For me, the most striking feature of his review concerned burning DVDs. He claimed that Vista uses a new file format for DVDs that isn't backward compatible with earlier Windows versions, not to mention being incompatible with Linux, Mac, etc. I'm puzzled about why I haven't heard more about this problem if it's real. For those of you running Vista, have you had problems writing data DVDs that work with non-Vista systems? Did you have to choose specifically to use the traditional format when burning the DVD? Is it really non-obvious how to make the traditional format the default as he suggests?
This seems like a show-stopper to me for anyone wanting to exchange data with non-Vista users, especially if the default is to use the Vista-only format. The fact that I haven't heard this complaint before makes me suspicious that it's something unique to his setup, but not being a Windows user I have no basis to judge.
Back when the issue of Internet filtering became a matter of widespread public discussion, some fifteen years ago now, there were suggestions that filtering software be developed that would enable people to subscribe to filtering lists. The expectation was that different groups would have different agendas and thus publish different lists. People wishing to adopt filtering could then subscribe to lists based on their own needs and beliefs; some might choose the Christian Coalition's list, some the list published by Planned Parenthood. Support for this system could be built into browsers through a mechanism like AdBlock, or perhaps better, supported by a DNS-like system in much the same way spam blacklists function today. I thought these ideas had a lot of merit in that they worked the way the Internet has always worked, by decentralizing the decision-making process and putting it in the hands of the end-users. Sadly I've not seen many efforts in this direction over the years since these ideas were first proposed.
And for those of you who don't see the point of such a study, consider that Einstein, Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (who founded the Dada movement) all lived within spitting distance of one another at one point in time.
This historical fact is the basis for one of the best nights of theatre I've ever experienced, watching the London Shakespeare Company's performance of Tom Stoppard's Travesties with John Wood in the leading role. Einstein doesn't appear in the play, but the other three do. There's a remarkable exchange between Lenin and Tzara on the role of the arts in society.
This is likely the last big contract outstanding and could add to the sale price of the election division when Diebold decides to sell it. The new CEO already has said in Fortune magazine that the election division is not a long term strategic fit for the company.
This is the best answer I've seen so far to my question in the earlier thread asking why Diebold was putting up such a fuss over such a small contract. Now that the Massachusetts courts aren't showing them much sympathy, the suit doesn't even seem like a good strategy from the perspective of bumping up the price of the election division.
I'm still puzzled why a $9 million contract is described as "big." Wouldn't a contract with Florida, Texas, California, or New York, just to name a few, be a lot bigger than this? Have all the big jurisdictions already made their choices?
I'd bet that selling ATMs to a newly-formed bank would bring in a whole lot more than $9 million.
People who live in parliamentary democracies like Canada and Britain often express puzzlement at the drive toward e-voting in American elections. That's because voting in parliamentary elections usually consists of casting one vote for the local MP candidate. In US elections, there are often a dozen or so different offices being voted on, not to mention a variety of referenda, so the ballot is necessarily more complex.
Moreover ballot "reformers" at the end of the nineteenth century pressed for the introduction of the "office-block" ballot format, where the race for each office is presented separately. At the time "party-list" ballots were much more common and allowed someone to vote for all the candidates of a single party by checking one box. This enabled parties to mobilize less well-educated voters, many of them recent immigrants, since party-list ballots didn't require a careful reading of multiple offices in order to cast a party-line ticket. Much of this reform effort reflected nativist sentiments among the more prosperous American middle class who feared the transformation of politics that might take place if European immigrants with "dangerous" social ideologies might take power. Party-list ballots are used in many parliamentary democracies, particularly those with proportional representation systems, but aren't at all common here in the US.
No successful Linux machine will sell outside of businesses if it doesn't come with support for media playback out of the box. That means licensing all the proprietary formats and codecs in advance. I can't imagine a model where you would buy a laptop with, say, plain-vanilla Fedora or Ubuntu on it, and the manufacturer points you to some server outside the US ("wink, wink") to download what you need to watch a DVD. The DMCA and similar US laws would make this a dicey proposition legally, and not one any successful company's attorneys could possibly endorse.
On the hardware side, things are much brighter since Intel opened its video and wifi hardware. My latest Inspiron has Intel graphics, and I specifically requested an Intel 3945 wireless card for another $20 or so. It shouldn't be hard for Dell to develop a customized version of some distro that supports these devices flawlessly out-of-the-box. If they choose to go with nVidia or ATI upgrades as well, they'll just ship the proprietary drivers pre-installed. It really doesn't bother me to see the large nVidia logo appear on my screen briefly at boot.
If you don't want to have a computer with proprietary parts, you won't want to buy a pre-installed Linux Dell. Most people, even most Linux users, probably won't care and just want something that works. I don't necessarily expect to see them priced much below an equivalent Windows machine, either, for reasons already discussed here (support costs, lack of subsidized pre-installs, etc.). My time is worth a lot more to me than a few dollars one way or the other. Installing Fedora on that Inspiron for my daughter took at least an hour or two. I'd gladly pay Dell $50 or so to have them do it and guarantee it will work properly when I first turn it on.
Finally, everyone here seems to think we'll be seeing Linux-only machines. I wouldn't be surprised to see dual-boot machines made available at the start, with Vista as the default OS. This would help satisfy Microsoft and let Dell continue to place those revenue-generating items on your Vista desktop and in your task bar.
Aside from games, what applications do you think will be "Vista-only?" Are there many "XP-only" applications, or will most of them also run on Windows 2000? What features in Vista make for a better word processor, spreadsheet, browser, or email client?
My bet is that many developers will avoid making anything Vista-only for a long time to come, since that would just reduce the potential market for their software.
When I heard this story on the morning news here in Boston, my first reaction was, "why are they suing over losing a measly $9 million contract?" My guess is their legal bill if they were to pursue this to the end would easily run to seven figures. According to the article, Diebold's attorney stated that "the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state's office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection." MA Secretary of State Galvin doesn't think there's any reason to re-open this matter; I doubt the courts will either.
What's especially surprising is that this move comes after a recent Diebold SEC filing suggested that Diebold is considering leaving the voting machine business because the bad PR the company has received is starting to affect its much more important ATM business. Banks don't want to put a machine in front of its customers whose manufacturer gets accused of building shoddy voting equipment every time an election is held.
First, I was replying to your question about whether these non-users were older. I was trying to be helpful by pointing to some relevant information, but for some reason known only to you, you thought I was being a wise ass.
Second, whether these employees are well-paid or not is hardly something I can control. They're working for a public health center; no one gets paid well in this line of work. I wish they could be paid well, too, but that's an issue with regards to government funding levels, private insurance costs, etc. None of that is relevant to this discussion.
Third, of course there are ways to control bored employees from surfing. I usually tell my clients that the solution to this problem is management, not technology.
Somehow you seem to think I'm some type of Microsoft shill working for some corporate overlords. Nothing could be further from the truth, but how would you know that since you've never met me, never talked to me, etc. Perhaps I'd take you more seriously if you want to discuss the actual topic in this thread rather than engaging in ad hominem arguments against someone you don't know.
I'm done with this discussion. If you wish to reply, go ahead, but I don't promise to read it or to reply. I don't need to spend any more time on immature arguments like yours.
Non-users of the Internet are older, poorer, and less well-educated than users. Older, poorer and less well-educated people are also less likely to own computers. For those of us who read the reports from the Pew Internet project like the one I just cited, these findings are old news.
With widespread access available to many people in the workplace, some people may well see no need to have a connection at home. One of my clients, a neighborhood health center, has a workforce drawn disproportionately from these less advantaged social groups. The management there is starting to become concerned about the amount of time these people spend surfing eBay, YouTube, etc.
Well, I tried OpenSuSE yesterday. It didn't detect my nVidia card, nor did it configure X to run with any other drivers. Oh, and it also installed/boot onto my secondary hard drive and wiped out 140GB of files. Sure I guess i shouldn't have had the secondary drive in the machine, but really who'd expect a distro to install to a second drive when I gave a nice big 160 all to itself?
I'm back to Fedora 6. Lucky for me the files on the secondary were torrented and replaceable.
I think a lot of you are being too harsh toward this guy.
IT departments are often the first target when people don't get the results they desire, because IT as a whole has lost much of its prestige and clout in firms over the past decade or so. That's why older people keep leaving the profession, and the rate of recruitment among younger people continues to decline.
People who were once in thrall to technology and computing now think it's unreliable and error-prone. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it's because many people are more experienced with computers and with computing problems. They've watched their computers lock up and need rebooting. They've "lost" an important email. They've "lost" an important document. Who are they going to blame?
On top of that, it sounds like the original poster works for a company that assumes, as do many companies and their investors, that every quarter must show better performance than the last. In the real world, of course, economies move up and down. It's only in the fantasy world of corporate America that expectations of ever-increasing growth continue to be the norm. When the fantasy bubble bursts, IT is an easy target.
The Livna repository maintains builds of the nVidia drivers; so far it works well for me under FC6. The only problem I've had is when a new kernel version is released. It takes a day or two for Livna's developers to catch up. I only noticed this the day I happened to reboot my Linux workstation after the kernel was updated by yum the previous night. I rebooted and chose the older kernel version to get started. A quick trip to rpm.livna.org found the newer driver version was then available.
If you want to avoid this hassle entirely, just add "exclude=kernel" to fedora-core.repo. You'll then keep the same working kernel and driver. You might miss a security update, of course, but for single-user machines safely behind a firewall I suspect the danger is small.
I've actually had much bigger problems with Intel's supposedly open-sourced 945GM video under FC6. I can't seem to make the "intel" driver work on my daughter's Dell 640m laptop with a widescreen display no matter what I try. For the moment I'm stuck using vesa which is slower than molasses. I didn't have the same problems with the i810 series.
I'd opine that such a strategy would make YouTube even more liable under the Grokster decision since they could be charged with encouraging copyright infringement.
I don't see how they could have won this case. "Limited" means exactly that. SCOTUS deferred to Congress to determined how long a "limited" copyright should be. How could they have ruled otherwise constitutionally? It's unfortunate that "limited" could eventually mean life of the author plus 999 years, but it's still "limited."
However, I think your interpretation of Grokster is spot on.
I browsed a few videos on YouTube and was surprised to find no advertising appeared. (I made sure AdBlock was turned off just to make sure.) I think if Google were to begin carrying ads on YouTube the Grokster decision would become relevant, though not necessarily determinative. In that decision the Court held that Grokster both profited directly from the violation of copyrights that it enabled, and also that Grokster's marketing strategy specifically encouraged the use of the service to violate copyrights. Even an advertiser-supported YouTube would probably not run afoul of that part of the Grokster ruling.
In the long run, though, YouTube has to start making money for Google. The only plausible models are subscriptions (very unlikely), ads, or direct payment by content creators to carry their material. While we see more branded programming on YouTube these days, I think they may ultimately need to include advertising. At that point the rationale for a DMCA exemption becomes much more murky.
I've already reported on one bug and will probably file a few more reports in the weeks ahead.
As I said, I specifically ordered the Intel 3945 wireless (and 945GM video), but it would not install out of the box. I had to track down the drivers from Intel and other sites. Our last laptop had a 2200 series Intel wireless card which wouldn't install out of the box either because the firmware couldn't be redistributed. As for the video, I don't call offering a site where someone has to download source from a repository and compile the driver particularly friendly to non-technical users. Intel suggests getting a binary version from the distro maintainers, but a search of Linux user forums suggests that finding such a beast has not proved easy for people using a wide range of distros.
While it would be nice to live in a world where mainstream vendors offer pre-installed Linux, and while there might be system manufacturers who offer that alternative, the vast majority of potential Linux users are buying preconfigured systems from major manufacturers. If Linux won't install cleanly on those systems, they won't be trying Linux again any time soon.
As I also said, I'm not a Linux newbie, and I encourage people to consider it as an alternative to Windows all the time. I've installed many different distros on many different systems over the years. Most of the time it's gone smoothly, but sometimes it does not. It's always been a lot easier to install Linux in a server setting where you don't care about video, wireless, etc., than it is to install on a modern workstation where all those things need to work from the beginning. I understand the constraints that proprietary code, patented algorithms, and arcane hardware can impose. All I'm saying is that one can select supposedly "supported" hardware configurations that neverthless pose installation problems for many distros.
Linux works *perfectly* if you can just manage the simple task of *using supported hardware*.
No, it doesn't. I just bought a Dell Inspiron 640m because it came with Intel 945GM graphics. I made sure I had an Intel 3945 wireless card installed as well. Both of these devices are "supported" hardware, yet neither of them worked out of the box. I could fix the wireless issues since I know what I'm doing, but a novice user would be flummoxed.
I'm still unable to get accelerated graphics to work on the 945GM platform. If you ask Intel for the drivers you get pointed to a site that requires you to download the driver source using git and build it yourself. The "intel" driver that's included with Fedora doesn't work correctly either. The older i810 driver generates memory allocation errors if you try to play a video. So I'm stuck with the generic "vesa" driver which can't decode H.264-encoded video at acceptable speeds. None of these were problems with the Vista installation before I ripped it out.
Oh, and I still have to find and install the 915resolution hack to drive the screen at 1200x800 or other wide-screen resolutions. Why isn't that supported at installation? And, I had to submit a bug to the Fedora developers because the screen brightness controls aren't supported either. That issue is still unresolved.
I've been using Linux for over a decade. I'm using "supported" hardware that I chose for this reason. My "out-of-box" experience is still poor. (Oh, and Ubuntu users have similar problems to mine; it's not just a Fedora issue.) Just to see if things had improved, I tried the FC7 beta 2 live-CD version of Fedora. It won't install graphics at all; I get dumped to the prompt.
If I was using some obscure manufacturer's machine, I might be less unhappy. But if Linux distributors want to get their product used, they need to make sure it works out-of-the-box on Dells. If it were up to me, I wouldn't release a distro until I made sure it installed cleanly on all the major Dell laptop and desktop products currently in release. (I'd include HP, and perhaps Gateway, in this list as well.) This might be a financial challenge for smaller distros, but certainly not for companies like RedHat or Canonical. Yes, I know that Dell changes components often, but the default machines have Intel everything. Given that Intel supposedly distributes open-source Linux drivers for all its hardware these days, Linux distros need to install cleanly on plain-vanilla Intel-based machines.
Ah, of course. If I could use my mod points in this discussion, I'd have modded you up.
It does appear that the timezone is set in/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit before/usr is mounted. Well the symlink seemed like a good idea, but that's clearly bad advice on systems that mount/usr separately. Nowadays most distros I've used like Fedora seem just to create a single / partition by default. But I certainly have other machines with a separate/usr partition; guess I'd better copy a few timezone files.
Thanks. I think that this procedure is the same as the one the installer uses where it copies the designated binary timezone data to/etc/localtime.
I honestly don't understand why the configuration scripts don't just create a symlink for/etc/localtime as I described. Creating a static version of/etc/localtime doesn't make much sense if timezone data is dependent on changing political whims. Why not just use a link and update the data in/usr/share/zoneinfo as needed?
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For me, the most striking feature of his review concerned burning DVDs. He claimed that Vista uses a new file format for DVDs that isn't backward compatible with earlier Windows versions, not to mention being incompatible with Linux, Mac, etc. I'm puzzled about why I haven't heard more about this problem if it's real. For those of you running Vista, have you had problems writing data DVDs that work with non-Vista systems? Did you have to choose specifically to use the traditional format when burning the DVD? Is it really non-obvious how to make the traditional format the default as he suggests?
This seems like a show-stopper to me for anyone wanting to exchange data with non-Vista users, especially if the default is to use the Vista-only format. The fact that I haven't heard this complaint before makes me suspicious that it's something unique to his setup, but not being a Windows user I have no basis to judge.
Back when the issue of Internet filtering became a matter of widespread public discussion, some fifteen years ago now, there were suggestions that filtering software be developed that would enable people to subscribe to filtering lists. The expectation was that different groups would have different agendas and thus publish different lists. People wishing to adopt filtering could then subscribe to lists based on their own needs and beliefs; some might choose the Christian Coalition's list, some the list published by Planned Parenthood. Support for this system could be built into browsers through a mechanism like AdBlock, or perhaps better, supported by a DNS-like system in much the same way spam blacklists function today. I thought these ideas had a lot of merit in that they worked the way the Internet has always worked, by decentralizing the decision-making process and putting it in the hands of the end-users. Sadly I've not seen many efforts in this direction over the years since these ideas were first proposed.
And for those of you who don't see the point of such a study, consider that Einstein, Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (who founded the Dada movement) all lived within spitting distance of one another at one point in time.
This historical fact is the basis for one of the best nights of theatre I've ever experienced, watching the London Shakespeare Company's performance of Tom Stoppard's Travesties with John Wood in the leading role. Einstein doesn't appear in the play, but the other three do. There's a remarkable exchange between Lenin and Tzara on the role of the arts in society.
This is likely the last big contract outstanding and could add to the sale price of the election division when Diebold decides to sell it. The new CEO already has said in Fortune magazine that the election division is not a long term strategic fit for the company.
This is the best answer I've seen so far to my question in the earlier thread asking why Diebold was putting up such a fuss over such a small contract. Now that the Massachusetts courts aren't showing them much sympathy, the suit doesn't even seem like a good strategy from the perspective of bumping up the price of the election division.
I'm still puzzled why a $9 million contract is described as "big." Wouldn't a contract with Florida, Texas, California, or New York, just to name a few, be a lot bigger than this? Have all the big jurisdictions already made their choices?
I'd bet that selling ATMs to a newly-formed bank would bring in a whole lot more than $9 million.
People who live in parliamentary democracies like Canada and Britain often express puzzlement at the drive toward e-voting in American elections. That's because voting in parliamentary elections usually consists of casting one vote for the local MP candidate. In US elections, there are often a dozen or so different offices being voted on, not to mention a variety of referenda, so the ballot is necessarily more complex.
Moreover ballot "reformers" at the end of the nineteenth century pressed for the introduction of the "office-block" ballot format, where the race for each office is presented separately. At the time "party-list" ballots were much more common and allowed someone to vote for all the candidates of a single party by checking one box. This enabled parties to mobilize less well-educated voters, many of them recent immigrants, since party-list ballots didn't require a careful reading of multiple offices in order to cast a party-line ticket. Much of this reform effort reflected nativist sentiments among the more prosperous American middle class who feared the transformation of politics that might take place if European immigrants with "dangerous" social ideologies might take power. Party-list ballots are used in many parliamentary democracies, particularly those with proportional representation systems, but aren't at all common here in the US.
No successful Linux machine will sell outside of businesses if it doesn't come with support for media playback out of the box. That means licensing all the proprietary formats and codecs in advance. I can't imagine a model where you would buy a laptop with, say, plain-vanilla Fedora or Ubuntu on it, and the manufacturer points you to some server outside the US ("wink, wink") to download what you need to watch a DVD. The DMCA and similar US laws would make this a dicey proposition legally, and not one any successful company's attorneys could possibly endorse.
On the hardware side, things are much brighter since Intel opened its video and wifi hardware. My latest Inspiron has Intel graphics, and I specifically requested an Intel 3945 wireless card for another $20 or so. It shouldn't be hard for Dell to develop a customized version of some distro that supports these devices flawlessly out-of-the-box. If they choose to go with nVidia or ATI upgrades as well, they'll just ship the proprietary drivers pre-installed. It really doesn't bother me to see the large nVidia logo appear on my screen briefly at boot.
If you don't want to have a computer with proprietary parts, you won't want to buy a pre-installed Linux Dell. Most people, even most Linux users, probably won't care and just want something that works. I don't necessarily expect to see them priced much below an equivalent Windows machine, either, for reasons already discussed here (support costs, lack of subsidized pre-installs, etc.). My time is worth a lot more to me than a few dollars one way or the other. Installing Fedora on that Inspiron for my daughter took at least an hour or two. I'd gladly pay Dell $50 or so to have them do it and guarantee it will work properly when I first turn it on.
Finally, everyone here seems to think we'll be seeing Linux-only machines. I wouldn't be surprised to see dual-boot machines made available at the start, with Vista as the default OS. This would help satisfy Microsoft and let Dell continue to place those revenue-generating items on your Vista desktop and in your task bar.
Aside from games, what applications do you think will be "Vista-only?" Are there many "XP-only" applications, or will most of them also run on Windows 2000? What features in Vista make for a better word processor, spreadsheet, browser, or email client?
My bet is that many developers will avoid making anything Vista-only for a long time to come, since that would just reduce the potential market for their software.
When I heard this story on the morning news here in Boston, my first reaction was, "why are they suing over losing a measly $9 million contract?" My guess is their legal bill if they were to pursue this to the end would easily run to seven figures. According to the article, Diebold's attorney stated that "the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state's office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection." MA Secretary of State Galvin doesn't think there's any reason to re-open this matter; I doubt the courts will either.
What's especially surprising is that this move comes after a recent Diebold SEC filing suggested that Diebold is considering leaving the voting machine business because the bad PR the company has received is starting to affect its much more important ATM business. Banks don't want to put a machine in front of its customers whose manufacturer gets accused of building shoddy voting equipment every time an election is held.
First, I was replying to your question about whether these non-users were older. I was trying to be helpful by pointing to some relevant information, but for some reason known only to you, you thought I was being a wise ass.
Second, whether these employees are well-paid or not is hardly something I can control. They're working for a public health center; no one gets paid well in this line of work. I wish they could be paid well, too, but that's an issue with regards to government funding levels, private insurance costs, etc. None of that is relevant to this discussion.
Third, of course there are ways to control bored employees from surfing. I usually tell my clients that the solution to this problem is management, not technology.
Somehow you seem to think I'm some type of Microsoft shill working for some corporate overlords. Nothing could be further from the truth, but how would you know that since you've never met me, never talked to me, etc. Perhaps I'd take you more seriously if you want to discuss the actual topic in this thread rather than engaging in ad hominem arguments against someone you don't know.
I'm done with this discussion. If you wish to reply, go ahead, but I don't promise to read it or to reply. I don't need to spend any more time on immature arguments like yours.
Non-users of the Internet are older, poorer, and less well-educated than users. Older, poorer and less well-educated people are also less likely to own computers. For those of us who read the reports from the Pew Internet project like the one I just cited, these findings are old news.
With widespread access available to many people in the workplace, some people may well see no need to have a connection at home. One of my clients, a neighborhood health center, has a workforce drawn disproportionately from these less advantaged social groups. The management there is starting to become concerned about the amount of time these people spend surfing eBay, YouTube, etc.
Only on Slashdot would the first reaction to this story be that all those people are sucking free wifi connections.
The real story is why such a large fraction of households don't think they need to, or simply don't want to, connect to the Internet.
Well, I saw the reference to /dev/hdb pass by quickly in the announced partitioning, but by then it was too late.
I found the entire partitioning manager in OpenSuSE much more difficult to use than the one in Fedora/RedHat/CentOS.
Well, I tried OpenSuSE yesterday. It didn't detect my nVidia card, nor did it configure X to run with any other drivers. Oh, and it also installed /boot onto my secondary hard drive and wiped out 140GB of files. Sure I guess i shouldn't have had the secondary drive in the machine, but really who'd expect a distro to install to a second drive when I gave a nice big 160 all to itself?
I'm back to Fedora 6. Lucky for me the files on the secondary were torrented and replaceable.
I think a lot of you are being too harsh toward this guy.
IT departments are often the first target when people don't get the results they desire, because IT as a whole has lost much of its prestige and clout in firms over the past decade or so. That's why older people keep leaving the profession, and the rate of recruitment among younger people continues to decline.
People who were once in thrall to technology and computing now think it's unreliable and error-prone. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it's because many people are more experienced with computers and with computing problems. They've watched their computers lock up and need rebooting. They've "lost" an important email. They've "lost" an important document. Who are they going to blame?
On top of that, it sounds like the original poster works for a company that assumes, as do many companies and their investors, that every quarter must show better performance than the last. In the real world, of course, economies move up and down. It's only in the fantasy world of corporate America that expectations of ever-increasing growth continue to be the norm. When the fantasy bubble bursts, IT is an easy target.
The Livna repository maintains builds of the nVidia drivers; so far it works well for me under FC6. The only problem I've had is when a new kernel version is released. It takes a day or two for Livna's developers to catch up. I only noticed this the day I happened to reboot my Linux workstation after the kernel was updated by yum the previous night. I rebooted and chose the older kernel version to get started. A quick trip to rpm.livna.org found the newer driver version was then available.
If you want to avoid this hassle entirely, just add "exclude=kernel" to fedora-core.repo. You'll then keep the same working kernel and driver. You might miss a security update, of course, but for single-user machines safely behind a firewall I suspect the danger is small.
I've actually had much bigger problems with Intel's supposedly open-sourced 945GM video under FC6. I can't seem to make the "intel" driver work on my daughter's Dell 640m laptop with a widescreen display no matter what I try. For the moment I'm stuck using vesa which is slower than molasses. I didn't have the same problems with the i810 series.
I'd opine that such a strategy would make YouTube even more liable under the Grokster decision since they could be charged with encouraging copyright infringement.
I don't see how they could have won this case. "Limited" means exactly that. SCOTUS deferred to Congress to determined how long a "limited" copyright should be. How could they have ruled otherwise constitutionally? It's unfortunate that "limited" could eventually mean life of the author plus 999 years, but it's still "limited."
However, I think your interpretation of Grokster is spot on.
You need to add another zero to that figure for prime-time shows (see http://www.axcessnews.com/business_082005.shtml).
Yes, it might be argued that format shifting constitutes a "derivative work." See http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/u sc_sec_17_00000103----000-.html.
I browsed a few videos on YouTube and was surprised to find no advertising appeared. (I made sure AdBlock was turned off just to make sure.) I think if Google were to begin carrying ads on YouTube the Grokster decision would become relevant, though not necessarily determinative. In that decision the Court held that Grokster both profited directly from the violation of copyrights that it enabled, and also that Grokster's marketing strategy specifically encouraged the use of the service to violate copyrights. Even an advertiser-supported YouTube would probably not run afoul of that part of the Grokster ruling.
In the long run, though, YouTube has to start making money for Google. The only plausible models are subscriptions (very unlikely), ads, or direct payment by content creators to carry their material. While we see more branded programming on YouTube these days, I think they may ultimately need to include advertising. At that point the rationale for a DMCA exemption becomes much more murky.
You mean, easy like this?
I've already reported on one bug and will probably file a few more reports in the weeks ahead.
As I said, I specifically ordered the Intel 3945 wireless (and 945GM video), but it would not install out of the box. I had to track down the drivers from Intel and other sites. Our last laptop had a 2200 series Intel wireless card which wouldn't install out of the box either because the firmware couldn't be redistributed. As for the video, I don't call offering a site where someone has to download source from a repository and compile the driver particularly friendly to non-technical users. Intel suggests getting a binary version from the distro maintainers, but a search of Linux user forums suggests that finding such a beast has not proved easy for people using a wide range of distros.
While it would be nice to live in a world where mainstream vendors offer pre-installed Linux, and while there might be system manufacturers who offer that alternative, the vast majority of potential Linux users are buying preconfigured systems from major manufacturers. If Linux won't install cleanly on those systems, they won't be trying Linux again any time soon.
As I also said, I'm not a Linux newbie, and I encourage people to consider it as an alternative to Windows all the time. I've installed many different distros on many different systems over the years. Most of the time it's gone smoothly, but sometimes it does not. It's always been a lot easier to install Linux in a server setting where you don't care about video, wireless, etc., than it is to install on a modern workstation where all those things need to work from the beginning. I understand the constraints that proprietary code, patented algorithms, and arcane hardware can impose. All I'm saying is that one can select supposedly "supported" hardware configurations that neverthless pose installation problems for many distros.
Linux works *perfectly* if you can just manage the simple task of *using supported hardware*.
No, it doesn't. I just bought a Dell Inspiron 640m because it came with Intel 945GM graphics. I made sure I had an Intel 3945 wireless card installed as well. Both of these devices are "supported" hardware, yet neither of them worked out of the box. I could fix the wireless issues since I know what I'm doing, but a novice user would be flummoxed.
I'm still unable to get accelerated graphics to work on the 945GM platform. If you ask Intel for the drivers you get pointed to a site that requires you to download the driver source using git and build it yourself. The "intel" driver that's included with Fedora doesn't work correctly either. The older i810 driver generates memory allocation errors if you try to play a video. So I'm stuck with the generic "vesa" driver which can't decode H.264-encoded video at acceptable speeds. None of these were problems with the Vista installation before I ripped it out.
Oh, and I still have to find and install the 915resolution hack to drive the screen at 1200x800 or other wide-screen resolutions. Why isn't that supported at installation? And, I had to submit a bug to the Fedora developers because the screen brightness controls aren't supported either. That issue is still unresolved.
I've been using Linux for over a decade. I'm using "supported" hardware that I chose for this reason. My "out-of-box" experience is still poor. (Oh, and Ubuntu users have similar problems to mine; it's not just a Fedora issue.) Just to see if things had improved, I tried the FC7 beta 2 live-CD version of Fedora. It won't install graphics at all; I get dumped to the prompt.
If I was using some obscure manufacturer's machine, I might be less unhappy. But if Linux distributors want to get their product used, they need to make sure it works out-of-the-box on Dells. If it were up to me, I wouldn't release a distro until I made sure it installed cleanly on all the major Dell laptop and desktop products currently in release. (I'd include HP, and perhaps Gateway, in this list as well.) This might be a financial challenge for smaller distros, but certainly not for companies like RedHat or Canonical. Yes, I know that Dell changes components often, but the default machines have Intel everything. Given that Intel supposedly distributes open-source Linux drivers for all its hardware these days, Linux distros need to install cleanly on plain-vanilla Intel-based machines.
Ah, of course. If I could use my mod points in this discussion, I'd have modded you up.
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit before /usr is mounted. Well the symlink seemed like a good idea, but that's clearly bad advice on systems that mount /usr separately. Nowadays most distros I've used like Fedora seem just to create a single / partition by default. But I certainly have other machines with a separate /usr partition; guess I'd better copy a few timezone files.
It does appear that the timezone is set in
Thanks. I think that this procedure is the same as the one the installer uses where it copies the designated binary timezone data to /etc/localtime.
/etc/localtime as I described. Creating a static version of /etc/localtime doesn't make much sense if timezone data is dependent on changing political whims. Why not just use a link and update the data in /usr/share/zoneinfo as needed?
I honestly don't understand why the configuration scripts don't just create a symlink for