The only way to take Linux to the next level is to professionalize the development
effort to ensure an efficient and stable environment
But what if Linus happens to be not interested in "getting Linux to the next level", or has a different idea of the next level altogether (which is very likely to be the case)? The thing is,
Linus has never been too much into taking over the world, or making slick professional appearance.
You can take the code and start running _your_ version/branch; in a way you could say distribution companies like Red Hat are already doing it (even though not so much with the kernel than with the system built on top of kernel).
The reason is aesthetic-.mp3 sounds slick and space-age, whereas.ogg sounds like egg
and/or the noise of vomiting.
No, no, no. Mp3 only "sounds cool" to you because you have grown so used to hearing it being used in every day contexts. There is absolutely nothing
in the name that would make it appealing to 'normal' people. [perhaps tech geeks are an exception here; they might think names like r2d2 and c3po are the best anyone could come up with?].
Mp3 is a boring TLA that no one would care about if the actual thing hadn't been working so well. It's popular despite its name, if you will.
As to ogg being uncool, perhaps so, perhaps not. But the whole approach is not to market it like an iMac; it's (as I understand) being pushed (if that word can even be used) as an open standard, first for people with techical background. I for one prefer them spending time making format and tools solid instead of tinkering with ad campaigns and market research.
Re:The best way to convert people from Microsoft..
on
Borking Outlook Express
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Note that it's NOT PREVENTING POSTING FROM WINDOWS USERS. It's preventing posting by Outlook users, which hopefully is a smaller group than windows users.
Just today I got 2 "see the pictures from my party" attachments from a clueless contractor who apparently is using Outlook; something that is actually prohibited by company's software regulations. Excluding Outlook users might even be construed as a security measure.:-p
Well, let's try an analogy here. Your PC (personal comp.) is pretty much useless without some software, minimally BIOS (or equivalent) plus an operating system. Should it then be classified as software? You can also rip and encode music and video footage and store it; is it now movie or music product?
The same applies to all kinds of appliances; washing machines have lots of software to control the functionality; cell phones are mostly software (plus hardware to run it on). And still few would claim they are software, even as a secondary functionality. This is because software has supporting role, not accessed directly by user.
So, basically for _movie_ DVDs primary function is to contain audio-visual content. It wouldn't make sense to say that they are both content and software, unless DVD contains both a movie and an interactive application (which certainly is possible). Movie industry tried claiming that just having software in there controlling viewing classifies movie DVDs as applications... which is silly, and fortunately court agreed.
Re:Use operating systems for what they're good for
on
Loki Games Closing?
·
· Score: 2
Is it really that hard to use windows
Perhaps you are glad to pay 50 - 200$ for the bootloader for games. That's what Windows would amount to me. I don't mind paying for games (I have bought enough, including couple of Loki titles... alas I don't care too much about 1st person shoot-em-ups), but I don't want to waste money on OS _just_ to get chance to buy games.
It's not that Windows is that especially for games. Various libs (directX) are ok but similar ones exist on linux (and usually same libs on various other platforms too). It _is_ convenient for developers, due to monopoly position and _good enough_ support for game writing.
because we have at least a reasonable amount of competition (cable vs DSL at least in most places are almost always controlled by separate companies)
You haven't been a broadband user lately have you?
The "competition" is practically non-existent now, telcos won, by:
Forcefully eliminating real competition (other DSL providers)
Creating a peaceful duopoly with cable guys
About the only thing left is the competition from third sector, and this project is Yet Another Example of these efforts. Good luck for all involved. I think USA could use this just as much as Australia and probably any other country in the world.
And the last paragraph (regarding "thank god") is pure nonsense. Constitution wasn't designed to assure free trade or competition. It's good for many valuable fundamental rights, but it doesn't have clauses for "taxes suck" or "big co's are ho's and need be controlled"
... which kind of makes sense since apparently other asian markets are healthier regarding piracy rates. Japan is probably close to western levels, Thailand and Korea somewhere between mainland China and Japan? Anyone have any actual figures (estimates) regarding various far eastern countries' piracy rates?
good percentage of technically
trained people have sufficient English skills to use the latest version of Photoshop.
For Photoshop maybe, but for some other products (InDesign etc) the support for localized versions has to go beyond just translating the menu texts and help files.
In many cases support for multi-byte character sets needs additional work (since apps were developed before standards like Unicode); the text flow may go from right to left (and/or from down to up), and the input methods may be platform dependant.
That is, english version might not have all the required feature for even inputting stuff, and will be useless. For some software this is not an issue, for many it is.
What's obvious malpractice to you and me, might not be so obvious to others
Agreed, but that's exactly why the matter has to be solved in courts eventually (unless an agreement is reached); courts handle 'unclear' issues all the time. In fact in the perfect world that'd be only kinds of issues they deal with. So, as long as
whoever is suing thinks that it's a question of 'deliberate ignorance' and defendant disagrees,
it should be eventually up to courts to decide on who is
right. Or would you prefer the "defendant is always right, can't sure" alternative that is supposed to now protect EULA-wielding companies?
If you are saying that sometimes courts make stupid decisions I certainly have to agree... but that's about the best and only reasonable (?) authoritative dispute-solving mechanism there is in typical democracies. (one could even claim that non-existence of international entities with similar international power is what causes most of current conflicts... but I digress)
An obligatory disclaimer; I'm not a big fan of "sue-anything-that-moves" litigation industry, and can see potential problems resulting from abuse. Still, alternative (no recourse for faulty products) doesn't sound any better.:-/
I'm not necessarily advocating this legislation, but your assumption that regulation is automatically anti-freedom is flawed.
Freedom and laissez-faire are not synonyms;
there is also the "freedom means responsibility" concept.
Just like with free speech you don't get "say whatever without consequences"; (pre-)censoring things is illegal, but you may be nailed later on
the contents.
Another way to put this is that libertarians have no monopoly for Freedom even though two things are related.
That being said, the goal (having some recourse against foolishly ignorant s/w companies) could be more easily obtained by just clearly abolishing EULAs, and letting legal action start based on actual damages products cause (if any). I know that administration doesn't really have power (and shouldn't have) over courts, but they should be able to test out EULAs in court.
I don't think the point was to punish co's because their products have problems; they would be punished if it could be shown that this was more or less deliberate, ie. company didn't bother to even try to make it secure?
In case of, say, Microsoft, the problem is not necessarily that they don't (try to) fix the known problems, it's that they somehow managed not to realize the obvious potential problems (with email/documents allowing active fully enabled scripting) when designing products in the first place.
I agree in Swing being a complex beast... But for some reason I did like JTable; it's one of the better examples of Swing (compared to for example lists... no way to easily create simple lists). JTable is complex, but mostly since table widgets by their nature are more complicated than, say, text fields. And I was pleasantly surprised about how easy it was to embed widgets in table cells, create 'synchronized' filter fields (ie. text fields above table that scroll with table if need be); features that haven't been implemented in
JTable, but could be added due to its extensibility.
But... there is definitely a learning curve in there, and unless you plan to do lots of Swing stuff, just spending days to learn how to do basic stuff with some widgets makes no sense. It's almost as if Swing was designed for "power user"
kinds of programmers.:-)
They achieve this by not accelerating ANY
DRAWING CODE.
Java 2 (1.2 and up... gotta love these name games) moved some formerly native stuff to "pure Java"; this makes it easier to port to new systems (and gets rid of a few platform-dependant bugs), but usually slowed things down a bit as well. However, Swing/AWT still has to (and does) call native OS calls for certain things like blits and (I believe) line drawing. Those will be accelerated if underlying graphics subsystem has acceleration. In any case, slower speed for widgets is, like you say, mostly due to them being drawn from Java, not from native system (even if primitives for drawing are at OS/GUI level)
All the widgets are drawn onto an offscreen buffer then blitted to
the main screen.
Double-buffering is on by default, but can be turned off on component-by-component basis. Designers probably thought most people prefer non-flickering widgets over flickering-but-faster ones.
As to Windows... I was under impression that Windows versions were the most optimized ones, and my experience has been that this appears true (compared to linux or solaris)?
Not quite. You do need to proof legal residency (ie. H1/H4/L1 etc). Instead of SSN you can also
use ITN (the tax id number people not 'qualified' for SSN, like spouses on H4 need and can apply for). Whether even ITN is required I don't know; I do know that ITN is just fine (interestingly, ability to drive a car seems to be such a sacred "right" that even us lowly foreigners can get to do that reasonably easily...:-) ).
Minor nitpicking; neither Swing nor AWT (on which Swing is based, just AWT primitive stuff not widgets) are on X-Windows (or Win32 GUI) level. They use platforms' windowing systems for (main-level) window management, and gfx primitive for actually doing screen output.
As to whether Swing is not the way to do actual GUI level (above X-windows, upper levels of W32 GUI) is arguable. It's not completely bad, although in some places it is bit overengineered. Its beauty is in customization, and some people like its "by-the-book" design patterns + OO design. It's unfortunate that its not multi-threaded, but apparently they had some valid reasons for avoiding that route (there was a white paper about that; basically multi-threading at that level is bitch to implement reliably). As to the most popular complaint, speed... well, it just depends on what you do and how (from application). Swing has been aggressively optimized, and is not dog slow if you know how to develop and don't do braindead stuff (which, in some cases, you can get by when using faster libs in apps written in C/C++). Part of the time saved when writing apps in Java should be used for more optimizations, if/when app doesn't feel quite as responsive as native ones; it's simple as that.
Yes I know, bad things may happen in the future. But for now, really, there's no way to magically get stuff not written in the first place back,
so it's still a good advice IMHO. Even more so when explaining that it either was:
Done on purpose, to uphold anonymity / privacy of the sources for the newspaper (web sites possibly being included in the same category), or
Done to save disk space
No one really knows how judges would react (umh, well, unfortunately I can guess... those dirty little foolmouthed slanderers says the judge),
but there's nothing obviously wrong here.
And, well, if some day courts will force normal people to act as snitches for police (mandatory web logs, to be stored for N years), then we'll have to cope with that. For now there is no such requirement. And to always keep logs just to prevent log-keeping from being mandatory doesn't sound good to me?
I have seen a few insightful and dead-on-right comments, but really, if I had to give one sentence summary of why broadband is still not ubiquitous like it ought to be (ie. only slowly crawling from under the rock), that would be:
It's telcos, stupid!
All the Qwest and Verizons are neither skilled nor motivated enough to change the situation.
The right to freedom of speech is alienable, meaning that people can sign away their
right to freedom of speech in a
contract.
...
Personally
I see nothing wrong with this
Personally I think the problem is more about not clearly definining and restricting exactly what is covered by NDAs (or whatever they are called in employment contracts). I understand that things from trade secrets to internal organizational issues are not things that one should spout out even after leaving the company.
On the other hand, communicating the fact that
one's ex-manager was a totally dork who couldn't find his/her ass with both hands, a hound dog and a helicopter should not be waived by these
contracts. I'm afraid that companies will try to (and might even succeed) in bending the definition of what really is under "kiss-n-no-tell" - clausule, just to prevent disgruntled ex-employees from giving out accurate image about the fucked company in question.
Besides, companies already do have recourse via slander / libel laws; they are bad enough as is without needing yet another can of whoop-ass against ex-employees.:-/
Well, I think that this case is different from the other more disturbing ones presented. If I understood correctly:
Employee was fired (for whatever reason)
Employee sent 32k emails (probably via mailing lists) to ex-coworkers at their mail addresses.
Company asked (um, probably demanded etc)
him/her to stop.
Employee claimed it's his/her god-given 1st amendment right to force all those people just
shut up and listen to what (s)he has to say.
I don't really see why the company shouldn't be
able to make the person in question stop, in this particular case. Although there would be ways to block emails technically, the basic question is (like you said) similar to spamming; why should the receivers have to pay for spammers privilege to send them (uncalled for) email? One problem is
that whereas talking to someone is usually impossible (or difficult) without receiver's will, sending email/fax/calling is much easier. So,
if the company had tried to prevent the person
from contacting ex-coworkers in person, the judge
would probably have just dismissed the case.
In fact the line between having the right to voice one's concern and trespassing is not all that clear; anti-abortion people have been prevented from picketing (in cases where they were shouting their propaganda in residential neighbourhoods);
it was considered harassment more than practicing peacefully their right to free speech.
The balance between your right to speak and my right to ignore is a difficult one to maintain.
However, printCafe's chances of actually getting any useful info are slim to none, as long as FC functions like its admin claims. Thing is,
FC bulletin boards are (supposed to be) completely anonymous; no need to login, web server logs are
either disabled or kept to minimum, and hopefully
purged daily if any are stored in the first place.
It is possible to create a registered account, but that's just storing name/pw pairs, no additional
contact info is asked (or stored I hope).
I don't think ISPs by default log contents of traffic flowing between web servers and clients, so at best printCafe could perhaps obtain list of IP-addresses of people who have browsed FC. With the volume FC gets proving that a single user (deduced from an IP-address; possible if they get lucky) actually wrote one of the messages specifically mentioned is... well, quite a task,
and should be legally next to impossible to
prove effectively enough (in civil suit I guess they don't need "beyond reasonable doubt" but still).
Of course I have no inside info on how it REALLY works, ie. are www-server logs directed to/dev/null or not... but it is much more anonymous than, say, Slashdot.
It's a good reminder, though, for all admins of anonymous chat rooms/bboards; companies will try to get info from your system via legal system. About the only sure way to prevent that is to get rid of that information (not collect in the first place being better than rm'ing it later on).
By which time, of course, the system will be hopelessly outdated, to the point where
the last 40% of the people to receive it, who are not-so-coincidentally probably the
ones who need it most, might as well not even have it.
Still... It has taken 20 years for telephone 'companies' (monopolies) to get from slow modems to slow ISDN-lines; for selected few even DSL is available. And this despite the fact that technology hasn't been the major problem for years now. They have succesfully been dragging their proverbial feet, while leeching out nice bounties.
So, I don't really know; non-competitive monopolies / cartels have already shown the worst case scenario, perhaps this might be the time to try out the alternatives, including society funded infrastructure projects?
Like I have said before, physical infrastructure might as well be built and maintained (mostly) by society (a la roads), but the layers above (from ISPs to content production) can and should be mostly left to companies. And of course, if private enterprises can actually produce better (less expensive, higher capacity with same price etc) physical infrastructure than towns and counties (while still making profit), they would be free to do so.
One reason I dislike the idea is that although it was claimed licensing fees were supposed to be low (according to Microsoft... so who knows), manufacturer has to pay something. And personally I'd be happy not to (indirectly) pay for support I don't need.
Now, since I agree that there are people who may want the support, it would be good if this support was optional; a plug-in could be bought. Same could be done for other formats too; if I had to pay for ogg-support, I would (as long as it's reasonable)
I did NOT claim profitability (personally
I'd just say they are at break-even), but
there are lots of ways to interpret numbers,
and saying "Red Hat is profitable" is not
an outright lie. Especially if you just consider
operating cash flow.
And just for convenience, here are some more quotes, in addition to one you cut'n pasted:
Red Hat Rises After Topping Estimates
Red Hat (RHAT:Nasdaq - news - commentary - research - analysis) said its
third-quarter net income excluding charges was $1.3 million, or 1 cent a share.
Analysts had been
expecting the company to break even
...
The Linux operating system distributor
had promised to break into
profitability by year's end
So; company had promised "profitability by year's end", it topped its promises, had positive cash flow... Profitable, n'est pas? (of course that's not the whole story; after other [mostly one-time] items, bottom line was negative)
Or how about (one of the other links):
Press Release
SOURCE: Red Hat
Red Hat Reports Fiscal Third Quarter Results
-Profitability and positive cash flows from
operations, adjusted for non-cash items,
highlight the quarter -
But whatever. Accounting is an art that can be used to pretty much claim anything for about any company. World is not quite as black-and-white as engineers usually think.
Motif implementations in general aren't free/Free (lesstif does exist, though)
Athena looks butt ugly, and doesn't have
half of useful UI components people need.
So yeah, gee, if you don't mind using UIs that use properietary and/or ugly and/or incomplete widget sets, there isn't all that much benefit?
Additionally, GTK (and QT) widgets do have 'real' usability improvements too; creating internationalized consistently functioning accessible (via keyboard or one of the special devices blind users etc use) UIs is much easier,
and as a result developers are more likely to
create better UIs. UIs that are much more accessible to 'minority' user groups (foreigners, people with disabilities).
Slashdot Mirror
But what if Linus happens to be not interested in "getting Linux to the next level", or has a different idea of the next level altogether (which is very likely to be the case)? The thing is, Linus has never been too much into taking over the world, or making slick professional appearance. You can take the code and start running _your_ version/branch; in a way you could say distribution companies like Red Hat are already doing it (even though not so much with the kernel than with the system built on top of kernel).
No, no, no. Mp3 only "sounds cool" to you because you have grown so used to hearing it being used in every day contexts. There is absolutely nothing in the name that would make it appealing to 'normal' people. [perhaps tech geeks are an exception here; they might think names like r2d2 and c3po are the best anyone could come up with?]. Mp3 is a boring TLA that no one would care about if the actual thing hadn't been working so well. It's popular despite its name, if you will.
As to ogg being uncool, perhaps so, perhaps not. But the whole approach is not to market it like an iMac; it's (as I understand) being pushed (if that word can even be used) as an open standard, first for people with techical background. I for one prefer them spending time making format and tools solid instead of tinkering with ad campaigns and market research.
Just today I got 2 "see the pictures from my party" attachments from a clueless contractor who apparently is using Outlook; something that is actually prohibited by company's software regulations. Excluding Outlook users might even be construed as a security measure. :-p
The same applies to all kinds of appliances; washing machines have lots of software to control the functionality; cell phones are mostly software (plus hardware to run it on). And still few would claim they are software, even as a secondary functionality. This is because software has supporting role, not accessed directly by user.
So, basically for _movie_ DVDs primary function is to contain audio-visual content. It wouldn't make sense to say that they are both content and software, unless DVD contains both a movie and an interactive application (which certainly is possible). Movie industry tried claiming that just having software in there controlling viewing classifies movie DVDs as applications... which is silly, and fortunately court agreed.
Perhaps you are glad to pay 50 - 200$ for the bootloader for games. That's what Windows would amount to me. I don't mind paying for games (I have bought enough, including couple of Loki titles... alas I don't care too much about 1st person shoot-em-ups), but I don't want to waste money on OS _just_ to get chance to buy games.
It's not that Windows is that especially for games. Various libs (directX) are ok but similar ones exist on linux (and usually same libs on various other platforms too). It _is_ convenient for developers, due to monopoly position and _good enough_ support for game writing.
You haven't been a broadband user lately have you? The "competition" is practically non-existent now, telcos won, by:
- Forcefully eliminating real competition (other DSL providers)
- Creating a peaceful duopoly with cable guys
About the only thing left is the competition from third sector, and this project is Yet Another Example of these efforts. Good luck for all involved. I think USA could use this just as much as Australia and probably any other country in the world.And the last paragraph (regarding "thank god") is pure nonsense. Constitution wasn't designed to assure free trade or competition. It's good for many valuable fundamental rights, but it doesn't have clauses for "taxes suck" or "big co's are ho's and need be controlled"
... which kind of makes sense since apparently other asian markets are healthier regarding piracy rates. Japan is probably close to western levels, Thailand and Korea somewhere between mainland China and Japan? Anyone have any actual figures (estimates) regarding various far eastern countries' piracy rates?
For Photoshop maybe, but for some other products (InDesign etc) the support for localized versions has to go beyond just translating the menu texts and help files.
In many cases support for multi-byte character sets needs additional work (since apps were developed before standards like Unicode); the text flow may go from right to left (and/or from down to up), and the input methods may be platform dependant.
That is, english version might not have all the required feature for even inputting stuff, and will be useless. For some software this is not an issue, for many it is.
Agreed, but that's exactly why the matter has to be solved in courts eventually (unless an agreement is reached); courts handle 'unclear' issues all the time. In fact in the perfect world that'd be only kinds of issues they deal with. So, as long as whoever is suing thinks that it's a question of 'deliberate ignorance' and defendant disagrees, it should be eventually up to courts to decide on who is right. Or would you prefer the "defendant is always right, can't sure" alternative that is supposed to now protect EULA-wielding companies?
If you are saying that sometimes courts make stupid decisions I certainly have to agree... but that's about the best and only reasonable (?) authoritative dispute-solving mechanism there is in typical democracies. (one could even claim that non-existence of international entities with similar international power is what causes most of current conflicts... but I digress)
An obligatory disclaimer; I'm not a big fan of "sue-anything-that-moves" litigation industry, and can see potential problems resulting from abuse. Still, alternative (no recourse for faulty products) doesn't sound any better. :-/
That being said, the goal (having some recourse against foolishly ignorant s/w companies) could be more easily obtained by just clearly abolishing EULAs, and letting legal action start based on actual damages products cause (if any). I know that administration doesn't really have power (and shouldn't have) over courts, but they should be able to test out EULAs in court.
In case of, say, Microsoft, the problem is not necessarily that they don't (try to) fix the known problems, it's that they somehow managed not to realize the obvious potential problems (with email/documents allowing active fully enabled scripting) when designing products in the first place.
JTable, but could be added due to its extensibility.
But... there is definitely a learning curve in there, and unless you plan to do lots of Swing stuff, just spending days to learn how to do basic stuff with some widgets makes no sense. It's almost as if Swing was designed for "power user"
kinds of programmers.
Java 2 (1.2 and up... gotta love these name games) moved some formerly native stuff to "pure Java"; this makes it easier to port to new systems (and gets rid of a few platform-dependant bugs), but usually slowed things down a bit as well. However, Swing/AWT still has to (and does) call native OS calls for certain things like blits and (I believe) line drawing. Those will be accelerated if underlying graphics subsystem has acceleration. In any case, slower speed for widgets is, like you say, mostly due to them being drawn from Java, not from native system (even if primitives for drawing are at OS/GUI level)
All the widgets are drawn onto an offscreen buffer then blitted to the main screen.
Double-buffering is on by default, but can be turned off on component-by-component basis. Designers probably thought most people prefer non-flickering widgets over flickering-but-faster ones.
As to Windows... I was under impression that Windows versions were the most optimized ones, and my experience has been that this appears true (compared to linux or solaris)?
Not quite. You do need to proof legal residency (ie. H1/H4/L1 etc). Instead of SSN you can also use ITN (the tax id number people not 'qualified' for SSN, like spouses on H4 need and can apply for). Whether even ITN is required I don't know; I do know that ITN is just fine (interestingly, ability to drive a car seems to be such a sacred "right" that even us lowly foreigners can get to do that reasonably easily... :-) ).
As to whether Swing is not the way to do actual GUI level (above X-windows, upper levels of W32 GUI) is arguable. It's not completely bad, although in some places it is bit overengineered. Its beauty is in customization, and some people like its "by-the-book" design patterns + OO design. It's unfortunate that its not multi-threaded, but apparently they had some valid reasons for avoiding that route (there was a white paper about that; basically multi-threading at that level is bitch to implement reliably). As to the most popular complaint, speed... well, it just depends on what you do and how (from application). Swing has been aggressively optimized, and is not dog slow if you know how to develop and don't do braindead stuff (which, in some cases, you can get by when using faster libs in apps written in C/C++). Part of the time saved when writing apps in Java should be used for more optimizations, if/when app doesn't feel quite as responsive as native ones; it's simple as that.
- Done on purpose, to uphold anonymity / privacy of the sources for the newspaper (web sites possibly being included in the same category), or
- Done to save disk space
No one really knows how judges would react (umh, well, unfortunately I can guess... those dirty little foolmouthed slanderers says the judge), but there's nothing obviously wrong here.And, well, if some day courts will force normal people to act as snitches for police (mandatory web logs, to be stored for N years), then we'll have to cope with that. For now there is no such requirement. And to always keep logs just to prevent log-keeping from being mandatory doesn't sound good to me?
It's telcos, stupid!
All the Qwest and Verizons are neither skilled nor motivated enough to change the situation.
Personally I see nothing wrong with this
Personally I think the problem is more about not clearly definining and restricting exactly what is covered by NDAs (or whatever they are called in employment contracts). I understand that things from trade secrets to internal organizational issues are not things that one should spout out even after leaving the company. On the other hand, communicating the fact that one's ex-manager was a totally dork who couldn't find his/her ass with both hands, a hound dog and a helicopter should not be waived by these contracts. I'm afraid that companies will try to (and might even succeed) in bending the definition of what really is under "kiss-n-no-tell" - clausule, just to prevent disgruntled ex-employees from giving out accurate image about the fucked company in question.
Besides, companies already do have recourse via slander / libel laws; they are bad enough as is without needing yet another can of whoop-ass against ex-employees. :-/
I don't really see why the company shouldn't be able to make the person in question stop, in this particular case. Although there would be ways to block emails technically, the basic question is (like you said) similar to spamming; why should the receivers have to pay for spammers privilege to send them (uncalled for) email? One problem is that whereas talking to someone is usually impossible (or difficult) without receiver's will, sending email/fax/calling is much easier. So, if the company had tried to prevent the person from contacting ex-coworkers in person, the judge would probably have just dismissed the case.
In fact the line between having the right to voice one's concern and trespassing is not all that clear; anti-abortion people have been prevented from picketing (in cases where they were shouting their propaganda in residential neighbourhoods); it was considered harassment more than practicing peacefully their right to free speech. The balance between your right to speak and my right to ignore is a difficult one to maintain.
However, printCafe's chances of actually getting any useful info are slim to none, as long as FC functions like its admin claims. Thing is, FC bulletin boards are (supposed to be) completely anonymous; no need to login, web server logs are either disabled or kept to minimum, and hopefully purged daily if any are stored in the first place. It is possible to create a registered account, but that's just storing name/pw pairs, no additional contact info is asked (or stored I hope). I don't think ISPs by default log contents of traffic flowing between web servers and clients, so at best printCafe could perhaps obtain list of IP-addresses of people who have browsed FC. With the volume FC gets proving that a single user (deduced from an IP-address; possible if they get lucky) actually wrote one of the messages specifically mentioned is... well, quite a task, and should be legally next to impossible to prove effectively enough (in civil suit I guess they don't need "beyond reasonable doubt" but still).
Of course I have no inside info on how it REALLY works, ie. are www-server logs directed to /dev/null or not... but it is much more anonymous than, say, Slashdot.
It's a good reminder, though, for all admins of anonymous chat rooms/bboards; companies will try to get info from your system via legal system. About the only sure way to prevent that is to get rid of that information (not collect in the first place being better than rm'ing it later on).
Still... It has taken 20 years for telephone 'companies' (monopolies) to get from slow modems to slow ISDN-lines; for selected few even DSL is available. And this despite the fact that technology hasn't been the major problem for years now. They have succesfully been dragging their proverbial feet, while leeching out nice bounties.
So, I don't really know; non-competitive monopolies / cartels have already shown the worst case scenario, perhaps this might be the time to try out the alternatives, including society funded infrastructure projects?
Like I have said before, physical infrastructure might as well be built and maintained (mostly) by society (a la roads), but the layers above (from ISPs to content production) can and should be mostly left to companies. And of course, if private enterprises can actually produce better (less expensive, higher capacity with same price etc) physical infrastructure than towns and counties (while still making profit), they would be free to do so.
Now, since I agree that there are people who may want the support, it would be good if this support was optional; a plug-in could be bought. Same could be done for other formats too; if I had to pay for ogg-support, I would (as long as it's reasonable)
And just for convenience, here are some more quotes, in addition to one you cut'n pasted:
So; company had promised "profitability by year's end", it topped its promises, had positive cash flow... Profitable, n'est pas? (of course that's not the whole story; after other [mostly one-time] items, bottom line was negative)Or how about (one of the other links):
But whatever. Accounting is an art that can be used to pretty much claim anything for about any company. World is not quite as black-and-white as engineers usually think.So yeah, gee, if you don't mind using UIs that use properietary and/or ugly and/or incomplete widget sets, there isn't all that much benefit?
Additionally, GTK (and QT) widgets do have 'real' usability improvements too; creating internationalized consistently functioning accessible (via keyboard or one of the special devices blind users etc use) UIs is much easier, and as a result developers are more likely to create better UIs. UIs that are much more accessible to 'minority' user groups (foreigners, people with disabilities).