Ok, I call BULLSHIT on your post. Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Are you just pulling numbers out of the air?
Or perhaps a better explaination is that you're confusing internal representations with output formats. My younger brother tells me that LightWave uses some 192-bit internal format, but I'm not going to be some wannabe loser and claim that it creates "192-bit color". Gee, perhaps they're using floating point numbers. 3 x 64 = 192, oddly enough. Or maybe they're using single precision, which gives us 6 x 32 = 192. I don't know exactly what the six numbers are, perhaps RGB with a surface normal.
Also, lets look at your numbers. Firstly, you're always counting an alpha channel. But alpha is only needed for compositing, not for final output. Secondly, most of us here are using 24-bit (8,8,8) or even 15/16-bit (5,5/6,5) true-colour display modes. Have you noticed any colour ringing or banding because of the lack of precision? I rarely have, and even then it was back when I used a 16-bit mode. 24-bit (i.e 8 bit components) is just fine for almost any work. About the only place it would be inadequant is perhaps doing X-ray or some other type of medical imaging. Now you're not only trying to tell us that Hollywood currently uses 32 bits per component but that the human eye can see 128 bit components? BULLSHIT. You do realise that for every bit you double the number of possible values? So 96-bit colour (3 x 32) has 16 million TIMES the number of values PER COMPONENT than 24-bit colour? My god, can you even comprehend how many different shades of colours that would produce?
Sorry to come down hard on you, but I think you sound like just a confused adolescent with bit-inadequacy issues. You're confusing internal representations with output formats. For internal work, sure you need extra bits to guard against rounding errors. You'd probably scan any film with a 12 or 16 bit scanner (i.e 36 or 48 bit colour), render to either a similar precision or even HDRI formats (floating point, 96 or 192 bit colour) and keep any intermediate images at the highest precision you can. And for compositing you'd have an alpha channel (or three for chroma-key work). But when you process it for final output, you throw away the alpha (which hopefully equals 100% by that stage) and round everything down. For DVD, that means converting to the YCrCb colour space, subsampling the croma channels to half size (i.e 4:2:2 sampling) and encoding. For a film "printer", it might take 36 (3x12) or 48 (3x16) bit RGB, or maybe just 24 bit.
Transactions? Exactly how many years behind the competition is OSS on that one?
Hey! Don't go blaming the whole Open Source(tm) software world for MySQL. Just because MySql Inc. claims it's the "most advanced open source relational database" in all its press releases, does not make the claim true. For those of us interested in real databases that are Open Source, well we use PostgreSQL or Firebird. They're not quite up to the level of Oracle or MSSQL, but they're easily better than the amateurish MySql.
Ok, a little lesson on container formats and codecs. I'm no expert myself, but I think I can cover this much. The Mplayer formats document explains this a bit too.
Container formats do pretty much what the name implies: they contain other content. In multimedia terms, this almost always involves some sort of interleaving. A little bit of video... a little bit of audio... a little bit of video... etc. That's especially important for streaming purposes.
Examples of container formats are: MPEG System Stream (SS) and Transport Stream (TS), VOB, Quicktime QT/MOV, Microsoft AVI / ASF, Ogg, Matroska.
Codecs are the actual audio/video/whatever(?) data that gets put into those container files.
Examples of video codecs: MPEG I/II/4, Indeo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV.
Examples of audio codecs: MPEG I/II, AAC (aka MPEG 4 audio), Vorbis.
Under MPEG, the individual streams are known as "elementary streams" (ES). These are multiplexed into a System Stream (SS). Now the Transport Stream (TS) format is being used in broadcast (DTV and HDTV) applications. I don't know the advantages/differences.
DVDs use the "Video OBject" (VOB) format. The original MPEG SS (as I understand it) couldn't contain the extra data that the DVD guys wanted. Stuff like AC3 and DTS audio, and the embedded command stream that allows menus, "easter egg" extra features, and director/theatrical cuts without taking almost 2x the room on the disc.
"MP3" is just an MPEG I layer 3 audio elementary stream.
Some MPEG "movies" on the internet are really just the MPEG I/II video elementary stream.
VCDs are MPEG I video with layer 2 audio in a System Stream. SVCD uses MPEG II video. Since a lot of DVD players include layer 3 audio ("MP3") decoding from a CD of files, some might allow layer 3 audio as well. They might also allow a higher bitrate than the SVCD standard (2.7Mbps), anywhere up to 5Mbps. These non-standard options are usually grouped under the "XVCD" name.
I'm not entirely sure about Microsofts' WMA and WMV formats. The few WMV's I have here on my linux box get identifed as "Microsoft ASF" by the file(1) tool. I don't have any WMA's to test. WMA might be a bare "elementary" stream similar to the MP3 situation, or it could be wrapped up in an ASF container as well. Either way,, they're using the same container format but using different "filename extensions" so that people don't get confused, and so that they can launch different apps for each.
In this message to the Mplayer-dev mailing list you can find some info on the "OGM" format (about a third of the way down. Just search for "ogm").
On Windows all you need is to provide the FourCC for a VfW or dshow based
player, and as most players on windows use a semi-automatic graph rendering
( again dhsow ) it wouldnt be too hard for us to simulate the behaviour of
AVI for this. In fact, the existing muxer for Ogg (.ogm ) from Tobias is
based on Dshow also, Tobias created it to be used with Graphedit, being M$'
tool around Dshow. In principal it is demuxing an existing video stream from
an AVI, copying the codec related info from the AVI header ( WAVEFORMATEX ),
writing these into the Ogg header and thats it.
It works, I suppose. But there's the geeky opposition because Ogg wasn't meant to be used that way.
Matroska seems (so far) to be ultimate container format. The authors first came up with EBML, basically a binary equivalent of XML. This could potentially allow almost any sort of metadata to be included in the descriptive head section. I suppose it could even allow for streams to be broken up into hierachical trees, perfect for interactive media. In case you can't tell, I'm really excited about the prospects of Matroska!:)
Ogg WHAT?
Are you talking about using Ogg Vorbis as the audio codec? Yes, it is very good. I wouldn't use anything else for either my CD rips or DVD rips.
Or are you talking about the bastardisation of the Ogg container format that is the OGM container format? Do some googling. From the mailing list postings I saw, the Ogg guys aren't too happy about this effort by one windows programmer to hack the Avi/VfW information into the Ogg container format. If that's what you're referring to, and using, I recommend you instead look at the Matroska container format. It's much more flexible and is slightly more efficient space-wise than OGM. Mplayer supports it, don't know about Xine. There's a Matroska splitter/demuxer thingy for windows, don't know about Mac OS/X support.
Remember, software freedom is, long term, as big a threat to Apples business model as it is Microsoft and SCO's
Except that Apple makes quite a lot of hardware. Microsoft doesn't make much hardware (keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc), while SCOG was a software company (as Caldera) but is now a litigation company.
Ah yes, the old vote with your dollars idea. Actually, it is kinda true in a twisted way. The problem is that big customers (corporations, universities, governments) spent lots of dollars, and hence effectively get lots of votes. Plus you've got the problem that the only people they're asking are the big customers. And MS is so big now that it almost doesn't have to care anymore (i.e it's a monopoly). The end result is that most home and small business users don't really get a vote at all. They're just sheep following the flock and trying to make the best of the situation. It may have small elements of democracy, but the dominate style of MS is that of totalitarianism.
It sounds like a fairly simple issue. Just get into a mixer program and set it to "record" or "capture" from line instead of mix/master or whatever it's currently using. If you're using ALSA then I'd recommend gamix. Sorry I can't recommend what to use with the older OSS drivers, I've been using ALSA for so many years. On my SB! Live!! gamix has a seperate "capture" section where I can select from quite a few sources. Console mixers like alsamixer or aumix (which uses OSS not ALSA) just show the capture source as some button or option next to each slider.
I don't think you're alone there. I myself have tried FreeS/wan several times over the years and have always found it a frustrating experience. I think the documentation should take a lot of the blame for the problem. It was never too clear and gave only a few wildly different (and sometimes conflicting) examples. Left side? Right side? They would often switch the left/right-side convention for no apparent reason. And it I found it wasn't always clear what configuration settings were required and how they interacted. Because of this it was hard to condense a working configuration out of the few examples they did give.
Many years ago I was trying to connect my network with my familys' network (linux to linux) I eventually went with vtun. It worked fairly well. More recently I went with OpenVPN when I needed to connect my dads' Win2K laptop back to the family network over a dial-up line. In both these examples I originally tried using FreeS/wan on the linux side(s). I thought it would be easier (especially with W2K in the second case) because IPsec is a standard. Nope. Now I'll go look at this new Kame port in the 2.6 kernel and IPsec-tools. Hopefully it's fairly easy to setup.
Unless this is an attempt by a right wing organization to discredit Kerry...
Ok, as a non US'ican I know pretty well who John Kerry is. Democrat presidential candidate, current front-runner. Vietnam vet and anti-war protester. But could someone explain the Jane Fonda thing? What did that forged photo purport to show?
That ad sucked up like 90% of my CPU and delayed every action in Mozilla. Geez, I thought Flash ads were bad because of my "old" my Athlon-750. When something sucks up 90% of an Athlon-2400, it's just evil. Because of that, Ugo, mediamgr.ugo.com went very quickly into the list of domains that my Squid proxy blocks. It was just intolerable.
so what are we looking at here? wifi without the tcp/ip layer?
I may be assuming too much here, but I imagine that since WiFi is 802.11 it's based on the existing Ethernet standards. So WiFi has no more to do with IP than the wired version we all know and love. I haven't heard of anyone doing so, but you could probably try running other ethernet-based protocols over WiFi e.g IPX/SPX, Ethertalk, AX.25(?), Token Ring, etc. The devices still use 48-bit MAC addresses and (I could be wrong) similar frame sizes.
Keeping the annecdotes in Australia, my Dad has had trouble a few times here in Bathurst (NSW, Aus) when parking in a certain street or two. All the big transmitters are all up on "The mount" (Mount Panorama) but I think there's a security firm nearby. Would they be transmitting though? Something weird. With all the gear using RF nowadays I guess problems with interference are just plain inevitable.
*sigh* It's posts like this that cause me to loose my faith (if one could call it that) in Slashdot and the moderator system. At best, this post should be mod'ed Funny. At worst it's an anti-OSS troll.
There is no such package as annoydvdcca_utils on Debian or any other Linux distro. Not even Google can find it, as another reply points out. And the only mention of "dvdcp" on Google is some Coupon Program from Netflix.
It's a part of a larger fascination with 'black' music...
A few years ago I had the opportunity to travel to Germany and was surprised to see a section labelled "Schwartz Musik" (Black Music) in many music stores. Not only was it rather blatent, but impractical as well. It covered a large range of music that we (Aus/US) would normally see broken into many catagories e.g Soul, Hip-hop, Rap, etc.
I think a better idea is to leave all those old probes exactly where they lay. [...] I'd like the old landing sites to be preserved just as they are. Perhaps build space history museums around them, or some of them can become part of the town square or something of a community.
Similarly, I've often wondered what would eventually happen to the moon landing sites. Perhaps a bubble or something could be constructed over each one. Imagine in 100 years, one could visit the tranquility museum and still see the base of the Eagle landing craft and the astronauts' footprints. The only problem with the footprints might be the need to protect them from vibrations, both natural (moon-quakes) and man-made. I imagine vibrations from surrounding construction efforts could smooth-out the prints made in the fine dust. They might have to be carefully dug-out with a large slab of surrounding ground and mounted on vibration-dampeners in order to keep the fragile footprints more-or-less intact.
I happen to know about Nestle's wrong doings very well. My mum was a member of the Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (now the Australian Breastfeeding Association) and was local leader for a little while. So I grew up around a lot of this stuff:P
IIRC, the "first" problem was that poverty caused the mothers to stretch the baby formula as far as they could. This left the infants severely under-nourished. You're right about the second problem: very poor sanitation in many areas meant that the water used was often contanimated with raw sewerage. The people didn't know to boil the water because of poor education and couldn't even read the instructions on the can, which would have told them to do so.
It looks like you've already gotten some knee-jerk responses from MS fanboys, so I'll make the analogy (as I see it) clear:
1:
The mothers were advised by docters who were on the take from Nestle, and encouraged by advertising to be "modern" like the west. The doctors often handed the mother their first can of infant formula free, "donated" by Nestle.
With this "donated" software, these third-world countries desire to be "modern", just like the west. They will probably be "advised" by MS or others with an interest. This first batch of MS software is donated but who says it will be free in the future?
2:
The mothers almost always had to water down the formula to make it last longer on their meager earnings. The water was also contaminated with raw sewerage, resulting in very sick infants and many deaths.
I'm sure these countries will try to also stretch this donated software as far as they can. There will be unauthorized copying and MS will no doubt crack down on "piracy" in the future. We've in fact seen MS do this many times already. It's almost a given.
3:
The mothers' own milk supply would "dry up", so to speak, leaving them dependant the formula to feed their infant.
These "donations" by MS could also be seen as dumping. It may seem like the easy was to jump-start a countrys software industry, but in the long run it will limit it, if not stifle it. This will lock many administrators and developers into knowing only MS systems. It will likely also affect any local open-source development, both now and in the future.
Re:IP6s problem is the numeric addresses r so comp
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
A 128 bit number converted to hexadecimal is NOT a pretty site and leaves a huge scope for typos and other cock-ups.
Windows CE must be a hell of a lot easier and practical to intergrate into embedded devices.
Note: *I've barely looked at a PDA, let alone owned one*
Just wondering, maybe it's just more MS lock-in. These expensive devices aren't much use if you can't easily transfer documents and calendering data (meetings, appointments, etc) between the PDA and your desktop PC. With ~90-95% of PCs running MS Windows, and about 90-95% of those PCs also having MS Office installed, it seems a simple decision to "go with windows" for a PDA. That way you get Pocket Word and Pocket Outlook and pocket versions of a lot of their other crap^H^H^H^Happlications. Otherwise you have to go reverse-engineering their file formats and protocols.
But that really only applies to PDA's. For more general embedded work I imagine that Linux is making real inroads into that territory. Forget PDA's and other devices with colour LCD displays and the need for a pretty GUI with compatible apps. Think industrial control and data logging. If these things have any user interface at all, it's maybe a few LEDs, some buttons, and perhaps a small alphanumeric LCD. You also mention "consumer routers". With home networks becoming ever more popular I'm sure we'll see a lot of Linux turning up in consumer-level network devices (i.e ADSL/Cable/WiFi routers, VPN gateways, special purpose file/email/proxy/whatever server boxes).
The desert "terrorists" who were portrayed in a positive light wore the headgarb associated with Arabs [...], and the representative from the world government was a Jewish guy with stereotypical Jewish curls...
I couldn't watch the show after that. [...] This one offended me, as I couldn't help but see it as Anti-American/Anti-Israel/Anti-Semetic bullshit.
Um.... ok. I haven't seen that episode, but maybe they were simply trying to make you look at things from different perspectives. As the saying goes, One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter. Ok, so perhaps they were a little too obvious with the arab/israeli similarities. Does that really justify the cliched knee-jerk reaction of calling it Anti-American?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I call BULLSHIT on your post. Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Are you just pulling numbers out of the air?
Or perhaps a better explaination is that you're confusing internal representations with output formats. My younger brother tells me that LightWave uses some 192-bit internal format, but I'm not going to be some wannabe loser and claim that it creates "192-bit color". Gee, perhaps they're using floating point numbers. 3 x 64 = 192, oddly enough. Or maybe they're using single precision, which gives us 6 x 32 = 192. I don't know exactly what the six numbers are, perhaps RGB with a surface normal.
Also, lets look at your numbers. Firstly, you're always counting an alpha channel. But alpha is only needed for compositing, not for final output. Secondly, most of us here are using 24-bit (8,8,8) or even 15/16-bit (5,5/6,5) true-colour display modes. Have you noticed any colour ringing or banding because of the lack of precision? I rarely have, and even then it was back when I used a 16-bit mode. 24-bit (i.e 8 bit components) is just fine for almost any work. About the only place it would be inadequant is perhaps doing X-ray or some other type of medical imaging. Now you're not only trying to tell us that Hollywood currently uses 32 bits per component but that the human eye can see 128 bit components? BULLSHIT. You do realise that for every bit you double the number of possible values? So 96-bit colour (3 x 32) has 16 million TIMES the number of values PER COMPONENT than 24-bit colour? My god, can you even comprehend how many different shades of colours that would produce?
Sorry to come down hard on you, but I think you sound like just a confused adolescent with bit-inadequacy issues. You're confusing internal representations with output formats. For internal work, sure you need extra bits to guard against rounding errors. You'd probably scan any film with a 12 or 16 bit scanner (i.e 36 or 48 bit colour), render to either a similar precision or even HDRI formats (floating point, 96 or 192 bit colour) and keep any intermediate images at the highest precision you can. And for compositing you'd have an alpha channel (or three for chroma-key work). But when you process it for final output, you throw away the alpha (which hopefully equals 100% by that stage) and round everything down. For DVD, that means converting to the YCrCb colour space, subsampling the croma channels to half size (i.e 4:2:2 sampling) and encoding. For a film "printer", it might take 36 (3x12) or 48 (3x16) bit RGB, or maybe just 24 bit.
</rant>Hey! Don't go blaming the whole Open Source(tm) software world for MySQL. Just because MySql Inc. claims it's the "most advanced open source relational database" in all its press releases, does not make the claim true. For those of us interested in real databases that are Open Source, well we use PostgreSQL or Firebird. They're not quite up to the level of Oracle or MSSQL, but they're easily better than the amateurish MySql.
Ok, a little lesson on container formats and codecs. I'm no expert myself, but I think I can cover this much. The Mplayer formats document explains this a bit too.
Container formats do pretty much what the name implies: they contain other content. In multimedia terms, this almost always involves some sort of interleaving. A little bit of video... a little bit of audio... a little bit of video... etc. That's especially important for streaming purposes.
Examples of container formats are: MPEG System Stream (SS) and Transport Stream (TS), VOB, Quicktime QT/MOV, Microsoft AVI / ASF, Ogg, Matroska.
Codecs are the actual audio/video/whatever(?) data that gets put into those container files.
Examples of video codecs: MPEG I/II/4, Indeo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV.
Examples of audio codecs: MPEG I/II, AAC (aka MPEG 4 audio), Vorbis.
It works, I suppose. But there's the geeky opposition because Ogg wasn't meant to be used that way.
Ogg WHAT?
Are you talking about using Ogg Vorbis as the audio codec? Yes, it is very good. I wouldn't use anything else for either my CD rips or DVD rips.
Or are you talking about the bastardisation of the Ogg container format that is the OGM container format? Do some googling. From the mailing list postings I saw, the Ogg guys aren't too happy about this effort by one windows programmer to hack the Avi/VfW information into the Ogg container format. If that's what you're referring to, and using, I recommend you instead look at the Matroska container format. It's much more flexible and is slightly more efficient space-wise than OGM. Mplayer supports it, don't know about Xine. There's a Matroska splitter/demuxer thingy for windows, don't know about Mac OS/X support.
You want to partition md (multi-device) devices? Isn't that what LVM is for? Or is LVM too heavy-weight?
Except that Apple makes quite a lot of hardware. Microsoft doesn't make much hardware (keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc), while SCOG was a software company (as Caldera) but is now a litigation company.
Ah yes, the old vote with your dollars idea. Actually, it is kinda true in a twisted way. The problem is that big customers (corporations, universities, governments) spent lots of dollars, and hence effectively get lots of votes. Plus you've got the problem that the only people they're asking are the big customers. And MS is so big now that it almost doesn't have to care anymore (i.e it's a monopoly). The end result is that most home and small business users don't really get a vote at all. They're just sheep following the flock and trying to make the best of the situation. It may have small elements of democracy, but the dominate style of MS is that of totalitarianism.
It sounds like a fairly simple issue. Just get into a mixer program and set it to "record" or "capture" from line instead of mix/master or whatever it's currently using. If you're using ALSA then I'd recommend gamix. Sorry I can't recommend what to use with the older OSS drivers, I've been using ALSA for so many years. On my SB! Live!! gamix has a seperate "capture" section where I can select from quite a few sources. Console mixers like alsamixer or aumix (which uses OSS not ALSA) just show the capture source as some button or option next to each slider.
I don't think you're alone there. I myself have tried FreeS/wan several times over the years and have always found it a frustrating experience. I think the documentation should take a lot of the blame for the problem. It was never too clear and gave only a few wildly different (and sometimes conflicting) examples. Left side? Right side? They would often switch the left/right-side convention for no apparent reason. And it I found it wasn't always clear what configuration settings were required and how they interacted. Because of this it was hard to condense a working configuration out of the few examples they did give.
Many years ago I was trying to connect my network with my familys' network (linux to linux) I eventually went with vtun. It worked fairly well. More recently I went with OpenVPN when I needed to connect my dads' Win2K laptop back to the family network over a dial-up line. In both these examples I originally tried using FreeS/wan on the linux side(s). I thought it would be easier (especially with W2K in the second case) because IPsec is a standard. Nope. Now I'll go look at this new Kame port in the 2.6 kernel and IPsec-tools. Hopefully it's fairly easy to setup.
Ok, as a non US'ican I know pretty well who John Kerry is. Democrat presidential candidate, current front-runner. Vietnam vet and anti-war protester. But could someone explain the Jane Fonda thing? What did that forged photo purport to show?
That ad sucked up like 90% of my CPU and delayed every action in Mozilla. Geez, I thought Flash ads were bad because of my "old" my Athlon-750. When something sucks up 90% of an Athlon-2400, it's just evil. Because of that, Ugo, mediamgr.ugo.com went very quickly into the list of domains that my Squid proxy blocks. It was just intolerable.
You should check out ALE then.
I may be assuming too much here, but I imagine that since WiFi is 802.11 it's based on the existing Ethernet standards. So WiFi has no more to do with IP than the wired version we all know and love. I haven't heard of anyone doing so, but you could probably try running other ethernet-based protocols over WiFi e.g IPX/SPX, Ethertalk, AX.25(?), Token Ring, etc. The devices still use 48-bit MAC addresses and (I could be wrong) similar frame sizes.
Keeping the annecdotes in Australia, my Dad has had trouble a few times here in Bathurst (NSW, Aus) when parking in a certain street or two. All the big transmitters are all up on "The mount" (Mount Panorama) but I think there's a security firm nearby. Would they be transmitting though? Something weird. With all the gear using RF nowadays I guess problems with interference are just plain inevitable.
Oh look, you're just regurgitating a pre-written troll from a troll site. Go away, troll.
*sigh* It's posts like this that cause me to loose my faith (if one could call it that) in Slashdot and the moderator system. At best, this post should be mod'ed Funny. At worst it's an anti-OSS troll.
There is no such package as annoydvdcca_utils on Debian or any other Linux distro. Not even Google can find it, as another reply points out. And the only mention of "dvdcp" on Google is some Coupon Program from Netflix.
Erm, that's Mainsoft, not Mainstay.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to travel to Germany and was surprised to see a section labelled "Schwartz Musik" (Black Music) in many music stores. Not only was it rather blatent, but impractical as well. It covered a large range of music that we (Aus/US) would normally see broken into many catagories e.g Soul, Hip-hop, Rap, etc.
Yes, ACLs are supported on most filesystems. Ext2/Ext3, JFS, XFS, and the /dev/pts fs. No ReiserFS yet though :(
Similarly, I've often wondered what would eventually happen to the moon landing sites. Perhaps a bubble or something could be constructed over each one. Imagine in 100 years, one could visit the tranquility museum and still see the base of the Eagle landing craft and the astronauts' footprints. The only problem with the footprints might be the need to protect them from vibrations, both natural (moon-quakes) and man-made. I imagine vibrations from surrounding construction efforts could smooth-out the prints made in the fine dust. They might have to be carefully dug-out with a large slab of surrounding ground and mounted on vibration-dampeners in order to keep the fragile footprints more-or-less intact.
I happen to know about Nestle's wrong doings very well. My mum was a member of the Nursing Mothers Association of Australia (now the Australian Breastfeeding Association) and was local leader for a little while. So I grew up around a lot of this stuff :P
I found two pages with some information: THE NESTLE "COVER UP" IN AUSTRALIA and CORPORATE SCUMBAG: Nestle demands millions from famine-stricken country.
IIRC, the "first" problem was that poverty caused the mothers to stretch the baby formula as far as they could. This left the infants severely under-nourished. You're right about the second problem: very poor sanitation in many areas meant that the water used was often contanimated with raw sewerage. The people didn't know to boil the water because of poor education and couldn't even read the instructions on the can, which would have told them to do so.
It looks like you've already gotten some knee-jerk responses from MS fanboys, so I'll make the analogy (as I see it) clear:
1:- The mothers were advised by docters who were on the take from Nestle, and encouraged by advertising to be "modern" like the west. The doctors often handed the mother their first can of infant formula free, "donated" by Nestle.
- With this "donated" software, these third-world countries desire to be "modern", just like the west. They will probably be "advised" by MS or others with an interest. This first batch of MS software is donated but who says it will be free in the future?
2:- The mothers almost always had to water down the formula to make it last longer on their meager earnings. The water was also contaminated with raw sewerage, resulting in very sick infants and many deaths.
- I'm sure these countries will try to also stretch this donated software as far as they can. There will be unauthorized copying and MS will no doubt crack down on "piracy" in the future. We've in fact seen MS do this many times already. It's almost a given.
3:Oh the irony.
Note: *I've barely looked at a PDA, let alone owned one*
Just wondering, maybe it's just more MS lock-in. These expensive devices aren't much use if you can't easily transfer documents and calendering data (meetings, appointments, etc) between the PDA and your desktop PC. With ~90-95% of PCs running MS Windows, and about 90-95% of those PCs also having MS Office installed, it seems a simple decision to "go with windows" for a PDA. That way you get Pocket Word and Pocket Outlook and pocket versions of a lot of their other crap^H^H^H^Happlications. Otherwise you have to go reverse-engineering their file formats and protocols.
But that really only applies to PDA's. For more general embedded work I imagine that Linux is making real inroads into that territory. Forget PDA's and other devices with colour LCD displays and the need for a pretty GUI with compatible apps. Think industrial control and data logging. If these things have any user interface at all, it's maybe a few LEDs, some buttons, and perhaps a small alphanumeric LCD. You also mention "consumer routers". With home networks becoming ever more popular I'm sure we'll see a lot of Linux turning up in consumer-level network devices (i.e ADSL/Cable/WiFi routers, VPN gateways, special purpose file/email/proxy/whatever server boxes).
Um.... ok. I haven't seen that episode, but maybe they were simply trying to make you look at things from different perspectives. As the saying goes, One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter. Ok, so perhaps they were a little too obvious with the arab/israeli similarities. Does that really justify the cliched knee-jerk reaction of calling it Anti-American?
Geez, spend two seconds with Google: SJ Games vs. the Secret Service