The strange thing is that I switched to Gentoo so that I could get the laptop stuff working. At least Gentoo is well documented and configurable. I found no distro that worked perfectly with everything on my laptop, including Ubuntu. (I was especially disappointed with Ubuntu because it had no wpa support out of the box.) But this was one or two Ubuntu releases ago, so it has hopefully improved since then. I'lld definitely check out the Ubuntu laptop project, thanks.
If I may be quite immodest, please take a look at the piece linked in my sig. It is in progress, but what's already there should be helpful. I can also use your comments!
You linked to suspend2. Actually swsusp and suspend2 are different. swsusp is in the main sources from kernel.org. It suspends to disk. suspend2 also suspends to disk, but also has additional features like compression and eye candy. It is not in the main sources from kernel.org so you have to patch your kernel or see if your distro offers a kernel already patched with suspend2 sources (Gentoo does, for example.)
On another note, suspend to ram is built in to the main sources. There's only one implementation of that.
Configuring suspend can be time consuming trial and error. What I think we need is a laptop distro, or at least some sort of app that sees what kind of laptop you have and automatically configures suspend, multimedia buttons, wireless, and other things that are peculiar to laptops.
Is there something wrong with the continuous improvement we've seen in GNOME with its six-month release cycle? UNIX is a solid base; is there a need to pull a Vista- or OS X-like move by starting over? "Linux 3.0" or even "Linux 2.8" doesn't turn anything up in Google; should I be worried?
GMail fully deserves its Beta label. I often get "Oops, the system was unable to perform that function" errors. Sometimes I go to the website only to see "Gmail is temporarily unavailable." It's so much better than any other webmail that I put up with the Beta glitches (and hope they don't lose my mail!)
People want to go the web site download a program and run it.
That's what they've been trained to do because with Windows, that's their only option. In my experience, a package manager is a much easier way to install the best software.
But for the sake of argument I'll assume you're right. I still don't see the problem. One can download Linux versions for Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Google Earth, Softmaker, and Moneydance, to name a few. Run the Windows-like installer, and the app is installed and ready to use.
Or at the very least pop up an icon for that device.
KDE and GNOME have done this for awhile now.
Menus need to be in a familiar order.
I agree wholeheartedly. I wish Windows devs would take that advice too. Often they jumble menus around or, in an attempt to be cutesy or innovative, they dump the menus altogether. But that's no excuse for the Linux apps.
Give programs names that anyone know what they are.
A valid point, though diminished somewhat by my GNOME menu. My editor is called gEdit (which actually is a clear name) but my menu says "Text Editor". Bizarre names haven't stopped adoption of apps like Skype, or Quicken. That said, I do think the name of the GIMP should be changed because people waste time arguing about it. NuImage would be nice.
most people know how to use Windows so Windows is easy
No way. If Windows were so easy, there wouldn't be rows of books about it. QVC wouldn't be selling DVDs to teach Windows use. Computers are complex things, and it takes effort to learn how to use them. If people don't want something complex, then they can buy a CD player instead of downloading music off the Net; they can use a typewriter instead of a word processor; they can send a letter rather than email. Combining all these functions into a single box makes it complex, whether it's Windows, Mac or Linux.
What's this allofmp3 site? I never heard of it! Whoa, it's right here on Yahoo News, so lots of people must be using it. Well, let me take a look at it...hmmm, looks pretty neat! I pay a low price and the MP3s have no copy protection. I don't have to buy CDs or use iTunes anymore just so I can get music that will play on my iPod. They've got a great selection, too. It's WAY easier to use than file sharing, because the download is pretty fast, the selection is better, and I don't have to worry about fake files or viruses either.
Wow, allofmp3.com. I'm sure glad the record companies sued them and that the news story printed the name of the website. I wouldn't have heard of them, but now they've got a new customer!
Though I see what you're saying, I doubt this is the case because the workbook is filled with extremely simple formulas. The only formula in there that's more complex than multiplication of three cells is a VLOOKUP function--that's the function that KSpread did not have.
The non-Excel spreadsheets seem to choke simply because the workbook is so huge.
By the way, what I'm doing with this thing is amortizing five variable-rate loans. I first tried to write it more compactly, but that was a bear to debug. When I simplified it by using a single row for every day of the loan, it fell into place very quickly. But 365 days * 20 years per loan * 5 loans = 36,500 rows. I've since been told of a more compact way to do this, but I've put off rewriting the sheet, in part because Excel handles it just fine.
Naa, News.com gets its facts straight. Plus, a technical detail is hardly "ancillary" for a technical website written for a technical audience. And I cherrypicked that example because I haven't read Ars in over a year due to that error and many others.
I've got a huge (17.5MB) spreadsheet that Excel handles, no problem. Excel takes about five seconds to open it and recalculates it in about a second.
No Linux program I tried could handle this spreadsheet. Gnumeric and OOo both choke on it. If they even load it, they then take several minutes to recalculate it. KSpread doesn't even have all the functions that are in the sheet.
So I was eager to try this new spreadsheet--PlanMaker, they call it. I downloaded it. Installation was really easy (to me, refuting the people who claim that it's too hard for ISVs to release proprietary binaries for Linux.)
Planmaker has now been cranking one of my cores at 100% for about five minutes, just trying to get this worksheet open. Still hasn't opened it. Remember that Excel does this in about five seconds.
If Gnumeric is any indicator, converting from the proprietary Excel file format isn't the problem. Gnumeric performed worse in its native XML format than it did with the Excel format.
Yes, I can already see holier-than-thou geek saying that I shouldn't have a 17.5MB spreadsheet and, to tell the truth, this sheet is not as efficiently written as it could be. But part of the value of spreadsheets is that they allow non-geeks to put some simple data models together. Spreadsheets need to be able to cope with inefficiently written sheets.
Excel can cope; nothing else can. Maybe Crossover is the next option to try.
Quality journalism, right. From the same source that, when faced with the Sony rootkit, said that LAME is an MP3 player.
If this were not a tech news site I would have excused an error like that. From a site like Ars it is not excusable. And it hasn't even been corrected, even though a year has passed and comments indicated the error.
"if the magazine had decided to go with an individual, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the likely choice. "It just felt to me a little off selecting him," Stengel said."
Without a chroot? How? Opera is my only problem -- I don't want to bother with chroot environments, so I'm stuck with the statically linked 32-bit version. The Opera people don't make it a priority to release a 64-bit version, unfortunately.
On Gentoo at least, there are several libraries that emulate a x86 environment on amd64. Portage installs these as needed. Also, when glibc compiles, you get both amd64 and x86 versions of many (if not all) libraries. This is how 32-bit Firefox works in Gentoo, without a chroot (though the Firefox is precompiled, unlike almost all other Gentoo software.)
I know it's popular to bash cable operators, but I've never had any major problems with Comcast. No company is perfect. Their tech support generally is incredibly stupid. Fortunately it seems their network engineers are more on the ball, as outages are rare and seldom last long. I would switch to Verizon if I had that option, because their upload speed is faster. Unfortunately the FiOS is not available in my apartment building, even though fiber is in the area generally.
You can get Internet only. However, the surcharge is slightly *more* than it costs to just get the basic cable (which has the major networks, public access, and CSPAN.) So you might as well just get the basic cable. Seems to me to be some sort of scheme Comcast uses to push up its subscriber numbers.
A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. Excel was trying to emulate quattro pro and lotus 123, lotus 123 was trying to emulate visicalc.
Yeah, but Excel and 123 both brought in new features that spurred their adoption.
Excel ran in Windows, a nice colorful interface with pretty buttons. It was the first spreadsheet to allow the user to select fonts. 123 was much faster than Visicalc.
123 and, later, Excel didn't take over exclusively because they mimicked the older competitor. Mimicry was part of it, but new features led to adoption of the new product. What new features is OOo bringing in that will spur its adoption? None. All it's got going for it right now is price. And current experience is indicating that this feature is not one that is making much of a difference.
I do agree that Excel kicks ass--or at least that nothing else has come close to it. Every other spreadsheet I have used for Linux is inferior.
But I think it's futile to try to create an Excel knockoff. No one is going to beat Excel at its own game. Look at all the top-notch Linux and open-source software:
* text editors, like Vim and Emacs. These both come from a long Unix tradition. They're not trying to mimic a proprietary app. Both have unique features you can't find anywhere else. * Firefox. It didn't try to mimic IE. It introduced tabbed browsing (before IE did, anyway--yes, Opera had it first) and has a thriving extensions scene (which Opera and IE do not.) * Apache. There was and is nothing comparable. * text procesing, like LaTeX. Has a long Unix tradition; isn't trying to mimic anything. * X. I know of nothing else that has its robust network transparency. That certainly isn't mimicking Windows.
Now, what top-shelf open source programs got there by trying to emulate a dominant proprietary application? Maybe Samba. Any others?
If Gnumeric, OOo, and Kspread are any indication, cloning Excel is a futile exercise.
I think the best thing that might happen to all these programs is the new MS Office ribbons. If open source doesn't try to emulate ribbons, but instead goes off in a new direction, there might be hope. If they try to clone ribbons, we're doomed.
You are right about LaTeX. It doesn't try to beat word processors at their own game--and why should it? Unix text processing has a much longer history than WYSIWYG word processors.
Similarly, Ledger doesn't try to beat Quicken or MS Money at their own game. It uses a completely different paradigm (the command line, and a plain text data file) and does it very well. Gnucash, on the other hand, plays the Quicken and MS Money game and, I would argue, does not measure up.
But Gnumeric really is an Excel clone, just as OOo Calc is an Excel clone. I'd argue Gnumeric is a better Excel clone than OOo Calc, but it's still just an Excel clone. Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone? What this would look like, I don't know. I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.
The other big "office suite" programs--word processing, email--have Unix alternatives that use a plain-text paradigm. The spreadsheet, at least to my knowledge, has no such Unix alternative. The closest things I can think of are awk and Gnuplot, but unlike LaTeX's ability to replace a word processor, I can't imagine using awk and Gnuplot in place of a spreadsheet.
Maybe open-source is doomed to try to emulate Excel?
I agree with you; CR is generally worth reading but sometimes their ratings leave a lot to be desired. Take the cell phone rating article that accompanied this one, for example. It rated phones without even considering an attribute that a lot of people consider very important: the size of the unit. The report doesn't even give the dimensions or the weight of the phones. They rated the phones as a nerd would: the more features, the better. Then the report complained that one of the camera phones didn't have very many megapixels. WHO CARES?? Like you'll ever get a decent photo out of that plastic pinhole lens! The lens quality matters much more than the megapixels, especially on such small images, and I'm surprised they couldn't see this elementary fact.
Other examples abound: they rate supermarkets, but these will vary widely in quality. They rate food, but tastes differ.
My favorite thing about CR, though, is that this "consumer advocate" organization has a homepage that says it's best viewed with IE or Netscape. Fortunately I've never had any problems using it with Firefox.
Remember that the cost of the phone is included in a contract, and that's why you get the termination fee if you cancel early.
Good theory. In practice, though: 1) the termination fee is not proportionate to the equipment subsidy. Cheap LG garbage phone incurs the same early termination fee that a top-of-the-line Blackberry has. 2) early termination fee is not fully prorated. Originally all of them were not prorated at all. Now Verizon, at least, prorates it, but even if I cancel one month before the contract is up, I still pay a $55 termination fee. 3) you still pay an early termination fee even if you brought your own equipment in with you. This happened to me with Sprint (I know, I was stupid not to get a new phone, but I actually liked my old monochrome phone.) 4) when the contract is up, I'm left with a device that generally works only with a particular carrier, unless I go through great hassle to try to "unlock" the device.
One solution to all this is prepaid, which generally has rates that are an even bigger ripoff--even though there is no credit risk for the carrier.
Why is this getting modded funny? It's insightful that the two websites associated with this video (plone, archive.org) are saying "open source" this, "open source" that, and yet they are not even offering the option of open source codecs. Choices are mp3, Flash, Quicktime. The sites are obviously throwing "open source" around while not realizing the importance of promoting it.
And yes, it does have practical ramifications. If I want to download the video, that's not easy in Flash, and getting Quicktime to play in Linux is absolute hell.
Slashdot Mirror
The strange thing is that I switched to Gentoo so that I could get the laptop stuff working. At least Gentoo is well documented and configurable. I found no distro that worked perfectly with everything on my laptop, including Ubuntu. (I was especially disappointed with Ubuntu because it had no wpa support out of the box.) But this was one or two Ubuntu releases ago, so it has hopefully improved since then. I'lld definitely check out the Ubuntu laptop project, thanks.
If I may be quite immodest, please take a look at the piece linked in my sig. It is in progress, but what's already there should be helpful. I can also use your comments!
Check out swsusp
You linked to suspend2. Actually swsusp and suspend2 are different. swsusp is in the main sources from kernel.org. It suspends to disk. suspend2 also suspends to disk, but also has additional features like compression and eye candy. It is not in the main sources from kernel.org so you have to patch your kernel or see if your distro offers a kernel already patched with suspend2 sources (Gentoo does, for example.)
On another note, suspend to ram is built in to the main sources. There's only one implementation of that.
Configuring suspend can be time consuming trial and error. What I think we need is a laptop distro, or at least some sort of app that sees what kind of laptop you have and automatically configures suspend, multimedia buttons, wireless, and other things that are peculiar to laptops.
He forgot how movie computers are always beeping and emitting other odd sounds at useless moments.
Is there something wrong with the continuous improvement we've seen in GNOME with its six-month release cycle? UNIX is a solid base; is there a need to pull a Vista- or OS X-like move by starting over? "Linux 3.0" or even "Linux 2.8" doesn't turn anything up in Google; should I be worried?
GMail fully deserves its Beta label. I often get "Oops, the system was unable to perform that function" errors. Sometimes I go to the website only to see "Gmail is temporarily unavailable." It's so much better than any other webmail that I put up with the Beta glitches (and hope they don't lose my mail!)
People want to go the web site download a program and run it.
That's what they've been trained to do because with Windows, that's their only option. In my experience, a package manager is a much easier way to install the best software.
But for the sake of argument I'll assume you're right. I still don't see the problem. One can download Linux versions for Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Google Earth, Softmaker, and Moneydance, to name a few. Run the Windows-like installer, and the app is installed and ready to use.
Or at the very least pop up an icon for that device.
KDE and GNOME have done this for awhile now.
Menus need to be in a familiar order.
I agree wholeheartedly. I wish Windows devs would take that advice too. Often they jumble menus around or, in an attempt to be cutesy or innovative, they dump the menus altogether. But that's no excuse for the Linux apps.
Give programs names that anyone know what they are.
A valid point, though diminished somewhat by my GNOME menu. My editor is called gEdit (which actually is a clear name) but my menu says "Text Editor". Bizarre names haven't stopped adoption of apps like Skype, or Quicken. That said, I do think the name of the GIMP should be changed because people waste time arguing about it. NuImage would be nice.
most people know how to use Windows so Windows is easy
No way. If Windows were so easy, there wouldn't be rows of books about it. QVC wouldn't be selling DVDs to teach Windows use. Computers are complex things, and it takes effort to learn how to use them. If people don't want something complex, then they can buy a CD player instead of downloading music off the Net; they can use a typewriter instead of a word processor; they can send a letter rather than email. Combining all these functions into a single box makes it complex, whether it's Windows, Mac or Linux.
What's this allofmp3 site? I never heard of it! Whoa, it's right here on Yahoo News, so lots of people must be using it. Well, let me take a look at it...hmmm, looks pretty neat! I pay a low price and the MP3s have no copy protection. I don't have to buy CDs or use iTunes anymore just so I can get music that will play on my iPod. They've got a great selection, too. It's WAY easier to use than file sharing, because the download is pretty fast, the selection is better, and I don't have to worry about fake files or viruses either.
Wow, allofmp3.com. I'm sure glad the record companies sued them and that the news story printed the name of the website. I wouldn't have heard of them, but now they've got a new customer!
Oh, and Gnumeric developer Jody Goldberg said something about how Gnumeric is slower due to the way it uses memory:
0 487
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=69979&cid=637
Maybe I will take her up on her offer by passing her my spreadsheet to see if this can be improved.
Though I see what you're saying, I doubt this is the case because the workbook is filled with extremely simple formulas. The only formula in there that's more complex than multiplication of three cells is a VLOOKUP function--that's the function that KSpread did not have.
The non-Excel spreadsheets seem to choke simply because the workbook is so huge.
By the way, what I'm doing with this thing is amortizing five variable-rate loans. I first tried to write it more compactly, but that was a bear to debug. When I simplified it by using a single row for every day of the loan, it fell into place very quickly. But 365 days * 20 years per loan * 5 loans = 36,500 rows. I've since been told of a more compact way to do this, but I've put off rewriting the sheet, in part because Excel handles it just fine.
Naa, News.com gets its facts straight. Plus, a technical detail is hardly "ancillary" for a technical website written for a technical audience. And I cherrypicked that example because I haven't read Ars in over a year due to that error and many others.
I've got a huge (17.5MB) spreadsheet that Excel handles, no problem. Excel takes about five seconds to open it and recalculates it in about a second.
No Linux program I tried could handle this spreadsheet. Gnumeric and OOo both choke on it. If they even load it, they then take several minutes to recalculate it. KSpread doesn't even have all the functions that are in the sheet.
So I was eager to try this new spreadsheet--PlanMaker, they call it. I downloaded it. Installation was really easy (to me, refuting the people who claim that it's too hard for ISVs to release proprietary binaries for Linux.)
Planmaker has now been cranking one of my cores at 100% for about five minutes, just trying to get this worksheet open. Still hasn't opened it. Remember that Excel does this in about five seconds.
If Gnumeric is any indicator, converting from the proprietary Excel file format isn't the problem. Gnumeric performed worse in its native XML format than it did with the Excel format.
Yes, I can already see holier-than-thou geek saying that I shouldn't have a 17.5MB spreadsheet and, to tell the truth, this sheet is not as efficiently written as it could be. But part of the value of spreadsheets is that they allow non-geeks to put some simple data models together. Spreadsheets need to be able to cope with inefficiently written sheets.
Excel can cope; nothing else can. Maybe Crossover is the next option to try.
Planmaker *still* hasn't opened the sheet.
Quality journalism, right. From the same source that, when faced with the Sony rootkit, said that LAME is an MP3 player.
If this were not a tech news site I would have excused an error like that. From a site like Ars it is not excusable. And it hasn't even been corrected, even though a year has passed and comments indicated the error.
Says Time editor:
i me_person_of_year
"if the magazine had decided to go with an individual, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the likely choice. "It just felt to me a little off selecting him," Stengel said."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061217/ap_on_re_us/t
Without a chroot? How? Opera is my only problem -- I don't want to bother with chroot environments, so I'm stuck with the statically linked 32-bit version. The Opera people don't make it a priority to release a 64-bit version, unfortunately.
On Gentoo at least, there are several libraries that emulate a x86 environment on amd64. Portage installs these as needed. Also, when glibc compiles, you get both amd64 and x86 versions of many (if not all) libraries. This is how 32-bit Firefox works in Gentoo, without a chroot (though the Firefox is precompiled, unlike almost all other Gentoo software.)
I know it's popular to bash cable operators, but I've never had any major problems with Comcast. No company is perfect. Their tech support generally is incredibly stupid. Fortunately it seems their network engineers are more on the ball, as outages are rare and seldom last long. I would switch to Verizon if I had that option, because their upload speed is faster. Unfortunately the FiOS is not available in my apartment building, even though fiber is in the area generally.
You can get Internet only. However, the surcharge is slightly *more* than it costs to just get the basic cable (which has the major networks, public access, and CSPAN.) So you might as well just get the basic cable. Seems to me to be some sort of scheme Comcast uses to push up its subscriber numbers.
That's the name of the distro, not Debian Linux.
A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet. Excel was trying to emulate quattro pro and lotus 123, lotus 123 was trying to emulate visicalc.
Yeah, but Excel and 123 both brought in new features that spurred their adoption.
Excel ran in Windows, a nice colorful interface with pretty buttons. It was the first spreadsheet to allow the user to select fonts. 123 was much faster than Visicalc.
123 and, later, Excel didn't take over exclusively because they mimicked the older competitor. Mimicry was part of it, but new features led to adoption of the new product. What new features is OOo bringing in that will spur its adoption? None. All it's got going for it right now is price. And current experience is indicating that this feature is not one that is making much of a difference.
I do agree that Excel kicks ass--or at least that nothing else has come close to it. Every other spreadsheet I have used for Linux is inferior.
But I think it's futile to try to create an Excel knockoff. No one is going to beat Excel at its own game. Look at all the top-notch Linux and open-source software:
* text editors, like Vim and Emacs. These both come from a long Unix tradition. They're not trying to mimic a proprietary app. Both have unique features you can't find anywhere else.
* Firefox. It didn't try to mimic IE. It introduced tabbed browsing (before IE did, anyway--yes, Opera had it first) and has a thriving extensions scene (which Opera and IE do not.)
* Apache. There was and is nothing comparable.
* text procesing, like LaTeX. Has a long Unix tradition; isn't trying to mimic anything.
* X. I know of nothing else that has its robust network transparency. That certainly isn't mimicking Windows.
Now, what top-shelf open source programs got there by trying to emulate a dominant proprietary application? Maybe Samba. Any others?
If Gnumeric, OOo, and Kspread are any indication, cloning Excel is a futile exercise.
I think the best thing that might happen to all these programs is the new MS Office ribbons. If open source doesn't try to emulate ribbons, but instead goes off in a new direction, there might be hope. If they try to clone ribbons, we're doomed.
You are right about LaTeX. It doesn't try to beat word processors at their own game--and why should it? Unix text processing has a much longer history than WYSIWYG word processors.
Similarly, Ledger doesn't try to beat Quicken or MS Money at their own game. It uses a completely different paradigm (the command line, and a plain text data file) and does it very well. Gnucash, on the other hand, plays the Quicken and MS Money game and, I would argue, does not measure up.
But Gnumeric really is an Excel clone, just as OOo Calc is an Excel clone. I'd argue Gnumeric is a better Excel clone than OOo Calc, but it's still just an Excel clone. Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone? What this would look like, I don't know. I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.
The other big "office suite" programs--word processing, email--have Unix alternatives that use a plain-text paradigm. The spreadsheet, at least to my knowledge, has no such Unix alternative. The closest things I can think of are awk and Gnuplot, but unlike LaTeX's ability to replace a word processor, I can't imagine using awk and Gnuplot in place of a spreadsheet.
Maybe open-source is doomed to try to emulate Excel?
I agree with you; CR is generally worth reading but sometimes their ratings leave a lot to be desired. Take the cell phone rating article that accompanied this one, for example. It rated phones without even considering an attribute that a lot of people consider very important: the size of the unit. The report doesn't even give the dimensions or the weight of the phones. They rated the phones as a nerd would: the more features, the better. Then the report complained that one of the camera phones didn't have very many megapixels. WHO CARES?? Like you'll ever get a decent photo out of that plastic pinhole lens! The lens quality matters much more than the megapixels, especially on such small images, and I'm surprised they couldn't see this elementary fact.
Other examples abound: they rate supermarkets, but these will vary widely in quality. They rate food, but tastes differ.
My favorite thing about CR, though, is that this "consumer advocate" organization has a homepage that says it's best viewed with IE or Netscape. Fortunately I've never had any problems using it with Firefox.
Remember that the cost of the phone is included in a contract, and that's why you get the termination fee if you cancel early.
Good theory. In practice, though: 1) the termination fee is not proportionate to the equipment subsidy. Cheap LG garbage phone incurs the same early termination fee that a top-of-the-line Blackberry has. 2) early termination fee is not fully prorated. Originally all of them were not prorated at all. Now Verizon, at least, prorates it, but even if I cancel one month before the contract is up, I still pay a $55 termination fee. 3) you still pay an early termination fee even if you brought your own equipment in with you. This happened to me with Sprint (I know, I was stupid not to get a new phone, but I actually liked my old monochrome phone.) 4) when the contract is up, I'm left with a device that generally works only with a particular carrier, unless I go through great hassle to try to "unlock" the device.
One solution to all this is prepaid, which generally has rates that are an even bigger ripoff--even though there is no credit risk for the carrier.
It's no wonder people hate cell phone carriers.
Why is this getting modded funny? It's insightful that the two websites associated with this video (plone, archive.org) are saying "open source" this, "open source" that, and yet they are not even offering the option of open source codecs. Choices are mp3, Flash, Quicktime. The sites are obviously throwing "open source" around while not realizing the importance of promoting it.
And yes, it does have practical ramifications. If I want to download the video, that's not easy in Flash, and getting Quicktime to play in Linux is absolute hell.
*cough*quicktime*cough*
Quicktime!
This is Eben Moglen, general counsel of the FSF. The Archive.org website says "Open Source Video."
And my choices are...YouTube, with proprietary Flash technology, or Quicktime!!