Yup. And in this age of lawsuits, supermarkets which sell products causing seizures in customers will quickly be sued by your friendly local personal injury lawyer.
So, I can see the stock market being declared artificial scarcity, since when you purchase a share in a corporation, you're essentially purchasing a small portion of that corporation, for which there really isn't any limit on how much that can be subdivided. But, in essence, you're subdividing something roughly equivalent to, say, a dollar bill, which you can only subdivide so far before it becomes practically worthless, anyway.
Digital music, on the other hand, unfortunately has little intrinsic value to it's purchaser except for enjoyment. There's nothing physical to it, being little more than a collection of bits that happens to be easily replicated. CDs, tapes, records, all have some natural scarcity since they have to be manufactured; money has scarcity because we can't easily replicate it ourselves (not to mention that there are all manner of laws against it, and that we assign value to it, so making more of it would be bad for the value that we assign to it); but a collection of bits has no value because it's inherently easy to replicate.
As a result, the only reason a collection of bits that we call "digital music" has no value except for the enjoyment that we get out of it, and even then, it's hard to apply varying prices to enjoyment alone - if people decide that what is demanded for pleasure is too much, they'll find something else to do that costs less, or they'll find a cheaper way to acquire it.
So, the only thing digital music sites have going for them right now are ease of acquisition and the pleasure of the end user. If the prices go up, then the ease of acquisition means less and less until it becomes worth their time to find what they're looking for - and I (and plenty of other people) think $0.99 is just pushing the border of where ease of acquisition stops mattering because they can do other things for less. Making variable prices, even if $0.99 is the maximum as well, changes that ease of acquisition to be more difficult simply because you can't assume everything will be the same price.
So, trying to make something similar to a stock market for digital music is likely to not work out well - if the only gain to music is pleasure, and the only advantage that online music stores have is ease of acquiring said pleasure, then changing the one advantage that they have over other methods ultimately for the worse is a Bad Idea.
Well, that depends on whether you happen to be a vegetarian or vegan to "save the animals" or other such similar things, or because you just don't like the taste of the stuff.
Being one of those people who don't eat meat because they don't like the stuff, I can't honestly say I care all that much if you can make meat withou it coming from an animal. It's still meat, regardless of whether it came from a Meat-o-Matic or not.
Leather without the cow and other such things - that would be nice. And no, that PVC stuff doesn't count.
As far as too big to use on a train, I get the feeling that the grandparent poster is referring to things like subways or light rail trains, which during rush hour (around here, at least) are packed to the point that you're lucky to find a place to stand a lot of the time, let alone pull out a video game and play. Talk about a clown car.
I've had one such issue with XFS... but that was hard disk death (and I'm still annoyed with it, because said death occured about a week ago). I was actually rather suprised when I was still able to recover >99% of the data that was on the disks after having superblocks and inode bitmaps become corrupted, and xfs_repair refusing to fix the filesystem after it had been moved to another disk. (I think I lost/usr/qt/3/include and a few libraries which I happened to have copies of floating around anyway.)
As far as reiserfs goes, I'm glad I switched to XFS when I did, because my old SuSE installation just ate itself last night - system locked up hard, so I rebooted, and the standard Gentoo boot process came back to tell me that there wasn't a reiserfs partition where there had been one not more than 10 minutes before. Feh.
You can find a number of sites here... the first one on the list (yes, it's Microsoft, but it does the job quite well) is one of the two that I tried on there, and it worked out quite nicely. Was able to get an aerial map of my home down to the surrounding 800x800yd area with little issue, excepting that you typically expect clicking on a point on the map to center it.
Actually... it's been a feature as far as I can tell since 3.2.0. It works quite nicely (though it is a bit annoying seeing stuff come up as misspelled when I know it's not, but that's a case of the spell checker not knowing what the acronym that I'm using happens to be or something like that.)
All I can say right now is that every cell phone I've ever owned (and I do live in the US) has had a SIM card. T-Mobile (formerly VoiceStream, until they were bought out by the German company of the same name) uses them in their phones, and I've seen a number of people swapping out SIM cards so that they could make use of someone else's phone (and have access to their phonebook).
As well, (they used to, don't know if they still do now, and I'm not quite sober enough to actually go visit their site) they offered tri-band GSM phones (900/1800/1900MHz), so (in theory) they would work worldwide. I don't know if you could stick another provider's SIM card into the phone and it would work, as I've never had the opportunity to test such things, nor have I heard any experiences with trying it.
The BSD license presents no guarantees whatsoever that any and all uses of the source code are going to be free of charge. All the BSD license does is say "go ahead and use this however you want, just give me credit for it".
I've read it a number of times. If you actually read section 2 (for which 2b is a clause of), you would note that it only applies to making changes to the original program itself:
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: (subclauses omitted for brevity)
Now, unless using the software as it was meant to be used falls under the category of "modifying the work or any portion of it", there is no restriction to you writing a program and placing it under the BSD license.
However, and this is where I see you taking issue, the compiled program falls under the combination of the BSD and GPL licenses; since the BSD license basically says "you can do anything with this as long as you give credit where credit is due", the compiled program is a GPL'd work. Note quite carefully that your source code doesn't necessarily contain anything from the Qt package, only the compiled binary (which, in the process of including any Qt header files in the source code, also imports all sorts of inline functions and other such things).
This is also where we have all of the fun legal issues with linking of GPL'd works: I can write anything I want and place it under any license I want. But in order to link it to GPL'd software, I can't place any restrictions on my work that go above and beyond the GPL. The BSD license (not the original 4-part, but we already knew that) fulfills the obligation of not placing additional constraints on the use and distribution of the software, so the whole issue is moot.
Also, read the paragraph immediately following all of the clauses in section 2, and you'll note that the GPL explicitly states that when the programs are distributed separately (and can be considered independent works), that the GPL need not apply to them. Your BSD licensed work is distributed separately from Qt (and can reasonably be considered an independent work), and, as such, unless you are distributing it as a compiled work, it falls under that clause, and as such, the GPL is irrelevant until you are trying to distribute the software as a compiled program.
If I'm not mistaken, neither the GPL or the QPL make any difference if you want to write software under a BSD license. In fact, there are modules in KDE which are BSD licensed.
No, you can't write for-profit software with Qt Free Edition (well, you can, as the GPL doesn't forbid that, but the moment you go distributing it, the receiving party has the option of giving it to anyone they want, so it's rather moot), but the GPL places no restrictions on using another license as long as the license doesn't place any restrictions on the software above and beyond the GPL.
...
Invalidation of the GPL would mean that existing GPL'd software could be incorporated into commercial code without restriction or credit to the original author....
Actually, at that point, it would become governed by copyright law, which is more restrictive (without permission by the owner of the copyright, anyway). So crediting the author is irrelevant, because there is still a copyright violation if the code is stuck into commercial code, or distributed, or much of anything really.
As well, commercial vendors wouldn't necessarily be under the mercy of SCO (because, even IF SCO is found to own certain bits of Linux kernel source code, they don't own the kernel in it's entirety), rather they would be under the mercy of the copyright holders of all of the code in question that they distribute (which could very easily be hundreds of thousands of individuals). I would imagine that most of the other predictions you've made are correct, though.
Qt is NOT under the gpl. it's a modified gpl that will NOT allow me to make a commercial open source application without paying gobs of money to them.
QT is most definately under the GPL. (According to the Free Edition of QT/Embedded 2.3.7, it IS GPL'd, and the GPL doesn't prevent commercial software -- it requires that you provide the source to said software and distribute it to those requesting the software:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: a) Accompany with it the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, b) Accompany with it a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge of no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;...
-- quoted verbatim from the GPL.) It isn't under the LGPL, which allows for the linking of software that isn't under a GPL-compatible license with it (which includes commercial software). And, considering that a "commercial open-source application" can still be under an open-source type license in the first place (such as the GPL), there isn't a single thing preventing you from actually writing software for a device that uses QT/Embedded and Qtopia as it's GUI platform, provided all of it's software is released under a GPL-compatible license.
It would also appear that MiniGUI is licensed under the GPL as well. The implications are the same as what you mentioned regarding QT, so I fail to see how MiniGUI is going to benefit you in any way more than QT/Embedded would. The parent poster is correct in this instance, in that the LGPL would have been more suitable for the software, but the licensing of the software is the prerogative of the author, and I'm rather indifferent to the whole thing anyway.
Basically, regarding both QT/Embedded and MiniGUI, as long as you follow the license agreement (in this case, QT/Embedded Free Edition and MiniGUI are both GPL'd), you are free to do as you please with them, including write for-profit software -- with the caveat that the GPL isn't much of a license agreement for purely for-profit software in the first place.
...but the only argument that could convince me to change my mind is one that involves a plausible repair senario.
Except that without knowing what the extent of the damage is in the first place, it's impossible to determine if it can be repaired in the first place. So perhaps there might have been a plausible repair scenario (or at least the opportunity to do something that didn't involve the death of a shuttle crew), but since no investigation was done while the opportunity was avaliable. NASA might be a godawful bureaucracy, but if you strip away the bureaucrats, you're left with people who have something of a clue and could have worked out something, instead of pretending that the problem didn't exist in the first place.
Windows 2003 does come with Luna (I'm currently running RC1 for a desktop system [from the days when it was called Windows.NET Server] with most of the desktop stuff turned back on), among other things. It actually comes with everything that's avaliable in XP -- but a good majority of it comes disabled, including themes. Makes perfectly good sense for it to come as such, as most of it has no place in what is supposed to be a server OS, but it's there in the case the administrator wants to turn it back on, or there's a purpose for it (The "Windows Audio" service comes turned off by default, as does DirectX video acceleration, but if you're running a server which is being used for audio/video streaming [not that I'd use Windows for that...], you might want to turn on one or both of those.)
That could just be the OpenBSD default. Or I could be smoking crack (which I'm starting to figure is the case..:), as I immediately turned off multiple desktops completely before starting using it, and it's been about 3 months since I did that installation, and about 6 months prior I installed KDE 2.2 on my SuSE 7.1 box at home.
Feel sorry all you want. I'm not particularly
bothered by it myself, as long as I can turn them
off somehow (or at least make it so that I have to
explicitly request to go to another desktop.)
In regards to GNOME/RedHat, I don't use either.
KDE 3.0.5 (as provided for OpenBSD/3.2) does use
multiple desktops by default, as does KDE 2 as
provided by SuSE. And the default configuration, as
I've seen it, is that moving the mouse to the edge
of the screen causes the WM to switch desktops. That's
where it becomes disorienting. (Which is why I
always just turn it off, since I'm never going to
use those default 4 desktops anyway.)
Eew. Multiple desktops. It's always been one of
the most disorientating features of every *NIX WM that I've ever used - accidentally move your mouse to the corner of the screen to click that close box? Oh, you're now on another desktop. (Yes, I know you can configure them to not use virtual desktops (or to only use 1) - it's the first thing I do on any new installation.)
Granted, it's just a feature that I was never
able to grasp worth a damn, more because I would
always manage to lose my application on some other
desktop.
OTOH, I go nuts without a dual-head system.
Sure, Windows doesn't do the greated job at handling
it, but it does an effective enough job for me (and
I can see everything that I'm working on at once
in the process.)
In actuality, the House of Representatives is
there to serve their own best interests (i.e.
re-election), which means not pissing off their
constituency too much.
And, in actuality, the Senate is there to serve
their own best interests as well. They haven't
been to serve the interests of the states for many
years, roughly around the time that the Constitution
was amended such that senators are elected by a
plurality of a state's voters instead of appointed
by the state.
Of course, it's also in their best interests
to get lots and lots of campaign donations, so that
they can all spend all kinds of money to spread
propaganda about themselves such that they look
good to their constituencies, so what they do in
office will quite frequently piss off a large chunk
of their constituency. 99% of getting re-elected to either
the house or the senate is making the people think
you're still good for the job. 1% of getting re-elected
is not pissing off the voters in the process.
That's right: Why do we have the DMCA? Because
the corporations want it. Why do we have copyright
law that lasts something like 70 years after the
death of the author? Because the corporations want it.
America never was a democracy to begin with, but
we're quite a long way from being a constitutional
republic either. The Supreme Court doesn't even
have the balls to enforce the constitution anymore,
so why do we keep fooling ourselves?
I repeat: The U.S.A is NOT a "constitutional
republic". The U.S.A. is a plutocracy.
Hm. I've seen a 3rd semi-common variation. The keyboard I'm using now (pre-Windows keys:) has the large enter key, wide backspace, and my backslash is immediately to the right of the right shift key.
It drives me absolutely batty when I use keyboards that don't have the backslash there (or have another completely inane key there) and I'm trying to write code. The one attached to the computer sitting to my right has the backslash key next to the (tiny!) backspace key, and a key labelled "turbo" next to the right shift key; I find myself pressing that key out of habit when I'm looking for the backslash or pipe.
I've also run into the variation of having the spacebar split with the left side of it being a backspace key. I'd rather press a dead key than hit backspace when trying to press space. Ugh!
Tabs are better than windows because [comment regarding usability].
Wrong. If you have more than a few tabs open, their names are
truncated to the point where you cannot tell which tab is which.
Personally, I've never run into this problem, until I've hit the point
where I've got 10-15 tabs open simultaneously. Keeping in mind that I've
never used OSX, Chimera, or Safari, I can't say much in regard to
those.
Even still, the names generally aren't really all that truncated.
Granted, my desktop is set up in a dual-head configuration (2 17"
monitors, both running at 1152x864), with a terminal window maximised on
one monitor, Mozilla and/or Phoenix and/or Opera7 maximised on the other
monitor, and various other items overlaying everything (IM clients,
WinAmp, other such things).
And, unlike with windows, there is no tab menu...
That's because it's not necessary. I don't know the shortcut key
on MacOS for this, but every browser I've seen which supports tabbed
browsing on both X11 and Win32 uses Ctl-Tab and Ctl-Shift-Tab to navigate
through them. And you have the tabs at the top of the browser window.
On top of that, I've never seen a convenient "Window" menu. Not even when
I used MacOS on a regular basis.
.b
Also, usability studies have time and again demonstrated that it's
easier to hit a systemwide menu bar than an in-window item.
And every power user I know doesn't like having to use the mouse if
there isn't a reason to. That was one of my largest gripes about MacOS
while I used it on a regular basis. It didn't matter what I did, I still
had to use the mouse. One would think that with Ctl, Cmd, Option, and
Shift, you could create enough keyboard shortcuts for everything
such that it would be unnecessary to use a mouse.
Also, your systemwide menu bar, which presumably contains a list of
windows for you to choose from (which is the only reason why you brought
it up, isn't it?), assumes that I want to read item titles every time I
want to get to something, or scan the list for the appropriate icon.
Granted, it's a good idea as long as you don't have 30 windows open at
once, which I quite frequently used to end up with while
browsing.
Why, you might ask, would one end up with so many open windows while
browsing the web and doing other things? Specifically so I don't have to
fuss with the back button every time I follow a link somewhere. Every page
load - whether caused by simply going "back" or following a link, still
causes an HTTP request to be sent out. Which means I have to wait for the
outgoing HTTP request and the 200 or 206 response to come back before the
page ever renders the second time, if I've just followed my link in the
browser window. Tabbed browsing makes that specific usage pattern, among
others, a whole hell of a lot easier.
People think that just because in-window items are closer to the point of
focus that they're easier to use; this is not true.
I haven't seen this on the thread anywhere, nor have I mentioned it
myself. It's not a matter of aim or point of focus. It's a matter of the
keyboard is easier for me to use because it allows me access to more
functions without having to: move my hands away from the keyboard, find
the mouse, move it to where I want it to go, click (and hold the mouse
button!), move the mouse some more, and release the mouse button
(finally!); or with the keyboard: Press Ctl-L.
Granted, active display items might be closer to the point of focus
for my mouse. They are absolutely nowhere near the point of focus
of my hands, which are usually in the vicinity of the keyboard. I
find it a far easier way to use the computer than to be required to locate
a menu bar, or other item within a window. The times I find a mouse more
convenient are when I'm moving stuff around. That's about it.
... Not to mention the fact that the systemwide menu bar already has a
usability infrastructure built up around it to allow things like full
keyboard navigation for the disabled and such. No tab interface has
that.
Hm. I could have just sworn I mentioned the shortcuts for doing so on
every platform that I use on a regular basis. In any case, if the
usability infrastructure is there for full keyboard navigation, why the
hell was I unable to get rid of my mouse after using MacOS for 3+ years?
Oh. That's because nothing could be done without the mouse.
This is one thing that I prefer on Win than Mac. All my
apps open maxmised
Horrible.
My first comment to that is that you do your work the way that suits
you, and I do my work the way that it suits me. I prefer maximised windows
myself, as well. Granted, that also depends on what it is that I'm
doing.
... I don't know what kind of work you do, but when I use my computer...
[description of computer usage here]... Zooming any of them up to fill
the screen would, at best, be a huge waste of screen real-estate.
I don't know exactly what kind of work you do. I do web development for
business and personal stuff, and various bits of C-ish stuff for other
personal projects. I've always found that having a maxmised window is more
convenient for me. Of course, I've also always found that IDE's get in my
way, GUI programming is a pain in the ass, and that I don't want to focus
on everything at once.
It's purely a matter of how you work. Don't bash my [or other people's]
way of doing it.
20 years is pretty limited. But 70 years after my death (USC Title 17 Section 302(a)) isn't really very limited, wouldn't you say?
On the other hand, it's the job of the judiciary to rule on such things, and they've given their ruling, which creates mandate for Congress to increase copyright terms again and again, since, by the dictionary definition of "limited", the term of copyright IS still limited, isn't it?
20 years ago Congress passed a similar bill. 20 years from now Congress is likely to do the same thing.
US Constitution, Article I Section 8: "The Congress shall have the power... to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries..."
"Limited" may not have been defined in the Constitution, but I think most people will agree that "limited times" was not meant to be interpreted as "lifetime + 70 years, and to be extended when it nears expiration".
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. And in this age of lawsuits, supermarkets which sell products causing seizures in customers will quickly be sued by your friendly local personal injury lawyer.
So, I can see the stock market being declared artificial scarcity, since when you purchase a share in a corporation, you're essentially purchasing a small portion of that corporation, for which there really isn't any limit on how much that can be subdivided. But, in essence, you're subdividing something roughly equivalent to, say, a dollar bill, which you can only subdivide so far before it becomes practically worthless, anyway.
Digital music, on the other hand, unfortunately has little intrinsic value to it's purchaser except for enjoyment. There's nothing physical to it, being little more than a collection of bits that happens to be easily replicated. CDs, tapes, records, all have some natural scarcity since they have to be manufactured; money has scarcity because we can't easily replicate it ourselves (not to mention that there are all manner of laws against it, and that we assign value to it, so making more of it would be bad for the value that we assign to it); but a collection of bits has no value because it's inherently easy to replicate.
As a result, the only reason a collection of bits that we call "digital music" has no value except for the enjoyment that we get out of it, and even then, it's hard to apply varying prices to enjoyment alone - if people decide that what is demanded for pleasure is too much, they'll find something else to do that costs less, or they'll find a cheaper way to acquire it.
So, the only thing digital music sites have going for them right now are ease of acquisition and the pleasure of the end user. If the prices go up, then the ease of acquisition means less and less until it becomes worth their time to find what they're looking for - and I (and plenty of other people) think $0.99 is just pushing the border of where ease of acquisition stops mattering because they can do other things for less. Making variable prices, even if $0.99 is the maximum as well, changes that ease of acquisition to be more difficult simply because you can't assume everything will be the same price.
So, trying to make something similar to a stock market for digital music is likely to not work out well - if the only gain to music is pleasure, and the only advantage that online music stores have is ease of acquiring said pleasure, then changing the one advantage that they have over other methods ultimately for the worse is a Bad Idea.
Well, that depends on whether you happen to be a vegetarian or vegan to "save the animals" or other such similar things, or because you just don't like the taste of the stuff.
Being one of those people who don't eat meat because they don't like the stuff, I can't honestly say I care all that much if you can make meat withou it coming from an animal. It's still meat, regardless of whether it came from a Meat-o-Matic or not.
Leather without the cow and other such things - that would be nice. And no, that PVC stuff doesn't count.
As far as too big to use on a train, I get the feeling that the grandparent poster is referring to things like subways or light rail trains, which during rush hour (around here, at least) are packed to the point that you're lucky to find a place to stand a lot of the time, let alone pull out a video game and play. Talk about a clown car.
I've had one such issue with XFS... but that was hard disk death (and I'm still annoyed with it, because said death occured about a week ago). I was actually rather suprised when I was still able to recover >99% of the data that was on the disks after having superblocks and inode bitmaps become corrupted, and xfs_repair refusing to fix the filesystem after it had been moved to another disk. (I think I lost /usr/qt/3/include and a few libraries which I happened to have copies of floating around anyway.)
As far as reiserfs goes, I'm glad I switched to XFS when I did, because my old SuSE installation just ate itself last night - system locked up hard, so I rebooted, and the standard Gentoo boot process came back to tell me that there wasn't a reiserfs partition where there had been one not more than 10 minutes before. Feh.
You can find a number of sites here... the first one on the list (yes, it's Microsoft, but it does the job quite well) is one of the two that I tried on there, and it worked out quite nicely. Was able to get an aerial map of my home down to the surrounding 800x800yd area with little issue, excepting that you typically expect clicking on a point on the map to center it.
Actually... it's been a feature as far as I can tell since 3.2.0. It works quite nicely (though it is a bit annoying seeing stuff come up as misspelled when I know it's not, but that's a case of the spell checker not knowing what the acronym that I'm using happens to be or something like that.)
All I can say right now is that every cell phone I've ever owned (and I do live in the US) has had a SIM card. T-Mobile (formerly VoiceStream, until they were bought out by the German company of the same name) uses them in their phones, and I've seen a number of people swapping out SIM cards so that they could make use of someone else's phone (and have access to their phonebook).
As well, (they used to, don't know if they still do now, and I'm not quite sober enough to actually go visit their site) they offered tri-band GSM phones (900/1800/1900MHz), so (in theory) they would work worldwide. I don't know if you could stick another provider's SIM card into the phone and it would work, as I've never had the opportunity to test such things, nor have I heard any experiences with trying it.
The BSD license presents no guarantees whatsoever that any and all uses of the source code are going to be free of charge. All the BSD license does is say "go ahead and use this however you want, just give me credit for it".
Thank you.
I've read it a number of times. If you actually read section 2 (for which 2b is a clause of), you would note that it only applies to making changes to the original program itself:
Now, unless using the software as it was meant to be used falls under the category of "modifying the work or any portion of it", there is no restriction to you writing a program and placing it under the BSD license.
However, and this is where I see you taking issue, the compiled program falls under the combination of the BSD and GPL licenses; since the BSD license basically says "you can do anything with this as long as you give credit where credit is due", the compiled program is a GPL'd work. Note quite carefully that your source code doesn't necessarily contain anything from the Qt package, only the compiled binary (which, in the process of including any Qt header files in the source code, also imports all sorts of inline functions and other such things).
This is also where we have all of the fun legal issues with linking of GPL'd works: I can write anything I want and place it under any license I want. But in order to link it to GPL'd software, I can't place any restrictions on my work that go above and beyond the GPL. The BSD license (not the original 4-part, but we already knew that) fulfills the obligation of not placing additional constraints on the use and distribution of the software, so the whole issue is moot.
Also, read the paragraph immediately following all of the clauses in section 2, and you'll note that the GPL explicitly states that when the programs are distributed separately (and can be considered independent works), that the GPL need not apply to them. Your BSD licensed work is distributed separately from Qt (and can reasonably be considered an independent work), and, as such, unless you are distributing it as a compiled work, it falls under that clause, and as such, the GPL is irrelevant until you are trying to distribute the software as a compiled program.
If I'm not mistaken, neither the GPL or the QPL make any difference if you want to write software under a BSD license. In fact, there are modules in KDE which are BSD licensed.
No, you can't write for-profit software with Qt Free Edition (well, you can, as the GPL doesn't forbid that, but the moment you go distributing it, the receiving party has the option of giving it to anyone they want, so it's rather moot), but the GPL places no restrictions on using another license as long as the license doesn't place any restrictions on the software above and beyond the GPL.
Actually, at that point, it would become governed by copyright law, which is more restrictive (without permission by the owner of the copyright, anyway). So crediting the author is irrelevant, because there is still a copyright violation if the code is stuck into commercial code, or distributed, or much of anything really.
As well, commercial vendors wouldn't necessarily be under the mercy of SCO (because, even IF SCO is found to own certain bits of Linux kernel source code, they don't own the kernel in it's entirety), rather they would be under the mercy of the copyright holders of all of the code in question that they distribute (which could very easily be hundreds of thousands of individuals). I would imagine that most of the other predictions you've made are correct, though.
QT is most definately under the GPL. (According to the Free Edition of QT/Embedded 2.3.7, it IS GPL'd, and the GPL doesn't prevent commercial software -- it requires that you provide the source to said software and distribute it to those requesting the software:
-- quoted verbatim from the GPL.) It isn't under the LGPL, which allows for the linking of software that isn't under a GPL-compatible license with it (which includes commercial software). And, considering that a "commercial open-source application" can still be under an open-source type license in the first place (such as the GPL), there isn't a single thing preventing you from actually writing software for a device that uses QT/Embedded and Qtopia as it's GUI platform, provided all of it's software is released under a GPL-compatible license.It would also appear that MiniGUI is licensed under the GPL as well. The implications are the same as what you mentioned regarding QT, so I fail to see how MiniGUI is going to benefit you in any way more than QT/Embedded would. The parent poster is correct in this instance, in that the LGPL would have been more suitable for the software, but the licensing of the software is the prerogative of the author, and I'm rather indifferent to the whole thing anyway.
Basically, regarding both QT/Embedded and MiniGUI, as long as you follow the license agreement (in this case, QT/Embedded Free Edition and MiniGUI are both GPL'd), you are free to do as you please with them, including write for-profit software -- with the caveat that the GPL isn't much of a license agreement for purely for-profit software in the first place.
Except that without knowing what the extent of the damage is in the first place, it's impossible to determine if it can be repaired in the first place. So perhaps there might have been a plausible repair scenario (or at least the opportunity to do something that didn't involve the death of a shuttle crew), but since no investigation was done while the opportunity was avaliable. NASA might be a godawful bureaucracy, but if you strip away the bureaucrats, you're left with people who have something of a clue and could have worked out something, instead of pretending that the problem didn't exist in the first place.
Windows 2003 does come with Luna (I'm currently running RC1 for a desktop system [from the days when it was called Windows .NET Server] with most of the desktop stuff turned back on), among other things. It actually comes with everything that's avaliable in XP -- but a good majority of it comes disabled, including themes. Makes perfectly good sense for it to come as such, as most of it has no place in what is supposed to be a server OS, but it's there in the case the administrator wants to turn it back on, or there's a purpose for it (The "Windows Audio" service comes turned off by default, as does DirectX video acceleration, but if you're running a server which is being used for audio/video streaming [not that I'd use Windows for that...], you might want to turn on one or both of those.)
That could just be the OpenBSD default. Or I could be smoking crack (which I'm starting to figure is the case.. :), as I immediately turned off multiple desktops completely before starting using it, and it's been about 3 months since I did that installation, and about 6 months prior I installed KDE 2.2 on my SuSE 7.1 box at home.
Feel sorry all you want. I'm not particularly bothered by it myself, as long as I can turn them off somehow (or at least make it so that I have to explicitly request to go to another desktop.)
In regards to GNOME/RedHat, I don't use either. KDE 3.0.5 (as provided for OpenBSD/3.2) does use multiple desktops by default, as does KDE 2 as provided by SuSE. And the default configuration, as I've seen it, is that moving the mouse to the edge of the screen causes the WM to switch desktops. That's where it becomes disorienting. (Which is why I always just turn it off, since I'm never going to use those default 4 desktops anyway.)
Eew. Multiple desktops. It's always been one of the most disorientating features of every *NIX WM that I've ever used - accidentally move your mouse to the corner of the screen to click that close box? Oh, you're now on another desktop. (Yes, I know you can configure them to not use virtual desktops (or to only use 1) - it's the first thing I do on any new installation.)
Granted, it's just a feature that I was never able to grasp worth a damn, more because I would always manage to lose my application on some other desktop.
OTOH, I go nuts without a dual-head system. Sure, Windows doesn't do the greated job at handling it, but it does an effective enough job for me (and I can see everything that I'm working on at once in the process.)
Argh! My garbage collector is broken!
In theory, the parent comment is correct.
In actuality, the House of Representatives is there to serve their own best interests (i.e. re-election), which means not pissing off their constituency too much.
And, in actuality, the Senate is there to serve their own best interests as well. They haven't been to serve the interests of the states for many years, roughly around the time that the Constitution was amended such that senators are elected by a plurality of a state's voters instead of appointed by the state.
Of course, it's also in their best interests to get lots and lots of campaign donations, so that they can all spend all kinds of money to spread propaganda about themselves such that they look good to their constituencies, so what they do in office will quite frequently piss off a large chunk of their constituency. 99% of getting re-elected to either the house or the senate is making the people think you're still good for the job. 1% of getting re-elected is not pissing off the voters in the process.
That's right: Why do we have the DMCA? Because the corporations want it. Why do we have copyright law that lasts something like 70 years after the death of the author? Because the corporations want it. America never was a democracy to begin with, but we're quite a long way from being a constitutional republic either. The Supreme Court doesn't even have the balls to enforce the constitution anymore, so why do we keep fooling ourselves?
I repeat: The U.S.A is NOT a "constitutional republic". The U.S.A. is a plutocracy.
Hm. I've seen a 3rd semi-common variation. The keyboard I'm using now (pre-Windows keys :) has the large enter key, wide backspace, and my backslash is immediately to the right of the right shift key.
It drives me absolutely batty when I use keyboards that don't have the backslash there (or have another completely inane key there) and I'm trying to write code. The one attached to the computer sitting to my right has the backslash key next to the (tiny!) backspace key, and a key labelled "turbo" next to the right shift key; I find myself pressing that key out of habit when I'm looking for the backslash or pipe.
I've also run into the variation of having the spacebar split with the left side of it being a backspace key. I'd rather press a dead key than hit backspace when trying to press space. Ugh!
Personally, I've never run into this problem, until I've hit the point where I've got 10-15 tabs open simultaneously. Keeping in mind that I've never used OSX, Chimera, or Safari, I can't say much in regard to those.
Even still, the names generally aren't really all that truncated. Granted, my desktop is set up in a dual-head configuration (2 17" monitors, both running at 1152x864), with a terminal window maximised on one monitor, Mozilla and/or Phoenix and/or Opera7 maximised on the other monitor, and various other items overlaying everything (IM clients, WinAmp, other such things).
That's because it's not necessary. I don't know the shortcut key on MacOS for this, but every browser I've seen which supports tabbed browsing on both X11 and Win32 uses Ctl-Tab and Ctl-Shift-Tab to navigate through them. And you have the tabs at the top of the browser window.
On top of that, I've never seen a convenient "Window" menu. Not even when I used MacOS on a regular basis.
Also, usability studies have time and again demonstrated that it's easier to hit a systemwide menu bar than an in-window item.
And every power user I know doesn't like having to use the mouse if there isn't a reason to. That was one of my largest gripes about MacOS while I used it on a regular basis. It didn't matter what I did, I still had to use the mouse. One would think that with Ctl, Cmd, Option, and Shift, you could create enough keyboard shortcuts for everything such that it would be unnecessary to use a mouse.
Also, your systemwide menu bar, which presumably contains a list of windows for you to choose from (which is the only reason why you brought it up, isn't it?), assumes that I want to read item titles every time I want to get to something, or scan the list for the appropriate icon. Granted, it's a good idea as long as you don't have 30 windows open at once, which I quite frequently used to end up with while browsing.
Why, you might ask, would one end up with so many open windows while browsing the web and doing other things? Specifically so I don't have to fuss with the back button every time I follow a link somewhere. Every page load - whether caused by simply going "back" or following a link, still causes an HTTP request to be sent out. Which means I have to wait for the outgoing HTTP request and the 200 or 206 response to come back before the page ever renders the second time, if I've just followed my link in the browser window. Tabbed browsing makes that specific usage pattern, among others, a whole hell of a lot easier.
I haven't seen this on the thread anywhere, nor have I mentioned it myself. It's not a matter of aim or point of focus. It's a matter of the keyboard is easier for me to use because it allows me access to more functions without having to: move my hands away from the keyboard, find the mouse, move it to where I want it to go, click (and hold the mouse button!), move the mouse some more, and release the mouse button (finally!); or with the keyboard: Press Ctl-L.
Granted, active display items might be closer to the point of focus for my mouse. They are absolutely nowhere near the point of focus of my hands, which are usually in the vicinity of the keyboard. I find it a far easier way to use the computer than to be required to locate a menu bar, or other item within a window. The times I find a mouse more convenient are when I'm moving stuff around. That's about it.
Hm. I could have just sworn I mentioned the shortcuts for doing so on every platform that I use on a regular basis. In any case, if the usability infrastructure is there for full keyboard navigation, why the hell was I unable to get rid of my mouse after using MacOS for 3+ years? Oh. That's because nothing could be done without the mouse.
My first comment to that is that you do your work the way that suits you, and I do my work the way that it suits me. I prefer maximised windows myself, as well. Granted, that also depends on what it is that I'm doing.
I don't know exactly what kind of work you do. I do web development for business and personal stuff, and various bits of C-ish stuff for other personal projects. I've always found that having a maxmised window is more convenient for me. Of course, I've also always found that IDE's get in my way, GUI programming is a pain in the ass, and that I don't want to focus on everything at once.
It's purely a matter of how you work. Don't bash my [or other people's] way of doing it.
Welcome to the Corporate States of America. Whee.
20 years is pretty limited. But 70 years after my death (USC Title 17 Section 302(a)) isn't really very limited, wouldn't you say?
On the other hand, it's the job of the judiciary to rule on such things, and they've given their ruling, which creates mandate for Congress to increase copyright terms again and again, since, by the dictionary definition of "limited", the term of copyright IS still limited, isn't it?
20 years ago Congress passed a similar bill. 20 years from now Congress is likely to do the same thing.
US Constitution, Article I Section 8: "The Congress shall have the power ... to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries..."
"Limited" may not have been defined in the Constitution, but I think most people will agree that "limited times" was not meant to be interpreted as "lifetime + 70 years, and to be extended when it nears expiration".