Video Cards

[Craig White]

The only way to know what dog food tastes like is to eat it.

Take a machine that is properly configured and put it on company heads
desk and let him use it for a week.

Either he makes it work and then it's a done deal or he can't make it
work and argument finished. If you have a system that's up to snuff, it
should be self-evident.

Keep in mind that Advanced Desktop on Vista requires a 256MB video card
with accelerated graphics and to obtain similar performance on Linux,
you are locking yourself into non-open source drivers which surely isn't
how I want to sell an open source OS.

As for not being able to run Microsoft Office on Linux...

- Open Office opens/saves .doc/.xls/.pps files (as well as their
template brethren)
- These file types are soon to be extinct
- Open Office also opens/saves open document format (link provided last
email)
- Microsoft Office does not open/save open document formats
- Open Office also includes Draw & Base at no extra cost
- Open Office is free, open source, freely distributable
- Microsoft Office (depending upon flavor) costs between $300 - $600 per
user

The only issue Microsoft Office presents is Outlook which is murderous
if you are not using Exchange Server and if you are using Exchange
Server, you get it free anyway.

Craig

On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 10:01 -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> Craig, 
> I appreciate your input and I agree with you. But back to reality...
> My corporation is interested in saving money from the licenses, but as far as 
> what the licenses entail, they request that I make the best decision based on 
> what the company needs. Of course I agree with the open license vs. 
> proprietary. But the company heads know linux isn't there on the desktop yet, 
> because that is what they read in their ceo mags. Meanwhile we all know it 
> works just fine. I don't know how many people on this list actually use 
> linux, let alone use it full time. I think there are only a couple of us that 
> are 100% linux all the time. Proves a point that even the linux groups still 
> use windows, so how am I to convince ceo's based on facts like that?
> 
> They look at it and say, ok, it does the basics that we want. But you know, 
> that new Vista sure is pretty! 
> 
> So I can throw AIGLX on and say, yeah, but look! Linux is just as pretty, and 
> even a little faster!
> Who cares about eye candy? Truth be told, they see it can do it and think it 
> is as advanced as Vista or even XP. They have no clue that it took Vista 5 
> years to get Aero right, and it's still wrong, meanwhile Beryl has been going 
> less than a year and it rocks!
> 
> So, while I agree with your points that open licensing and source is much 
> better in just about every case, corporate heads don't always see that, 
> especially when they don't see how to make money off something that is given 
> away. Nonetheless I work for a government branch, so we're not making money 
> off this, but still, they want to know they are moving forward in technology, 
> not backwards, and the mags they read don't always give the best light on 
> Linux because you  can't run MS Office on it.
> 
> nathan
> 
> 
> On Tuesday 14 November 2006 09:42, you wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 09:12 -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> > > Hello All,
> > >
> > > I'm looking for a machine with a new video card. I haven't had much luck
> > > with a few of the older Radeon based cards, and I love the nVidia cards,
> > > however, the machine I am purchasing only has an ATI Radeon X600SE.
> > >
> > > I'm not going to play games, and this is a Linux only box, however, I
> > > would like to play with AIGLX and all the new fancy eye candy.
> > >
> > > How do you like the performance of the newish ATI cards and how well do
> > > they work? The ones I've used recently just seemed really flaky,
> > > especially compared to the nVidia cards and my personal favorite the
> > > Intel i915 based cards.
> > >
> > > Any information you can offer will be greatly appreciated. I'm not going
> > > to impress anyone with the gaming ability of this machine, but the eye
> > > candy will convince upper management that Linux will be better suited in
> > > the future than XP... lol
> > > It's funny how the eye candy wins things out like this...
> >
> > ----
> > I think that it's an ugly trap to get sucked into.
> >
> > To obtain performance, you undoubtedly have to use the proprietary
> > binary code from those vendors instead of using the open source drivers.
> >
> > It seems to me that the clinching the deal between open source versus
> > proprietary is simply that - the source of the programs themselves.
> >
> > The 'eye candy' as you put it, doesn't have anything to do with the
> > important issues such as...
> >
> > - Software Licensing...the need to obtain and maintain licensing records
> > with proprietary systems with complicated End User License Agreements,
> > complicated licensing requirements (see Microsoft's License 6) versus
> > the simplicity of GPL copyleft.
> >
> > - Software sourcing...open source versus single point requirement. Open
> > source doesn't wait for single source to acknowledge problem and deliver
> > solution.
> >
> > - Data storage formats...open document formats versus proprietary,
> > undocumented formats (see http://oasis-open.org) - Even the common
> > Microsoft formats of XLS/DOC/PPT are going the way of the dinosaur and
> > are being replaced by a new and hopelessly overly impenetrable XML
> > format which not surprisingly, gives Microsoft more control over your
> > data. Suggest that you obtain the schema definitions for both Open
> > Office formats and Microsoft Office formats.
> >
> > - Future...if you research the installation/maintenance costs for Vista
> > and related Office applications, you will undoubtedly find a lot of
> > resistance to the high cost, high system demands for Microsoft's next
> > step.
> >
> > One of the most interesting things about Microsoft is their ability to
> > pivot on their own standards and simply discard them. I just read a
> > fairly good analysis of their new 'Zune' player in
> > tidbits...http://db.tidbits.com/issue/855 which discusses how their Zune
> > doesn't use their 'PlaysForSure' technology. I can't think of a clearer
> > statement by Microsoft saying...buy our DRM strategies and you will find
> > yourself abandoned as soon as we come up with our next great product.
> >
> > Craig
>