The first one really pissed me off, because he actually bent my bumper.
What you do is you get one of those 3" tube bumper setups like I did for my Trooper. Yeah, they make you look like a wannabee poseur -- but you can plow into one of these little unibodies, bend it double, back out, touch up the paint a bit, and drive off. Pretty damned good investment, actually.
Re:The Failing of Democracy, Capitalism as Governm
on
The Perils Of E-Voting
·
· Score: 1
what if the majority decides that black men should work for free, or that we should have a state religion?
That's not devil's advocacy at all. Precisely that happened in Germany early this century. Perhaps you have heard of the "Nazi" party?
Just substitute "Jew" for "black" and "Teutonic mystical babble" for "religion"...
This is why we have constitutions, so that we have *limited* democracy, not true democracy. True democracy is best defined as 'three wolves and a sheep voting on who's for dinner'.
Hmm, locally stored key, local player, whip out the debugger... bingo, auto unlocker.
not quite... locally stored key generated from machine key + song key at purchase time. Auto unlocker for that particular song yes, not for any other.
I supppppose you could build a shared db of the decoded song keys somehow. But why on earth would you bother to go to that much effort when just redirecting the sound output through a capture driver is so much easier?
One continuing problem raised throughout the evolution of online music, however, is the complaint that the major record labels have not been willing to license online music distributors to provide their music, or have offered licenses on terms much different than online entities related to those labels. While I do not think that copyright owners have any general duty to license their products to others, a complete lack of licensing puts in question the labels' professed desire to be ubiquitous, and a policy of merely cross-licensing among major label-related entities might raise some competition concerns that this committee would have a duty to consider.
Working at a company with their own take on selling music online, I can attest here that Sen. Hatch is so right. The major labels are in complete Fear-And-Loathing denial mode of what online distribution means to their business model (at a corporate level, I hasten to add; individual employees are often very savvy indeed) and after a few months of watching developments, I've come to the conclusion that the existing labels need to be Amazoned by somebody who gets online distribution before they start acting sensible on their own.
Oops - looks like some errant transmission! Looks like we better call her as soon as possible and let her know what happened:)
I just did. Sure 'nuff, that number gets me the voice mail of Sue Runfola. Hmmm. If this is a fake, someone went to a fair bit of effort to get the background right!
None of your examples are rumours, they're just projects that never came to fruition.
How about the 10 year+ one that Apple had System 7 running on 486 hardware?
'Star Trek'. It did and I saw it when Apple was trying to get Chancery to not jump ship for Windows.
Or that Sun/Oracle was going to buy...
Both were discussed seriously by management with those two companies when they were flirting with the idea of entering the mass market space. Oracle's was much more serious, but they ended up going with... with... with something that wasn't as good an idea as buying Apple, anyway.
Or Copland/Gershwin...
Still have a Copland DR1 disc kicking around somewhere, I believe. It sucked.
An Apple-extended gcc is what builds OS X. Project Builder is the looks-too-damn-much-like-VC++ IDE front end to it.
Is one likely to ship with OSX?
There will almost certainly be no standard BSD kit shipping on the Consumer distribution CDs. It will almost as certainly be a free download in the same fashion as MPW is now, since it is the development environment, as mentioned above.
Can the gui (shell?) be altered to make an OSX desktop look like, for example, KDE? Is there support for themes, and does the word themes even apply?
Officially no... but Aqua is itself basically one big theme file; if you remove it (or even switch resolutions on the fly;) you get a DP2-ish Platinum appearance. I deduce that theme implementation will not be a particularly challenging task. Check with the Kaleidoscope fellows.
I'd love to be able to run OSX on my P3 machine
Give it up. Apple makes money on hardware. It is remotely possible you will see specific preconfigured x86 systems, but there will be no shrinkwrap OS X for Intel. Ever. Anyone who thinks different (hee hee) either is utterly ignorant of Apple's business model, or is on crack.
Now, the open-source Darwin runs on Intel. But Quartz, Cocoa, etc. won't. Even Yellow Box for Windows is being EOLd in September, which I think is a mistake, but whatever.
Is there a particularly good Mac site I can get this information from
Microsoft has been much, much more sneaky than that. Microsoft has, since the late 1980s, expressly targeted the "influential end user" (their term) and particularly software developers.
Longer than that. I've been a paid-up Apple Developer since 1984, and I can remember three separate occassions that stacks of Windows programming CDs and offers of free membership in their online networks, developer organizations, etc. arrived unsolicited. A lot of people contrasted this extremely favorably with the pay-through-the-nose for Developer status and then again for AppleLink attitude that Apple had at the time.
Me, I thought it was great. This was before the days when AOL shipped you all the free coasters you needed, so I thought it was very nice of MSFT to help protect my furniture like that.
But while people like you insist on "comfort" over results, this industry will remain full of lazy, irresponsible "geeks".
Speaking as one of these Lazy Irresponsible Geeks(tm), I have to ask... since I have a salary in the top 3% of tax filers nationwide, while dressing worse than street panners and fitting your description perfectly (heh, posting on/. at 11:03 AM, for starters;) -- why the HELL would I want to change a damned thing?
A revision of the GPL would be a good opportunity to shield open source authors from the increasing threat posed by software patents.
On the other hand, look how pissy RMS gets over the patent litigation provisions in the APSL, which Apple's lawyers stand firm on as the minimum that could possibly shield Apple from de facto contempt of court in case litigation ever does arise.
How he thinks that the shareholders/board members of Apple would ever stand for something that left Apple as open to legal attack as the pure GPL would, I dunno...
I develop a GPL'd product for the MacOS which uses PowerPlant, a proprietary toolkit. But my program is perfectly legal to distribute. How, you ask? Because I add the following to the license...
Actually, that doesn't cut it, because that exception is fairly obviously (OD: IANAL) a restriction of the GPL as defined in section 6. It works as long as nobody adds anything non-original to your distribution, true 'nuff... but nobody can add any GPLd code to Millenium's-Almost-But-Not-Quite-GPLd code without falling afoul of GPL 2b) again... because PowerPlant is part of the whole, and although you can certainly grant an exception for your own Not-Quite-GPLd code, you can't grant an exception for anyone else's GPLd code.
So... this accomplishes nothing, really, other than setting up Yet Another Schism, between The Real GPL(tm) code and Millenium's GPL Except For PowerPlant(tm) code.
I'm also quite mystified why on earth you think it's sensible to make whatever this PowerPlant-based project is GPL anyway, since that very basis would seem to make it philosophically unacceptable to anyone who thinks the GPL is a useful license.
Let's face it, basing GPL code on non-GPL frameworks is a pretty bloody straightforward violation of the spirit of the GPL, isn't it now? Whether you can come up with sneaky interpretations to pretend to justify it, the fact remains is that it is not part of RMS's political manifesto, as anyone who thinks about it for a minute rather than scurry around trying to twist the GPL until a loophole appears will realize.
In my opinion, whoever came up with "data" and "resource" forks in Mac OS was an idiot.
That's because you misunderstand the problem space of the original Macintosh design. The Resource Manager was a rather elegant way to gain most of the benefits of virtual memory with no physical resource cost and a reasonably minimal runtime overhead. On a single 400k floppy 8 MHz 68000 with 22K of usuable RAM, coming up with the Resource Manager was not idiotic. Perhaps not an act of utter genius, but somewhat clever at the very least, I would think.
I conclude that Unix/Linux needs either a new executable format that will allow for standardized resource embedding...
That's a great idea! We call them "Packages" in OS X. Help yourself to the design. We don't mind, really.
Transparent and flawless? I guess you've never talked to anybody who went through the 68K/PPC conversion kicking and screaming, eh?
Actually, I made a lot of money cleaning up after those idiots.
Programs I wrote in 1984 compile perfectly today. Anyone who followed Apple's rules for compatibility, which are 95% unchanged since the days when Inside Macintosh came in three-ring binders (I'm pretty much as old-school as a Mac developer gets) didn't have any significant problems then, and hasn't upgrading to Carbon today.
Now, before people jump all over me about API limitations, yes I realize that there's a lot of places where jobs have to be done in a non-compatible fashion. That's holding me up Carbonizing right now because all four projects I'm responsible for at my day job do CD ripping and there's no OS X equivalent of DV 22 yet. But if you were smart enough to ISOLATE those portions of the code which you knew would eventually be a problem, replacing them was straightforward then and is straightforward now. Well, will be once I get the new APIs anyway, I imagine.
So, to turn your question back... guess you've never talked to any Mac OS developer with a CLUE, eh?
Obviously nobody! That's why not a single line of code has been touched! It still runs only on Mac OS X Server like release 1.0 did! All those people are delusional that think they're running the FreeBSD 3.4 port! Or the Red Hat Linux 6.2 port! Or the Solaris 7 port! Or the Windows NT/2K port!! Or a number of others that are in progress, but I trust the point is made sufficiently.
What's the incentive?
Well, that's such a stupid question it should be marked "Troll" at best, isn't it? Obviously contributors want to benefit from the improvements made. In the above case, the revenue model of providing a streaming broadcast service on the hw of their choice is obvious to the point of triviality, as we can see from the number of companies springing up based on precisely that.
My guess is there will be little return on investment on these projects, and will therefore be unattractive to the software companies.
That's a pretty embarrasingly silly guess, given that companies are basing their business model on the use of exactly that, as just mentioned...
I believe that the "gated community" model is destined for/dev/null.
Well, anything's possible, I suppose. But your belief is directly contradicted by the factual evidence to date, so I'd consider it pretty unlikely.
When he got his Royal Society of Arts Medal for Achievement in Design he went on at some length about the technical requirements of his designs. Relevant to this discussion are that the iMac shape was made squatter so that hot air would circulate quicker, and vents pepper the handle so it has someplace to go. The design of the motherboard was also redone to place heat producers in appropriate locations for stimulating circulation. It was quite a bitch all around, really. But what Steve wants, Steve gets. Or else.
So... at the very least, it's not terribly likely that a company that doesn't design both its motherboards and enclosures, like Apple, is going to be able to compete on this particular front, even if everybody does start using Transmeta chips.
...is that the 'Digital Revolution' should really be called the 'Efficiency Revolution'.
Let us consider the inventions he mentions as significant. Electricity, internal combustion engine, chemistry, mass media, plumbing. Without CAD, without JIT distribution networks, without instant communication, without molecular modelling, how far and how fast would any of these have developed and actually have been brought to the people? (Note that about a third of the world's population still does not have *either* running water or electricity on demand.)
The real digital 'revolution' is simply efficiency. We communicate faster, we calculate faster, we model consequences better, we design more quickly, we use less people to perform a given job. Thus the effects of the digital revolution are not anything attributable to a specific technology, they are simply that everything ELSE gets better faster than it would have otherwise.
I think what a lot of people seem to miss about the Internet is that, quite simply, people are not going to be making the staggering amounts of money that they currently make
Indeed. Contrary to conventional opinion about the free market being an apologia for exploitation and massive profits, Adam Smith consistently maintained that profits were proof of inefficiencies and/or market breakdown, and in a perfectly free and efficient market profits would be zero as all products and services would be priced at exactly their cost of provision. As the Internet is the freest and most efficient market ever created, profits to be sustainably extracted from it will inevitably turn out to be lower than in any other portion of the economy.
The wild card here is that the underlying technology is improving so fast that new ecosystems arise out of nothing constantly, and the colonizers of these new ecosystems extract the windfall profits that successful pioneers always do. To date this has almost completely masked the underlying efficiencies and therefore lack of long-term profitability, but sooner or later it will become obvious.
For our secure MP3 product MPE we had to satisfy the record companies who want something unbreakable while keeping it efficient enough for a player to decode on the fly. Management would probably get upset if I discussed it in detail, but it's probably not letting the cat out of the bag too much to disclose that it is a publicly available and fairly extensively studied algorithm that has never been broken, so we're pretty darn confident that it's more than secure enough for its purpose.
People will steal anything that's not nailed down...
And if you can pry it up, it's not nailed down!
Seriously now, RMS says that he copies music without a problem... so why on earth should the rest of us respect the copyright-based restrictions on GPL code any more than he respects the copyright-based restrictions on music? None of the other GPL zealots around here seem to have any cognitive dissonance with advocating music piracy in pretty much the same breath as advocating enforcing the GPL either, for that matter. Odd, isn't it?
Anyway, I do a lot of porting work, and from what I see all source code that's made public gets used in commercial software no matter WHAT license happens to be attached it. I don't make a fuss about it, I just pretend I don't know what I'm looking at. Life's too short to try to change human nature, and hey, I'm just in this for the money:)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that MW has the coolest shirts of any programming environment on any platform.
:)
"KICKING ASS AND WRITING CODE" -- that one, like, actually *attracts* chicks. At least it's good for a laugh
"BLOOD SWEAT CODE" -- wearing it right now, baby.
Et cetera
The first one really pissed me off, because he actually bent my bumper.
What you do is you get one of those 3" tube bumper setups like I did for my Trooper. Yeah, they make you look like a wannabee poseur -- but you can plow into one of these little unibodies, bend it double, back out, touch up the paint a bit, and drive off. Pretty damned good investment, actually.
what if the majority decides that black men should work for free, or that we should have a state religion?
That's not devil's advocacy at all. Precisely that happened in Germany early this century. Perhaps you have heard of the "Nazi" party?
Just substitute "Jew" for "black" and "Teutonic mystical babble" for "religion"...
This is why we have constitutions, so that we have *limited* democracy, not true democracy. True democracy is best defined as 'three wolves and a sheep voting on who's for dinner'.
Hmm, locally stored key, local player, whip out the debugger... bingo, auto unlocker.
... locally stored key generated from machine key + song key at purchase time. Auto unlocker for that particular song yes, not for any other.
not quite
I supppppose you could build a shared db of the decoded song keys somehow. But why on earth would you bother to go to that much effort when just redirecting the sound output through a capture driver is so much easier?
One continuing problem raised throughout the evolution of online music, however, is the complaint that the major record labels have not been willing to license online music distributors to provide their music, or have offered licenses on terms much different than online entities related to those labels. While I do not think that copyright owners have any general duty to license their products to others, a complete lack of licensing puts in question the labels' professed desire to be ubiquitous, and a policy of merely cross-licensing among major label-related entities might raise some competition concerns that this committee would have a duty to consider.
Working at a company with their own take on selling music online, I can attest here that Sen. Hatch is so right. The major labels are in complete Fear-And-Loathing denial mode of what online distribution means to their business model (at a corporate level, I hasten to add; individual employees are often very savvy indeed) and after a few months of watching developments, I've come to the conclusion that the existing labels need to be Amazoned by somebody who gets online distribution before they start acting sensible on their own.
Oops - looks like some errant transmission! Looks like we better call her as soon as possible and let her know what happened :)
I just did. Sure 'nuff, that number gets me the voice mail of Sue Runfola. Hmmm. If this is a fake, someone went to a fair bit of effort to get the background right!
Unfullfilled rumors in the Mac world???
... with ... with something that wasn't as good an idea as buying Apple, anyway.
None of your examples are rumours, they're just projects that never came to fruition.
How about the 10 year+ one that Apple had System 7 running on 486 hardware?
'Star Trek'. It did and I saw it when Apple was trying to get Chancery to not jump ship for Windows.
Or that Sun/Oracle was going to buy...
Both were discussed seriously by management with those two companies when they were flirting with the idea of entering the mass market space. Oracle's was much more serious, but they ended up going with
Or Copland/Gershwin...
Still have a Copland DR1 disc kicking around somewhere, I believe. It sucked.
Could I use a free compiler a la gcc on OSX?
... but Aqua is itself basically one big theme file; if you remove it (or even switch resolutions on the fly ;) you get a DP2-ish Platinum appearance. I deduce that theme implementation will not be a particularly challenging task. Check with the Kaleidoscope fellows.
An Apple-extended gcc is what builds OS X. Project Builder is the looks-too-damn-much-like-VC++ IDE front end to it.
Is one likely to ship with OSX?
There will almost certainly be no standard BSD kit shipping on the Consumer distribution CDs. It will almost as certainly be a free download in the same fashion as MPW is now, since it is the development environment, as mentioned above.
Can the gui (shell?) be altered to make an OSX desktop look like, for example, KDE? Is there support for themes, and does the word themes even apply?
Officially no
I'd love to be able to run OSX on my P3 machine
Give it up. Apple makes money on hardware. It is remotely possible you will see specific preconfigured x86 systems, but there will be no shrinkwrap OS X for Intel. Ever. Anyone who thinks different (hee hee) either is utterly ignorant of Apple's business model, or is on crack.
Now, the open-source Darwin runs on Intel. But Quartz, Cocoa, etc. won't. Even Yellow Box for Windows is being EOLd in September, which I think is a mistake, but whatever.
Is there a particularly good Mac site I can get this information from
You could always try the mothership.
Microsoft has been much, much more sneaky than that. Microsoft has, since the late 1980s, expressly targeted the "influential end user" (their term) and particularly software developers.
Longer than that. I've been a paid-up Apple Developer since 1984, and I can remember three separate occassions that stacks of Windows programming CDs and offers of free membership in their online networks, developer organizations, etc. arrived unsolicited. A lot of people contrasted this extremely favorably with the pay-through-the-nose for Developer status and then again for AppleLink attitude that Apple had at the time.
Me, I thought it was great. This was before the days when AOL shipped you all the free coasters you needed, so I thought it was very nice of MSFT to help protect my furniture like that.
...with an even more silly one :)
;)
That was my first reaction...
...then I realized "wait a minute, he's RIGHT! Ain't it GREAT!??!!?"
But while people like you insist on "comfort" over results, this industry will remain full of lazy, irresponsible "geeks".
... since I have a salary in the top 3% of tax filers nationwide, while dressing worse than street panners and fitting your description perfectly (heh, posting on /. at 11:03 AM, for starters ;) -- why the HELL would I want to change a damned thing?
Speaking as one of these Lazy Irresponsible Geeks(tm), I have to ask
Mod this up. That's a cool book I had not previously been aware of, and I consider myself reasonably well-informed in libertarian thought.
A revision of the GPL would be a good opportunity to shield open source authors from the increasing threat posed by software patents.
...
On the other hand, look how pissy RMS gets over the patent litigation provisions in the APSL, which Apple's lawyers stand firm on as the minimum that could possibly shield Apple from de facto contempt of court in case litigation ever does arise.
How he thinks that the shareholders/board members of Apple would ever stand for something that left Apple as open to legal attack as the pure GPL would, I dunno
I develop a GPL'd product for the MacOS which uses PowerPlant, a proprietary toolkit. But my program is perfectly legal to distribute. How, you ask? Because I add the following to the license...
... but nobody can add any GPLd code to Millenium's-Almost-But-Not-Quite-GPLd code without falling afoul of GPL 2b) again ... because PowerPlant is part of the whole, and although you can certainly grant an exception for your own Not-Quite-GPLd code, you can't grant an exception for anyone else's GPLd code.
... this accomplishes nothing, really, other than setting up Yet Another Schism, between The Real GPL(tm) code and Millenium's GPL Except For PowerPlant(tm) code.
Actually, that doesn't cut it, because that exception is fairly obviously (OD: IANAL) a restriction of the GPL as defined in section 6. It works as long as nobody adds anything non-original to your distribution, true 'nuff
So
I'm also quite mystified why on earth you think it's sensible to make whatever this PowerPlant-based project is GPL anyway, since that very basis would seem to make it philosophically unacceptable to anyone who thinks the GPL is a useful license.
Let's face it, basing GPL code on non-GPL frameworks is a pretty bloody straightforward violation of the spirit of the GPL, isn't it now? Whether you can come up with sneaky interpretations to pretend to justify it, the fact remains is that it is not part of RMS's political manifesto, as anyone who thinks about it for a minute rather than scurry around trying to twist the GPL until a loophole appears will realize.
Actually, how fast have the PC emulators gotten? I never tried VirtualPC before.
My completely subjective feeling is that VPC on a G4/450 is roughly as snappy as a P166, maybe a P233. Good enough for everything I need it for.
In my opinion, whoever came up with "data" and "resource" forks in Mac OS was an idiot.
That's because you misunderstand the problem space of the original Macintosh design. The Resource Manager was a rather elegant way to gain most of the benefits of virtual memory with no physical resource cost and a reasonably minimal runtime overhead. On a single 400k floppy 8 MHz 68000 with 22K of usuable RAM, coming up with the Resource Manager was not idiotic. Perhaps not an act of utter genius, but somewhat clever at the very least, I would think.
I conclude that Unix/Linux needs either a new executable format that will allow for standardized resource embedding...
That's a great idea! We call them "Packages" in OS X. Help yourself to the design. We don't mind, really.
Transparent and flawless? I guess you've never talked to anybody who went through the 68K/PPC conversion kicking and screaming, eh?
... guess you've never talked to any Mac OS developer with a CLUE, eh?
Actually, I made a lot of money cleaning up after those idiots.
Programs I wrote in 1984 compile perfectly today. Anyone who followed Apple's rules for compatibility, which are 95% unchanged since the days when Inside Macintosh came in three-ring binders (I'm pretty much as old-school as a Mac developer gets) didn't have any significant problems then, and hasn't upgrading to Carbon today.
Now, before people jump all over me about API limitations, yes I realize that there's a lot of places where jobs have to be done in a non-compatible fashion. That's holding me up Carbonizing right now because all four projects I'm responsible for at my day job do CD ripping and there's no OS X equivalent of DV 22 yet. But if you were smart enough to ISOLATE those portions of the code which you knew would eventually be a problem, replacing them was straightforward then and is straightforward now. Well, will be once I get the new APIs anyway, I imagine.
So, to turn your question back
If your foundation is not stable, then anything you build will also be unstable. I feel this to be the case with this filesystem.
How do you explain it having worked transparently and flawlessly for Lisa/Mac users since 1983 through four major revisions then? Hmmmm?
So, a "gated community" project is established, announced, and initialized.
/dev/null.
Like Darwin Streaming Server perchance?
Who is going to contribute?
Obviously nobody! That's why not a single line of code has been touched! It still runs only on Mac OS X Server like release 1.0 did! All those people are delusional that think they're running the FreeBSD 3.4 port! Or the Red Hat Linux 6.2 port! Or the Solaris 7 port! Or the Windows NT/2K port!! Or a number of others that are in progress, but I trust the point is made sufficiently.
What's the incentive?
Well, that's such a stupid question it should be marked "Troll" at best, isn't it? Obviously contributors want to benefit from the improvements made. In the above case, the revenue model of providing a streaming broadcast service on the hw of their choice is obvious to the point of triviality, as we can see from the number of companies springing up based on precisely that.
My guess is there will be little return on investment on these projects, and will therefore be unattractive to the software companies.
That's a pretty embarrasingly silly guess, given that companies are basing their business model on the use of exactly that, as just mentioned...
I believe that the "gated community" model is destined for
Well, anything's possible, I suppose. But your belief is directly contradicted by the factual evidence to date, so I'd consider it pretty unlikely.
...is that Jonathan Ive is a god of design :)
... at the very least, it's not terribly likely that a company that doesn't design both its motherboards and enclosures, like Apple, is going to be able to compete on this particular front, even if everybody does start using Transmeta chips.
When he got his Royal Society of Arts Medal for Achievement in Design he went on at some length about the technical requirements of his designs. Relevant to this discussion are that the iMac shape was made squatter so that hot air would circulate quicker, and vents pepper the handle so it has someplace to go. The design of the motherboard was also redone to place heat producers in appropriate locations for stimulating circulation. It was quite a bitch all around, really. But what Steve wants, Steve gets. Or else.
So
...is that the 'Digital Revolution' should really be called the 'Efficiency Revolution'.
Let us consider the inventions he mentions as significant. Electricity, internal combustion engine, chemistry, mass media, plumbing. Without CAD, without JIT distribution networks, without instant communication, without molecular modelling, how far and how fast would any of these have developed and actually have been brought to the people? (Note that about a third of the world's population still does not have *either* running water or electricity on demand.)
The real digital 'revolution' is simply efficiency. We communicate faster, we calculate faster, we model consequences better, we design more quickly, we use less people to perform a given job. Thus the effects of the digital revolution are not anything attributable to a specific technology, they are simply that everything ELSE gets better faster than it would have otherwise.
I think what a lot of people seem to miss about the Internet is that, quite simply, people are not going to be making the staggering amounts of money that they currently make
;)
Indeed. Contrary to conventional opinion about the free market being an apologia for exploitation and massive profits, Adam Smith consistently maintained that profits were proof of inefficiencies and/or market breakdown, and in a perfectly free and efficient market profits would be zero as all products and services would be priced at exactly their cost of provision. As the Internet is the freest and most efficient market ever created, profits to be sustainably extracted from it will inevitably turn out to be lower than in any other portion of the economy.
The wild card here is that the underlying technology is improving so fast that new ecosystems arise out of nothing constantly, and the colonizers of these new ecosystems extract the windfall profits that successful pioneers always do. To date this has almost completely masked the underlying efficiencies and therefore lack of long-term profitability, but sooner or later it will become obvious.
Conclusion: Ride the wave, sell out early
For our secure MP3 product MPE we had to satisfy the record companies who want something unbreakable while keeping it efficient enough for a player to decode on the fly. Management would probably get upset if I discussed it in detail, but it's probably not letting the cat out of the bag too much to disclose that it is a publicly available and fairly extensively studied algorithm that has never been broken, so we're pretty darn confident that it's more than secure enough for its purpose.
People will steal anything that's not nailed down...
... so why on earth should the rest of us respect the copyright-based restrictions on GPL code any more than he respects the copyright-based restrictions on music? None of the other GPL zealots around here seem to have any cognitive dissonance with advocating music piracy in pretty much the same breath as advocating enforcing the GPL either, for that matter. Odd, isn't it?
:)
And if you can pry it up, it's not nailed down!
Seriously now, RMS says that he copies music without a problem
Anyway, I do a lot of porting work, and from what I see all source code that's made public gets used in commercial software no matter WHAT license happens to be attached it. I don't make a fuss about it, I just pretend I don't know what I'm looking at. Life's too short to try to change human nature, and hey, I'm just in this for the money
But they definitely have to do something about the "system requirements" for the Desktop Partner.
... they're trying. Look for the message I just posted about them looking for programmers. Specifically, me, but they mentioned Linux too.
Ah