I think your right from wrong lesson got a little garbled.
Sharing is good, not bad.
Stealing is, of course, very bad. But sharing does not mean stealing.
I've never stolen music, and I very much doubt you have either. You just bought an illogical load of horse pucky from some people that regard it as stealing because they somehow feel entitled to a monopoly on making copies, and a nice fat monopoly rent-check everytime anyone does that.
If I heard something on XM and liked it, I'd probably run out and buy it on a released CD so I wouldn't have to listen to all the compression artifacts.
I would too, except... if that CD is coming from an RIAA affiliated company, forget about it. I don't care how much I like it. No way these communist bastards get another cent from me.
It's not a knee-jerk response. I actually bend over backwards in the other direction.
Everybody that I've ever known that used flash has said something like 'yeah, I know a lot of people really screw it up and it sucks and it's bad... BUT *I* do it right, you've got to see it, it's not {long list of bad thing associated with flash.} And, despite this happening hundreds of times, before, I *always* go ahead and look at their site.
And it's always deja mu. Same old bull. Maybe one day...
Seriously, I think flash has a role to the people that use it kind of like alcohol to the alcoholic, or crack to the crack addicted. They all show that same pattern. Every alcoholic will readily admit all those other folks have problems and do bad things when they drink... but he always thinks he's different. Rarely the case.
Still, I've known people that can drink responsibly, and I've known folks, believe it or not, that could smoke crack occasionally without letting their life fall to crap too. But I'm still looking for that rare web developer that can start putting flash on his webpages without it degrading them.
I'm sorry, those are two great examples of why not to do this. They're ugly and unusable and they just scream 'HEY! I've got nothing to say so I like to believe that "the media is the message" to compensate.'
Now there may be some worthwhile content on those sites, or they may not, but that's exactly what their design screams out. Not the first impression you want to make, unless of course you'd rather drive the potential audience away right off.
And trying to *force* my browser to display in the font you want, instead of the one I've chosen, is not only offensive, it's just dumb. You don't know how good or bad my eyes are. You don't know my taste in fonts either.
Well of course it all comes down to what you mean by usability. Of course OS X is vastly superior under the hood. But I'm talking interfaces here, and the interface just isn't as good.
Tog has a bit to say on this, and I agree with him on most of it. And that's Panther (10.3), remember OSX starts with Cheetah(10.0). Cheetah was an absolute disaster from a UI design point of view, and while it's been improving with each release, (and Tog updates without seeming to leave the previous articles available, or I'd point you to the Jaguar articles as well - some things have improved, but many are still the same) it's still far from the level of simple, consistent UI design that OS9 had. OS 10 was NeXT, of course, and the NeXT interface was quite good, but in the process of making it *look* prettier they really managed to screw a lot of stuff up.
The dock is an absolute trainwreck, so much so that instead of discussing it in that article he just links to another. And he's right. While the NeXT dock did basically one thing, and quite well, so many additional functions were added to the dock for OS 10 that really became overloaded and practically unusable for any of them. And Apple has this annoying patronising tendency that expressed itself in this case by them locking out the sort of customisability that could have otherwise mitigated this. Finder is extremely annoying. The biggest problem, for me, is the way it absolutely insists on throwing up a spinning beach ball for 30 seconds EVERY time I come across a video file that quicktime doesn't understand and absolutely refuses to let you disable the previews to prevent that. You can set them not visible, but it still insists on calculating them anyhow.
I could go on and on, but reading Tog will save a lot of space here. OS 9 really was a lot better from a UI design standpoint. Unfortunately it didn't have the underpinnings necessary for serious usage either. But OS 10 would have been a lot better if they'd simply duplicated the OS 9 GUI, or left the old NeXT GUI alone, IMOP.
A wise man once said "the only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that everything is learned." And the truth is, even the nipple is only partly intuitive, as any nursing mother will tell you.
I've tried several virtual desktop add ons, and wasn't happy with any of them, sad to say.
I've tried WindowShadeX, I like it, but it's really annoying to have to pay for basic functionality that should be there by default. And on top of that, they no longer support the version of OS X I'm using, as I found out the hard way when I tried to reinstall after having to do a reinstall because of a hard disk failure. The old version that works with 10.2.8 isn't available anymore. I finally went ahead and got the disks to upgrade, but haven't had time to do that yet.
The Next or WindowMaker implementation of the dock was great. The OS X implementation, though, just sucks. It tries to do way too many things at once, you can't convince it to limit itself so it doesn't get overloaded, and it won't go away! Most annoying thing ever. I run ASM for task switching, keep a finder window open to apps to launch programs, and use a custom plist file to set the dock down to a tiny hidden thing in the lower right hand corner, and it STILL insists on popping up and getting in the way from time to time.
I had a theme engine, not shapeshifter, something that worked with 10.2, before the crash, but can't seem to find it again. I was running an Apple platinum theme, and it helped, but honestly, many of the changes I'd want to make just don't seem to be allowed no matter what you do. Can you change that bloody button layout with three buttons crunched together on the left, with the clickable portion just a small area on the core? Nothing I've seen will do that. Very annoying, what's the point of having the button change to let you know you're on it, but then refuse to take the click because the area that changes on mouseover is larger than the area that will actually accept a click? What moron thought that was a good idea?
Finder actually is tolerable for me most of the time - as long as there are no video files anywhere near. There don't seem to be many options - I'm not sure if it's possible to actually replace it? A lot of things on the mac seem to be locked down like that. But for heavy duty file management on the mac nothing I've seen beats unixtree.
I like WindowMaker, it's really a shame there isn't more work being done on GnuStep. If half the money that's been pumped into the GNOME fiasco had gone there... *sigh* But I do, actually, find KDE pretty tolerable. It has a lot of options, and if you spend a little time to customise it you can do a lot with it - it's not just a bad Windows clone. Of course some distros try to make it into that... on Debian I know when you first install it and load it up, it asks for an overall default - windows-like, mac-like, or unix-like are the choices. If you take a little bit of time to play with it, you can go beyond those simple default sets and customise just about everything to your liking, without much fuss.
The infrastructure was built with tax money from the get go, and much of it has been subsidised even long after they were supposedly privatised. So you actually got both - a portion of the taxes you've paid went to build their business, then they bill you for the 'service' as well. They've been doing this so long they seem to think they have a constitutional right to get paid several times for the same thing.
Well obviously winning requires commitment, hard work, and smarts.
But it's doable.
We can't afford to let up on the legal front for a moment.
But we also need to recognise that front is going to be a long, tough fight, and wherever possible we should play to our strengths and circumvent it technologically.
The next Winamp needs to be an FOSS application that supports Ogg, and uses it by default. That's the best way around.mp3 problems.
Dvds, of course, are going to be harder. I don't see a technical shortcut there.
OS X has made some serious technical advances, but the usability of the system has seriously slid downhill from OS9. A real missed opportunity for Apple, as much as for anyone else.
It's very easy on Ubuntu too. Apt-get install firefox. Or fire up synaptic, search for firefox, click install.
What he did to try and make the point was link to instructions for installing a firefox version that hasn't been vetted and made available on the ubuntu repository yet. Yes, naturally, that's a little more complex.
There should be laws acting directly or indirectly against the imposition of such Artificial Scarcity.
You seem to have a very unrealistic view of where laws come from.;)
The golden rule: those that have the gold, make the rules. The correllary is that most of the rules are designed to make sure that those that have the gold, keep getting more, and aren't actually expected to do anything useful in order to do so.
The main problem has changed. The main problem used to be that there simply wasn't good Free Software for what people wanted to do.
Now the main problem is that key elements of what people want to do are blocked by software patents and other legal stuff. People want to play MP3s, but can't because MP3 is not a Free codec. People want to watch DVDs, but can't because any Free Software DVD player program is classified as a "circumvention device" (and is therefore illegal) under US and Australian copyright law.
To paraphrase a great man: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they outlaw you, then you win.
Oh come on. I love my mac as much as anyone, but the GUI is definitely NOT intuitive and often DOESN'T just work.
I'm constantly tempted to wipe the thing and install linux on it so I can get basic GUI functions like virtual desktops, window shading, a dock that doesn't try to be everything else too, or failing that, will at least go away, a theme that doesn't include stupid glowing gumdrops everywhere, and a file manager that doesn't INSIST on blocking up with a spinning beach ball while it calls the server EVERY SINGLE TIME the cursor rests on a video file quicktime doesn't have a codec for. Even when there's no net connection available, by the way.
Apple does some things very right, but their patronising attitude to the user can get very annoying as well.
It's a step up from Windows, but then again, anything is. It's an obvious step backwards from either OS9 or a decently configured X11 system.
It's probably true that it's better for people that would never take the time to customise an X11 display, but that's something anyone that spends a lot of time on their computer would definitely want to do, and not something that requires any degree of technical knowledge.
Here you can find current information on cards supported by DRI. ATI Radeons up to the rv280 chipset, the Matrox cards, most of the Intel chipsets, the S3 Virge, the SiS 300 series, and the VIA/Unichrome chipsets all have accelerated drivers available. Several more are in active development, DRI is fairly new remember.
While you're welcome to buy their hardware and reverse engineer it if you wish, it seems to me to be more than they deserve. Free drivers for those cards would boost their sales, and I'd rather see a competitor that does the right thing get them.
On the other hand, there isn't, sadly, much competition on the high end outside these two companies at the moment, so if you really require more than the free software friendly cards can give you, I guess that's what you have to do. And sadly, ATI cards based on the older, well supported chipsets are still getting a lot of free sales despite the way that company is treating us at the moment.
I have a feeling what they're trying to hide here is a practice of degrading performance in software - i.e. selling one card for say $100 and another for $350, with the difference being a few flipped bits somewhere that tell their drivers not to work as well on the cheap one. So, if you do bother to reverse engineer some of these cards, you might get a nice bonus of actually getting the performance you paid for without an 'artifical scarcity tax' added.
Supported linux drivers are kept up to date by the kernel team. When an ABI change comes along that might break em, he that did the breaking gets to do the fixing.
Sure, eventually everything gets dropped. Just the other day they FINALLY dropped support for the PC/XT hard drives. You know, the old pre-ide drives that shipped on IBM machines with 8086 processors and 640k of ram? Machines you couldn't even run linux on... but some folks transplanted those drives into their new 386s way back when, and someone wrote drivers for them, they went in the kernel tree, and they've been supported through every ABI change afterward for all these years. Finally someone twigged on that there's not much point in continuing to maintain drivers for 5meg hard drives anymore...
Say what you want, once you have proper linux hardware support, it stays around a looong time.
Suppose we completely set aside the goal of widespread adoption, and simply leave open the goal that people should be able to use Linux to do whatever they want. That's not too controversial, right?
You can do that. And if you want to install blobware drivers, that's ok too. The license only controls what you can redistribute.
You're perfectly within your rights compiling a binary blob into your kernel. (Not too smart, but hey, it's your choice.) You just can't distribute the result to unsuspecting third parties.
1. ATI and Nvidia should be forced to open up their drivers. Great idea, but no one has been able to do it.
No one's been trying to do that. No one wants that.
The goal is to get them to publish interoperability specs - simply the interface information - so that good free software programmers can write good free drivers to talk to the hardware without wasting a lot of effort reverse-engineering what should be public information.
Reverse engineering isn't actually that hard to do, I'm sure that any Nvidia competitors that see any advantage to be gained by it have already done it. But their developers get paid to do what they're told. Why on earth would free software developers volunteer a disproportionate amount of their time to supporting a product if the manufacturer isn't willing to communicate with them?
It's simple, if Nvidia wants to sell their hardware to free software folks, they need to be reasonable about this. And if not, we'll buy other brands.
There are a huge number of other cards out there with known interfaces and well written well supported drivers. None of them are quite as fast as the latest from Nvidia and ATI, but anyone that trades their freedom for a couple more frames per second in Quake deserves what they get.
7. If you want to use software that requires hardware 3D acceleration, you have to pick a closed source OS -- either OS X or Windows.
That is simply not true. You can get hardware 3d support with free drivers. You just have to be pickier about which video card you buy - and willing to get something not quite as powerful as the latest and greatest from nvidia.
I'm so sick and tired of seeing this stupidity repeated over and over again. No matter how often it's debunked, it's like the night of the living dead, astroturfers just keep slinging it. Both in the context of hardware, and also I've noticed MS using it in Europe recently in complaining about the interoperability demands.
No one wants their crufty buggy source. All that's wanted is proper documentation of the protocol for speaking with the hardware, in the one case, or the software, in the other.
Microsoft, of course, has rational cause to fear this in the case of their software. Once other people can write software that interoperates with it, they'll lose sales.
Hardware manufacturers, on the other hand, have no rational reason to resist this. If they'd just provide some simple interoperability specs, they could save all the money they now spend on writing linux drivers, and get BETTER drivers written for them, maintained for them, by the community, at no charge. And support not just linux, but every other free operating system as well, again, at no charge to them.
The difference is that these aren't private companies, they're public utilities (paid for by tax money) that have been converted into private monopolies. There are very few places in this country where there is any actual competition in this business.
And on what basis do you think the current model is not sustainable? These folks are raking in cash hand over fist on their overpriced, underpowered internet service. They've dipped into the public coffers many times for infrastructure - and much of the infrastructure we paid for was never delivered, btw. If their business model isn't making money, they must need to reduce the amount being laundered into the executives accounts in the bahamas, cause their is no other explanation for it.
There isn't a 'dos part' in WindowsXP, it runs on the NT kernel.
And yes, you can run that kernel all alone without the GUI on top. There's no particular point in doing it, but you certainly can. You could build a completely different OS on top of it, if you had nothing better to do with your time.
Similarly you can run 'just the dos part' of win9x or ME, which did run on top of DOS. The last version of MS-DOS MS sold alone was 6.22. Windows95 and Windows 98 shipped with MS-DOS versions 7.x. WindowsME shipped with MS-DOS 8.x. And yes, that's what the ver command returned.
Similarly, when you get the version under CMD on XP and it says 'Windows XP [version 5.1.xxx]' think about that for a second. Is that version 5.1 of WindowsXP? NO! That's what it returns on the very first version of 'WinXP.' It is, however, version 5.1 of NT. 'Windows XP' is just some nonsense some pinhead in marketing came up with. The first released version of NT was '3.1' - again marketing at work, it should have been 1.0 but Windows on top of DOS was called 3.1 and they didn't want NT to sound behind. So you start with 3.1. Then 3.5 came out, then 3.51. Next was NT 4. When NT 5.0 was released, marketing insisted on a new name, Windows 2000. But ver still returns the correct string, [version 5.0.xxx] and again, NT 5.1, aka 'Windows XP' as you pointed out, still returns the correct string if you know how to get to it, [version 5.1.xxx].
For you to seriously argue that the pinheads in marketing know what these things are, and the engineers that built them don't, is truly astonishing.
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I think your right from wrong lesson got a little garbled.
Sharing is good, not bad.
Stealing is, of course, very bad. But sharing does not mean stealing.
I've never stolen music, and I very much doubt you have either. You just bought an illogical load of horse pucky from some people that regard it as stealing because they somehow feel entitled to a monopoly on making copies, and a nice fat monopoly rent-check everytime anyone does that.
I would too, except... if that CD is coming from an RIAA affiliated company, forget about it. I don't care how much I like it. No way these communist bastards get another cent from me.
It's not a knee-jerk response. I actually bend over backwards in the other direction.
Everybody that I've ever known that used flash has said something like 'yeah, I know a lot of people really screw it up and it sucks and it's bad... BUT *I* do it right, you've got to see it, it's not {long list of bad thing associated with flash.} And, despite this happening hundreds of times, before, I *always* go ahead and look at their site.
And it's always deja mu. Same old bull. Maybe one day...
Seriously, I think flash has a role to the people that use it kind of like alcohol to the alcoholic, or crack to the crack addicted. They all show that same pattern. Every alcoholic will readily admit all those other folks have problems and do bad things when they drink... but he always thinks he's different. Rarely the case.
Still, I've known people that can drink responsibly, and I've known folks, believe it or not, that could smoke crack occasionally without letting their life fall to crap too. But I'm still looking for that rare web developer that can start putting flash on his webpages without it degrading them.
I'm sorry, those are two great examples of why not to do this. They're ugly and unusable and they just scream 'HEY! I've got nothing to say so I like to believe that "the media is the message" to compensate.'
Now there may be some worthwhile content on those sites, or they may not, but that's exactly what their design screams out. Not the first impression you want to make, unless of course you'd rather drive the potential audience away right off.
And trying to *force* my browser to display in the font you want, instead of the one I've chosen, is not only offensive, it's just dumb. You don't know how good or bad my eyes are. You don't know my taste in fonts either.
No, he means viral files.
Bloody radical feminists these days... *grumblegrumble*
For anyone that still doesn't get it.
Well of course it all comes down to what you mean by usability. Of course OS X is vastly superior under the hood. But I'm talking interfaces here, and the interface just isn't as good.
Tog has a bit to say on this, and I agree with him on most of it. And that's Panther (10.3), remember OSX starts with Cheetah(10.0). Cheetah was an absolute disaster from a UI design point of view, and while it's been improving with each release, (and Tog updates without seeming to leave the previous articles available, or I'd point you to the Jaguar articles as well - some things have improved, but many are still the same) it's still far from the level of simple, consistent UI design that OS9 had. OS 10 was NeXT, of course, and the NeXT interface was quite good, but in the process of making it *look* prettier they really managed to screw a lot of stuff up.
The dock is an absolute trainwreck, so much so that instead of discussing it in that article he just links to another. And he's right. While the NeXT dock did basically one thing, and quite well, so many additional functions were added to the dock for OS 10 that really became overloaded and practically unusable for any of them. And Apple has this annoying patronising tendency that expressed itself in this case by them locking out the sort of customisability that could have otherwise mitigated this. Finder is extremely annoying. The biggest problem, for me, is the way it absolutely insists on throwing up a spinning beach ball for 30 seconds EVERY time I come across a video file that quicktime doesn't understand and absolutely refuses to let you disable the previews to prevent that. You can set them not visible, but it still insists on calculating them anyhow.
I could go on and on, but reading Tog will save a lot of space here. OS 9 really was a lot better from a UI design standpoint. Unfortunately it didn't have the underpinnings necessary for serious usage either. But OS 10 would have been a lot better if they'd simply duplicated the OS 9 GUI, or left the old NeXT GUI alone, IMOP.
A wise man once said "the only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that everything is learned." And the truth is, even the nipple is only partly intuitive, as any nursing mother will tell you.
I've tried several virtual desktop add ons, and wasn't happy with any of them, sad to say.
I've tried WindowShadeX, I like it, but it's really annoying to have to pay for basic functionality that should be there by default. And on top of that, they no longer support the version of OS X I'm using, as I found out the hard way when I tried to reinstall after having to do a reinstall because of a hard disk failure. The old version that works with 10.2.8 isn't available anymore. I finally went ahead and got the disks to upgrade, but haven't had time to do that yet.
The Next or WindowMaker implementation of the dock was great. The OS X implementation, though, just sucks. It tries to do way too many things at once, you can't convince it to limit itself so it doesn't get overloaded, and it won't go away! Most annoying thing ever. I run ASM for task switching, keep a finder window open to apps to launch programs, and use a custom plist file to set the dock down to a tiny hidden thing in the lower right hand corner, and it STILL insists on popping up and getting in the way from time to time.
I had a theme engine, not shapeshifter, something that worked with 10.2, before the crash, but can't seem to find it again. I was running an Apple platinum theme, and it helped, but honestly, many of the changes I'd want to make just don't seem to be allowed no matter what you do. Can you change that bloody button layout with three buttons crunched together on the left, with the clickable portion just a small area on the core? Nothing I've seen will do that. Very annoying, what's the point of having the button change to let you know you're on it, but then refuse to take the click because the area that changes on mouseover is larger than the area that will actually accept a click? What moron thought that was a good idea?
Finder actually is tolerable for me most of the time - as long as there are no video files anywhere near. There don't seem to be many options - I'm not sure if it's possible to actually replace it? A lot of things on the mac seem to be locked down like that. But for heavy duty file management on the mac nothing I've seen beats unixtree.
I like WindowMaker, it's really a shame there isn't more work being done on GnuStep. If half the money that's been pumped into the GNOME fiasco had gone there... *sigh* But I do, actually, find KDE pretty tolerable. It has a lot of options, and if you spend a little time to customise it you can do a lot with it - it's not just a bad Windows clone. Of course some distros try to make it into that... on Debian I know when you first install it and load it up, it asks for an overall default - windows-like, mac-like, or unix-like are the choices. If you take a little bit of time to play with it, you can go beyond those simple default sets and customise just about everything to your liking, without much fuss.
The infrastructure was built with tax money from the get go, and much of it has been subsidised even long after they were supposedly privatised. So you actually got both - a portion of the taxes you've paid went to build their business, then they bill you for the 'service' as well. They've been doing this so long they seem to think they have a constitutional right to get paid several times for the same thing.
Well obviously winning requires commitment, hard work, and smarts. But it's doable. We can't afford to let up on the legal front for a moment. But we also need to recognise that front is going to be a long, tough fight, and wherever possible we should play to our strengths and circumvent it technologically. The next Winamp needs to be an FOSS application that supports Ogg, and uses it by default. That's the best way around .mp3 problems.
Dvds, of course, are going to be harder. I don't see a technical shortcut there.
OS X has made some serious technical advances, but the usability of the system has seriously slid downhill from OS9. A real missed opportunity for Apple, as much as for anyone else.
It's very easy on Ubuntu too. Apt-get install firefox. Or fire up synaptic, search for firefox, click install.
What he did to try and make the point was link to instructions for installing a firefox version that hasn't been vetted and made available on the ubuntu repository yet. Yes, naturally, that's a little more complex.
You seem to have a very unrealistic view of where laws come from. ;)
The golden rule: those that have the gold, make the rules. The correllary is that most of the rules are designed to make sure that those that have the gold, keep getting more, and aren't actually expected to do anything useful in order to do so.
To paraphrase a great man: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they outlaw you, then you win.
Oh come on. I love my mac as much as anyone, but the GUI is definitely NOT intuitive and often DOESN'T just work.
I'm constantly tempted to wipe the thing and install linux on it so I can get basic GUI functions like virtual desktops, window shading, a dock that doesn't try to be everything else too, or failing that, will at least go away, a theme that doesn't include stupid glowing gumdrops everywhere, and a file manager that doesn't INSIST on blocking up with a spinning beach ball while it calls the server EVERY SINGLE TIME the cursor rests on a video file quicktime doesn't have a codec for. Even when there's no net connection available, by the way.
Apple does some things very right, but their patronising attitude to the user can get very annoying as well.
It's a step up from Windows, but then again, anything is. It's an obvious step backwards from either OS9 or a decently configured X11 system.
It's probably true that it's better for people that would never take the time to customise an X11 display, but that's something anyone that spends a lot of time on their computer would definitely want to do, and not something that requires any degree of technical knowledge.
Here you can find current information on cards supported by DRI. ATI Radeons up to the rv280 chipset, the Matrox cards, most of the Intel chipsets, the S3 Virge, the SiS 300 series, and the VIA/Unichrome chipsets all have accelerated drivers available. Several more are in active development, DRI is fairly new remember.
While you're welcome to buy their hardware and reverse engineer it if you wish, it seems to me to be more than they deserve. Free drivers for those cards would boost their sales, and I'd rather see a competitor that does the right thing get them.
On the other hand, there isn't, sadly, much competition on the high end outside these two companies at the moment, so if you really require more than the free software friendly cards can give you, I guess that's what you have to do. And sadly, ATI cards based on the older, well supported chipsets are still getting a lot of free sales despite the way that company is treating us at the moment.
I have a feeling what they're trying to hide here is a practice of degrading performance in software - i.e. selling one card for say $100 and another for $350, with the difference being a few flipped bits somewhere that tell their drivers not to work as well on the cheap one. So, if you do bother to reverse engineer some of these cards, you might get a nice bonus of actually getting the performance you paid for without an 'artifical scarcity tax' added.
"Server P2P?" *cough*
Supported linux drivers are kept up to date by the kernel team. When an ABI change comes along that might break em, he that did the breaking gets to do the fixing.
Sure, eventually everything gets dropped. Just the other day they FINALLY dropped support for the PC/XT hard drives. You know, the old pre-ide drives that shipped on IBM machines with 8086 processors and 640k of ram? Machines you couldn't even run linux on... but some folks transplanted those drives into their new 386s way back when, and someone wrote drivers for them, they went in the kernel tree, and they've been supported through every ABI change afterward for all these years. Finally someone twigged on that there's not much point in continuing to maintain drivers for 5meg hard drives anymore...
Say what you want, once you have proper linux hardware support, it stays around a looong time.
You can do that. And if you want to install blobware drivers, that's ok too. The license only controls what you can redistribute.
You're perfectly within your rights compiling a binary blob into your kernel. (Not too smart, but hey, it's your choice.) You just can't distribute the result to unsuspecting third parties.
No one's been trying to do that. No one wants that.
The goal is to get them to publish interoperability specs - simply the interface information - so that good free software programmers can write good free drivers to talk to the hardware without wasting a lot of effort reverse-engineering what should be public information.
Reverse engineering isn't actually that hard to do, I'm sure that any Nvidia competitors that see any advantage to be gained by it have already done it. But their developers get paid to do what they're told. Why on earth would free software developers volunteer a disproportionate amount of their time to supporting a product if the manufacturer isn't willing to communicate with them?
It's simple, if Nvidia wants to sell their hardware to free software folks, they need to be reasonable about this. And if not, we'll buy other brands.
There are a huge number of other cards out there with known interfaces and well written well supported drivers. None of them are quite as fast as the latest from Nvidia and ATI, but anyone that trades their freedom for a couple more frames per second in Quake deserves what they get.
That is simply not true. You can get hardware 3d support with free drivers. You just have to be pickier about which video card you buy - and willing to get something not quite as powerful as the latest and greatest from nvidia.
I'm so sick and tired of seeing this stupidity repeated over and over again. No matter how often it's debunked, it's like the night of the living dead, astroturfers just keep slinging it. Both in the context of hardware, and also I've noticed MS using it in Europe recently in complaining about the interoperability demands.
No one wants their crufty buggy source. All that's wanted is proper documentation of the protocol for speaking with the hardware, in the one case, or the software, in the other.
Microsoft, of course, has rational cause to fear this in the case of their software. Once other people can write software that interoperates with it, they'll lose sales.
Hardware manufacturers, on the other hand, have no rational reason to resist this. If they'd just provide some simple interoperability specs, they could save all the money they now spend on writing linux drivers, and get BETTER drivers written for them, maintained for them, by the community, at no charge. And support not just linux, but every other free operating system as well, again, at no charge to them.
Actually many (most?) have unmetred long distance as well these days. The cost of metering is often higher than the cost of providing the service.
The difference is that these aren't private companies, they're public utilities (paid for by tax money) that have been converted into private monopolies. There are very few places in this country where there is any actual competition in this business.
And on what basis do you think the current model is not sustainable? These folks are raking in cash hand over fist on their overpriced, underpowered internet service. They've dipped into the public coffers many times for infrastructure - and much of the infrastructure we paid for was never delivered, btw. If their business model isn't making money, they must need to reduce the amount being laundered into the executives accounts in the bahamas, cause their is no other explanation for it.
There isn't a 'dos part' in WindowsXP, it runs on the NT kernel.
And yes, you can run that kernel all alone without the GUI on top. There's no particular point in doing it, but you certainly can. You could build a completely different OS on top of it, if you had nothing better to do with your time.
Similarly you can run 'just the dos part' of win9x or ME, which did run on top of DOS. The last version of MS-DOS MS sold alone was 6.22. Windows95 and Windows 98 shipped with MS-DOS versions 7.x. WindowsME shipped with MS-DOS 8.x. And yes, that's what the ver command returned.
Similarly, when you get the version under CMD on XP and it says 'Windows XP [version 5.1.xxx]' think about that for a second. Is that version 5.1 of WindowsXP? NO! That's what it returns on the very first version of 'WinXP.' It is, however, version 5.1 of NT. 'Windows XP' is just some nonsense some pinhead in marketing came up with. The first released version of NT was '3.1' - again marketing at work, it should have been 1.0 but Windows on top of DOS was called 3.1 and they didn't want NT to sound behind. So you start with 3.1. Then 3.5 came out, then 3.51. Next was NT 4. When NT 5.0 was released, marketing insisted on a new name, Windows 2000. But ver still returns the correct string, [version 5.0.xxx] and again, NT 5.1, aka 'Windows XP' as you pointed out, still returns the correct string if you know how to get to it, [version 5.1.xxx].
For you to seriously argue that the pinheads in marketing know what these things are, and the engineers that built them don't, is truly astonishing.