What good is a patch if you can't get your users to install it cuz they're dumb?
About as much good as a network poluted with MS transmitted diseases. The users are not dumb, they are doing what the "experts" tell them is right. It's the "experts" who either lack a clue or have an interest in M$ shit that are the problem. Fix one expert and you swing a few hundred users sooner or later. The more experts you fix the faster the users swing.
I'm now working in the trenches, a local computer retail shop. The cost of this latest wave of viruses is $40, $100 per disabled computer. This is on top of the "normal" windoze attrition that's part of the upgrade train now pushing windoze XP as a fix. Do you have any idea how much it would cost the end user to get all the fucking patches put on after reinstalling their crappy OEM M$ software? Doing the same for broken XP boxes is also expensive, but they seem to fix a little faster. The customers are not happy, yet they feel compelled to stay in windoze land due to Microshit's audio/video device driver lockin or a percieved M$ Word requirement. MSN and AOL subscriptions are another problem.
Still, I see a way to promote free software: use the right tool for the right job. Free software's networking is much better than Microsoft's poor stuff. A dual booting machine that uses free software for all email and other net functions is a practical solution to MS transmitted diseases.
That was Al Bundy in "Married with Children". Oh yeah, dumb fuckers get what they deserve. Bill Gates is doing his best to fuck everyone, and always been a whiner. Having to use Windows for most of and the rest of his life is punishment enough for his sins.
His money. If *you* had all those billions in the bank, would you be sitting here reading this drivel?
Yes, but I would not pay people to post said drivel. There are many other things I'd do differenly than Bill Gates. It has to do with morals and paranoia. When you have morals you don't need to be pre-emptively paranoid and the world is a better place.
whereas most OSes give you just enough rope to tie a knot, Linux gives you enough rope to hang about 900 people.:^)
How is it that you can compare this one isolated incedent to every campus and business in the country being plauged now? I just heard of a whole major industrial complex being shut down because viruses blew out their silly Windoze servers as well as many desktop machines. The compairsion does not hold water and the FUD needs to point the other way. This other OS is presently screwing everyone with little or no user intervention and despite tremendous efforts to undo the problems by people who know what they are doing. Your little 900 person problem is like a marble orbiting around the sun, invisible by scale.
Here I sit, posting this comment from a knoppix CD. It's a little slow but it works faster than win2k with all the anti-virus cruft.
Between your simple classes and a proposal to ban M$ computers that polute networks, I think we have a solution to the problem. When student machines blow up, you kick them off the network and give them a CD with their choice of Distro on it. Knoppix will get them up so that they don't miss much and they can blind the windoze side to the network and dual boot or simple wipe that junk for good.
If you're an out of work geek, consider looking into the "old smoke-stack" industries for places where you could apply your software skills in helping companies improve margins through better automation and more efficient processes.
Good luck. You are likely to be trampled by all the early retirement package, people from closed plants and layoffs who were hoping that this new fangled IT thing might make them useful again. People like me, who would be happy to have another job at a power plant. Manufacturing has been "contracting" in the US for the last 25 years. It's been moving to Mexico, Canada, East Europe and other places. Trade with China put that trend on th fast track. Big dumb companies have moved lots of IT offshore, engineering jobs took off with the factories and soon the consulting firms will have serious competition from them.
I can see why you say it's dead field though, and honestly I do sympathize with the management's position - you either cut what you can or just close the doors. Once business stabilizes though, process engineering becomes important again.
Booming in China, that is. It's so easy to exploit the poor bastards there with their wonderful centralized government. Once price pays all, all but the workers and engineers. Why pay 60,000 for a US process engineer when that might cover your entire Chinese or Russian payroll? Now that's sutting the doors but good. As long as there's money to be made selling stuff made by slave labor, labor will continue moving to non-free countries where wages can other expenses are kept low at gunpoint.
This will stabilize one way or another. We will take what we want from the rest of the world by force of arms or go broke when we run out of things to trade. Agribusiness giants will continue profiting from grain exports, the rest of us will go under when there's no one left to buy what we make and sell. The "service economy" is bullshit. Other people know and can do what we do.
Airplanes, crayons and all that. I wonder how old the archives are they used.
When I was a kid, all you had to do was tune in Mr. Rogers to see crayons being made.
That was back when you did not need to sign a NDA or EULA to get a propriatory player to learn something. Mr. Rodgers came to you via published standard broadcasting signal. Now you gotta have a silly flash player, tomorrow you will have to have a DRM OS and dissapearing files for the distributed memory hole and universal censorship to work.
Exemplery justice is not justice. It would be wrong for this script kiddie to pay for things he did not do, just to scare others. It's immoral and it won't work. There are many variants of MSBLASTER and many authors for each. It would be wrong to make him pay for all the damage done by it, but dumb fucks like you would like to see him fry for all the damage ever done by any virus. At this point, it's doubtful he did anything at all but test the damn thing out and even that is shaky. Even if he did write a varient, proving the damage will be impossible. Yet he will feel the weight of thousands of clueless Big_Dumb_Company_M$_Admins who have had their reputations rightly tarnished for using Microsoft crap again and again. The FBI needs to look like it's doing something to please them and you.
The real bag guys in this whole thing are the ones with all the money in Redmond. It's their crap that's broken by design. The worst thing that can be said about the script kiddie at this point is that someone said he played with a varient of a nasty M$ virus. That's weak, but he's going to pay for it.
It all reeks of cluelessness, failure of design and scape-goating. Why can't the FBI use it's new USA ACT or Patriot ACT powers to catch the real authors?
The only lesson I've learned one I've learned many times long ago: Microsoft is terminally broken and it's a bad idea to have anything at all to do with it.
The silly thing with all of this is that the drivers and support for this card that result from the reverse engineering will ultimately result in more sales. It seems so counter-intuitive for VIA to resist this.
Can you imagine what would happen to VIA's sales if they somehow offended M$ and M$ retaliated? They could keep VIA in the dark or give them bogus SDK info so that their hardware would not run well under Windblows. Even witholding a dinky little check here is damaging. Harware makers that defy Microsoft are doing something heroic and should be rewarded.
Once enough hardware makers tell Microsoft to shove off, it's all over. In fact, it's already all over. Windows already enjoys the bad reputation they deserve. When you buy something for Windows, the odds of it working are only marginally better with the goofey M$ binary driver than they are with a free driver. There are some exceptions to this rule, like winmodems and crappy little digicams, but the gap is closing quickly. Everyone will be better off when stuff can be chosen on grounds of technical merit rather than M$ favor.
He took the binary code and inferred a C language program that would produce the same code.
It won't produce the same code. Different compilers do things different ways. In the end the binary produced will run the hardware the same way and that's the goal.
Very clever, but I thought reverse engineering worked on a functional level.
He did do functional analysis to make it work. He understood what the thing was doing. If he did not, his code would never have worked. He made little doodles and what have you to make it clear to himself. Now it's in C, the diagrams are much easier to make, though we can be sure he's going to share his diagrams as well. That way other people can make nice software too.
IANAL, but I don't think the source code is legally safe if VIA wants to go after it.
I don't know why you think that. He could have had his computer tell him what it was doing instead of using IDC, no? It's not like he dumpster dived code like old Bill Gates did BASIC. He understood what the code did and reimplemented it himself. Even if he did have dumpster dived code, he could use that to make a functional diagram and then use that to write new code and the results would be the same.
If there is a legal problem with this, there should not be. Why should people be afraid to understand what their machines do and then share that information? So someone else can make money of evryone else's ignorance? Shit, no one would be able to get anything done that way.
Remember "private" phone listings? What a scam that was. The phone company sold your name and number to direct marketing creeps who then annoyed you day and night. To help you out, the phone company sold you an "unlisted number", which kept your friends and relatives from being able to contact you. The phone creeps could still get your number and you still got annoying sales calls. The phone company then sold you caller ID and creeps ID blocking. So the cycle rolled, with extra money for the phone company and the rest of the world as screwed as possible.
I have no faith in a blocking tag. Retailers will set off alarms every time you leave a store if you block their signals and readers will be made to defeat them in time. All you will get out of this evil technology is more grief, just like the phone system. The root of the problem, customer data retention and sale, is what needs to be addressed.
SCO DoS themselves and their neighors? No, I can't believe it. SCO is utterly dependent on it's network connection to support it's one or two customers. It makes no sense. I mean, why would a company that claims copyright infringment not reveal the sections of publically published code which are infringing by sending cease and dissist letters? This makes no sense. Why would Microsoft pay licensing to SCO for Linux rights when they make nothing for Linux and continue to say they never will? This makes no sense either.
Oh wait, now I remember, this is all one big FUD campaign by Microsoft. They are funding SCO's nonsensical and suicidal actions in order to smear free software as somehow dishonest.
The "Slashdot effect" is a similar thing. Once a story drops off Slashdot's front page, traffic to any site drops back two orders of magnitude to normal. I imagine that much of that traffic is DoS.
Yes, Microsoft's standing is so low that I can say these things and believe them. Their represntatives have filled billboards with crap and denied their identity, written letters to senators for other (and sometimes dead) people on their behalf, created fictional characters for a "Mac Switcher" astroturf campaign when no real such person could be found and have even infiltrated meetings of grade shcool teachers with explicit direction to conceal their identity to gain trust. No lie seems beyond them and they are happy to harm others if it will do them some good.
Maybe for most people the techno-utopia will cease, but that is because that is what most people wanted.
Huh? Do you know anyone who thinks an end to end internet is a bad thing once they understand the concept? I don't. If it dies, it's through ignorance.
[blither]... One thinks the 'network' is dying because they idealized it in another form, not in a 'better' form or a 'worse' form just their form. Simply put it is a case of the "good old days" syndrome,... [blather]...there will always be complainers with valid points because it is very easy in hindsight to pick out what was better than you have now, while glossing over what was worse.
Three years ago, I had a cable modem with a fixed IP address and no blocked ports. It was offered by an independent company through my cable company and there was competition for the business. I also had my pick of DSL service on similar terms from many competitors. It looked like a true end to end high speed network was right around the corner. There is nothing to gloss over, it was simply better than the high priced DHCP emulate a dialup modem crap offered by one or no companies everywhere today.
The squeze is on and mostly complete, though not for traffic and bandwith concerns.
My system files take less than 1.5 G of drive space.
>You missed the part where he said "Understand, this was back when I had a 1GB hard drive".
No I didn't. Back then such a system would fit there because it still can. I could easily trim enough stuff today to make the fit and would not lose very much.
Maybe they think GCC is a piece of crap (which for high performance computing, it is).
pinkployd, you anoy me.
Do you have any kind of benchmark to back that silly assertion up? Can you even define "high performance computing" for me? If you mean scientific computing, gcc is in wide use. Do a little searching and you will find goodies like this.
I'd love to see the licensing fees for a 1,000 node cluster. Put up or shut up, please.
It's all nice and good of IBM to make a compiler for their chips. I hope they can be persuaded to donate chunks to gcc and think that it would help drive their own sales. It would be silly to hold their own work on C and FORTRAN against them.
You, taking advantage of the news to flame GCC and all the good people who work on it, just shows what a nasty little troll you are. Why not spend your time constructively? I'd love to know what compilers you use to get your work done. Hey, you might even contribute to GCC in your spare time. Until then, piss off.
what happens when mr doyle flips his switch and 95% of the browser market (IE) can no longer watch flash videos in a web page, chat through a web page, watch a movie clip on ifilms, or use simple scriptlets or custom applets (potentially not even take advantage of mime typing or any function which invokes a dll)?....
They'd create a proprietary tangential protocol, that allows them to create a proprietary application that continues to offer full media control. if there is no hypermedia, there is no patent infringement.
They have already done that and lost in court. Active X and all that crap is just what you are talking about. It cost them lots of money to aquire all that shit and work it into their OS, turning it off would hurt bad.
Now imagine that Doyle decides that free and open protocals and software can use his patents royalty free. This would put free software at a tremendous competitive advantage, precisely the competitive disadvantage that Macromedia and Microsoft would like to hold over free software. What Doyle says makes sense. There's no public good comes from big company dominance of the web. Him using the same deranged system that got us there to get us out would not be nuts, it would be wonderful.
What's my point? The basic home Windows user would just give up at this point.;)
Have you tried putting XP on that poor PII thinkpad? Good freaking luck.
Is there any good site with detailed comparison's of them that the average joe user could find?
Do you really want to read a detailed book about GUIs? Next time, try CD distro like Knoppix or Suse Live. Both of these CDs will run from your CDROM and give you an idea of what you want. Give it a shot in that old thinkpad, in time you might even rescue it.
The average home user does not install OSs. By the time they get to that point they can go free just as easily as they can go Windoze.
Bob's main argument was that it's just too hard to develop free software GUI aplications because of the wide variety and choice of free software tools. This is the same lie taken up one level. It's not any harder to use KDE tools for software development than it is to use Visual Studio and the free tools are beter than the expensive and restrictive one the same way the restrictive and expensive interface is inferior to the free ones.
Microsoft is desperate to keep people enslaved to developing for their platform. Wben they can't get there by making soemething worthwhile, they simply lie. Microsoft's standing is so low right now that their representatives have to conceal who they work for. I don't know if this poor Russell Jones is bought or just ignorant, but what he says makes no sense and fits the general M$ FUD pattern.
Bloat? What bloat? I've got Elightenment, KDE, Sawfish, TWM and Window Maker installed on this machine along with all sorts of other goodies. My system files take less than 1.5 G of drive space. Oh yeah, it all works well together and is beautifully managed and kept up to date by apt-get. To get that kind of functionality from Microsoft, I'd need many more gigs of hard drive space, hundreds of reboots, virus protection, rebuilds and all that hastle. When I stack that kind of trouble up against the occasional KDE to Mozilla or Enlightenment clipboard hastle, well, the choice from a user perspective is obvious.
Would it be fair to say then, that Red Hat has the right idea trying to make a standardised GUI using the bets bits of (predominantly) GNOME and KDE?
It might not be fair to call it "right" but it is fair to say that it can be done with free software. Of course, Red Hat makes plenty of tools available for working with what they have done so that it's just as easy to make things work in the Red Hat world as it is in the Microsoft world. the whole article is just FUD to scare off developers
Micorsoft is trying to influence those they consider influential. They would brainwash their developers to keep them enslaved and have them to scare off newbies. There's nothing very new here. It's really all the same bullshit, "freedom is just too hard."
Russell Jones starts with the same tired arguments that choice is bad and that free software developers can't make an easy to use interface. You can change out "easy to use interface" with "operating system", "kernel" or "quality software" to realize that this is a very old argument. It's been BS before and it's BS today. Someone makes a choice for the neophyte, and there are free intefaces just as easy to migrate to as the next crappy M$ interface.
Bob's twist on this is aimed at stemming the flood of developers asway from M$ junk by turning reality on it's head. He tells us that developing applications for multiple window managers is just too hard. That's silly. Why would anyone continue to pay Micrsoft licenses when there's many free GUI deveopment kits of equal or better quality available? He complains, "Supporting many GUIs isn't just a simple process of including one set of libraries or another; it's often a frustrating and error-prone exercise in writing GUI-specific code," as if Microsoft's interface were any better or less frustrating. He admits that programs written for one window manager run on others, can he say that for Win32 crap? No, he can't. In fact, you are lucky if your MFC program will continue to run from one version of Windoze to the next and even low level API calls are known to change. The whole "including libraries" FUD is a baseless projection from Microsoft DLL hell. When you open your eyes, what you see it that the more you rely on Microsoft the more painful your world is. When you get away from M$, you see how inadequate their tools really were.
Keep on comming, windoze developers, the water is fine. Freedom does have it's drawbacks, but they are nothing like those encountered in the Windoze world. You will never know just how easy and rational things are in the free software world unless you try it out. The fact is that Marketing morons can not and do not make software that's easy for their users of their developers, they make software that screws both.
After all it's UK citizens who pay for the BBC through our license fee.... Why should we foot the (substantial) bill to serve up our programming to other countries in the world?
Because you have already paid for it? Keep it to yourself if you want. Either way will cost you about the same. Someone already mentioned the benefits of sharing your culture. Can you name a benefit of limiting your culture's travel or extinguishing it?
I hope you decide that you should not share your thoughts by talking, but confuse talking and breathing.
Slashdot Mirror
About as much good as a network poluted with MS transmitted diseases. The users are not dumb, they are doing what the "experts" tell them is right. It's the "experts" who either lack a clue or have an interest in M$ shit that are the problem. Fix one expert and you swing a few hundred users sooner or later. The more experts you fix the faster the users swing.
I'm now working in the trenches, a local computer retail shop. The cost of this latest wave of viruses is $40, $100 per disabled computer. This is on top of the "normal" windoze attrition that's part of the upgrade train now pushing windoze XP as a fix. Do you have any idea how much it would cost the end user to get all the fucking patches put on after reinstalling their crappy OEM M$ software? Doing the same for broken XP boxes is also expensive, but they seem to fix a little faster. The customers are not happy, yet they feel compelled to stay in windoze land due to Microshit's audio/video device driver lockin or a percieved M$ Word requirement. MSN and AOL subscriptions are another problem.
Still, I see a way to promote free software: use the right tool for the right job. Free software's networking is much better than Microsoft's poor stuff. A dual booting machine that uses free software for all email and other net functions is a practical solution to MS transmitted diseases.
That was Al Bundy in "Married with Children". Oh yeah, dumb fuckers get what they deserve. Bill Gates is doing his best to fuck everyone, and always been a whiner. Having to use Windows for most of and the rest of his life is punishment enough for his sins.
Yes, but I would not pay people to post said drivel. There are many other things I'd do differenly than Bill Gates. It has to do with morals and paranoia. When you have morals you don't need to be pre-emptively paranoid and the world is a better place.
How is it that you can compare this one isolated incedent to every campus and business in the country being plauged now? I just heard of a whole major industrial complex being shut down because viruses blew out their silly Windoze servers as well as many desktop machines. The compairsion does not hold water and the FUD needs to point the other way. This other OS is presently screwing everyone with little or no user intervention and despite tremendous efforts to undo the problems by people who know what they are doing. Your little 900 person problem is like a marble orbiting around the sun, invisible by scale.
Between your simple classes and a proposal to ban M$ computers that polute networks, I think we have a solution to the problem. When student machines blow up, you kick them off the network and give them a CD with their choice of Distro on it. Knoppix will get them up so that they don't miss much and they can blind the windoze side to the network and dual boot or simple wipe that junk for good.
Good luck. You are likely to be trampled by all the early retirement package, people from closed plants and layoffs who were hoping that this new fangled IT thing might make them useful again. People like me, who would be happy to have another job at a power plant. Manufacturing has been "contracting" in the US for the last 25 years. It's been moving to Mexico, Canada, East Europe and other places. Trade with China put that trend on th fast track. Big dumb companies have moved lots of IT offshore, engineering jobs took off with the factories and soon the consulting firms will have serious competition from them.
Booming in China, that is. It's so easy to exploit the poor bastards there with their wonderful centralized government. Once price pays all, all but the workers and engineers. Why pay 60,000 for a US process engineer when that might cover your entire Chinese or Russian payroll? Now that's sutting the doors but good. As long as there's money to be made selling stuff made by slave labor, labor will continue moving to non-free countries where wages can other expenses are kept low at gunpoint.
This will stabilize one way or another. We will take what we want from the rest of the world by force of arms or go broke when we run out of things to trade. Agribusiness giants will continue profiting from grain exports, the rest of us will go under when there's no one left to buy what we make and sell. The "service economy" is bullshit. Other people know and can do what we do.
Airplanes, crayons and all that. I wonder how old the archives are they used.
That was back when you did not need to sign a NDA or EULA to get a propriatory player to learn something. Mr. Rodgers came to you via published standard broadcasting signal. Now you gotta have a silly flash player, tomorrow you will have to have a DRM OS and dissapearing files for the distributed memory hole and universal censorship to work.
That makes about as much sense as putting this 18 year old in jail like the scape goat he's going to be.
The real bag guys in this whole thing are the ones with all the money in Redmond. It's their crap that's broken by design. The worst thing that can be said about the script kiddie at this point is that someone said he played with a varient of a nasty M$ virus. That's weak, but he's going to pay for it.
It all reeks of cluelessness, failure of design and scape-goating. Why can't the FBI use it's new USA ACT or Patriot ACT powers to catch the real authors?
The only lesson I've learned one I've learned many times long ago: Microsoft is terminally broken and it's a bad idea to have anything at all to do with it.
Can you imagine what would happen to VIA's sales if they somehow offended M$ and M$ retaliated? They could keep VIA in the dark or give them bogus SDK info so that their hardware would not run well under Windblows. Even witholding a dinky little check here is damaging. Harware makers that defy Microsoft are doing something heroic and should be rewarded.
Once enough hardware makers tell Microsoft to shove off, it's all over. In fact, it's already all over. Windows already enjoys the bad reputation they deserve. When you buy something for Windows, the odds of it working are only marginally better with the goofey M$ binary driver than they are with a free driver. There are some exceptions to this rule, like winmodems and crappy little digicams, but the gap is closing quickly. Everyone will be better off when stuff can be chosen on grounds of technical merit rather than M$ favor.
It won't produce the same code. Different compilers do things different ways. In the end the binary produced will run the hardware the same way and that's the goal.
Very clever, but I thought reverse engineering worked on a functional level.
He did do functional analysis to make it work. He understood what the thing was doing. If he did not, his code would never have worked. He made little doodles and what have you to make it clear to himself. Now it's in C, the diagrams are much easier to make, though we can be sure he's going to share his diagrams as well. That way other people can make nice software too.
IANAL, but I don't think the source code is legally safe if VIA wants to go after it.
I don't know why you think that. He could have had his computer tell him what it was doing instead of using IDC, no? It's not like he dumpster dived code like old Bill Gates did BASIC. He understood what the code did and reimplemented it himself. Even if he did have dumpster dived code, he could use that to make a functional diagram and then use that to write new code and the results would be the same.
If there is a legal problem with this, there should not be. Why should people be afraid to understand what their machines do and then share that information? So someone else can make money of evryone else's ignorance? Shit, no one would be able to get anything done that way.
You must have missed the bit where it was claimed that the cost of the device is ten cents. It should sell for no more than a buck. It's just a scam to make money for RFID makers, so I expect it to be a ripp off in every way. It's just too easy to see this comming.
I have no faith in a blocking tag. Retailers will set off alarms every time you leave a store if you block their signals and readers will be made to defeat them in time. All you will get out of this evil technology is more grief, just like the phone system. The root of the problem, customer data retention and sale, is what needs to be addressed.
Oh wait, now I remember, this is all one big FUD campaign by Microsoft. They are funding SCO's nonsensical and suicidal actions in order to smear free software as somehow dishonest.
The "Slashdot effect" is a similar thing. Once a story drops off Slashdot's front page, traffic to any site drops back two orders of magnitude to normal. I imagine that much of that traffic is DoS.
Yes, Microsoft's standing is so low that I can say these things and believe them. Their represntatives have filled billboards with crap and denied their identity, written letters to senators for other (and sometimes dead) people on their behalf, created fictional characters for a "Mac Switcher" astroturf campaign when no real such person could be found and have even infiltrated meetings of grade shcool teachers with explicit direction to conceal their identity to gain trust. No lie seems beyond them and they are happy to harm others if it will do them some good.
Huh? Do you know anyone who thinks an end to end internet is a bad thing once they understand the concept? I don't. If it dies, it's through ignorance.
[blither] ... One thinks the 'network' is dying because they idealized it in another form, not in a 'better' form or a 'worse' form just their form. Simply put it is a case of the "good old days" syndrome, ... [blather] ...there will always be complainers with valid points because it is very easy in hindsight to pick out what was better than you have now, while glossing over what was worse.
Three years ago, I had a cable modem with a fixed IP address and no blocked ports. It was offered by an independent company through my cable company and there was competition for the business. I also had my pick of DSL service on similar terms from many competitors. It looked like a true end to end high speed network was right around the corner. There is nothing to gloss over, it was simply better than the high priced DHCP emulate a dialup modem crap offered by one or no companies everywhere today.
The squeze is on and mostly complete, though not for traffic and bandwith concerns.
No I didn't. Back then such a system would fit there because it still can. I could easily trim enough stuff today to make the fit and would not lose very much.
pinkployd, you anoy me.
Do you have any kind of benchmark to back that silly assertion up? Can you even define "high performance computing" for me? If you mean scientific computing, gcc is in wide use. Do a little searching and you will find goodies like this. I'd love to see the licensing fees for a 1,000 node cluster. Put up or shut up, please.
It's all nice and good of IBM to make a compiler for their chips. I hope they can be persuaded to donate chunks to gcc and think that it would help drive their own sales. It would be silly to hold their own work on C and FORTRAN against them.
You, taking advantage of the news to flame GCC and all the good people who work on it, just shows what a nasty little troll you are. Why not spend your time constructively? I'd love to know what compilers you use to get your work done. Hey, you might even contribute to GCC in your spare time. Until then, piss off.
They'd create a proprietary tangential protocol, that allows them to create a proprietary application that continues to offer full media control. if there is no hypermedia, there is no patent infringement.
They have already done that and lost in court. Active X and all that crap is just what you are talking about. It cost them lots of money to aquire all that shit and work it into their OS, turning it off would hurt bad.
Now imagine that Doyle decides that free and open protocals and software can use his patents royalty free. This would put free software at a tremendous competitive advantage, precisely the competitive disadvantage that Macromedia and Microsoft would like to hold over free software. What Doyle says makes sense. There's no public good comes from big company dominance of the web. Him using the same deranged system that got us there to get us out would not be nuts, it would be wonderful.
Have you tried putting XP on that poor PII thinkpad? Good freaking luck.
Is there any good site with detailed comparison's of them that the average joe user could find?
Do you really want to read a detailed book about GUIs? Next time, try CD distro like Knoppix or Suse Live. Both of these CDs will run from your CDROM and give you an idea of what you want. Give it a shot in that old thinkpad, in time you might even rescue it.
The average home user does not install OSs. By the time they get to that point they can go free just as easily as they can go Windoze.
You can just drive free software as easily as the next M$ junk.
Bob's main argument was that it's just too hard to develop free software GUI aplications because of the wide variety and choice of free software tools. This is the same lie taken up one level. It's not any harder to use KDE tools for software development than it is to use Visual Studio and the free tools are beter than the expensive and restrictive one the same way the restrictive and expensive interface is inferior to the free ones.
Microsoft is desperate to keep people enslaved to developing for their platform. Wben they can't get there by making soemething worthwhile, they simply lie. Microsoft's standing is so low right now that their representatives have to conceal who they work for. I don't know if this poor Russell Jones is bought or just ignorant, but what he says makes no sense and fits the general M$ FUD pattern.
It might not be fair to call it "right" but it is fair to say that it can be done with free software. Of course, Red Hat makes plenty of tools available for working with what they have done so that it's just as easy to make things work in the Red Hat world as it is in the Microsoft world. the whole article is just FUD to scare off developers
Russell Jones starts with the same tired arguments that choice is bad and that free software developers can't make an easy to use interface. You can change out "easy to use interface" with "operating system", "kernel" or "quality software" to realize that this is a very old argument. It's been BS before and it's BS today. Someone makes a choice for the neophyte, and there are free intefaces just as easy to migrate to as the next crappy M$ interface.
Bob's twist on this is aimed at stemming the flood of developers asway from M$ junk by turning reality on it's head. He tells us that developing applications for multiple window managers is just too hard. That's silly. Why would anyone continue to pay Micrsoft licenses when there's many free GUI deveopment kits of equal or better quality available? He complains, "Supporting many GUIs isn't just a simple process of including one set of libraries or another; it's often a frustrating and error-prone exercise in writing GUI-specific code," as if Microsoft's interface were any better or less frustrating. He admits that programs written for one window manager run on others, can he say that for Win32 crap? No, he can't. In fact, you are lucky if your MFC program will continue to run from one version of Windoze to the next and even low level API calls are known to change. The whole "including libraries" FUD is a baseless projection from Microsoft DLL hell. When you open your eyes, what you see it that the more you rely on Microsoft the more painful your world is. When you get away from M$, you see how inadequate their tools really were.
Keep on comming, windoze developers, the water is fine. Freedom does have it's drawbacks, but they are nothing like those encountered in the Windoze world. You will never know just how easy and rational things are in the free software world unless you try it out. The fact is that Marketing morons can not and do not make software that's easy for their users of their developers, they make software that screws both.
Because you have already paid for it? Keep it to yourself if you want. Either way will cost you about the same. Someone already mentioned the benefits of sharing your culture. Can you name a benefit of limiting your culture's travel or extinguishing it?
I hope you decide that you should not share your thoughts by talking, but confuse talking and breathing.