the current situation is pretty rediculous. the way i see it, a graphics card manufacturer makes a card where the capabilities of the chips on the board are unknown, the firmware on the board in a binary blob, the meaning of the various pins in the pci-express slot is unknown and a second binary blob installed in the kernel of the operating system is also unknowable. how did it ever get this ridiculous?
you're not only looking at linux gamers, you're looking at the thousands of linux-workstations used in the special-effects-industry. if they could come with really stable drivers as part of the kernel, that may help sway the balance of power away from the good nvidia cards currently used.
there are a number of reasons why this would be in ati's interest:
the cards cost up to 4000 euros a shot, so it's a lucrative market
they could advertise with "we make the cards they used for harry potter 14"
opening up the drivers ensures that every linux kernel within a short time will come with a version of these drivers and there will be a good chance that the cards will just work and work well.
there's been a rumour for quite a while now that sun will move solaris10 from the CDDL to GPL3 as soon as GPL3 is finished. (one should also mention that duke nukem forever will also be released under the GPL3 according to a similar rumour)
i think linux has the advantage of being open source. this means that ubuntu can take the product advances red hat has made and then add their own. people are starting to hear about ubuntu, it's as if "the industry" has got together en masse and decided that it's time for linux to move onto the desktop and has singled-out ubuntu as the distro to push. it would not surprise me to hear of linux-versions of products from adobe et al. being released in the next year. as well as this, mark shuttleworth must be laughing at the people who ridiculed him for pumping so much money into canonical and ubuntu. now that the deal with dell has been announced, the future looks pretty rosey for his company.
my optimism comes from many things. i would say the most positive sign is that dell has chosen canonical to provide support for ubuntu and is working with canonical to make sure the hardware works out of the box. that a chip manufacturer like intel is working with the linux kernel team together is nothing unusual, but having them talk to a distribution is as far as i know unprecidented. it would imply that intel has very well-defined plans for this chip and may well be releasing a device with it in the future running mubuntu (TM howlingmadhowie 2007).
also of note is the article on the bbc website. "the increasingly popular Linux operating system Ubuntu" is just the start. they actually manage to explain what foss software is, rather than just stressing the "free as in beer" aspect. all in all, a piece which shows an understanding of foss and ubuntu, and that from auntie beeb.
so when you say "linux has a lot of work (to do) to make a consumer grade product", you mean free and open source software which runs on the linux kernel does not look as pretty as proprietary software on a different operating system.
how about the millions of people who do use a linux distribution as their home desktops? are they all animators and scientists? at the moment, they need a reason to use a linux distribution, because they damn well didn't get the computer with this on it. one hopes this will change.
in general i get the impression from your post that you have two or three favourite applications for windows and don't like the fact that the free software equivalents you know look different. i am also amused by your discrete catagorisation of people as "average user" or "geek".
by the way, what are the usability issues stopping you using linux? for some reason, there are millions of people who don't suffer from them.
Linux and other open source projects are getting a harsh lesson in what it is like to ship consumer grade software products.
um, you do know that linux has been the operating system of choice for supercomputers, webservers, special effects production, scientific computing etc. for a number of years now, don't you? because you seem to think that linux, freebsd, openbsd or whatever just suddenly turned up yesterday or something. are you also aware of the fact that a lot of people who write free and open-source software get paid good money to do so?
what you mean to say is, you hope that aero uses the graphics processor efficiently. the fact that beryl/compiz does much more and that with an onboard shared-memory graphics chip from 2002 should give you a clue that things are not okay with aero. unfortunately, a clue is all you are going to get, seeing as you're not allowed to know how aero works and you're not allowed to know how the graphics cards work.
so just carry on spouting out opinions as if they're facts.
of course, canonical is going to get every hardware combination dell is intending to offer ubuntu on and loadtest the hell out of it to make sure everything works perfectly (i hope).
if they do, you will have laptops in which everything works automatically under linux (suspend to disk/ram, special buttons etc. etc.). let's see what canonical can do, if they're given access to the hardware.
it is an interesting point, and one worth repeating, that the french, like people who live at any geographic location, consist of individuals. in the modern age, individuals often get together to from a group with some of their time.
a valid question would be, which group membership is more important to this guy: his membership in the foss community or his french passport?
the difference is, if it were windows, you might as well say it is the operating system, because the operating system is just one big blackbox. with linux, one would hope that quantas can find a few people who actually know how linux works and regression check the problems. of course, if they're running proprietary software on the boxes, this may not help much.
i think what has happened, is that kernels have become free and good. how many years to you have to go back before solaris cost hundreds of dollars and free/openBSD wasn't any good? the ability to share code inherent in opensource projects is a prerequisite for choice.
what i'm saying is, that the vast majority of blu-ray or hd-dvd discs burnt will contain (illegally) ripped media, which wouldn't have existed in these sizes without blu-ray or hd-dvd. i just find the irony quite amusing. naturally, large density discs have some legal uses too, i just can't anywhere near the same number of blu-ray discs will be burnt containing legal media as those burnt to contain illegal media.
this i view as a pretty positive development. it is positive for those who don't yet have broadband and want to share files (be that legal or illegal, it doesn't really bother me). anybody who's really into data-archiving should probably be spending more time thinking about raid-arrays and waiting for flash-media to reach a size when it gets useful. i do believe that flash-media represent the future of data-storage.
on a similar note, i went into my local computers-for-the-masses discounter recently and asked what sort of external harddrives they had 'because i have 250GB of pictures i've taken myself and films i've filmed myself and texts i've written myself'. the assistant laughed at that one.
so basically, blu-ray and hd-dvd in the actions of most people will provide an answer to one question: how am i going to transport the high-density films i rip? the irony is delicious.
oh it's even worse than that. who needed to burn 4GB of data before dvd-films were being ripped? i bet, amongst the kiddies, 80 percent of content on DVD-Rs is films and other media (illegally) ripped for giving to their friends. of course, most kiddies nowadays have 120GB external usb harddrives.
so this leaves the question, how are the kiddies going to get 45GB together to put on a blu-ray disk? you have three guesses... (hint, the answer's in the question)
"I actually LIKE competition, because it means that Apple and their developers actually have to work to make better products."
that's certainly the last course apple (or any other software company) will take to deal with competition. the usual method envolves lawyers and lots of suing, cease and desist etc.
is it not a tad worrying, when people on slashdot (which is rumoured to be visited by technically educated people) mark something like this insightful? what does that tell us about the state of modern computing? what has happened to this field? 30 years ago, people would have marked this funny, had there been a slashdot. after 30 years of closed-source software, even the experts don't have a clue how a computer works. "your computer crashing when you do that? that'll be (role a D6) the operating system".
"The author seems like they're shooting bullets of blame in a wild and uncontrollable manner."
... which is of course all you can do, if you're using closed-source software and are too cheap to pay apple, microsoft and toshiba to fix the problem for you personally.
if you're going to bomb citizens and schools in afghanistan with the justification, that a terrorist group active in the country funded by a seperate country was tolerated by the country's government, then you have to allow a citizen to criticise his own government.
the right alt-key is called Alt Gr on the german keyboard and is necessary for a number of keys (curly braces, square braces, backslash, at-sign, euro-sign and tilda)
the idea is to lessen the total load on the server.
let's do the math(s) here:
1000 people want to download a distribution
1000 x 700MB = 700GB
now let's say, 500 people download the distribution and the other 500 download the.torrent file
500 x 700MB + 500 x very little B = 350GB
and the server lives to see another day!
of course, you can also tell the server to prefer certain files etc. etc...
of course, you could also try just typing the search terms into google trends yourself. it would probably be faster than posting here on slashdot, which makes me think you had a reason for posting here and not typing the search terms into google trends.
as are citations from any encyclopedia. as a musician, i often find it amusing, when someone starts quoting grove or mgg at me, they are at times useful to get an overview, but because they are only compiled by a few people, there are often very obvious biases in the articles. wikipedia is better than these.
there are a number of areas where wikipedia is the best secondary source of all. i doubt there are encyclopedias of computer technology or comic heroes which come anywhere near wikipedia's level. does one quote from them? stupid question, it's an encyclopedia, if you quote from it, you are quoting someone and you should give that person's name. it is always best to quote primary sources. if i'm writing an article about mozart's correspondence, i go dig out the letters, i don't quote the grove on it.
it is also a question about the importance of the venue. if i'm trying to get an overall picture of the history of kraplakistan and i have 5 minutes to do so, then there is no source better than wikipedia. if i am going to court, i don't just grab stuff off the net (or out of any encyclopedia).
Slashdot Mirror
the current situation is pretty rediculous. the way i see it, a graphics card manufacturer makes a card where the capabilities of the chips on the board are unknown, the firmware on the board in a binary blob, the meaning of the various pins in the pci-express slot is unknown and a second binary blob installed in the kernel of the operating system is also unknowable. how did it ever get this ridiculous?
there are a number of reasons why this would be in ati's interest:
- the cards cost up to 4000 euros a shot, so it's a lucrative market
- they could advertise with "we make the cards they used for harry potter 14"
opening up the drivers ensures that every linux kernel within a short time will come with a version of these drivers and there will be a good chance that the cards will just work and work well.there's been a rumour for quite a while now that sun will move solaris10 from the CDDL to GPL3 as soon as GPL3 is finished. (one should also mention that duke nukem forever will also be released under the GPL3 according to a similar rumour)
i think linux has the advantage of being open source. this means that ubuntu can take the product advances red hat has made and then add their own. people are starting to hear about ubuntu, it's as if "the industry" has got together en masse and decided that it's time for linux to move onto the desktop and has singled-out ubuntu as the distro to push. it would not surprise me to hear of linux-versions of products from adobe et al. being released in the next year. as well as this, mark shuttleworth must be laughing at the people who ridiculed him for pumping so much money into canonical and ubuntu. now that the deal with dell has been announced, the future looks pretty rosey for his company.
my optimism comes from many things. i would say the most positive sign is that dell has chosen canonical to provide support for ubuntu and is working with canonical to make sure the hardware works out of the box. that a chip manufacturer like intel is working with the linux kernel team together is nothing unusual, but having them talk to a distribution is as far as i know unprecidented. it would imply that intel has very well-defined plans for this chip and may well be releasing a device with it in the future running mubuntu (TM howlingmadhowie 2007).
also of note is the article on the bbc website. "the increasingly popular Linux operating system Ubuntu" is just the start. they actually manage to explain what foss software is, rather than just stressing the "free as in beer" aspect. all in all, a piece which shows an understanding of foss and ubuntu, and that from auntie beeb.
so when you say "linux has a lot of work (to do) to make a consumer grade product", you mean free and open source software which runs on the linux kernel does not look as pretty as proprietary software on a different operating system.
how about the millions of people who do use a linux distribution as their home desktops? are they all animators and scientists? at the moment, they need a reason to use a linux distribution, because they damn well didn't get the computer with this on it. one hopes this will change.
in general i get the impression from your post that you have two or three favourite applications for windows and don't like the fact that the free software equivalents you know look different. i am also amused by your discrete catagorisation of people as "average user" or "geek".
by the way, what are the usability issues stopping you using linux? for some reason, there are millions of people who don't suffer from them.
Linux and other open source projects are getting a harsh lesson in what it is like to ship consumer grade software products.
um, you do know that linux has been the operating system of choice for supercomputers, webservers, special effects production, scientific computing etc. for a number of years now, don't you? because you seem to think that linux, freebsd, openbsd or whatever just suddenly turned up yesterday or something. are you also aware of the fact that a lot of people who write free and open-source software get paid good money to do so?
not quite right i'm afraid
what you mean to say is, you hope that aero uses the graphics processor efficiently. the fact that beryl/compiz does much more and that with an onboard shared-memory graphics chip from 2002 should give you a clue that things are not okay with aero. unfortunately, a clue is all you are going to get, seeing as you're not allowed to know how aero works and you're not allowed to know how the graphics cards work.
so just carry on spouting out opinions as if they're facts.
and people say linux is complicated...
of course, canonical is going to get every hardware combination dell is intending to offer ubuntu on and loadtest the hell out of it to make sure everything works perfectly (i hope).
if they do, you will have laptops in which everything works automatically under linux (suspend to disk/ram, special buttons etc. etc.). let's see what canonical can do, if they're given access to the hardware.
it is an interesting point, and one worth repeating, that the french, like people who live at any geographic location, consist of individuals. in the modern age, individuals often get together to from a group with some of their time.
a valid question would be, which group membership is more important to this guy: his membership in the foss community or his french passport?
the difference is, if it were windows, you might as well say it is the operating system, because the operating system is just one big blackbox. with linux, one would hope that quantas can find a few people who actually know how linux works and regression check the problems. of course, if they're running proprietary software on the boxes, this may not help much.
i think what has happened, is that kernels have become free and good. how many years to you have to go back before solaris cost hundreds of dollars and free/openBSD wasn't any good? the ability to share code inherent in opensource projects is a prerequisite for choice.
what i'm saying is, that the vast majority of blu-ray or hd-dvd discs burnt will contain (illegally) ripped media, which wouldn't have existed in these sizes without blu-ray or hd-dvd. i just find the irony quite amusing. naturally, large density discs have some legal uses too, i just can't anywhere near the same number of blu-ray discs will be burnt containing legal media as those burnt to contain illegal media.
this i view as a pretty positive development. it is positive for those who don't yet have broadband and want to share files (be that legal or illegal, it doesn't really bother me). anybody who's really into data-archiving should probably be spending more time thinking about raid-arrays and waiting for flash-media to reach a size when it gets useful. i do believe that flash-media represent the future of data-storage.
on a similar note, i went into my local computers-for-the-masses discounter recently and asked what sort of external harddrives they had 'because i have 250GB of pictures i've taken myself and films i've filmed myself and texts i've written myself'. the assistant laughed at that one.
so basically, blu-ray and hd-dvd in the actions of most people will provide an answer to one question: how am i going to transport the high-density films i rip? the irony is delicious.
oh it's even worse than that. who needed to burn 4GB of data before dvd-films were being ripped? i bet, amongst the kiddies, 80 percent of content on DVD-Rs is films and other media (illegally) ripped for giving to their friends. of course, most kiddies nowadays have 120GB external usb harddrives.
so this leaves the question, how are the kiddies going to get 45GB together to put on a blu-ray disk? you have three guesses... (hint, the answer's in the question)
why make trillions when you can make... billions?
"I actually LIKE competition, because it means that Apple and their developers actually have to work to make better products."
that's certainly the last course apple (or any other software company) will take to deal with competition. the usual method envolves lawyers and lots of suing, cease and desist etc.
is it not a tad worrying, when people on slashdot (which is rumoured to be visited by technically educated people) mark something like this insightful? what does that tell us about the state of modern computing? what has happened to this field? 30 years ago, people would have marked this funny, had there been a slashdot. after 30 years of closed-source software, even the experts don't have a clue how a computer works. "your computer crashing when you do that? that'll be (role a D6) the operating system".
"The author seems like they're shooting bullets of blame in a wild and uncontrollable manner."
... which is of course all you can do, if you're using closed-source software and are too cheap to pay apple, microsoft and toshiba to fix the problem for you personally.
and as you can see, it does it a lot faster than the old windows xp kernel (no surprise there). i wonder what it will be like against vista?
i nux%20vs%20Windows
http://widefox.pbwiki.com/Kernel%20Comparison%20L
if you're going to bomb citizens and schools in afghanistan with the justification, that a terrorist group active in the country funded by a seperate country was tolerated by the country's government, then you have to allow a citizen to criticise his own government.
the right alt-key is called Alt Gr on the german keyboard and is necessary for a number of keys (curly braces, square braces, backslash, at-sign, euro-sign and tilda)
the idea is to lessen the total load on the server.
.torrent file
let's do the math(s) here:
1000 people want to download a distribution
1000 x 700MB = 700GB
now let's say, 500 people download the distribution and the other 500 download the
500 x 700MB + 500 x very little B = 350GB
and the server lives to see another day!
of course, you can also tell the server to prefer certain files etc. etc...
well, if you wish
+ explorer%2C+ie6%2C+ie7%2C+ie&ctab=0&geo=all&date=a ll here you are
http://www.google.com/trends?q=firefox%2Cinternet
of course, you could also try just typing the search terms into google trends yourself. it would probably be faster than posting here on slashdot, which makes me think you had a reason for posting here and not typing the search terms into google trends.
as are citations from any encyclopedia. as a musician, i often find it amusing, when someone starts quoting grove or mgg at me, they are at times useful to get an overview, but because they are only compiled by a few people, there are often very obvious biases in the articles. wikipedia is better than these.
there are a number of areas where wikipedia is the best secondary source of all. i doubt there are encyclopedias of computer technology or comic heroes which come anywhere near wikipedia's level. does one quote from them? stupid question, it's an encyclopedia, if you quote from it, you are quoting someone and you should give that person's name. it is always best to quote primary sources. if i'm writing an article about mozart's correspondence, i go dig out the letters, i don't quote the grove on it.
it is also a question about the importance of the venue. if i'm trying to get an overall picture of the history of kraplakistan and i have 5 minutes to do so, then there is no source better than wikipedia. if i am going to court, i don't just grab stuff off the net (or out of any encyclopedia).
you shouldn't have to complain to walmart. you should have the law on your side, and the law should be the 10,000 pound gorilla in these cases.