The referenced article speaks of COM being messed up. I don't have enough personal experience, other than seeing security holes fly by on CERT and BUGTRAQ. There are numerous citations of the inadequate security model of ActiveX. Perhaps I err by equating COM with ActiveX, but I thought it was a market-driven renaming, not anything fundamentally technical.
Go back and reread the end of Fountains of Paradise. The answer is obviously, all of the above, add in a few towers to sea platforms, for good measure. Then in the ring at GSO, put in a race track, and we can have the, "A.C.Clarke 140,115 Race" every year.
In addition, I don't TRUST IE just because it's from MS. MS has shown a pattern of "phone home" software that began with Win95 (to the best of my knowledge) and has never stopped, including the phone home Word documents that popped up in the last week.
I've got the whole MS ClassB network firewalled out, both incoming and outgoing, with only a hole for Expedia : port 80, so we can check airline reservations.
But I tried to say, but didn't really get out, that sometimes MS has good ideas, but architects and implements them poorly. In other words, maybe MS took the right approach with COM, but messed it up.
And what does it say for the kitchen-sink concept of software definition and development, in general.
To go one step further, what does it say for the concept of pay-for software?
Outside of games, developers of pay-for software generally keep buyers coming back year after year for upgrades by adding new features. Somehow it just doesn't cut it just fixing bugs. Those shouldn't have been there in the first place, and admitting that you're just fixing bugs means that you should be giving it away.
Now we're seeing a claim that in a rather fundamental fashion, feature accretion is not a good thing.
Now to take a 180, sometimes feature accretion just may be necessary. So how do we do it in a secure, reliable fashion? Is COM the answer? Does MS really have it licked? I say that with tongue in cheek, because I believe MS values speed to market and profits over ALL else. But maybe they have a kernel of a good idea. Of course, I was in the OpenDoc camp, in the old days.
is either *very* shrewd, or downright annoying, depending on your point of view.
The Duron is targeted specifically at the Celeron, and nothing else. Until this announcement, the chip has been clocked at 700MHz, to match the Celeron. But look at the aftermarket, and I've heard reports of overclocking it to 900MHz, which makes sense, considering it's built on the same lines with Thunderbird, which is shipping 1.1GHz parts.
I presume this 750MHz announcement is meant to sway fence-sitters who look only at MHz and "Intel Inside" stickers, since even the 700MHz mopped the floor with Celeron. Duh gee, the number's bigger, so maybe it'll be faster, even though it's cheaper.
On the annoying side, AMD is clearly protecting their Thunderbird market by capping the Duron clock speed. I can appreciate this some, because L2 Cache size is a little more difficult to equate to price and performance than MHz. They're also playing the clock-locking games with Duron. Last round, people began tinkering with the lands on the substrate to unlock the clock, but I've heard that the latest production runs can't be tweaked that way. Normally I wouldn't overclock, but a 700MHz part off of a 1.1GHz line seems like it has a bit of headroom, to me.
The world is SUPPOSED to present you with surprises, and you're SUPPOSED to modify your world-view based on those things. To deny being surprised by the world is to calcify your world-view. That's dangerous.
Filtering your news is close to filtering those surprises. It may be a valid argument that filtering Katz is not the same as filtering news. Still, I enjoy some Katz articles, though I frequently only skim them.
Remember, we don't LIKE the MPAA. We actually WANT them to do stupid stuff like this. The more obnoxious they get, the better the chances that the whole DeCSS nonsense will get SMASHED, and the concepts of free use and free speech will return.
We should really be greatful to the MPAA for being such wonderfully obnoxious poster-boys for the DMCA, especially before the October review by the Library of Congress.
I hope they do a make a LOT more stupid moves like this, and get a lot more people mad.
Aside...
DeCSS is personal use of encryption. Encryption is a weapon, according to the government. Limiting our use of DeCSS is impairing our right to bear arms, as protected by the constitution, as well as impairing our free speach. Maybe the NRA is our friend on this one.
(Tongue partly in cheek on that last bit, but only partly.)
I believe we can all agree that the first step of space travel is 'hard'. Getting off of your home planet and into orbit, much less escape velocity is difficult. It involves the control of *large* amounts of energy. In order to be truly spacefaring, you need to do this not a few times, but regularly. One can infer from this that very-high-energy technology is widely available in a spacefaring civilization.
Here on Earth, we don't really qualify as a spacefaring civilization, yet. We're close, but not *quite* there. At the same time, we're awfully lucky that we survived the Cuban Missle Crisis, and we just about punched out with WWIII when KAL-007 was shot down. (There was a lot of behind-the-scenes happening, then.)
I assert that a species that doesn't have a pretty good lid on its impulses, and that includes the human race, at the moment, will likely destroy itself once the wide deployment of the very-high-energy technology need to be spacefaring happens. We've survived nuclear power thus far by luck and by restricting deployment.
Most of our species is not fit to live in a nuclear era. We don't yet have the energy technology to be truly spacefaring, so this situation may well get worse before it gets better.
We need to grow up, more than a little.
Isn't this part of what the Star Trek civilization is about? So many people complain about ST-TNG talking the enemy to death, but if the first impulse was to always come out with blazing guns, how long would the Federation really last. I would instead argue that the Klingons never would have become truly spacefaring.
This presupposes human psychology. But I'd argue that the same is true of any life that arose in the Darwinian model.
By this reasoning, any species that has become truly spacefaring understands the problems of becoming a 'mature species', and is almost by definition non-intervening.
By the same token, we're having population problems even now. I'd also assert that we're going to have to have solved our uncontrolled breeding urges before space travel is truly viable. That further stacks the deck in the 'non-interventionist' camp. The "colonize the galaxy" model assumes expansion and population increase are limited only by transit time, and not by intelligence.
I don't know what the breeding and colonization speed of a mature spacefaring culture would be. It may also be that we have unknown links to Earth. There may be trace element atmospheric combinations that are unique to Earth that we depend on. Maybe as a species, we're infertile without that great big Moon in the sky. Maybe in order to colonize, we've got to learn to terraform, too. Sounds like a good reason to get to Mars with a permanent presence, to me. Explore our own biological limits.
is that they cease to be capitalists. The cornerstone of capitalism is a free market. An essential part of the free market is that it includes downward mobility as well as upward.
As they get big enough, corporations cease to like the idea of the free market, because now they're on top and want to stay there. The game quits being one of attracting customers by making a better product, and trying to find ways to FORCE the customer to buy their product.
Ballmer call Linux "Communism". But it's really Capitalism, only measured in a non-cash currency. (prestige) Others have similarly likened Windows to other governing/economic styles. I won't comment.
Dominion mentions that it took Communism 80 years to fall. I'd further assert that the amount of chaos in the aftermath is (directly?) proportional to the amount of time past its natural life that a dominating institution has existed. By that criteria, I think Intel could disappear less disruptively than Microsoft.
It has come to my attention that your license to use the English Language has expired. Further speech on your part will be considered an infringement. Our lawyer will talk to your lawyer about this.
Furthermore, your continued use of the English Language will be taken as evidence that your are using some form of DMCA-prohibited Circumvention Device, such as a brain. We will aggressively pursue legal action against the parties that distributed this "brain" to you. If you are engaged in the manufacture of these "brains", commonly through the mechanism known as "children", we will pursue legal action against you.
In October of this year, mere possession of this Circumvention device will become illegal, and our attornies will be at the forefront of this legal opportunity.
Katz has focused here on the delivery medium, but has not delved into the editorial control of content.
I believe that I should learn something new from the news. I should hear opinions that I disagree with, as well as ones that I do. I should hear news that I like, and news that I dislike. If I get too choosey about getting a news program that I like too much, I fear I will not be getting a balanced picture of what is really happening in the world.
Part of the pride of old-school journalism was the concepts of fairness and objectivity. Our "classic" news sources still make at least some attempt to stick to those standards.
It's not clear that the "Neuvo-News" subscribes to the same philosophy. Even in the old-school technologies of paper, radio, and TV it's possible to get a whole range of slants. There are info-rags on both the right and left sides of the issues, the whole gamut from Rush to Oprah. While the latter aren't really news shows, they certainly do pretend to have editorial comment on current events. On the web, where the burden of publishing is even lower, many may well never have even heard of the concept of journalistic integrity, much less attempt to achieve it.
Scan for unsigned ADKs and report them back to the (supposed-to-be) owner, as well as the current holder. For that matter, scan for signed ADKs, as well, and report them, too.
It can't really be a virus or IRC bot, but why not a snipped of open source code. Get it out, and everyone scan every key they hold. Scan every key that you know you've put somewhere. Scan every key you use to send. Scan every key you touch.
For that matter, wrap it in with GPG.
While we're at it, send upgrade notices back to anyone who uses the wrong version of PGP to send us mail. Stomp it from the face of the Earth.
Microsoft pretty much NEVER does it right the first time out. Rev#1 is a joke, Rev#2 is a pig, but workable, Rev#3 is the one that dominates the marketplace.
Unfortunately, they've followed that pattern so often that everyone begins to quake when MS releases Rev#1, often as not folding then and there. Also unfortunately, devoid of competition, MS doesn't feel as intense a need to get the product up to the Rev#3 stage.
Imagine Microsoft's version of...
- The Pentium FP bug
- The 286 comatose phase-of-the-moon jump bug
- The 286, period
- The 6502 catch-fire-and-burn instruction
The mind boggles.
Is it harder to push buggy hardware into the marketplace than it is buggy software?
Sue the party with the deepest pockets. AOL certainly has deeper pockets than Napster or any of the other mp3 (or any other file format) "online exchange clubs."
What's missed is that this may well have a knock-on effect, where legal blame gets transferred to the original author. This is kind of a fallout of the DeCSS case, except there the author was clearly a citizen of another country. Makes you kind of surprised that there isn't some sort of international civil suit against Johansen. (Is there such a thing?)
There could be a chill here regarding writing GPL software "that could be used to do Evil," as defined by some big company. Of course this suit has to succeed. Won't it be odd to see Slashdotters rooting for AOL?
You missed my point. It wasn't a GNOME-dependency. It was a non-GNOME library that at one point in time was only available with Helix-GNOME. That one piece couldn't be installed alone - it ended up requiring a complete new beta Helix-GNOME install.
I'm complaining about non-orthogonality. I realize things can't be perfectly orthogonal, and have each shared lib stand completely on its own. But this was a ridiculous mass of spaghetti, dependency-wise.
Funny, when I first started looking at them, I thought KDE looked like a Win-Wannabee, and GNOME was trying to be the OO UI that OS/2 had. Over time and some GNOME usage, I've become disillusioned with it, too. This is especially as one reads more and more if Icaza "wanting to do Windows, only the right way".
Well, I believe a share of Windows problems are architectural, not a matter of implementation. You simply can't come up with a clean implementation of a broken architecture.
The last straw finally came in the past few weeks, in two parts. First, I've been looking to get my wife off of AOL, and went searching for IMAP cllients for her to select from. One of them required a non-GNOME library, but I could only find a GNOME update of it in RPM form. That required a few more GNOME updates, and so on. Eventually I would have had to download an update tens of megabytes of stuff just to test a stupid GUI MUA. I gave up. Later I found a "non-GNOME encumbered" version of the library, and discovered I didn't like the MUA, anyway. At about that time, Icaza comes out with his "make Unix suck less" rant. IMHO it looks like a wishlist to come up with a middleware layer on Unix roughly akin to Win32. In other words, he wants to take the problems I just had, institutionalize them, and make them even worse.
I agree that shared code has been a bit of a problem in Unix. But IMHO, the lib*.so.* system works, we just need to use it better. I don't want to see the API turn into a monolithic mess, especially one that has to be installed in the form of two dozen inseparable components, and that's just for the run time.
I will probably continue to have GNOME and KDE libs on my system, just for access to their applications. But at present, I run neither desktop. They're both too win-like and too bloated for my taste. I just wish I had the WPS for Linux. Well, at least DFM is alive, again.
By the same token, couldn't Microsoft have called pkunzip, unzip, gunzip, and their ilk "circumvention tools" back when the MS vs Slashdot storm was brewing over MS-Kerberos? After all unzip was used as a "circumvention tool" to bypass the Microsoft licensing agreement pushbutton. This is about as effective as locking my front door with a thumbtack.
Think of the number of mirrors they'd have to go after, since only distribution of circumvention tools is currently illegal. Circumvention doesn't become illegal until October.
After the Microsoft trial, numerous comments and speculation were made on Slashdot and other forums about how the appeals process is highly unlikely to overturn the Finding of Facts. Any action is more likely to focus on the Findings of Law and the Remedies.
First off, this trial doesn't appear to have three parts, like the Microsoft trial did. I don't pretend to know the differences at work. Can you enlighten us further on why things appear different?
Second, based on the Microsoft trial discussion, it appears that the appeals process is not merely 'redo the lower court trial', but rather focuses on certain aspects of that trial. Accordingly, the decision of the lower court must have in some sense set the stage for the appeal. Can you comment on how this decision sets the stage for a deCSS appeal?
Last I knew, the DRI 3D driver for the G400 was rather incomplete. It did only 16bpp, and the basic stuff. The Utah-GLX driver is more complete, in that it does 32bpp as well, but there's a bunch of noise about it's ability to use/accelerate stencils.
Even at that, there's not mention of extensions, like Environmental Bump Mapping, etc. (I know, do it, myself.)
This is a good start. But the key word is, "start".
Slashdot Mirror
The referenced article speaks of COM being messed up. I don't have enough personal experience, other than seeing security holes fly by on CERT and BUGTRAQ. There are numerous citations of the inadequate security model of ActiveX. Perhaps I err by equating COM with ActiveX, but I thought it was a market-driven renaming, not anything fundamentally technical.
Go back and reread the end of Fountains of Paradise. The answer is obviously, all of the above, add in a few towers to sea platforms, for good measure. Then in the ring at GSO, put in a race track, and we can have the, "A.C.Clarke 140,115 Race" every year.
In addition, I don't TRUST IE just because it's from MS. MS has shown a pattern of "phone home" software that began with Win95 (to the best of my knowledge) and has never stopped, including the phone home Word documents that popped up in the last week.
I've got the whole MS ClassB network firewalled out, both incoming and outgoing, with only a hole for Expedia : port 80, so we can check airline reservations.
But Linux geeks CAN see Flash animations. Netscape for Linux has shipped with Flash since 4.74, and the plugin was available before that.
What frosts me are the sites that ASSUME that because you're not running Windows, you can't do Flash, and deny access.
There's some rather amusing (God and Devil Show) available on Flash.
But I tried to say, but didn't really get out, that sometimes MS has good ideas, but architects and implements them poorly. In other words, maybe MS took the right approach with COM, but messed it up.
And what does it say for the kitchen-sink concept of software definition and development, in general.
To go one step further, what does it say for the concept of pay-for software?
Outside of games, developers of pay-for software generally keep buyers coming back year after year for upgrades by adding new features. Somehow it just doesn't cut it just fixing bugs. Those shouldn't have been there in the first place, and admitting that you're just fixing bugs means that you should be giving it away.
Now we're seeing a claim that in a rather fundamental fashion, feature accretion is not a good thing.
Now to take a 180, sometimes feature accretion just may be necessary. So how do we do it in a secure, reliable fashion? Is COM the answer? Does MS really have it licked? I say that with tongue in cheek, because I believe MS values speed to market and profits over ALL else. But maybe they have a kernel of a good idea. Of course, I was in the OpenDoc camp, in the old days.
is either *very* shrewd, or downright annoying, depending on your point of view.
The Duron is targeted specifically at the Celeron, and nothing else. Until this announcement, the chip has been clocked at 700MHz, to match the Celeron. But look at the aftermarket, and I've heard reports of overclocking it to 900MHz, which makes sense, considering it's built on the same lines with Thunderbird, which is shipping 1.1GHz parts.
I presume this 750MHz announcement is meant to sway fence-sitters who look only at MHz and "Intel Inside" stickers, since even the 700MHz mopped the floor with Celeron. Duh gee, the number's bigger, so maybe it'll be faster, even though it's cheaper.
On the annoying side, AMD is clearly protecting their Thunderbird market by capping the Duron clock speed. I can appreciate this some, because L2 Cache size is a little more difficult to equate to price and performance than MHz. They're also playing the clock-locking games with Duron. Last round, people began tinkering with the lands on the substrate to unlock the clock, but I've heard that the latest production runs can't be tweaked that way. Normally I wouldn't overclock, but a 700MHz part off of a 1.1GHz line seems like it has a bit of headroom, to me.
The world is SUPPOSED to present you with surprises, and you're SUPPOSED to modify your world-view based on those things. To deny being surprised by the world is to calcify your world-view. That's dangerous.
Filtering your news is close to filtering those surprises. It may be a valid argument that filtering Katz is not the same as filtering news. Still, I enjoy some Katz articles, though I frequently only skim them.
At present, the geeks who want to watch DVDs on Linux are the ones with their brains splattered on the walls. The MPAA is doing the splattering.
Remember, we don't LIKE the MPAA. We actually WANT them to do stupid stuff like this. The more obnoxious they get, the better the chances that the whole DeCSS nonsense will get SMASHED, and the concepts of free use and free speech will return.
We should really be greatful to the MPAA for being such wonderfully obnoxious poster-boys for the DMCA, especially before the October review by the Library of Congress.
I hope they do a make a LOT more stupid moves like this, and get a lot more people mad.
Aside...
DeCSS is personal use of encryption. Encryption is a weapon, according to the government. Limiting our use of DeCSS is impairing our right to bear arms, as protected by the constitution, as well as impairing our free speach. Maybe the NRA is our friend on this one.
(Tongue partly in cheek on that last bit, but only partly.)
I believe we can all agree that the first step of space travel is 'hard'. Getting off of your home planet and into orbit, much less escape velocity is difficult. It involves the control of *large* amounts of energy. In order to be truly spacefaring, you need to do this not a few times, but regularly. One can infer from this that very-high-energy technology is widely available in a spacefaring civilization.
Here on Earth, we don't really qualify as a spacefaring civilization, yet. We're close, but not *quite* there. At the same time, we're awfully lucky that we survived the Cuban Missle Crisis, and we just about punched out with WWIII when KAL-007 was shot down. (There was a lot of behind-the-scenes happening, then.)
I assert that a species that doesn't have a pretty good lid on its impulses, and that includes the human race, at the moment, will likely destroy itself once the wide deployment of the very-high-energy technology need to be spacefaring happens. We've survived nuclear power thus far by luck and by restricting deployment.
Most of our species is not fit to live in a nuclear era. We don't yet have the energy technology to be truly spacefaring, so this situation may well get worse before it gets better.
We need to grow up, more than a little.
Isn't this part of what the Star Trek civilization is about? So many people complain about ST-TNG talking the enemy to death, but if the first impulse was to always come out with blazing guns, how long would the Federation really last. I would instead argue that the Klingons never would have become truly spacefaring.
This presupposes human psychology. But I'd argue that the same is true of any life that arose in the Darwinian model.
By this reasoning, any species that has become truly spacefaring understands the problems of becoming a 'mature species', and is almost by definition non-intervening.
By the same token, we're having population problems even now. I'd also assert that we're going to have to have solved our uncontrolled breeding urges before space travel is truly viable. That further stacks the deck in the 'non-interventionist' camp. The "colonize the galaxy" model assumes expansion and population increase are limited only by transit time, and not by intelligence.
I don't know what the breeding and colonization speed of a mature spacefaring culture would be. It may also be that we have unknown links to Earth. There may be trace element atmospheric combinations that are unique to Earth that we depend on. Maybe as a species, we're infertile without that great big Moon in the sky. Maybe in order to colonize, we've got to learn to terraform, too. Sounds like a good reason to get to Mars with a permanent presence, to me. Explore our own biological limits.
It appears that they had 100 boxen earlier, 95 running Unix. Now that they're all Win2k, how many systems are they using to carry the workload?
So I presume you'll put yourself in the .smart domain? Well, I'll hijack your DNS, and move you over to .dumb, so there.
is that they cease to be capitalists. The cornerstone of capitalism is a free market. An essential part of the free market is that it includes downward mobility as well as upward.
As they get big enough, corporations cease to like the idea of the free market, because now they're on top and want to stay there. The game quits being one of attracting customers by making a better product, and trying to find ways to FORCE the customer to buy their product.
Ballmer call Linux "Communism". But it's really Capitalism, only measured in a non-cash currency. (prestige) Others have similarly likened Windows to other governing/economic styles. I won't comment.
Dominion mentions that it took Communism 80 years to fall. I'd further assert that the amount of chaos in the aftermath is (directly?) proportional to the amount of time past its natural life that a dominating institution has existed. By that criteria, I think Intel could disappear less disruptively than Microsoft.
It has come to my attention that your license to use the English Language has expired. Further speech on your part will be considered an infringement. Our lawyer will talk to your lawyer about this.
Furthermore, your continued use of the English Language will be taken as evidence that your are using some form of DMCA-prohibited Circumvention Device, such as a brain. We will aggressively pursue legal action against the parties that distributed this "brain" to you. If you are engaged in the manufacture of these "brains", commonly through the mechanism known as "children", we will pursue legal action against you.
In October of this year, mere possession of this Circumvention device will become illegal, and our attornies will be at the forefront of this legal opportunity.
Control Program for Babbage?
Required a minimum of 50 gears and 100 toggles in order to run. 15 wheel graphical display.
Katz has focused here on the delivery medium, but has not delved into the editorial control of content.
I believe that I should learn something new from the news. I should hear opinions that I disagree with, as well as ones that I do. I should hear news that I like, and news that I dislike. If I get too choosey about getting a news program that I like too much, I fear I will not be getting a balanced picture of what is really happening in the world.
Part of the pride of old-school journalism was the concepts of fairness and objectivity. Our "classic" news sources still make at least some attempt to stick to those standards.
It's not clear that the "Neuvo-News" subscribes to the same philosophy. Even in the old-school technologies of paper, radio, and TV it's possible to get a whole range of slants. There are info-rags on both the right and left sides of the issues, the whole gamut from Rush to Oprah. While the latter aren't really news shows, they certainly do pretend to have editorial comment on current events. On the web, where the burden of publishing is even lower, many may well never have even heard of the concept of journalistic integrity, much less attempt to achieve it.
Choose carefully. Be surprised.
Scan for unsigned ADKs and report them back to the (supposed-to-be) owner, as well as the current holder. For that matter, scan for signed ADKs, as well, and report them, too.
It can't really be a virus or IRC bot, but why not a snipped of open source code. Get it out, and everyone scan every key they hold. Scan every key that you know you've put somewhere. Scan every key you use to send. Scan every key you touch.
For that matter, wrap it in with GPG.
While we're at it, send upgrade notices back to anyone who uses the wrong version of PGP to send us mail. Stomp it from the face of the Earth.
Microsoft pretty much NEVER does it right the first time out. Rev#1 is a joke, Rev#2 is a pig, but workable, Rev#3 is the one that dominates the marketplace.
Unfortunately, they've followed that pattern so often that everyone begins to quake when MS releases Rev#1, often as not folding then and there. Also unfortunately, devoid of competition, MS doesn't feel as intense a need to get the product up to the Rev#3 stage.
Imagine Microsoft's version of...
- The Pentium FP bug
- The 286 comatose phase-of-the-moon jump bug
- The 286, period
- The 6502 catch-fire-and-burn instruction
The mind boggles.
Is it harder to push buggy hardware into the marketplace than it is buggy software?
Sue the party with the deepest pockets. AOL certainly has deeper pockets than Napster or any of the other mp3 (or any other file format) "online exchange clubs."
What's missed is that this may well have a knock-on effect, where legal blame gets transferred to the original author. This is kind of a fallout of the DeCSS case, except there the author was clearly a citizen of another country. Makes you kind of surprised that there isn't some sort of international civil suit against Johansen. (Is there such a thing?)
There could be a chill here regarding writing GPL software "that could be used to do Evil," as defined by some big company. Of course this suit has to succeed. Won't it be odd to see Slashdotters rooting for AOL?
You missed my point. It wasn't a GNOME-dependency. It was a non-GNOME library that at one point in time was only available with Helix-GNOME. That one piece couldn't be installed alone - it ended up requiring a complete new beta Helix-GNOME install.
I'm complaining about non-orthogonality. I realize things can't be perfectly orthogonal, and have each shared lib stand completely on its own. But this was a ridiculous mass of spaghetti, dependency-wise.
Funny, when I first started looking at them, I thought KDE looked like a Win-Wannabee, and GNOME was trying to be the OO UI that OS/2 had. Over time and some GNOME usage, I've become disillusioned with it, too. This is especially as one reads more and more if Icaza "wanting to do Windows, only the right way".
Well, I believe a share of Windows problems are architectural, not a matter of implementation. You simply can't come up with a clean implementation of a broken architecture.
The last straw finally came in the past few weeks, in two parts. First, I've been looking to get my wife off of AOL, and went searching for IMAP cllients for her to select from. One of them required a non-GNOME library, but I could only find a GNOME update of it in RPM form. That required a few more GNOME updates, and so on. Eventually I would have had to download an update tens of megabytes of stuff just to test a stupid GUI MUA. I gave up. Later I found a "non-GNOME encumbered" version of the library, and discovered I didn't like the MUA, anyway. At about that time, Icaza comes out with his "make Unix suck less" rant. IMHO it looks like a wishlist to come up with a middleware layer on Unix roughly akin to Win32. In other words, he wants to take the problems I just had, institutionalize them, and make them even worse.
I agree that shared code has been a bit of a problem in Unix. But IMHO, the lib*.so.* system works, we just need to use it better. I don't want to see the API turn into a monolithic mess, especially one that has to be installed in the form of two dozen inseparable components, and that's just for the run time.
I will probably continue to have GNOME and KDE libs on my system, just for access to their applications. But at present, I run neither desktop. They're both too win-like and too bloated for my taste. I just wish I had the WPS for Linux. Well, at least DFM is alive, again.
By the same token, couldn't Microsoft have called pkunzip, unzip, gunzip, and their ilk "circumvention tools" back when the MS vs Slashdot storm was brewing over MS-Kerberos? After all unzip was used as a "circumvention tool" to bypass the Microsoft licensing agreement pushbutton. This is about as effective as locking my front door with a thumbtack.
Think of the number of mirrors they'd have to go after, since only distribution of circumvention tools is currently illegal. Circumvention doesn't become illegal until October.
After the Microsoft trial, numerous comments and speculation were made on Slashdot and other forums about how the appeals process is highly unlikely to overturn the Finding of Facts. Any action is more likely to focus on the Findings of Law and the Remedies.
First off, this trial doesn't appear to have three parts, like the Microsoft trial did. I don't pretend to know the differences at work. Can you enlighten us further on why things appear different?
Second, based on the Microsoft trial discussion, it appears that the appeals process is not merely 'redo the lower court trial', but rather focuses on certain aspects of that trial. Accordingly, the decision of the lower court must have in some sense set the stage for the appeal. Can you comment on how this decision sets the stage for a deCSS appeal?
Can someone point to the original announcement?
Last I knew, the DRI 3D driver for the G400 was rather incomplete. It did only 16bpp, and the basic stuff. The Utah-GLX driver is more complete, in that it does 32bpp as well, but there's a bunch of noise about it's ability to use/accelerate stencils.
Even at that, there's not mention of extensions, like Environmental Bump Mapping, etc. (I know, do it, myself.)
This is a good start. But the key word is, "start".