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I'd like to see how they define UNIX platform.

You mean for licensing purposes? Qt Free is GPL, so you can port it to any platform.

Does NT's POSIX count as a UNIX platform? Does BeOS count as a UNIX platform?

Currently, Qt Free requires a working POSIX subsystem (NT's is subpar but Red Hat Cygwin is good) and an X11 server. XFree86 works on Windows NT/2K but not on 9x because of stupid assumptions in the design of Windows 9x's USER and GDI servers. (Why oh why didn't Microsoft just release NT 4 as Windows 95?)

free for OSS and pay for commercial is one thing. Doing the same for UNIX and Windows is just punishing a developer for not liking *NIX.

It's not punishing but instead "not wasting effort on porting a free software package to an environment that's thought to be hostile to free software."

video codec ... Sorensen ... Apple

You're thinking of QuickTime, rather than the communist-looking Qt toolkit used as KDE's widget set.

textual display information imbedded into movies now?

<OT>This has been in quicktime for a while (since at least 3.0).</OT>

Back on topic: will qt free edition (or xfree86) ever be ported to windows 9x?

I don't really know anything else about Bono's career as a politician.

Six words: Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Despite that fact, I play any Nintendo games I want to on Nesticle.

NESticle's accuracy sucks Big Floppy Donkey Dick; it can't emulate games that rely on precise timing. Use TuxNES or one of the better WinDOS-based emulators instead. The only reason I ever touch NESticle is to make sure NES software I write displays a warning message if it is run on NESticle; it takes only four lines of NES asm to detect NESticle, and from there I display an advertisement for LoopyNES.

A click through is not Law... click-throughs have all the legal binding of any other un-signed, un-witnessed agreement: none at all.

Big-money software licenses (such as Oracle and MSSQL licenses) often require a written contract that has all the consideration and everything, to the effect: "You give up $50,000 and the right to reverse engineer this software and publish benchmarks in exchange for the right to receive this software (we're not giving you the disc until we receive your signature) and use this software in commerce."

Under standard copyright law, something like benchmarks is considered fair use, and is thus not subject to asinine click through agreements. If something is not covered by copyright law, it cannot reasonably be covered by click through

Click-through is like any other contract. Once you agree to it, you are bound by it. The agreements already waive your first sale rights. If you waive fair use, you waive fair use; such are the terms of the agreement. If you don't like it, tough beans. Use free software instead.

Most windows lusers couldn't compile anyway

They can if the installation wizard handles compiling the software; such an installation package would be similar to a source RPM. And yes, there is a free full-featured GNU compiler for Windows. There are two in fact: MinGW GCC and the GCC from Red Hat Cygwin.

they had brains they wouldn't be using an OS designed for two year olds.

So we're supposed to run games for the Wintendo platform under Wine? Good luck.

I upgrade my software with apt

Pretty hard to do if the distro on your Debian CD doesn't support your network connection hardware and protocols (winmodem, AOL, Juno, NetZero, network card, cable modem, DSL modem, PPPoE, etc.).

I read my docs online

Pretty hard to do if you can't boot or if your video subsystem isn't working.

I'm sorry but I have a modded PS One

When I saw that console, my first thought was "What? This is the kind of console that would be packed in a Barbie playset." Then, after a bit of pondering: "No, that's too cute to be Barbie. It looks more like Precious Moments style."

and my Japanese games look just fine.

What region are your console and TV designed for?

... Americans

The screen corruption I mentioned requires that 50fps software be run on 60fps TVs or vice versa. (See other comments nearby about PAL60 TVs; however, it's very hard to find a 50fps TV in the US unless you have a video capture card in your PC.) Because NTSC-U/C and NTSC-J regions use identical 60 Hz NTSC television standards, there is no graphical corruption.

I wrote: "European games are optimized for 50 fps PAL, while North American and Japanese games run on 60 fps NTSC ... Games that don't conform to the television will fall out of sync." Did you miss this part?

But I agree that keeping Japanese games out of American hands, especially when not a lot of text is involved and the community accepts bad translations as humorous, is a result of outright greed.

well, to do a digital lowpass filter, you would use a FFT; i doubt that many commercial audio devices would use time-domain convolution when the FFT is faster

For one thing, it wouldn't necessarily be faster. Filtering with FFT is O(n log w) where w == window size; time-domain convolution is O(nm) where m == filter length. The hard edges of the FFT window creates artifacts that can be audible as a buzzing noise; this is why MP3 and Vorbis spend a few extra cycles on MDCT (an overlapped transform). Besides, you don't need a lot of taps; I know of a decent FOUR tap low-pass filter [11 19 5 -3]/32.

The real, more subtle reason copyright terms are infinite is that bills keep getting passed to lengthen them.

For more information on perpetual copyright, read this writeup on Everything.

Here's how to get around perpetual copyrights and trademarks: Abstract the copyrighted expression away from the uncopyrightable idea by finding antecedents from before 1923 (or are otherwise Free). For example, derive Precious Moments from the Eloi people in chapter 4 of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine , and derive Noddy from Pinocchio renditions. This way you can avoid copyright and trademark infringement by taking a stereotype (uncopyrightable under Capcom v. Data East) and "making it yours" by changing just enough that the original expression is distinctive enough to overpower any copied expression.

This is why I no longer like Winnie-the-Pooh, as it has no Free antecedents.

The real, more subtle reason copyright terms are infinite is that bills keep getting passed to lengthen them.

For more information on perpetual copyright, read this writeup on Everything.

Here's how to get around perpetual copyrights and trademarks: Abstract the copyrighted expression away from the uncopyrightable idea by finding antecedents from before 1923 (or are otherwise Free). For example, derive Precious Moments from the Eloi people in chapter 4 of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine , and derive Noddy from Pinocchio renditions. This way you can avoid copyright and trademark infringement by taking a stereotype (uncopyrightable under Capcom v. Data East) and "making it yours" by changing just enough that the original expression is distinctive enough to overpower any copied expression.

This is why I no longer like Winnie-the-Pooh, as it has no Free antecedents.

It's basically same as the DVD regions, except only 3 - one for each of Japan, America, and Europe

This is for a good reason. Console software is optimized for a particular television hardware standard. European games are optimized for 50 fps PAL, while North American and Japanese games run on 60 fps NTSC (that is, until 2006 when the USian FCC kills NTSC). Games that don't conform to the television will fall out of sync and produce a scrambled picture. For example, take NES games. The NES is easy to mod-chip (simply cut the power line) but the more timing-sensitive games (especially Rare games such as Rad Racer that use Pole Position-style raster scrolling) crash when played on a different style of television.

This also has the side effect of making it possible to play burned copies of games.

Which may or may not be illegal, depending on the license the game is released under. Backup first, free software second, piracy last.

You can't write free software for the PlayStation unless you need a special mastering process to put the boot code on a real PSX disc. A compatibility chip allows you to burn and run Free Software(TM) designed for PSX using a garden-variety Orange Book conforming CD-R burner.

we would need to say goodbye to slashdot and freshmeat!

We would need to say goodbye to calling them slashdot.org and freshmeat.net, but Andover already owns slashdot.com, and OSDN could buy freshmeat2.com. Or they could just move everything to slashdot.osdn.com, freshmeat.osdn.com, etc. SourceForge could probably keep its .net though, as it does provide hosting services for free software projects.

OpenNIC is an additional root server that claims "DNS" to stand for "Democratic Name System." But for it to actually work, both your computer and your mail server have to have OpenNIC listed in resolv.conf (or whatever the NT equivalent is). I haven't had any success in getting Hotmail to support OpenNIC.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

RIAA v. Napster Is founded on some people can use it for piracy so it should be shut down. Since it is users trading music, all Napster's delivering is indexes.

Contributory copyright infringement. The primary use of this is to pirate music published by the Big Five labels. If you want to promote your band's music or discover independent music, there are better tools such as MP3.com. They'll even manufacture CDs for your band that contain Red Book audio plus a CD Extra track with MP3 files.

For starters, it's 9x that hold all the legacy code that is supposed to make DOS programs work. The whole *point* of 9x is to move DOS style applications to NT style applications. I think that MS would've been overjoyed if it could've dumped DOS & 9x all together long ago, it has a far superior product in its hands (NT).

So why is Microsoft charging twice as much for NT as for 9x? And why couldn't they have just done more work in the DOS virtualization department? For example, Windows 2000's VDM chokes on 32-bit programs that conform to the DPMI spec.

I'm not sure if Linux is suffering from the same problem (having to maitain compatability with legacy code, so you can't solve problems the most efficent way)

Linux has a legacy (POSIX; Single UNIX Spec; X11) but it's a quite well-designed legacy. DOS is nice as an embedded OS, but anything complex is ugly.

Do you really think that, among the other lies and half-truths in your post, that the W3C has specifications for graphics primitives like drawing a line?

I assume you've never heard of SVG, the W3C's "language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML."

It's your lucky day. The browser you're looking for can be found (link to IE).

Some of us aren't as lucky. IE doesn't run on every computer being made today, especially more powerful workstations. (Support for Alpha and other non-Mac RISC machines was dropped back in the NT4 days.) See my previous comment #192 to see the real cost of running IE.

While everyone continues to use software that is in it's 19th beta stage, buggy and unfinished, I can use a very stable commercial product (say, IE for example) that performs well

Not if your computer doesn't have an x86 processor. In that case, you'd need an emulator plus a copy of Windows (USD $320). Even if you are running on an x86, you need a virtualizer ($300) plus Windows. Isn't $600 a bit steep for a web browser? Might as well just pay for Opera.

What's that rule in software development? Something like, adding more members to a project team makes the project later. Or to put it another way, too many cooks in the kitchen...

Spoil the broth. See also The Mythical Man-Month.

Currently, one of the most troubling bugs for me is that apparently memory cache isn't implemented for http!

It's not implemented in Mozilla. It's implemented in your file system's disk cache capability. I can't speak for Windows, but Linux uses all RAM that's not used for apps for disk caching.

However there is one thing that it's lacking, and that's a "Shop" button.

So make your own. Add a link to http://www.bn.com to your button bar and label it "Shop"

All I want is for it not to suck up 120 megs of ram while it's running!!!

It doesn't. The top program provides an inaccurate picture of memory utilization, showing how much RAM each process has access to, not necessarily how much each process owns. For example, Mozilla's threads share memory, but top counts each one separately, inflating Mozilla's apparent memory footprint. If you see six 'mozilla' entries in top, count only the one that's using the most memory for a more accurate picture.

Also, much of the memory that XFree86 is reported to be using is mapped from the video card and used to store pixmaps. (Too bad X11 can't scale pixmaps.)

Somebody Set Us Up the Mozilla!

1. Point of grammar: it's "set up us" not "set us up"

2. Why are you comparing Mozilla to a bomb?

And anyway, vinyl sounds better.

No it doesn't. Click here then click Myths (can't link directly as it uses a JS redirect to the frames page).

What language used to own it?

In a sense, HTML used to "own" PHP just as it effectively owns EcmaScript. Go to OSDN SourceForge and follow any of the Show Source links at the bottom of the pages.

It'd be possible to fix the icon with a GTK+-based (but not PHP) paint program called GIMP. It even runs on Windows.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Now, I'm not supporting Microsoft on it, but I haven't seen a better implementation of Java support yet.

Not even Sun's J2SE? What about IBM's extremely fast recompiler? I guess you haven't seen them because you aren't looking.

-It will not allow you to trap Ctrl+Alt+Del

Then how does the Worms demo trap it? (It traps C-M-Del so that you have to view the advertising at the end.)

Why can't we moderate stories?

Because you logged onto the wrong web site. Nest time, instead of typing slashdot.org into your browser, try www.kuro5hin.org instead. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to moderate stories.

All your hallucinogen are belong to us.

Is "One dollar == one vote" the future of American democracy?

No. It's the present. Otherwise, we wouldn't have laws such as the Bono Act and the DMCA.

There is also the not minor factor of very different code bases at the root of each system. One has its roots in DOS while the other derives from VMS.

What's so important about that? Let me rephrase: "The biggest reason that the Windows OS sold to consumers in fall 1995 was built around DOS and not Microsoft's VMS clone is because of marketing." That sound better?

something for personal and family domains

ummm... how about .8m.com?

something for software projects

umm... how about .sourceforge.net?

The US domain should have .com, .net and whatever the hell else we want under it.

Are you talking .co.us? If so, register your domain in Colorado. Equivalents for .net, .org, and .edu can be found in Nebraska (.ne.us), Oregon (.or.us), and Alaska (.ak.us like .ac.uk). Other states have potential for pronounceable names (Indiana best.in.us; Ohio who.oh.us; Connecticut re.ct.us).

And yes, it is possible to get the standard changed so as to drop any mandatory city name that your state may impose.

there would be a strong need for .sucks, .tm, and yadda yadda yadda

.tm already exists; it used to be Turkmenistan's domain.

How is it Microsoft's fault that Quicken 2000 or TurboTax 2001 won't run on thier P100 with 16 megs of ram and Windows 95?

Not Microsoft's fault. It's Intuit's fault for not targeting the machines that the target audience (consumers with hand-me-down computers) uses.

a monopoly itself IS NOT ILLEGAL

Granted, but under the Sherman Act, a monopoly that practices anticompetition and harms the consumer is illegal. Consumers are harmed every time a Windows 9x box BSODs and no other pre-installed options (not even Windows 2000) are available at Wal-Mart or Best Buy because of Microsoft's exclusive contracts with all the major computer manufacturers.

the software equivalent of the FDA might be necessary

That would completely destroy the free software movement, as software would become a controlled substance. Pretty much everything would be patented, and you would need to wait 20 years for a generic, and even then your favorite software may be "by prescription only," with Microsoft colluding with licensed IT practitioners to get them to prescribe Microsoft software instead of its competitors'.

I need file compatibility with the maximum number of people

If that's your biggest reason for choosing Office, have you considered HTML or LaTeX? HTML can be viewed or printed using any Web browser, and LaTeX can be edited on any machine with Emacs (includes Windows), compiled into a PDF, and viewed or printed on any platform that has an Acrobat Reader.

If click-and-drool was the reason for going to Windows, then they went the wrong way. They should be in Mac OS

Blame it on Lotus. People wanted to run Lotus 1-2-3 (and other software from the office) at home but also run a click-and-drool desktop on the same box (back then, boxen were expensive). At that time, PC emulation on Macintosh computers (then called SoftPC) was not usably fast.

Using that key sequence to bring up a login dialog effectively prevents the "false login screen" style of password sniffers.

Control+Alt+Del only pulls up a login screen in GUI mode. Recent versions of Windows NT (4.03 and later including 5.x) include a technology called DirectInput that lets programs easily read the keyboard as a set of 104 buttons (which is how games prefer to read the keyboard). For example, if Control and Insert are player 1's and 2's fire buttons, and Alt and Delete are jump buttons, you don't want to put up a login screen when player 1 is firing and both players are jumping. Thus, a program that uses DirectInput can spoof a login screen.

"But NT isn't designed for games. Use Windows 9x instead."
Games are just another application. The only reason Windows 9x wasn't a version of NT is because of marketing.

The ILOVEYOU virus ... breaks what law?

Computer tampering is a crime, at least in the United States.

Incompatible file formats ... breaks what law?

The Sherman Antitrust Act. The fact that important data cannot be read because it's under a layer of (weak) encryption (i.e. an undocumented file format) harms both competition and consumers.

To an extent, Microsoft (the first major closed-source provider) did inspire the so-called "Open Source" movement. But the movement for free software explicitly for freedom's sake has been around since the early 1980s when Microsoft's influence on the industry was already great.

There's no way that Megacorp or Ultra-rich are the norm (*the majority*) in our country.

They hold the majority of the dollars, the capital.

Don't agree. AIX is as standard as it gets

Sorry, bad example. I haven't followed AIX recently.

Fix it, don't invent excuses

That's a bit hard when you don't have $10,000 on hand to purchase the target system that somebody is bitching to you about in an email.

What about the many thousands of parody tracks available? (e.g. "Lasagne", a take-off of "La Bamba")

"Lasagna" by Weird Al Yankovic appeared on the album "Even Worse" which is under Bono Act perpetual copyright. Most parodies came off either some comedy album, SNL, MADtv, Howard Stern, or the like and are copyrighted by their producers.

I'd say that Al Yankovic performed less than one-third of the songs attributed to him on Napster, but that's another node.

12k GIF ... Perhaps we should report these guys to themselves (for infringing Terminal Reality's trademark)

I'd report you to copyright.net for posting a GIF, but copyright.net handles only copyrights, not patents (on GIF's LZW compression) or trademarks (on the Terminal Reality logo).

renaming text files does not work

Have you ever used Wrapster?

Since when is it a copyright violation to possess mp3's of cd's I own?

It's not a copyright violation under 17 USC 107, as you mention. But it is a patent violation under United States law unless the encoder publisher has paid THOMSON multimedia $15K/year or $2.50/unit sold (whichever is greater). That means you, LAME users.

The prosecution in a court of law would have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you had Knowledge and Intent

You're mistaken here. The "beyond reasonable doubt" standard (which became a household word during the Simpson trial) is from criminal law. The vast majority of copyright cases fall under civil law, where there has to be "a preponderance of evidence" (51%) that there was intent or just negligence. Failure to set up a strong firewall (e.g. OpenBSD patched every couple weeks) could be considered negligence.