In addition, Apple will announce Mac OS X Server's price has been dramatically reduced from the $995 price tag announced in January. The new cost, depending on configuration, will be less than $300 to less than $600. Mac OS X (as in the roman numeral for ten) Server was originally scheduled for release in February.
Just to be clear, people need office software. I don't dispute this.
But Microsoft doesn't design their office software to help people be more productive. They design their office software to sell a lot of copies. These goals sometimes overlap, but not always, and sometimes come into conflict.
Nobody would want to learn to use another office product if he/she has been using one for years, regardless of how smooth the transition can be.
This is a gross oversimplification. More accurately, the amount of time invested in using one product can be considered an advantage of that product when comparing it to something new. If the new product is overwhelmingly better, people will switch. Otherwise, we'd all still be using paper and pen, right?
And let the "patent chaicers" chace their victims. They will have at least the hard time Feds are having chacing encryption stuff. Actually much harder.
This is true now, with actually free software. Is there any known case of free software being attacked by patent owners?
Perhaps so, but at the worst we'll have a mediochre but working XSL implementation in Mozilla that can then be improved by self-motivated hackers. It would have happened eventually, to be sure, but it certainly doesn't hurt the effort to have money going into it.
A bit of clarification. There are two parts to XSL; some people consider it to actually be two different languages.
The first part specifies transformations from XML to something else (e.g., HTML, PDF, PostScript). This is the part that you seem to be referring to, though it's actually more general than what you describe, since the resulting document doesn't have to be HTML or HTML-like.
The second part is essentially a formatting language, like CSS. You can then use the XSL transformation language to process an XML document and spit out a set of XSL formatting elements.
The question I pose is: Does a GPLed program containing a patented process constitute a patent violation under these criteria, so long as it is distributed gratis, and/or should it?
A program can't both be GPLed and require zero-cost distribution. A program that you can't sell isn't really free.
But for the purposes of the discussion, we'll assume you do this. It's definitely not clear-cut and you'll probably have a hard time in court with that argument. It's really not a form of research, and the intent really would be to undermine the patent. The plaintiff would have to demonstrate this, of course, but you'd not be in a good position.
I'm sorry it took so long to reply to this. I had most of a reply written out last night when Netscape ate itself. I was too tired to redo the whole thing then.
No they don't.
If you want me to take this statement right here seriously you'll have to present some argument to the contrary.
You said it yourself (emphasis mine):
Microsoft is one of those cases that patents were DESIGNED for.
They didn't exactly work well, of course, in this instance.
To be more clear: I'm not saying that patents never protect the little guy. I'm just saying that the protection is hardly reliable. Big companies like Microsoft still can and do use strong-arm tactics to get what they want. You brought up the Apple example, and their hardly little guys.
If I'd desired, when I came up with these two patents I could have instead quit my job here and filed for both, then offered to sell them to my former employer.
You're one of the lucky few. Most companies claim all IP rights to their employees' ideas.
Try selling a great idea that's not patented to IBM?
This is where we have a disconnect. Obviously if ideas aren't treated (and protected) like physical property, you can't buy and sell them. Ideas don't behave like physical property, and therefore I don't consider intellectual property to be a valid concept.
People who have great ideas are valuable. I don't want to buy a great idea, I want to have people who come up with great ideas working for me. Sure, other people may be able to use those ideas too, but I'll get the best access to them, and I can ensure that the idea-generators are working in my interest. Look at law: lawyers can't patent their lines of argument. The difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer (you can read that as "highly-paid lawyer and less highly-paid lawyer") isn't that the good lawyer has strict control over the best lines of argument. It's that the good lawyer has the best knowledge of law and the effective use of argument, and has the best chances of being able to use or create effective arguments. Software is not really all that different.
I don't buy the bit about me being better off.
You're approaching this from the perspective of an inventor. I'm approaching it from the perspective of a consumer. All inventors are also consumers, but the reverse is not true. This means that, although you benefit from your own patents, you also suffer somewhat (along with everyone else) because of others' patents.
The issue is one of relative versus absolute benefit. Having a patent may put you in a better position within society, but having no patents puts society itself in a better position. The licence fees you get from your patents may give you a higher standard of living than your less inventive neighbor, but allowing ideas to be used freely will make the general standard of living for everyone (inventors included) higher. To put it into more concrete terms: How much of your income is coming from patent fees and how much of it goes into fees for other patents (and this includes patent fees paid by other companies that are included in the price of products you buy)? It's impossible to calculate, of course, and I'm not positive that it works out to more total cost than benefit, but the question is rarely asked and very important.
However, it is also bad that if a company wants to reprint a picture of a work of art, they have to contact the piece's owner (or creator, depending on the contracts signed) for permission, and possibly a royalty fee, first. Why? Because it limits the proliferation of art. Because it puts limits on free trade and the free exchange of information and ideas.
Can't argue there:-)
But in this case the limitation on the public's desire to see art is acceptable (to me), because the person who created it is deemed to have the right to control when and if these pieces are used, INCLUDING the right to sell this right to someone else if they so choose.
Let me emphasize that it's not always (or even usually) the creator who benefits most from IP laws. Most creators have lawyers, managers, publishers, etc. Often the creators don't have the property rights, having signed them over to their publishers (i.e., large companies). Big business really does have the upper hand here. Do you remember what happened with the Beatles back catalog? Michael Jackson was able to outbid Paul McCartney for the rights to his own songs. Now Jackson collects the royalties.
The problem is, if I want my ideas to benefit me, I have to admit that other peoples' ideas should benefit them.
The flip side of that: "if I want other peoples' ideas to benefit me, I have to admit that my ideas should benefit them." The question is whether we gain more than we lose by allowing restrictions on the use of information.
But at the end of the day, if I have a staggeringly exciting idea, I want to get some recognition for it, and if it's saleable I want to get some money from it. And without patents it's just plain unlikely that I would do so.
Well, I'm not sure that I believe that you can't get recognition without a patent. Good ideas tend to stand out on their own merit. Getting money from it is tricky, but let me reiterate my two main points: 1) As a creator of good ideas, you as a person have value greater than the sum of those ideas (and this is speaking of strictly financial value here) and smart people/companies realize this; 2) The benefits of a patent to a patent-holder are obvious because it increases his or her relative wealth in the society, whereas the benefits of a patent-free society are subtle because they increase the general standard of living for everyone. So the inability to get paid for use of your ideas in the absence of patents is a red herring of sorts.
Big companies can already too easily steal from brilliant individuals; I don't think we should make it easier than it already is.
Well I'm the last person to want big companies to benefit at the cost of the individual. But I'm not sure that patents prevent this, or that the lack of patents makes it easier. Using a term like "steal" is loaded and betrays your assumption that ideas are like physical property. If you just say that large companies are reusing ideas created by individuals, then you still have to demonstrate that this harms the individuals more than it does when you restrict everyone's ability to freely use information and ideas.
They keep the big boys from stealing the ideas that the little boys come up with, and they keep the jackals from effectively 'stealing' the entire R&D budgets of the real innovators.
No they don't.
Fact is, patents (and in particular software patents) are bad for the consumer and usually help large companies more than small ones or individual inventors. Ideas and innovation don't exist in a vaccum; all ideas build on a heritage. It's impossible for an inventor to stand on the shoulders of giants when only other giants can afford it. I can't build an insanely great Quicktime player because I can't afford the patent fees for the codecs. Free software doesn't exist if all technology is patented away.
I'm fairly certain that if patent laws were to be repealed tomorrow, IBM would still be standing and you and I would be much better off.
My god. That's just AWFUL! I can't believe that commercial software vendors would have the freaking NERVE to keep a free-market economy going, while driving hobbyists out of... business???
Right on! We should be giving more software patents out! We should be encouraging more monopolies in the industry! That'll get the free market going! Sure as hell would make my job easier if I had to pay exhorbitant licensing fees everytime I write a line of code! Screw people who enjoy programming and appreciate freedom! We have businesses to run!
Yeah, right on brother! And fuck the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, too. Everyone claims that slavery takes away freedom, but if you take that away you remove my FREEDOM to trade slaves... and you also remove my FREEDOM to sell myself into slavery. If a person wants to sell themself into slavery by all means they should...I wish those abolitionists would quit their whinning [sic]...
(And before everyone gets in a tizzy, I'm not equating proprietary software with slave trade. I'm only trying to make a point.)
I guess that depends on which nifty features you're talking about. Integration between apps and the window manager (as demonstrated by the GNOME pager/tasklist, for example) requires WMs to support certain hints. But the vast majority of the functionality provided by GNOME and GNOME apps does not require window manager support (I would expect this to be true of KDE as well, though).
FWIW, the hints I mentioned are supported already by Enlightenment, IceWM and Window Maker.
Sorta. It does automatically install depended-on packages, so you don't have to worry about finding all of the libraries for a particular program. Relatedly, it uninstalls apps when libraries they depend on are uninstalled. So you won't end up with broken apps.
They haven't (yet) solved the problem of programs and libraries that were installed from source (i.e., not using dpkg). So it may not recognize libraries that you compiled yourself. The dpkg people hint that they're working on this.
On the other hand, because of the open development, I have yet to find a library that wasn't packaged already. So, at least in my experience, the problem isn't that bad.
Okay, you're a moron, too. Happy?
on
Unix in Perl
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· Score: 1
Anyhow, the GNU utilities have been ported very widely. Maybe perl has been ported more widely, maybe not. Odds are that if a platform has perl, it's got gawk, gnu ls, gnu tr, gnu sed, and the rest of the gang.
True, but not all individual systems have the GNU tools installed. And for those that do, it's not likely that they are installed as the standard tools.
The intention is that, in a perl script, instead of calling the external program in backticks (which, if you don't know perl, has the same effect as doing it in the shell) you would load in the equivalent script. So instead of calling whatever ls is installed on the system--not really knowing for sure what the command-line syntax or output format is on this particular machine--you just make sure and call the perl version.
I just hope that they aren't too surprised when someone adds a chunk of GPL code to JavaScript and releases it under the pure GPL and Netscape has no rights to use that code.
It's clear that they recognize that as a risk, but they decided to test it out to see if it happens. Really, why would someone do that?
One of the criticizms of the original MPL and NPL is that you couldn't combine code covered by those licences with GPL-covered code (including just linking to a library). If my reading is correct:
You still can't combine GPL'ed and [NM]PL'ed code, but
You can combine GPL'ed code with dually-licensed code, but
The combined version would only be covered by the GPL. It could not be included by Netscape in proprietary releases.
This seems like a very good thing to me. In particular, it means that GPL'ed code can include code from and link to dually-licensed libraries (like the forthcoming JavaScript library).
Fragmentation isn't good. Choice is good. Fragmentation sometimes results in choice (and is sometimes necessary for it). But not always. And it's not really the best way to provide choice.
Is having multiple window managers really more beneficial than having one super-configurable window manager? There's a tradeoff between efficiency and complexity on one hand and configurability on the other hand, but I think that you lose a lot more by forking the code. Red Hat used to ship with FVWM95 as the default, but switched it to FVWM2 with default configuration files that made it look like 95.
The secret of the vi and emacs wars is that the two programs, though they purportedly do the same thing, are pretty fundamentally different in design philosophy. I would claim that they have two separate uses. I use both, depending on my task -- most of my administrative tasks (editing config files and so forth) are done in vi, and most of my development tasks (editing C, Java, HTML and other extended editing jobs) are done in emacs. There's a substantial difference between the two programs. The reason both projects continue isn't because of stubbornness, but because people need a featureful, complex, super-configurable editor and a lightweight, fast, efficiency-oriented editor. For another example, see the Netscape vs. lynx war.
In contrast, take the GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs split. This is truly unfortunate, and there is a good deal of duplicated effort and catch-up games between the groups. There's no reason for both editors to exist -- the differences in design philosophy are minor and reconcilable (you could argue that they're more like differences in developer interest than design philosophy).
I strongly disagree that we benefit by having two desktop environments. It does not give us more choice, but less. I can use any window manager with my apps -- neither one cares about the other. vi and emacs are functionally equivalent -- they both edit regular ASCII. I can't choose whether my apps use KDE or GNOME. If I want to use GIMP, I have to have GTK. If I want to use KMidi or KPPP, I have to use KDE. If I want KLyX and Gnumeric and have them both integrate seamlessly with each other and the rest of my desktop...well I'm out of luck. Like FSF and XEmacs, GNOME and KDE aren't different enough to warrant their coexistence.
The STL will give you maps, lists, vectors etc...If you wrote the same software in C, you'd either spend days implementing the trees yourself, or use a less efficient and error-prone general tree implementation (using void pointers).
Apparently glib (part of the GTK+ project) has a number of useful data structures implemented in C. I haven't used it, and I'm not arguing that it's better. Obviously it would have to use void* or equivalent so you miss out on static type checking. And I don't think it's as comprehensive as STL. But it is there!
C++ can be translated to C, so the code should be equally fast.
This doesn't necessarily follow. I wouldn't expect C++ translated to C to be any faster than C++ compiled directly, there still needs to be some overhead for the C++ features you use. In other words, you may be able to make a C implementation that is more efficient than the translated version.
One of the design goals for C++ is that there shouldn't be any runtime cost for features of the language you don't use. So if I compile my ANSI C program with a C++ compiler, I shouldn't lose anything.
Used wrongly, C++ can be arbitrarily slow, just like any other language.
This is an important point. C++ arguably offers more potential for abuse than most other languages. Because it's easier and faster for an experienced developer to write in C++ than C, many people have the false impression that it is an easier or simpler language than C when quite the opposite is true.
The only thing I hate about C++ is the time it takes to compile my code...That actually slows development.
If you don't use "make" or equivalent, you really should. It's worth the effort!
Well, er, that's only if you believe in evolution on a large scale. There is plenty of "evidence" that, although there are minimal "evolutionary" changes over time, evolution has been "disproved" by a lack of evidence evidence on the large scale.
A lack of evidence doesn't disprove a theory. It just doesn't provide support for it. The acceptence of the theory of evolution is based on a common-sense extension of the visible minor changes to the long term. Is there any reason to believe that this extension doesn't follow? Is there evidence that there are contraints on the amount that a genetic code can change?
What kind of evidence would convince you that evolution occurs? A billion-year case study?
I thought it was particularly interesting that HP wants to support Linux partly to catch up to IBM.
Last year, when Linux was really just starting to get mainstream attention, a number of companies started to support Linux in some way because they thought it was interesting.
Now it looks like we're going to be seeing more and more people supporting Linux to stay competetive, because they're expected to support it. Soon enough, companies that aren't particularly interested in Linux (and perhaps don't even like it for some reason) will have to support it just because everyone else does. That's a great sign!
In particular, it makes me think that we can make the same push with software freedom over the next few years. If enough companies (and especially big names like HP) become interested in free software, soon their competitors will have no choice!
Slashdot Mirror
You say you have a Userland Slashbox, but I don't see it.
Apples and Oranges, so to speak. Try comparing with LinuxPPC on a 400 MHz G3 and get back to me.
I would believe that the G3 is faster than the PII. The OS is probably not the bottleneck (at least in the case of Linux and possibly Solaris).
Because all of those things are already ported to Linux/PPC.
More generally, I think the question should be "Why use Darwin when Linux already works?"
Full Article
Just to be clear, people need office software. I don't dispute this.
But Microsoft doesn't design their office software to help people be more productive. They design their office software to sell a lot of copies. These goals sometimes overlap, but not always, and sometimes come into conflict.
This is a gross oversimplification. More accurately, the amount of time invested in using one product can be considered an advantage of that product when comparing it to something new. If the new product is overwhelmingly better, people will switch. Otherwise, we'd all still be using paper and pen, right?
How is it better than using Perl? I couldn't find a direct answer to that question on the site.
Yeah, or people who flame Katz. :-)
Yeah, that would be actually useful.
And this may require some extensive work, but I'd like to be able to edit or cancel my posts.
And while we're at it, how about Gnus-style adaptive scoring?
This is true now, with actually free software. Is there any known case of free software being attacked by patent owners?
Perhaps so, but at the worst we'll have a mediochre but working XSL implementation in Mozilla that can then be improved by self-motivated hackers. It would have happened eventually, to be sure, but it certainly doesn't hurt the effort to have money going into it.
A bit of clarification. There are two parts to XSL; some people consider it to actually be two different languages.
The first part specifies transformations from XML to something else (e.g., HTML, PDF, PostScript). This is the part that you seem to be referring to, though it's actually more general than what you describe, since the resulting document doesn't have to be HTML or HTML-like.
The second part is essentially a formatting language, like CSS. You can then use the XSL transformation language to process an XML document and spit out a set of XSL formatting elements.
A program can't both be GPLed and require zero-cost distribution. A program that you can't sell isn't really free.
But for the purposes of the discussion, we'll assume you do this. It's definitely not clear-cut and you'll probably have a hard time in court with that argument. It's really not a form of research, and the intent really would be to undermine the patent. The plaintiff would have to demonstrate this, of course, but you'd not be in a good position.
I'm sorry it took so long to reply to this. I had most of a reply written out last night when Netscape ate itself. I was too tired to redo the whole thing then.
You said it yourself (emphasis mine):
To be more clear: I'm not saying that patents never protect the little guy. I'm just saying that the protection is hardly reliable. Big companies like Microsoft still can and do use strong-arm tactics to get what they want. You brought up the Apple example, and their hardly little guys.
You're one of the lucky few. Most companies claim all IP rights to their employees' ideas.
This is where we have a disconnect. Obviously if ideas aren't treated (and protected) like physical property, you can't buy and sell them. Ideas don't behave like physical property, and therefore I don't consider intellectual property to be a valid concept.
People who have great ideas are valuable. I don't want to buy a great idea, I want to have people who come up with great ideas working for me. Sure, other people may be able to use those ideas too, but I'll get the best access to them, and I can ensure that the idea-generators are working in my interest. Look at law: lawyers can't patent their lines of argument. The difference between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer (you can read that as "highly-paid lawyer and less highly-paid lawyer") isn't that the good lawyer has strict control over the best lines of argument. It's that the good lawyer has the best knowledge of law and the effective use of argument, and has the best chances of being able to use or create effective arguments. Software is not really all that different.
You're approaching this from the perspective of an inventor. I'm approaching it from the perspective of a consumer. All inventors are also consumers, but the reverse is not true. This means that, although you benefit from your own patents, you also suffer somewhat (along with everyone else) because of others' patents.
The issue is one of relative versus absolute benefit. Having a patent may put you in a better position within society, but having no patents puts society itself in a better position. The licence fees you get from your patents may give you a higher standard of living than your less inventive neighbor, but allowing ideas to be used freely will make the general standard of living for everyone (inventors included) higher. To put it into more concrete terms: How much of your income is coming from patent fees and how much of it goes into fees for other patents (and this includes patent fees paid by other companies that are included in the price of products you buy)? It's impossible to calculate, of course, and I'm not positive that it works out to more total cost than benefit, but the question is rarely asked and very important.
Can't argue there :-)
Let me emphasize that it's not always (or even usually) the creator who benefits most from IP laws. Most creators have lawyers, managers, publishers, etc. Often the creators don't have the property rights, having signed them over to their publishers (i.e., large companies). Big business really does have the upper hand here. Do you remember what happened with the Beatles back catalog? Michael Jackson was able to outbid Paul McCartney for the rights to his own songs. Now Jackson collects the royalties.
The flip side of that: "if I want other peoples' ideas to benefit me, I have to admit that my ideas should benefit them." The question is whether we gain more than we lose by allowing restrictions on the use of information.
Well, I'm not sure that I believe that you can't get recognition without a patent. Good ideas tend to stand out on their own merit. Getting money from it is tricky, but let me reiterate my two main points: 1) As a creator of good ideas, you as a person have value greater than the sum of those ideas (and this is speaking of strictly financial value here) and smart people/companies realize this; 2) The benefits of a patent to a patent-holder are obvious because it increases his or her relative wealth in the society, whereas the benefits of a patent-free society are subtle because they increase the general standard of living for everyone. So the inability to get paid for use of your ideas in the absence of patents is a red herring of sorts.
Well I'm the last person to want big companies to benefit at the cost of the individual. But I'm not sure that patents prevent this, or that the lack of patents makes it easier. Using a term like "steal" is loaded and betrays your assumption that ideas are like physical property. If you just say that large companies are reusing ideas created by individuals, then you still have to demonstrate that this harms the individuals more than it does when you restrict everyone's ability to freely use information and ideas.
No they don't.
Fact is, patents (and in particular software patents) are bad for the consumer and usually help large companies more than small ones or individual inventors. Ideas and innovation don't exist in a vaccum; all ideas build on a heritage. It's impossible for an inventor to stand on the shoulders of giants when only other giants can afford it. I can't build an insanely great Quicktime player because I can't afford the patent fees for the codecs. Free software doesn't exist if all technology is patented away.
I'm fairly certain that if patent laws were to be repealed tomorrow, IBM would still be standing and you and I would be much better off.
Right on! We should be giving more software patents out! We should be encouraging more monopolies in the industry! That'll get the free market going! Sure as hell would make my job easier if I had to pay exhorbitant licensing fees everytime I write a line of code! Screw people who enjoy programming and appreciate freedom! We have businesses to run!
Yeah, right on brother! And fuck the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, too. Everyone claims that slavery takes away freedom, but if you take that away you remove my FREEDOM to trade slaves... and you also remove my FREEDOM to sell myself into slavery. If a person wants to sell themself into slavery by all means they should...I wish those abolitionists would quit their whinning [sic]...
(And before everyone gets in a tizzy, I'm not equating proprietary software with slave trade. I'm only trying to make a point.)
I guess that depends on which nifty features you're talking about. Integration between apps and the window manager (as demonstrated by the GNOME pager/tasklist, for example) requires WMs to support certain hints. But the vast majority of the functionality provided by GNOME and GNOME apps does not require window manager support (I would expect this to be true of KDE as well, though).
FWIW, the hints I mentioned are supported already by Enlightenment, IceWM and Window Maker.
Sorta. It does automatically install depended-on packages, so you don't have to worry about finding all of the libraries for a particular program. Relatedly, it uninstalls apps when libraries they depend on are uninstalled. So you won't end up with broken apps.
They haven't (yet) solved the problem of programs and libraries that were installed from source (i.e., not using dpkg). So it may not recognize libraries that you compiled yourself. The dpkg people hint that they're working on this.
On the other hand, because of the open development, I have yet to find a library that wasn't packaged already. So, at least in my experience, the problem isn't that bad.
True, but not all individual systems have the GNU tools installed. And for those that do, it's not likely that they are installed as the standard tools.
The intention is that, in a perl script, instead of calling the external program in backticks (which, if you don't know perl, has the same effect as doing it in the shell) you would load in the equivalent script. So instead of calling whatever ls is installed on the system--not really knowing for sure what the command-line syntax or output format is on this particular machine--you just make sure and call the perl version.
It's clear that they recognize that as a risk, but they decided to test it out to see if it happens. Really, why would someone do that?
One of the criticizms of the original MPL and NPL is that you couldn't combine code covered by those licences with GPL-covered code (including just linking to a library). If my reading is correct:
This seems like a very good thing to me. In particular, it means that GPL'ed code can include code from and link to dually-licensed libraries (like the forthcoming JavaScript library).
Fragmentation isn't good. Choice is good. Fragmentation sometimes results in choice (and is sometimes necessary for it). But not always. And it's not really the best way to provide choice.
Is having multiple window managers really more beneficial than having one super-configurable window manager? There's a tradeoff between efficiency and complexity on one hand and configurability on the other hand, but I think that you lose a lot more by forking the code. Red Hat used to ship with FVWM95 as the default, but switched it to FVWM2 with default configuration files that made it look like 95.
The secret of the vi and emacs wars is that the two programs, though they purportedly do the same thing, are pretty fundamentally different in design philosophy. I would claim that they have two separate uses. I use both, depending on my task -- most of my administrative tasks (editing config files and so forth) are done in vi, and most of my development tasks (editing C, Java, HTML and other extended editing jobs) are done in emacs. There's a substantial difference between the two programs. The reason both projects continue isn't because of stubbornness, but because people need a featureful, complex, super-configurable editor and a lightweight, fast, efficiency-oriented editor. For another example, see the Netscape vs. lynx war.
In contrast, take the GNU Emacs vs. XEmacs split. This is truly unfortunate, and there is a good deal of duplicated effort and catch-up games between the groups. There's no reason for both editors to exist -- the differences in design philosophy are minor and reconcilable (you could argue that they're more like differences in developer interest than design philosophy).
I strongly disagree that we benefit by having two desktop environments. It does not give us more choice, but less. I can use any window manager with my apps -- neither one cares about the other. vi and emacs are functionally equivalent -- they both edit regular ASCII. I can't choose whether my apps use KDE or GNOME. If I want to use GIMP, I have to have GTK. If I want to use KMidi or KPPP, I have to use KDE. If I want KLyX and Gnumeric and have them both integrate seamlessly with each other and the rest of my desktop...well I'm out of luck. Like FSF and XEmacs, GNOME and KDE aren't different enough to warrant their coexistence.
Apparently glib (part of the GTK+ project) has a number of useful data structures implemented in C. I haven't used it, and I'm not arguing that it's better. Obviously it would have to use void* or equivalent so you miss out on static type checking. And I don't think it's as comprehensive as STL. But it is there!
This doesn't necessarily follow. I wouldn't expect C++ translated to C to be any faster than C++ compiled directly, there still needs to be some overhead for the C++ features you use. In other words, you may be able to make a C implementation that is more efficient than the translated version.
One of the design goals for C++ is that there shouldn't be any runtime cost for features of the language you don't use. So if I compile my ANSI C program with a C++ compiler, I shouldn't lose anything.
This is an important point. C++ arguably offers more potential for abuse than most other languages. Because it's easier and faster for an experienced developer to write in C++ than C, many people have the false impression that it is an easier or simpler language than C when quite the opposite is true.
If you don't use "make" or equivalent, you really should. It's worth the effort!
Uh oh...hot button!
A lack of evidence doesn't disprove a theory. It just doesn't provide support for it. The acceptence of the theory of evolution is based on a common-sense extension of the visible minor changes to the long term. Is there any reason to believe that this extension doesn't follow? Is there evidence that there are contraints on the amount that a genetic code can change?
What kind of evidence would convince you that evolution occurs? A billion-year case study?
I thought it was particularly interesting that HP wants to support Linux partly to catch up to IBM.
Last year, when Linux was really just starting to get mainstream attention, a number of companies started to support Linux in some way because they thought it was interesting.
Now it looks like we're going to be seeing more and more people supporting Linux to stay competetive, because they're expected to support it. Soon enough, companies that aren't particularly interested in Linux (and perhaps don't even like it for some reason) will have to support it just because everyone else does. That's a great sign!
In particular, it makes me think that we can make the same push with software freedom over the next few years. If enough companies (and especially big names like HP) become interested in free software, soon their competitors will have no choice!