With all the talk here on/. about writing Congress about Net Neutrality, why aren't we writing our STATES about it, asking them to legislate in our favor? Then write your Fed Congressman and tell him that the Fed Congress should stay out of it? Yeah, FTC, yeah FCC, yeah Interstate Commerce. Whatever. I got it. But just because they have the *right* to intervene doesn't mean they *should*. They could easily legislate that the states should handle it as they choose and be done with it.
If enough states have the backbone that Maine has, maybe it would become too complex for these companies to bother with it.
Besides, your state is where you have the most voice. It's where you stand the biggest chance of changing anything. The STATE is where Democracy lives, not the Federal government. Think of it this way: if you take the bribery money normally kept for the Fed Congress and multiply the number of pockets by 50, it becomes much more difficult to bribe people. Especially when those people feel much more beholden to their constituents.
Another way of looking at it is that you bank on the fact that the Congress will probably talk it into submission and then pigeonhole it. In the meantime, maybe we can get some states to follow Maine's lead, and have some sensible legislation in place for a while. Perhaps it'll even serve as a model for a Federal law later on.
Please read the whole post before replying. Notice the GP's point #3:
3. There are organizations that will help homeless people who are interested do all of these things, even to the point of fronting the fee for the picture ID, which they often must have for some treatment programs anyway (especially those that involve paid-for housing).
Since the taxpayers of this country have been saddled with tens of millions (billions?) of subsidies to those who we have to go through for our net connection,
I've seen this claim before, but where is the proof? Can anyone actually quantify the amount of money and how big a percentage of the whole it represents? I'm sure there's more, but here's one I found in 30 seconds on TheGoogle:
Rural America is home to one-fifth of the Nation's population. The needs of this population are as diverse as those of the populations in large towns and cities. Communities in rural America rely upon many of the same things as urban areas, including good paying jobs, access to critical services like education, healthcare, and technology, and strong and safe communities. One specific utility that many growing businesses are relying on for further growth is broadband, which allows high-speed data transmission.
[...]
In 2004, President Bush announced an initiative to make access to broadband technology available to every American by 2007. While broadband has begun to penetrate rural America, rural areas still lag behind urban centers. The Rural Utilities Service delivers one of the Department's programs designed to increase access to broadband for rural residents and businesses. This program provides loans to companies that are willing to provide broadband in rural communities. Since the beginning of this program in February 2003, USDA has approved over $658 million in loans. The 2006 President's Budget provides funding that will support an additional $359 million in loans.
I don't know what sort of percentage this represents, but I'm sure you'd agree that it's a significant amount of taxpayer money involved, regardless.
Companies probably aren't primarily concerned with the social implications of work habits. To some extent, yes. But it's got to have a cost benefit attached to it or they simply cannot do it.
This may be true for middle-to-small corporations, but I find that the really gigantic corporations I've worked for don't need a positive cost-benefit for everything. They give to charities, encourage employees to take company time on occasion for volunteer work, and the one I'm contracting to now even owns one of the world's largest private art collections, despite that being fairly tangential to their core business.
I personally find that when I do work from home my productivity is rather insane in comparison. I might only work 4 hours on some days, but I'll finish an entire week of work in that time and then spend the remaining 4 hours of the work-day observing the work in action (reading logs) while I watch a movie. A heck of a lot better than it might be at work.
I notice the same thing. I get a TON of stuff done when I'm working from home. It's nice to have everything I need in close proximity, better (and cheaper) food, and many fewer distractions. Since I don't have to drive 90 minutes, I even wind up working overtime at least that much. Better for them. I also don't mind staying on a little while longer, since I know I don't have to drive home afterwards. Overall, it seems to be a better deal for them *and* for me.
US courts ruled in the Adobe case that Rot13 was a form of copy protection.
Oddly enough, I believe it can then be argued that ROT-26 is also an encryption device:
1. Rot-13 is an encryption device, assuming your comment is correct. 2. ROT-13 is a simple substitution cypher. Decryption is defined as subtracting 13 characters, wrapping at A, where ROT13 encryption is defined as adding 13 characters, wrapping at Z. 3. By extension, any substitution cypher is a DMCA-approved cypher. 4. ROT-1..infinity follow the same algorithm as ROT-13. They simply aren't symmetrical in the way that ROT-13 happens to be (re-encryption leads to plaintext). The symmetry of ROT-13 is purely coincidental due to the fact that 13 is 1/2 of 26. It is not necessarily an intended function of the cypher. This phenomenon will also exhibit periodically in ROT-26, ROT-39, ROT-52, and all later ROT-type algorithms with a key which is a multiple of 13. 5. ROT-26 is included in the set of ROT-1 through ROT-infinity. Coincidentally, it also exhibits the quirk of symmetry, where re-encryption reveals the plaintext.
Q.E.D. - ROT-26 is an approved DMCA cypher, and can be used to protect copyrighted materials.
This post is copyrighted material which has been encrypted using ROT-26. By reading it, you have circumvented my copy protection device. Please cease and desist immediately.
Speaking of retaining the bladder, will new designs incorporate strategically-located zippers? Or are we still going the Depends (tm) route? There's just something non-sexy about being a pee-pee-pants in space.
I don't know about you, but my linux "desktop" is a mess too. It occurs to me that this is a great way to manage all those desktop icons. Feature request for Nautilus/Konq?
Icons used in the last week (for example) stay on the desktop. Icons not used in the past week go into a virtual desktop folder marked 'Older Stuff' or some such. The top level of this folder contains icons used in the last month and a series of (virtual) folders marked 'spreadsheets', 'text files', 'documents', etc. These folders hold icons that haven't been used in over a month (or whatever), grouped by type. Once a user clicks on anything in this folder or the type-based subfolders, it goes back to the desktop automatically, and waits to get aged out again.
Basically just age-based and type-based search folders for desktop icons. Configurable, of course.
Any particular reason they can't just send them to the Open Office ftp site? If they just install the vanilla product, there's nothing to do. Source is available, and probably only patches done by Dell that aren't contributed upstream would have to be made available. Soooo.... where's the problem again?
A prominent climatologist working for The Weather Channel has suggested that on air meteorologists be stripped of their credentials if they express any skepticism concerning global climate change.
... though there are probably other examples with a similar theme.
People love to lie about Al Gore for some reason.
Probably because he's the poster child for environmental alarmism. People likely ascribe anything Gore-esque to the man himself.
I was recently debugging a customer's new DSL connection. They'd just received their service kit, and were having trouble getting it working. I called up Verizon tech support to see if there was anything on their end (there were issues, as it turned out), but part of their support process goes:
Please go to Start->Run and type 'cmd'
Please type 'ipconfig' and tell me what it says
Obviously, I'd already done that before even calling, but I was a little surprised that command lines were part of the standard troubleshooting procedure in Windows. I've been Linux-only for years now, and from all of the "OMG! Windows has a GUI! Linux must eliminate the command line!" stuff I hear on this forum, I guess I'd assumed that there would be no need for such an "antiquated" interface.
Maybe asking someone to type something and read the results isn't so complicated after all -- even for "illiterate" grandmothers (who probably had a better education than today's kids). If it is, I wonder how Verizon copes when "grandmothers" call? [/shockhorror]
I work in NYC, and my last boss told me about a time one of his employees didn't show up for 3 days. Here, people get concerned, but it tends to be balanced out by a respect for privacy (a.k.a. minding your own business), so there's a bit of a lag.
Anyway, on the third day of not being able to contact the guy, my boss called the police to go check the guy's apartment. They found him dead. No neighbors had reported anything, and he lived alone with apparently infrequent contact with relatives. Had my boss not been concerned, the neighbors would have called in a couple more days complaining about the smell.
Unfortunately, not a happy ending, but the point is that this is not a ridiculous concept to us 'coasters, either. We just tend to be a little slower in reacting to it.
I hate to keep preaching it...but one way to cut that 'my company owns me and can call me 24/7'...is to get away from being a direct, salaried employee. I love contracting....my motto is "I never work for free".
If they have to PAY you for ever single hour you work...they will think twice on interfering with your free time...
I emphatically agree. I think the most important aspect is knowing that you are not in a race for promotion, because you work for someone else (myself, in my case). It removes most of the politics from the equation, of which lots of overtime is really a manifestation.
Really -- I'd wager that most people don't work overtime because they love their jobs so much, or because they honestly want to "put one in for the team". They work it because they're trying to keep up appearances -- either that they are responsible enough for that next level position, or that they are "more dedicated" than that other guy, who's competing for this year's bonus/raise/promotion. (In the latter regard, it's sort of a prisoners' dilemma.)
Being a contractor frees you psychologically, as well as physically getting you out the door on time. Now that I've experienced it, I'd be loathe to work any other way.
(and I haven't tried with Evolution lately) I use Evolution every day to talk to Exchange. It uses a connector that apparently screen-scrapes the Outlook Web Access interface (I don't know the implementation details, which is why I say "apparently"). You probably knew that. My real reason for writing is to note my experience: It's adequate at best.
I need to restart Evolution every day because it seems to lose contact with OWA. It crashes randomly. People tell me that my emails "look funny" -- not bad, just different than normal email sent by Outlook. I still can't figure out how to access the firm-maintained address book, though it does seem to work with my personal address book stored on the server.
On the plus side, it's pretty feature complete. Mail, calendar, tasks, etc work really well. There's just a lot of fit and finish and stability work to do before I can really show it off to my co-workers. It's come a long way, though, and I'm sure it'll really come together in the next few years. That puts it squarely into the realm of "adequate", where a forgiving person like myself can use it on a daily basis, but it's not really ready to try to win over Outlook's main userbase of accountants and secretaries.
I work in a major city and live in a suburb. My commute is 90-120 minutes one way, depending on time of day. I actually have a gym membership, and found that I really enjoy going. However, my visits have dropped off sharply (er... non-existent now) because even a "normal" day of work (9 hours) is 12-13 hours long. Add a family into the mix, and it makes getting proper exercise very difficult.
I walk to the train (10-15 minutes) when the weather is nice, and walk once I'm in the city -- total of maybe 20-30 minutes of walking per day, but that's all I can do. Better than nothing, granted, but it's not what I need to be doing.
The killer in the whole thing is the commute, as others have noted. By the time I get home, I'm exhausted. I wind up eating dinner at 8:30-9:00 at night, which is awful for one's health, even though my wife is religious about cooking healthy food for me.
Anecdotally, I go on vacation for two weeks in the summer. During that time, I typically lose more than ten pounds, without doing anything particularly strenuous. Just the fact that I'm not at my sedentary job (programming), sitting on a train for 3 hours, and eating late meals knocks off the weight. If I could take more than two weeks off, I bet I'd knock off 20 pounds or more.
Once my contract is up, I'll be looking for something more local, but I'm not holding my breath.
Everything has a weakness somewhere. The guys designing this stuff have to get it to market eventually, but the guys cracking it have as much time as they need to find the oversight that winds up being the chink in the armor.
That's not a matter of not needing Windows, that's a matter of someone not needing a desktop PC at all. That's true of most computer owners. When computers moved away from the scientific/business user and into the mainstream, they became vastly overcomplicated and expensive for the purposes they generally serve. My Blackberry does most of what people do with their computers, but the interface is a little cramped, which is where your idea comes in.
It seems like WebTV was probably a great idea that was simply before its time. Here to fill the niche now is task-specific Linux desktops (Internet client, Business Workstation, Scientific Workstation, Audio Pro workstation, etc), where a given distro has pre-defined package sets to fill the most likely needs of a given class of user. I think that's why people need to stop shying away from trying to convert people to "Linux on the Desktop", and to start looking for classes of users where this is feasible. A big niche is the web browser/email/IM types who just use their computer as a communication device, and this niche is easily filled by Linux.
Microsoft, being a legal entity can be charged with something, but you cannot jail a corporate entity. The veil of incorporation means that it is unlikely that individuals will be charged either Really, I don't know why this keeps being said, as it certainly isn't true. Corporate veils protect against financial liability to creditors, but they're no shield for illegal activity. Do you really think I could buy a get-out-of-jail-free card for the $600 it took me to set up my corporation? Do you really think that the government would grant such a "license to kill" as cheaply and easily as a few forms and less than $1000? Not a bad investment, really.
Slashdot readers seem to be generally anti-corporation, and assign them "powers" that simply don't exist, just so they can point to how "unfair" this particular legal construct is.
Warranty - and safety - are also the reasons I went with a Kia Sportage. Manufacturer support counts for a lot, the sense that they will stand behind their product. That's also why I've been an OSX user for the last few years. Microsoft would have to make huge changes for me to go back. Apple simply does a better job. There's a bonus, too; old Windows machines make great linux-based servers.:)
I used to own only American cars (one Chevy and two Pontiacs ('93 and '99). The Chevy (Lumina) transmission finally quit at like 260k miles, and I didn't see a point in fixing it (but damn, I loved that car!). The two Grand Am's were alright, but nothing to write home about. After having to towel out my last Pontiac every time it rained, I was finally in a position to spend a little more on a Honda, and it'll take a lot to get me to go back to American cars. I've even gotten a new second Honda so my wife doesn't need to drive me to work.
The handling and generally more "solid" feel of the Hondas compared to the GM cars is out of this world. The American cars always had the stupidest shit that broke (the window and lock buttons, cabin lightbulb socket...), and good luck getting THAT fixed after warranty. And that brings me to the point of this story, and to how it relates to your comment.
My first Honda is a Pilot. It sat in the driveway for a while when gas was $3+/gallon, and the disc brakes developed surface rust. When time came for my inspection, the Honda shop replaced EVERY DISC (and a few other little things) for free -- even though it was out of warranty. The Honda dealer stood behind the car even though I bought it used from a Nissan dealer. I can't tell you how shocked I was when they told me that they wouldn't charge me for the parts and labor!
They stood behind their product, even when they didn't have to. They went above and beyond their obligations (none) to me. I understand that every product has trouble once in a while, but when it does, I want the producer to stand behind it and make it right. Honda has done that for me, and has probably gotten a customer for life.
Detroit found out the hard way that customer relationships are important, and that "Buy American" only goes so far. I'm sure these companies will come back in a few years once they get their act together, but I expect the Asian cars to eat their collective lunches for a while until they figure it out. I think Microsoft is in for a schooling in this regard as well.
Nerds are by definition not in the mainstream, and this news clearly is [mainstream.] It is in a section called "politics", which the death of a former President certainly falls into. I don't really know why Slashdot decided to have this category to begin with, but since it does, you need to expect political news in it.
Broaden your scope, lose your focus. Lose your focus, lose your interest. I don't really mind this, though. I come to this site to read the discussions, much of which is more insightful/inciteful than you'd find in mainstream press. Sometimes it's interesting to me to hear the perspectives of other people who are "outside the mainstream", even if the news itself isn't.
I have the 1680x1050 resolution widescreen. The default drivers finally started supporting 1200xsomething by default, but that's pretty far from the resolution I want anyway. It's nice that the first screen I see is in true color and 1200xsomething, but that's not really what I want.
Also, last I knew, they didn't support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap (exact name?) extension last I knew. This is a requirement for Xgl. Last time I wanted to try beryl, nothing supported this. Now that nVidia's proprietary driver supports it, I haven't had the chance to try it out again, but at least it's there now for when I want it. No dice with the free driver.
Also, the new nvidia-settings program provides easy drag-n-drop, point-n-click setup of additional monitors, which is great for laptops that are only occasionally docked.
To sum it up: nvidia drivers support my resolution, a GL extension I want, and support dynamic monitor configurations. None of these are supplied by the default nv driver.
I want to be clear, though: it pains me that I find myself in this situation. I would much rather use the free version, but it just plain isn't keeping up. I have a nice graphics card and high-res screen that I don't want to give up. Bad enough I can't use my fingerprint scanner and bluetooth radio under Ubuntu, but my video card is non-negotiable.
Slashdot Mirror
With all the talk here on /. about writing Congress about Net Neutrality, why aren't we writing our STATES about it, asking them to legislate in our favor? Then write your Fed Congressman and tell him that the Fed Congress should stay out of it? Yeah, FTC, yeah FCC, yeah Interstate Commerce. Whatever. I got it. But just because they have the *right* to intervene doesn't mean they *should*. They could easily legislate that the states should handle it as they choose and be done with it.
If enough states have the backbone that Maine has, maybe it would become too complex for these companies to bother with it.
Besides, your state is where you have the most voice. It's where you stand the biggest chance of changing anything. The STATE is where Democracy lives, not the Federal government. Think of it this way: if you take the bribery money normally kept for the Fed Congress and multiply the number of pockets by 50, it becomes much more difficult to bribe people. Especially when those people feel much more beholden to their constituents.
Another way of looking at it is that you bank on the fact that the Congress will probably talk it into submission and then pigeonhole it. In the meantime, maybe we can get some states to follow Maine's lead, and have some sensible legislation in place for a while. Perhaps it'll even serve as a model for a Federal law later on.
-CW
Emphasis mine.
I've seen this claim before, but where is the proof? Can anyone actually quantify the amount of money and how big a percentage of the whole it represents? I'm sure there's more, but here's one I found in 30 seconds on TheGoogle:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2006/agric
I don't know what sort of percentage this represents, but I'm sure you'd agree that it's a significant amount of taxpayer money involved, regardless.
This may be true for middle-to-small corporations, but I find that the really gigantic corporations I've worked for don't need a positive cost-benefit for everything. They give to charities, encourage employees to take company time on occasion for volunteer work, and the one I'm contracting to now even owns one of the world's largest private art collections, despite that being fairly tangential to their core business.
I notice the same thing. I get a TON of stuff done when I'm working from home. It's nice to have everything I need in close proximity, better (and cheaper) food, and many fewer distractions. Since I don't have to drive 90 minutes, I even wind up working overtime at least that much. Better for them. I also don't mind staying on a little while longer, since I know I don't have to drive home afterwards. Overall, it seems to be a better deal for them *and* for me.
Just sayin'.
Oddly enough, I believe it can then be argued that ROT-26 is also an encryption device:
1. Rot-13 is an encryption device, assuming your comment is correct.
2. ROT-13 is a simple substitution cypher. Decryption is defined as subtracting 13 characters, wrapping at A, where ROT13 encryption is defined as adding 13 characters, wrapping at Z.
3. By extension, any substitution cypher is a DMCA-approved cypher.
4. ROT-1..infinity follow the same algorithm as ROT-13. They simply aren't symmetrical in the way that ROT-13 happens to be (re-encryption leads to plaintext). The symmetry of ROT-13 is purely coincidental due to the fact that 13 is 1/2 of 26. It is not necessarily an intended function of the cypher. This phenomenon will also exhibit periodically in ROT-26, ROT-39, ROT-52, and all later ROT-type algorithms with a key which is a multiple of 13.
5. ROT-26 is included in the set of ROT-1 through ROT-infinity. Coincidentally, it also exhibits the quirk of symmetry, where re-encryption reveals the plaintext.
Q.E.D. - ROT-26 is an approved DMCA cypher, and can be used to protect copyrighted materials.
This post is copyrighted material which has been encrypted using ROT-26. By reading it, you have circumvented my copy protection device. Please cease and desist immediately.
Speaking of retaining the bladder, will new designs incorporate strategically-located zippers? Or are we still going the Depends (tm) route? There's just something non-sexy about being a pee-pee-pants in space.
I don't know about you, but my linux "desktop" is a mess too. It occurs to me that this is a great way to manage all those desktop icons. Feature request for Nautilus/Konq?
Icons used in the last week (for example) stay on the desktop. Icons not used in the past week go into a virtual desktop folder marked 'Older Stuff' or some such. The top level of this folder contains icons used in the last month and a series of (virtual) folders marked 'spreadsheets', 'text files', 'documents', etc. These folders hold icons that haven't been used in over a month (or whatever), grouped by type. Once a user clicks on anything in this folder or the type-based subfolders, it goes back to the desktop automatically, and waits to get aged out again.
Basically just age-based and type-based search folders for desktop icons. Configurable, of course.
Good? Bad? Ugly? You decide.
Any particular reason they can't just send them to the Open Office ftp site? If they just install the vanilla product, there's nothing to do. Source is available, and probably only patches done by Dell that aren't contributed upstream would have to be made available. Soooo.... where's the problem again?
Probably because he's the poster child for environmental alarmism. People likely ascribe anything Gore-esque to the man himself.
Obviously, I'd already done that before even calling, but I was a little surprised that command lines were part of the standard troubleshooting procedure in Windows. I've been Linux-only for years now, and from all of the "OMG! Windows has a GUI! Linux must eliminate the command line!" stuff I hear on this forum, I guess I'd assumed that there would be no need for such an "antiquated" interface.
Maybe asking someone to type something and read the results isn't so complicated after all -- even for "illiterate" grandmothers (who probably had a better education than today's kids). If it is, I wonder how Verizon copes when "grandmothers" call? [/shockhorror]
I work in NYC, and my last boss told me about a time one of his employees didn't show up for 3 days. Here, people get concerned, but it tends to be balanced out by a respect for privacy (a.k.a. minding your own business), so there's a bit of a lag.
Anyway, on the third day of not being able to contact the guy, my boss called the police to go check the guy's apartment. They found him dead. No neighbors had reported anything, and he lived alone with apparently infrequent contact with relatives. Had my boss not been concerned, the neighbors would have called in a couple more days complaining about the smell.
Unfortunately, not a happy ending, but the point is that this is not a ridiculous concept to us 'coasters, either. We just tend to be a little slower in reacting to it.
If they have to PAY you for ever single hour you work...they will think twice on interfering with your free time...
I emphatically agree. I think the most important aspect is knowing that you are not in a race for promotion, because you work for someone else (myself, in my case). It removes most of the politics from the equation, of which lots of overtime is really a manifestation.Really -- I'd wager that most people don't work overtime because they love their jobs so much, or because they honestly want to "put one in for the team". They work it because they're trying to keep up appearances -- either that they are responsible enough for that next level position, or that they are "more dedicated" than that other guy, who's competing for this year's bonus/raise/promotion. (In the latter regard, it's sort of a prisoners' dilemma.)
Being a contractor frees you psychologically, as well as physically getting you out the door on time. Now that I've experienced it, I'd be loathe to work any other way.
Hah! My favorite quote: "This is not a specification; this is a DNA sequence."
Nice. Great article, too. Thanks for the link.
Don't you mean "sosumi" ?
I need to restart Evolution every day because it seems to lose contact with OWA. It crashes randomly. People tell me that my emails "look funny" -- not bad, just different than normal email sent by Outlook. I still can't figure out how to access the firm-maintained address book, though it does seem to work with my personal address book stored on the server.
On the plus side, it's pretty feature complete. Mail, calendar, tasks, etc work really well. There's just a lot of fit and finish and stability work to do before I can really show it off to my co-workers. It's come a long way, though, and I'm sure it'll really come together in the next few years. That puts it squarely into the realm of "adequate", where a forgiving person like myself can use it on a daily basis, but it's not really ready to try to win over Outlook's main userbase of accountants and secretaries.
"strength" != "virtue"
Someone can be a good liar, but that's not a good thing. Get it?
I work in a major city and live in a suburb. My commute is 90-120 minutes one way, depending on time of day. I actually have a gym membership, and found that I really enjoy going. However, my visits have dropped off sharply (er... non-existent now) because even a "normal" day of work (9 hours) is 12-13 hours long. Add a family into the mix, and it makes getting proper exercise very difficult.
I walk to the train (10-15 minutes) when the weather is nice, and walk once I'm in the city -- total of maybe 20-30 minutes of walking per day, but that's all I can do. Better than nothing, granted, but it's not what I need to be doing.
The killer in the whole thing is the commute, as others have noted. By the time I get home, I'm exhausted. I wind up eating dinner at 8:30-9:00 at night, which is awful for one's health, even though my wife is religious about cooking healthy food for me.
Anecdotally, I go on vacation for two weeks in the summer. During that time, I typically lose more than ten pounds, without doing anything particularly strenuous. Just the fact that I'm not at my sedentary job (programming), sitting on a train for 3 hours, and eating late meals knocks off the weight. If I could take more than two weeks off, I bet I'd knock off 20 pounds or more.
Once my contract is up, I'll be looking for something more local, but I'm not holding my breath.
Everything has a weakness somewhere. The guys designing this stuff have to get it to market eventually, but the guys cracking it have as much time as they need to find the oversight that winds up being the chink in the armor.
It seems like WebTV was probably a great idea that was simply before its time. Here to fill the niche now is task-specific Linux desktops (Internet client, Business Workstation, Scientific Workstation, Audio Pro workstation, etc), where a given distro has pre-defined package sets to fill the most likely needs of a given class of user. I think that's why people need to stop shying away from trying to convert people to "Linux on the Desktop", and to start looking for classes of users where this is feasible. A big niche is the web browser/email/IM types who just use their computer as a communication device, and this niche is easily filled by Linux.
Slashdot readers seem to be generally anti-corporation, and assign them "powers" that simply don't exist, just so they can point to how "unfair" this particular legal construct is.
Warranty - and safety - are also the reasons I went with a Kia Sportage. Manufacturer support counts for a lot, the sense that they will stand behind their product. That's also why I've been an OSX user for the last few years. Microsoft would have to make huge changes for me to go back. Apple simply does a better job. There's a bonus, too; old Windows machines make great linux-based servers. :)
I used to own only American cars (one Chevy and two Pontiacs ('93 and '99). The Chevy (Lumina) transmission finally quit at like 260k miles, and I didn't see a point in fixing it (but damn, I loved that car!). The two Grand Am's were alright, but nothing to write home about. After having to towel out my last Pontiac every time it rained, I was finally in a position to spend a little more on a Honda, and it'll take a lot to get me to go back to American cars. I've even gotten a new second Honda so my wife doesn't need to drive me to work.The handling and generally more "solid" feel of the Hondas compared to the GM cars is out of this world. The American cars always had the stupidest shit that broke (the window and lock buttons, cabin lightbulb socket...), and good luck getting THAT fixed after warranty. And that brings me to the point of this story, and to how it relates to your comment.
My first Honda is a Pilot. It sat in the driveway for a while when gas was $3+/gallon, and the disc brakes developed surface rust. When time came for my inspection, the Honda shop replaced EVERY DISC (and a few other little things) for free -- even though it was out of warranty. The Honda dealer stood behind the car even though I bought it used from a Nissan dealer. I can't tell you how shocked I was when they told me that they wouldn't charge me for the parts and labor!
They stood behind their product, even when they didn't have to. They went above and beyond their obligations (none) to me. I understand that every product has trouble once in a while, but when it does, I want the producer to stand behind it and make it right. Honda has done that for me, and has probably gotten a customer for life.
Detroit found out the hard way that customer relationships are important, and that "Buy American" only goes so far. I'm sure these companies will come back in a few years once they get their act together, but I expect the Asian cars to eat their collective lunches for a while until they figure it out. I think Microsoft is in for a schooling in this regard as well.
Ouch.
*wipes egg from face*
That's what I get for writing this stuff from memory.
I have the 1680x1050 resolution widescreen. The default drivers finally started supporting 1200xsomething by default, but that's pretty far from the resolution I want anyway. It's nice that the first screen I see is in true color and 1200xsomething, but that's not really what I want.
Also, last I knew, they didn't support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap (exact name?) extension last I knew. This is a requirement for Xgl. Last time I wanted to try beryl, nothing supported this. Now that nVidia's proprietary driver supports it, I haven't had the chance to try it out again, but at least it's there now for when I want it. No dice with the free driver.
Also, the new nvidia-settings program provides easy drag-n-drop, point-n-click setup of additional monitors, which is great for laptops that are only occasionally docked.
To sum it up: nvidia drivers support my resolution, a GL extension I want, and support dynamic monitor configurations. None of these are supplied by the default nv driver.
I want to be clear, though: it pains me that I find myself in this situation. I would much rather use the free version, but it just plain isn't keeping up. I have a nice graphics card and high-res screen that I don't want to give up. Bad enough I can't use my fingerprint scanner and bluetooth radio under Ubuntu, but my video card is non-negotiable.