You should be watching the traffic signals too, in that case it would not be unexpected. You see somone speed past you, you see the light, you know it's going to change.
The thing is, stopping SUDDENLY isn't so easy. There's reaction times to take into account, there's varying speeds of brakes. You need *some* sort of immediate warning. There just plain are going to be cases where someone going at decent speed sees the sudden red light, panicks, and stops on a dime. If the person behind them (a) doesn't see the light *quite* as immediately (b) can't stop on a dime for whatever reason, is this really enough of the person behind's fault that it's worth fucking up their insurance and car? Most people aren't going to consider the mere presence of a stoplight qualification for this sort of stop. *This is why yellow lights exist in the first place*.
True, but not everyone drives at the same speed, making drivers unpredictable.
Oh, agreed. However, speeding is at least a sort of predictability. Someone driving at a speed inconsistent with everyone else causes a hazard, but at least it's one other drivers can anticipate and easily deal with the consequences of. Sudden and intense changes in speed, meanwhile, are not something that other drivers can deal with as well. I find it very hard to believe the overall unpredictability of the system would be anything but increased by these lights.
Normally the lights have a sign a few hundred feet infront of them that warn of their functionality.
Okay, that makes things almost somewhat better; assuming I were an SF driver (and I may well be, in about a year and a half), if all such lights had a warning somewhat ahead of the road, that at least would remove my fear that while driving around SF I'd unexpectedly come up to one of these lights, someone would trigger it, I wouldn't be fully paying attention at that moment and I'd rearend someone. But I still wouldn't be willing to drive on that street. After all, I wouldn't have to worry about rearending someone, but there's still the fear that the person behind me is senile or doesn't speak english and doesn't read the sign and they'll rearend me..
This is the worst idea EVER. Yeah, I'm going to feel *real fucking safe* when suddenly the most batshit nuts, speeding drivers on the road are unexpectedly and without warning coming to sudden stops because they've triggered the "punishment light". To say nothing of the collateral damage caused by the fact that everybody on the road winds up stopping.
Vehicular safety ONLY FUNCTIONS when the behavior of all of the drivers is as PREDICTABLE as possible. That's why we have stoplights in the first place, if you think about it.
I can't wait for the first time it rains in this area. One person will speed, the light will suddenly turn red, half the cars will notice and come to a sudden stop, some of the cars will stop more slowly than others because of the slippery road, some will hydroplane... just THINK of the number of rear-end collisions you'd get. (And, of course, in each case, the insurance companies would place "at fault" the person in rear for failing to notice the without-warning red light immediately and stop immediately, or for failing to predict the person in front of them might come to a stop without warning...)
Should the project managers file a counterclaim, the project could be restored.
Uhh, I doubt it. This is about the most clear-cut case of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions applying you could get. The only way this could be declared unworkable is if the DMCA was struck down. Given, striking down the DMCA is only a matter of time, and it needs to happen. But if you're trying to find an optimal case on which to challenge the DMCA, this certainly isn't it.
The EFF failed to challenge their lower-court losses over DeCSS because they believed they would not have a higher court's sympathy when defending a group named "2600.com", and they needed to wait for a more opportune small case that could be used to set precedent. I'm not so sure this was a good idea. But in any case, this would be even worse.
With DeCSS, there was at least overwhelming public sympathy, and the intent of the opposition was clear; you were fighting the DVD consortium and MPAA directly, and they were clearly moneygrubbing oligopolists trying to price-fix between countries and take rights consumers had had for years (like copying vhs tapes) and remove them through a law they personally bought. Whereas Apple has created something new, and is giving their users at least a modicum of ability to exercise fair use. The application of the DMCA is still unjust, and DRM is still an idiotic concept, but framing Apple as a villan in this would be really difficult, especially when far more clear abuses of the DMCA are still going on.
I do wonder, though, why the EFF seems totally disinterested in challenging the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions. It seemed like DVDxCopy made a great test case, and the bullshit with the lexmark print drivers made an even better one. Have they just given up?
(P.S.: If I am not mistaken, isn't this the first time Apple has ever invoked the DMCA? There was that one time that someone was doing something wierd involving allowing iDVD to work on a different OS version, and Apple asked them to stop, and they did and went and complained to the press and made some cryptic comments about the DMCA, yet from what was seen of apple legal's correspondence with them there didn't actually appear to be any DMCA invocation. Hm.. oh well.)
the only time you have a problem is when some LiNuX d00d3r made a poor assumption
And unfortunately, it is the case that 90% of the software I would potentially want to run is written by short-sighted LiNuX d00d3rs with little concept of "other people have system configurations which are different from mine".
You haven't experienced pain until you have tried to compile KDE (or anything for that matter) on AIX 4.3.
To my intense relief, I have never had to compile anything at all on an AIX system.
5. Create at least one distribution in which in every single program, "copy" and "paste" are done in exactly the same way with exactly the same results 100% of the time.
6. Create at least one distribution in which every single scroll bar in the entire system looks the same.
7. No one ever has to think about the XF86Config file, ever.
8. There's a clear and obvious way to set and change your monitor resolution that works regardless of whether you know strange things about your monitor, or "scanlines", or the XF86Config file, and NO MATTER WHICH WM AND DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT YOU USE.
9. The way to set up a remote X session is clear and straightforward, and doesn't involve lots of poking at cryptic pages on google and headscratching trying to remember where you have to run Xauth or other such and whether you have forwarding enabled in your ssh_config , etc...
9a. No one ever gets the error message "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1", for any reason, ever. That's just not descriptive as an error, and it doesn't give you any indication what to do to fix it.
10. If I am on a linux machine, and there's another linux or unix machine somewhere or hopefully even something more exotic (like windows), I can connect to that machine and open up a file browser window displaying the files there and edit them and copy them back and forth, without having to read the Midnight Commander web page, without having to set up cryptic emacs/vi plugins, without having to think about "does this remote computer have ftp, samba, afp, nfs, or some combination thereof?".
11. Make a GUI manpage browser with scrollbars, and hyperlinks, and tables of contents for individual manpages, and the ability to quickly expand/collapse individual sections within the individual manpages, and quickly sorted/filtered browsing of the man -k / apropos database; and put this program where people know it exists and know what it is.
There was a time when saying you had a Sun meant you weren't just 1337, but respectable, a power user
I'd say that's already a lost battle. These days, "I've got a Sun" seems to elicit "Huh! That's kind of neat. Don't you spend all of your time trying to get seemingly trivial applications to compile, though?"
You're not much of a player anymore when you're trying to keep your head above water by selling commodity PCs.
Unless you're also the person who develops the most common implementation of the commodity OS that runs on the commodity PCs, and sells the "professional" version of the office software that all such PCs, including the ones made by other people, run. Then maybe you've got something. (And it doesn't hurt if this position means that you can, for example, get an actually good applet VM onto a majority of desktops, thus making your other products stronger.)
I don't know, but I think Sun wants the spot that Lindows covets and Redhat could have had (if they hadn't abandoned the consumer market).
Perhaps they just intend to attempt to defeat Microsoft in the marketplace and on the strength of their products, rather than in the courtroom?
Not that from looking at the public information they seem to have a terribly clear plan on how to do so, mind you, but it's a theory that settling their lawsuits would be in no way inconsistent with.
I don't think "lawyers" have anything to do with Sun not open sourcing Java's class libraries. I think Sun's failure to open source Java will continue to be, as it has been, just because there's no compelling reason from their perspective to do so.
Sun just hasn't given enough direct support to the open source community, and this recent event-- which seriously implies Microsoft may in some way in future have the ability to manipulate Java-- is the final straw, as anything Microsoft has their fingers in they'll find a way to twist to their ends. It's a good thing.NET doesn't have these problems.
Duke Nukem Forever was originally first described in a Bell Labs whitepaper personally written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in early 1970, just over 34 years ago. The whitepaper said that Duke Nukem Forever would run on Bell Labs' new UNIX system, and would be available "sometime before the end of the year". Bell started taking orders the next week, and the historic first order for DNF, by the U.S. patent office, was placed on that day. Eight months later, despite not yet being finished, Duke Nukem Forever was proclaimed "Game of the Year" by the October issue of the Association for Computing Machinery quarterly journal.
Since then the game has changed publishers and target platform numerous times, and changed intended game engines a stunning 57 times. Of the original five-man development team, two are still on the project, one currently holds a senior managerial position at Intel, and two are since dead. In 1995 when the original UNIX intellectual property block was licensed from Novell to SCO, the Duke Nukem Forever project was split off and separately sold to a company called 3D Realms, who still oversees it and currently publically states that DNF will be available "when it's done".
hammered home by the fact that SCO talked of adding a Linux compatibility layer to their UNIX product a few years back, but dropped it because it just would have been too difficult to impliment IIRC
The links, if you follow them, just all go to generic OpenBSD pages.
Too bad, since this would be cool and probably isn't even that unrealistic. We've already got Linux for all three of the major tv consoles at the moment plus the Dreamcast...
The problem isn't that they take a day off for silliness. the problem is that the april fools jokes are consistently unbelievably lame. Humor with the element of surprise removed is...?
IBM has finally started directing the case into those areas that they are strong in and SCO is weak in (facts) and out of those areas that SCO is strong in and IBM is weak in (baseless allegations and conjcture). As such, it seems very likely that they are about to (1) demonstrate themselves plowing over the SCO lawyers and (2) win.
The question I suppose would be asking is, whether this is a small thing or a small thing that the entire case turns out to hinge on, what happens to public perceptions once IBM starts winning?
SCO has been able to provide the illusion they are the lead in this even as IBM has taken them apart during the discovery phase. The media has more or less bought this. Once IBM starts leading, and IBM starts determining the path things will take in the courtroom, will the media notice? Will they see SCO's loss as the first of a number of losses? Will they just overlook the declaratory judgement, or will they note the declaratory judgement disproves quite a number of SCO's public claims, and start looking at ? Will their attitude change at all? Will their stock price change once the people who have been buying realize, oh hey, it's possible SCO might lose after all-- and, since their entire business right now is litigation, that would leave... oh wait...
Of course this probably won't instantly kill SCO's case. But if somehow it sets off a stock "correction", it might well instantly kill SCO. It isn't likely. But it's a nice dream.
A related question. I have been of late working with a Gentoo install. Once GNOME 2.6 is released, on what timescale will the 2.6 packages (and the new Epiphany, yum) show up in a normal emerge -u world? Like, are we talking minutes? Days? Weeks? Months?
When does the Gentoo community/coderbase tend to consider such things reading for unmasking?
past 15 years... Now, the while the cost of hardware continues to go down, the cost of software continues to go up. The number of people who are needed to build the massive applications to make use of 10 THz will be huge. Somebody's got to pay the damn programmers, right
Actually, my perception is that the price of software has gone up because before there was a relatively competitive market, and now most of the "bellweather" markets have been taken over by a monopoly with the ability to set its own prices.
The price raises I see for any other reason have been negligable. In fact, if you markets which Microsoft controls to the point where it can (and does) charge whatever it wants, there really doesn't seem to be coherent price movement in any consistent direction. Video games cost about the same.as they did when I was six despite over an order of magnitude more development complexity. Video editing and 3d rendering software... oh wait, we didn't have that at the consumer level 15 years ago. What's left? As far as I can tell it cost tens of thousands of dollars or something for a UNIX license 15 years ago, and tens of thousands of dollars or something for a departmental UNIX support contract from IBM today.
Yes, I know you said "discard Microsoft" but the fact is, you're talking about is something which stems from Microsoft wholly. "You should pay a lot more money for software these days" isn't reasonable, or a truth. It's just something Microsoft has convinced you of.
This isn't a Microsoft thing...this could easily be an IBM thing or an Adobe thing, etc
Interesting you mention IBM, because they, like Apple, are primarily working on the model right now of using hardware to drive software sales in a sort of "package" way that blends the line between the two-- you just buy a z390 or whatever and a support contract. But that isn't quite the process Gates is describing... or is it? When you get down to it, you can think of a mac as paying a couple thousand dollars to run OS X, and those $100 packages just being upgrades. I dont' know many people who buy G5s to run Linux.
I've used Swing on small projects, but never used GTK, Qt or GNUStep.
I had a job for part of which I spent about four or five months writing WxWindows. It seemed fairly easy to pick up, entirely reasonable as a development platform, and the quibbles I had with the functionality and documentation only came up a couple of times (one of the class docs was misleadingly written at one point, and one of the classes, WxListBox or something, turned out to only work on the Windows platform). Is Qt "better" than it? I wouldn't know. All I know is I had no objections to WxWindows whatsoever.
Most of the stuff I do is not GUI. However what I do all of my personal GUI development in is Cocoa, one of the two Mac OS X GUI libraries, which I consider as elegant, complete and (usually) well-documented as I could possibly imagine a GUI library to be. From my perspective, it is generally a joy to use. And, um, well, it doesn't cost me anything to use. The development tools came free with the OS. Now, given, I had to pay money for OS X itself, and anyone who uses my programs will have to have paid money for the OS as well. But, um, you know what? I don't really mind paying for the OS so much. Personally. I feel like I'm getting what I paid for there. And I CERTAINLY prefer paying money to use the OS and then getting dev tools and a lovely dev library that I can do anything I want with to either YOU WILL USE THE GPL PERIOD or having to pay, um, what appears to be a per-year, per-developer, per-platform fee of at least either $500 or $1500, i can't tell which, to develop software. What I'm currently getting just sounds like a better deal to me, so personally I'm going to stick with it.
(And since Cocoa is what GNUStep aims toward, who knows, if I really wanted to I think I could probably port my software to GNUStep without *too* much trouble. I know GNUStep is woefully incomplete, but this is why I mentioned it.)
But this is of course totally just my opinion. And it isn't entirely germane. But hey, you asked.
If they don't want to pay for a commercial QT license, they are in exactly the same boat that they would be if they wrote a GTK app; i.e., if they want to distribute, they have to distribute under GPL.
GTK has no such restriction. It is released under the LGPL.
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You should be watching the traffic signals too, in that case it would not be unexpected. You see somone speed past you, you see the light, you know it's going to change.
The thing is, stopping SUDDENLY isn't so easy. There's reaction times to take into account, there's varying speeds of brakes. You need *some* sort of immediate warning. There just plain are going to be cases where someone going at decent speed sees the sudden red light, panicks, and stops on a dime. If the person behind them (a) doesn't see the light *quite* as immediately (b) can't stop on a dime for whatever reason, is this really enough of the person behind's fault that it's worth fucking up their insurance and car? Most people aren't going to consider the mere presence of a stoplight qualification for this sort of stop. *This is why yellow lights exist in the first place*.
True, but not everyone drives at the same speed, making drivers unpredictable.
Oh, agreed. However, speeding is at least a sort of predictability. Someone driving at a speed inconsistent with everyone else causes a hazard, but at least it's one other drivers can anticipate and easily deal with the consequences of. Sudden and intense changes in speed, meanwhile, are not something that other drivers can deal with as well. I find it very hard to believe the overall unpredictability of the system would be anything but increased by these lights.
Normally the lights have a sign a few hundred feet infront of them that warn of their functionality.
Okay, that makes things almost somewhat better; assuming I were an SF driver (and I may well be, in about a year and a half), if all such lights had a warning somewhat ahead of the road, that at least would remove my fear that while driving around SF I'd unexpectedly come up to one of these lights, someone would trigger it, I wouldn't be fully paying attention at that moment and I'd rearend someone. But I still wouldn't be willing to drive on that street. After all, I wouldn't have to worry about rearending someone, but there's still the fear that the person behind me is senile or doesn't speak english and doesn't read the sign and they'll rearend me..
This is the worst idea EVER. Yeah, I'm going to feel *real fucking safe* when suddenly the most batshit nuts, speeding drivers on the road are unexpectedly and without warning coming to sudden stops because they've triggered the "punishment light". To say nothing of the collateral damage caused by the fact that everybody on the road winds up stopping.
Vehicular safety ONLY FUNCTIONS when the behavior of all of the drivers is as PREDICTABLE as possible. That's why we have stoplights in the first place, if you think about it.
I can't wait for the first time it rains in this area. One person will speed, the light will suddenly turn red, half the cars will notice and come to a sudden stop, some of the cars will stop more slowly than others because of the slippery road, some will hydroplane... just THINK of the number of rear-end collisions you'd get. (And, of course, in each case, the insurance companies would place "at fault" the person in rear for failing to notice the without-warning red light immediately and stop immediately, or for failing to predict the person in front of them might come to a stop without warning...)
Should the project managers file a counterclaim, the project could be restored.
Uhh, I doubt it. This is about the most clear-cut case of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions applying you could get. The only way this could be declared unworkable is if the DMCA was struck down. Given, striking down the DMCA is only a matter of time, and it needs to happen. But if you're trying to find an optimal case on which to challenge the DMCA, this certainly isn't it.
The EFF failed to challenge their lower-court losses over DeCSS because they believed they would not have a higher court's sympathy when defending a group named "2600.com", and they needed to wait for a more opportune small case that could be used to set precedent. I'm not so sure this was a good idea. But in any case, this would be even worse.
With DeCSS, there was at least overwhelming public sympathy, and the intent of the opposition was clear; you were fighting the DVD consortium and MPAA directly, and they were clearly moneygrubbing oligopolists trying to price-fix between countries and take rights consumers had had for years (like copying vhs tapes) and remove them through a law they personally bought. Whereas Apple has created something new, and is giving their users at least a modicum of ability to exercise fair use. The application of the DMCA is still unjust, and DRM is still an idiotic concept, but framing Apple as a villan in this would be really difficult, especially when far more clear abuses of the DMCA are still going on.
I do wonder, though, why the EFF seems totally disinterested in challenging the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions. It seemed like DVDxCopy made a great test case, and the bullshit with the lexmark print drivers made an even better one. Have they just given up?
(P.S.: If I am not mistaken, isn't this the first time Apple has ever invoked the DMCA? There was that one time that someone was doing something wierd involving allowing iDVD to work on a different OS version, and Apple asked them to stop, and they did and went and complained to the press and made some cryptic comments about the DMCA, yet from what was seen of apple legal's correspondence with them there didn't actually appear to be any DMCA invocation. Hm.. oh well.)
the only time you have a problem is when some LiNuX d00d3r made a poor assumption
And unfortunately, it is the case that 90% of the software I would potentially want to run is written by short-sighted LiNuX d00d3rs with little concept of "other people have system configurations which are different from mine".
You haven't experienced pain until you have tried to compile KDE (or anything for that matter) on AIX 4.3.
To my intense relief, I have never had to compile anything at all on an AIX system.
Item 5: Stop making problems the user's fault. Let's just fix them.
Great quote. Somebody print that up t-shirts and pass them out at linux conferences...
5. Create at least one distribution in which in every single program, "copy" and "paste" are done in exactly the same way with exactly the same results 100% of the time.
6. Create at least one distribution in which every single scroll bar in the entire system looks the same.
7. No one ever has to think about the XF86Config file, ever.
8. There's a clear and obvious way to set and change your monitor resolution that works regardless of whether you know strange things about your monitor, or "scanlines", or the XF86Config file, and NO MATTER WHICH WM AND DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT YOU USE.
9. The way to set up a remote X session is clear and straightforward, and doesn't involve lots of poking at cryptic pages on google and headscratching trying to remember where you have to run Xauth or other such and whether you have forwarding enabled in your ssh_config , etc...
9a. No one ever gets the error message "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1", for any reason, ever. That's just not descriptive as an error, and it doesn't give you any indication what to do to fix it.
10. If I am on a linux machine, and there's another linux or unix machine somewhere or hopefully even something more exotic (like windows), I can connect to that machine and open up a file browser window displaying the files there and edit them and copy them back and forth, without having to read the Midnight Commander web page, without having to set up cryptic emacs/vi plugins, without having to think about "does this remote computer have ftp, samba, afp, nfs, or some combination thereof?".
11. Make a GUI manpage browser with scrollbars, and hyperlinks, and tables of contents for individual manpages, and the ability to quickly expand/collapse individual sections within the individual manpages, and quickly sorted/filtered browsing of the man -k / apropos database; and put this program where people know it exists and know what it is.
There was a time when saying you had a Sun meant you weren't just 1337, but respectable, a power user
I'd say that's already a lost battle. These days, "I've got a Sun" seems to elicit "Huh! That's kind of neat. Don't you spend all of your time trying to get seemingly trivial applications to compile, though?"
You're not much of a player anymore when you're trying to keep your head above water by selling commodity PCs.
Unless you're also the person who develops the most common implementation of the commodity OS that runs on the commodity PCs, and sells the "professional" version of the office software that all such PCs, including the ones made by other people, run. Then maybe you've got something. (And it doesn't hurt if this position means that you can, for example, get an actually good applet VM onto a majority of desktops, thus making your other products stronger.)
I don't know, but I think Sun wants the spot that Lindows covets and Redhat could have had (if they hadn't abandoned the consumer market).
Underling: Sir, there's a situation. I have good news and bad news.
Bill Gates: Alright, let me hear it.
Underling: The bad news is, someone has created an XBox emulator capable of playing a commercial game, and the public has become aware of it.
Bill Gates: Oh no! That's horrible! This could undermine H&E's entire business model! What's the good news?
Underling: The game is Turok Evolution.
Bill Gates: *Whew*
May 2005. Anyone else notice that that's about the middle of the indeterminate area that the PS3, GC2 and XBox2 are currently likely to be launched?
O Lucasarts give us this day our tie-ins, we are ready to recieve... -_-
What does Sun stand for, now?
Perhaps they just intend to attempt to defeat Microsoft in the marketplace and on the strength of their products, rather than in the courtroom?
Not that from looking at the public information they seem to have a terribly clear plan on how to do so, mind you, but it's a theory that settling their lawsuits would be in no way inconsistent with.
Apple Computer signed a similar "cross-licensing" agreement with Microsoft a number of years ago when they settled some lawsuits, and they seem perfectly capable of releasing all the open-source software they want. I think the IP crosslicensing is just a standard thing MS tries to do with companies they find they're in frequent mutual lawsuits with and there's nothing more sinister about it than preventing more incessant IP suits from flying between the two companies.
I don't think "lawyers" have anything to do with Sun not open sourcing Java's class libraries. I think Sun's failure to open source Java will continue to be, as it has been, just because there's no compelling reason from their perspective to do so.
Sun just hasn't given enough direct support to the open source community, and this recent event-- which seriously implies Microsoft may in some way in future have the ability to manipulate Java-- is the final straw, as anything Microsoft has their fingers in they'll find a way to twist to their ends. It's a good thing .NET doesn't have these problems.
...wait
Duke Nukem Forever was originally first described in a Bell Labs whitepaper personally written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in early 1970, just over 34 years ago. The whitepaper said that Duke Nukem Forever would run on Bell Labs' new UNIX system, and would be available "sometime before the end of the year". Bell started taking orders the next week, and the historic first order for DNF, by the U.S. patent office, was placed on that day. Eight months later, despite not yet being finished, Duke Nukem Forever was proclaimed "Game of the Year" by the October issue of the Association for Computing Machinery quarterly journal.
Since then the game has changed publishers and target platform numerous times, and changed intended game engines a stunning 57 times. Of the original five-man development team, two are still on the project, one currently holds a senior managerial position at Intel, and two are since dead. In 1995 when the original UNIX intellectual property block was licensed from Novell to SCO, the Duke Nukem Forever project was split off and separately sold to a company called 3D Realms, who still oversees it and currently publically states that DNF will be available "when it's done".
hammered home by the fact that SCO talked of adding a Linux compatibility layer to their UNIX product a few years back, but dropped it because it just would have been too difficult to impliment IIRC
You mean this? They don't seem to have "dropped" i, in fact they seem to be selling it...
Sorry no more responses allowed after this, or else I'll sue you for non-literal illiterate literation.
But then wouldn't you open yourself up to being countersued for illegal levels of litigious alliteration?
The links, if you follow them, just all go to generic OpenBSD pages.
Too bad, since this would be cool and probably isn't even that unrealistic. We've already got Linux for all three of the major tv consoles at the moment plus the Dreamcast...
And every year, said git is right.
The problem isn't that they take a day off for silliness. the problem is that the april fools jokes are consistently unbelievably lame. Humor with the element of surprise removed is...?
Maybe that will be /.s April Fools joke, no April Fools articles?
What a lovely dream.
What will we make fun of then?
Well, it is beginning to look like Infinium will be providing playable Phantom prototypes either at E3 in may, or not at all..
And then in November there's *cough* no, never mind, not going there..
IBM has finally started directing the case into those areas that they are strong in and SCO is weak in (facts) and out of those areas that SCO is strong in and IBM is weak in (baseless allegations and conjcture). As such, it seems very likely that they are about to (1) demonstrate themselves plowing over the SCO lawyers and (2) win.
The question I suppose would be asking is, whether this is a small thing or a small thing that the entire case turns out to hinge on, what happens to public perceptions once IBM starts winning?
SCO has been able to provide the illusion they are the lead in this even as IBM has taken them apart during the discovery phase. The media has more or less bought this. Once IBM starts leading, and IBM starts determining the path things will take in the courtroom, will the media notice? Will they see SCO's loss as the first of a number of losses? Will they just overlook the declaratory judgement, or will they note the declaratory judgement disproves quite a number of SCO's public claims, and start looking at ? Will their attitude change at all? Will their stock price change once the people who have been buying realize, oh hey, it's possible SCO might lose after all-- and, since their entire business right now is litigation, that would leave... oh wait...
Of course this probably won't instantly kill SCO's case. But if somehow it sets off a stock "correction", it might well instantly kill SCO. It isn't likely. But it's a nice dream.
A related question. I have been of late working with a Gentoo install. Once GNOME 2.6 is released, on what timescale will the 2.6 packages (and the new Epiphany, yum) show up in a normal emerge -u world? Like, are we talking minutes? Days? Weeks? Months?
When does the Gentoo community/coderbase tend to consider such things reading for unmasking?
past 15 years... Now, the while the cost of hardware continues to go down, the cost of software continues to go up. The number of people who are needed to build the massive applications to make use of 10 THz will be huge. Somebody's got to pay the damn programmers, right
Actually, my perception is that the price of software has gone up because before there was a relatively competitive market, and now most of the "bellweather" markets have been taken over by a monopoly with the ability to set its own prices.
The price raises I see for any other reason have been negligable. In fact, if you markets which Microsoft controls to the point where it can (and does) charge whatever it wants, there really doesn't seem to be coherent price movement in any consistent direction. Video games cost about the same.as they did when I was six despite over an order of magnitude more development complexity. Video editing and 3d rendering software... oh wait, we didn't have that at the consumer level 15 years ago. What's left? As far as I can tell it cost tens of thousands of dollars or something for a UNIX license 15 years ago, and tens of thousands of dollars or something for a departmental UNIX support contract from IBM today.
Yes, I know you said "discard Microsoft" but the fact is, you're talking about is something which stems from Microsoft wholly. "You should pay a lot more money for software these days" isn't reasonable, or a truth. It's just something Microsoft has convinced you of.
This isn't a Microsoft thing...this could easily be an IBM thing or an Adobe thing, etc
Interesting you mention IBM, because they, like Apple, are primarily working on the model right now of using hardware to drive software sales in a sort of "package" way that blends the line between the two-- you just buy a z390 or whatever and a support contract. But that isn't quite the process Gates is describing... or is it? When you get down to it, you can think of a mac as paying a couple thousand dollars to run OS X, and those $100 packages just being upgrades. I dont' know many people who buy G5s to run Linux.
...you do realize you just entirely failed to address a single one of the parent post's points, right?
I've used Swing on small projects, but never used GTK, Qt or GNUStep.
I had a job for part of which I spent about four or five months writing WxWindows. It seemed fairly easy to pick up, entirely reasonable as a development platform, and the quibbles I had with the functionality and documentation only came up a couple of times (one of the class docs was misleadingly written at one point, and one of the classes, WxListBox or something, turned out to only work on the Windows platform). Is Qt "better" than it? I wouldn't know. All I know is I had no objections to WxWindows whatsoever.
Most of the stuff I do is not GUI. However what I do all of my personal GUI development in is Cocoa, one of the two Mac OS X GUI libraries, which I consider as elegant, complete and (usually) well-documented as I could possibly imagine a GUI library to be. From my perspective, it is generally a joy to use. And, um, well, it doesn't cost me anything to use. The development tools came free with the OS. Now, given, I had to pay money for OS X itself, and anyone who uses my programs will have to have paid money for the OS as well. But, um, you know what? I don't really mind paying for the OS so much. Personally. I feel like I'm getting what I paid for there. And I CERTAINLY prefer paying money to use the OS and then getting dev tools and a lovely dev library that I can do anything I want with to either YOU WILL USE THE GPL PERIOD or having to pay, um, what appears to be a per-year, per-developer, per-platform fee of at least either $500 or $1500, i can't tell which, to develop software. What I'm currently getting just sounds like a better deal to me, so personally I'm going to stick with it.
(And since Cocoa is what GNUStep aims toward, who knows, if I really wanted to I think I could probably port my software to GNUStep without *too* much trouble. I know GNUStep is woefully incomplete, but this is why I mentioned it.)
But this is of course totally just my opinion. And it isn't entirely germane. But hey, you asked.
If they don't want to pay for a commercial QT license, they are in exactly the same boat that they would be if they wrote a GTK app; i.e., if they want to distribute, they have to distribute under GPL.
GTK has no such restriction. It is released under the LGPL.