Why should the popular vote winner get 2 bonus votes? If you're going to get that granular, why not have each congressional district vote cast their EC vote separately?
But then, that system would give rural area's much greater say than densley populated areas... How many congressional districts are there in Manhattann for instance? And how many people live there? Contrast that with say, some district in say Wyoming... It'd effectively give landowners an edge over renters, in a sense.
Really, i can see no real reason why we need electors in this day and age. A long time ago, it might have served a purpose, since the country was so vast and communications weren't what they are today. We could have an election, give the electors a few weeks to tally our votes, and then they'ed go cast their straws. But in this day and age, everyone's voice should have an equal say.
I don't think any state would be more negelected by getting rid of the EC, because every single vote would count more, not less. No candidate will get 100% of CA, TX, and NY votes. They'ed still have to go and fight for votes elsewhere.
Any candidate that concentrated solely on those 3 states would get pummelled at the national polls, i think.
I think getting rid of the EC would actually make candidates go and fight votes harder than they do. Right now, for instance, there was basically now campaigning of any sort in Massachusetts, because a Gore win was a given. If there weren't any electors involved, then you can be sure that both Bush and Gore'd have been here rallying the troops, trying to eke out ever single additional vote they could.
I do like your idea about yes and no votes, though... And that'd work fine with regular vote for vote voting rather than with the EC. Give each person 5 votes that they can do with as they want... You could put say 1 vote for gore, 1 for nader and 3 against bush. But that'd probably end up being way too hard to explain across the nation and probably won't happen. A "None of the above" choice would be a nice option to have on all elections.
Yeah... All that talk about every vote counting is basically rubish. They only stood a chance at counting if you happened to live in one of 3 counties in florida. My massachusetts vote certainly didn't count... Gore won Mass by a landslide, but none of the votes that put him over the top could be applied to say florida...
WE need to get rid of this electoral college asap. Make peoples votes actually count. That should be the one lesson that comes out of this election
x86 can't compete in the area's that Itanium is targetted at. If it could, then Intel wouldn't have spent billions to make the Itanium. Those computers in the back rooms of banks, et al, aren't saying "Intel Inside". So, it makes little sense to devise an architecture that's meant to get them into the biggest computers in the world yet still throw in x86 compatibility... it's just a non-issue. Something people don't want or need...
Intel's confused, i think...:) And I find this amusing solely because my previous post was spent defending them...
Agreed... Intel sat out on the RISC craze instead reengineering their processor over and over so as to be competive with the RISC crowd. Now, most of the world (at one point at least... remember when they were touting everyone signed onto their ship) agrees that VLIW will be the next revolutionary change in processing architectures. From every review and analysis i've read, VLIW could do wonders, but only if the compilers are perfect...
Still, it would be nice if they scrapped the hope of running x86 code directly on the silicon of the chip. They're basically pasting a P3 on top of the chip so that it'll be able to run some applications out of the gate... That money would be better used, i think, getting tools into developers hands so that they can port their software to Itanium;s architecture, and then maybe licensing Transemeta's code morphing engine, or else coming up with their own software based emulator.
And so far as i remember, the PPro was indeed much faster than 486's for all tasks. It just lagged behind the Pentiums at running 16 bit code. That's intel's legacy, by now... The first generation of silicon that emerges when they build a new core is slower than the previous top of the line...
They shouldn't get railed for it, like they do around here, because the same situation has occured before. If they didn't take those risks, we'd be running 700 MHz 486's now... But they instead took a hit here and there when they introd the P5 which was clocked slower than the 486's of the time. Then the PPro was slower than the Pentiums. Then the P2 came out but only scaled to 2 CPU's rather than the 4 or 8 the Pro could do. Now the P4 is here and it's slower than the P3 at its' intro... Give them six months and the P3 will be eating the P4's dust. Same goes for Itanium. Of course, it's not going to be the fastest out the gate, but after they tweak it a bit and let it go, if all goes well, it could blow other arch's out of the water.
Not with more intellegent schemes... You don't want to just record it all as it travels across the pipe and call it a day. Throw it all in a database, store each graphic once and only once. Store each page in each state that its in once and only once. Compress all the text... I bet you could get 95-99% space saving, just by building an intellegent graphics cache.... And in the end you'd be able to single out users much easier, or even build a demographic of users who you'd like to track much easier...
How can they steal my credit card information? I never gave said information to AOL in the first place. Nor does it reside anywhere on my hard drive, so far as i can figure. Is this some sort of "psychic" hack where they can read my mind or something?:)
If the hole's limited to AIM, and AIM users don't need to provide anything but an email address to access the service, i can't figure how anyone could steal anything more than that.
In the end they should enforce upon users a permissions based system. Each account gets a master account and 6 user accounts. They should explain the master account as being a sort of "root" account, only use it when you need to change your billing info or your screen names. And then disable "remote" access to it - ei AIM. That'd their worries right there, but at this point it'd cost them millions in order to notify everyone of the change and what to do about it.
Ermmmmmmm... American encryption laws are a moot point for a couple reasons... First, the laws don't exist anymore - they've given the okay on exports of encryption to all but the 6 or 7 countries we have embargo's against, and Theo + OpenBSD are based in Canada, making them immunte to USA's laws anyhow...
Why are there 25 free linuxes? Don't we only need one? And geez, what's with all of these operating systems in general? Wouldn't we be better off one, say Windows?
The BSD's are projects just like any other... They're developed with different mindsets, different goals. And since it's under all the BSD license... the leaders from any of the other BSD's can pick and choose from anything any other *BSD has done. So effort doesn't need to be wasted unless one has a better solution in mind, in which case it's not wasted after all.
I need to kill X on occassion because Netscapes appears to freeze X itself. There's no ability to open a terminal window, or even type into one that's already open. Can't switch to another desktop or anything like that.
Mostly happens when i try to enter a page protected by basic authentication (.htaccss and.htpasswd) and accidentally bring down a menu while i'm waiting for it to load. The screen asking for the password pops up, but the menu's stuck down... can't do anything at that point but hit ctrl-alt-f2 to get to a new terminal.
Also happens when going to a secure site and bringing down a menu prior to the secure site warning popping up, if that helps, if you're curious at all...
Thank god then that IBM has fully embraced Java... They seem even more excited about Java than Sun themselves... ANd they've been pouring lots of resources into perfecting Java across all their platforms. Java seems like it should have been invented by IBM, since they've got so much more to gain from it than sun, given that they've develop and support various platforms based various architectures.
Since Sun's SPARC only, their only real incentive for developing Java is so that Java will run best on Solaris, meaning that maybe once companies adopt Java rather than win32 on the desktop, or Java rather than C on the server, Solaris/SPARC will be the "logical" next step.
I've had netscape lock up X on me, which ends up pretty much equating to a crash, so far as i'm concerned... I have to switchback to the console, kill X, meaning i lose all my unsaved work in other programs, and then relaunch X...
When X crashes, for all intents and purposes, the OS has crashed, in my book.
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
But the age old question arises: Do the applications exist for them to make the switch? I'm betting that they run a lot of custom/vertical market applications, so unless they want to pay developers and consultants to recreate their systems in order to run under linux, they've pretty much locked themselves into needing Windows based PC's to keep their basic infrastructure running intact.
Their patents would have to be extremely specific... They can't have simply patented running another processors instruction set, because there's a wide variety of prior art for that. And anything to do with abstraction is probably also covered under Java... And given the machines that their code is running on, it's safe to say that they're no using code morphing as a means of prolonging battery life in portables, which is probably where most of transmeta's patents lie...
And lets not forget... Transmeta initially chose ibm as a foundry specifically because they have a license from intel to manufacture x86 compatible chips... IBM could have extracted a cross-license agreement to cover whatever technologies they needed covered when the were negotiating wth Transmeta.
No one can ever guarentee "all" of something. It's an unreasonable expectation and just impossible. There's always a straggler here or there, etc... Convincing intel and via they should include some microcode in their chipsets is a very great place to start.
Also the hardware cannot recognize writing compiler for every possible platform. That requires significantly more AI in silicon than currently available hardware has.
That doesn't matter much, since 95% of the world uses one basic hardware platform, and the other 5% using 20 others... If you compromise the 95%, you've done an excellent job.
I don't think it that carnivore's so much the issue as opposed to people reading your email who really aren't authorized to read it. Prior to the internet, communication was limited to letters, telephone, radio and face to face communication. You had a reasonable expectation of privacy when using letters and face to face communications. You didn't expect much privacy using radio, and somewhere in the back of your mind you realized that your telephone could be tapped if someone was really out to get you.
That same holds true for the internet. Chalk email up to the current level of privacy you get from radio... Now, if all those web based email services adopt encyption of your messages in one form or another, you'll get an added level of security. Yes, law enforcement will still in all likely hood be able to get at your messages, but they'll stay out of the hands of "hackers, crackers and bears (oh my!)".
Not too shabby, i'm thinking. If you're really intent on keeping your messages away form the govenrnment, you can still use PGP.
In the end though, i don't see why people have come to expect privacy on the internet. Yes, i do feel it's wrong that companies like doubleclick can track users across various websites. But you've read over and over that sending plaintext email is equivalent to mailing postcards. Yahoo's now giving their users an envelope. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want more than that, you can roll your own.
The revenue will come from people willing to fork out for a boxed set with a book, because of the backing it has; if something goes wrong, paying for the set gives them someone to call (and makes them feel good about supporting the effort).
Ermm... The comment i originally replied to was one that stated that there was no future in selling software... Which I'm assuming includes the boxed set with manuals. And the linux companies are pretending to be big boys now... Most of them, you're not supporting "the effort" anymore. You're supporting their paychecks.
(which they re-release under the GPL so nobody else has to re-invent that wheel)... that comes with Linux at a list price of $0.00.
Funny... So many GPLed packages have names like "YA..." for "Yet Another...". GPLing your code doesn't prevent people from re-inventing the wheel in the slightest bit, way, shape or form.
that comes with Linux at a list price of $0.00.
Wait... I thought you said that the linux distro's would earn their keep selling boxed sets with manuals? But if they cost $0, where's their money? Oh, in support. And you say they have incentive to make Linux more palatable to everyday users (readers of slashdot obviously excluded).
Ermm... What part of the "K" in Koffice makes you think it'll ever run under gnome? Have you checked out koffice.org recently? What's the first line of their website say?
The lesson I take from this is that free software kills the software-sales and software-license business models. Service and technical support are still valuable in a free-software environment.
So, while companies like Apple, Palm, Microsoft, and just about every other for profit software company move in the direction of making software easier to use and charging money for their efforts in the matter, Redhat, and any other Linux distro companies only hope for survival is keeping their distributions needlessly complex?
Afterall, that'll be the only revenue they can count on, correct?
Face it, proprietary software isn't going anywhere. And neither is free software. They both serve different markets, though there's widespread talk in the linux community of shoehorning Linux into environments where it just won't work (Most home desktops, for instance).
Not nearly as quickly as IT pro's... Most stuff IT-wise is completely learned. You read a book, you know it, you apply it. Most stuff in DTP relies much more on the designers sense of style than anything else... Things that can't be commoditized. Yes, it's getting easier for anyone to throw together themselves a flyer to bring to kinko's and photocopy, but if you're aspiring for any sort of printed material, you'd best be hiring out your work, or else paying immense extra charges for sending your files to the service bureau in unsupported file formats, using true type fonts and RGB images.
Frankly, i've earned my keep for years as a graphic designer, and unless ALL of the tools are available for Linux, there just isn't any incentive for me to move over to it.
Even if adobe ports pagemaker, photoshop, and illustrator to Linux, i'd still stick with Macs, simply because QuarkXPress and Macromedia Freehand probably still wouldn't been available... And yes, Apple would need to port Applescript to Linux before a Quark port would really be able to earn it's keep. Let's also talk about color management at some point?
And lets not say that Graphic Designers and Mac users have no inkling or curiousity to use linux... I've converted myself to Linux on my home Athlon machine... Been running without a reboot to windows or missing my Mac for most tasks for a couple months now.
In order for any company to make a dent in the DTP market, there needs to be cooperation from other companies, which i'm not sure is *even* legal.
I'm not who you're responding to, but i'd say these days that the kernel is what an OS used to be refered to. A complete OS, IMO, is the kernel, filesystem support, networking support, user input support, and display support (including GUI and fonts).
Just because one thing runs in the kernel and another thing runs in the user space doesn't mean that they're not all part of the operating system.
From dictionary.com:
system: 1 -A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.
Who can ask them not to ship it? It's not like they were contemplating Pagemaker or Photoshop... Framemaker is an extremely low-volume product that they bought and still haven't 100% figured out what to do with. Since they do ship it for a number of other platforms, they probably just decided that if someone really needs to run framemaker, they probably already are running it.
That, plus linux support would just be a pain. If they announced that they supported Redhat Linux, then everyone would get down on them for choosing one distro over another. Just about ever other operating system in the world has a more "standardized" install than the various breeds of Linux.
Microsoft hasn't tried anything that evil yet. When Office goes to a subscription model, it will simply fail to create new documents. But even if it refuses to open existing documents, and you had the option to buy a non-expiring version, they're in the clear. Just like expiring demo-ware. You know, the kind that lets you do whatever you want for 30 days and then shuts itself off... They're not violating your rights by shutting down at a predetermined time, because you're fully aware that it's a time limited version.
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Why should the popular vote winner get 2 bonus votes? If you're going to get that granular, why not have each congressional district vote cast their EC vote separately?
But then, that system would give rural area's much greater say than densley populated areas... How many congressional districts are there in Manhattann for instance? And how many people live there? Contrast that with say, some district in say Wyoming... It'd effectively give landowners an edge over renters, in a sense.
Really, i can see no real reason why we need electors in this day and age. A long time ago, it might have served a purpose, since the country was so vast and communications weren't what they are today. We could have an election, give the electors a few weeks to tally our votes, and then they'ed go cast their straws. But in this day and age, everyone's voice should have an equal say.
I don't think any state would be more negelected by getting rid of the EC, because every single vote would count more, not less. No candidate will get 100% of CA, TX, and NY votes. They'ed still have to go and fight for votes elsewhere.
Any candidate that concentrated solely on those 3 states would get pummelled at the national polls, i think.
I think getting rid of the EC would actually make candidates go and fight votes harder than they do. Right now, for instance, there was basically now campaigning of any sort in Massachusetts, because a Gore win was a given. If there weren't any electors involved, then you can be sure that both Bush and Gore'd have been here rallying the troops, trying to eke out ever single additional vote they could.
I do like your idea about yes and no votes, though... And that'd work fine with regular vote for vote voting rather than with the EC. Give each person 5 votes that they can do with as they want... You could put say 1 vote for gore, 1 for nader and 3 against bush. But that'd probably end up being way too hard to explain across the nation and probably won't happen. A "None of the above" choice would be a nice option to have on all elections.
Yeah... All that talk about every vote counting is basically rubish. They only stood a chance at counting if you happened to live in one of 3 counties in florida. My massachusetts vote certainly didn't count... Gore won Mass by a landslide, but none of the votes that put him over the top could be applied to say florida...
WE need to get rid of this electoral college asap. Make peoples votes actually count. That should be the one lesson that comes out of this election
x86 can't compete in the area's that Itanium is targetted at. If it could, then Intel wouldn't have spent billions to make the Itanium. Those computers in the back rooms of banks, et al, aren't saying "Intel Inside". So, it makes little sense to devise an architecture that's meant to get them into the biggest computers in the world yet still throw in x86 compatibility... it's just a non-issue. Something people don't want or need...
:) And I find this amusing solely because my previous post was spent defending them...
Intel's confused, i think...
Agreed... Intel sat out on the RISC craze instead reengineering their processor over and over so as to be competive with the RISC crowd. Now, most of the world (at one point at least... remember when they were touting everyone signed onto their ship) agrees that VLIW will be the next revolutionary change in processing architectures. From every review and analysis i've read, VLIW could do wonders, but only if the compilers are perfect...
Still, it would be nice if they scrapped the hope of running x86 code directly on the silicon of the chip. They're basically pasting a P3 on top of the chip so that it'll be able to run some applications out of the gate... That money would be better used, i think, getting tools into developers hands so that they can port their software to Itanium;s architecture, and then maybe licensing Transemeta's code morphing engine, or else coming up with their own software based emulator.
And so far as i remember, the PPro was indeed much faster than 486's for all tasks. It just lagged behind the Pentiums at running 16 bit code. That's intel's legacy, by now... The first generation of silicon that emerges when they build a new core is slower than the previous top of the line...
They shouldn't get railed for it, like they do around here, because the same situation has occured before. If they didn't take those risks, we'd be running 700 MHz 486's now... But they instead took a hit here and there when they introd the P5 which was clocked slower than the 486's of the time. Then the PPro was slower than the Pentiums. Then the P2 came out but only scaled to 2 CPU's rather than the 4 or 8 the Pro could do. Now the P4 is here and it's slower than the P3 at its' intro... Give them six months and the P3 will be eating the P4's dust. Same goes for Itanium. Of course, it's not going to be the fastest out the gate, but after they tweak it a bit and let it go, if all goes well, it could blow other arch's out of the water.
Not with more intellegent schemes... You don't want to just record it all as it travels across the pipe and call it a day. Throw it all in a database, store each graphic once and only once. Store each page in each state that its in once and only once. Compress all the text... I bet you could get 95-99% space saving, just by building an intellegent graphics cache.... And in the end you'd be able to single out users much easier, or even build a demographic of users who you'd like to track much easier...
How can they steal my credit card information? I never gave said information to AOL in the first place. Nor does it reside anywhere on my hard drive, so far as i can figure. Is this some sort of "psychic" hack where they can read my mind or something? :)
If the hole's limited to AIM, and AIM users don't need to provide anything but an email address to access the service, i can't figure how anyone could steal anything more than that.
In the end they should enforce upon users a permissions based system. Each account gets a master account and 6 user accounts. They should explain the master account as being a sort of "root" account, only use it when you need to change your billing info or your screen names. And then disable "remote" access to it - ei AIM. That'd their worries right there, but at this point it'd cost them millions in order to notify everyone of the change and what to do about it.
Ermmmmmmm... American encryption laws are a moot point for a couple reasons... First, the laws don't exist anymore - they've given the okay on exports of encryption to all but the 6 or 7 countries we have embargo's against, and Theo + OpenBSD are based in Canada, making them immunte to USA's laws anyhow...
Why are there 25 free linuxes? Don't we only need one? And geez, what's with all of these operating systems in general? Wouldn't we be better off one, say Windows?
The BSD's are projects just like any other... They're developed with different mindsets, different goals. And since it's under all the BSD license... the leaders from any of the other BSD's can pick and choose from anything any other *BSD has done. So effort doesn't need to be wasted unless one has a better solution in mind, in which case it's not wasted after all.
I need to kill X on occassion because Netscapes appears to freeze X itself. There's no ability to open a terminal window, or even type into one that's already open. Can't switch to another desktop or anything like that.
.htpasswd) and accidentally bring down a menu while i'm waiting for it to load. The screen asking for the password pops up, but the menu's stuck down... can't do anything at that point but hit ctrl-alt-f2 to get to a new terminal.
Mostly happens when i try to enter a page protected by basic authentication (.htaccss and
Also happens when going to a secure site and bringing down a menu prior to the secure site warning popping up, if that helps, if you're curious at all...
Thank god then that IBM has fully embraced Java... They seem even more excited about Java than Sun themselves... ANd they've been pouring lots of resources into perfecting Java across all their platforms. Java seems like it should have been invented by IBM, since they've got so much more to gain from it than sun, given that they've develop and support various platforms based various architectures.
Since Sun's SPARC only, their only real incentive for developing Java is so that Java will run best on Solaris, meaning that maybe once companies adopt Java rather than win32 on the desktop, or Java rather than C on the server, Solaris/SPARC will be the "logical" next step.
I've had netscape lock up X on me, which ends up pretty much equating to a crash, so far as i'm concerned... I have to switchback to the console, kill X, meaning i lose all my unsaved work in other programs, and then relaunch X...
When X crashes, for all intents and purposes, the OS has crashed, in my book.
Of course, that much money (just the money they're paying to take care of uncertain licenses) could probably also buy CD burners and enough blanks to create no-license-hassles copies of Linux or Free / Open / NetBSD for every computer the city owns.
But the age old question arises: Do the applications exist for them to make the switch? I'm betting that they run a lot of custom/vertical market applications, so unless they want to pay developers and consultants to recreate their systems in order to run under linux, they've pretty much locked themselves into needing Windows based PC's to keep their basic infrastructure running intact.
Their patents would have to be extremely specific... They can't have simply patented running another processors instruction set, because there's a wide variety of prior art for that. And anything to do with abstraction is probably also covered under Java... And given the machines that their code is running on, it's safe to say that they're no using code morphing as a means of prolonging battery life in portables, which is probably where most of transmeta's patents lie...
And lets not forget... Transmeta initially chose ibm as a foundry specifically because they have a license from intel to manufacture x86 compatible chips... IBM could have extracted a cross-license agreement to cover whatever technologies they needed covered when the were negotiating wth Transmeta.
No one can ever guarentee "all" of something. It's an unreasonable expectation and just impossible. There's always a straggler here or there, etc... Convincing intel and via they should include some microcode in their chipsets is a very great place to start.
Also the hardware cannot recognize writing compiler for every possible platform. That requires significantly more AI in silicon than currently available hardware has.
That doesn't matter much, since 95% of the world uses one basic hardware platform, and the other 5% using 20 others... If you compromise the 95%, you've done an excellent job.
I don't think it that carnivore's so much the issue as opposed to people reading your email who really aren't authorized to read it. Prior to the internet, communication was limited to letters, telephone, radio and face to face communication. You had a reasonable expectation of privacy when using letters and face to face communications. You didn't expect much privacy using radio, and somewhere in the back of your mind you realized that your telephone could be tapped if someone was really out to get you.
That same holds true for the internet. Chalk email up to the current level of privacy you get from radio... Now, if all those web based email services adopt encyption of your messages in one form or another, you'll get an added level of security. Yes, law enforcement will still in all likely hood be able to get at your messages, but they'll stay out of the hands of "hackers, crackers and bears (oh my!)".
Not too shabby, i'm thinking. If you're really intent on keeping your messages away form the govenrnment, you can still use PGP.
In the end though, i don't see why people have come to expect privacy on the internet. Yes, i do feel it's wrong that companies like doubleclick can track users across various websites. But you've read over and over that sending plaintext email is equivalent to mailing postcards. Yahoo's now giving their users an envelope. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want more than that, you can roll your own.
The revenue will come from people willing to fork out for a boxed set with a book, because of the backing it has; if something goes wrong, paying for the set gives them someone to call (and makes them feel good about supporting the effort).
Ermm... The comment i originally replied to was one that stated that there was no future in selling software... Which I'm assuming includes the boxed set with manuals. And the linux companies are pretending to be big boys now... Most of them, you're not supporting "the effort" anymore. You're supporting their paychecks.
(which they re-release under the GPL so nobody else has to re-invent that wheel)... that comes with Linux at a list price of $0.00.
Funny... So many GPLed packages have names like "YA..." for "Yet Another...". GPLing your code doesn't prevent people from re-inventing the wheel in the slightest bit, way, shape or form.
that comes with Linux at a list price of $0.00.
Wait... I thought you said that the linux distro's would earn their keep selling boxed sets with manuals? But if they cost $0, where's their money? Oh, in support. And you say they have incentive to make Linux more palatable to everyday users (readers of slashdot obviously excluded).
Something has to give here...
Ermm... What part of the "K" in Koffice makes you think it'll ever run under gnome? Have you checked out koffice.org recently? What's the first line of their website say?
:)
The lesson I take from this is that free software kills the software-sales and software-license business models. Service and technical support are still valuable in a free-software environment.
So, while companies like Apple, Palm, Microsoft, and just about every other for profit software company move in the direction of making software easier to use and charging money for their efforts in the matter, Redhat, and any other Linux distro companies only hope for survival is keeping their distributions needlessly complex?
Afterall, that'll be the only revenue they can count on, correct?
Face it, proprietary software isn't going anywhere. And neither is free software. They both serve different markets, though there's widespread talk in the linux community of shoehorning Linux into environments where it just won't work (Most home desktops, for instance).
Not nearly as quickly as IT pro's... Most stuff IT-wise is completely learned. You read a book, you know it, you apply it. Most stuff in DTP relies much more on the designers sense of style than anything else... Things that can't be commoditized. Yes, it's getting easier for anyone to throw together themselves a flyer to bring to kinko's and photocopy, but if you're aspiring for any sort of printed material, you'd best be hiring out your work, or else paying immense extra charges for sending your files to the service bureau in unsupported file formats, using true type fonts and RGB images.
Frankly, i've earned my keep for years as a graphic designer, and unless ALL of the tools are available for Linux, there just isn't any incentive for me to move over to it.
Even if adobe ports pagemaker, photoshop, and illustrator to Linux, i'd still stick with Macs, simply because QuarkXPress and Macromedia Freehand probably still wouldn't been available... And yes, Apple would need to port Applescript to Linux before a Quark port would really be able to earn it's keep. Let's also talk about color management at some point?
And lets not say that Graphic Designers and Mac users have no inkling or curiousity to use linux... I've converted myself to Linux on my home Athlon machine... Been running without a reboot to windows or missing my Mac for most tasks for a couple months now.
In order for any company to make a dent in the DTP market, there needs to be cooperation from other companies, which i'm not sure is *even* legal.
I'm not who you're responding to, but i'd say these days that the kernel is what an OS used to be refered to. A complete OS, IMO, is the kernel, filesystem support, networking support, user input support, and display support (including GUI and fonts).
Just because one thing runs in the kernel and another thing runs in the user space doesn't mean that they're not all part of the operating system.
From dictionary.com:
system: 1 -A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.
Who can ask them not to ship it? It's not like they were contemplating Pagemaker or Photoshop... Framemaker is an extremely low-volume product that they bought and still haven't 100% figured out what to do with. Since they do ship it for a number of other platforms, they probably just decided that if someone really needs to run framemaker, they probably already are running it.
That, plus linux support would just be a pain. If they announced that they supported Redhat Linux, then everyone would get down on them for choosing one distro over another. Just about ever other operating system in the world has a more "standardized" install than the various breeds of Linux.
Microsoft hasn't tried anything that evil yet. When Office goes to a subscription model, it will simply fail to create new documents. But even if it refuses to open existing documents, and you had the option to buy a non-expiring version, they're in the clear. Just like expiring demo-ware. You know, the kind that lets you do whatever you want for 30 days and then shuts itself off... They're not violating your rights by shutting down at a predetermined time, because you're fully aware that it's a time limited version.