Cad/CAM Pro-E offers a good CAD/CAM package for Linux.
Point given, but this is also kind of a niche.
Compwiz which is about as main stream or soon to be as you can get. Hardware 3D UIs are the way of the future. Totally useless if you are going to run server but pretty nice if you are using a Desktop.
Mainstream? of all the Linux users I've met (of which there are many), I've yet to see someone using Compiz, or any other 3D-accelerated desktop for that matter.
What you want to run VESA?
I don't *want* to, but it's usable at least.
How? You could just use Debian. As an end user you could just install Ubuntu and not install blobs. Any user advanced enough to care about a blob free system can do a custom install to get a blob free system.
Actually, if you read the responses people from the gNewSense team have posted, you'd see that they've found blobs in places they didn't expect them to see, and that they've removed blobs in most upgrades, hinting at the possibility that a blob-free install is harder than just doing a "rm -rf flash*.deb acrobat*.deb" on the apt server.
What are these "horrid tactics," licensing software for less than Microsoft does?
Less? a quick search on Amazon gave me a $87 price for an upgrade version of Windows Vista Home Premium, and $110 for OSX 10.5. Unless you want to argue with the rest of the Apple fans around here that have argued that OSX is merely an upgrade, and not a full version, in which case please tell me so I can go and grab some popcorn.
Trying to force iTunes users to try Safari on Windows?
There, fixed that for you. Ohh, and also the piece of shit known as "Quicktime", but I'll let that one slide since it could, theoretically, maybe actually be required for iTunes.
Releasing software updates faster than most rivals?
Sources? preferably ones that don't have the words "Apple" or "Mac" anywhere within their name.
Processing hundreds of vulnerability reports within a couple months?
Which OS doesn't?
Lay it on the line if you have a grief, don't just suggest evil lurking were none does.
How about suing bloggers simply because they "spoiled" their surprise? silencing criticism within their forums, while pretending there's nothing wrong?
And why the FUCK are you posting random Apple-related ads in all your comments? it's making you look like a first-class astroturfer, which is *not* good for your credibility.
Don't you think if there was any legal angle that could force Apple to license their OS, Dell wouldn't have gone after them at least a year ago?
No. Dell is interested in profit, and why sell an OS that's both more expensive and in less demand than what they currently have? now, they *might* have thought about it had Apple offered to license them OSX for less than what they pay for Windows OEM licenses, but given how long it took them to offer Linux (which is not only free, but with higher demand in the business sector), the odds aren't that high either.
If Psystar tried to sell computers with OSX it's because they're a small player trying to profit from a small niche that was as-of-then unfulfilled, but the only large manufacturer with any incentive for selling OSX instead of Windows is Apple itself.
The only "free" yuck drivers that support 3d on a current gpu are Intel.
Keyword: 3D. Besides compiz and blender, I can't think of any use for 3D that's not gaming-related, so it's a relatively small niche.
Seems to me like the FOSS community should be doing everything to support ATI since they are working very hard to create a FOSS driver that is completely in the spirit of FOSS! They are releasing all the documentation and helping to write the drivers.
Aren't they? I don't see how it relates to your post, however, unless you believe that "helping ATI" is a higher objective than "preserving the distro's usefulness, and keeping it from becoming Yet Another Ubuntu Clone", and are still advocating introducing a binary blob in a distro whose main goal is being blob-free.
Sounds way to like religion at this point to me. But if your purity is more important the practicality then you go for it.
Sounds way too much like propaganda to me. But if your desire to give unpaid marketing to ATI is more important than usefulness then you go for it.
IMHO unless you are writeing code, or paying people to write code and then contributing it back then all your talk about "Freedom" is useless drivel. As they say freedom isn't free. People that rant about FOSS but contribute nothing are nothing but freeloaders.
Wouldn't it be a great compromise to put those the working Open Source drivers in the distro along with the binary drivers for those that don't
No, it wouldn't. The entire purpose behind this distro is so that people can download it, and *know* they can fully excersize their four freedoms with it, and if you include binary drivers (even as placeholder for a future OSS one), you'll have to maintain a list in your website stating something to the effect of "v2.01 is free except for the ATi graphics driver, v2.02 to 2.08 is free except for the NVidia driver and wifi", and such, essentially making this nothing more than Yet Another Ubuntu Clone.
The reason it seems odious is because the very act of farming highlights the paradox that threatens the very reason one plays: MMOs are work disguised as leisure.
No, *your* MMO is work disguised as leisure. Guild Wars at least isn't, and probably EVE too from what I've heard, not all MMOs follow EQ and WoW's simplistic design.
Find me an Apple laptop, at any price, that competes with my old Thinkpad in the way of style and ability. You can't. Know why I'm so sure you can't? because *I* fucking dictate my criteria for "style" and "ability", and as such, can arbitrarily adjust it so that you can never match it.
First off, "pre" is latin, not english. Second, "pre-installed" means "installed before (being purchased)", with the latter part implicit from the context. And third, if you're so pedant as to confuse a notebook computer with a spiral-ring notebook, you ought to be pedant enough not to use the word "laptop" for something that doesn't go on top of your lap.
That was the problem with Final Fantasy, it tried to be a human drama and then didn't use human emotions on the faces of the actors. IF it had been a pure action flick with no close-ups there wouldn't have been a problem. It wasn't the uncanny valley, it was just bad acting, if it had been done by humans who could act we would have felt the same.
Windows 98 was slower than Windows 95, running on the same hardware
Windows XP was slower than Windows 98, running on the same hardware
Windows Vista is slower than Windows XP, running on the same hardware.
95->98 was fairly insignificant, IIRC, and you forgot 2K and ME, which bridge the performance gap between 98 and XP. Thing is, the XP->Vista jump was *much* bigger than any of those that came before it.
it's just dogged by this idea that it's crap because you can't run it on your P3-800 and it won't work with your dot-matrix printer from 1977.
That, and the fact that both Linux, XP, and Microsoft's best OS, Win2K run pretty damn well on that P3-800, while Vista struggles in a dual-core CPU with 1.5 GBs of RAM, which *isn't* an acceptable performance for an OS, period.
If a single encounter with a smug developer is enough to turn that user back to Propietary Closed-Source Software, what do you think happens to a developer who encounters "shit doesn't work, fix it" idiot-users in a daily basis?
Answer: he turns into a "smug developer" to prevent assholes from ruining his hobby, and having worked in tech support, I do not blame him in the least.
Force the devs to be polite, and you'll lose most of the unpaid ones. Make the users polite, and the devs shall follow, perhaps even gaining a few extra ones along the way.
But do you really want military people and only military people deciding when and how to escalate a conflict
No, I don't, which is why I dislike the idea of requiring the qualities of an army general in a president. Let the president worry about "what" and "why" (a diplomat's job), and the army generals worry about "when", "where" and "how".
And of course, you're not always going to be talking about a "declaring war" situation. The crazy jihaddist types have totally learned that lesson. One way to consternate your enemy is avoid giving them a geopolitically concentrated enemy that has any resemblance to historical nation-state foes. Those days are gone (Russia not withstanding).
But defending the country from crazy jihaddist is already a labor of the armed forces without the president having to say so, attacking the jihaddists' homeland may not be, but I'd rather let the UN deal with such international affairs (and yes, I know you US Republicans' viewpoint about that, don't worry. Doesn't mean I agree).
The president doesn't make legislation happen. The president can't tax anyone. The president is one of the three legs of the checks-and-balances system, with the congress and the courts impacting some issues far more than the president can or should.
Here's where we agree...
The president is the civilian who is in charge of executive tasks, and the defense of the country is first among those. The military and its related services/agencies are the tools of that job.
...and here's where we don't. It is my understanding (and, from what I can see, that of most civilized nations of the world), that the defense of the country is the responsability of the military, the title of "Commander in Chief" (or closest equivalent) being bestowed upon the president solely to remind the military that their ultimate allegiance is to the people of their country, leaving any kind of tactical decision to those with the experience to do so: the people serving in the armed forces.
Military decisions should be made by the military, diplomatic decisions should be made by diplomats, and those two things shouldn't *EVER* mix except through an official declaration of war issued by the Senate. And it's that, the fact that you're looking for the qualities of an army general for your president, what scares me the most. Perhaps your system is designed to make that a necessity, but that doesn't make it any less comfortable for us in the rest of the world (specially us in South America and Europe, who have plenty of experience with folks trying to mix both roles).
What, exactly, is your definition of "war"? mine is "a large-scale armed conflict between opposing parties", and this ain't "large-scale".
Dunno, but your description of this whole Al-Qaida thing, with small-scale actions designed to maximize fear in order to push a political goal and all that, makes it look less like "war" and more like "terrorism", IMHO. I wonder why.
This is why I can't stand the FSF. Sure guys, it would be nice if everything was open and free, but that is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.
I am reminded of an old saying: "Believing in something won't ensure it'll happen, but not believing in it does ensure it won't". Or something to that effect.
Stop expecting some big company to go exclusively with Ogg Vorbis and Theora, two codecs which have not been patent-tested in the courts
Even if we dismiss Xiph's efforts towards ensuring Ogg formats are patent-free, it's still better to have something that *could* be free of patents than something we know for a fact isn't. Specially if they want to say they're pushing for free formats, as is the case here.
Oh, it is because they want the nifty DVD case and the FBI warnings that come on that version of the disc? I doubt it. They want the comments from the director stepping all over the dialog of the movie?
Except for the idiotic FBI warnings (why do I have to suffer those even if I've never set foot on the USofA?), all your questions can be responded with a resounding "YES!", simply by pointing to sales of "Collector's Edition", "Director's Cut" and such. They aren't any cheaper, they're usually the same movie, only with prettier packaging and dirty, dirty directors ruining the movie with talk, but alas, people still pay for 'em, myself included.
Now, there are valid arguments against copyright infringement, and I personally believe it's wrong, but people like you acting all Chicken Little about it and giving the MAFIAA arguments for suing old grandmas and raping our computers with DRM make me want to set up a BitTorrent tracker and donate all my bandwidth to The Pirate Bay simply not to be on *your* side of the argument.
First, you probably meant Louis XVI, Louis XIV died of sickness after a 70+ years old rule, nothing to do with the French Revolution. And second, I fear Apple and their zealots far, *FAR* more than I fear even the most extreme Linux users, but I'd still prefer a nice, 40/60 split between Linux and the *BSDs just to make sure.
They have succeeded with products that people want to pay for.
That *some* people want to pay for, and quickly proceed to flame those of us that don't. Granted, not the fault of the company per se, but it does hurt their image nevertheless.
They have contributed much to the open source community.
Not as much as IBM or Sun, yet the "Lotus Notes was made by the Devil himself, he just subcontracted it to IBM!" jokes are still plentiful 'round here.
They have raised the bar for software/hardware technology in general.
In some ways, but in others they've popularized some very idiotic things such as DRM, batteries you can't change without voiding your warranty, focusing on visual design over proper ventilation in computer cases, etc.
They give developers a great platform for either open source development or Mac development without charging for developer tools.
They have created an exceptional market for independent developers to make REAL money writing for the iPhone.
So funny that you'd put both of those together... gonna leave it up to you to figure out why;)
Seriously, there are reasons for people to like Apple, but there are also reasons for people to dislike them and to deny that, well, doesn't speak well for you. Or Apple, either (see #1).
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I'm waiting for the math version, Pi, even though the levels won't be able to be solved rationally.
Cad/CAM Pro-E offers a good CAD/CAM package for Linux.
Point given, but this is also kind of a niche.
Compwiz which is about as main stream or soon to be as you can get. Hardware 3D UIs are the way of the future. Totally useless if you are going to run server but pretty nice if you are using a Desktop.
Mainstream? of all the Linux users I've met (of which there are many), I've yet to see someone using Compiz, or any other 3D-accelerated desktop for that matter.
What you want to run VESA?
I don't *want* to, but it's usable at least.
How? You could just use Debian. As an end user you could just install Ubuntu and not install blobs. Any user advanced enough to care about a blob free system can do a custom install to get a blob free system.
Actually, if you read the responses people from the gNewSense team have posted, you'd see that they've found blobs in places they didn't expect them to see, and that they've removed blobs in most upgrades, hinting at the possibility that a blob-free install is harder than just doing a "rm -rf flash*.deb acrobat*.deb" on the apt server.
What are these "horrid tactics," licensing software for less than Microsoft does?
Less? a quick search on Amazon gave me a $87 price for an upgrade version of Windows Vista Home Premium, and $110 for OSX 10.5. Unless you want to argue with the rest of the Apple fans around here that have argued that OSX is merely an upgrade, and not a full version, in which case please tell me so I can go and grab some popcorn.
Trying to force iTunes users to try Safari on Windows?
There, fixed that for you. Ohh, and also the piece of shit known as "Quicktime", but I'll let that one slide since it could, theoretically, maybe actually be required for iTunes.
Releasing software updates faster than most rivals?
Sources? preferably ones that don't have the words "Apple" or "Mac" anywhere within their name.
Processing hundreds of vulnerability reports within a couple months?
Which OS doesn't?
Lay it on the line if you have a grief, don't just suggest evil lurking were none does.
How about suing bloggers simply because they "spoiled" their surprise? silencing criticism within their forums, while pretending there's nothing wrong?
And why the FUCK are you posting random Apple-related ads in all your comments? it's making you look like a first-class astroturfer, which is *not* good for your credibility.
Don't you think if there was any legal angle that could force Apple to license their OS, Dell wouldn't have gone after them at least a year ago?
No. Dell is interested in profit, and why sell an OS that's both more expensive and in less demand than what they currently have? now, they *might* have thought about it had Apple offered to license them OSX for less than what they pay for Windows OEM licenses, but given how long it took them to offer Linux (which is not only free, but with higher demand in the business sector), the odds aren't that high either.
If Psystar tried to sell computers with OSX it's because they're a small player trying to profit from a small niche that was as-of-then unfulfilled, but the only large manufacturer with any incentive for selling OSX instead of Windows is Apple itself.
No, but feel free to mod him down -1, Troll, it's the standard way of saying "I'm modding you down because I don't like your opinion" around here.
The only "free" yuck drivers that support 3d on a current gpu are Intel.
Keyword: 3D. Besides compiz and blender, I can't think of any use for 3D that's not gaming-related, so it's a relatively small niche.
Seems to me like the FOSS community should be doing everything to support ATI since they are working very hard to create a FOSS driver that is completely in the spirit of FOSS! They are releasing all the documentation and helping to write the drivers.
Aren't they? I don't see how it relates to your post, however, unless you believe that "helping ATI" is a higher objective than "preserving the distro's usefulness, and keeping it from becoming Yet Another Ubuntu Clone", and are still advocating introducing a binary blob in a distro whose main goal is being blob-free.
Sounds way to like religion at this point to me. But if your purity is more important the practicality then you go for it.
Sounds way too much like propaganda to me. But if your desire to give unpaid marketing to ATI is more important than usefulness then you go for it.
IMHO unless you are writeing code, or paying people to write code and then contributing it back then all your talk about "Freedom" is useless drivel. As they say freedom isn't free. People that rant about FOSS but contribute nothing are nothing but freeloaders.
At least ATI/AMD is contributing.
And so are the gNewSense guys. Your point?
Wouldn't it be a great compromise to put those the working Open Source drivers in the distro along with the binary drivers for those that don't
No, it wouldn't. The entire purpose behind this distro is so that people can download it, and *know* they can fully excersize their four freedoms with it, and if you include binary drivers (even as placeholder for a future OSS one), you'll have to maintain a list in your website stating something to the effect of "v2.01 is free except for the ATi graphics driver, v2.02 to 2.08 is free except for the NVidia driver and wifi", and such, essentially making this nothing more than Yet Another Ubuntu Clone.
The reason it seems odious is because the very act of farming highlights the paradox that threatens the very reason one plays: MMOs are work disguised as leisure.
No, *your* MMO is work disguised as leisure. Guild Wars at least isn't, and probably EVE too from what I've heard, not all MMOs follow EQ and WoW's simplistic design.
Find me an Apple laptop, at any price, that competes with my old Thinkpad in the way of style and ability. You can't. Know why I'm so sure you can't? because *I* fucking dictate my criteria for "style" and "ability", and as such, can arbitrarily adjust it so that you can never match it.
First off, "pre" is latin, not english. Second, "pre-installed" means "installed before (being purchased)", with the latter part implicit from the context. And third, if you're so pedant as to confuse a notebook computer with a spiral-ring notebook, you ought to be pedant enough not to use the word "laptop" for something that doesn't go on top of your lap.
That was the problem with Final Fantasy, it tried to be a human drama and then didn't use human emotions on the faces of the actors. IF it had been a pure action flick with no close-ups there wouldn't have been a problem. It wasn't the uncanny valley, it was just bad acting, if it had been done by humans who could act we would have felt the same.
We did.
Windows 98 was slower than Windows 95, running on the same hardware Windows XP was slower than Windows 98, running on the same hardware Windows Vista is slower than Windows XP, running on the same hardware.
95->98 was fairly insignificant, IIRC, and you forgot 2K and ME, which bridge the performance gap between 98 and XP. Thing is, the XP->Vista jump was *much* bigger than any of those that came before it.
it's just dogged by this idea that it's crap because you can't run it on your P3-800 and it won't work with your dot-matrix printer from 1977.
That, and the fact that both Linux, XP, and Microsoft's best OS, Win2K run pretty damn well on that P3-800, while Vista struggles in a dual-core CPU with 1.5 GBs of RAM, which *isn't* an acceptable performance for an OS, period.
Grow up, and learn to troll better, kiddo, personal insults are just *so* last century...
advertisers aren't going to move to less interactive or more static mediums
Remind me again, how did Google get to be the advertising giant it is today?
If a single encounter with a smug developer is enough to turn that user back to Propietary Closed-Source Software, what do you think happens to a developer who encounters "shit doesn't work, fix it" idiot-users in a daily basis?
Answer: he turns into a "smug developer" to prevent assholes from ruining his hobby, and having worked in tech support, I do not blame him in the least.
Force the devs to be polite, and you'll lose most of the unpaid ones. Make the users polite, and the devs shall follow, perhaps even gaining a few extra ones along the way.
But do you really want military people and only military people deciding when and how to escalate a conflict
No, I don't, which is why I dislike the idea of requiring the qualities of an army general in a president. Let the president worry about "what" and "why" (a diplomat's job), and the army generals worry about "when", "where" and "how".
And of course, you're not always going to be talking about a "declaring war" situation. The crazy jihaddist types have totally learned that lesson. One way to consternate your enemy is avoid giving them a geopolitically concentrated enemy that has any resemblance to historical nation-state foes. Those days are gone (Russia not withstanding).
But defending the country from crazy jihaddist is already a labor of the armed forces without the president having to say so, attacking the jihaddists' homeland may not be, but I'd rather let the UN deal with such international affairs (and yes, I know you US Republicans' viewpoint about that, don't worry. Doesn't mean I agree).
The president doesn't make legislation happen. The president can't tax anyone. The president is one of the three legs of the checks-and-balances system, with the congress and the courts impacting some issues far more than the president can or should.
Here's where we agree...
The president is the civilian who is in charge of executive tasks, and the defense of the country is first among those. The military and its related services/agencies are the tools of that job.
...and here's where we don't. It is my understanding (and, from what I can see, that of most civilized nations of the world), that the defense of the country is the responsability of the military, the title of "Commander in Chief" (or closest equivalent) being bestowed upon the president solely to remind the military that their ultimate allegiance is to the people of their country, leaving any kind of tactical decision to those with the experience to do so: the people serving in the armed forces.
Military decisions should be made by the military, diplomatic decisions should be made by diplomats, and those two things shouldn't *EVER* mix except through an official declaration of war issued by the Senate. And it's that, the fact that you're looking for the qualities of an army general for your president, what scares me the most. Perhaps your system is designed to make that a necessity, but that doesn't make it any less comfortable for us in the rest of the world (specially us in South America and Europe, who have plenty of experience with folks trying to mix both roles).
Let me just say that, as someone who's not a US citizen, the fact that you refer to your president as "Commander in Chief" scares me. A lot.
What, exactly, is your definition of "war"? mine is "a large-scale armed conflict between opposing parties", and this ain't "large-scale".
Dunno, but your description of this whole Al-Qaida thing, with small-scale actions designed to maximize fear in order to push a political goal and all that, makes it look less like "war" and more like "terrorism", IMHO. I wonder why.
This is why I can't stand the FSF. Sure guys, it would be nice if everything was open and free, but that is NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.
I am reminded of an old saying: "Believing in something won't ensure it'll happen, but not believing in it does ensure it won't". Or something to that effect.
Stop expecting some big company to go exclusively with Ogg Vorbis and Theora, two codecs which have not been patent-tested in the courts
Even if we dismiss Xiph's efforts towards ensuring Ogg formats are patent-free, it's still better to have something that *could* be free of patents than something we know for a fact isn't. Specially if they want to say they're pushing for free formats, as is the case here.
Oh, it is because they want the nifty DVD case and the FBI warnings that come on that version of the disc? I doubt it. They want the comments from the director stepping all over the dialog of the movie?
Except for the idiotic FBI warnings (why do I have to suffer those even if I've never set foot on the USofA?), all your questions can be responded with a resounding "YES!", simply by pointing to sales of "Collector's Edition", "Director's Cut" and such. They aren't any cheaper, they're usually the same movie, only with prettier packaging and dirty, dirty directors ruining the movie with talk, but alas, people still pay for 'em, myself included.
Now, there are valid arguments against copyright infringement, and I personally believe it's wrong, but people like you acting all Chicken Little about it and giving the MAFIAA arguments for suing old grandmas and raping our computers with DRM make me want to set up a BitTorrent tracker and donate all my bandwidth to The Pirate Bay simply not to be on *your* side of the argument.
First, you probably meant Louis XVI, Louis XIV died of sickness after a 70+ years old rule, nothing to do with the French Revolution. And second, I fear Apple and their zealots far, *FAR* more than I fear even the most extreme Linux users, but I'd still prefer a nice, 40/60 split between Linux and the *BSDs just to make sure.
And that's an issue solved by marketing, not programmers, so you're barking the wrong tree here.
Judging by the number of iPhone users, I'd say that Microsoft's eventual doom won't necessarily be a victory for Linux, or openness for that matter.
They have succeeded with products that people want to pay for.
That *some* people want to pay for, and quickly proceed to flame those of us that don't. Granted, not the fault of the company per se, but it does hurt their image nevertheless.
They have contributed much to the open source community.
Not as much as IBM or Sun, yet the "Lotus Notes was made by the Devil himself, he just subcontracted it to IBM!" jokes are still plentiful 'round here.
They have raised the bar for software/hardware technology in general.
In some ways, but in others they've popularized some very idiotic things such as DRM, batteries you can't change without voiding your warranty, focusing on visual design over proper ventilation in computer cases, etc.
They give developers a great platform for either open source development or Mac development without charging for developer tools.
They have created an exceptional market for independent developers to make REAL money writing for the iPhone.
So funny that you'd put both of those together... gonna leave it up to you to figure out why ;)
Seriously, there are reasons for people to like Apple, but there are also reasons for people to dislike them and to deny that, well, doesn't speak well for you. Or Apple, either (see #1).