Could this be used for paving the way to the end of free-of-charge services, or to make other such changes to the service?
If you try to turn a free-of-charge service into a paid service for an existing and established user base, the users will revolt, but if you first threaten that you may have to take away the service altogether and then go "ah, but we just might be able to save it if you start paying us so that we can afford the new licensing costs...", business users might be relieved that they can avoid the greater one-time expense of switching to a different system and be much more willing to start paying for the service.
They are going to lose credibility, because too much press in a short ammount of time for a company can be just as bad as flying under the wire.
Sadly, I don't think that's going to happen. Sure, they might lose credibility among Slashdot folk, but the rest of the people (and media) will either be too ignorant to notice or to understand that Apple's argument doesn't stand. Even among the technically knowledgeable, many (especially those who are into iPhones already) are still deep in the coolness factor and will just tell you that they don't understand why you'd need jailbreaking anyway since the phone is an appliance and not a computer, or something like that. They might even be right to some extent. Of course that has nothing to do with whether Apple's claims against jailbreaking stand or not, but try explaining that to someone within the Reality Distortion Field...
No, I haven't tried, but I can see how it would go. Those who are already critical will continue to be so; those who aren't, won't be, because they probably don't care.
The software restricting applications to only what has been authorized should have nothing to do with the software that controls the wireless chip in the first place. There shouldn't be any realistic way of directly controlling the GSM/3G chip from applications, so the risk of doing damage through that, either inadvertently or on purpose, should be limited to potential security holes in the software (and the design separating the two should limit that, too).
If it were possible to hurt a cell tower just because an application is misbehaving, there would be something very, very wrong with the way the software was designed. I don't buy that argument for a second.
and some johnny-come-lately hacking those products by falsely claiming to be an ipod at the device-id level.
What other kinds of device id's would you suggest using for the purpose?
Specifying one of a well-defined set of device id's is practically part of the interface between the software and the player since the software doesn't talk to any devices that don't. Hell, the id probably doesn't even matter that much for any other purpose than that, and perhaps for knowing some details of how it would be best to communicate with that device. If you specify an id and act like a device with that id is supposed to, you're just implementing the interface, even if the interface hasn't been officially made public.
Is everyone else implementing communication through an interface defined by someone else also a "johnny-come-lately"? That would make an awful lot of applications that deal with proprietary file formats "johnny-come-latelies". What if Palm also supported interfaces with some other similar software? It'd be exactly the same situation as supporting a bunch of other vendors' file formats or network protocols simply for compatibility.
And it's not like Apple invented the concept of a proprietary interface between PC software and a music player, so it really is just another interface. And implementing compatibility with an existing interface is just that, not copying someone else's great novel idea.
The area is important, but the kinds of activities you engage in and the kinds of establishments you visit are an equally dividing factor. As a tourist the amount and kind of paperwork and formalities you have to deal with are usually quite limited. If you actually tried to move to Japan, I believe you'd quickly find out that dealing with the authorities, getting a job and having a social life are surprisingly difficult if you don't speak any Japanese. Also, as a tourist you usually tend to end up in places that also get at least some other tourists and foreigners, such as hotels, and those places tend to be much readier with English than most other establishments.
Disclaimer: I've only been there as a tourist, too.
BTW, my author friend didn't refer to this as 'writers block' because that term applies to a loss of ideas and inability to figure out what to write next. Her "chapter-11" concern and what appears to be your concern too, is an easier one of lacking motivation; you know what to do you just don't want to do it. Now... if you got a thorny problem and don't know how to get started working on it then... that's closer to the classical writers block problem.
That's a good distinction, but of course the two aren't entirely disconnected either. Not knowing how to get started can easily be discouraging and demotivating. Also, often getting past that takes some effort and banging the head in the wall, doing things without really knowing what you should do, which can be really hard to do if you lack the motivation.
I think that's how my "coder's blocks" tend to occur.
How to get past them... that's another story, I don't really know. Usually it goes away if I manage to stop worrying about it for a little while and do something else (physical exercise, study something, some other and easier tasks at work, generally something self-motivated that will make me feel better), then get into some kind of a "fuck, I gotta do this" mood. YMMV, people are different.
On the other hand, it might also be worthwhile to think about matters on a larger scale. Is it only that project that you're bogging down with? Or do you generally feel unmotivated with other things as well, such as personal matters, leisure activities, hobbies etc.? If so, that sounds like depression.
Aside from all the other incredible cluelessness this is screaming, what if I don't have a Facebook account? Or an account for MySpace or some other site where your login could be an arbitrary username? How do they distinguish that from me refraining to give the account information and just lying that I don't have an account?
To be fair, you should rather change it to BozemanFuckingSucks1 (or perhaps BozemanFuckingSucks2 if you want to suggest that something else also sucks?). This is about a city in Montana, not the state of Montana as a whole.
Also, building a user-friendly store/repository isn't just a technical task. The distinction between a traditional repository and an app store may seem to be a matter of naming, but it really should be also a matter of presentation, and that requires some thoughtful effort.
For example, it would help browsing if available applications were divided into helpful categories and perhaps sub-categories. Current repositories do of course have categories, but they aren't very helpful to a non-technical user, or even to a technical one: many categories contain so many packages that it makes no sense to browse through them.
In an app store targeted at a general audience, the categories need to be meaningfully sized and set based on non-technical use cases, not technical needs. Also, descriptions for the applications need to be thought about. gnome-app-install used e.g. by Ubuntu is nicer for the average person than browsing through the entire repository (no libraries etc. that most people wouldn't want to install directly anyway), but the package descriptions could really use some work.
Example: Person receives a 7z archive and gets a tip that 7zip can be used to open it. Person finds "7zip" in add/remove applications. And what does the description for that have to say? (from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS)
7z and 7za file archivers with high compression ratio
p7zip is the Unix port of 7-Zip, a file archiver that archives with very high compression ratios.
p7zip-full provides:
/usr/bin/7za a standalone version of the 7-zip tool that handles 7z archives (implementation of the LZMA compression algorithm) and some other formats.
/usr/bin/7z not only does it handle 7z but also ZIP, Zip64, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM, ISO and DEB archives. 7z compression is 30-50% better than ZIP compression.
p7zip provides 7zr, a light version of 7za, and p7zip a gzip like wrapper around 7zr.
So, uhm, yeah. That's useful information if you already know that both tools listed above are command line tools and that certain archiving GUIs can also use them if they're installed. Other than that, the person in our examle is left totally in the dark. Is this the application he wants for opening the archive? If it is, how on earth should it be used? (Probably just by double-clicking on the archive, because now the same GUI the person had previously used for zip archives can also open 7z, thanks to the installation of the command-line tool, but that's in no way obvious unless you already knew it.) Perhaps the description in an app store should just say "installing this application will allow you to open and create 7z archives with $standard_archiver_gui." In a repository more likely used by more experienced and technically-minded people it would be a useful detail to mention the command-line utilities.
That's certainly just an anecdote, but there are similar and milder cases spread all over, both in gnome-app-install and particularly in more traditional repositories. Good descriptions are also important for searchability.
Anything calling itself an app store should focus more on usability to the average person rather than to the geek who knows and cares what the difference between a Qt and GTK application is. That's another difference between a traditional repository and the kind of an app store the Novell guy is talking about. Yes, it's partially marketing, but it's also a matter of real usability for many people.
Other details such as meaningful sorting for search results come to mind. Also, in an app store you'd probably want to pre-select the applications at least to some degree rather than dumping all open source software the world has produced into the same view. (Huge repositories such as Debian's certainly have their place, and I love having one at my disposal, but most people really aren't going to need a gazillion different applications written for different UI toolkits when there's a perfectly decent one for the one that comes
It's not just a matter of customising the UI layout or functionality such as behaviour of tabs. Opera has certainly been more customisable than Firefox out of the box in that sense, and might still be.
However, in my opinion the vast library of extensions boosts the customisability of Firefox ahead of Opera's; there's always only so much you can do with built-in configurability of the application, but with all the extensions available for Firefox the possibilities are huge.
Granted, there's an amount of effort involved, but in customising there always is.
As far as I know, it's not only about copyright but about the ah-so-lovely "intellectual property" in general. Some of the elevations on the list probably have to do with copyright laws, others might have to do with patent protection or whatever.
How does anyone get "blacklist" out of this?
I've heard it being called a blacklist in media before. I'm not really sure what the possible implications of being included on a specific watch level in the report would have, but generally, the difference between a listing used as a diplomatic pressure device and a blacklist doesn't have to be great. It all depends on how much pressure it's being used to create.
Mods: This _might_ have been insightful had parent given any resemblance of argumentation for anything he wrote, including this:
It's getting pretty comical, watching Linux zealots cling onto the idea that Ubuntu is anywhere near production quality (for the desktop)
Seriously, Ubuntu (or any Linux distro, or any OS) isn't perfect; it's in pretty good shape at some things and behind the competition at others. There's no point in denying the shortcomings where they can be found, and I also start feeling more than a bit uneasy when I hear people advocating Linux as near-perfect. It's not suitable for everyone in every situation, and advocating it as if it were is bound to cause disappointment with a negative effect far greater than the positive image you originally managed to give. Also, the first step in making things better is to realize what to improve.
However, from your post it's impossible to say whether you're any better. Saying that something is far from production quality and going on to complain about people who claim otherwise without giving any argumentation is no more constructive than seeing no evil. In fact, as someone already pointed out in another reply, it would be possible to churn out your post's worth of information without ever having even seen the target of your criticism.
To put it short, you give the impression that something sucks without giving any indication as to what exactly it is that sucks, or why -- the former part being even more important than the latter. In some other contexts that kind of suggestion without actually saying anything would be called "FUD".
Well, if these guys really used to have a more lenient stance on DRM and have only moved towards stricter attitudes over time, you'd think there might be a reason for that.
The main reason why people wouldn't trust Sony or Warner making such a claim is that they tend to believe the motivation these companies have for pushing DRM isn't the piracy figures alone; they're also used as an excuse for schemes that give the big corps more control over the market and ways to milk the same product for more cash. The motivation was always there regardless of the piracy figures, and thus there's also more incentive to make the figures support those other motives.
If Stardock indeed used to have a lenient stance at least in the past, clearly they didn't have these motivations. If their opinion has changed, they've either picked up these ulterior motives over time (which, I suppose, is also a possibility), or they've actually come to believe that it's necessary due to the piracy figures. If they believe in that themselves and also state it as the reason in public, they would seem to have less incentive to forge the figures than the big corps who also have completely different reasons for wanting to yell "omg pirates!111".
Does that actually help? If you do "rm -rf/" and rm is an alias for "rm -i", wouldn't the effect be the same as muttering "rm -irf/"? At least on the system I have at hand right now (Ubuntu) the -f option causes rm to not prompt at all, overriding the effect of -i.
To be honest, the Intel Linux driver also does suck for 3D performance. The integrated Intel chips may be able to run something like Unreal Tournament 2004 on Windows, not conveniently but it might be closer to animation than to a slideshow, depending on the exact chip and whether you turn the details down enough. Last time I checked it was completely hopeless on Linux.
I, too, used to steer away from Wine as much as possible, both because most things seemed to require extensive tweaking and because doing that used to suck pretty bad. For example the Wine configuration panel used to be quite wanting.
However, lately I've had surprising success with Wine, albeit mostly with older games and not the latest thing at the stores (I wouldn't have the hardware for that anyway). I even have a Cedega account, but there are quite a few things (even games and related things such as installers) that just seem to work on Wine and not on Cedega, so I've been moving towards just plain Wine again.
Also, things like the menu integration (works quite nicely at least on Ubuntu) and the application uninstaller make running and managing installed applications less confusing.
Of course many applications just plain don't work, so check the online application database and test the applications you need to make sure before ditching that Windows install.
I don't think that's enough of a reason. Most other video decoding doesn't use much hardware acceleration either -- my Linux + NVidia system might be able to accelerate MPEG-2 decoding or so, but that's pretty irrelevant because that's pretty fast to decode anyway.
Support for hardware accelerated H.264 decoding is beginning to appear (perhaps also on Linux, with NVidia releasing VDPAU support for Linux), but to the best of my knowledge, most systems aren't hardware accelerating it anyway.
It might be, though, that the slow part is video output rather than decoding the input stream, and the reason you suggest might be significant for that. I think I recall reading that at least Flash 9 for Linux uses OpenGL for scaling etc., and that might well be slower than using hardware accelerated video overlay like most video player software.
Slashdot Mirror
Could this be used for paving the way to the end of free-of-charge services, or to make other such changes to the service?
If you try to turn a free-of-charge service into a paid service for an existing and established user base, the users will revolt, but if you first threaten that you may have to take away the service altogether and then go "ah, but we just might be able to save it if you start paying us so that we can afford the new licensing costs...", business users might be relieved that they can avoid the greater one-time expense of switching to a different system and be much more willing to start paying for the service.
Moral? Big industry?
They are going to lose credibility, because too much press in a short ammount of time for a company can be just as bad as flying under the wire.
Sadly, I don't think that's going to happen. Sure, they might lose credibility among Slashdot folk, but the rest of the people (and media) will either be too ignorant to notice or to understand that Apple's argument doesn't stand. Even among the technically knowledgeable, many (especially those who are into iPhones already) are still deep in the coolness factor and will just tell you that they don't understand why you'd need jailbreaking anyway since the phone is an appliance and not a computer, or something like that. They might even be right to some extent. Of course that has nothing to do with whether Apple's claims against jailbreaking stand or not, but try explaining that to someone within the Reality Distortion Field...
No, I haven't tried, but I can see how it would go. Those who are already critical will continue to be so; those who aren't, won't be, because they probably don't care.
The software restricting applications to only what has been authorized should have nothing to do with the software that controls the wireless chip in the first place. There shouldn't be any realistic way of directly controlling the GSM/3G chip from applications, so the risk of doing damage through that, either inadvertently or on purpose, should be limited to potential security holes in the software (and the design separating the two should limit that, too).
If it were possible to hurt a cell tower just because an application is misbehaving, there would be something very, very wrong with the way the software was designed. I don't buy that argument for a second.
I'm still trying to figure out what gen y is supposed to mean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y
and some johnny-come-lately hacking those products by falsely claiming to be an ipod at the device-id level.
What other kinds of device id's would you suggest using for the purpose?
Specifying one of a well-defined set of device id's is practically part of the interface between the software and the player since the software doesn't talk to any devices that don't. Hell, the id probably doesn't even matter that much for any other purpose than that, and perhaps for knowing some details of how it would be best to communicate with that device. If you specify an id and act like a device with that id is supposed to, you're just implementing the interface, even if the interface hasn't been officially made public.
Is everyone else implementing communication through an interface defined by someone else also a "johnny-come-lately"? That would make an awful lot of applications that deal with proprietary file formats "johnny-come-latelies". What if Palm also supported interfaces with some other similar software? It'd be exactly the same situation as supporting a bunch of other vendors' file formats or network protocols simply for compatibility.
And it's not like Apple invented the concept of a proprietary interface between PC software and a music player, so it really is just another interface. And implementing compatibility with an existing interface is just that, not copying someone else's great novel idea.
I guess Apple doesn't hurt other companies enough yet.
MS sells a lot to corporations, so their monopoly hurts those. Apple mostly sells consumer stuff, so it doesn't directly appear to hurt the economy.
The area is important, but the kinds of activities you engage in and the kinds of establishments you visit are an equally dividing factor. As a tourist the amount and kind of paperwork and formalities you have to deal with are usually quite limited. If you actually tried to move to Japan, I believe you'd quickly find out that dealing with the authorities, getting a job and having a social life are surprisingly difficult if you don't speak any Japanese. Also, as a tourist you usually tend to end up in places that also get at least some other tourists and foreigners, such as hotels, and those places tend to be much readier with English than most other establishments.
Disclaimer: I've only been there as a tourist, too.
BTW, my author friend didn't refer to this as 'writers block' because that term applies to a loss of ideas and inability to figure out what to write next. Her "chapter-11" concern and what appears to be your concern too, is an easier one of lacking motivation; you know what to do you just don't want to do it. Now... if you got a thorny problem and don't know how to get started working on it then ... that's closer to the classical writers block problem.
That's a good distinction, but of course the two aren't entirely disconnected either. Not knowing how to get started can easily be discouraging and demotivating. Also, often getting past that takes some effort and banging the head in the wall, doing things without really knowing what you should do, which can be really hard to do if you lack the motivation.
I think that's how my "coder's blocks" tend to occur.
How to get past them... that's another story, I don't really know. Usually it goes away if I manage to stop worrying about it for a little while and do something else (physical exercise, study something, some other and easier tasks at work, generally something self-motivated that will make me feel better), then get into some kind of a "fuck, I gotta do this" mood. YMMV, people are different.
On the other hand, it might also be worthwhile to think about matters on a larger scale. Is it only that project that you're bogging down with? Or do you generally feel unmotivated with other things as well, such as personal matters, leisure activities, hobbies etc.? If so, that sounds like depression.
Aside from all the other incredible cluelessness this is screaming, what if I don't have a Facebook account? Or an account for MySpace or some other site where your login could be an arbitrary username? How do they distinguish that from me refraining to give the account information and just lying that I don't have an account?
To be fair, you should rather change it to BozemanFuckingSucks1 (or perhaps BozemanFuckingSucks2 if you want to suggest that something else also sucks?). This is about a city in Montana, not the state of Montana as a whole.
Uh, a normal 2WD car still has four wheels total, unlike a motorbike.
Gerrit Blank, 14, was rushing to school when he saw a massive fireball heading straight towards him from the sky.
That must be one of the better excuses I've heard for being late for school.
Also, building a user-friendly store/repository isn't just a technical task. The distinction between a traditional repository and an app store may seem to be a matter of naming, but it really should be also a matter of presentation, and that requires some thoughtful effort.
For example, it would help browsing if available applications were divided into helpful categories and perhaps sub-categories. Current repositories do of course have categories, but they aren't very helpful to a non-technical user, or even to a technical one: many categories contain so many packages that it makes no sense to browse through them.
In an app store targeted at a general audience, the categories need to be meaningfully sized and set based on non-technical use cases, not technical needs. Also, descriptions for the applications need to be thought about. gnome-app-install used e.g. by Ubuntu is nicer for the average person than browsing through the entire repository (no libraries etc. that most people wouldn't want to install directly anyway), but the package descriptions could really use some work.
Example: Person receives a 7z archive and gets a tip that 7zip can be used to open it. Person finds "7zip" in add/remove applications. And what does the description for that have to say? (from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS)
7z and 7za file archivers with high compression ratio
p7zip is the Unix port of 7-Zip, a file archiver that archives with very high compression ratios.
p7zip-full provides:
p7zip provides 7zr, a light version of 7za, and p7zip a gzip like wrapper around 7zr.
So, uhm, yeah. That's useful information if you already know that both tools listed above are command line tools and that certain archiving GUIs can also use them if they're installed. Other than that, the person in our examle is left totally in the dark. Is this the application he wants for opening the archive? If it is, how on earth should it be used? (Probably just by double-clicking on the archive, because now the same GUI the person had previously used for zip archives can also open 7z, thanks to the installation of the command-line tool, but that's in no way obvious unless you already knew it.) Perhaps the description in an app store should just say "installing this application will allow you to open and create 7z archives with $standard_archiver_gui." In a repository more likely used by more experienced and technically-minded people it would be a useful detail to mention the command-line utilities.
That's certainly just an anecdote, but there are similar and milder cases spread all over, both in gnome-app-install and particularly in more traditional repositories. Good descriptions are also important for searchability.
Anything calling itself an app store should focus more on usability to the average person rather than to the geek who knows and cares what the difference between a Qt and GTK application is. That's another difference between a traditional repository and the kind of an app store the Novell guy is talking about. Yes, it's partially marketing, but it's also a matter of real usability for many people.
Other details such as meaningful sorting for search results come to mind. Also, in an app store you'd probably want to pre-select the applications at least to some degree rather than dumping all open source software the world has produced into the same view. (Huge repositories such as Debian's certainly have their place, and I love having one at my disposal, but most people really aren't going to need a gazillion different applications written for different UI toolkits when there's a perfectly decent one for the one that comes
It's not just a matter of customising the UI layout or functionality such as behaviour of tabs. Opera has certainly been more customisable than Firefox out of the box in that sense, and might still be.
However, in my opinion the vast library of extensions boosts the customisability of Firefox ahead of Opera's; there's always only so much you can do with built-in configurability of the application, but with all the extensions available for Firefox the possibilities are huge.
Granted, there's an amount of effort involved, but in customising there always is.
For some reason I thought Opera was a pay browser (or had ads or something making it not free-as-in-beer).
It used to be that way years ago. You could either pay or watch ads. I think that was changed somewhere around version 8.x or so, though.
There's also no mention of DMCA.
As far as I know, it's not only about copyright but about the ah-so-lovely "intellectual property" in general. Some of the elevations on the list probably have to do with copyright laws, others might have to do with patent protection or whatever.
How does anyone get "blacklist" out of this?
I've heard it being called a blacklist in media before. I'm not really sure what the possible implications of being included on a specific watch level in the report would have, but generally, the difference between a listing used as a diplomatic pressure device and a blacklist doesn't have to be great. It all depends on how much pressure it's being used to create.
Women making more money than their partners is a pretty recent concept, at least in most of the world.
Mods: This _might_ have been insightful had parent given any resemblance of argumentation for anything he wrote, including this:
It's getting pretty comical, watching Linux zealots cling onto the idea that Ubuntu is anywhere near production quality (for the desktop)
Seriously, Ubuntu (or any Linux distro, or any OS) isn't perfect; it's in pretty good shape at some things and behind the competition at others. There's no point in denying the shortcomings where they can be found, and I also start feeling more than a bit uneasy when I hear people advocating Linux as near-perfect. It's not suitable for everyone in every situation, and advocating it as if it were is bound to cause disappointment with a negative effect far greater than the positive image you originally managed to give. Also, the first step in making things better is to realize what to improve.
However, from your post it's impossible to say whether you're any better. Saying that something is far from production quality and going on to complain about people who claim otherwise without giving any argumentation is no more constructive than seeing no evil. In fact, as someone already pointed out in another reply, it would be possible to churn out your post's worth of information without ever having even seen the target of your criticism.
To put it short, you give the impression that something sucks without giving any indication as to what exactly it is that sucks, or why -- the former part being even more important than the latter. In some other contexts that kind of suggestion without actually saying anything would be called "FUD".
Yeah, and as we all know, the Internet is not a big truck.
Well, if these guys really used to have a more lenient stance on DRM and have only moved towards stricter attitudes over time, you'd think there might be a reason for that.
The main reason why people wouldn't trust Sony or Warner making such a claim is that they tend to believe the motivation these companies have for pushing DRM isn't the piracy figures alone; they're also used as an excuse for schemes that give the big corps more control over the market and ways to milk the same product for more cash. The motivation was always there regardless of the piracy figures, and thus there's also more incentive to make the figures support those other motives.
If Stardock indeed used to have a lenient stance at least in the past, clearly they didn't have these motivations. If their opinion has changed, they've either picked up these ulterior motives over time (which, I suppose, is also a possibility), or they've actually come to believe that it's necessary due to the piracy figures. If they believe in that themselves and also state it as the reason in public, they would seem to have less incentive to forge the figures than the big corps who also have completely different reasons for wanting to yell "omg pirates!111".
Does that actually help? If you do "rm -rf /" and rm is an alias for "rm -i", wouldn't the effect be the same as muttering "rm -irf /"? At least on the system I have at hand right now (Ubuntu) the -f option causes rm to not prompt at all, overriding the effect of -i.
To be honest, the Intel Linux driver also does suck for 3D performance. The integrated Intel chips may be able to run something like Unreal Tournament 2004 on Windows, not conveniently but it might be closer to animation than to a slideshow, depending on the exact chip and whether you turn the details down enough. Last time I checked it was completely hopeless on Linux.
I, too, used to steer away from Wine as much as possible, both because most things seemed to require extensive tweaking and because doing that used to suck pretty bad. For example the Wine configuration panel used to be quite wanting.
However, lately I've had surprising success with Wine, albeit mostly with older games and not the latest thing at the stores (I wouldn't have the hardware for that anyway). I even have a Cedega account, but there are quite a few things (even games and related things such as installers) that just seem to work on Wine and not on Cedega, so I've been moving towards just plain Wine again.
Also, things like the menu integration (works quite nicely at least on Ubuntu) and the application uninstaller make running and managing installed applications less confusing.
Of course many applications just plain don't work, so check the online application database and test the applications you need to make sure before ditching that Windows install.
I don't think that's enough of a reason. Most other video decoding doesn't use much hardware acceleration either -- my Linux + NVidia system might be able to accelerate MPEG-2 decoding or so, but that's pretty irrelevant because that's pretty fast to decode anyway.
Support for hardware accelerated H.264 decoding is beginning to appear (perhaps also on Linux, with NVidia releasing VDPAU support for Linux), but to the best of my knowledge, most systems aren't hardware accelerating it anyway.
It might be, though, that the slow part is video output rather than decoding the input stream, and the reason you suggest might be significant for that. I think I recall reading that at least Flash 9 for Linux uses OpenGL for scaling etc., and that might well be slower than using hardware accelerated video overlay like most video player software.