Exactly. He's already made Gateway spend money not only on his tech support calls, but on a lawyer who doesn't come cheap. At some point, it will be in Gateway's interest to just cut their losses and refund the money. The longer he holds out, the more likely that will happen.
Not at all. Gateway do not want to set a precedent with this. Otherwise they'd have to respect it everywhere.
*pedantic quip about emacs not being from unix background, and, irrelevantly, how vi is better*
Seriously though, when you have the huge about of keybindings that emacs has, normal modifier bindings only allow you have about 50 bindings. Having hierarchical key chords though (ie C-x foo for buffer related bindings, C-a foo for gnu screen bindings, etc) actually makes sense. Bear in mind that emacs does such a huge amount of things that having many hundreds of bindings by default is important, because otherwise it's be horrendus to use.
I mean, obviously, even more horrendus to use than it is now.
Why does this seem to get zero press? I can only figure out what I read on wikipedia and their website, but it looks like a bonafide China-Style blocker.
At the moment, however, it does only block Child Pornography, Criminally Obscene (types of porn, i suspect) and "Incitement to Racial Hatred" content. These are noble goals (though I would not agree with enforcing them through a manditory content filter) but I'm certain that, once in place, the blocklist will expand significantly.
Coming from a unix background, I find ctrl+c a strange keybinding. It's rather anying to have to use a either a binding or a menu to copy and paste. When I do use Windows, I am always mildly frustrated by this decision.
3. Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use the sale of counterfeit CDs to raise revenue and launder money.
Only because it is illegal. 1930's mobsters made quite a good living out of the illegality of alcohol. Career criminals will profit from whatever is currently illegal. This isn't a particulary convincing moral arguement as to whether copying is morally right or not, it simply states a negative effect of a prohibition. Any prohibition of something (be it violence, restricted substances whatever), will always have some negative effect. Counterfeit CD's might as well be heroin for all they care.
You're saying that if you don't see that stop sign and cause me ten million dollars of medical bills that since it's an honest mistake you (or rather your insurance company; the same company that insures doctors) shouldn't have to pay?
Exactly, yes. That's what I would agree with. Intent isn't present, so, neither should mens rea be.
Sigh, yet another general statement without supporting evidence. I think your post is a sly bit of astroturfing for NVidia. ATI has had WHQL certified new driver releases for years now. NVidia has only recently been able to get their new releases WHQL qualified. Sure, there is more to drivers, but it indicates that ATI has had a solid development, testing, and qualification regimen in place for a long time.
This statement is utterly untrue. WHQL is pretty much just a case of;
Co-operate with MS on driver releases (and institute their "minimum-standard" level of QA)
Pay MS what I'm sure is a large some of money for the privilege
Lack of WHQL doesn't indicate anything about driver quality apart from that certain companies are co-operating with MS to institute a minimum standard; many, many third parties develop drivers over and above this already. That fact that companies do not do WHQL says less about their hackers' development style than it does about their executives attitudes towards unjustifiable costs.
I think that ever increasing size and complexity are things that a reliable kernel should avoid. What is wrong with that?
The fact that it's a non-issue. Increasing the number of drivers in the kernel does not increase the complexity - they don't depend on each other or anything. They're all independant.
What really seems to have ticked people off (including myself) is that you phrased your question like you knew what you were talking about, and you in fact (rather obviously) did not. In future, you should be careful to show that your questions are curiousity-based, and not adversarial. I will be careful not to see socratic irony where none exists.
Either you're teaching them something or you're entertaining them. Pick one. A 13y old is more than capable of learning about a lot of things, because for example I remember doing so at that age. Science education in the USA is notoriously less than what could and should be taught.
What an ignorant absolute. I currently find learning C very entertaining.
I never said that there wouldn't be any improvements if the driver was open sourced. I even pointed out that I would expect security fixes. Is a more secure driver a bad thing? Not at all.
You strongly implied with your tone that these improvements weren't worth open sourcing for.
So yes I do doubt that you would see any improvement is speed with a FOSS driver. Not impossible but highly unlikely.
You should really read Linus' Law. Speed improvement isn't highly unlikely, as with the massive level of interest that graphics drivers recieve, I am sure there's a few talented people out there who are interested in working on them. Either way, opening the source code to the public certainly doesn't reduce the speed. Speed is not an arguement for or against the opening of code, it's actually a apoligist approach.
I have no idea where you got the idea that most Linux users are unwilling to pay for software let alone games.
Perhaps from the way that Linux people generally ship software with no cost to the user. How many Linux users out there are currently paying for any part of the software on their machine?
Payment for software only exists in the higher end server sector, and even here, it's more like payment for service.
You've drawn a stupid conclusion. What percentage of Doom 3 sales happened because of it's x86 Linux support? Linux users are largely uninterested in any of the following;
1. Millions of hackers? There isn't a single FOSS project that millions of hackers have contributed too.
Pedantic behavior rarely convinces anyone.
2. There are very few people with the experience to write a good much less great 3d driver.
You see, that's funny, you get a whole set of guys who are busy writing what many consider complex programs. Here's one you often see doing fairly well. Yet obviously, these same people are totally unable to write a working graphics driver. Even though they have written just about every other kind of driver between them, and had them overwhelmingly beat the crap out of the closed-source sector.
3. Even with the specs I am guessing that the majority of contributions will be security or code clean up and not performance optimizations.
They have already sold the card, so it doesn't matter as far as revenue who writes the best driver.
This shows a complete lack of understanding. These cards are sold in a massively competitive market purely on their speed. ATI (and Nvidia) feel that by keeping their drivers obfuscated they can prevent competition from stealing their performance boosts.
While I would agree that this is short sighted, it's fairly obvious why they believe that keeping drivers closed would give them a competitive advantage.
The real problem is that the hard-core Linux users don't use Windows, so they just assume everything that was wrong with Windows 95 is still wrong with Windows Vista.
Important issues, like vendor lock-in, security and stability have seen little progress in nearly a decade. In fact, it's pretty fair to say that all the big problems people had with win95, are, largely, still present. Vendor lock-in is actually far worse than before.
The statment "Everyone serious compiles their own kernel anyway" is just not true.
Not only is it not true, it's not even what the GP said.
He said that any serious user is capable of compiling their own kernel. This is largely true. Go ask on #debian; most of them are actually capable of it, but don't actually do it, because the benefit is not enough.
On my aging laptop, smaller, static kernels are useful to me because otherwise boot times become too long. So there, I do build my own kernel - with debian testing no less.
Surely if people feel strongly that something someone is doing is wrong they should be able to talk about it and protest about it?
There's a lot of talk here about "How dare they tell Opes that they're being idiots!" Like there's something wrong with making your opinion of something heard.
If people only took an interest in something that directly affected them, this world would be a far shallower place. Surely inconvience is a price to pay for the chance to say what you want to say? As far as I can see, no one's being a jackass - there's no direct impairment of the companys trade - people are simply calling them up and telling them they're idiots.
As for Microsoft going under... I don't think we'll ever see that in our lifetime.
God that's a stupid statement. If you know anything about business, you know that situations can change rapidly - anyone who had shares in anything remotely related to the 2001 accounting scandal will tell you that.
It's not impossible that the tech industry could change in a way where MS were entirely unable to compete. This is the tech industry, remember.
Slashdot Mirror
Have we considered, possibly, perhaps, maybe just, that with greater research this technology could improve over time?
Nah, that's silly!
*pedantic quip about emacs not being from unix background, and, irrelevantly, how vi is better*
Seriously though, when you have the huge about of keybindings that emacs has, normal modifier bindings only allow you have about 50 bindings. Having hierarchical key chords though (ie C-x foo for buffer related bindings, C-a foo for gnu screen bindings, etc) actually makes sense. Bear in mind that emacs does such a huge amount of things that having many hundreds of bindings by default is important, because otherwise it's be horrendus to use.
I mean, obviously, even more horrendus to use than it is now.
Why does this seem to get zero press? I can only figure out what I read on wikipedia and their website, but it looks like a bonafide China-Style blocker.
Cleanfeed
At the moment, however, it does only block Child Pornography, Criminally Obscene (types of porn, i suspect) and "Incitement to Racial Hatred" content. These are noble goals (though I would not agree with enforcing them through a manditory content filter) but I'm certain that, once in place, the blocklist will expand significantly.
On many keyboards, they lack a dedicated button, normally requiring an extra modifier key. On a toshbia someone has, I recall it being Fn.
Agreed, lack of home and end keys on a laptop is something that drives me crazy. It really impairs non-vim text input boxes.
In fact, one of the selling points of Thinkpads to me is that all the models I've ever seen contain these keys.
Coming from a unix background, I find ctrl+c a strange keybinding. It's rather anying to have to use a either a binding or a menu to copy and paste. When I do use Windows, I am always mildly frustrated by this decision.
- Co-operate with MS on driver releases (and institute their "minimum-standard" level of QA)
- Pay MS what I'm sure is a large some of money for the privilege
Lack of WHQL doesn't indicate anything about driver quality apart from that certain companies are co-operating with MS to institute a minimum standard; many, many third parties develop drivers over and above this already. That fact that companies do not do WHQL says less about their hackers' development style than it does about their executives attitudes towards unjustifiable costs.Next time, you might want to try a rational question.
Try researching before making outlandish statements.
It's not like firefox is using unused memory - firefox is often using memory that could be put to better use by other programs.
Payment for software only exists in the higher end server sector, and even here, it's more like payment for service.
You've drawn a stupid conclusion. What percentage of Doom 3 sales happened because of it's x86 Linux support? Linux users are largely uninterested in any of the following;
While I would agree that this is short sighted, it's fairly obvious why they believe that keeping drivers closed would give them a competitive advantage.
They're not stupid, they're just wrong.
Important issues, like vendor lock-in, security and stability have seen little progress in nearly a decade. In fact, it's pretty fair to say that all the big problems people had with win95, are, largely, still present. Vendor lock-in is actually far worse than before.
Like the Republicans or the Democrats? Surely you jest.
He said that any serious user is capable of compiling their own kernel. This is largely true. Go ask on #debian; most of them are actually capable of it, but don't actually do it, because the benefit is not enough.
On my aging laptop, smaller, static kernels are useful to me because otherwise boot times become too long. So there, I do build my own kernel - with debian testing no less.
Surely if people feel strongly that something someone is doing is wrong they should be able to talk about it and protest about it?
There's a lot of talk here about "How dare they tell Opes that they're being idiots!" Like there's something wrong with making your opinion of something heard.
If people only took an interest in something that directly affected them, this world would be a far shallower place. Surely inconvience is a price to pay for the chance to say what you want to say? As far as I can see, no one's being a jackass - there's no direct impairment of the companys trade - people are simply calling them up and telling them they're idiots.
It's called freedom of expression.
It's not impossible that the tech industry could change in a way where MS were entirely unable to compete. This is the tech industry, remember.
To reiterate: This is because you originally formated them from OSX. This is no longer the default behavior of iTunes.
Wikipedia agrees.