I agree that cubes are pretty bad. I've worked in a cube and I've worked in an open-floor office. The open-floor office was much better. I had less personal space but I didn't feel walled in. Cubes don't really provide meaningful privacy but do stunt social activity and collaboration. That is, you can hear the guy two cubes over haggling over car prices on the phone, but if you want to round up people to go out you have to go around to everyone's cube individually. And when you're in an open environment you get the benefit of everyone's decorations, of the view out the windows, etc.
The funny/sad thing is that people in cubes really fight when management wants to alter the space by taking down or shortening walls.
Does it have a stand? How does it not slide all over the place? I haven't used a tablet, so all I have to go on is pictures. It looks like it pretty much sits flat on a surface. Without a desk it's useless.
I wouldn't use a phone to annotate diagrams, I'd use a laptop. Or if at my own office, a desktop computer with a nice big monitor.
I've never seen anyone take notes in a meeting on a tablet. I've seen lots of people use laptops. If you can't use the tablet as a PC then you're still going to need a laptop. If you have a laptop then the marginal benefit of a tablet is pretty tiny.
There may be things a tablet is better at than any other device but the existing devices are perfectly adequate. And the tablet is inadequate at everything else -- unable to replace any of your other devices.
Decent handwriting recognition? Surely you jest. Handwriting is inherently slower than typing and less accurate.
I've browsed the web on a Palm Pilot quite a lot; the stylus is similar to a touch interface, although Palm didn't take advantage of the gestural capabilities. It's not bad for browsing and reading. If you have to enter anything it's a horrible pain, no matter what input method you use.
Maybe a system where gestures stood in for common words and letter combinations could be successful. Maybe everyone will learn shorthand again. We'd all have to re-train ourselves to "write" with the tips of our fingers (unless you want to bring back the stylus). It seems like that would be more fatiguing than typing, still, if you had to do it for a significant length of time. And if you're not going to use it much why spend the money?
If you're entering a significant amount of data you'll want to use a real keyboard. If you're not entering a significant amount of data a mouse will work just fine for squiggles and highlighting.
If you're going to use the computer in one place a desktop PC is best ergonomically. If you're going to take it places where you don't have a desk, or where there is a desk but overhead lighting that glares, you're going to want a device where you can point the screen toward your face. A smartphone is OK because you can hold it up to your face and still use it; a laptop is OK because you can tilt the screen. A tablet? Too big to use one-handed or with thumbs, and no tilting screen.
The tablet computer is a device with a vanishingly small niche. Tablets have failed in the past and they'll keep failing in the future.
We're used to thinking this way about the Internet because most wired ISPs don't charge per amount of data (although some use bandwidth caps and rate-limiting). But as it does require more infrastructure to send more data, charging for each phone call spreads the cost of the infrastructure over its users more fairly. I don't think the idea of charging per byte for cellular Internet will go away soon.
Ha, that too? I never actually tried the desktops one because of the crash reports... I did try the one that was supposed to give you mouse focus. It sucked. Although I like mouse focus and multiple desktops with X11 I've mostly given up on them anywhere else.
Apparently there are a handful of commercial third-party programs that are supposed to give you multiple desktops on Windows, some of which are supposed to be much better than the powertoy one.
Ironically, one of the pitches for tiling window managers is that typical window managers don't really manage windows -- that a good tiling manager saves you the effort of having to resize and place all your windows manually. I tried one for a couple months a few years ago and didn't really like it, but I can see the appeal.
I can't install software on my only telephone either. But I didn't buy a sophisticated computing device, I just bought a little phone/answering machine that sits on top of my computer.
Yoeu can spend your money however you like. I'd be pretty disappointed if I bought a computer and couldn't do what I wanted with it.
When we started filtering spam based on word frequencies spammers tried to give their messages similar word frequencies to legitimate emails. When we start filtering based on templates they'll change their templates such that an attempt to filter this way catches a lot of false positives. Not hard.
In the US your various state and federal taxes are also deducted straight from your paycheck at the expected rate. But many people have income that's not from their employer -- bank accounts, investments, etc. Because there are several different tax brackets, and because earnings can't be predicted exactly, typically your total income at the end of the year isn't just your bi-weekly paycheck times 26.
So at the end of every year you're sent statements from your employer(s) and any other source of taxable income stating how much you earned and how much was sent to the government as tax. Then you figure out your total income, what sorts of deductions you're entitled to (there are lots of these -- for children and other dependents, for certain kinds of business expenses... some of which are basically loopholes for rich people with smart accountants), and based on those, what you should have been taxed. If you should have payed more you pay more. If you should have payed less you get a refund check.
I agree with you on some points. That the necessity of a tax-preparation industry is insane. That saying the government shouldn't simplify people's taxes to save this business is like saying Microsoft should build security flaws into Windows to keep the anti-virus industry alive. That SafeDisc sounds incredibly scummy. I've never needed tax prep help myself, so I can't really speak from experience.
But there's nothing wrong with charging $50 per year. They have to update the software when the tax code changes, or when their understanding of it changes. And they've come up with a scheme by which you pay each time you use it. That sounds exceptionally fair to me -- the amount you pay is related to the utility you get from the software. $50 each year might be more than the software is worth to many people... but clearly they're staying in business this way, and there's nothing evil about setting your prices as high as the market will bear. If it's not worth $50 to enough people they won't make any sales. If it's easy to create tax prep software for less than $50 per copy-year someone else will undercut them on price.
I only say this because I find it strange that people complain about perfectly reasonable pricing schemes so often around here. It's just weird.
Usually when a software company licenses a patent they pay some amount and have the right to distribute binaries implementing the patented methods. Mozilla distributes its source code under the LGPL. It's unlikely that Mozilla could arrange a deal under which they're allowed to distribute source code to users and provide users the right to redistribute it freely for any amount of money.
This is the general problem with Free Software and patents.
It's fair to say that governments of the USA (including state governments) have been pretty crazy about online poker, what with arresting executives in airports and such. I'm not OK with the idea that if you open up shop on the Internet you have to block your service to anyone in a particular political jurisdiction at the request of its government, or else become a criminal there. Maybe it's not that hard for the whole US, but states have arrested online gambling execs as well (Kentucky, IIRC, was one). And that's pure madness. It's like the situation where pornographers are prosecuted for violating "community standards" in po-dunk towns they've never set foot in. And so the most prudish and repressive standards rule the land. If you're doing something controversial you'd better keep a good list of where you can't travel!
At least that's how it works for freedom of speech. For consumer protections, companies operating across state lines typically only have to follow the laws where they're incorporated. So they most permissive standards rule the land. Funny how that works.
It might be nice in some cases if movie scripts, authors' notes, drafts, source code, etc., became public. But I think it's a very good thing that people have the right to keep those things private. And although I generally don't think corporations deserve some of the "personal" rights they enjoy, this is one that they deserve as well.
So they're targeting a specific binary interface that is becoming obsolete? Great idea! One of the major advantages of ReactOS over Wine in theory is the ability to run device drivers, right? It shouldn't be more than a couple years before hardware manufacturers stop writing WinXP drivers for their new devices. Then ReactOS will have to start chasing again -- they'll chase Win7 after Win9 is released, and they'll chase Win9 after Win11 is released. As long as they chase Microsoft they'll struggle for relevance.
This isn't the first instance of Javascript messing with the clipboard. One of my former co-workers encountered a real estate search site that repeatedly overwrote his clipboard. He had the page open while he was working and discovered the issue while trying to copy-paste some database queries from one file to another or something.
My first thought was that the browser shouldn't even allow that. But since each of the individual components (looking at the selection, capturing keystrokes, writing the clipboard) can be used in JS for useful things it's hard for browser makers to do much about it. Of course, we should all be surfing with JS under tight control...
Typing is faster than handwriting and it's easier to correct errors. Handwriting as computer input sucks. I won a Palm TX in a class design competition when I was in college, and even after learning "Graffiti" pretty well it's still no better than hunt-and-pecking on the virtual keyboard with the stylus. Graffiti feels fast because you're moving your hands a lot but when you look up at the meager amount of text you entered you get discouraged pretty fast. If you think you can take notes and annotate them, as you say, with "audio, video, and hyperlinks", in real-time, you're high.
I agree, intuitively, that tablets, as they've existed so far, are awkward if you want to use them for a long time. But I think laptops have similar problems, and that hasn't stopped them from overtaking desktops (to such an extent that even though it would be possible to fold some laptop innovations to desktop computers nobody bothers because margins are so slim). Ergonomically if you're sitting down your input controls should be close to your lap, and the display a couple feet away and at eye level. Laptops can't achieve that, and tablets are even farther from it.
If this tablet is big enough that you can't comfortably hold it up to your face like a book (or cell phone, or Kindle) it is 100% Full Of Fail, guaranteed. Any time you didn't have a desk right in front of you you'd have to crane your neck to use it. I do think a device the size and weight of a Kindle, netbook-level processing power, a general-purpose OS, and an iPhone-like screen, could work. For people like me that would be interested in doing lots of typing, the company could make a USB keyboard/trackball combo that you can mount the tablet onto, holding it up like a laptop screen (such keyboards exist already for Palm Pilots, but who would want to type that much into a Palm Pilot?).
I've never played Farmville but I've read a bit about it. Here's the thing. Farmville doesn't really have a sophisticated internal economy. When you buy tractors you're not really paying for a tractor, but for the game itself. Not for a couple columns bumped in a database row, but for the hardware, software, and effort that go into producing the game. The trick for the game makers is to figure out how to get people to want to buy lots of "tractors". You're right in that there's basically no effort involved in making a tractor, but it does take effort to write code into the game to support the existence and ownership of tractors. That's what you're paying for.
It's different for games that have internal economies... where in WOW people "farm" gold, and trade and sell it, both inside and outside of the game.
I am not convinced AMD/ATI cares that much. Their driver situation is *still* bad enough that I'm using an integrated Intel chip that can barely run Google Earth until the Libre driver supports my ATI card. It doesn't say much for their regard for Unix that they haven't fixed a long-standing bug, 100% reproducible, affecting a standard Unix feature accessible on modern desktop environments in two clicks. It doesn't say much for their regard for openness that they haven't even acknowledged that it exists.
To be fair, the reason I got an ATI card in the first place is that they released their specs; I figured there would be passable Libre drivers eventually. I didn't anticipate how awful the Gratis ones would be.
I hate to feed the trolls, but last I checked you could run the VESA driver for pretty much any card. It offers a couple basic 2-D acceleration primitives that are in the VESA standard, which is usually enough for me.
Some people are working on a Libre ATI driver. It takes a lot of work, even given specs. It doesn't support my ATI board yet, so I'm not using it yet (I'm using my onboard Intel until then). When the Libre ATI driver is ready I'll put my ATI card back in and give it a whirl. It almost certainly won't have this stupid bug in it. And even if perf is a little worse than the gratis driver, it's worth it for that reason.
The difference is not much on Windows. ATI and Nvidia care enough to trace issues and fix them on Windows. They don't care enough to do it on Linux. They don't care enough to implement many X features in standard ways either.
The difference is that with a Libre driver when there's an annoying bug it will get fixed. With the gratis Linux drivers there are plenty of annoying bugs that will probably never get fixed. In another post on this story I mentioned ATI's fast-user-switching bug. It causes X to go down completely when you use it. A lot of KDE and Gnome devs probably want to fix this bug, and are perfectly capable. I want to fix this bug, and I'm probably capable. But none of us can.
The difference is that you'd get better quality in many respects with a Libre driver.
Because it's in the kernel of their operating system. Because the fact that the driver is not Libre prevents other desktop-related stuff from working because the one vendor doesn't care and nobody else can fix it. Here's an example:
Using the gratis ATI driver, running two X servers on the card crashes the driver and leaves X and the card in an unusable state (you have to ssh into the box to reboot it cleanly). This has apparently been a bug in the ATI driver for ages. And because multiple X servers are used to implement "fast user switching", ATI's crap driver blocks fast user switching.
This sort of bug would be fixed in a libre driver. It's 100% reproducible, incredibly annoying, and affects a feature in desktop environments with millions of users and thousands of developers. If I had the source code to ATI's driver I could probably fix this bug. But ATI doesn't care.
It's impossible for the Linux kernel team and X.org to design interfaces and a good model for how kernel drivers should interact with userspace X drivers to provide rendering in a way that fits in with X's model when the two biggest GPU makers will just ignore it, write their own kernel modules and their own interfaces. With a Libre driver new X.org standards and interfaces would be adopted much quicker and the drivers would fit into the system better. Nvidia and ATI care about this for Windows (to some degree) and so their drivers fit well there. On Linux they don't. But lots of other people do care, and non-Libre drivers prevent them from doing anything about it.
No Free Software license, GPL included, relies on the theory that you must get the permission of the copyright holder to use the software. The GPL only applies when you redistribute. The software is freely offered for any usage.
The theory that using the software requires a copy as defined by copyright law is used only by proprietary software makers to enforce EULAs. I think it's a pretty dubious theory (to be specific, I think the idea that copying the binary from system memory to RAM counts as a copy for the purposes of copyright law is absurd, but a copy from installation media to your hard drive should probably count), and apparently they're not too confident in it either -- they also do their best to make sure users agree to the license in one way or another.
Even if the proprietary vendors' theory is right it doesn't affect the GPL much. If copying to system memory constitutes a copy, you're now obligated to provide yourself with source code if you request it. Or is it that your hard drive is obligated to provide your RAM with source code?
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I agree that cubes are pretty bad. I've worked in a cube and I've worked in an open-floor office. The open-floor office was much better. I had less personal space but I didn't feel walled in. Cubes don't really provide meaningful privacy but do stunt social activity and collaboration. That is, you can hear the guy two cubes over haggling over car prices on the phone, but if you want to round up people to go out you have to go around to everyone's cube individually. And when you're in an open environment you get the benefit of everyone's decorations, of the view out the windows, etc.
The funny/sad thing is that people in cubes really fight when management wants to alter the space by taking down or shortening walls.
Does it have a stand? How does it not slide all over the place? I haven't used a tablet, so all I have to go on is pictures. It looks like it pretty much sits flat on a surface. Without a desk it's useless.
I wouldn't use a phone to annotate diagrams, I'd use a laptop. Or if at my own office, a desktop computer with a nice big monitor.
I've never seen anyone take notes in a meeting on a tablet. I've seen lots of people use laptops. If you can't use the tablet as a PC then you're still going to need a laptop. If you have a laptop then the marginal benefit of a tablet is pretty tiny.
There may be things a tablet is better at than any other device but the existing devices are perfectly adequate. And the tablet is inadequate at everything else -- unable to replace any of your other devices.
Decent handwriting recognition? Surely you jest. Handwriting is inherently slower than typing and less accurate.
I've browsed the web on a Palm Pilot quite a lot; the stylus is similar to a touch interface, although Palm didn't take advantage of the gestural capabilities. It's not bad for browsing and reading. If you have to enter anything it's a horrible pain, no matter what input method you use.
Maybe a system where gestures stood in for common words and letter combinations could be successful. Maybe everyone will learn shorthand again. We'd all have to re-train ourselves to "write" with the tips of our fingers (unless you want to bring back the stylus). It seems like that would be more fatiguing than typing, still, if you had to do it for a significant length of time. And if you're not going to use it much why spend the money?
If you're entering a significant amount of data you'll want to use a real keyboard. If you're not entering a significant amount of data a mouse will work just fine for squiggles and highlighting.
If you're going to use the computer in one place a desktop PC is best ergonomically. If you're going to take it places where you don't have a desk, or where there is a desk but overhead lighting that glares, you're going to want a device where you can point the screen toward your face. A smartphone is OK because you can hold it up to your face and still use it; a laptop is OK because you can tilt the screen. A tablet? Too big to use one-handed or with thumbs, and no tilting screen.
The tablet computer is a device with a vanishingly small niche. Tablets have failed in the past and they'll keep failing in the future.
We're used to thinking this way about the Internet because most wired ISPs don't charge per amount of data (although some use bandwidth caps and rate-limiting). But as it does require more infrastructure to send more data, charging for each phone call spreads the cost of the infrastructure over its users more fairly. I don't think the idea of charging per byte for cellular Internet will go away soon.
Ha, that too? I never actually tried the desktops one because of the crash reports... I did try the one that was supposed to give you mouse focus. It sucked. Although I like mouse focus and multiple desktops with X11 I've mostly given up on them anywhere else.
Apparently there are a handful of commercial third-party programs that are supposed to give you multiple desktops on Windows, some of which are supposed to be much better than the powertoy one.
Ironically, one of the pitches for tiling window managers is that typical window managers don't really manage windows -- that a good tiling manager saves you the effort of having to resize and place all your windows manually. I tried one for a couple months a few years ago and didn't really like it, but I can see the appeal.
Is that the same one that can easily be made to crash the kernel? Or is it a new one?
I can't install software on my only telephone either. But I didn't buy a sophisticated computing device, I just bought a little phone/answering machine that sits on top of my computer.
Yoeu can spend your money however you like. I'd be pretty disappointed if I bought a computer and couldn't do what I wanted with it.
When we started filtering spam based on word frequencies spammers tried to give their messages similar word frequencies to legitimate emails. When we start filtering based on templates they'll change their templates such that an attempt to filter this way catches a lot of false positives. Not hard.
In the US your various state and federal taxes are also deducted straight from your paycheck at the expected rate. But many people have income that's not from their employer -- bank accounts, investments, etc. Because there are several different tax brackets, and because earnings can't be predicted exactly, typically your total income at the end of the year isn't just your bi-weekly paycheck times 26.
So at the end of every year you're sent statements from your employer(s) and any other source of taxable income stating how much you earned and how much was sent to the government as tax. Then you figure out your total income, what sorts of deductions you're entitled to (there are lots of these -- for children and other dependents, for certain kinds of business expenses... some of which are basically loopholes for rich people with smart accountants), and based on those, what you should have been taxed. If you should have payed more you pay more. If you should have payed less you get a refund check.
I agree with you on some points. That the necessity of a tax-preparation industry is insane. That saying the government shouldn't simplify people's taxes to save this business is like saying Microsoft should build security flaws into Windows to keep the anti-virus industry alive. That SafeDisc sounds incredibly scummy. I've never needed tax prep help myself, so I can't really speak from experience.
But there's nothing wrong with charging $50 per year. They have to update the software when the tax code changes, or when their understanding of it changes. And they've come up with a scheme by which you pay each time you use it. That sounds exceptionally fair to me -- the amount you pay is related to the utility you get from the software. $50 each year might be more than the software is worth to many people... but clearly they're staying in business this way, and there's nothing evil about setting your prices as high as the market will bear. If it's not worth $50 to enough people they won't make any sales. If it's easy to create tax prep software for less than $50 per copy-year someone else will undercut them on price.
I only say this because I find it strange that people complain about perfectly reasonable pricing schemes so often around here. It's just weird.
Usually when a software company licenses a patent they pay some amount and have the right to distribute binaries implementing the patented methods. Mozilla distributes its source code under the LGPL. It's unlikely that Mozilla could arrange a deal under which they're allowed to distribute source code to users and provide users the right to redistribute it freely for any amount of money.
This is the general problem with Free Software and patents.
It's fair to say that governments of the USA (including state governments) have been pretty crazy about online poker, what with arresting executives in airports and such. I'm not OK with the idea that if you open up shop on the Internet you have to block your service to anyone in a particular political jurisdiction at the request of its government, or else become a criminal there. Maybe it's not that hard for the whole US, but states have arrested online gambling execs as well (Kentucky, IIRC, was one). And that's pure madness. It's like the situation where pornographers are prosecuted for violating "community standards" in po-dunk towns they've never set foot in. And so the most prudish and repressive standards rule the land. If you're doing something controversial you'd better keep a good list of where you can't travel!
At least that's how it works for freedom of speech. For consumer protections, companies operating across state lines typically only have to follow the laws where they're incorporated. So they most permissive standards rule the land. Funny how that works.
It might be nice in some cases if movie scripts, authors' notes, drafts, source code, etc., became public. But I think it's a very good thing that people have the right to keep those things private. And although I generally don't think corporations deserve some of the "personal" rights they enjoy, this is one that they deserve as well.
So they're targeting a specific binary interface that is becoming obsolete? Great idea! One of the major advantages of ReactOS over Wine in theory is the ability to run device drivers, right? It shouldn't be more than a couple years before hardware manufacturers stop writing WinXP drivers for their new devices. Then ReactOS will have to start chasing again -- they'll chase Win7 after Win9 is released, and they'll chase Win9 after Win11 is released. As long as they chase Microsoft they'll struggle for relevance.
This isn't the first instance of Javascript messing with the clipboard. One of my former co-workers encountered a real estate search site that repeatedly overwrote his clipboard. He had the page open while he was working and discovered the issue while trying to copy-paste some database queries from one file to another or something.
My first thought was that the browser shouldn't even allow that. But since each of the individual components (looking at the selection, capturing keystrokes, writing the clipboard) can be used in JS for useful things it's hard for browser makers to do much about it. Of course, we should all be surfing with JS under tight control...
Typing is faster than handwriting and it's easier to correct errors. Handwriting as computer input sucks. I won a Palm TX in a class design competition when I was in college, and even after learning "Graffiti" pretty well it's still no better than hunt-and-pecking on the virtual keyboard with the stylus. Graffiti feels fast because you're moving your hands a lot but when you look up at the meager amount of text you entered you get discouraged pretty fast. If you think you can take notes and annotate them, as you say, with "audio, video, and hyperlinks", in real-time, you're high.
I agree, intuitively, that tablets, as they've existed so far, are awkward if you want to use them for a long time. But I think laptops have similar problems, and that hasn't stopped them from overtaking desktops (to such an extent that even though it would be possible to fold some laptop innovations to desktop computers nobody bothers because margins are so slim). Ergonomically if you're sitting down your input controls should be close to your lap, and the display a couple feet away and at eye level. Laptops can't achieve that, and tablets are even farther from it.
If this tablet is big enough that you can't comfortably hold it up to your face like a book (or cell phone, or Kindle) it is 100% Full Of Fail, guaranteed. Any time you didn't have a desk right in front of you you'd have to crane your neck to use it. I do think a device the size and weight of a Kindle, netbook-level processing power, a general-purpose OS, and an iPhone-like screen, could work. For people like me that would be interested in doing lots of typing, the company could make a USB keyboard/trackball combo that you can mount the tablet onto, holding it up like a laptop screen (such keyboards exist already for Palm Pilots, but who would want to type that much into a Palm Pilot?).
I've never played Farmville but I've read a bit about it. Here's the thing. Farmville doesn't really have a sophisticated internal economy. When you buy tractors you're not really paying for a tractor, but for the game itself. Not for a couple columns bumped in a database row, but for the hardware, software, and effort that go into producing the game. The trick for the game makers is to figure out how to get people to want to buy lots of "tractors". You're right in that there's basically no effort involved in making a tractor, but it does take effort to write code into the game to support the existence and ownership of tractors. That's what you're paying for.
It's different for games that have internal economies... where in WOW people "farm" gold, and trade and sell it, both inside and outside of the game.
I am not convinced AMD/ATI cares that much. Their driver situation is *still* bad enough that I'm using an integrated Intel chip that can barely run Google Earth until the Libre driver supports my ATI card. It doesn't say much for their regard for Unix that they haven't fixed a long-standing bug, 100% reproducible, affecting a standard Unix feature accessible on modern desktop environments in two clicks. It doesn't say much for their regard for openness that they haven't even acknowledged that it exists.
To be fair, the reason I got an ATI card in the first place is that they released their specs; I figured there would be passable Libre drivers eventually. I didn't anticipate how awful the Gratis ones would be.
I hate to feed the trolls, but last I checked you could run the VESA driver for pretty much any card. It offers a couple basic 2-D acceleration primitives that are in the VESA standard, which is usually enough for me.
Some people are working on a Libre ATI driver. It takes a lot of work, even given specs. It doesn't support my ATI board yet, so I'm not using it yet (I'm using my onboard Intel until then). When the Libre ATI driver is ready I'll put my ATI card back in and give it a whirl. It almost certainly won't have this stupid bug in it. And even if perf is a little worse than the gratis driver, it's worth it for that reason.
The difference is not much on Windows. ATI and Nvidia care enough to trace issues and fix them on Windows. They don't care enough to do it on Linux. They don't care enough to implement many X features in standard ways either.
The difference is that with a Libre driver when there's an annoying bug it will get fixed. With the gratis Linux drivers there are plenty of annoying bugs that will probably never get fixed. In another post on this story I mentioned ATI's fast-user-switching bug. It causes X to go down completely when you use it. A lot of KDE and Gnome devs probably want to fix this bug, and are perfectly capable. I want to fix this bug, and I'm probably capable. But none of us can.
The difference is that you'd get better quality in many respects with a Libre driver.
Because it's in the kernel of their operating system. Because the fact that the driver is not Libre prevents other desktop-related stuff from working because the one vendor doesn't care and nobody else can fix it. Here's an example:
Using the gratis ATI driver, running two X servers on the card crashes the driver and leaves X and the card in an unusable state (you have to ssh into the box to reboot it cleanly). This has apparently been a bug in the ATI driver for ages. And because multiple X servers are used to implement "fast user switching", ATI's crap driver blocks fast user switching.
This sort of bug would be fixed in a libre driver. It's 100% reproducible, incredibly annoying, and affects a feature in desktop environments with millions of users and thousands of developers. If I had the source code to ATI's driver I could probably fix this bug. But ATI doesn't care.
It's impossible for the Linux kernel team and X.org to design interfaces and a good model for how kernel drivers should interact with userspace X drivers to provide rendering in a way that fits in with X's model when the two biggest GPU makers will just ignore it, write their own kernel modules and their own interfaces. With a Libre driver new X.org standards and interfaces would be adopted much quicker and the drivers would fit into the system better. Nvidia and ATI care about this for Windows (to some degree) and so their drivers fit well there. On Linux they don't. But lots of other people do care, and non-Libre drivers prevent them from doing anything about it.
No Free Software license, GPL included, relies on the theory that you must get the permission of the copyright holder to use the software. The GPL only applies when you redistribute. The software is freely offered for any usage.
The theory that using the software requires a copy as defined by copyright law is used only by proprietary software makers to enforce EULAs. I think it's a pretty dubious theory (to be specific, I think the idea that copying the binary from system memory to RAM counts as a copy for the purposes of copyright law is absurd, but a copy from installation media to your hard drive should probably count), and apparently they're not too confident in it either -- they also do their best to make sure users agree to the license in one way or another.
Even if the proprietary vendors' theory is right it doesn't affect the GPL much. If copying to system memory constitutes a copy, you're now obligated to provide yourself with source code if you request it. Or is it that your hard drive is obligated to provide your RAM with source code?