I updated my Galaxy S to 2.2 few days ago with Kies, but it actually made things worse. My GPS worked just fine on 2.1, never had any of the problems people have been complaining about. After the update my GPS is completely useless.

Well, if I recall correctly, on VLC softsubs have worked quite a while. Don't know about mplayer, because it was only recently I noticed that it had support for ASS subtitles. It just had to be enabled manually. Even without enabling them, mplayer still could display the subs, they just were horrible to watch. VLC worked fine.

Never seen anything like this. Though I never wanted to hear English dubs, so don't know about audio channels. Nowadays they do work, since I've watched some movies with multiple audio channels.

By the way, what does 'proper support' mean? I mean, I've never had any problems whatsoever.

Well, there's your problem.

There is mplayer in Ubuntu (not installed by default). And it even ships with VDPAU-support (well, in 9.10). And if one chooses to use Totem media player (that's the shiny one you're talking about), it actually downloads the required codecs from the repositories (no searching the Internets, incredible huh?), and it just works. Anyways, all the codecs (atleast most used codecs) ARE available in the repos.

Yeah, audio sucks on Linux. Without Pulseaudio everything basically just works (and on OSS4 even better). On the issue of several sound cards I don't have much to say, other than that problem probably exists only on minority. Why would a normal user want to use several sound cards? (The onboard one can be disabled from the BIOS, and it's possible from Linux also).

Nevertheless, even with Pulseaudio everything has worked for me. No playing around. Except when Pulseaudio decides to cap one core to the max. Or just crashes, or decides that I don't need to hear any sounds, but that's another story.

Well first of all, 720p should play smoothly even on an older dual core (and even single core, haven't tested it though). My laptops Core Duo 1.6ghz plays even 1080p video smoothly, although on lower bitrates only.

Second of all, there IS hardware acceleration support on Linux, both with Nvidia and Ati cards. Nvidias VDPAU support is compiled in mplayer found in Ubuntu repos (9.10, once again). For what I've read, there's some support even for Ati cards.

I've watched anime for years, but on Linux only since 2005 when I made The Jump(tm). It wasn't very easy in the beginning to get things to work (required manual downloading of the codecs from mplayerhq etc.). Can't say how long they've been available, because I can't recall the last time I had to do manual downloads.

Besides, is your rant even relevant because you're clearly talking about the past (and about other distros), and the article is about the present state (of Ubuntu)?

Actually, Elisa dropped the filtering some time ago. Now it's available as opt in service.

If I recall correctly, only the smaller ISPs have the filtering in place.

Indeed. The cochlear nucleus is the only part that receives input from the ipsilateral ear. After that, auditory input comes from both ears (via superior olive -> inferior colliculus -> medial geniculate -> auditory cortex).