I've been following Mozilla since the beginning, and downloading almost every milestone. But I kept using IE; it just wasn't enough.
When I heard about Phoenix I was moderately interested, but I didn't want a cut-down version (since the full Mozilla obviously wasn't enough for me), so I waited until 0.2 -- and the day I downloaded it, I turned off IE, and haven't used it since.
I can't answer _why_ I prefer it so much. I just _do_. It starts up fast enough, is incredibly easy to use in the ways I want to use it -- the only thing I missed at first was type-ahead find, and with the latest version I even have that.
I don't think Phoenix is cut-down from Mozilla Navigator at all; its size is dramatically smaller, which makes it start faster, but its functionality is right up there.
I don't know exactly why Phoenix was able to immediately replace IE for me when Mozilla never had. But it did, and I'm glad.
That's a common theory, but Tolkien said in one of his letters that Elves didn't repeat names -- when he was asked about this specific one he reiterated the rule, and had to admit that it was a hole.
He never precisely explained, but I recall there being a letter in which he speculated about rebirth or resurrection having been the cause (he used resurrection elsewhere).
An excellent question; I started wondering whether she'd be in it when I first watched the movie. The reason I did that is that Aragorn didn't seem to get Narsil reforged in FOTR (as he did in the book).
I just finished watching the extended edition (whew, LONG movie, very very worth it), and my suspicions are confirmed: they didn't reforge Narsil because Aragorn wasn't ready for it/didn't want it.
Therefore, it'll be reforged in TTT, and someone will have to bring it. Guess who?
As to why Peter's pushing Arwen: that's pretty obvious. She's needed to build up Aragorn's character. Without her, he's just an action hero.
Tolkien had a lot of liberty in the books that Peter doesn't have for the movies. I think Peter, by and large, made some very good choices; delaying the reforging of Narsil was one of them (although cutting out the part where they talk about it was not such a good choice, IMO, since that talk makes Aragorn's character more evident).
I do miss Glorfindel, though. Seems he always gets dunked in the movies (he's ALWAYS cut out). I don't blame the producers, and in fact Tolkien really shouldn't have put him in because at the time of LOTR he was ___DEAD___, but poor guy...
No, there's plenty more to do. As a very simple example, the driver organization is still very much in flux; devfs is under fire, and alternates are springing up.
On a higher level, the way we handle multiple processors could very well entirely change (if Larry McVoy has his way, and I think he's right). The result might be a kernel which runs very well on a single processor, but is perfectly scalable to thousands of processors.
Copyright is property-like in this sense -- you can sell your copyright for cash, use it as collateral for a loan and leave it to your heirs (if it hasn't expired). As such, it's appropriate to describe Copyright as a property right.
Well spoken, right up to the last word -- but there you make your error.
It's appropriate to describe a "copy right" as _property_. It's not appropriate to describe it as a property _right_. It's actually a right to control government action against certain private actions, e.g. copying the book you wrote without your permission.
Your logic is impeccable; but the conclusion, because of that one extra word, doesn't follow. Remove that word, and it all makes sense. Copy right is a property which can be sold, owned, licensed, leased, traded, or completely revoked. The thing covered by copy right is not therefore property; I would argue that it isn't.
But I won't do so here; I just wanted to point out the serious logical error.
You are completely and utterly incorrect. Property rights can and do expire. For example, I can grant you real estate in perpetuity ("fee simple"), or I can grant you a life estate. Or an estate for a certain length of time.
Wow. How horribly wrong.
Okay, yes, you CAN grant me the right to use your property under almost any terms you care to invent. Note the phrasing, though? It's still YOUR property! I may have an exclusive right to use it, even to the exclusion of your usage rights; but in order to withold any rights from me, you have to maintain ownership of those rights. I'm buying the rights, not the land.
Wow, it gets worse.
The exclusive right for a limited time is unquestionably, without any doubt whatsoever, a property right.
It's hard to argue properly against this. Either you're claiming that ALL exclusive rights for limited amounts of time are property rights, a completely absurd proposition; or you're claiming that the specific exclusive right under discussion is a property right. Unfortunately for you, this begs the question.
There are many arguments against your position; for example, consider that copyright itself is considered property; the item copyrighted may be given away without in any way affecting the copyright. The copyright is definitely property, and is owned by one person. The item copyrighted is not property, and can be in the hands of many people but isn't owned by any of them (or is owned by all).
The definition of "life" isn't clear, but it's pretty definite that a virus doesn't have the minimal number of genes required for life, because it requires a specific set of genes provided by another cell in order to survive.
So using a virus wouldn't be a shortcut, it would either be cheating (by failing to count the genes the virus used only when reproducing) or would result in a much higher count (if you honestly counted them).
You've got a very good point -- it's not even close to being in production. The author lacks the resources to fab it. The design is nonetheless impressive, and his previous chips testify to that.
Even *one* processor often ends up being memory-bound - 25 on one die will cause most to be idly stalled on memory loads.
Did I mention that each one has an on-chip block of memory?
Also, the previous article on this chip said that the pinout was chosen so that it could be put back-to-back with a specific SRAM chip, not SDRAM.
My typo, sorry. Yes, he picked the fastest SRAM he could find. But the pinout isn't specific to that -- it's software programmable.
Another poster called into question the claim that you could have all of those processors active at once without overheating, but without actually checking a chip or reading a detailed electrical specs sheet, I can't confirm or refute that allegation.
It's a rather premature allegation -- look at his other processors, the ones he's actually built. It's not a _silly_ allegation, just groundless.
I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs--x86, UNIX-like operating systems, C++, gcc, etc--for something simpler and cooler running, whose blatant wrongness doesn't eat away at your soul every time you use it. The whole Windows vs. Linux nonsense is a complete red herring in that regard.
I know exactly how you feel. Others agree as well -- for example, Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, colorForth, and the very impressive 25X chip design (25 asynchronous processors in one tiny, low power chip, interfacing directly to an SDRAM or whatever else you want -- each of the output pins is software controlled by one processor).
I'm not sure whether anything could ever come of such -- but I'd like to see it.
Essentially, it throws the parsing problem right back in the spammer's faces: They must answer a fuzzy logic question in order to get into your inbox once and for all.
It also throws that problem in the face of everyone who wants to communicate with you. That rather clearly indicates an arrogant attitude to most people, and definitely is a barrier to communication.
Bayesian filters to me, seem to work if you are a dull person without many changes in your life.
Wrong. Bayesian filters _learn_, they're not static.
For ex, if you constantly get spams with the word Madam in it and you later on get a sex change, you will need to recalibrate your filters.
So, you have no idea how Bayesian filters work. You seem to have them confused with regexp filters, and really stupidly configured ones, at that. (Imagine throwing away an email because it contained a/single/ slightly negative word!)
Yes, it'd be wonderful to stop spam from ever being published. It'd save a lot of money. But it's impossible.
refusing connections from known spammer IPs and the proper use of blacklists would cut down on a lot of the email traffic.
NO. Blacklists are a horrible, horrible non-solution. Once an IP address is on a blacklist it's almost impossible to get it off, so it's useless -- so the spammer just gets a new one, and lets the old one rot. So it doesn't even slow them down!
For arguments against blacklists, see http://www.paulgraham.com/falsepositives.html
Those things are not just bad, they're REALLY bad.
I wouldn't at all object to a mail relay running its own simple mail filter to reduce the load on other machines -- but it'd better not EVER, ever have a false positive. And honestly, that's the point I just can't believe.
1. Most functional languages don't include the concept of setting a variable; reading a variable is also very different from Algol-like languages. Forth isn't functional, but doesn't have much use for variables; the closest thing it provides is essentially direct memory access.
2. Many languages truly do no more than imitate what Fortran finally discovered so many years ago -- but there are also many more which go much, much further, starting with the simple concept of recursion and stretching onward to continuations and preemption. Although anything we know now can be implemented through continuations and preemption, many languages automate some smaller and easier to work with (or optimise) subset, such as Icon, Sather, or J/K/APL. Forth has some really interesting things to contribute here, thanks to the fact that a 'continuation' in Forth is just a single pointer.
3. Finally, you imply that all languages call functions in the same way. You probably only know language which work in the same way; but there's more out there. Consider the differences between the parameter passing styles: C is applicative, Haskell is curried, J is combinatoral and Forth is concatenative. In other words, C depends on lambda theory; Haskell depends on curried lambdas; J depends on dataflow around functions; and Forth depends on dataflow within a stack passed and returned from composed functions. Most modern languages are lambda-based, so more like C; a few are starting to become curried, since that's a very simple change which gives a lot of power and flexibility in parsing.
So no, language can't simply be swapped without regard.
If nothing else, Forth will teach you to factor your code into small procdures, because making a function longer than about 5 lines quickly becomes unreadable:).
True. One line is the recommended length -- but that one line holds something very different from what it would have to hold in C.
Forth also has some interesting design details which result in function calls having much less overhead than function calls in C.
-Billy
Re:What about GPL?? Sources??
on
Xandros 1.0
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Translation: If you take a GPL'd program and make modifications it and release that program you must make the modifications available to anyone who had a license to the original program or any derivative version of it!
Read the FAQ again -- it explicitly says that you do NOT have to do anything. You don't have to make the modifications available to anyone; you just have to permit them to use your modifications, if they should happen to get their hands on them.
The only people who have a *right* under the GPL to get their hands on your modifications are the ones you give the modified software to.
This doesn't matter. Odds are almost 100% that Xandros has already released all their modifications as patches. The main reason they're not giving it away is that they're heavily integrated with non-GPL, and in fact non-free software. They couldn't give that away if they wanted to, and they shouldn't.
-Billy
Re:But I *like* those functions...
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Read the Phoenix documentation -- the whole goal is to produce a modular Mozilla with a rationally designed user interface.
Quite a selfish viewpoint you have there - it turns out that the best solution for YOU may not be the best for society at large.
Two points.
First, in the most general case...
Second:-), in the specific case of software, choosing and being satisfied with subpar software because it's free provides a negative selection pressure on Free Software. If you wish it to remain inferior, then by all means keep advancing it.
Choosing a product based on how it meets your needs doesn't hurt the worse Free Software (although it may hurt a company which happens to be backing it); it only forces the Free Software to compete for users, which in the long run will help it.
And at the end of the day, even if you're right and I SHOULD have been using the Free Software, it's still free and you can still use it in utter certainty that you're doing the right thing -- and I can still switch to it.
(Of course, this license sounds too bad to be true; I can't agree to terminating all possibility of working on Subversion. The license here is against my interests, so I won't accept it.)
Quite a selfish viewpoint you have there - it turns out that the best solution for YOU may not be the best for society at large.
Two points.
First, in the most general case, contrary to what you say, society (including the Free Software society) gains by encouraging the individual to make the best choice for his own interests. See the economic work of John Nash for a detailed mathematical proof, or von Mises' "Human Action" for a carefully reasoned logical explanation.
But if businesses had their way, there would be no free software - and you don't find that the least bit scary?
I find it to be an uninteresting scare tactic on your part. Obviously, a license or law like that would be against my interests, and I'd fight to prevent it, just as I am fighting to support Open Source Software and Free Software (both for their own merits).
So you have a choice - live in a world where free software is a critical force for maintaining the rights of consumers, or live in a world where you just want whats "best", and therefor implying that the world would be just fine without free software. I hope you thing the first, because the second is a scary world indeed.
I take the second choice, because contrary to your statement, Free Software IS the best. Shake off your fear -- if you truly support free software, have a little bit of trust in it!
Fight for it -- freedom is always worth fighting for -- but stop trying to destroy freedom in the name of Freedom.
Samba isn't developed my Microsoft; SMB is. And the problems SMB solves are fading even now; in 50 years there's no way that SMB will be useful. Microsoft will have moved on to something else.
And, of course, rsync isn't part of the rlogin/rsh/rwhatever toolset. It's completely independant.
The reason that rsync might still be used is that it implements a really powerful algorithm to do its job, which is being adopted in many cutting-edge projects. I don't know if those cutting-edge projects will have relatives which are still in use in 50 years, but they have more of a chance than Samba.
But IRRC, a PL/I compiler will compile FORTRAN 66 code with no complaints.
A PL/I compiler will compile Befunge code with no complaints:-). An amazing language -- if you can put two tokens together, the language design committee probably assigned them a meaning.
(But not one which makes sense of Befunge, of course.:-)
This is not a mere subsidy, though. This is a contract to build software which meets needs that have not previously been met.
They aren't subsidising open source; they're paying for a service which (for some reason) they believe that they need.
Now, you can argue that they shouldn't have the money available to pay for it (you'd be arguing for smaller government), or you can argue that they don't really need the features that Outlook doesn't provide, but you can't call this mere economic distortion. It's no more distortion than any consumer distorts the market by installing Linux.
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
"Including Common Lisp."
- Robert Morris
(I love this one -- I found it on Graham's webpage, you know, the one developing the 'arc' programming language.)
My solution to this mess? Eliminate advertising entirely.
The problem with this is the same as the problem with the so-called "campaign finance reform". The need for advertising is still there; if it can't be paid for, it'll be done without cash (or someone who DOES manage to do it will win).
Or do you intend to also put a muzzle on "the press"? Remember what the press is: it's people who have enough money to buy a printing press/broadcast station and market it (even a website will have impact only in proportion to its marketing).
If you enact this without also muzzling the press, you're allowing that particular class of wealthy people to determine the outcome of elections. If you muzzle the press, of course, you're violating their freedom of speech in a very directly unconstitutional way.
Neither implementation has appropriate results; however, that covers all possible implementations for your idea.
Therefore, your idea should not be implemented.
(Your ideas about advertising are also badly wrong, but a rebuttal is badly OT in this case.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've been following Mozilla since the beginning, and downloading almost every milestone. But I kept using IE; it just wasn't enough.
When I heard about Phoenix I was moderately interested, but I didn't want a cut-down version (since the full Mozilla obviously wasn't enough for me), so I waited until 0.2 -- and the day I downloaded it, I turned off IE, and haven't used it since.
I can't answer _why_ I prefer it so much. I just _do_. It starts up fast enough, is incredibly easy to use in the ways I want to use it -- the only thing I missed at first was type-ahead find, and with the latest version I even have that.
I don't think Phoenix is cut-down from Mozilla Navigator at all; its size is dramatically smaller, which makes it start faster, but its functionality is right up there.
I don't know exactly why Phoenix was able to immediately replace IE for me when Mozilla never had. But it did, and I'm glad.
-Billy
That's a common theory, but Tolkien said in one of his letters that Elves didn't repeat names -- when he was asked about this specific one he reiterated the rule, and had to admit that it was a hole.
He never precisely explained, but I recall there being a letter in which he speculated about rebirth or resurrection having been the cause (he used resurrection elsewhere).
-Billy
An excellent question; I started wondering whether she'd be in it when I first watched the movie. The reason I did that is that Aragorn didn't seem to get Narsil reforged in FOTR (as he did in the book).
I just finished watching the extended edition (whew, LONG movie, very very worth it), and my suspicions are confirmed: they didn't reforge Narsil because Aragorn wasn't ready for it/didn't want it.
Therefore, it'll be reforged in TTT, and someone will have to bring it. Guess who?
As to why Peter's pushing Arwen: that's pretty obvious. She's needed to build up Aragorn's character. Without her, he's just an action hero.
Tolkien had a lot of liberty in the books that Peter doesn't have for the movies. I think Peter, by and large, made some very good choices; delaying the reforging of Narsil was one of them (although cutting out the part where they talk about it was not such a good choice, IMO, since that talk makes Aragorn's character more evident).
I do miss Glorfindel, though. Seems he always gets dunked in the movies (he's ALWAYS cut out). I don't blame the producers, and in fact Tolkien really shouldn't have put him in because at the time of LOTR he was ___DEAD___, but poor guy...
-Billy
No, there's plenty more to do. As a very simple example, the driver organization is still very much in flux; devfs is under fire, and alternates are springing up.
On a higher level, the way we handle multiple processors could very well entirely change (if Larry McVoy has his way, and I think he's right). The result might be a kernel which runs very well on a single processor, but is perfectly scalable to thousands of processors.
-Billy
Copyright is property-like in this sense -- you can sell your copyright for cash, use it as collateral for a loan and leave it to your heirs (if it hasn't expired). As such, it's appropriate to describe Copyright as a property right.
Well spoken, right up to the last word -- but there you make your error.
It's appropriate to describe a "copy right" as _property_. It's not appropriate to describe it as a property _right_. It's actually a right to control government action against certain private actions, e.g. copying the book you wrote without your permission.
Your logic is impeccable; but the conclusion, because of that one extra word, doesn't follow. Remove that word, and it all makes sense. Copy right is a property which can be sold, owned, licensed, leased, traded, or completely revoked. The thing covered by copy right is not therefore property; I would argue that it isn't.
But I won't do so here; I just wanted to point out the serious logical error.
-Billy
You are completely and utterly incorrect. Property rights can and do expire. For example, I can grant you real estate in perpetuity ("fee simple"), or I can grant you a life estate. Or an estate for a certain length of time.
Wow. How horribly wrong.
Okay, yes, you CAN grant me the right to use your property under almost any terms you care to invent. Note the phrasing, though? It's still YOUR property! I may have an exclusive right to use it, even to the exclusion of your usage rights; but in order to withold any rights from me, you have to maintain ownership of those rights. I'm buying the rights, not the land.
Wow, it gets worse.
The exclusive right for a limited time is unquestionably, without any doubt whatsoever, a property right.
It's hard to argue properly against this. Either you're claiming that ALL exclusive rights for limited amounts of time are property rights, a completely absurd proposition; or you're claiming that the specific exclusive right under discussion is a property right. Unfortunately for you, this begs the question.
There are many arguments against your position; for example, consider that copyright itself is considered property; the item copyrighted may be given away without in any way affecting the copyright. The copyright is definitely property, and is owned by one person. The item copyrighted is not property, and can be in the hands of many people but isn't owned by any of them (or is owned by all).
-Billy
The definition of "life" isn't clear, but it's pretty definite that a virus doesn't have the minimal number of genes required for life, because it requires a specific set of genes provided by another cell in order to survive.
So using a virus wouldn't be a shortcut, it would either be cheating (by failing to count the genes the virus used only when reproducing) or would result in a much higher count (if you honestly counted them).
-Billy
Why dop you think that the Segway has multiple redundant control systems, computers, sensors...?
Good objection, but wrong object. The Segway is almost certainly MUCH safer than running.
-Billy
I'd be careful calling this impressive.
You've got a very good point -- it's not even close to being in production. The author lacks the resources to fab it. The design is nonetheless impressive, and his previous chips testify to that.
Even *one* processor often ends up being memory-bound - 25 on one die will cause most to be idly stalled on memory loads.
Did I mention that each one has an on-chip block of memory?
Also, the previous article on this chip said that the pinout was chosen so that it could be put back-to-back with a specific SRAM chip, not SDRAM.
My typo, sorry. Yes, he picked the fastest SRAM he could find. But the pinout isn't specific to that -- it's software programmable.
Another poster called into question the claim that you could have all of those processors active at once without overheating, but without actually checking a chip or reading a detailed electrical specs sheet, I can't confirm or refute that allegation.
It's a rather premature allegation -- look at his other processors, the ones he's actually built. It's not a _silly_ allegation, just groundless.
-Billy
I'm at the point where I'd be willing to chuck the historic trappings of desktop PCs--x86, UNIX-like operating systems, C++, gcc, etc--for something simpler and cooler running, whose blatant wrongness doesn't eat away at your soul every time you use it. The whole Windows vs. Linux nonsense is a complete red herring in that regard.
I know exactly how you feel. Others agree as well -- for example, Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, colorForth, and the very impressive 25X chip design (25 asynchronous processors in one tiny, low power chip, interfacing directly to an SDRAM or whatever else you want -- each of the output pins is software controlled by one processor).
I'm not sure whether anything could ever come of such -- but I'd like to see it.
-Billy
Essentially, it throws the parsing problem right back in the spammer's faces: They must answer a fuzzy logic question in order to get into your inbox once and for all.
/single/ slightly negative word!)
It also throws that problem in the face of everyone who wants to communicate with you. That rather clearly indicates an arrogant attitude to most people, and definitely is a barrier to communication.
Bayesian filters to me, seem to work if you are a dull person without many changes in your life.
Wrong. Bayesian filters _learn_, they're not static.
For ex, if you constantly get spams with the word Madam in it and you later on get a sex change, you will need to recalibrate your filters.
So, you have no idea how Bayesian filters work. You seem to have them confused with regexp filters, and really stupidly configured ones, at that. (Imagine throwing away an email because it contained a
-Billy
Yes, it'd be wonderful to stop spam from ever being published. It'd save a lot of money. But it's impossible.
refusing connections from known spammer IPs and the proper use of blacklists would cut down on a lot of the email traffic.
NO. Blacklists are a horrible, horrible non-solution. Once an IP address is on a blacklist it's almost impossible to get it off, so it's useless -- so the spammer just gets a new one, and lets the old one rot. So it doesn't even slow them down!
For arguments against blacklists, see
http://www.paulgraham.com/falsepositives.html
Those things are not just bad, they're REALLY bad.
I wouldn't at all object to a mail relay running its own simple mail filter to reduce the load on other machines -- but it'd better not EVER, ever have a false positive. And honestly, that's the point I just can't believe.
-Billy
All computer languages rehash the same concepts:
# set/read variables
# conditional, branching and looping constructs
# call functions
1. Most functional languages don't include the concept of setting a variable; reading a variable is also very different from Algol-like languages. Forth isn't functional, but doesn't have much use for variables; the closest thing it provides is essentially direct memory access.
2. Many languages truly do no more than imitate what Fortran finally discovered so many years ago -- but there are also many more which go much, much further, starting with the simple concept of recursion and stretching onward to continuations and preemption. Although anything we know now can be implemented through continuations and preemption, many languages automate some smaller and easier to work with (or optimise) subset, such as Icon, Sather, or J/K/APL. Forth has some really interesting things to contribute here, thanks to the fact that a 'continuation' in Forth is just a single pointer.
3. Finally, you imply that all languages call functions in the same way. You probably only know language which work in the same way; but there's more out there. Consider the differences between the parameter passing styles: C is applicative, Haskell is curried, J is combinatoral and Forth is concatenative. In other words, C depends on lambda theory; Haskell depends on curried lambdas; J depends on dataflow around functions; and Forth depends on dataflow within a stack passed and returned from composed functions. Most modern languages are lambda-based, so more like C; a few are starting to become curried, since that's a very simple change which gives a lot of power and flexibility in parsing.
So no, language can't simply be swapped without regard.
-Billy
If nothing else, Forth will teach you to factor your code into small procdures, because making a function longer than about 5 lines quickly becomes unreadable :).
True. One line is the recommended length -- but that one line holds something very different from what it would have to hold in C.
Forth also has some interesting design details which result in function calls having much less overhead than function calls in C.
-Billy
Translation: If you take a GPL'd program and make modifications it and release that program you must make the modifications available to anyone who had a license to the original program or any derivative version of it!
Read the FAQ again -- it explicitly says that you do NOT have to do anything. You don't have to make the modifications available to anyone; you just have to permit them to use your modifications, if they should happen to get their hands on them.
The only people who have a *right* under the GPL to get their hands on your modifications are the ones you give the modified software to.
This doesn't matter. Odds are almost 100% that Xandros has already released all their modifications as patches. The main reason they're not giving it away is that they're heavily integrated with non-GPL, and in fact non-free software. They couldn't give that away if they wanted to, and they shouldn't.
-Billy
Read the Phoenix documentation -- the whole goal is to produce a modular Mozilla with a rationally designed user interface.
The thing's built around the concept of plugins.
-Billy
Equally easy to misplace a }, as you mention; and much less visible.
-Billy
Quite a selfish viewpoint you have there - it turns out that the best solution for YOU may not be the best for society at large.
:-), in the specific case of software, choosing and being satisfied with subpar software because it's free provides a negative selection pressure on Free Software. If you wish it to remain inferior, then by all means keep advancing it.
Two points.
First, in the most general case...
Second
Choosing a product based on how it meets your needs doesn't hurt the worse Free Software (although it may hurt a company which happens to be backing it); it only forces the Free Software to compete for users, which in the long run will help it.
And at the end of the day, even if you're right and I SHOULD have been using the Free Software, it's still free and you can still use it in utter certainty that you're doing the right thing -- and I can still switch to it.
(Of course, this license sounds too bad to be true; I can't agree to terminating all possibility of working on Subversion. The license here is against my interests, so I won't accept it.)
-Billy
Quite a selfish viewpoint you have there - it turns out that the best solution for YOU may not be the best for society at large.
Two points.
First, in the most general case, contrary to what you say, society (including the Free Software society) gains by encouraging the individual to make the best choice for his own interests. See the economic work of John Nash for a detailed mathematical proof, or von Mises' "Human Action" for a carefully reasoned logical explanation.
But if businesses had their way, there would be no free software - and you don't find that the least bit scary?
I find it to be an uninteresting scare tactic on your part. Obviously, a license or law like that would be against my interests, and I'd fight to prevent it, just as I am fighting to support Open Source Software and Free Software (both for their own merits).
So you have a choice - live in a world where free software is a critical force for maintaining the rights of consumers, or live in a world where you just want whats "best", and therefor implying that the world would be just fine without free software. I hope you thing the first, because the second is a scary world indeed.
I take the second choice, because contrary to your statement, Free Software IS the best. Shake off your fear -- if you truly support free software, have a little bit of trust in it!
Fight for it -- freedom is always worth fighting for -- but stop trying to destroy freedom in the name of Freedom.
-Billy
You don't know what you're talking about.
Samba isn't developed my Microsoft; SMB is. And the problems SMB solves are fading even now; in 50 years there's no way that SMB will be useful. Microsoft will have moved on to something else.
And, of course, rsync isn't part of the rlogin/rsh/rwhatever toolset. It's completely independant.
The reason that rsync might still be used is that it implements a really powerful algorithm to do its job, which is being adopted in many cutting-edge projects. I don't know if those cutting-edge projects will have relatives which are still in use in 50 years, but they have more of a chance than Samba.
-Billy
But IRRC, a PL/I compiler will compile FORTRAN 66 code with no complaints.
:-). An amazing language -- if you can put two tokens together, the language design committee probably assigned them a meaning.
:-)
A PL/I compiler will compile Befunge code with no complaints
(But not one which makes sense of Befunge, of course.
-Billy
Excuse me -- you don't want a web-based solution to content publishing?
-Billy
This is not a mere subsidy, though. This is a contract to build software which meets needs that have not previously been met.
They aren't subsidising open source; they're paying for a service which (for some reason) they believe that they need.
Now, you can argue that they shouldn't have the money available to pay for it (you'd be arguing for smaller government), or you can argue that they don't really need the features that Outlook doesn't provide, but you can't call this mere economic distortion. It's no more distortion than any consumer distorts the market by installing Linux.
-Billy
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
"Including Common Lisp."
- Robert Morris
(I love this one -- I found it on Graham's webpage, you know, the one developing the 'arc' programming language.)
-Billy
My solution to this mess? Eliminate advertising entirely.
The problem with this is the same as the problem with the so-called "campaign finance reform". The need for advertising is still there; if it can't be paid for, it'll be done without cash (or someone who DOES manage to do it will win).
Or do you intend to also put a muzzle on "the press"? Remember what the press is: it's people who have enough money to buy a printing press/broadcast station and market it (even a website will have impact only in proportion to its marketing).
If you enact this without also muzzling the press, you're allowing that particular class of wealthy people to determine the outcome of elections. If you muzzle the press, of course, you're violating their freedom of speech in a very directly unconstitutional way.
Neither implementation has appropriate results; however, that covers all possible implementations for your idea.
Therefore, your idea should not be implemented.
(Your ideas about advertising are also badly wrong, but a rebuttal is badly OT in this case.)
-Billy