I don't know about taxes, but given an average grad student stipend, that's insignificant compared to both the cost of the education and the value of their research. In a grad school I attended, our stipend was about $20,000 a year, and I was told the cost per grad student per year to the institution was about $60,000 a year. (Where does that other $40,000 go? Advisor's salaries, class tuition, IT costs, buildings maintenance, etc...)
PhD programs are not like undergrad, where you learn a bunch of stuff and work on mostly contrived problems and you aren't expected to contribute anything new to the field. It's more like a job where you solve hard problems for the people funding your education in exchange for grant money. Typical funding sources are NSF, DARPA, NIH, and sometimes corporations (IBM, Microsoft, and Intel all fund quite a bit of research).
What the US government gets out of the grant money it spends is better solutions to hard research problems, some of which have significant economic value. In that respect, individual students are a bit of a gamble, but overall I'd say it's a net gain. If it's a Chinese or Indian that does the actual work, who cares? The real idiocy of the program though is that we often don't allow them to stay once they've completed their degree. Oh no, we can't have highly educated foreigners in our country competing for valuable US jobs! Never mind that there really aren't enough PhDs in the world to make any significant difference to the employment statistics.
Ray tracing is very CPU parallel, I don't dispute that. By "memory parallel" I mean that if you want to render something on two separate computers, you have to have a complete copy of the 3-d model on both computers. With rasterization algorithms, you can split up the work amongst a bunch of machines, and each one only needs one part of the model. That way, you can render things that wouldn't fit into the memory of a single machine. This isn't an issue for games, but for rendering scenes for movies it is a big deal. Take a look at the 2006 symposium on interactive raytracing keynote.
Yes, very much so. (Not the same issues exactly, but similar ones.) In order for a ray-tracer to be efficient it needs to sort the scene into some sort of acceleration structure. Regular grids, BSP trees and octrees have been used in the past, but currently the most popular acceleration structures are KD-trees (like a bsp tree but axis-aligned) and BIH-trees (also similar to a bsp tree but with subtle differences difficult to describe succinctly). KD-trees are generally faster for static scenes. (Interesting trivia: balanced trees yield awful performance. Trees built using the surface-area heuristic are much faster.) Ray-intersections against BIH trees tend to be a little slower (often around 30%), but they can be built much faster (several orders of magnitude iirc) using an in-place sort remarkably similar to quicksort. Performance of rebuilding an acceleration structure is fairly unimportant for static scenes, but for games it can be the bottleneck.
For the game designer, this is relevant because it means he/she can't just move stuff around willy-nilly. If the scene can be, for instance, partitioned into a heirarchy of static objects (maybe represented by KD-trees) that can all move freely around within a top-level BIH tree, then the game will run much faster than if all the geometry is stuffed into a single tree that has to be re-sorted (n log n) every frame. (My own not-very-fast ray tracer could be modified to do something like this, since I treat bih-trees and kd-trees as primitive objects, just like triangles and spheres.)
I believe that the transition to ray tracing is inevitable (not just because it looks better but also because in a lot of cases it's just plain faster), but it does have some bottlenecks that aren't well known or widely understood.
O(n) in the number of primary rays, generally some multiple of the number of pixels on the screen (though it might be a bit less if you're using MLRTA)
O(n) in the number of lights (though there may be some shortcuts) if shadow rays tests dominate
O(something big) if there's a lot of reflective and/or refractive objects and you don't do anything to mitigate the rampant recursion
O(n log n) in the number of photons, if you're using photon mapping
O(n log n) in the number of objects that moved since the last time you rebuilt the acceleration structure
That first one was what the original post was refering to. (Tracing a single ray is O(n log n). Tracing a pixel involves sending one or more rays and a shadow ray for each light for each primary ray that hit an object. Tracing a whole image involves tracing a lot of pixels. If the number of pixels and the number of lights are assumed to be a constant, they drop out of the big O equation. It's a very big constant, though, and that's one reason why ray tracers are so slow. However, once you get enough CPU to compensate for that large constant, the algorithm starts running pretty fast, and it doesn't slow down much at all when you throw lots of geometry at it.
To me, the most impressive aspect is the well founded claim that ray tracing scales *nearly linearly with number of cores*
This is true of traditional rastersization algorithms, as well (though the parallelism isn't quite so obvious since its generally handled by specialized hardware rather than normal CPUs). Ray tracers are actually somewhat harder to parallelize because they aren't memory parallel (not a problem for shared memory multi-core machines, but it is a big deal if you want to model enormous scenes and share the computation across multiple computers).
More important (and not mentioned in the article) is that ray tracing scales logarithmically with the amount of geometry, not linearly.
According to wikipedia, the Eee will use 11 watts in the first generation, and 7 in the second generation:
ASUS plans to introduce second-generation Eee PCs in April 2008 which are meant to feature Intel's Merom processors. The power consumption of the next-generation notebooks will reduce to 7W TDP, down from 11W TDP, and the removal of the fan to save more power and reduce noise.
On the other hand, OLPC uses 2 watts during normal use, and.3 -.8 watts in E-book reader mode:
The laptop will consume about 2 W of power during normal use, far less than the 10 to 45 W of conventional laptops.[2]
In e-book mode, all hardware sub-systems are powered down except the monochrome display. When the user moves to a different page the system wakes up, draws the new page on the display and then goes back to sleep. Power consumption in e-book mode is estimated to be 0.3 to 0.8 W.
Power usage is very important in off-grid settings. The designers of the OLPC wanted something that would run a whole school day without needing to be plugged in, and that can (iirc) run for ten minutes for every one minute spent pulling the cord on the hand charger. It also lets them use lower-density batteries (like lithium iron phosphate) that are less toxic and don't need to be recycled.
Do the terms of service allow sharing your connection with your neighbors? Not having your ISP discriminate on the basis of what technology you're using or who you're connecting is a good thing, but do they discriminate against certain (legal) uses?
According to capitalist theory, good companies with solid products should be preferred by consumers and dominate the market.
The trouble with the theory is that consumers are, in most cases, unable to evaluate whether the companies that make the products they use employ good security practices (and will continue to do so in the future). See information asymmetry.
Wind power results in a net cost to the level of atmospheric energy. Any attempt to harness wind power extracts energy from the atmosphere and redirects it to human ends. On a small scale, that is no problem. On a large scale, like the bizarre concept represented in this post, the consequences on the planet would be unpredictable and eventually potentially harmful.
By necessity, any generation of electricity is going to remove energy from our environment somehow. (In the case of fossil fuels, this is stored chemical energy, but it still came from somewhere.) Hydroelectric power, the big (and relatively environmentally friendly) energy producer where I live, requires a whole river to be diverted. This wind power proposal is more like sticking your toe into a fast-moving stream. It seems fair to assume (so long as we lack evidence to the contrary) that it is unlikely to have a significant effect (good or bad), and it would replace technologies with known negative effects.
Your argument seems to me no different than one which says we should not harness electricity from tidal changes because it contributes to tidal locking between the earth and moon. In both cases, the amount of energy likely to ever be extracted is only a very small portion of the total energy available.
I agree with you. I don't respect copyright law as much as I used to, for several reasons:
I perceive that copyright law ought to reflect my interests as a consumer as well as content owners, but it doesn't. If it did, the maximum copyright length would be much shorter.
Huge penalties for violation and selective enforcement.
Intellectual property tends to be overpriced to begin with (CDs especially).
That doesn't mean I go out and copy everything I can off of P2P networks, I'm just saying I don't feel much outrage when other people do so - quite the opposite.
I think if the government (the US government in my case) wanted to regain my respect for copyright law, they should:
Enact more reasonable copyright laws (this might mean leaving TRIPS).
Reduce penalties for infringement that isn't for commercial gain, but shut down the guys that are, for instance, making a living selling anime bootlegs from China on Ebay.
and content owners need to
Reduce their prices.
Cater more to the "heavy tail" consumers.
Stop trying to control what we do with the stuff they sell us (DRM).
The most likely way I see that these last three are going to come about is that new companies that actually want to sell the products that people want will replace the ones that don't. Some government action may be necessary to break up monopolies, I don't really understand the industry well enough to know if market forces are enough.
The legal-affairs committee agreed to exclude all intellectual-property infringements by private users for personal use. They went even further by saying that the abuse must be "a deliberate and conscious infringement of the intellectual property right for the purpose of obtaining commercial advantage."
This sounds like a horrible implementation of a good idea. I have thought that perhaps there should be a legal distinction between copyright infringement for monetary gain and copyright infringement not for monetary gain. For instance, it seems to me that there's a big difference between making a copy of a DVD for a friend and selling a bootleg DVD on ebay. In my ideal world, the former would be no worse than a misdemeanor, if it's even illegal at all. It's the people that are making a living off of copyright violation that I have no sympathy for.
However, it appears that the law is merely shifting the liability away from the people who are actually committing the copyright violation to the people that sell the products that they might use to that end (ISPs, hardware manufacturers, whatever). So it then becomes illegal for a company to help (or fail to hinder) their users from doing something that is for the user perfectly legal? That doesn't make any sense.
They include the cost of building and tooling up the factory, amortized over the number of cars produced. The Prius is newer, ergo that cost is divided among fewer cars than the Hummer.
I don't think that accounts for it. Even mainstream cars like the Honda Civic are listed as having a $2.42 per mile cost, which is similarly ludicrous. (With an average live span of 178000 miles, as they say, the total cost is $430,760.) The cheapest car in the report is the Scion xB at $90,342. The report would have us believe that not only is Toyota losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per car, all the other auto makers are not doing much better, losing ten dollars or more for every dollar they bring in. I find it more plausible that the numbers are completely made up, or based on wildly inaccurate assumptions, or they put the decimal point in the wrong place.
I would bet that Toyota is still in the red over the Prius when you take into account R&D and one-time manufacturing/construction costs.
I don't dispute that. They may be willing to take a loss for awhile to enter a new market segment. But not hundreds of thousands of dollars for a mass-produced car.
That $3.25 per mile includes all energy and resources that went into the manufacturing of the vehicle as well, not just your cost per mile after purchasing. The energy required by the machinery at the nickel ore mines plus refining of said nickel for instance (when talking about the batteries it uses).
So, let's say a prius costs $20,000 and it burns about $8,000 worth of fuel and costs $4,000 in maintenance (wild guess) in 100,000 miles. Where does the other $293,000 come from? The manufacturing energy costs should contribute to the final cost of the vehicle, unless they're heavily subsidized by someone. Toyota would not manufacture the car if they were taking that big of a loss. Are they including some ill-defined "environmental damage" cost in their calculations? If so, they ought to have said so in the article. $3.25 per mile sounds like a made-up number.
How could you work in a datacenter with no oxygen[?]
From the article:
At 15 percent oxygen, it's safe for humans to enter. The lower oxygen content of the air is similar to being at an altitude of about 6,000 feet, Eickhorn said. He demonstrated with a lighter inside a sealed atrium Wagner has on display at Cebit. It won't light.
Yes, but you're never going to make that particular group of Linux users happy.
What do you mean? It's easy to be ambiguously negative, but hard to refute if I don't know who "that particular group" is or why they are always going to be unhappy.
If you mean that Linux users will always complain about binary-only graphics drivers, open source drivers may eventually be forthcoming. I don't see a lot of Linux users complaining about lack of support for hard drives, sound cards, network adapters, etc... and it isn't because there aren't components of those types that don't work in Linux, but for every component that doesn't work, there's an equivalent component that does. In the graphics card market, that isn't the case. None of the best (i.e. best performance for the least money) graphics cards have open source drivers. If this was not the case, most Linux users would stop complaining.
I see four potential ways the problem of proprietary graphics drivers could be resolved: Nvidia/ATI release their driver source code (not likely), the community writes their own drivers (some progress is being made here with both ATI and Nvidia cards), another company that is more friendly to the Linux community becomes a dominant player in the graphics market (perhaps IBM or Intel), or polygon rasterization algorithms are superseded by new algorithms that don't work very well on current GPUs (like real-time ray tracing).
Ubuntu seems to handle Nvidia and ATI setup pretty well.
I'm using Ubuntu with the proprietary Nvidia drivers myself, since I occasionally work on a project that requires OpenGL. However, as far as I know, there isn't a good open source driver for Nvidia that does hardware accellerated GL. Last I checked, the most recent ATI card with an open source driver is the 9250 (and I didn't have good luck with it when I tried to use it). Just because it works with Ubuntu doesn't mean its open source. I've had a lot of problems with Nvidia drivers in the past, and Dell probably doesn't want to be in the position of dealing with angry customers when new versions of a driver they have no control over doesn't work or is out of date. (It's true they have this problem with Windows already, but Nvidia can ignore the complaints of Linux users much more easily than Windows users.)
As a Linux user, there's really only two things I would like to see from Dell (or any PC manufacturer). One is the option of buying a computer with either a free OS or no OS (some more casual users (the type that Linux needs to be attracting if it wants to grow its user base) might prefer their favorite distro pre-installed, but I'm more likely to want to set everything up myself). Second, I want to know if the hardware will work well with open source drivers.
The first is tricky for PC manufacturers from a political standpoint; they don't want to offend Microsoft. (I am curious if anyone has a good answer to this: supposing Microsoft were to raise their per-OS lisencing fees as retaliation against a PC manufacturer for selling a non-Microsoft OS, would they get sued for anticompetitive practices, or would they get away with it? Could they retaliate in other, more subtle ways?)
The second is also tricky because many of the better graphics cards don't have open source drivers. (At least, not drivers that support 3d accelleration, which is usually why people buy high-end graphics cards in the first place.) If Dell were to say "sure, we support Linux, just use the binary-only Nvidia driver", that approach isn't going to make a lot of Linux users happy.
Much to my surprise, I was actually able to watch this movie from within firefox in Ubuntu for x86-64. I think I have some sort of gstreamer and/or mplayer plugin installed. Not that I'm claiming that quicktime is an open format, but at least it is possible to watch this with non-Apple software. Personally, I think it's a shame firefox doesn't support at least some sort of video format natively (even one that few people use would be better than nothing).
I suppose this is a gray area; more white to me, but black to you.
I agree it's not really black and white, it's just that the objections to the ad to me seem very reasonable, and I don't think it's any great loss if an ad gets pulled off the air (although I suppose I should mention that I have a bias against advertising in general). I'm kind of surprised how few people are sympathetic to the idea that the ad could be harmful. And it isn't like I expect every kid who happens to see the ad is going to go on a joyride; however, it seems entirely likely that a few might do so and injure themselves or others. While this might reasonably be classified as a freak accident, I think it is prudent to minimize the number of freak accidents when doing so is not terribly inconvenient.
I don't think your religion should matter. It annoys me when people mention their christianity to strengthen their argument.
I think the poster that mentioned he was a conservative Christian did so only to provide some insight for anyone who is wondering why a person might come to the conclusions that he did, rather than to present some sort of moral credentials. In other words, its easier to write "I'm a conservative Christian and I don't watch TV" than, say, "I think television is an unnecessary distraction and/or hindrance to fulfilling God's plan for my life", even if the later is a bit more informative (I don't know if it sounds less condescending to non-Christians).
Right. Because children are not known to experiment with the world around them and none of them will EVER get the idea that pulling or pushing buttons/sticks/levers in a car would be awesome.
Are you saying that children should be actively encouraged to try dangerous things because they're going to try to do them anyways?
You know, back in my day people just weren't this fucking stupid!
Of course they were, you just might not have been aware of it then. And its not like I expect every child who sees the add to hijack a car. But if one in 10,000 children decides to try, and of those one in five are successful in obtaining their parent's keys, and of those one half are successful in starting their parent's car, and of those one in ten are injured, then there are likely to be a few injuries in a country as large as Australia that wouldn't have happened if the ads hadn't played. Maybe those injuries will be rare enough to fit in the "freak accident" category. Freak accidents have always happened and always will, but I think adults have a responsibility to exercise due diligence in making them as rare as possible, and I don't see it as much of a loss to society if some people don't see an ad they would have otherwise seen.
**OR**, you could explain to your child why it's a bad idea to immitate that ad
Newsflash: children don't always do as their told, and can't be monitored 24/7 (parents have to sleep sometime).
so making them do an extremely unpleasant task would stop them
No, it wouldn't. It would compel them to do it in secret.
Obviously they can't do it without your permission, since as a good parent you would keep your keys somewhere safe as you would with the poisons, knives, (guns?), electric powertools, exposed electric circuits etc.
I'm not a parent, myself. What you say is a good idea, but one that not everyone will follow. Children are notorious for finding things that their parents think are well hidden, and it's hard to expect every parent to stick their keys in, say, a combination safe every night before going to sleep.
What would you think of an ad that depicted small children apparently having fun while playing with poisons, using knifes, shooting firearms, operating power tools, or installing an electrical outlet? Does that sound like a good idea to you? I'm all for personal responsibility in most things, but children don't always have adequate judgment, so I think the world is a safer place if we don't encourage them to do dangerous things.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about taxes, but given an average grad student stipend, that's insignificant compared to both the cost of the education and the value of their research. In a grad school I attended, our stipend was about $20,000 a year, and I was told the cost per grad student per year to the institution was about $60,000 a year. (Where does that other $40,000 go? Advisor's salaries, class tuition, IT costs, buildings maintenance, etc...)
PhD programs are not like undergrad, where you learn a bunch of stuff and work on mostly contrived problems and you aren't expected to contribute anything new to the field. It's more like a job where you solve hard problems for the people funding your education in exchange for grant money. Typical funding sources are NSF, DARPA, NIH, and sometimes corporations (IBM, Microsoft, and Intel all fund quite a bit of research).
What the US government gets out of the grant money it spends is better solutions to hard research problems, some of which have significant economic value. In that respect, individual students are a bit of a gamble, but overall I'd say it's a net gain. If it's a Chinese or Indian that does the actual work, who cares? The real idiocy of the program though is that we often don't allow them to stay once they've completed their degree. Oh no, we can't have highly educated foreigners in our country competing for valuable US jobs! Never mind that there really aren't enough PhDs in the world to make any significant difference to the employment statistics.
Ray tracing is very CPU parallel, I don't dispute that. By "memory parallel" I mean that if you want to render something on two separate computers, you have to have a complete copy of the 3-d model on both computers. With rasterization algorithms, you can split up the work amongst a bunch of machines, and each one only needs one part of the model. That way, you can render things that wouldn't fit into the memory of a single machine. This isn't an issue for games, but for rendering scenes for movies it is a big deal. Take a look at the 2006 symposium on interactive raytracing keynote.
Yes, very much so. (Not the same issues exactly, but similar ones.) In order for a ray-tracer to be efficient it needs to sort the scene into some sort of acceleration structure. Regular grids, BSP trees and octrees have been used in the past, but currently the most popular acceleration structures are KD-trees (like a bsp tree but axis-aligned) and BIH-trees (also similar to a bsp tree but with subtle differences difficult to describe succinctly). KD-trees are generally faster for static scenes. (Interesting trivia: balanced trees yield awful performance. Trees built using the surface-area heuristic are much faster.) Ray-intersections against BIH trees tend to be a little slower (often around 30%), but they can be built much faster (several orders of magnitude iirc) using an in-place sort remarkably similar to quicksort. Performance of rebuilding an acceleration structure is fairly unimportant for static scenes, but for games it can be the bottleneck.
For the game designer, this is relevant because it means he/she can't just move stuff around willy-nilly. If the scene can be, for instance, partitioned into a heirarchy of static objects (maybe represented by KD-trees) that can all move freely around within a top-level BIH tree, then the game will run much faster than if all the geometry is stuffed into a single tree that has to be re-sorted (n log n) every frame. (My own not-very-fast ray tracer could be modified to do something like this, since I treat bih-trees and kd-trees as primitive objects, just like triangles and spheres.)
I believe that the transition to ray tracing is inevitable (not just because it looks better but also because in a lot of cases it's just plain faster), but it does have some bottlenecks that aren't well known or widely understood.
- O(log n) in the number of objects in the scene
- O(n) in the number of primary rays, generally some multiple of the number of pixels on the screen (though it might be a bit less if you're using MLRTA)
- O(n) in the number of lights (though there may be some shortcuts) if shadow rays tests dominate
- O(something big) if there's a lot of reflective and/or refractive objects and you don't do anything to mitigate the rampant recursion
- O(n log n) in the number of photons, if you're using photon mapping
- O(n log n) in the number of objects that moved since the last time you rebuilt the acceleration structure
That first one was what the original post was refering to. (Tracing a single ray is O(n log n). Tracing a pixel involves sending one or more rays and a shadow ray for each light for each primary ray that hit an object. Tracing a whole image involves tracing a lot of pixels. If the number of pixels and the number of lights are assumed to be a constant, they drop out of the big O equation. It's a very big constant, though, and that's one reason why ray tracers are so slow. However, once you get enough CPU to compensate for that large constant, the algorithm starts running pretty fast, and it doesn't slow down much at all when you throw lots of geometry at it.This is true of traditional rastersization algorithms, as well (though the parallelism isn't quite so obvious since its generally handled by specialized hardware rather than normal CPUs). Ray tracers are actually somewhat harder to parallelize because they aren't memory parallel (not a problem for shared memory multi-core machines, but it is a big deal if you want to model enormous scenes and share the computation across multiple computers).
More important (and not mentioned in the article) is that ray tracing scales logarithmically with the amount of geometry, not linearly.
I believe that's only true of singlemode fiber. Multimode usually uses LEDs.
Do the terms of service allow sharing your connection with your neighbors? Not having your ISP discriminate on the basis of what technology you're using or who you're connecting is a good thing, but do they discriminate against certain (legal) uses?
By necessity, any generation of electricity is going to remove energy from our environment somehow. (In the case of fossil fuels, this is stored chemical energy, but it still came from somewhere.) Hydroelectric power, the big (and relatively environmentally friendly) energy producer where I live, requires a whole river to be diverted. This wind power proposal is more like sticking your toe into a fast-moving stream. It seems fair to assume (so long as we lack evidence to the contrary) that it is unlikely to have a significant effect (good or bad), and it would replace technologies with known negative effects.
Your argument seems to me no different than one which says we should not harness electricity from tidal changes because it contributes to tidal locking between the earth and moon. In both cases, the amount of energy likely to ever be extracted is only a very small portion of the total energy available.
There was no link in the story, so here's some that seem to be relevant.
An article
relevant Google news search
That doesn't mean I go out and copy everything I can off of P2P networks, I'm just saying I don't feel much outrage when other people do so - quite the opposite. I think if the government (the US government in my case) wanted to regain my respect for copyright law, they should:
- Enact more reasonable copyright laws (this might mean leaving TRIPS).
- Reduce penalties for infringement that isn't for commercial gain, but shut down the guys that are, for instance, making a living selling anime bootlegs from China on Ebay.
and content owners need to- Reduce their prices.
- Cater more to the "heavy tail" consumers.
- Stop trying to control what we do with the stuff they sell us (DRM).
The most likely way I see that these last three are going to come about is that new companies that actually want to sell the products that people want will replace the ones that don't. Some government action may be necessary to break up monopolies, I don't really understand the industry well enough to know if market forces are enough.This sounds like a horrible implementation of a good idea. I have thought that perhaps there should be a legal distinction between copyright infringement for monetary gain and copyright infringement not for monetary gain. For instance, it seems to me that there's a big difference between making a copy of a DVD for a friend and selling a bootleg DVD on ebay. In my ideal world, the former would be no worse than a misdemeanor, if it's even illegal at all. It's the people that are making a living off of copyright violation that I have no sympathy for.
However, it appears that the law is merely shifting the liability away from the people who are actually committing the copyright violation to the people that sell the products that they might use to that end (ISPs, hardware manufacturers, whatever). So it then becomes illegal for a company to help (or fail to hinder) their users from doing something that is for the user perfectly legal? That doesn't make any sense.
I don't think that accounts for it. Even mainstream cars like the Honda Civic are listed as having a $2.42 per mile cost, which is similarly ludicrous. (With an average live span of 178000 miles, as they say, the total cost is $430,760.) The cheapest car in the report is the Scion xB at $90,342. The report would have us believe that not only is Toyota losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per car, all the other auto makers are not doing much better, losing ten dollars or more for every dollar they bring in. I find it more plausible that the numbers are completely made up, or based on wildly inaccurate assumptions, or they put the decimal point in the wrong place.
I don't dispute that. They may be willing to take a loss for awhile to enter a new market segment. But not hundreds of thousands of dollars for a mass-produced car.
What do you mean? It's easy to be ambiguously negative, but hard to refute if I don't know who "that particular group" is or why they are always going to be unhappy.
If you mean that Linux users will always complain about binary-only graphics drivers, open source drivers may eventually be forthcoming. I don't see a lot of Linux users complaining about lack of support for hard drives, sound cards, network adapters, etc... and it isn't because there aren't components of those types that don't work in Linux, but for every component that doesn't work, there's an equivalent component that does. In the graphics card market, that isn't the case. None of the best (i.e. best performance for the least money) graphics cards have open source drivers. If this was not the case, most Linux users would stop complaining.
I see four potential ways the problem of proprietary graphics drivers could be resolved: Nvidia/ATI release their driver source code (not likely), the community writes their own drivers (some progress is being made here with both ATI and Nvidia cards), another company that is more friendly to the Linux community becomes a dominant player in the graphics market (perhaps IBM or Intel), or polygon rasterization algorithms are superseded by new algorithms that don't work very well on current GPUs (like real-time ray tracing).
As a Linux user, there's really only two things I would like to see from Dell (or any PC manufacturer). One is the option of buying a computer with either a free OS or no OS (some more casual users (the type that Linux needs to be attracting if it wants to grow its user base) might prefer their favorite distro pre-installed, but I'm more likely to want to set everything up myself). Second, I want to know if the hardware will work well with open source drivers.
The first is tricky for PC manufacturers from a political standpoint; they don't want to offend Microsoft. (I am curious if anyone has a good answer to this: supposing Microsoft were to raise their per-OS lisencing fees as retaliation against a PC manufacturer for selling a non-Microsoft OS, would they get sued for anticompetitive practices, or would they get away with it? Could they retaliate in other, more subtle ways?)
The second is also tricky because many of the better graphics cards don't have open source drivers. (At least, not drivers that support 3d accelleration, which is usually why people buy high-end graphics cards in the first place.) If Dell were to say "sure, we support Linux, just use the binary-only Nvidia driver", that approach isn't going to make a lot of Linux users happy.
Much to my surprise, I was actually able to watch this movie from within firefox in Ubuntu for x86-64. I think I have some sort of gstreamer and/or mplayer plugin installed. Not that I'm claiming that quicktime is an open format, but at least it is possible to watch this with non-Apple software. Personally, I think it's a shame firefox doesn't support at least some sort of video format natively (even one that few people use would be better than nothing).
I agree it's not really black and white, it's just that the objections to the ad to me seem very reasonable, and I don't think it's any great loss if an ad gets pulled off the air (although I suppose I should mention that I have a bias against advertising in general). I'm kind of surprised how few people are sympathetic to the idea that the ad could be harmful. And it isn't like I expect every kid who happens to see the ad is going to go on a joyride; however, it seems entirely likely that a few might do so and injure themselves or others. While this might reasonably be classified as a freak accident, I think it is prudent to minimize the number of freak accidents when doing so is not terribly inconvenient.
I think the poster that mentioned he was a conservative Christian did so only to provide some insight for anyone who is wondering why a person might come to the conclusions that he did, rather than to present some sort of moral credentials. In other words, its easier to write "I'm a conservative Christian and I don't watch TV" than, say, "I think television is an unnecessary distraction and/or hindrance to fulfilling God's plan for my life", even if the later is a bit more informative (I don't know if it sounds less condescending to non-Christians).
Of course they were, you just might not have been aware of it then. And its not like I expect every child who sees the add to hijack a car. But if one in 10,000 children decides to try, and of those one in five are successful in obtaining their parent's keys, and of those one half are successful in starting their parent's car, and of those one in ten are injured, then there are likely to be a few injuries in a country as large as Australia that wouldn't have happened if the ads hadn't played. Maybe those injuries will be rare enough to fit in the "freak accident" category. Freak accidents have always happened and always will, but I think adults have a responsibility to exercise due diligence in making them as rare as possible, and I don't see it as much of a loss to society if some people don't see an ad they would have otherwise seen.
Newsflash: children don't always do as their told, and can't be monitored 24/7 (parents have to sleep sometime).
No, it wouldn't. It would compel them to do it in secret.
I'm not a parent, myself. What you say is a good idea, but one that not everyone will follow. Children are notorious for finding things that their parents think are well hidden, and it's hard to expect every parent to stick their keys in, say, a combination safe every night before going to sleep.
What would you think of an ad that depicted small children apparently having fun while playing with poisons, using knifes, shooting firearms, operating power tools, or installing an electrical outlet? Does that sound like a good idea to you? I'm all for personal responsibility in most things, but children don't always have adequate judgment, so I think the world is a safer place if we don't encourage them to do dangerous things.