Perhaps the patch simply allocates the bad portion of memory with some useless data. If the data is protected by the OS, it would prevent it from ever being overwritten and since the data is useless, it would never cause a problem again.
Sure, it sounds like it would waste your memory a bit, but I can't imagine it would be a huge chunk. I'm sure Palm users would rather lose a few kb of RAM than have to cross-ship their Palm and re-load all of their software.
Incidentally, my Handspring Visor (which are also subject to the problem) was found to be not affected. Whew!
equipment for the lasers and mirrors could be quite large, and while they might shrink it, it would still be large compared to one cm^3. But I bet you could use the same equipment to address every cm^3 in the hard-drive form fatcor.
No more disk/RAM
Let's face it: we have RAM to execute programs and disks to store data and programs permanently. When you have something as potentially fast as holographic memory (assuming it boils down to no moving parts), you have the speed of RAM combined with the capacity and persistence of disks.
What this means is the whole paradigm of modern operating systems shifts. Your programs will maintian state between power cycles, files won't have to be read into memory (they can be used in-place), etc. The whole thing takes over "virtual memory". (This is sort of how the PalmOS works with programs maintaining state)
This is not unlike the paradigm 64-bit memory addressing boasts (where you could map the entire drive into a memory address range and make dealing with disks a whole lot simpler).
I remember seeing articles about this sort of thing in PC Magazine years ago. They stated things like "costing pennies on the GB", and "just around the corner". Yet, it's still not here.
Granted, many posters here and the article itself have pointed out many legitimate reasons.
If people are given a choice between software that truly belongs to them which they have full control over and being led around on a leash by corporate interests that have goals other than their own, they'll pick freedom every time.
Please...
The "people" you're referring to are only a small subset of the people on the planet -- most of them would be slashdot readers too.
Give a choice between software they can pay for that is easy to use and software that is free, but unknown to the mainstream, a majority of people (i.e. the mainstream people) will choose the prior because it will seem like there only choice! Nevermnd if you explained to them about the political and philosophical advantages of free software they'd stare at you with a glazed look.
The day that free software is packaged, marketed and igven shelf-space like pay-for software is the day your statement will reach a wider audience.
Check out Jabber. It's an instant messaging server specification (with quite few server and client implementations) that is designed to interact with several different services at once.
For example, you could talk to user@aim.jabber.org and user@icq.jabber.org without a naming conflict.
Depending on your bent, you may also be reminded of the character Francisco d'Anconia in Atlas Shrugged when he declares "The coats-of-arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines."
I was just out getting lunch today at the local Penn Station where there are pictures of satisfied customers pasted above the grill. One photo caught my eye of two younger guys proudly displaying their Tommy Hilfigger and Nike shirts.
Not knowing of the subject material in this this story, I wondered if brand names people seem to wear as status symbols was anything like the coats-of-arms on shields and armor in the "good'ol-days". My mind quickly moved on to wondering if people would actually do battle to defend their brand. Would they simply be defending their brand as some people follow sports teams, or would the brand followers attach ideals to their brands and simply fly the brand as their flag? What if...
1. I write my first program in LOGO in the first grade. It drew an animated picture fo a bow shooting an arrow across the screen. I can't remember much else about it, but perhaps there is a flavor of LOGO still around?
2. Teach them machine language and how a processor works. Having an understanding of HOW what they're programming WORKS can be quite powerful insight.
3. Teach them a simple language like VBScript or JScript. The advantage of scripting languages like these is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO COMPILE! It is amazing how much real programming has nothing to do with programming and everything to do with programming tools, environments, platform issues, etc.
4. As another poster pointed out, don't underestimate their ability. Kids have amazing learning potential. They don't yet have fears and phobias of new things and stupid mental blocks like us adults. Just give them something like C, Java, etc. -- explain to them it's a language in which you instruct computers to do things. Tell themhow the instructions must be compiled into 1's and 0's for the computer to understand them at its level. They'll probably catch on quick!
I've seen a lot of good replies to this interview and I hope that Lars & Co. take the time to revisit this discussion. It sounds like he was intrigued by the concept in the first place. If nothing else, someone print off the discussions and mail them to Metallica.
Sometimes I feel the best points are made after an interview. If these comments stay inside Slashdot, they may as well not even have been made in the first place.
But as of today, nobody that I have spoken to can claim that any particular movie that was ever shown on the Internet ever came off a DVD, and nobody is even claiming that.
But here's what gets me. My understanding is that the case(s) have been on hold while Mr. valenti is too busy to testify.
I believe that Mr. Valenti made himself too busy to give the pirates time to figure out how to start pirating. The MPAA knew no DeCSS oriented piracy was oging on then, but just needed time to wait until the pirates did what pirates do.
Now, with DeCSS ripped DiVX movies, the MPAA has new amunititon to strike down DeCSS with.
True, it's my own personal conspiracy theory, but it's good, ain't it?
There are potentially a number of other factors to consider when asking why college student CD purchases have declined. Perhaps the article should be more appoproately named "Why are college student record store CD purchases declining?"
Beign a recently graduated university student, I was subject to tuition increases of 7%/year -- at least twice the rate of inflation. Thus, each year, I had less and less money for luxury items such as CDs. Perhaps on a larger scale this has been denting CD purchases.
Another important point is where college students are buying their CDs? Why tromp over to the CD store when you can order it online and have it delivered to you. Does SoundScan count those statistics? Demographically, the college bunch would be the group most likely to take their music-purchasing trasnactions online. This too would show up as fewer record store CD sales.
Of course, there are more points such as music is becoming worse and worse (so why buy it?), perhaps the students are preferring a different class of music altogether like one might find on the trendy MP3.com-type sites.
I think studies such as this are probably at least indirectly motivated by the RIAA to provide negative press for Napster. Well, their negative press won't work on me. what might work would be some positive press for the RIAA. But the best RIAA news I got lately was the FTC stopping their stranglehold on CD prices!
Just to keep all of the facts on the table... Outlook also runs on NT where security is a bit tighter. This is not meant to start any kind of OS war, but people keep assuming that anyone who uses Outlook must use Windows 9x.
Just for the record, I've used perl for straight CGI, ASP (using VBScript, JScript and ActiveState's PerlScript), and most recently JavaServlets.
I tend to shy away from the ASP/JSP/PHP3 paradigms just because they integrate presentation with the code. It means designers and coders will be working in the same domain. Jason Hunter has an article contrasting JSP (and the models like it) to what he favors, a template system.
We're presently using Java Servlets with our own home-grown template system. Java is a pretty darn good language, in my opinion. It has nice, consistent syntax, good OO design, and a wonderful set of libraries for just about anything (particulary, threading, RMI and JDBC come in very handy).
It is a valid point that much web work is text processing, simply because HTTP is text-based (and all parameters/info passed back and forth is text based for the most part, too). Thus, regular expressions, and Perl because of its RE support, lend themselves well to web work. However, I know of to regular expression packages for Java, one of which we use. We still hand-code some text processing in inner loops for the best possible speed, but RE's are a tremendous development-time saver.
All of that said, my preference considering the high-level models models I've used would be: Servlets, JSP(/ASP/PHP3), plain out-of-process CGI.
Please forgive me if I have incorrectly lumped ASP, JSP and PHP3 together incorrectly, but I believe, at least from the high-level, they are similar.
Good point. On the other hand, I was considering that if people simply downloaded the music because it was available, or because they moderately liked Metallica, but not enough to justify spending $15-$20 per CD, they could simply invest a small amount of their time to get the files. Yet, without that option, they would not have even considered getting the music through the more expensive legal means. This is why, I, personally, would like to see a cheaper digital distribution model that would enable lesser fans to buy more.
Considering that people obviously want to download Metallica music, as well as that of other artists, why not use your popularity and integrity to promote the adoption of real digital music distribution? Perhaps MP3 alone wouldn't suffice, as you would want to also distribute lyrics, artwork, etc. with the music. But with a long-standing popular band as yourselves taking the lead, others would surely follow and the labels would listen.
What are your ideas on why those 300,000+ people stole your works? Because they could, because they wanted them, to harm you financially, or some other reason?
Considering the 300,000+ people who you've indentified as trafficking your works, do you feel they would have been legitimate customers had Napster not been available to them? In other words, do you feel the 'stealing' has hurt you financially by taking away from your record sales, or is this more of a philosphical matter in that you disagree with them stealing regardless of the financial impact?
I heard about this on TV a year or so ago. It was on either PBS or Discovery. It was a whole show on the subject of mind over matter. In addition to convering some of the more quacky things (projecting images onto photographic plates via mental enegery), it also covered the detection of brain activity and using it to control things.
The two example that stick out in my mind were the following. First, they had a flight silumator machine (for the Navy or USAF) being controlled by a pilot using only thought. Apparently, it was a bit cumbersome. Second, a man had rigged his sailboat so he could steer by thought. They actually showed it in action. His thoughts were detected and transduced into motor movement controlling the steering wheel of the rather large sailboat. Pretty neat.
The thing I remember most, though, was that they're weren't really 'READING MINDS'. Instead, they could pick out differing activities of the brain. It wasn't about thinking LEFT or RIGHT, but more about thinking HOT and 2+2. In other words, because the thoughts took place in vastly different parts of the brain, detectors attached to the head could distinguigh between these thoughts. These thoughts could thenbe mapped into other things in the physical world.
Not quit mind reading, but still pretty darn cool!
My interpretation of that statement in the press-release was that in 1996, they planned to eliminate the use of SA in GPS satellites by 2006 at the latest -- we are 6 years ahead of schedule.
I believe the GPS satellites are organized in geo-staionary orbits spaced somewhat evenly around the planet. I think the minimum is that you can "see" at least 4 satellite from any point o the surface of the Earth (and you only need 3 for triangulation). Do selectively reduce a region's accuracy then would be to re-enable SA on the satellite visible from that area. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Re:Don't worry about it, Napster's a different iss
on
MP3.com Loses In Court
·
· Score: 4
I don't agree with the SuSE anaglogy here. MP3.com came up with a very clever way of determining ownership (or at leats posession of) the actual CD that isn't easy to fake. Random samples of sections of the CDs are sent back to the MP3.com servers for verification (dropping every other 16-bit word, and retrying until a match comes up). To defeat this scheme, you'd have to have access to every other 16-bit word of the ENTIRE CD! If you have that much, you probably could've copied the whole CD anyways.
Which brings up the point of an exact copy. Yes, you could defeat it with an exact copy. But who is at fault there? The person who copied the CD? The person who copied the CD? Or the person wop accepted the fake? Who got in trouble in school for copying a paper? The teacher who accepted the fake as real?
There is still a crucial difference. While a radio station has a license to broadcast the music from the record companies, there is no guarantee one way or another if the radio listeners legally own a copy of the music they'll here on the radio. That is just not the point of radio. Radio's point is to broadcast to the public. My.MP3.com, on the other hand, is designed only to broadcast the music to customers who already purchased the music. Thus, while the RIAA could claim damagaes against a radio station broadcasting without a license, the RIAA has already received it's money from EVERY user of My.MP3.com many times over (since each user has already purchased their CDs, and many people will end up with copies of the same CD due to overlapping tastes). I think I'll listen to white or pink noise from now on.
I'll try and keep this independent of GUI so it could be applied to VUI, etc. A user interface is kind of like an API in that it let's users control a complex system through a limited number of methods. The key to a GOOD UI is making those methods distinct, concise, consistent and customizable. DISTINCT: The more distinuighable two methods are, the easier it will be for the user to interface to the system through. There will be less time deliberating which method is which. As an example, consider the addition of icons to file listings. Rather than having to actually see the letters in a file's extension, now you can get a breif distuinguishment between file types by the color of their icons. Many OSes do things such as dimming hidden files, white paper-looking icons for documents, gears and such for system files, etc. These shapes and colors can be conditioned in one's mind and allow for faster recognition. CONCISE: Whether typing, speaking, or clicking through menus, the shorter the action is, the better. In most cases, you are doing a limited number of actions very frequently. The more rare actions need not be accessed so readily. Microsoft did this in their latest version of Office by hiding not-so-used menu items. I arrange my Programs menu by putting more frequently accessed programs and documents closer to the root (or even on a launch bar). It just makes things more efficient. CONSISTENT: I hate starting up some program and trying to remember if it's 'exit' or 'quit' to end the program. If identical actions in different contexts are expressed to the user in the same way, the user will have a faster learning curve and a better intuition for the UI. To take this idea to the extreme, Microsoft Windows always look the same. Close, Max, Min all in the right, control-icon in the left, scroll-bar on the right, menus along the top, etc. In fact, a lot of GUIs to it this way. Where there are visual clues, there is at least a way to figure out inconsistent commands and controls, but just imagine trying to GUESS which voice command would exit a program in a VUI. CUSTOMIZABLE: In order for a user to better experience something, the user might want to tailor a UI to themselves. In a VUI, this is just about necessary (voice training). In a GUI, the basic customizations include colors and font sizes. But other systems let you customize futher by adding menu items, changing the arrangment of window buttons, etc. One thing to note is that this breaks with consistency. If one is not careful in their customization, they could also ruin distinguighability. But you can potentially gain efficiency. You could even in fact use it to increase distinguishability. I use a switch box for my WIndows 98 and Windows NT systems. I have a diferent color scheme in each so that I can easily realize what computer I'm using. it's so subconcious it seems I just *know* which one I'm using.
OK, so the cat's out of the bag and it looks bad, right? Well, not exactly. A response from a Be engineer can be found on BeNews here.
So it seems that the library in question is part of the BeOS distribution (both Personal Edition and Pro), but the library in question is never actually used.
IANAL, but it seems to me if you accidetnally include something like that but never use it, are you still violating the license? Perhaps the law could be twisted either way, but I say look at the root of the matter. What were Be's intentions? What damage has been done to the holder of the license?
Can you understand why they're not interested? Business types are not interested in making things look 'cool'. But, you can spin it another way to get them to support it. "Imagine, business guys, you could have your design department customize this application and brand it for your company, making your corporate image even more ubiquitous within and without." Custom branding is the way to sell it to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it sounds like it would waste your memory a bit, but I can't imagine it would be a huge chunk. I'm sure Palm users would rather lose a few kb of RAM than have to cross-ship their Palm and re-load all of their software.
Incidentally, my Handspring Visor (which are also subject to the problem) was found to be not affected. Whew!
No more disk/RAM
Let's face it: we have RAM to execute programs and disks to store data and programs permanently. When you have something as potentially fast as holographic memory (assuming it boils down to no moving parts), you have the speed of RAM combined with the capacity and persistence of disks.
What this means is the whole paradigm of modern operating systems shifts. Your programs will maintian state between power cycles, files won't have to be read into memory (they can be used in-place), etc. The whole thing takes over "virtual memory". (This is sort of how the PalmOS works with programs maintaining state)
This is not unlike the paradigm 64-bit memory addressing boasts (where you could map the entire drive into a memory address range and make dealing with disks a whole lot simpler).
Granted, many posters here and the article itself have pointed out many legitimate reasons.
Please...
The "people" you're referring to are only a small subset of the people on the planet -- most of them would be slashdot readers too.
Give a choice between software they can pay for that is easy to use and software that is free, but unknown to the mainstream, a majority of people (i.e. the mainstream people) will choose the prior because it will seem like there only choice! Nevermnd if you explained to them about the political and philosophical advantages of free software they'd stare at you with a glazed look.
The day that free software is packaged, marketed and igven shelf-space like pay-for software is the day your statement will reach a wider audience.
For example, you could talk to user@aim.jabber.org and user@icq.jabber.org without a naming conflict.
I was just out getting lunch today at the local Penn Station where there are pictures of satisfied customers pasted above the grill. One photo caught my eye of two younger guys proudly displaying their Tommy Hilfigger and Nike shirts.
Not knowing of the subject material in this this story, I wondered if brand names people seem to wear as status symbols was anything like the coats-of-arms on shields and armor in the "good'ol-days". My mind quickly moved on to wondering if people would actually do battle to defend their brand. Would they simply be defending their brand as some people follow sports teams, or would the brand followers attach ideals to their brands and simply fly the brand as their flag? What if...
Then my food was ready.
1. I write my first program in LOGO in the first grade. It drew an animated picture fo a bow shooting an arrow across the screen. I can't remember much else about it, but perhaps there is a flavor of LOGO still around?
2. Teach them machine language and how a processor works. Having an understanding of HOW what they're programming WORKS can be quite powerful insight.
3. Teach them a simple language like VBScript or JScript. The advantage of scripting languages like these is that YOU DON'T HAVE TO COMPILE! It is amazing how much real programming has nothing to do with programming and everything to do with programming tools, environments, platform issues, etc.
4. As another poster pointed out, don't underestimate their ability. Kids have amazing learning potential. They don't yet have fears and phobias of new things and stupid mental blocks like us adults. Just give them something like C, Java, etc. -- explain to them it's a language in which you instruct computers to do things. Tell themhow the instructions must be compiled into 1's and 0's for the computer to understand them at its level. They'll probably catch on quick!
Sometimes I feel the best points are made after an interview. If these comments stay inside Slashdot, they may as well not even have been made in the first place.
But here's what gets me. My understanding is that the case(s) have been on hold while Mr. valenti is too busy to testify.
I believe that Mr. Valenti made himself too busy to give the pirates time to figure out how to start pirating. The MPAA knew no DeCSS oriented piracy was oging on then, but just needed time to wait until the pirates did what pirates do.
Now, with DeCSS ripped DiVX movies, the MPAA has new amunititon to strike down DeCSS with.
True, it's my own personal conspiracy theory, but it's good, ain't it?
Who had the money to initiate an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft? Only the U.S. government backed by our tax dollars.
The day every american pays 20% of their annual income to a company is the day that company becomes more powerful than the government.
I'd like to see the orginal source to this study.
There are potentially a number of other factors to consider when asking why college student CD purchases have declined. Perhaps the article should be more appoproately named "Why are college student record store CD purchases declining?"
Beign a recently graduated university student, I was subject to tuition increases of 7%/year -- at least twice the rate of inflation. Thus, each year, I had less and less money for luxury items such as CDs. Perhaps on a larger scale this has been denting CD purchases.
Another important point is where college students are buying their CDs? Why tromp over to the CD store when you can order it online and have it delivered to you. Does SoundScan count those statistics? Demographically, the college bunch would be the group most likely to take their music-purchasing trasnactions online. This too would show up as fewer record store CD sales.
Of course, there are more points such as music is becoming worse and worse (so why buy it?), perhaps the students are preferring a different class of music altogether like one might find on the trendy MP3.com-type sites.
I think studies such as this are probably at least indirectly motivated by the RIAA to provide negative press for Napster. Well, their negative press won't work on me. what might work would be some positive press for the RIAA. But the best RIAA news I got lately was the FTC stopping their stranglehold on CD prices!
Just to keep all of the facts on the table... Outlook also runs on NT where security is a bit tighter. This is not meant to start any kind of OS war, but people keep assuming that anyone who uses Outlook must use Windows 9x.
I tend to shy away from the ASP/JSP/PHP3 paradigms just because they integrate presentation with the code. It means designers and coders will be working in the same domain. Jason Hunter has an article contrasting JSP (and the models like it) to what he favors, a template system.
We're presently using Java Servlets with our own home-grown template system. Java is a pretty darn good language, in my opinion. It has nice, consistent syntax, good OO design, and a wonderful set of libraries for just about anything (particulary, threading, RMI and JDBC come in very handy).
It is a valid point that much web work is text processing, simply because HTTP is text-based (and all parameters/info passed back and forth is text based for the most part, too). Thus, regular expressions, and Perl because of its RE support, lend themselves well to web work. However, I know of to regular expression packages for Java, one of which we use. We still hand-code some text processing in inner loops for the best possible speed, but RE's are a tremendous development-time saver.
All of that said, my preference considering the high-level models models I've used would be: Servlets, JSP(/ASP/PHP3), plain out-of-process CGI.
Please forgive me if I have incorrectly lumped ASP, JSP and PHP3 together incorrectly, but I believe, at least from the high-level, they are similar.
Good point. On the other hand, I was considering that if people simply downloaded the music because it was available, or because they moderately liked Metallica, but not enough to justify spending $15-$20 per CD, they could simply invest a small amount of their time to get the files. Yet, without that option, they would not have even considered getting the music through the more expensive legal means. This is why, I, personally, would like to see a cheaper digital distribution model that would enable lesser fans to buy more.
Considering that people obviously want to download Metallica music, as well as that of other artists, why not use your popularity and integrity to promote the adoption of real digital music distribution? Perhaps MP3 alone wouldn't suffice, as you would want to also distribute lyrics, artwork, etc. with the music. But with a long-standing popular band as yourselves taking the lead, others would surely follow and the labels would listen.
What are your ideas on why those 300,000+ people stole your works? Because they could, because they wanted them, to harm you financially, or some other reason?
Considering the 300,000+ people who you've indentified as trafficking your works, do you feel they would have been legitimate customers had Napster not been available to them? In other words, do you feel the 'stealing' has hurt you financially by taking away from your record sales, or is this more of a philosphical matter in that you disagree with them stealing regardless of the financial impact?
The two example that stick out in my mind were the following. First, they had a flight silumator machine (for the Navy or USAF) being controlled by a pilot using only thought. Apparently, it was a bit cumbersome. Second, a man had rigged his sailboat so he could steer by thought. They actually showed it in action. His thoughts were detected and transduced into motor movement controlling the steering wheel of the rather large sailboat. Pretty neat.
The thing I remember most, though, was that they're weren't really 'READING MINDS'. Instead, they could pick out differing activities of the brain. It wasn't about thinking LEFT or RIGHT, but more about thinking HOT and 2+2. In other words, because the thoughts took place in vastly different parts of the brain, detectors attached to the head could distinguigh between these thoughts. These thoughts could thenbe mapped into other things in the physical world.
Not quit mind reading, but still pretty darn cool!
My interpretation of that statement in the press-release was that in 1996, they planned to eliminate the use of SA in GPS satellites by 2006 at the latest -- we are 6 years ahead of schedule.
I believe the GPS satellites are organized in geo-staionary orbits spaced somewhat evenly around the planet. I think the minimum is that you can "see" at least 4 satellite from any point o the surface of the Earth (and you only need 3 for triangulation). Do selectively reduce a region's accuracy then would be to re-enable SA on the satellite visible from that area. Can anyone confirm or deny this?
Which brings up the point of an exact copy. Yes, you could defeat it with an exact copy. But who is at fault there? The person who copied the CD? The person who copied the CD? Or the person wop accepted the fake? Who got in trouble in school for copying a paper? The teacher who accepted the fake as real?
There is still a crucial difference. While a radio station has a license to broadcast the music from the record companies, there is no guarantee one way or another if the radio listeners legally own a copy of the music they'll here on the radio. That is just not the point of radio. Radio's point is to broadcast to the public. My.MP3.com, on the other hand, is designed only to broadcast the music to customers who already purchased the music. Thus, while the RIAA could claim damagaes against a radio station broadcasting without a license, the RIAA has already received it's money from EVERY user of My.MP3.com many times over (since each user has already purchased their CDs, and many people will end up with copies of the same CD due to overlapping tastes). I think I'll listen to white or pink noise from now on.
I'll try and keep this independent of GUI so it could be applied to VUI, etc. A user interface is kind of like an API in that it let's users control a complex system through a limited number of methods. The key to a GOOD UI is making those methods distinct, concise, consistent and customizable. DISTINCT: The more distinuighable two methods are, the easier it will be for the user to interface to the system through. There will be less time deliberating which method is which. As an example, consider the addition of icons to file listings. Rather than having to actually see the letters in a file's extension, now you can get a breif distuinguishment between file types by the color of their icons. Many OSes do things such as dimming hidden files, white paper-looking icons for documents, gears and such for system files, etc. These shapes and colors can be conditioned in one's mind and allow for faster recognition. CONCISE: Whether typing, speaking, or clicking through menus, the shorter the action is, the better. In most cases, you are doing a limited number of actions very frequently. The more rare actions need not be accessed so readily. Microsoft did this in their latest version of Office by hiding not-so-used menu items. I arrange my Programs menu by putting more frequently accessed programs and documents closer to the root (or even on a launch bar). It just makes things more efficient. CONSISTENT: I hate starting up some program and trying to remember if it's 'exit' or 'quit' to end the program. If identical actions in different contexts are expressed to the user in the same way, the user will have a faster learning curve and a better intuition for the UI. To take this idea to the extreme, Microsoft Windows always look the same. Close, Max, Min all in the right, control-icon in the left, scroll-bar on the right, menus along the top, etc. In fact, a lot of GUIs to it this way. Where there are visual clues, there is at least a way to figure out inconsistent commands and controls, but just imagine trying to GUESS which voice command would exit a program in a VUI. CUSTOMIZABLE: In order for a user to better experience something, the user might want to tailor a UI to themselves. In a VUI, this is just about necessary (voice training). In a GUI, the basic customizations include colors and font sizes. But other systems let you customize futher by adding menu items, changing the arrangment of window buttons, etc. One thing to note is that this breaks with consistency. If one is not careful in their customization, they could also ruin distinguighability. But you can potentially gain efficiency. You could even in fact use it to increase distinguishability. I use a switch box for my WIndows 98 and Windows NT systems. I have a diferent color scheme in each so that I can easily realize what computer I'm using. it's so subconcious it seems I just *know* which one I'm using.
OK, so the cat's out of the bag and it looks bad, right? Well, not exactly. A response from a Be engineer can be found on BeNews here.
So it seems that the library in question is part of the BeOS distribution (both Personal Edition and Pro), but the library in question is never actually used.
IANAL, but it seems to me if you accidetnally include something like that but never use it, are you still violating the license? Perhaps the law could be twisted either way, but I say look at the root of the matter. What were Be's intentions? What damage has been done to the holder of the license?
Can you understand why they're not interested? Business types are not interested in making things look 'cool'. But, you can spin it another way to get them to support it. "Imagine, business guys, you could have your design department customize this application and brand it for your company, making your corporate image even more ubiquitous within and without." Custom branding is the way to sell it to them.