvdcss seems to be enough to play DVD's in xine and totem. I also had a skipping problem, which required me to edit /etc/hdparm.conf to enable dma on the dvd drive. With that, it worked like a regular dvd player with menus and such.
The company that makes PowerDVD also has a PowerCinema for Linux, but I think it's targeted more toward manufacturers than end users. Someone should make a list of top "Windows features" not created or supported by Microsoft, just like there's a list of top "Weird Al" songs not by Weird Al. So far DVD playback, accelerated OpenGL, and extensive driver support are on the list.
In my sad experience, offering a range means that you get the minimum.
You get to decide how much is the minimum though.
Make a spreadsheet of all expected/likely purchases for the next year. Give rough min and max ranges for quantity and price for each line item. Include things like new systems, servers, upgrades, replacements, software licensing, network hardware, the unexpected, etc. Try to keep IT wages and contract work seperate from hardware/licensing costs. Then use the spreadsheet totals to figure out a good range of expected costs for the year.
Somehow, cooltechzone managed to stay up throughout the "Is it wrong to love Microsoft?" article, but they can't handle the traffic generated by their inkjet printer buyer's guide. Maybe people are RTFA this time.
Windows XP didn't come with hardware accelerated OpenGL drivers at all. You got a cheap old software renderer. OEM's usually installed the accelerated drivers themselves, or users had to download the driver from the video card manufacturer. Now, with Vista, you still don't get a full OpenGL driver, but you get an OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D, like GLDirect or AltOGL, which is almost as good, but still evil. No doubt, OEM's will still install full OpenGL drivers so that users won't call up asking why Doom 3 performs like crap on their new PC, and everyone who doesn't buy the expensive boxed Windows Vista will be happy with their 3D gaming experience.
Up to 50% slower isn't that bad anyway. "Up to" is just something you say to make your argument sound stronger. Something can be both up to 50% slower and up to 50% faster at the same time. If 50% slower is the worst case, I doubt we can expect the average to be much worse than 20-30% slower, which is pretty impressive for an OpenGL wrapper. Plus, if the wrapper is written well, you can promise that if Direct3D works, OpenGL should work too. I've seen too many instances where a card had good Direct3D support and OpenGL simply crashed the system after so many minutes.
The extremely bad part is, the wrapper will lead some manufacturers to stop supporting OpenGL, so there will be nothing for them to port to Linux. So by embracing OpenGL, while at the same time eliminating the need for driver level support, Microsoft will weaken manufacturer support for OpenGL on Linux. If you're a Windows user, you'll benefit from Microsoft making their wrapper as good as possible to kill manufacturer support. Microsoft has an incentive to not make the wrapper buggy. If you're a Linux user like me, this'll suck ass.
Because if it was free, they wouldn't want it.
Use whatever works for you, since money always comes first. I think you overestimate the difficulty of most OSS though. People rarely migrate just for the hell of it.