On Wed, 5 May 2004 17:40:13 -0400 JoeHill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You bring up a good point. Xandros, Libranet, Mandrake, all the 'not > free as in beer' distros, trumpet their ease of use, including their > support for
At least in the case of Mandrake, much of that stuff is in plf for obvious reasons, and sooner or later there is going to be suse-specific equivalents of plf stuff. It's only a matter of time. I'm all for open standards, but the problem is that much of the content providers on the Internet have locked into the proprietary technology and this makes things very difficult for us, even should we attempt to make use of it on a GPL platform. (At least this *seems* seamless on a Windows platform -- case in point, my brother's other system (which runs windows) -- I was over there the other day, doing routine maintenance and such, connected to my home Linux box over xvnc. I was looking around for radio stations and such, noticed that the Realplayer was way out of date, and so d/l the newer windows version. Looked pretty slick, but I couldn't get it to open much of anything, so my fallback was to shoutcast.com for the night :). Realistically speaking, Windows isn't any better of a platform for doing certain tasks of a proprietary nature, such as copying or encoding DVDs. It may just seem easier because it's a monolithic program as opposed to a bunch of utilities. But the legal thing still seems to be present, otherwise we wouldn't have to see boatloads of spam supporting something being the only "legal" dvd copying program around. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David E. Fox Thanks for letting me [EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns [EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk. -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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