Oops, sorry, didn't mean to sound like I was insulting you or anything. It's a potentially interesting question, even if it is pure speculation.
However, I should point out that even in your simpler, "the whole thing is invalidated" scenario, the results are not necessarily guaranteed. SCO, for example, suggests that the GPL is invalid, and then suggests that it should be dealt with under a law where a bequest to a defunct charity is reassigned by a judge to a reasonably equivalent charity. The code, SCO suggests, is like the bequest, and the only reasonably equivalent charity to the GPL is the public domain.
Now that's pretty obviously stupid - the only reason a judge has to rule on a bequest is that the bequestor is, presumably, dead. The authors of Linux, GCC, Emacs, etc., are not dead, so they should be able to decide what should be done with their own code. But that shows another possibility: that the owners of the code could be ordered to choose a valid license of some sort, rather than simply having all the code revert to complete non-distributability.
I agree that your suggestion is the simplest and probably the most likely (in the very unlikely event that the GPL is invalidated). I'm just trying to show that it's not necessarily the only possible outcome. There may even be others that none of us have thought of.
My first reaction was to disagree, and say that this is about the GPL, for several reasons. Some of those reasons have been articulated by others, but in particular, I remembered that IBM had a counterclaim specifically about the GPL. But when I checked the counterclaims, I saw that you are right! This is a motion for summary judgement on IBM's eighth counterclaim, which is "Copyright Infringement", not on their sixth counterclaim, which is "Breach of the GNU General Public License". Which means this is only going to get more interesting when IBM finally does get around to arguing counterclaim six.:)
If they lose because they repudiated the GPL (i.e. if the fact that they publicly claimed it's unenforcible, void, unconstitutional, etc.), then perhaps so, because that would seem to apply to all their other uses of GPL'd code. Still, I think the "repudiation" argument is the weaker of IBM's arguments, and I'm not sure it'll fly in court.
If they lose for violating the GPL, and, in particular, for trying to charge people per-CPU fees for Linux, and for asking them to sign licenses agreeing not to use or distribute the source, then the answer is no. That's a violation of the kernel license, which just happens to be the GPL. It's not a violation of the licenses of any other software that may happen to be under the GPL, since they haven't tried to charge for or restrict the distribution of that other software. On the other hand, the violation claims should be a slam-dunk for IBM.
It helps to think of the GPL as boilerplate. The kernel has a license, gcc has a license, emacs has a license, etc., and they all just happen to use exactly the same words. Ordinarily, you can't actually "violate the GPL"; all you can do is violate a particular license that happens to be the GPL. It takes some really unusual (and spectacularly stupid) behavior to end up in violation of all the licenses of all software everywhere that uses the GPL. Before SCO came along, I would have said it was impossible. Now...I'm still not convinced it's possible, but if there was ever a company with the proper combination of chutzpah and stupidity to pull it off, it's SCO!:)
I agree that Windows Media is unobtrusive - if, by "unobtrusive," you mean the vendor would rather pour boiling lead over their own genitals than provide a version that will work on my system!
I find it hard to agree with the claim that it will play almost everything though - unless, by "play everything," you mean, the vendor would rather pour boiling lead over their own genitals than provide a version that will work on my system!:)
"You've missed the point. If the courts find the license to be invalid, there is no license for IBM to be complying with."
That depends on why they find it invalid and how much of it they find invalid. It's hard to imagine how they could find any of it invalid, but if they did find any of it invalid, it would probably only be a small portion. And what the results would be would depend on what that small portion was.
Saying, "if the courts find the GPL invalid, the results will be X" is sort of like saying, "if tuna fish could build cars, they'd look like X". It's pretty pure speculation, and unlikely to ever be tested in reality. (Not trying to pick on you here, I know you didn't start the thread, and were just playing along, but you post was a convenient place to hang mine.)
Every time you want to view a new Real stream, you have to download RealPlayer version x+1.
That I won't argue with, although it'll be interesting to see if it remains true after some of the most recent and obvious changes to their system.
Their player is bloated with ads and doo-dad components [...]
The new one (or at least the beta I have of the new one) isn't.
Their free player is also crippled beyond repair. You can't save streams [...]
That's not true of the new one (or at least of the beta of the new one). I didn't know this until my four-year old niece had saved a bunch of songs from pbskids.org. (Gah! But at least it's not Brittany, I suppose.:)
Today's Real streams run like technology straight out of 1994.
Hmm, ok, but I like the fact that the player now reportedly handles Ogg Theora! (Although I admit I haven't had a chance to test this yet.)
Their software won't stop f***ing harassing you. [...]
Again, not in the new one (or at least the beta of the new one).
I've hated Real for years, and haven't had their player installed since 2000 or so, but when I saw a mention on the Ogg Theora site that Real player could now be used to view Theora streams, I was intrigued enough to give them one more try, and I've been very favorably impressed.
Anyway, I agree that you've probably named the main reasons people have hated Real. I just want to point out that companies can change (in the seventies and early eighties, I hated IBM, and in the late eighties, I hated Apple, and neither of those is true any more), and there are some signs that Real may be changing. Time will tell. Maybe it's because I'm using the beta, and they didn't bother adding the ads and misbehavior to that, and maybe it's because I'm using the Linux version (although with all the ads and malware that come bundled with Windows these days, I'm not sure why Windows users would be upset by Real), but my impression of Real has certainly taken a major change for the better recently.
First of all, even if they own certain bits as they claim, there is no way they own the whole thing. So, no, they can't distribute Linus's own code or Alan's own code or HP's own code, or...
And second (and more important), even if they did own the whole thing (which they don't), the fact that they've been distributing it for free, with a copy of the GPL, and no indication that any other license does or should apply, bars them from making certain legal claims against other companies. Look up "estoppel" and "laches" in your handy local legal dictionary. This is the point that IBM is raising.
Consider, for example, the Grateful Dead. They (or their surviving members and heirs) have the legal right to control their own music. But if they tried to sue someone for distributing one of their concert recordings, they'd lose[*], because they've had an official, published policy for over twenty years that fans can trade and distribute their concert recordings.
Ironically, SCO can probably still sue someone for distributing Linux who doesn't comply with the GPL! In fact, they might want to try that, since it's the only way they're going to win any kind of suit anytime soon!:)
[*] I'm glossing over a couple of irrelevant details here, like their no-attempt-to-profit and no-official-release requirements.
Almost, but not quite true. First, the contract issue matters to other companies that have SysV licenses, like Daimler-Chrysler and Autozone. And second, it matters to people using the IBM code at the center of the contract dispute: JFS, RCU, AIO, etc. If all that code is clean, then the copyright issues turn into almost nothing in any case.
According to what I've been told, it's not "simply your broker"; the limit is official NASDAQ policy. Not saying that you couldn't find a way to set up a deal outside the market, but that sort of thing is probably risky for more than merely financial reasons. But IANASB (I Am Not A Stock Broker).
Of course, if the stock goes down much more, SCOX will once again be in danger of being de-listed, and if that happens, then I suppose that NASDAQ rules will no longer apply. But then, would you really want to short them at 50 cents a share? Frankly, at that price, I think it'd almost be more fun to buy some, just to show to your friends or use as toilet paper or something.:)
I'm not sure why you got modded funny - seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion to me. But beyond that, I hope they go after Canopy and Ralph Yarro! TSG ain't gonna have enough money left to cover all the damage they've done, and it's pretty clear, IMO, that a lot of the money that's come out of this scheme so far has been funneled to Canopy. Now, if Canopy were just sucking money out, it might be hard to prove they were actively involved, rather than innocent beneficiaries, but the CA deal, where CA ended up buying SCOSource licenses as part of a settlement with another Canopy company may be the chink in the armor that IBM needs to go after the bastards. We can only hope!
There's been SCO code in Linux for years, and it's never been hidden. Do a "grep -i caldera" to find tons of files with code from SCO. Of course, if the poll had asked about code from SCO but not openly contributed by SCO, that might have been a different matter!:)
[H]ow does it make money? Mostly by paid search results.
Actually, my understanding is that they make more money off of licensing their technology than off of paid search results. A lot of companies like to be able to search their internal documents without posting them publicly.
This is the issue they're already facing
on
Linux Apps On Solaris
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
One word: Oracle. The database giant says, "Sun is our primary and recommended platform," and Sun enjoys a decade of dominance in the server market. Then Oracle says, "Linux is now our primary and recommended platform," and suddenly Sun is struggling to make ends meet. Coincidence? I think not.
Go to www.oracle.com and click on "technologies". What do you see? You see Linux (and, to be fair, Windows). What don't you see? You don't see Solaris. Hmmm....
While I agree with your main point, I have to challenge your conventional wisdom of TANSTAAFL ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"). Newton's second law only applies to closed systems. The Earth is not a closed system. Life (at least, most terrestrial life) is solar powered, either directly or indirectly. Life is a free lunch.:)
Tell a tree there ain't no free lunch, and the tree would laugh at you if it could (and if it could be bothered to care about your quirky human misperceptions).:)
There may be no such thing as perpetual motion, but if I build a machine that'll keep running until the Sun burns out, that's probably perpetual enough for most people alive today!:)
It's a fallacy to claim 'A' is false becuase the person saying it is 'B'.
Yes, but that's not what happened. You've got causality backwards. What happened is that a person said 'A', which is false, so we started looking into his motivations for saying 'A', and discovered that he is 'B'. The fact that he is 'B' doesn't make 'A' false - you're quite correct there. The fact that 'A' is false, however, is why we uncovered the fact that he is 'B'.
I had never heard of Greenhills software before this nonsense came up. So I certainly didn't assume he was wrong because he is from Greenhills. I assumed he was wrong because he was wrong, and then googled Greenhills to see if I could find out his motivation for lying.
Note: the lie is not that OSS can be insecure - that's plainly true. The lie is that proprietary software in inherently more secure than OSS. The truth is that software security depends on how well the code is audited, which has nothing to do with whether it's open or closed, but open does provide more opportunities for auditing. Background checks are a red herring - the world is full of sleeper agents.
While I share your anger and frustration at people who drive too slowly, too far to the left, there is NEVER any reason to tailgate ANYONE! EVER! Tailgating is stupid and dangerous, and people who engage in it, for whatever reason, should, IMO, have their license to pass on their genes to a next generation revoked! (Not to mention their license to drive.)
People who don't observe the "slower traffic, keep right" law are a problem. Your proposed solution, however, is ten times worse than the problem you're trying to solve.
Evolution has had such a feature (called VFolders) for years.
And GNUS (emacs mail/news client) has had such a feature for several times as many years as Evolution has existed. But who's counting?:)
I agree that a tree view of "conversations" would be nice. My biggest complaint so far, though, is the extremely limited filters. You only get to have 30, (nowhere near enough for all my lists), and you can apparently only filter on to/from/subject. Still, I try to keep in mind that it's only beta, and it'll probably improve as time goes on.
If they'd just add support for the X-Face header, then I'd be impressed!:)
That seems appropriate, since it sounds like most of his complaints boil down to: "it's not enough like Windows." (Except for the ones that boil down to: "it needs to have a bunch of options that you'll only ever use once out cluttering the interface all the time." Frankly, I'd rather do my configuration with a text editor, and have it out-of-sight, out-of-mind the rest of the time, which is probably why I use XEmacs as my file manager, inside good ol' FVWM - both heavily customized).
Still, I see no reason why this guy shouldn't go ahead and build his little project. It'll be an interesting experiment, and maybe useful things will come out of it. And if not, well, maybe the fact that it didn't will be useful information.
The original board game had almost nothing in common with the original computer game. The board game had no combat whatsoever, and mostly involved trading commodities. It did have city-building and technology development, and some would argue that Sid must have "borrowed" these elements, but the argument is circumstantial, and I find it unconvincing.
Avalon Hill's Civilization-the-board-game was my favorite board game for many years. And, perhaps coincidentally, Sid Meier's Civilization-the-computer-game was my favorite computer game for several years. I will say, however, that my brother recently got Sid Meier's Civilization-the-board-game, and it's a pretty good game too.
As much as you're going to hate this, in this scenario the IT user is the poor communicator
As a disinterested third party (a non-support person who does understand computers), let me suggest that it's not that simple. In the particular dialog that started this thread, I think both parties are at fault. Sure, the support guy was rude and unsupportive. But the user was deliberately being a dimwit. If you use a computer as a regular part of your job, it should be part of your job to A) know the basics of how to operate it, and B) at least know enough to read the warnings or take notes when something unusual occurs.
When I was a kid, most cars had meters on the dashboard, showing things like oil pressure and engine temperature and such. Things that most people really don't need to operate the vehicle. Well, we have a cult of ignorance in this country, and so the meters were replaced with "idiot lights". But some people find these lights distracting, so they tape over them. That's ok if it's your own car, and you don't mind replacing your engine every 5000 miles. But when you're driving a company car, you have some responsibility to keep an eye on things and make sure the engine doesn't explode. If you tape over the idiot light, and as a result, the engine is destroyed, you deserve the blame. Even if you're not a professional mechanic. So why is it different for computers?
What you're basically saying is that it's always the mechanic's fault when an engine gets blown. Well, sorry, I don't buy that theory. I don't expect your average driver should be able to replace the fuel injection system, but I do expect them to be able to recognize when the fuel gauge is approaching 'E', and to not stall out on the freeway because there's no gas. I do expect them to notify their mechanic when the idiot light comes on, rather than covering it and driving till the engine dies.
Um, wasn't the blink tag a Netscape "innovation"? Marc Aannddrreeeesssseen spoke at our LUG about a week after the original Communicator source release, and said that within 24 hours of the code release, someone had created a patch to allow the blink tag to work on images! Now there's someone who could have gone down in the Annoyingness Hall of Fame!:)
We're not happy about this - we're upset that Robertson gave up and sold out. It doesn't matter how much effort MS has put into promoting their non-trademarkable mark, it's not a reasonable trademark! A lot of us were worried that Robertson was in this for the money, not the principle of the thing, and we were, sadly, proved right.
There was no particular outcry when the OSS Phoenix browser was forced to change its name (to, eventually, Firefox). Granted, it wasn't MS who forced the change, but "Phoenix" also isn't a generic term of art. Not exactly the same as what you claimed, but fairly close. If you really want to test your hypothesis, why don't you make a spreadsheet for X11 (easy to fork gnumeric or oocalc) and call it X-cel, and see how many people rally behind you. I certainly won't.
I tell you what. You stop applauding MS's attempt to defend invalid trademarks, and I'll promise not to applaud any attempts on their part to defend any of their valid trademarks! If you can't make that deal, then you're clearly a troll, not "insightful".
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, sorry, didn't mean to sound like I was insulting you or anything. It's a potentially interesting question, even if it is pure speculation.
However, I should point out that even in your simpler, "the whole thing is invalidated" scenario, the results are not necessarily guaranteed. SCO, for example, suggests that the GPL is invalid, and then suggests that it should be dealt with under a law where a bequest to a defunct charity is reassigned by a judge to a reasonably equivalent charity. The code, SCO suggests, is like the bequest, and the only reasonably equivalent charity to the GPL is the public domain.
Now that's pretty obviously stupid - the only reason a judge has to rule on a bequest is that the bequestor is, presumably, dead. The authors of Linux, GCC, Emacs, etc., are not dead, so they should be able to decide what should be done with their own code. But that shows another possibility: that the owners of the code could be ordered to choose a valid license of some sort, rather than simply having all the code revert to complete non-distributability.
I agree that your suggestion is the simplest and probably the most likely (in the very unlikely event that the GPL is invalidated). I'm just trying to show that it's not necessarily the only possible outcome. There may even be others that none of us have thought of.
My first reaction was to disagree, and say that this is about the GPL, for several reasons. Some of those reasons have been articulated by others, but in particular, I remembered that IBM had a counterclaim specifically about the GPL. But when I checked the counterclaims, I saw that you are right! This is a motion for summary judgement on IBM's eighth counterclaim, which is "Copyright Infringement", not on their sixth counterclaim, which is "Breach of the GNU General Public License". Which means this is only going to get more interesting when IBM finally does get around to arguing counterclaim six. :)
If they lose because they repudiated the GPL (i.e. if the fact that they publicly claimed it's unenforcible, void, unconstitutional, etc.), then perhaps so, because that would seem to apply to all their other uses of GPL'd code. Still, I think the "repudiation" argument is the weaker of IBM's arguments, and I'm not sure it'll fly in court.
:)
If they lose for violating the GPL, and, in particular, for trying to charge people per-CPU fees for Linux, and for asking them to sign licenses agreeing not to use or distribute the source, then the answer is no. That's a violation of the kernel license, which just happens to be the GPL. It's not a violation of the licenses of any other software that may happen to be under the GPL, since they haven't tried to charge for or restrict the distribution of that other software. On the other hand, the violation claims should be a slam-dunk for IBM.
It helps to think of the GPL as boilerplate. The kernel has a license, gcc has a license, emacs has a license, etc., and they all just happen to use exactly the same words. Ordinarily, you can't actually "violate the GPL"; all you can do is violate a particular license that happens to be the GPL. It takes some really unusual (and spectacularly stupid) behavior to end up in violation of all the licenses of all software everywhere that uses the GPL. Before SCO came along, I would have said it was impossible. Now...I'm still not convinced it's possible, but if there was ever a company with the proper combination of chutzpah and stupidity to pull it off, it's SCO!
I agree that Windows Media is unobtrusive - if, by "unobtrusive," you mean the vendor would rather pour boiling lead over their own genitals than provide a version that will work on my system!
:)
I find it hard to agree with the claim that it will play almost everything though - unless, by "play everything," you mean, the vendor would rather pour boiling lead over their own genitals than provide a version that will work on my system!
"You've missed the point. If the courts find the license to be invalid, there is no license for IBM to be complying with."
That depends on why they find it invalid and how much of it they find invalid. It's hard to imagine how they could find any of it invalid, but if they did find any of it invalid, it would probably only be a small portion. And what the results would be would depend on what that small portion was.
Saying, "if the courts find the GPL invalid, the results will be X" is sort of like saying, "if tuna fish could build cars, they'd look like X". It's pretty pure speculation, and unlikely to ever be tested in reality. (Not trying to pick on you here, I know you didn't start the thread, and were just playing along, but you post was a convenient place to hang mine.)
And the kernel is properly called "Linux" no matter what you think about the whole silly "GNU/Linux" argument.
Every time you want to view a new Real stream, you have to download RealPlayer version x+1.
:)
That I won't argue with, although it'll be interesting to see if it remains true after some of the most recent and obvious changes to their system.
Their player is bloated with ads and doo-dad components [...]
The new one (or at least the beta I have of the new one) isn't.
Their free player is also crippled beyond repair. You can't save streams [...]
That's not true of the new one (or at least of the beta of the new one). I didn't know this until my four-year old niece had saved a bunch of songs from pbskids.org. (Gah! But at least it's not Brittany, I suppose.
Today's Real streams run like technology straight out of 1994.
Hmm, ok, but I like the fact that the player now reportedly handles Ogg Theora! (Although I admit I haven't had a chance to test this yet.)
Their software won't stop f***ing harassing you. [...]
Again, not in the new one (or at least the beta of the new one).
I've hated Real for years, and haven't had their player installed since 2000 or so, but when I saw a mention on the Ogg Theora site that Real player could now be used to view Theora streams, I was intrigued enough to give them one more try, and I've been very favorably impressed.
Anyway, I agree that you've probably named the main reasons people have hated Real. I just want to point out that companies can change (in the seventies and early eighties, I hated IBM, and in the late eighties, I hated Apple, and neither of those is true any more), and there are some signs that Real may be changing. Time will tell. Maybe it's because I'm using the beta, and they didn't bother adding the ads and misbehavior to that, and maybe it's because I'm using the Linux version (although with all the ads and malware that come bundled with Windows these days, I'm not sure why Windows users would be upset by Real), but my impression of Real has certainly taken a major change for the better recently.
First of all, even if they own certain bits as they claim, there is no way they own the whole thing. So, no, they can't distribute Linus's own code or Alan's own code or HP's own code, or...
:)
And second (and more important), even if they did own the whole thing (which they don't), the fact that they've been distributing it for free, with a copy of the GPL, and no indication that any other license does or should apply, bars them from making certain legal claims against other companies. Look up "estoppel" and "laches" in your handy local legal dictionary. This is the point that IBM is raising.
Consider, for example, the Grateful Dead. They (or their surviving members and heirs) have the legal right to control their own music. But if they tried to sue someone for distributing one of their concert recordings, they'd lose[*], because they've had an official, published policy for over twenty years that fans can trade and distribute their concert recordings.
Ironically, SCO can probably still sue someone for distributing Linux who doesn't comply with the GPL! In fact, they might want to try that, since it's the only way they're going to win any kind of suit anytime soon!
[*] I'm glossing over a couple of irrelevant details here, like their no-attempt-to-profit and no-official-release requirements.
Almost, but not quite true. First, the contract issue matters to other companies that have SysV licenses, like Daimler-Chrysler and Autozone. And second, it matters to people using the IBM code at the center of the contract dispute: JFS, RCU, AIO, etc. If all that code is clean, then the copyright issues turn into almost nothing in any case.
According to what I've been told, it's not "simply your broker"; the limit is official NASDAQ policy. Not saying that you couldn't find a way to set up a deal outside the market, but that sort of thing is probably risky for more than merely financial reasons. But IANASB (I Am Not A Stock Broker).
:)
Of course, if the stock goes down much more, SCOX will once again be in danger of being de-listed, and if that happens, then I suppose that NASDAQ rules will no longer apply. But then, would you really want to short them at 50 cents a share? Frankly, at that price, I think it'd almost be more fun to buy some, just to show to your friends or use as toilet paper or something.
I'm not sure why you got modded funny - seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion to me. But beyond that, I hope they go after Canopy and Ralph Yarro! TSG ain't gonna have enough money left to cover all the damage they've done, and it's pretty clear, IMO, that a lot of the money that's come out of this scheme so far has been funneled to Canopy. Now, if Canopy were just sucking money out, it might be hard to prove they were actively involved, rather than innocent beneficiaries, but the CA deal, where CA ended up buying SCOSource licenses as part of a settlement with another Canopy company may be the chink in the armor that IBM needs to go after the bastards. We can only hope!
It's comments like this that make me long for a "Weird, +0" moderation option. :)
There's been SCO code in Linux for years, and it's never been hidden. Do a "grep -i caldera" to find tons of files with code from SCO. Of course, if the poll had asked about code from SCO but not openly contributed by SCO, that might have been a different matter! :)
[H]ow does it make money? Mostly by paid search results.
Actually, my understanding is that they make more money off of licensing their technology than off of paid search results. A lot of companies like to be able to search their internal documents without posting them publicly.
One word: Oracle. The database giant says, "Sun is our primary and recommended platform," and Sun enjoys a decade of dominance in the server market. Then Oracle says, "Linux is now our primary and recommended platform," and suddenly Sun is struggling to make ends meet. Coincidence? I think not.
Go to www.oracle.com and click on "technologies". What do you see? You see Linux (and, to be fair, Windows). What don't you see? You don't see Solaris. Hmmm....
While I agree with your main point, I have to challenge your conventional wisdom of TANSTAAFL ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"). Newton's second law only applies to closed systems. The Earth is not a closed system. Life (at least, most terrestrial life) is solar powered, either directly or indirectly. Life is a free lunch. :)
:)
:)
Tell a tree there ain't no free lunch, and the tree would laugh at you if it could (and if it could be bothered to care about your quirky human misperceptions).
There may be no such thing as perpetual motion, but if I build a machine that'll keep running until the Sun burns out, that's probably perpetual enough for most people alive today!
It's a fallacy to claim 'A' is false becuase the person saying it is 'B'.
Yes, but that's not what happened. You've got causality backwards. What happened is that a person said 'A', which is false, so we started looking into his motivations for saying 'A', and discovered that he is 'B'. The fact that he is 'B' doesn't make 'A' false - you're quite correct there. The fact that 'A' is false, however, is why we uncovered the fact that he is 'B'.
I had never heard of Greenhills software before this nonsense came up. So I certainly didn't assume he was wrong because he is from Greenhills. I assumed he was wrong because he was wrong, and then googled Greenhills to see if I could find out his motivation for lying.
Note: the lie is not that OSS can be insecure - that's plainly true. The lie is that proprietary software in inherently more secure than OSS. The truth is that software security depends on how well the code is audited, which has nothing to do with whether it's open or closed, but open does provide more opportunities for auditing. Background checks are a red herring - the world is full of sleeper agents.
While I share your anger and frustration at people who drive too slowly, too far to the left, there is NEVER any reason to tailgate ANYONE! EVER! Tailgating is stupid and dangerous, and people who engage in it, for whatever reason, should, IMO, have their license to pass on their genes to a next generation revoked! (Not to mention their license to drive.)
People who don't observe the "slower traffic, keep right" law are a problem. Your proposed solution, however, is ten times worse than the problem you're trying to solve.
If more people spelled it out, we'd see less nonsense like 24/7/365 ("24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 weeks a ... waitaminnit!") :)
Evolution has had such a feature (called VFolders) for years.
:)
:)
And GNUS (emacs mail/news client) has had such a feature for several times as many years as Evolution has existed. But who's counting?
I agree that a tree view of "conversations" would be nice. My biggest complaint so far, though, is the extremely limited filters. You only get to have 30, (nowhere near enough for all my lists), and you can apparently only filter on to/from/subject. Still, I try to keep in mind that it's only beta, and it'll probably improve as time goes on.
If they'd just add support for the X-Face header, then I'd be impressed!
"the name [...] reminds me of Windows ME"
That seems appropriate, since it sounds like most of his complaints boil down to: "it's not enough like Windows." (Except for the ones that boil down to: "it needs to have a bunch of options that you'll only ever use once out cluttering the interface all the time." Frankly, I'd rather do my configuration with a text editor, and have it out-of-sight, out-of-mind the rest of the time, which is probably why I use XEmacs as my file manager, inside good ol' FVWM - both heavily customized).
Still, I see no reason why this guy shouldn't go ahead and build his little project. It'll be an interesting experiment, and maybe useful things will come out of it. And if not, well, maybe the fact that it didn't will be useful information.
The original board game had almost nothing in common with the original computer game. The board game had no combat whatsoever, and mostly involved trading commodities. It did have city-building and technology development, and some would argue that Sid must have "borrowed" these elements, but the argument is circumstantial, and I find it unconvincing.
Avalon Hill's Civilization-the-board-game was my favorite board game for many years. And, perhaps coincidentally, Sid Meier's Civilization-the-computer-game was my favorite computer game for several years. I will say, however, that my brother recently got Sid Meier's Civilization-the-board-game, and it's a pretty good game too.
As much as you're going to hate this, in this scenario the IT user is the poor communicator
As a disinterested third party (a non-support person who does understand computers), let me suggest that it's not that simple. In the particular dialog that started this thread, I think both parties are at fault. Sure, the support guy was rude and unsupportive. But the user was deliberately being a dimwit. If you use a computer as a regular part of your job, it should be part of your job to A) know the basics of how to operate it, and B) at least know enough to read the warnings or take notes when something unusual occurs.
When I was a kid, most cars had meters on the dashboard, showing things like oil pressure and engine temperature and such. Things that most people really don't need to operate the vehicle. Well, we have a cult of ignorance in this country, and so the meters were replaced with "idiot lights". But some people find these lights distracting, so they tape over them. That's ok if it's your own car, and you don't mind replacing your engine every 5000 miles. But when you're driving a company car, you have some responsibility to keep an eye on things and make sure the engine doesn't explode. If you tape over the idiot light, and as a result, the engine is destroyed, you deserve the blame. Even if you're not a professional mechanic. So why is it different for computers?
What you're basically saying is that it's always the mechanic's fault when an engine gets blown. Well, sorry, I don't buy that theory. I don't expect your average driver should be able to replace the fuel injection system, but I do expect them to be able to recognize when the fuel gauge is approaching 'E', and to not stall out on the freeway because there's no gas. I do expect them to notify their mechanic when the idiot light comes on, rather than covering it and driving till the engine dies.
Um, wasn't the blink tag a Netscape "innovation"? Marc Aannddrreeeesssseen spoke at our LUG about a week after the original Communicator source release, and said that within 24 hours of the code release, someone had created a patch to allow the blink tag to work on images! Now there's someone who could have gone down in the Annoyingness Hall of Fame! :)
We're not happy about this - we're upset that Robertson gave up and sold out. It doesn't matter how much effort MS has put into promoting their non-trademarkable mark, it's not a reasonable trademark! A lot of us were worried that Robertson was in this for the money, not the principle of the thing, and we were, sadly, proved right.
There was no particular outcry when the OSS Phoenix browser was forced to change its name (to, eventually, Firefox). Granted, it wasn't MS who forced the change, but "Phoenix" also isn't a generic term of art. Not exactly the same as what you claimed, but fairly close. If you really want to test your hypothesis, why don't you make a spreadsheet for X11 (easy to fork gnumeric or oocalc) and call it X-cel, and see how many people rally behind you. I certainly won't.
I tell you what. You stop applauding MS's attempt to defend invalid trademarks, and I'll promise not to applaud any attempts on their part to defend any of their valid trademarks! If you can't make that deal, then you're clearly a troll, not "insightful".