>I know this sounds stupid, but what happens when you actually try playing something through a media player? In the past, I've occasionally had that error message when logging into KDE/Gnome about not being able to connect to the sound server, yet still had my sound system work fine.

It doesn't work at all in amaroK. Do you have any ideas for a Realtek High Definition Audio driver for Ubuntu? I would rather use apt-get because I'm not in the mood to start searching again for a package.

Actually, it loads a "void-engine" instead of the "xine-engine" for playback. It can't play anything.

The only reason I don't like Mac, their price and customer service. Its too expensive for a normal person to buy plus there is not much I gain by using it. That being said, I am sure there must be a pretty good reason for all those people out there using Mac.

>The right to information that isn't yours? The right to information
>that companies poured millions of dollars into creating?
Yes, and all they manage to come up with is IIS, SQL Server and what not _I_don't_care_about_standards_, while software foundations like Apache coming up with a web server the world uses, and guess what, its free.

Mind you, like Linux, I don't share the same point of view that nothing should be closed source and they are immoral in holding back. I guess its fine, there is not much we can do.

>That is really unfair.
Actually it really is.

>Them being writers, not open source geeks, have probably never
>even heard of other formats such as the Open Document Textfile.
Yes, ignorance really is bliss. Breaking out of it seems so hard.


>While open source is definitely a nice thing, you've got a pretty
>screwed perspective if you believe that it's immoral not to release source code that people have spent years of labor to produce.
Agreed on this one.

>I'm sure that if Microsoft Office were inferior to OpenOffice, .odt
>would soon become a well-known format.
The best things in life are never rationed.

>The only reason I don't like Mac, their price and customer service. Its too expensive for a normal person to buy plus there is not much I gain by using it. That being said, I am sure there must be a pretty good reason for all those people out there using Mac.

you could try hackintosh ;-p

>While open source is definitely a nice thing, you've got a pretty screwed perspective if you believe that it's immoral not to release source code that people have spent

An immoral activity doesn't become acceptable just because many are doing it. (of course acceptable to me)

>>The only reason I don't like Mac, their price and customer service. Its too expensive for a normal person to buy plus there is not much I gain by using it. That being said, I am sure there must be a pretty good reason for all those people out there using Mac.

>you could try hackintosh ;-p

That is what this topic is about...

>Um he is the CEO. Bill Gates doesn't need to take a stance on open
>source because Ballmer does it for him.
Bill Gates has pretty much left the company; right now he's donating money to charity. I don't think he really cares that much about what happens to Microsoft.

>But I think a free and slightly inferior office suit is more appealing to
>a slightly superior office suit that costs money.
Not to the business people.

>I prefer not to use a word processor in general.
So it wouldn't have made any difference if they had offered you a choice of .doc or .odt. Your real problem with it wasn't that they required it to be in a proprietary format, it's that they didn't offer the format you wanted it to be in.

>Microsoft and other companies are pushing there software to be the standard.
Yes, but usually the reason something becomes standard is because people buy and use it.

>Microsoft is a monopoly that eliminates choice by eliminating the competition.
Microsoft has tons of competition, and I don't think they're eliminating very much of it. Some examples include Linux, as already mentioned, and of course Apple, which has the largest chunk of the operating system market besides Microsoft. I can see free choice here. So what if Microsoft has made a few deals with Novell and a few other Linuxes? There are thousands of Linux distros out there.

>Yes, and all they manage to come up with is IIS, SQL Server and
>what not _I_don't_care_about_standards_, while software
>foundations like Apache coming up with a web server the world
>uses, and guess what, its free.
Apache is being widely used because its quality is, for the most part, higher than that of IIS. People buy/download and use whatever suits their budget and needs the best. I'm happy that both IIS and Apache exist, it gives choice.

@linux:
My mind is a little bit foggy, but there should be a way of modifying the appliance in VMWare to use different hardware. Perhaps try a Sound Blaster card? Those tend to work right out of the box.

Going back the original topic, hackintoshes *are* definitely illegal if you haven't purchased a license for the copy of OS X that's running on the computer. There's no gray area there. And, for the record, the license agreement in OS X says that you will not install the software on anything other than a licensed Apple machine. So even if you bought a copy of OS X for every PC that you used it on, you'd still technically be breaking the law.