All science relies on the assumption that the universe is consistent. "That the same conditions give the same results". So is it with math. So is it with the Universe, too, thus we don't need a God to explain it, we just need to believe that 1 = 1, always.
Well, it is bullshit. The scientific method says, when a theory begins to predict absurd results, scrap the theory. Teleportation IS absurd, as are parallel universes, multiple realities and humanoid aliens.
About concerts, has there been a ruling on that already? That as an issue must have been addressed in every standard contract, like, who keeps the rights to the recordings, and that depends on the legal status of the contract too, like if there is some clause so exploitive it is illegal and the contract is voided in court, then, who keeps the rights to the (band-authorized or not) recordings of concerts they've done under said contract? Before and after the court decision? Can the court force the label to give back the distribution rights, royalties, copyrights, whatever, to the band? Retroactively or not?
The answers to all those questions don't seems as interesting to me as the fact that it's such a complex system, it really needs to be replaced by something more efficient.
I'm thinking about what will happen to the music industry, I don't think it will happen overnight.. We have one major label prudently trying an (overpriced, but at least DRM-free) other distribution. DRM'd solutions will disappear Real Soon Now anyway, as soon as China dares produce consumer electronics that ignore or bypass DRM altogether and allow people to enjoy their media any way they want to. It will be illegal in the US, but they'll be sold on the 'Net (from Sweden, maybe) and FedExed in anonymous carton boxes. As long as they are not made by Sony (LOL! As if ever... ) they will be cheap enough that everyone and their dog will buy one. End of DRM forever. Or, rather, some companies will try to stick to it, but they will never be more popular than they are now. Exit Napster and Real and those few others... Apple will stay, because they have a dominant position and they're VERY careful not to annoy enough people enough; for example, by allowing more and more devices to share the same music. I think Steve Jobs meant it when he was saying HE, for one, wanted DRM to disappear. (As ITMS boss, that is - he does nothing to advertise the opinion he has when he's at Disney). Okay, recursively back to the music industry. I meant to say, the record labels will have much less power now that the Perfect Solution seems to emerge : a record label that works with the artists on a time-limited basis to promote their works, without enslaving them for $.001 per copy. Such labels would compete on a level playing field, what with the slow adoption rate of this business model by the big majors, who will still be the biggest players, but they won't own 95% market share, because other, less evil (fair contracts + Fair Use) labels will have top-selling artists by then. I think that the System is just become much more corrupt now than in the times of the Betamax, and that has caused laws such as the DMCA. But until now, in such cases, the tech has always ended up being adopted elsewhere, then everywhere. The Universal Player is illegal, but as long as it will be profitable enough to build one, some day, someone will. And if it's priced right, I WILL BUY IT.
No, he wouldn't. Because a small not-for-profit org does NOT have $LOTS to spend on hardware that's overpriced just because it reads "business class" on the site it has to be bought.
And because it seems that, as Photoshop will never run in WINE, people would be forced to use the Win32/64 emulator on the nextWindows. That being open source would kill off a few bugs, and so it will be the Best Way to run software written for the older API.
All this while MS is developing their next API, which they can have included in Vista already... Hey, it could be a C# VM, for example, running on top of an NT kernel, and a GUI using widgets all based on DirectX primitives for display. Such a system could even be very, very sweet...
It is a Lisp environment Grub can boot to. You don't really need Linux. Oh yes, you do, but, I mean, you don't need actually more than Emacs, the GNU toolchain, *some* kernel, and bash. (Hey, wait... Maybe The GNU Project has ended up producing a full-blown OS with tons of utilities ans useless bells'n whistles. After all.)
With the amount of R&D they do and all, if they sell only one chip with everything in it for a price anyone can pony up, calculated to recoup costs and pay everyone well (so that they can buy GeForces too), you have a healthy company and economy.
The system which maximizes shareholders' values does not do that.
I don't think they even produce enough of those insanely expensive cards to recoup their R&D costs on them only, but I'd certainly like to make sure. With numbers.
1. Take WINE source 2. Make it Just Work 3. Publish source to Wine That Works 4. Include Binary In Next Platform... so that they can pull an OSX and start over, leaving no one dead in the water when it comes to running legacy Win32/win64 code.
Oh, and I have to inform you that Apple happily distributes GCC (it is GPL software, right?) in MacOSX.
One of the problems is that there are Windows Search textboxes all over the desktop, and Google can't replace those with its own. (Read : they don't want to clunk-skin the Windows "search" button by overlaying with one that says GOOGLE. As the button is hardwired in Explorer, you can't replace it short of recompiling the shell and maybe some libs too.)
The other problem is that they can't or won't use the Microsoft Search APIs (which are supposed to be used in MS products), I suppose that those APIs really are an interface to a whole mess of spaghetti code that somehow manages to return search results, from a quite low level. Google wants a lower-level access to "search" code, because theirs is much more efficient. But since MS Search is a tangled mess of spaghetti, there IS no lower-level access, it just somehow manages to return results.
Google seems not to want to reinvent several shapes of wheels - they just want a nice lib that will read the NTFS and compress the metadata in a separate file. Which is all a search program has to do, and frankly, this whole discussion is moot.
Take the time to export the list of files at the FS level, put them in a table, update the table for every FS access and voil, you have a queryable FS.
(Details : Create the table in RAM at mount time and flush it to disk on end. Re-create table from disk if not cleanly unmounted. Support some file formats as filesystems, such as mailboxes and Office files.)
I remember a bug in XP's built-in search. I had to find files in a directory and put them in an other on the same partition. So I cut'n pasted the files in some other directory.
Well, it seems some metadata was noot updating properly : the search returned the same files as results, but from the new directory!
If civil rights will be gone when unelected, politically-appointed attorneys arbitrarily dictate to corporate entities what they can or can't do, then what exactly do you call the system by which corporate entities openly buy out elected government officials to pass laws favoring them?
In April, Microsoft urged the federal competition authorities to thoroughly investigate Google's acquisition of online advertising brokerage DoubleClick, after being beaten by Google in closing a deal for the company. The Federal Trade Commission has since confirmed it is investigating the matter.
Emphasis mine. They don't want support for their products and profit margins. They retaliate against Microsoft, using their weak spot that they've been convicted for unfair practice and such.
Or they could grab the WINE code, fork it, make it Just Work, publish the source, and then include it in the next closed-source, proprietary, non-Windows platform they'll market. Apple could have done that for the Carbon framework, except that there was no MacOS9 emulator on Linux to begin with
Why else is do we mainly download and P2P top 40 crap.
Short answer : because you are idiots.
Long answer : because piracy really is price discrimination. The cost of a pirated album on bittorrent is "configure your client right, then click download on your friendly torrent site" and that's a price most people seem happy to pay.
The cost of an album in online stores is ridiculous. They have no costs! "Yes but bandwidth" is negligible because if you charge anything at all from 1cent up then you obviously cover that. "Yes but maintenance" is nearly a fixed cost and if you need it [and you charge anything at all for songs] then it's paid for, too. "Yes but hardware" don't make me laugh THAT hard, I might die. "Yes but content" has to be paid for simply to the artists and the store takes a marginal cut.
The cost in B&M stores... well, it's hardware. It can break, but it can't be erased. And even the case will last longer than any current hard drive, even if using both as intended.
Insight : because they are the common denominator. Lots of people know they want the Top40 crap, even if there are much more more people trading lesser-known music. 172 seeds for the Madonna's discography and 1 for the doom-metal band Avrigus (who give away their music to download for free, because they never saw £1 in royalties from their label) - does it mean that there exists no interest at all in like small obscure bands? Or is it because there are so many people seeding every other obscure bands, that pop music has more copies floating around of the same. It's a dilution process, the Top40 scene is concentrated in a smaller set of artists.
Why not release a DRM scheme under the GPL? With keys transmitted by SSH and hardware crypto. Open every spec, it still is quite unbreakable without at least a soldering iron.
Tivo [...] restricted how people can change the software ON THE MACHINES THEY SELL. More like "Tivo [...] restricted how people can change the software ON THE MACHINES THOSE PEOPLE BOUGHT." If you sell a good to me, then I own it, am I right? Yes. And no but maybe it just *should* be yours and some day there will be a judge a little less stupid than the ones who did not rule that "if you buy it it's yours period".
People that fell so strongly about this issue are clearly not the audience for the Tivo products on the first place. Maybe building their own Tivo like device using MythTV would be a better solution for them TiVo owns broad patents on basic DVR functions. Fuck the patents. DVR function is an obvious use and the software for TV cards is clear prior art.
Yeah. But I'd buy a TiVo if I could hook it up to my box and copy the recorded shows as standard MPEG files with the ads stripped.
I won't ever buy a DVR that does not let me do Just That Right Out Of The Box. And if that's illegal then maybe I'll start a business building Just That. In Armenia, they don't have digital laws yet... I think... and those are generally paid for by the local industries, so if it works really well I might buy a no-DRM law, too.
Agreed. Then the license for the software that TiVo uses should include a "NO DRM" clause. That's GPLv3 for you.
If the law prevents them from doing Just That then they either relocate their legal adress to some place without that very law or get out of business. Or carry on with their useless boxes I won't ever buy as long as they implement evil features like DRM and force-showing ads. Once again : if you want me to watch ads it's because the advertisers have given you a ton more $ than I'll ever be able to. Thus you give me the service for free. And I'm going to strip the ads ANYWAY because I don't want to have them embedded in content I will still be watching in years from now.
It's really hard for TiVo to abide by the software's license too it seems!
Fuck them and their evil business model. I want CONTENT not ads. If I'm paying for a service then I expect my eyeballs not to be sold to advertisers. Or they make it free NOW for everyone who asks so that there are infinitely more people for them to sell.
If they REALLY earn that much more money by selling one user's eyeballs than by the subscription then it must be free or they are coprophagous. "Digest it twice! It may be disgusting but at least you make sure you get all the nutrition you can out of your food!"
The Really Smart thing to do right now would be to open a company in some country with no digital laws at all and sell PVRs that 1.connects to anything (UHF and cable and DVB and Sat-receivers etc) - without paying of course! (If there *are* any ads I'm not going to pay) - and 2.strips the ads from everything (I'm not going to watch any of your ads anyway, fuckers).
I'd buy one. For no more than $400 obviously - that's about the marginal cost of production, counting 1TB disk space, 1 cpu, 1 gpu, RAM and a mobo. (Except that hardware is subject to price-discrimination in an highly evil way. The real versions are horribly expensive and everything else is ridiculously underpowered. Does it really cost nVidia ten times more to produce a 8800Ultra than a 8500GT? No it does NOT. If they wanted to kill off ATI they'd just have to sell the REAL chips, like GeForce8-based Quadros, for $80. They sell chips for $80 too and they are produced in the same factories with the same methods and same everything. So they'd still turn a profit.)
The IRA went out of business because the social primates in Ireland were getting fed better when they restored their economy and did it fucking SO WELL that with a quality of life going higher there was no need to go attack the tribe with more resources in the next valley. Going to war is a species-typical behavior. Activated by an environmental switch (I will get less food). Mediated by xenophobic memes ("Allah u-Akbar"... "Oust the uncatholic invaders"... "Dieu et mon droit"... "Terrorists! Kill kill kill!"... whatever).
Interesting. Both those countries 1.had cultures that emphasized discipline VERY much, and 2. the friendly officials that the US put in place then and there were quite free to choose how to rebuild the country and its administration... This is NOT the case in Iraq.
If you want to see really stupid reasons to go to war, go read up on the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam. Short version : In 650 or something there was a war between two tribes whose chiefs had both usurped the succession to Muhammad. One won but it was the one with the least legitimacy. One tribe became Sunni and the other Shi'ite. Can't remember which was which. They've been fighting EVER SINCE. Now if I remember right you have one that usually run things because they are more clever or because they historically have led their countries and the other are ten times more numerous.
The perfect OS detects everything, EVERYTHING, right away. You don't need to configure anything. Your monitors run at their native resolutions, with all drivers installed and the right options checked. Your t sensors work OUT OF THE BOX.
The perfect OS only has ONE media player which can read everything no matter the codec or encryption used. The perfect OS decides ITSELF what options you need checked in your media player.
No one on Earth owns a dxr3, really... no one but both people who bought one in the first place and they're not using linux. As for both people who have Matrox cards : they've all replaced them with nvidia since only nvidia has any sort of actually usable drivers. So why do I still see g400 and dxr3 as output drivers in both Xine and mplayer? And how comes I see them at all, as I have no g400 nor dxr3? Why is that not detected? And how comes reading video uses 100% CPU on one core when rendering to OpenGL? What's the point of rendering video to OpenGL anyway then, shouldn't it use LESS CPU if it uses the 100GFlops on my graphics card? Or is that because of Beryl? Or XGL? Or or or...
Last one : Linux will be ready for MY desktop when it will detect that my CPU doesn't NEED to run at 3.06GHz all the time. See, the linux devs HAVE written the support for that, but for some unfathomable reason, NO distro would enable it BY DEFAULT so that I don't need to jump through hoops.
Now that we have at least decent package managers : Linux will be ready for the desktop when the installer automagically configures it well enough that everything Just Works out of the box exactly as the hardware specs say the hardware can. End Of Debate Forever.
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Okay. I'd really like only one, though : Tactile Gemma, self-titled, 2001. Can't even find it on Amazon.
All science relies on the assumption that the universe is consistent. "That the same conditions give the same results".
So is it with math.
So is it with the Universe, too, thus we don't need a God to explain it, we just need to believe that 1 = 1, always.
Well, it is bullshit. The scientific method says, when a theory begins to predict absurd results, scrap the theory. Teleportation IS absurd, as are parallel universes, multiple realities and humanoid aliens.
c hive.html That's about the only thing about quantum physics I've ever read that made some sense.
There is an interview just about that there: http://laputan.blogspot.com/2003_09_21_laputan_ar
About concerts, has there been a ruling on that already? That as an issue must have been addressed in every standard contract, like, who keeps the rights to the recordings, and that depends on the legal status of the contract too, like if there is some clause so exploitive it is illegal and the contract is voided in court, then, who keeps the rights to the (band-authorized or not) recordings of concerts they've done under said contract? Before and after the court decision? Can the court force the label to give back the distribution rights, royalties, copyrights, whatever, to the band? Retroactively or not?
The answers to all those questions don't seems as interesting to me as the fact that it's such a complex system, it really needs to be replaced by something more efficient.
I'm thinking about what will happen to the music industry, I don't think it will happen overnight.. We have one major label prudently trying an (overpriced, but at least DRM-free) other distribution.
DRM'd solutions will disappear Real Soon Now anyway, as soon as China dares produce consumer electronics that ignore or bypass DRM altogether and allow people to enjoy their media any way they want to. It will be illegal in the US, but they'll be sold on the 'Net (from Sweden, maybe) and FedExed in anonymous carton boxes. As long as they are not made by Sony (LOL! As if ever... ) they will be cheap enough that everyone and their dog will buy one. End of DRM forever. Or, rather, some companies will try to stick to it, but they will never be more popular than they are now. Exit Napster and Real and those few others... Apple will stay, because they have a dominant position and they're VERY careful not to annoy enough people enough; for example, by allowing more and more devices to share the same music. I think Steve Jobs meant it when he was saying HE, for one, wanted DRM to disappear. (As ITMS boss, that is - he does nothing to advertise the opinion he has when he's at Disney).
Okay, recursively back to the music industry. I meant to say, the record labels will have much less power now that the Perfect Solution seems to emerge : a record label that works with the artists on a time-limited basis to promote their works, without enslaving them for $.001 per copy. Such labels would compete on a level playing field, what with the slow adoption rate of this business model by the big majors, who will still be the biggest players, but they won't own 95% market share, because other, less evil (fair contracts + Fair Use) labels will have top-selling artists by then.
I think that the System is just become much more corrupt now than in the times of the Betamax, and that has caused laws such as the DMCA. But until now, in such cases, the tech has always ended up being adopted elsewhere, then everywhere. The Universal Player is illegal, but as long as it will be profitable enough to build one, some day, someone will.
And if it's priced right, I WILL BUY IT.
... for *when* the disks *will* crash, you mean. They always do, at some point.
No, he wouldn't. Because a small not-for-profit org does NOT have $LOTS to spend on hardware that's overpriced just because it reads "business class" on the site it has to be bought.
Because it would make their programs better?
...
And because it seems that, as Photoshop will never run in WINE, people would be forced to use the Win32/64 emulator on the nextWindows. That being open source would kill off a few bugs, and so it will be the Best Way to run software written for the older API.
All this while MS is developing their next API, which they can have included in Vista already... Hey, it could be a C# VM, for example, running on top of an NT kernel, and a GUI using widgets all based on DirectX primitives for display. Such a system could even be very, very sweet
It is a Lisp environment Grub can boot to. You don't really need Linux. Oh yes, you do, but, I mean, you don't need actually more than Emacs, the GNU toolchain, *some* kernel, and bash. (Hey, wait ... Maybe The GNU Project has ended up producing a full-blown OS with tons of utilities ans useless bells'n whistles. After all.)
...
And they really need a HURD
(I should not post when THAT stoned)
Yeah, right. I can punch cards for x86 code. Take THAT! :p
With the amount of R&D they do and all, if they sell only one chip with everything in it for a price anyone can pony up, calculated to recoup costs and pay everyone well (so that they can buy GeForces too), you have a healthy company and economy.
The system which maximizes shareholders' values does not do that.
I don't think they even produce enough of those insanely expensive cards to recoup their R&D costs on them only, but I'd certainly like to make sure. With numbers.
I was talking of doing just what the GPL allows :
... so that they can pull an OSX and start over, leaving no one dead in the water when it comes to running legacy Win32/win64 code.
1. Take WINE source
2. Make it Just Work
3. Publish source to Wine That Works
4. Include Binary In Next Platform
Oh, and I have to inform you that Apple happily distributes GCC (it is GPL software, right?) in MacOSX.
No.
One of the problems is that there are Windows Search textboxes all over the desktop, and Google can't replace those with its own. (Read : they don't want to clunk-skin the Windows "search" button by overlaying with one that says GOOGLE. As the button is hardwired in Explorer, you can't replace it short of recompiling the shell and maybe some libs too.)
The other problem is that they can't or won't use the Microsoft Search APIs (which are supposed to be used in MS products), I suppose that those APIs really are an interface to a whole mess of spaghetti code that somehow manages to return search results, from a quite low level. Google wants a lower-level access to "search" code, because theirs is much more efficient. But since MS Search is a tangled mess of spaghetti, there IS no lower-level access, it just somehow manages to return results.
Google seems not to want to reinvent several shapes of wheels - they just want a nice lib that will read the NTFS and compress the metadata in a separate file. Which is all a search program has to do, and frankly, this whole discussion is moot.
Take the time to export the list of files at the FS level, put them in a table, update the table for every FS access and voil, you have a queryable FS.
(Details : Create the table in RAM at mount time and flush it to disk on end. Re-create table from disk if not cleanly unmounted. Support some file formats as filesystems, such as mailboxes and Office files.)
I remember a bug in XP's built-in search. I had to find files in a directory and put them in an other on the same partition. So I cut'n pasted the files in some other directory.
Well, it seems some metadata was noot updating properly : the search returned the same files as results, but from the new directory!
If civil rights will be gone when unelected, politically-appointed attorneys arbitrarily dictate to corporate entities what they can or can't do, then what exactly do you call the system by which corporate entities openly buy out elected government officials to pass laws favoring them?
Emphasis mine.
They don't want support for their products and profit margins. They retaliate against Microsoft, using their weak spot that they've been convicted for unfair practice and such.
Or they could grab the WINE code, fork it, make it Just Work, publish the source, and then include it in the next closed-source, proprietary, non-Windows platform they'll market. Apple could have done that for the Carbon framework, except that there was no MacOS9 emulator on Linux to begin with
Short answer : because you are idiots.
Long answer : because piracy really is price discrimination. The cost of a pirated album on bittorrent is "configure your client right, then click download on your friendly torrent site" and that's a price most people seem happy to pay. ... well, it's hardware. It can break, but it can't be erased. And even the case will last longer than any current hard drive, even if using both as intended.
The cost of an album in online stores is ridiculous. They have no costs! "Yes but bandwidth" is negligible because if you charge anything at all from 1cent up then you obviously cover that. "Yes but maintenance" is nearly a fixed cost and if you need it [and you charge anything at all for songs] then it's paid for, too. "Yes but hardware" don't make me laugh THAT hard, I might die. "Yes but content" has to be paid for simply to the artists and the store takes a marginal cut.
The cost in B&M stores
Insight : because they are the common denominator. Lots of people know they want the Top40 crap, even if there are much more more people trading lesser-known music. 172 seeds for the Madonna's discography and 1 for the doom-metal band Avrigus (who give away their music to download for free, because they never saw £1 in royalties from their label) - does it mean that there exists no interest at all in like small obscure bands? Or is it because there are so many people seeding every other obscure bands, that pop music has more copies floating around of the same. It's a dilution process, the Top40 scene is concentrated in a smaller set of artists.
Why not release a DRM scheme under the GPL? With keys transmitted by SSH and hardware crypto. Open every spec, it still is quite unbreakable without at least a soldering iron.
Yeah. But I'd buy a TiVo if I could hook it up to my box and copy the recorded shows as standard MPEG files with the ads stripped.
I won't ever buy a DVR that does not let me do Just That Right Out Of The Box. And if that's illegal then maybe I'll start a business building Just That. In Armenia, they don't have digital laws yet... I think... and those are generally paid for by the local industries, so if it works really well I might buy a no-DRM law, too.
Agreed. Then the license for the software that TiVo uses should include a "NO DRM" clause. That's GPLv3 for you.
If the law prevents them from doing Just That then they either relocate their legal adress to some place without that very law or get out of business.
Or carry on with their useless boxes I won't ever buy as long as they implement evil features like DRM and force-showing ads.
Once again : if you want me to watch ads it's because the advertisers have given you a ton more $ than I'll ever be able to. Thus you give me the service for free. And I'm going to strip the ads ANYWAY because I don't want to have them embedded in content I will still be watching in years from now.
It's really hard for TiVo to abide by the software's license too it seems!
Fuck them and their evil business model. I want CONTENT not ads. If I'm paying for a service then I expect my eyeballs not to be sold to advertisers. Or they make it free NOW for everyone who asks so that there are infinitely more people for them to sell.
If they REALLY earn that much more money by selling one user's eyeballs than by the subscription then it must be free or they are coprophagous. "Digest it twice! It may be disgusting but at least you make sure you get all the nutrition you can out of your food!"
The Really Smart thing to do right now would be to open a company in some country with no digital laws at all and sell PVRs that 1.connects to anything (UHF and cable and DVB and Sat-receivers etc) - without paying of course! (If there *are* any ads I'm not going to pay) - and 2.strips the ads from everything (I'm not going to watch any of your ads anyway, fuckers).
I'd buy one. For no more than $400 obviously - that's about the marginal cost of production, counting 1TB disk space, 1 cpu, 1 gpu, RAM and a mobo.
(Except that hardware is subject to price-discrimination in an highly evil way. The real versions are horribly expensive and everything else is ridiculously underpowered. Does it really cost nVidia ten times more to produce a 8800Ultra than a 8500GT? No it does NOT. If they wanted to kill off ATI they'd just have to sell the REAL chips, like GeForce8-based Quadros, for $80. They sell chips for $80 too and they are produced in the same factories with the same methods and same everything. So they'd still turn a profit.)
Maybe it has to do with the "forbidden" field of ph ysiognomy</a>.
The IRA went out of business because the social primates in Ireland were getting fed better when they restored their economy and did it fucking SO WELL that with a quality of life going higher there was no need to go attack the tribe with more resources in the next valley. Going to war is a species-typical behavior. Activated by an environmental switch (I will get less food). Mediated by xenophobic memes ("Allah u-Akbar" ... "Oust the uncatholic invaders" ... "Dieu et mon droit" ... "Terrorists! Kill kill kill!" ... whatever).
Interesting. Both those countries 1.had cultures that emphasized discipline VERY much, and 2. the friendly officials that the US put in place then and there were quite free to choose how to rebuild the country and its administration ... This is NOT the case in Iraq.
If you want to see really stupid reasons to go to war, go read up on the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite Islam. Short version : In 650 or something there was a war between two tribes whose chiefs had both usurped the succession to Muhammad. One won but it was the one with the least legitimacy. One tribe became Sunni and the other Shi'ite. Can't remember which was which. They've been fighting EVER SINCE. Now if I remember right you have one that usually run things because they are more clever or because they historically have led their countries and the other are ten times more numerous.
Click here if you want to know the real reasons humans do wars.
The perfect OS detects everything, EVERYTHING, right away. You don't need to configure anything. Your monitors run at their native resolutions, with all drivers installed and the right options checked. Your t sensors work OUT OF THE BOX. ...
The perfect OS only has ONE media player which can read everything no matter the codec or encryption used. The perfect OS decides ITSELF what options you need checked in your media player.
No one on Earth owns a dxr3, really... no one but both people who bought one in the first place and they're not using linux. As for both people who have Matrox cards : they've all replaced them with nvidia since only nvidia has any sort of actually usable drivers. So why do I still see g400 and dxr3 as output drivers in both Xine and mplayer? And how comes I see them at all, as I have no g400 nor dxr3? Why is that not detected? And how comes reading video uses 100% CPU on one core when rendering to OpenGL? What's the point of rendering video to OpenGL anyway then, shouldn't it use LESS CPU if it uses the 100GFlops on my graphics card? Or is that because of Beryl? Or XGL? Or or or
Last one : Linux will be ready for MY desktop when it will detect that my CPU doesn't NEED to run at 3.06GHz all the time. See, the linux devs HAVE written the support for that, but for some unfathomable reason, NO distro would enable it BY DEFAULT so that I don't need to jump through hoops.
Now that we have at least decent package managers : Linux will be ready for the desktop when the installer automagically configures it well enough that everything Just Works out of the box exactly as the hardware specs say the hardware can.
End Of Debate Forever.