This is the best reason to not support patents if you ask me. No matter what we say about companies embracing and extending, standards do have clout and influence. If the W3C keeps a steady "we don't need no steenkin' patents" attitude, that will tell corporations that if they want their work as a W3C standard, they'd damn well better not patent it.
My main problem with RAND is: who's idea of it is reasonable? The way I look at it, if I have to pay for it, it's not reasonable. I'm in the military - I don't get paid much, and I'm not going to write any OSS software that uses patents I'd have to pay for. I wouldn't mind so much if it was patented with a "anyone can use this, just put somewhere in your software that it uses our idea" similar to what BSD used to do, or if it was something similar to the ideas that people had about getting patents and assigning them to the FSF, but I'd use silver dollars as fishing weights before I'd pay one red cent for the right to use patented standards.
A lot of the web standards originated with individuals, not companies. If we allow patents in the standardization process, this will make it harder for individuals to contribute. This will hurt the progress of the web.
I agree with you - I'd like to find out more about why IBM is pushing this. Really, Sun and Microsoft are the ones with the most clout in the internet community - no one really hears much about web standards coming from IBM. I don't understand why they would want this, considering that they would probably end up paying more royalties than they would receive (which is why I suppose Apple and HP are against it).
Patents in standards are not unusual at all, really. Look at gifs for instance - they're pretty much standard (de facto, if not de jure) and the compression algorithm is patented (hell, UNIX compress is a standard too, which uses the same compression).
Hardware standards are almost always awash in patents. You don't hear as much about it because only the manufacturers deal with them, but they're there. The IA32 architecture is a standard - wanna guess how many patents are on it? Software's pretty much one of the first areas where most standards were not patented.
I think the reason a lot of people don't think standards can be patented is because most of the stuff we use in the RFC's are not. Email, for instance, isn't, nor is DNS, FTP or HTTP or anything of that nature. RFC's are rather unique in that they offer full, free disclose of the standards contained therein - most standards organizations don't (ever try do download an IEEE or ISO standard?). Hell, I think that just about anyone can submit an RFC (the first one was written on toilet paper in a UCB bathroom if I remember right). Fortunately, the web-related standards are pretty much controlled by the W3C, which hasn't in the past allowed patents, and puts all their reccomendations out where everyone has equal access to them.
Check out the information in the giflib README file. I don't have a link handy, but basically it states that you must have a UNISIS license to use it.
There's a compatible library, called libungif, which doesn't compress gifs. Usually this is what you're using on a default install of gimp. Personally, I use giflib because the chance of someone actually seeing my work is very small (most of the time I only do image creation for my own systems) and I use PNG for anything that doesn't require transparency and will be seen by IE users. I was a warez nut way back before I started using linux, so maybe it's just that old habits die hard.
If you do a search, you can find plenty of articles about this. Seems what happened was compuserve used them as the default image format, and UNISYS never said a thing until they were firmly entrenched in the web. Then out of the blue they started demanding royalties - caused quite a fuss. Personally I see it as a good thing, since gif is an inferior format anyway compared to PNG in most applications.
Also note that it's lzw compression they have the patent on, which is used in tons of programs (including I believe pkzip and the standard UNIX 'compress' program - ever wonder why the free UNIXen use gzip? That's why.).
LZW's not the best compression out there (as with all compression algorithms, different data will produce different results on which one is the best) but generally gzip and bzip2 do the job much better - although bzip2 seems to require much more CPU in the process. It will eventually be phased out completely I'm sure, even after the patent expires.
Re:Heh, .9.5? Foolish.
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
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· Score: 2, Informative
In addition to the entries above, you can also have your sidebar (if you use it - methinks IE has something similar to the sidebar) search for google and display results there. I don't use the sidebar myself, but this is something I noticed before I turned it off.
I used to work in an NT shop (not by choice - uncle sam made me do it) but I ran linux machines at home. The air force is pretty adamant about locking your workstation when you're out of site of it (which I was in and out all the time, going out to train the new people on fixing customers' computers), so you get in the habit of ctl-alt-del every time you turn around in your chair.
Of course, I'd get home, start workin' on some code or something, then the phone would ring and I'd reboot the machine without thinking when I got up to answer it.
That happened a couple times, then I commented the line in/etc/inittab and didn't have any problems after that (other than being embarrassed at myself when I'd catch myself ctl-alt-del'ing by linux box).
If they need some new software, they're not going to hop on over to freshmeat. They're going to decide the function of the software. Then they're going to hire somebody to design a system that accomplishes that exact task.
No they're not. That's the old DOD.
In the new DOD, the officers will drag their heels for a while, then ask the resident computer people (the NCC on an air force base) to suggest something. The NCC will ask some E3 to come up with something (preferably one of the few that knows what he's doing) and he'll make a few reccomendations. Then the superintendant, who barely knows how to use outlook but thinks he's a genius, will reject it for some stupid reason and ask one of the NCO's to come up with something. The NCO doesn't know much either but spends lots of time reading advertisements from the major software dealers and picks something out that says it will do something similar to what they want to do, but has lots of problems (which he won't see because he just looks at the products pages from vendors instead of searching around USENET (which he doesn't know exists) or looking for reviews on the web). The superintendent will approve that, but then some other master sergeant from the AUTODIN team or something will argue for something else. The officers will hold several meetings, then flip a coin and choose some product that doens't work at all but looks nice on their OPR's (performance reports). They'll order the sorftware, and order the NCC to get everything set up.
Of course, then it all goes back to the one airman who knew it wouldn't work right in the first place, and he'll be the one forced to implement it. After it doesn't work right, he'll pull all sorts of hacks and tricks to get it to work, then get transferred to another base. Unfortunately, since he was the only one in the NCC who could understand what he did (everyone else is still trying to figure out how to create shares on the fileserver), no one else understands how it works and end up just rebooting the machine whenever something bad happens.
It's called COTS - commercial off the shelf. The DOD doesn't write custom software very much anymore at all (with a few exceptions, but not many). The idea is that you can train your people for one thing (NT server, for instance) and they'll be able to work it on any base. They lose that advantage because they don't train people at all anyway, so they may as well write their own software.
Last year DISA rolled out "DMS" (defense messaging system) which is a MS Exchange server.
Actually, DMS runs on lotus notes as well. I think the army was using it for that.
Plus there's UNIX machines they use for it too, but not being a DMS guy (I went from being the top UNIX guy at one base to working AUTODIN (or STAMPS) at this one... and they ask me why I don't reenlist) I'm not exactly sure what they're for. The DMS guys don't know either (like the air force would actually TRAIN somebody...)
I don't do anything seriously intense with it, but I'm running 2.4.10 on my ultra-1 and haven't had any problems with the kernel at all. When I first dist-upgraded to testing, the 2.2 kernel would panic when I tried to access my NFSv3 server, but 2.4.10 (kernel.org version) seems to do allright.
Offtopic, but anyone ever get solaris 8 to install with networking on an ultra-1 with the buggy firmware problem that causes the ethernet chips to not initialize? Tried setting the option to probe the network on boot, but it didn't help. I'm wanting to run solaris, but can't get it to go.
MySQL doesn't (I'm pretty sure anyway) have the old windows licensing scheme anymore (used to be GPL for UNIX, pay for windoze). They do offer different licensing schemes if you want to pay for them (for various reasons, including the fact that there's no warrantee under the GPL) but the default license is GPL.
Hamburglar: My catchphrase, "robble robble", never caught on. I thought that if I stopped everyone from using catchphrases, then people could see me for the lovable mascot that I am...
Zoe: It's not your catchprase, hamburglar. Pepole hate you because you still their damned hambergers.
Never been to england, but in japan on a US military base it was specifically illegal to bicycle drunk. Apparently some guy went down this killer hill one night and lost control (I've gone down that hill myself many a time, and it's hard to do it sober when the wind's blowing hard). Bashed his head open and was killed immediately.
In my home town (small town in north oklahoma), if you're riding a bike or just walking late at night you'll be pulled over. They claim they like to keep track of people out at night - sounds rather orwelian to me. I'd understand if they were making sure you weren't out stumbling around drunk, but after the second time getting pulled over by the same damn cop and made to stand in the cold for a freaking hour while he sat in his nice warm car running every check on my ID, I started thinking they just do it to piss pedestrians and cyclists off.
The women in kansas are cute, I'll give ya that. I worked in southern kansas (being from northern oklahoma) for a while.
And I can see advantages to being able to see one side of the state from the other, being that there's a total of 12 hills in that state.
One thing though, driving between north central oklahoma and st. louis - your windshield stays nice and clean the whole way, EXCEPT on 166. Seems like once you hit the kansas state line, your car becomes a target. Cross into missouri and wipe it off, it stays fairly clean the rest of the way up. Kansas must offer a tax break for dragonflies or something.
I've had to work with OWA (Outlook web access), and it's not all that great (as of exchange server 5.5 anyway). Being the webmaster at my last base for a while, I had to take care of the OWA machine as well and it was a pain in the ass.
First of all, you have to run it on IIS. This may or may not be a problem - if you're already using IIS for your webserver, then it's not a bad thing (you don't want your OWA server to be anything else, BTW - don't put OWA on your main webserver). However, if you use apache or iPlanet for your webserver, that's one more platform you have to support.
Second, it likes to do nasty things like quit talking to your mail server for no reason. If you have multiple mail servers, it's pretty easy to fix (a couple registry changes to point to another web server - you can flop back and forth between two servers just fine, it's the change that fixes it) except that you'll most likely have to go on site to fix it, and it has a nasty habit of doing it at 2am when some bigwig is trying to access their mail. Again, may or may not be a problem depending on your setup.
Third, it requires the systemroot directory to be WORLD WRITABLE. Microsoft says that it's not a vulnerability - you can believe them you if wish, I don't.
Fourth, because it does nasty little things to the IIS code, patching IIS could break things. Watch out for that - you know how fast microsoft comes out with patches.
A lot of companies use OWA, but if it were up to me I wouldn't have it available out on the internet. For intranet use it's fine. YMMV, of course.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I run a linux desktop at home. In fact, it's the only desktop I have at home. It's not that I don't know how to use windoze as a desktop (considering end user support ended up being one of my offical jobs at my last base, with several thousand users, or that my work desktop is windoze), it's just that it's woefully underpowered and offers little flexibility.
You're asking me to give up my multiple desktops, my well-integrated CLI-and-GUI environment, my text tools (which you can get for windoze, but they're much less powerful there since most windoze apps don't use text for much), my useful third mouse button (or second, in the mac's case), my stability (2000 doesn't beat my linux box, I doubt XP will), my proper home directory (shared via NFS so it's the same all over my network), my sloppy focus (sometimes you DO want to type in a window in the background), my aplications that don't whine at me to register them (and cost nothing), and for what?
So I can run a system where I have little control and have to either buy all my apps or listen to them nag me? So I can watch the pretty little banner ad that flashes at the bottom of an ICQ window? So when the next version of my OS comes out I have to spend some of my hardware budget on it? So I can have every other app I install put AOL icons on my desktop? So I can get lousy error messages that tell me nothing?
This is all off the top of my head - I could go on and on about why I use a linux desktop instead of a windoze one. I actually do have windoze dual booting on my main workstation - I use it for testing my webpages and occasionally playing a game. Then I boot my ass right back into linux with a sigh of relief.
You might think windoze does a good job of making a desktop, and for you, it might. But some of us are power users and you'll pry our UNIX desktops away from our cold, dead fingers.
It's all about how you use it. What's good for you obviously isn't good for me. Complaining about people trying to make a linux desktop is like complaining about phone companies offering special rates on calls to Idaho. Nobody wants to call Idaho, right? Sure, except for the people that know people there...
Actually, a female friend of mine had something similar without power requirements at all - just get a clit piercing and you're set to go. Get off just by walking down the street. After a while you get used to it, so you just take it out for a couple days (apparently it doesn't close as easily as other piercings) and you're ready to go again.
Cool thing was I always had an audience when I practiced on my bass. She had a habit of sitting on my amp...
Considering how many operating systems available at that time that are still in use, and that I'm currently sitting in the middle of 4 UNIX machines, I'd say they were right. From their point of view, this is the future:)
In the corporate environments I've worked in, users didn't reconfigure their systems (at least they weren't supposed to). Corporate UNIX users usually wouldn't have root access anyway. Upgrades and whatnot are usually done by the IT team and computer-savvy volunteers from the floor. This article's for business users - home users are a completely different ballgame.
Just think of X as your video/mouse driver and low-level (i.e. line and pixel) graphics libraries. It's actually more than that, but that's its closest equivalent in the windoze world.
As far as the more advanced features such as remote display and font server and whatnot, you don't need to worry about them unless you need them. All in all though, X is fascinating if you're interested in that sort of thing, and while many parts of it are in extreme need of major overhaul, it's still one of the most advanced and flexible display systems out there.
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If you reply to every comment out there, everyone will know you're a scam. Moron.
This is the best reason to not support patents if you ask me. No matter what we say about companies embracing and extending, standards do have clout and influence. If the W3C keeps a steady "we don't need no steenkin' patents" attitude, that will tell corporations that if they want their work as a W3C standard, they'd damn well better not patent it.
My main problem with RAND is: who's idea of it is reasonable? The way I look at it, if I have to pay for it, it's not reasonable. I'm in the military - I don't get paid much, and I'm not going to write any OSS software that uses patents I'd have to pay for. I wouldn't mind so much if it was patented with a "anyone can use this, just put somewhere in your software that it uses our idea" similar to what BSD used to do, or if it was something similar to the ideas that people had about getting patents and assigning them to the FSF, but I'd use silver dollars as fishing weights before I'd pay one red cent for the right to use patented standards.
A lot of the web standards originated with individuals, not companies. If we allow patents in the standardization process, this will make it harder for individuals to contribute. This will hurt the progress of the web.
I agree with you - I'd like to find out more about why IBM is pushing this. Really, Sun and Microsoft are the ones with the most clout in the internet community - no one really hears much about web standards coming from IBM. I don't understand why they would want this, considering that they would probably end up paying more royalties than they would receive (which is why I suppose Apple and HP are against it).
Patents in standards are not unusual at all, really. Look at gifs for instance - they're pretty much standard (de facto, if not de jure) and the compression algorithm is patented (hell, UNIX compress is a standard too, which uses the same compression).
Hardware standards are almost always awash in patents. You don't hear as much about it because only the manufacturers deal with them, but they're there. The IA32 architecture is a standard - wanna guess how many patents are on it? Software's pretty much one of the first areas where most standards were not patented.
I think the reason a lot of people don't think standards can be patented is because most of the stuff we use in the RFC's are not. Email, for instance, isn't, nor is DNS, FTP or HTTP or anything of that nature. RFC's are rather unique in that they offer full, free disclose of the standards contained therein - most standards organizations don't (ever try do download an IEEE or ISO standard?). Hell, I think that just about anyone can submit an RFC (the first one was written on toilet paper in a UCB bathroom if I remember right). Fortunately, the web-related standards are pretty much controlled by the W3C, which hasn't in the past allowed patents, and puts all their reccomendations out where everyone has equal access to them.
Check out the information in the giflib README file. I don't have a link handy, but basically it states that you must have a UNISIS license to use it.
There's a compatible library, called libungif, which doesn't compress gifs. Usually this is what you're using on a default install of gimp. Personally, I use giflib because the chance of someone actually seeing my work is very small (most of the time I only do image creation for my own systems) and I use PNG for anything that doesn't require transparency and will be seen by IE users. I was a warez nut way back before I started using linux, so maybe it's just that old habits die hard.
If you do a search, you can find plenty of articles about this. Seems what happened was compuserve used them as the default image format, and UNISYS never said a thing until they were firmly entrenched in the web. Then out of the blue they started demanding royalties - caused quite a fuss. Personally I see it as a good thing, since gif is an inferior format anyway compared to PNG in most applications.
Also note that it's lzw compression they have the patent on, which is used in tons of programs (including I believe pkzip and the standard UNIX 'compress' program - ever wonder why the free UNIXen use gzip? That's why.).
LZW's not the best compression out there (as with all compression algorithms, different data will produce different results on which one is the best) but generally gzip and bzip2 do the job much better - although bzip2 seems to require much more CPU in the process. It will eventually be phased out completely I'm sure, even after the patent expires.
No, I imaginve after 9.9 it'll go to 9.10.
Those aren't decimal points there.
In addition to the entries above, you can also have your sidebar (if you use it - methinks IE has something similar to the sidebar) search for google and display results there. I don't use the sidebar myself, but this is something I noticed before I turned it off.
I used to work in an NT shop (not by choice - uncle sam made me do it) but I ran linux machines at home. The air force is pretty adamant about locking your workstation when you're out of site of it (which I was in and out all the time, going out to train the new people on fixing customers' computers), so you get in the habit of ctl-alt-del every time you turn around in your chair.
/etc/inittab and didn't have any problems after that (other than being embarrassed at myself when I'd catch myself ctl-alt-del'ing by linux box).
Of course, I'd get home, start workin' on some code or something, then the phone would ring and I'd reboot the machine without thinking when I got up to answer it.
That happened a couple times, then I commented the line in
No they're not. That's the old DOD.
In the new DOD, the officers will drag their heels for a while, then ask the resident computer people (the NCC on an air force base) to suggest something. The NCC will ask some E3 to come up with something (preferably one of the few that knows what he's doing) and he'll make a few reccomendations. Then the superintendant, who barely knows how to use outlook but thinks he's a genius, will reject it for some stupid reason and ask one of the NCO's to come up with something. The NCO doesn't know much either but spends lots of time reading advertisements from the major software dealers and picks something out that says it will do something similar to what they want to do, but has lots of problems (which he won't see because he just looks at the products pages from vendors instead of searching around USENET (which he doesn't know exists) or looking for reviews on the web). The superintendent will approve that, but then some other master sergeant from the AUTODIN team or something will argue for something else. The officers will hold several meetings, then flip a coin and choose some product that doens't work at all but looks nice on their OPR's (performance reports). They'll order the sorftware, and order the NCC to get everything set up.
Of course, then it all goes back to the one airman who knew it wouldn't work right in the first place, and he'll be the one forced to implement it. After it doesn't work right, he'll pull all sorts of hacks and tricks to get it to work, then get transferred to another base. Unfortunately, since he was the only one in the NCC who could understand what he did (everyone else is still trying to figure out how to create shares on the fileserver), no one else understands how it works and end up just rebooting the machine whenever something bad happens.
It's called COTS - commercial off the shelf. The DOD doesn't write custom software very much anymore at all (with a few exceptions, but not many). The idea is that you can train your people for one thing (NT server, for instance) and they'll be able to work it on any base. They lose that advantage because they don't train people at all anyway, so they may as well write their own software.
Actually, DMS runs on lotus notes as well. I think the army was using it for that.
Plus there's UNIX machines they use for it too, but not being a DMS guy (I went from being the top UNIX guy at one base to working AUTODIN (or STAMPS) at this one... and they ask me why I don't reenlist) I'm not exactly sure what they're for. The DMS guys don't know either (like the air force would actually TRAIN somebody...)
I don't do anything seriously intense with it, but I'm running 2.4.10 on my ultra-1 and haven't had any problems with the kernel at all. When I first dist-upgraded to testing, the 2.2 kernel would panic when I tried to access my NFSv3 server, but 2.4.10 (kernel.org version) seems to do allright.
Offtopic, but anyone ever get solaris 8 to install with networking on an ultra-1 with the buggy firmware problem that causes the ethernet chips to not initialize? Tried setting the option to probe the network on boot, but it didn't help. I'm wanting to run solaris, but can't get it to go.
PosgreSQL is more free?
MySQL doesn't (I'm pretty sure anyway) have the old windows licensing scheme anymore (used to be GPL for UNIX, pay for windoze). They do offer different licensing schemes if you want to pay for them (for various reasons, including the fact that there's no warrantee under the GPL) but the default license is GPL.
Look here if you like the hamburglar.
Hamburglar: My catchphrase, "robble robble", never caught on. I thought that if I stopped everyone from using catchphrases, then people could see me for the lovable mascot that I am...
Zoe: It's not your catchprase, hamburglar. Pepole hate you because you still their damned hambergers.
According to the link he posted (the one to nasa) it is about 14 billion dollars. He just posted it wrong.
Basically on the site it said the budget was 14,035.3 million dollars, which is a bit above 14 billion.
Wonder if you could use a flywheel of sorts to store energy at stops? I know they work well in larger setups, not sure about bicycles though.
:)
That way you could do without the motor altogether. After all, if you wanted a motor on it you could just refit a moped
Never been to england, but in japan on a US military base it was specifically illegal to bicycle drunk. Apparently some guy went down this killer hill one night and lost control (I've gone down that hill myself many a time, and it's hard to do it sober when the wind's blowing hard). Bashed his head open and was killed immediately.
In my home town (small town in north oklahoma), if you're riding a bike or just walking late at night you'll be pulled over. They claim they like to keep track of people out at night - sounds rather orwelian to me. I'd understand if they were making sure you weren't out stumbling around drunk, but after the second time getting pulled over by the same damn cop and made to stand in the cold for a freaking hour while he sat in his nice warm car running every check on my ID, I started thinking they just do it to piss pedestrians and cyclists off.
The women in kansas are cute, I'll give ya that. I worked in southern kansas (being from northern oklahoma) for a while.
And I can see advantages to being able to see one side of the state from the other, being that there's a total of 12 hills in that state.
One thing though, driving between north central oklahoma and st. louis - your windshield stays nice and clean the whole way, EXCEPT on 166. Seems like once you hit the kansas state line, your car becomes a target. Cross into missouri and wipe it off, it stays fairly clean the rest of the way up. Kansas must offer a tax break for dragonflies or something.
In japan you can't use a cell phone while driving. The military had to get special permission to use their radios while driving as well.
Because this way you won't click into goatse.cx when you forget to hover over the link before clicking it.
Good thing for slow connections... I almost got sucked into that site at work once.
Yes, imagine it. i could use the camera to project an image of what im looking at right in front of my own eye!!!
Or have it point backwards... good for backstabbing corporate environments :)
I've had to work with OWA (Outlook web access), and it's not all that great (as of exchange server 5.5 anyway). Being the webmaster at my last base for a while, I had to take care of the OWA machine as well and it was a pain in the ass.
First of all, you have to run it on IIS. This may or may not be a problem - if you're already using IIS for your webserver, then it's not a bad thing (you don't want your OWA server to be anything else, BTW - don't put OWA on your main webserver). However, if you use apache or iPlanet for your webserver, that's one more platform you have to support.
Second, it likes to do nasty things like quit talking to your mail server for no reason. If you have multiple mail servers, it's pretty easy to fix (a couple registry changes to point to another web server - you can flop back and forth between two servers just fine, it's the change that fixes it) except that you'll most likely have to go on site to fix it, and it has a nasty habit of doing it at 2am when some bigwig is trying to access their mail. Again, may or may not be a problem depending on your setup.
Third, it requires the systemroot directory to be WORLD WRITABLE. Microsoft says that it's not a vulnerability - you can believe them you if wish, I don't.
Fourth, because it does nasty little things to the IIS code, patching IIS could break things. Watch out for that - you know how fast microsoft comes out with patches.
A lot of companies use OWA, but if it were up to me I wouldn't have it available out on the internet. For intranet use it's fine. YMMV, of course.
Windoze and mac make better desktops eh?
Coulda fooled me.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I run a linux desktop at home. In fact, it's the only desktop I have at home. It's not that I don't know how to use windoze as a desktop (considering end user support ended up being one of my offical jobs at my last base, with several thousand users, or that my work desktop is windoze), it's just that it's woefully underpowered and offers little flexibility.
You're asking me to give up my multiple desktops, my well-integrated CLI-and-GUI environment, my text tools (which you can get for windoze, but they're much less powerful there since most windoze apps don't use text for much), my useful third mouse button (or second, in the mac's case), my stability (2000 doesn't beat my linux box, I doubt XP will), my proper home directory (shared via NFS so it's the same all over my network), my sloppy focus (sometimes you DO want to type in a window in the background), my aplications that don't whine at me to register them (and cost nothing), and for what?
So I can run a system where I have little control and have to either buy all my apps or listen to them nag me? So I can watch the pretty little banner ad that flashes at the bottom of an ICQ window? So when the next version of my OS comes out I have to spend some of my hardware budget on it? So I can have every other app I install put AOL icons on my desktop? So I can get lousy error messages that tell me nothing?
This is all off the top of my head - I could go on and on about why I use a linux desktop instead of a windoze one. I actually do have windoze dual booting on my main workstation - I use it for testing my webpages and occasionally playing a game. Then I boot my ass right back into linux with a sigh of relief.
You might think windoze does a good job of making a desktop, and for you, it might. But some of us are power users and you'll pry our UNIX desktops away from our cold, dead fingers.
It's all about how you use it. What's good for you obviously isn't good for me. Complaining about people trying to make a linux desktop is like complaining about phone companies offering special rates on calls to Idaho. Nobody wants to call Idaho, right? Sure, except for the people that know people there...
Actually, a female friend of mine had something similar without power requirements at all - just get a clit piercing and you're set to go. Get off just by walking down the street. After a while you get used to it, so you just take it out for a couple days (apparently it doesn't close as easily as other piercings) and you're ready to go again.
Cool thing was I always had an audience when I practiced on my bass. She had a habit of sitting on my amp...
Considering how many operating systems available at that time that are still in use, and that I'm currently sitting in the middle of 4 UNIX machines, I'd say they were right. From their point of view, this is the future :)
In the corporate environments I've worked in, users didn't reconfigure their systems (at least they weren't supposed to). Corporate UNIX users usually wouldn't have root access anyway. Upgrades and whatnot are usually done by the IT team and computer-savvy volunteers from the floor. This article's for business users - home users are a completely different ballgame.
Just think of X as your video/mouse driver and low-level (i.e. line and pixel) graphics libraries. It's actually more than that, but that's its closest equivalent in the windoze world.
As far as the more advanced features such as remote display and font server and whatnot, you don't need to worry about them unless you need them. All in all though, X is fascinating if you're interested in that sort of thing, and while many parts of it are in extreme need of major overhaul, it's still one of the most advanced and flexible display systems out there.