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Ben Goodger wrote: > 1. Is it so difficult for Linux to not turn Num Lock off six or seven times > during the transition from GRUB to GNOME? It keeps turning it off, at every > opportunity. Check to see if your BIOS is also trying to set NumLock and then check the config of either X or your desktop manager (kdm, gdm or xdm). This isn't something that I've come across before but installing a new package is probably not the answer. > 3. Why does Flash have such poor audio control which more often than not > results in it being completely silenced, fixed only by restarting ALSA? > (firefox) Likely answer is that ALSA doesn't really have much idea what actually happens inside the black-box that is a proprietary Flash driver. All Flash support has to be painstakingly reverse engineered and that is probably the most difficult job in modern programming. So when the free software Flash driver tries to work with ALSA, the developers have to work without the knowledge of how Flash is "supposed" to work. This always leads to bugs. Until Macromedia allow free software developers access to the API, these problems will continue. Proprietary solutions will always suffer from these problems, that is why proprietary code elicits such an extreme reaction from free software developers (like myself and Kai). We *want* to help you solve these problems. We *want* to be able to support the absolute latest Flash and 3D acceleration. The problem is that the people designing the methods that implement this functionality don't want to work with us. > 4. Why do Flash and Java plugins have such poor keyboard input? Is it so > difficult to make them accept it? (firefox) Possibly, yes. Again, Java is somewhat open but the JDK is still not under a free software licence and problems integrating Java into other systems are still down to Sun to solve - if they are interested in solving them. Free software developers simply do not have access to the code to solve the problems. > 5. Why do Flash and Java and Javascript run so much slower in Linux? > (firefox) If that is true, it could be down to the extra layers involved - part of the mechanism to support proprietary interfaces can involve some form of emulation and that can be very CPU intensive. Try comparing the CPU usage rather than just timing. > 7. why, even when I input the horz/vert settings from its manual, can X not > get sane refresh rates while Windows obtains a comfortable 85Hz at the same > colour depth and resolution? That one is relatively easy. It is because Microsoft enter a private agreement with the monitor/graphics card manufacturer whereby the details of the hardware are declared to the MS developers. This allows the installer to have a reliable reference table, indexed on the machine-readable ID string for the device concerned. Some of these hardware tables are available in the free software world, some are not and it is particularly prevalent in more recent hardware. Generally, the older the hardware, the more likely it is that someone has calculated the required data (sometimes by trial and error, sometimes by reverse engineering) and made that data available to the free software world. Note that simply obtaining the data via the MS type licensing would make the free software developer (and potentially the user) liable for prosecution. > 8. Why, indeed, does X require me to enter these to get the thing > working at > all? Is there something stopping it from achieving basic levels of > user-friendliness which were reached by Microsoft eleven years ago or more, > and Apple a good time before that? Microsoft and Apple have non-disclosure agreements with the various manufacturers that allow their developers full access to these settings. Apple traditionally limited their risk by keeping their hardware specific to their systems. Microsoft obtain the data simply be being the monopoly player. Manufacturers know they won't sell their hardware without Windows operability. So Microsoft are the driving force behind the non-disclosure and Apple's previous usage of a limited range of hardware made their agreements less problematic. The core problem lies with the Microsoft monopoly - some manufacturers would be willing to offer their data to RedHat or Debian but are prevented by the agreements that Microsoft required to allow Windows support. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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