They already do this: it's contracted to a privately-held company called The Federal Reserve. By having the word "Federal" in the name you'd think it's a government agency owned by the people, wouldn't you. . .
I haven't purchased any ATI cards in about four years, and for customers I steer them to either NVidia or, for lower-end customers, to Intel's embedded chipsets. The nice folks at ATI will eventually figure it out, if not by themselves, then by their AMD overlords.
. . . and considering that Fedora 5 comes with 2.6.16 (at best) it's not likely to fare any better on current-generation hardware. I'd still have to download the vanilla kernel, track down any vendor-specific optimizations, merge those in if the process isn't too time-consuming, then figure out which combination of kernel modules/firmware/tuner settings work with each rev of each card. Combine that with the suck that is Hauppauge -- I bought a PVR-150, chose it over the PVR-500 because I was skeptical and now I'm glad I saved my money on the dual tuner card. With a 500ms or so delay on the display it renders the cable guide totally worthless -- and you have a recipe for a craptacular HTPC. I then ordered an uber-cheap-but-easy-to-configure MSI TV@nywhere, and I had that card up and running in literally five minutes, compared to 3-4 hours of trying various firmware and tuner setting combinations with the Hauppage. Not only that, the MSI does hardware MPEG2 encoding, hardware-assisted MPEG4, plus NO appreciable delay in the display. Not only that, the MSI works with standard TV apps like xawtv and kdetv, whereas the Hauppauge works ONLY with Myth.
Or, install Windows Media Center and have it all work out of the box. MythTV may be GORGEOUS and offer tons and tons of functionality Windows Media Center will never provide, but Windows Media Center can be installed and fully configured out of the box in a half hour to 45 minutes.
I like Myth, really, and plan to put time into getting it to work perfectly, but it's hard to put aside an entire day to devote to setting up a TV/PVR application.
Say you buy an ATI Radeon 917183712. You install the proprietary drivers in x.org 11.92, and they run fine. Then, the Radeon 32648956125 comes out, and new "unified" drivers are released. Only thing wrong: the Radeon 917183712 is still on the market and is still actively distributed, and will remain so for the forseeable future in embedded chipsets (servers and laptops), however, ATI elects to drop support for the Radeon 917183712 in the driver to encourage (force upgrades) to the brand-new Radeon 32648956125 if you want to run x.org 12.78
OK so the model and version numbers in the above are insane, but this is EXACTLY what ATI has done time and again. They drop support for product which is STILL IN THE CHANNEL (let alone not even obsolete) in their drivers. If the drivers were open source, this would not be an issue and you can run x.org 7.0, 7.1, or 15.0 regardless of whether or not ATI bothers to update it, because the x.org team will keep the famework around the driver updated.
Not going to happen. NVidia and ATi have stated they couldn't open up the drivers if they wanted to. There's just too much licensed IP they don't have the rights to open.
Bullshit. They can yank out third-party routines and instead document EVERY register that is exposed to the bus. What possible "IP" can be "violated" by documenting that placing falue (n) through (n+255) in $foo register does $bar? Absolutely none. It does not reveal any optimizations in that third-party routine, and does not expose the chip mask to the layperson, e.g., anyone not possessing the equipment necessary to disassemble a chip without damage, not possessing an electron microsocope, and not possessing the skills to reverse engineer it even if they could get to the point where they can take those pictures.
Verizon will only install FIOS in single-tenant buildings. I rent an apartment, and I rent space in an office suite.:(
WTF Verizon? Every time I try to come back there is always, ALWAYS a technical reason I can't come back.
And every time you send your reps to my place of business to sell me services, I inform your rep that you can't deliver what you're offering, they call to confirm (actually they call to prove me wrong and try to sell me the service) and find out that I've already inquired about the service and can't get it unless in a single-tenant building and/or (in the case of HIGH-speed DSL) am willing to settle for five or fewer non-consecutive IP addresses.
In some people's minds, an extensible system where you can selectively add everything and the kitchen sink by your own choosing is bloat, even if the minimal installation is extremely efficient.
I prefer to call that level of choice flexibility.
It is very likely that Family Guy or South Park will pick up the meme sooner. Family Guy lives on pop culture references, and South Park will spoof just about anyone for any reason.
The idea behind e-ink in a device like that is:
- Make it easy to read in bright light (many cellphones still do not come with transflective displays)
- Decrease battery consumption, extending call and standby times
Program manager says you need to implement (X, Y, Z) by $FOO date. Only a stable (X) or a very, very unstable (X, Y, Z) possible by that date but the VP is backing the project managers demands.
In addition, Vista is a "major upgrade" which is several years late, with Microsoft's yanking features left and right, and pulling out a LOT of code changes to meet their 200th or so delayed date, while Apple has:
- Introduced a brand-new OS
- (as you mentioned) Accelerated their GUI
- Refreshed the look and feel several times
- Kept up with security patches (and no, not rushing just the DRM patches like Microsoft does)
- Migrated to a new platform (PPC -> x86) while maintaining backwards compatibility
- Introduced two new video NLE suites
- Introduced an office suite
- Introduced an IDE rivaling that of Microsoft's
- Introduced a new method of file browsing (love it or hate it, Finder is unique and interesting)
During that same time period, while Microsoft's upgrades to office suites have consisted largely of upgrading the GUI (ooooh, new screen-estate sucking toolbars renamed to Ribbons) while yanking key selling features (VBA).
Don't forget that "Net" income is calculated after their HUGE bonuses are all paid out. Don't get suckered by their crying poor; if business really were that bad they'd have pulled out long ago.
This is just a maneuver to avoid having to pay the artists. Obviously.
and "sue McDonalds for making coffee". It's a stupid lie that just won't die.
No matter how hot the coffee was, even if "too hot" that woman was a fucking dumbass to place the very hot coffee, which was in a styrofoam cup, between her legs and then proceed to drive her manual transmission-equipped vehicle. That reeks of stupidity and she deserved to get scalded.
Our founding fathers were pretty clear in their peripheral writings (letters and whatnot) that the second amendment proposal was for INDIVIDUALS, for the purpose of the PEOPLE retaining the absolute right to overthrow a tyrannical government when the constitution is ignored and when people's inherent inalienable rights are being infringed (e.g,, right to vote, right to worship freely, freedom from taxation without representation, right to own property). We have in essence lost the right to own property (buy a house and try not paying property taxes; the government claims they have the right to take your home), and lost our representation (congress is bought and paid for by the economic elite, so you choose between Corp X's Candidate A or Candidate B).
What they meant was "well-regulated militia" was individuals who not only owned weapons, but knew how to use them to effectively kill or maim tyrants (I'm in favor of maiming rather than killing; I believe assholes should be forced to live with their remorse for mistreating others).
What lawyers do is they read the Constitution, ignore peripheral writings by those who drafted the law, and take those writings out of context. If they want to refer to other writings, they compare against OTHER nations' laws (how the Hell do they get the idea that THAT is legal?) for their arguments.
And as far as AC's comments regarding abortion goes: The Constitution guarantees the right to life. How is it the laws are interpreted such that a human is not a human until it fully exits the body? That certainly is not a scientific conclusion.
Well, the requested format can be generated on the fly using 100% OSS, so if demand for ogg for a particular track is low, no big deal, but if someone requests ogg (or wma, vqf, or any other standard format) it can be generated upon request.
Well I like some Christian music, but there is very little good Christian rock, and I've never heard any that could be classified as progressive rock. Nor have I heard any Christian jazz. So, if I don't buy, does this mean that EMI will mark it down as a failure? Try offering some rock and some jazz, EMI, in either OGG or 320kbps+ MP3 format, then I'll buy.
How many MP3s do they expect to sell from that offering - 100 tracks worldwide? I think their selected offering is a maneuver to "prove" that DRM-free music sales from the labels won't work.
Slashdot Mirror
On OLDER chipsets, OLDER videocards, sure. But I wanted to run a Core 2 Duo, not a Pentium II or Pentium III.
They already do this: it's contracted to a privately-held company called The Federal Reserve. By having the word "Federal" in the name you'd think it's a government agency owned by the people, wouldn't you. . .
I haven't purchased any ATI cards in about four years, and for customers I steer them to either NVidia or, for lower-end customers, to Intel's embedded chipsets. The nice folks at ATI will eventually figure it out, if not by themselves, then by their AMD overlords.
. . . and considering that Fedora 5 comes with 2.6.16 (at best) it's not likely to fare any better on current-generation hardware. I'd still have to download the vanilla kernel, track down any vendor-specific optimizations, merge those in if the process isn't too time-consuming, then figure out which combination of kernel modules/firmware/tuner settings work with each rev of each card. Combine that with the suck that is Hauppauge -- I bought a PVR-150, chose it over the PVR-500 because I was skeptical and now I'm glad I saved my money on the dual tuner card. With a 500ms or so delay on the display it renders the cable guide totally worthless -- and you have a recipe for a craptacular HTPC. I then ordered an uber-cheap-but-easy-to-configure MSI TV@nywhere, and I had that card up and running in literally five minutes, compared to 3-4 hours of trying various firmware and tuner setting combinations with the Hauppage. Not only that, the MSI does hardware MPEG2 encoding, hardware-assisted MPEG4, plus NO appreciable delay in the display. Not only that, the MSI works with standard TV apps like xawtv and kdetv, whereas the Hauppauge works ONLY with Myth.
Or, install Windows Media Center and have it all work out of the box. MythTV may be GORGEOUS and offer tons and tons of functionality Windows Media Center will never provide, but Windows Media Center can be installed and fully configured out of the box in a half hour to 45 minutes.
I like Myth, really, and plan to put time into getting it to work perfectly, but it's hard to put aside an entire day to devote to setting up a TV/PVR application.
The harm is this:
Say you buy an ATI Radeon 917183712. You install the proprietary drivers in x.org 11.92, and they run fine. Then, the Radeon 32648956125 comes out, and new "unified" drivers are released. Only thing wrong: the Radeon 917183712 is still on the market and is still actively distributed, and will remain so for the forseeable future in embedded chipsets (servers and laptops), however, ATI elects to drop support for the Radeon 917183712 in the driver to encourage (force upgrades) to the brand-new Radeon 32648956125 if you want to run x.org 12.78
OK so the model and version numbers in the above are insane, but this is EXACTLY what ATI has done time and again. They drop support for product which is STILL IN THE CHANNEL (let alone not even obsolete) in their drivers. If the drivers were open source, this would not be an issue and you can run x.org 7.0, 7.1, or 15.0 regardless of whether or not ATI bothers to update it, because the x.org team will keep the famework around the driver updated.
Bullshit. They can yank out third-party routines and instead document EVERY register that is exposed to the bus. What possible "IP" can be "violated" by documenting that placing falue (n) through (n+255) in $foo register does $bar? Absolutely none. It does not reveal any optimizations in that third-party routine, and does not expose the chip mask to the layperson, e.g., anyone not possessing the equipment necessary to disassemble a chip without damage, not possessing an electron microsocope, and not possessing the skills to reverse engineer it even if they could get to the point where they can take those pictures.
I can get FIOS neither at my office nor at home.
:(
Verizon will only install FIOS in single-tenant buildings. I rent an apartment, and I rent space in an office suite.
WTF Verizon? Every time I try to come back there is always, ALWAYS a technical reason I can't come back.
And every time you send your reps to my place of business to sell me services, I inform your rep that you can't deliver what you're offering, they call to confirm (actually they call to prove me wrong and try to sell me the service) and find out that I've already inquired about the service and can't get it unless in a single-tenant building and/or (in the case of HIGH-speed DSL) am willing to settle for five or fewer non-consecutive IP addresses.
Government-guaranteed monopolies suck.
In some people's minds, an extensible system where you can selectively add everything and the kitchen sink by your own choosing is bloat, even if the minimal installation is extremely efficient.
I prefer to call that level of choice flexibility.
It is very likely that Family Guy or South Park will pick up the meme sooner. Family Guy lives on pop culture references, and South Park will spoof just about anyone for any reason.
The idea behind e-ink in a device like that is:
- Make it easy to read in bright light (many cellphones still do not come with transflective displays)
- Decrease battery consumption, extending call and standby times
FWIW, Prodigy beat AOL to the Internet.
Ah, yes, but tomorrow's warmed-over crap is the day after tomorrow's Year 2038 Bug fix boom.
Sure there is!
As in:
Program manager says you need to implement (X, Y, Z) by $FOO date. Only a stable (X) or a very, very unstable (X, Y, Z) possible by that date but the VP is backing the project managers demands.
In this case, a "goto hell" is 100% acceptable.
In addition, Vista is a "major upgrade" which is several years late, with Microsoft's yanking features left and right, and pulling out a LOT of code changes to meet their 200th or so delayed date, while Apple has:
- Introduced a brand-new OS
- (as you mentioned) Accelerated their GUI
- Refreshed the look and feel several times
- Kept up with security patches (and no, not rushing just the DRM patches like Microsoft does)
- Migrated to a new platform (PPC -> x86) while maintaining backwards compatibility
- Introduced two new video NLE suites
- Introduced an office suite
- Introduced an IDE rivaling that of Microsoft's
- Introduced a new method of file browsing (love it or hate it, Finder is unique and interesting)
During that same time period, while Microsoft's upgrades to office suites have consisted largely of upgrading the GUI (ooooh, new screen-estate sucking toolbars renamed to Ribbons) while yanking key selling features (VBA).
Microsoft is innovating how, exactly?
I think the idea is to get the pissant third-rate military dictators addicted to WoW, then they won't have TIME to oppress their subjects.
Don't forget that "Net" income is calculated after their HUGE bonuses are all paid out. Don't get suckered by their crying poor; if business really were that bad they'd have pulled out long ago.
This is just a maneuver to avoid having to pay the artists. Obviously.
No matter how hot the coffee was, even if "too hot" that woman was a fucking dumbass to place the very hot coffee, which was in a styrofoam cup, between her legs and then proceed to drive her manual transmission-equipped vehicle. That reeks of stupidity and she deserved to get scalded.
Our founding fathers were pretty clear in their peripheral writings (letters and whatnot) that the second amendment proposal was for INDIVIDUALS, for the purpose of the PEOPLE retaining the absolute right to overthrow a tyrannical government when the constitution is ignored and when people's inherent inalienable rights are being infringed (e.g,, right to vote, right to worship freely, freedom from taxation without representation, right to own property). We have in essence lost the right to own property (buy a house and try not paying property taxes; the government claims they have the right to take your home), and lost our representation (congress is bought and paid for by the economic elite, so you choose between Corp X's Candidate A or Candidate B).
What they meant was "well-regulated militia" was individuals who not only owned weapons, but knew how to use them to effectively kill or maim tyrants (I'm in favor of maiming rather than killing; I believe assholes should be forced to live with their remorse for mistreating others).
What lawyers do is they read the Constitution, ignore peripheral writings by those who drafted the law, and take those writings out of context. If they want to refer to other writings, they compare against OTHER nations' laws (how the Hell do they get the idea that THAT is legal?) for their arguments.
And as far as AC's comments regarding abortion goes: The Constitution guarantees the right to life. How is it the laws are interpreted such that a human is not a human until it fully exits the body? That certainly is not a scientific conclusion.
99% of games he is aware of are:
- Tetris
- Super Tetris
- That cool puzzle game with the Apple logo
1. Suspension
2. Of
3. Disbelief
Even crappy technically ignorant movies like Wargames, ID4, and Hackers are fun to watch.
That's what I thought.
Probably not, because they want their computers to WORK.
Yes. After all, only terrorists brush their teeth or drink H2O.
Well, the requested format can be generated on the fly using 100% OSS, so if demand for ogg for a particular track is low, no big deal, but if someone requests ogg (or wma, vqf, or any other standard format) it can be generated upon request.
Well I like some Christian music, but there is very little good Christian rock, and I've never heard any that could be classified as progressive rock. Nor have I heard any Christian jazz. So, if I don't buy, does this mean that EMI will mark it down as a failure? Try offering some rock and some jazz, EMI, in either OGG or 320kbps+ MP3 format, then I'll buy.
How many MP3s do they expect to sell from that offering - 100 tracks worldwide? I think their selected offering is a maneuver to "prove" that DRM-free music sales from the labels won't work.