> Algae essentially grow in 2d too. They only grow in the plane that the sun shines. Once you have an algae soup, only the top few cm get any light.
There is an engineering solution around that problem. I recommend you check out Solaroof, which is (much more than) a circulation system in which the algae-full water from a tank is pumped and circulated over the roof of a greenhouse. The idea is that the algae don't need permanent sunlight, but can rather be "activated" with short exposures to it, and then sent to the bottom of the pool, where they can continue with their metabolic cycle.
I have met the guy in a pub, and he made perfect sense. This may not be an industry worth setting up in Sweden, Siberia or New England, but I think it would be more than feasible in very sunny, semi-desertic places like you can find in Australia, Southern Spain, Morocco, Israel, Mexico...
> Stripped of "full service" firm inefficiencies and armed with cutting-edge technology, our clients' legal goals gets accomplished, not just discussed. Hard-hitting, high-tech litigation SWAT teams pose a greater threat to opponents than slow-moving bureaucracies, positioning our Clients' to win under the profession's customary BATNA analysis. Aggressive, attack-focused litigation encourages prompt, favorable outcomes while reducing our clients' business risk and saving time and money.
As someone has said above, the letter is major 0wnage. The RIAA vs the people is really an example of a litigation army versus guerrilla lawyers. The army may be getting some civilians along their path, but the guerrilla are winning every facedown.
I wasn't there, but I don't think you were either. So we both have to go by what What Noticias.com printed. This was (my translation):
Aguilera remarked that "there has been research" in a mobile phone through which one can "access information", as well as on "the way to extend the information society to less developed economies."
Translation is a bit stilted, but it is because I want to keep the boundaries of quotations in the original:
Aguilera ha señalado que "se ha investigado" en un teléfono móvil a través del cual se pueda "acceder a la información", además de en "la manera de extender la sociedad de la información en las economías menos desarrolladas"..
Nowhere in the article does it say Google people were working in "something related to cell phones" (which wouldn't be news, not after the iPhone presentation and their many mobile apps/sites/versions). In the article it says that research is being done "on a cell phone".
Did she say it? I guess nobody will know for sure but her and the reporter. Not that I have noticias.com dear in my heart, or that I will trust them farther than I can throw its director. However, Aguilera should know better than to fall in such a trap (and I am being charitable).
What strikes me is that Google never announces anything before they launch it, and they definitely never make press releases about products they are not thinking of doing. There is a lot of things they could be doing and they aren't, but you don't read press releases about them. "We are also not doing a portable hard disk with a Google mirror, or a fax that transmits pizzas."
Aguilera has forced Google's hand in a way unbecoming to a high executive. I don't think she will last long at the company.
> "Hecker also took Nintendo to task for not taking games seriously enough. "It's not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form," he said. To illustrate his point, he searched for references to games as art on all three console manufacturers web sites. While he found numerous such references on both the official PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sites, Wii.com had none at all.
Then again, if you follow games as art, you don't need to look up anywhere to know that Nintendo has published a retrospective of Toshio Iwai's seminal interactive toys for the DS under the name of Elektroplankton. If that is not taking the medium seriously enough, I don't know what is.
Thanks, but this still doesn't make the license not copyleft. I had already considered the GCC exception, or the GPL exception for system and compiler libraries (if you compile your GPL program for Windows with Visual Studio, you can though you are linking against a whole lot of non-free code).
Anyway, this is moot because I just answered my own question! Yesterday I was just too wasted to look properly, and asking on Slashdot was a lazy way out. Thanks a lot for trying to help, and thanks for the good work in general. I just noticed your URL, and I think the work you FSF Europe guys are doing on the software patent issue is awesome. I often send friends over to your webpage for a laff at the BSA's gaffe when they defined "Computer-Implemented Inventions" as "software patents".
Oops, yesterday I was a bit thick, I guess, because today I have found the GNU page in the Free Software Directory, so I am answering my own question.
These are all the GNU packages not under a copyleft license I have been able to verify. I have tried to err on the side of caution, which means all the packages listed here are GNU and not copyleft, but there might be some non-copyleft GNU packages that I have failed to list:
Kawa: licensed under the Kawa License, which is an X-11/MIT style license. Kawa is a Scheme/Emacs Lisp environment that runs on Java, in case you were wondering.
Ncurses, which is distributed under an X11-style license.
Proto, which is is a tool for finding C and C++ function prototypes (someone please explain to me what that means), in the Public Domain. This one is not downloadable from the GNU ftp, but I guess that, if they list it as a GNU project, it must be.
Quexo, xquery implementation using Kawa to compile to java bytecode. Under the Kawa license, which means an X11-style license.
Speex, an audio compression codec for voice, under the Xiph.org license (a modified BSD)
At least one other non-GNU programs is listed as being GNU on the directory, like Slib, a portable scheme library, which under a simple permissive non-warranty license.
In any case, if anyone else was wondering, well, you can stop wondering now.
Good point about Ogg Vorbis, but I don't think the GNU.org writer meant that. And the LGPL is to them a copyleft license, albeit minor. I will have to dig deeper.
It is the *licensor's* license to distribute (not the end user's right to use) which is terminated when said licensor brings a patent claim. Otherwise the article makes sense; I don't agree with her take on software patents, but it is pretty consistent with the received 'wisdom' among patent lawyers.
Except that most of Europe uses ISO-8859-something (or ISO-8859-1something), and many, many people still encode their documents with windows codepage 1250 (number pulled out of ass, mibht be a different one) or something similar.
I agree with you that UTF-8 sucks the less of any format for non-ascii latin characters, with the added benefit that it also does non-latin, but specifying it somewhere is really helpful. If only the ISO Latin-1something people and the windows codepage something people were equally nice about it.
I haven't even seen a Wiring board, so I am talking on hearsay, but wasn't the Wiring board too expensive? I think that is what gave Arduino the edge: it was simpler, but much cheaper. As to making the AtMega128 work with Wiring, do you mean the Wiring-hardware version of the Wiring/Arduino IDE+toolchain?
The basic Arduino board is really a reference board for the cheaper ATmega8 chip (8 bit only) coupled with the Wiring software IDE+toolchain (based on GCC). Best of both worlds in my opinion. Cheap, powerful, and blessed with a very actively developed IDE. A friend of mine teaches robotics to the 12-year-old "problem-kids" in his school, and they take to it like a fish to water.
The Wiring/Arduino language is a subset of C with a series of easy-peasy libraries, but you can also access the full C compiler if you need it. This way your students learn in an easy sandbox, but are not really confined to it, and can take their hardware expertise with them when they graduate to more complex projects.
I have not followed Arduino lately and don't know whether it already supports interrupts. Interrupts and ethernet are the only things I missed on it when I was tinkering with it a year ago.
The only embarrassment is in leaving out a closing tag for , for the rest of the comment he made total sense. Being shocked that someone thinks a stdout interface is what will get the job done (when a full-screen ncurses-like interface is where it's at, of course!) neatly parallells being shocked that someone thinks any text interface will get the job done (when a web 2.0 app is where it's at, of course!).
The bot could copy the image and present a copy to the porn-seekers. Hotlinking is not an issue, once the original webwerver has sent the image, it is just an image and can be copied and sent.
Cory Doctorow wrote some time ago about an umbeatable way to solve captchas: have a the captcha-circumventing bot connected to a free porn site, inline the images in the gateway pages to the photos and videos, and have the porn-seekers gain access by solving the images. They would have the same infrastructure that they would need if they used developing world click-workers, without the hassle of having to arrange payments.
If you had read Greg Egan's short story _The Hundred Light-Year Diary_ (it is in his book Axiomatic), your greatest fear would be getting messages from 25 years from now and getting nothing but "everything is fine, don't worry, just keep it going the way it is right now!". *shudder*
A friend of mine told me that in a city in India someone put a computer with a touch screen in a street corner in a poor neighbourhood, where the street boys could play with it. They learnt to do things very quickly, and they started giving names to what they saw. "Windows" were "Fields", and "Icons" were "Houses". The "Pointer" was a "Bird"... I wonder what would come of Interface design in the hands and minds of people with totally different cultural constraints.
I don't know anything more: the story sounds half-apocryphal to mee, and I apologise for its vagueness, but I still think it is relevant.
> Gestures might be a nice idea for the future. Perhaps you want to try to come up with a more detailed proposal on how this would work?
Actually, the gesture idea was about imitating the Hal interface completely, doing away with the WIMP metaphor. But some of its ideas could be used in the Gimp. The HAL has two modes, one for frame editing and another one for editing video clips. You toggle between modes by flicking the pen out either the side of the tablet. When in either mode, the tool pallette is invoked by flicking the pen out the top or the bottom edges of the tablet (which edge you use determines the placement of the pallete).
Maybe these flicks of the wrist/pen could be used for cycling between fullscreen and windowed modes, and for toggling visibility/invisibility of the tools pallette. This would make for a nice Hal-ified work setup when paired with a sane/useful config for the gamepad in the non-pen hand. Thankfully, Playstation pads and their PC clones are bilaterally symmetrical, so left-handers will have in this case the same pivileges as right-handers.
In my present design, a gamepad-to-midi interface needs three things above all, in order of priority. - copy/cut/paste/undo - modifier keys - selected shortcut keys
Plus possible gestures for the thumb-joystick, I am still thinking abot what to put there.
Incidentally, I might be able to write a good proposal if I knew whether something can work or not. This is one of the reasons why I am thinking about learning to code: the more I see software developers at work, the more I realise that prototyping is like sketching. You don't do mockups of previous ideas, but rather you find your idea by building it.
So I not only don't have a clear idea of what gestures to put in the thumb-joystick of the gamepad; I also fear it might turn out not to be such a good idea after all.
> AFAIK the interface is already abstracted away from the engine in preperation for GEGL, >... > I remember seeing some generalized device settings in the 2.3.12 preferences dialog, wonder if I can set up a gamepad...;)
All of this is great news. Last time I asked, modifier keys were not abstracted at all. I will update to Etch in a couple of months, so maybe their Gimp will come with that feature. A Spanish writer said that "God punishes us giving us what we ask for", so it might turn out that now I am so used to the Gimp that I don't like the compromises required in order to get the modifier keys in a more photoshoppy way.
> GIMP developers well writen bug reports/feature sugesitons should be best route outside of doing it yourself
You are right that I should write a decent bug report/feature suggestion on the abstraction of modifier keys; that would be enough to make Gimp more customisable for each user. I have a draft somewhere, which I started after meeting some Gimp devels at CCC last year... but life intervened, and I stopped.
As to setting up a gamepad, I have been thinking along the same lines, and I would probably have started if I could set modifier keys to it (shortcuts just aren't enough). I even got an adapter for my GC pad that turned out not to work well, and got sidetracked again (yes, I know).
My ideas for using a gamepad with the Gimp include gestures for the analog joystick (twiddle it clockwise or counterclockwise for slider value adjustments, draw glyphs for selecting rarely-used tools, etc). Also, the design of the Hal's joystick was completely sweet, and perfectly matched for the software features. The Hal is pretty minimalistic, and the left-hand joystick was not an option or an alternative: it was *the* interface, and the software had been designed with it in mind. I don't know if a Gimp/gamepad would work as well, mostly because the Gimp is designed with a keyboard in mind, and would require more gamepad switches than you can use with one hand.
> That's how software should be made, with a focus on what the user wants out of the software. > > Which user? You can't be everything to everyone. In this case, people editing photos very rarely have any need for drawing circles, and it's a bad idea to clutter the UI up with stuff that they aren't going to use much anyway.
This would be true if it weren't for Gimp's UI, which is completely modular and palletised. Sometimes you don't want to open a new application just to add a box with some text and a vectorial dingbat to a photo. A small vector mini-app that sits in its own tab in the tool pallette would be a very useful addition to those of us who miss it, and completely unobstrusive to those of us who will never need it.
Letting users drive the codebase is not always a good idea, and we all know Microsoft is particularly guilty of creeping featurism, but... there are cases where features are just plain good. The grandfather post's anecdote of the Excel team adding support for list and ad-hoc database management to their spreadsheet is a good example of good practices in user-centered software design.
Slashdot Mirror
> Algae essentially grow in 2d too. They only grow in the plane that the sun shines. Once you have an algae soup, only the top few cm get any light.
There is an engineering solution around that problem. I recommend you check out Solaroof, which is (much more than) a circulation system in which the algae-full water from a tank is pumped and circulated over the roof of a greenhouse. The idea is that the algae don't need permanent sunlight, but can rather be "activated" with short exposures to it, and then sent to the bottom of the pool, where they can continue with their metabolic cycle.
I have met the guy in a pub, and he made perfect sense. This may not be an industry worth setting up in Sweden, Siberia or New England, but I think it would be more than feasible in very sunny, semi-desertic places like you can find in Australia, Southern Spain, Morocco, Israel, Mexico...
Check out the copy from his website:
> Stripped of "full service" firm inefficiencies and armed with cutting-edge technology, our clients' legal goals gets accomplished, not just discussed. Hard-hitting, high-tech litigation SWAT teams pose a greater threat to opponents than slow-moving bureaucracies, positioning our Clients' to win under the profession's customary BATNA analysis. Aggressive, attack-focused litigation encourages prompt, favorable outcomes while reducing our clients' business risk and saving time and money.
As someone has said above, the letter is major 0wnage. The RIAA vs the people is really an example of a litigation army versus guerrilla lawyers. The army may be getting some civilians along their path, but the guerrilla are winning every facedown.
JJ:
I wasn't there, but I don't think you were either. So we both have to go by what What Noticias.com printed. This was (my translation):
Aguilera remarked that "there has been research" in a mobile phone through which one can "access information", as well as on "the way to extend the information society to less developed economies."
Translation is a bit stilted, but it is because I want to keep the boundaries of quotations in the original:
Aguilera ha señalado que "se ha investigado" en un teléfono móvil a través del cual se pueda "acceder a la información", además de en "la manera de extender la sociedad de la información en las economías menos desarrolladas"..
Nowhere in the article does it say Google people were working in "something related to cell phones" (which wouldn't be news, not after the iPhone presentation and their many mobile apps/sites/versions). In the article it says that research is being done "on a cell phone".
Did she say it? I guess nobody will know for sure but her and the reporter. Not that I have noticias.com dear in my heart, or that I will trust them farther than I can throw its director. However, Aguilera should know better than to fall in such a trap (and I am being charitable).
What strikes me is that Google never announces anything before they launch it, and they definitely never make press releases about products they are not thinking of doing. There is a lot of things they could be doing and they aren't, but you don't read press releases about them. "We are also not doing a portable hard disk with a Google mirror, or a fax that transmits pizzas."
Aguilera has forced Google's hand in a way unbecoming to a high executive. I don't think she will last long at the company.
> "Hecker also took Nintendo to task for not taking games seriously enough. "It's not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form," he said. To illustrate his point, he searched for references to games as art on all three console manufacturers web sites. While he found numerous such references on both the official PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sites, Wii.com had none at all.
Then again, if you follow games as art, you don't need to look up anywhere to know that Nintendo has published a retrospective of Toshio Iwai's seminal interactive toys for the DS under the name of Elektroplankton. If that is not taking the medium seriously enough, I don't know what is.
Thanks, but this still doesn't make the license not copyleft. I had already considered the GCC exception, or the GPL exception for system and compiler libraries (if you compile your GPL program for Windows with Visual Studio, you can though you are linking against a whole lot of non-free code).
Anyway, this is moot because I just answered my own question! Yesterday I was just too wasted to look properly, and asking on Slashdot was a lazy way out. Thanks a lot for trying to help, and thanks for the good work in general. I just noticed your URL, and I think the work you FSF Europe guys are doing on the software patent issue is awesome. I often send friends over to your webpage for a laff at the BSA's gaffe when they defined "Computer-Implemented Inventions" as "software patents".
These are all the GNU packages not under a copyleft license I have been able to verify. I have tried to err on the side of caution, which means all the packages listed here are GNU and not copyleft, but there might be some non-copyleft GNU packages that I have failed to list:
- Kawa: licensed under the Kawa License, which is an X-11/MIT style license. Kawa is a Scheme/Emacs Lisp environment that runs on Java, in case you were wondering.
- GNU less: the page says it is licensed under a SimplePermissiveNowarranty, but if you download the latest less tarball from ftp.gnu.org, you will find it is GPLd. However, older versions of less were non-copyleft, and they still are, as you can still download them.
- Ncurses, which is distributed under an X11-style license.
- Proto, which is is a tool for finding C and C++ function prototypes (someone please explain to me what that means), in the Public Domain. This one is not downloadable from the GNU ftp, but I guess that, if they list it as a GNU project, it must be.
- Quexo, xquery implementation using Kawa to compile to java bytecode. Under the Kawa license, which means an X11-style license.
- Speex, an audio compression codec for voice, under the Xiph.org license (a modified BSD)
At least one other non-GNU programs is listed as being GNU on the directory, like Slib, a portable scheme library, which under a simple permissive non-warranty license.In any case, if anyone else was wondering, well, you can stop wondering now.
Good point about Ogg Vorbis, but I don't think the GNU.org writer meant that. And the LGPL is to them a copyleft license, albeit minor. I will have to dig deeper.
Slightly offtopic: Yesterday, reading gnu.org, this bit of news jumped on me:
Most GNU software is copylefted, but not all; however, all GNU software must be free software.
Yes, I am surprised too. Any guess as to which piece of GNU software is under a non-copyleft license?
It is the *licensor's* license to distribute (not the end user's right to use) which is terminated when said licensor brings a patent claim. Otherwise the article makes sense; I don't agree with her take on software patents, but it is pretty consistent with the received 'wisdom' among patent lawyers.
Except that most of Europe uses ISO-8859-something (or ISO-8859-1something), and many, many people still encode their documents with windows codepage 1250 (number pulled out of ass, mibht be a different one) or something similar.
I agree with you that UTF-8 sucks the less of any format for non-ascii latin characters, with the added benefit that it also does non-latin, but specifying it somewhere is really helpful. If only the ISO Latin-1something people and the windows codepage something people were equally nice about it.
> Many larger corporations and governments are loathe to go with sole-source suppliers.
So why do they keep buying into a Microsoft Windows monoculture?
I haven't even seen a Wiring board, so I am talking on hearsay, but wasn't the Wiring board too expensive? I think that is what gave Arduino the edge: it was simpler, but much cheaper. As to making the AtMega128 work with Wiring, do you mean the Wiring-hardware version of the Wiring/Arduino IDE+toolchain?
I am Madrid-based and so is my friend, so his material is in Spanish.
He wrote an Arduino guide for teachers (Spanish) of high-school (I think it is for 13 and 14 year-olds), which you can also download in a big zipfile of doom.
His personal site is karamaku.info, any new develpment from him should appear there.
> The IDE now supports interrupts
I am a happy man now!
The basic Arduino board is really a reference board for the cheaper ATmega8 chip (8 bit only) coupled with the Wiring software IDE+toolchain (based on GCC). Best of both worlds in my opinion. Cheap, powerful, and blessed with a very actively developed IDE. A friend of mine teaches robotics to the 12-year-old "problem-kids" in his school, and they take to it like a fish to water.
The Wiring/Arduino language is a subset of C with a series of easy-peasy libraries, but you can also access the full C compiler if you need it. This way your students learn in an easy sandbox, but are not really confined to it, and can take their hardware expertise with them when they graduate to more complex projects.
I have not followed Arduino lately and don't know whether it already supports interrupts. Interrupts and ethernet are the only things I missed on it when I was tinkering with it a year ago.
The only embarrassment is in leaving out a closing tag for , for the rest of the comment he made total sense. Being shocked that someone thinks a stdout interface is what will get the job done (when a full-screen ncurses-like interface is where it's at, of course!) neatly parallells being shocked that someone thinks any text interface will get the job done (when a web 2.0 app is where it's at, of course!).
The bot could copy the image and present a copy to the porn-seekers. Hotlinking is not an issue, once the original webwerver has sent the image, it is just an image and can be copied and sent.
Cory Doctorow wrote some time ago about an umbeatable way to solve captchas: have a the captcha-circumventing bot connected to a free porn site, inline the images in the gateway pages to the photos and videos, and have the porn-seekers gain access by solving the images. They would have the same infrastructure that they would need if they used developing world click-workers, without the hassle of having to arrange payments.
For me it would be a toss-up betwween Sven's Co-op for Half-Life and Quake 2 in co-op mode.
Others would say it's a toss-up between Starcraft and Total Annihilation.
If you had read Greg Egan's short story _The Hundred Light-Year Diary_ (it is in his book Axiomatic), your greatest fear would be getting messages from 25 years from now and getting nothing but "everything is fine, don't worry, just keep it going the way it is right now!". *shudder*
Oh, thanks a lot! I should have said that in turning it into hearsay, I made it half-apocryphal.
And the links are really sweet. I wish I could spend my moderation points on your comment.
A friend of mine told me that in a city in India someone put a computer with a touch screen in a street corner in a poor neighbourhood, where the street boys could play with it. They learnt to do things very quickly, and they started giving names to what they saw. "Windows" were "Fields", and "Icons" were "Houses". The "Pointer" was a "Bird"... I wonder what would come of Interface design in the hands and minds of people with totally different cultural constraints.
I don't know anything more: the story sounds half-apocryphal to mee, and I apologise for its vagueness, but I still think it is relevant.
> Gestures might be a nice idea for the future. Perhaps you want to try to come up with a more detailed proposal on how this would work?
Actually, the gesture idea was about imitating the Hal interface completely, doing away with the WIMP metaphor. But some of its ideas could be used in the Gimp. The HAL has two modes, one for frame editing and another one for editing video clips. You toggle between modes by flicking the pen out either the side of the tablet. When in either mode, the tool pallette is invoked by flicking the pen out the top or the bottom edges of the tablet (which edge you use determines the placement of the pallete).
Maybe these flicks of the wrist/pen could be used for cycling between fullscreen and windowed modes, and for toggling visibility/invisibility of the tools pallette. This would make for a nice Hal-ified work setup when paired with a sane/useful config for the gamepad in the non-pen hand. Thankfully, Playstation pads and their PC clones are bilaterally symmetrical, so left-handers will have in this case the same pivileges as right-handers.
In my present design, a gamepad-to-midi interface needs three things above all, in order of priority.
- copy/cut/paste/undo
- modifier keys
- selected shortcut keys
Plus possible gestures for the thumb-joystick, I am still thinking abot what to put there.
Incidentally, I might be able to write a good proposal if I knew whether something can work or not. This is one of the reasons why I am thinking about learning to code: the more I see software developers at work, the more I realise that prototyping is like sketching. You don't do mockups of previous ideas, but rather you find your idea by building it.
So I not only don't have a clear idea of what gestures to put in the thumb-joystick of the gamepad; I also fear it might turn out not to be such a good idea after all.
> AFAIK the interface is already abstracted away from the engine in preperation for GEGL, ... ;)
>
> I remember seeing some generalized device settings in the 2.3.12 preferences dialog, wonder if I can set up a gamepad...
All of this is great news. Last time I asked, modifier keys were not abstracted at all. I will update to Etch in a couple of months, so maybe their Gimp will come with that feature. A Spanish writer said that "God punishes us giving us what we ask for", so it might turn out that now I am so used to the Gimp that I don't like the compromises required in order to get the modifier keys in a more photoshoppy way.
> GIMP developers well writen bug reports/feature sugesitons should be best route outside of doing it yourself
You are right that I should write a decent bug report/feature suggestion on the abstraction of modifier keys; that would be enough to make Gimp more customisable for each user. I have a draft somewhere, which I started after meeting some Gimp devels at CCC last year... but life intervened, and I stopped.
As to setting up a gamepad, I have been thinking along the same lines, and I would probably have started if I could set modifier keys to it (shortcuts just aren't enough). I even got an adapter for my GC pad that turned out not to work well, and got sidetracked again (yes, I know).
My ideas for using a gamepad with the Gimp include gestures for the analog joystick (twiddle it clockwise or counterclockwise for slider value adjustments, draw glyphs for selecting rarely-used tools, etc). Also, the design of the Hal's joystick was completely sweet, and perfectly matched for the software features. The Hal is pretty minimalistic, and the left-hand joystick was not an option or an alternative: it was *the* interface, and the software had been designed with it in mind. I don't know if a Gimp/gamepad would work as well, mostly because the Gimp is designed with a keyboard in mind, and would require more gamepad switches than you can use with one hand.
> That's how software should be made, with a focus on what the user wants out of the software.
>
> Which user? You can't be everything to everyone. In this case, people editing photos very rarely have any need for drawing circles, and it's a bad idea to clutter the UI up with stuff that they aren't going to use much anyway.
This would be true if it weren't for Gimp's UI, which is completely modular and palletised. Sometimes you don't want to open a new application just to add a box with some text and a vectorial dingbat to a photo. A small vector mini-app that sits in its own tab in the tool pallette would be a very useful addition to those of us who miss it, and completely unobstrusive to those of us who will never need it.
Letting users drive the codebase is not always a good idea, and we all know Microsoft is particularly guilty of creeping featurism, but... there are cases where features are just plain good. The grandfather post's anecdote of the Excel team adding support for list and ad-hoc database management to their spreadsheet is a good example of good practices in user-centered software design.