My excellent philosophy professor summed it up rather succinctly: there are two types of arguments, arguments with a goal of synthesis, and arguments with a goal of victory.
I haven't read that book (and now will), but I would also recommend another classic, Fritjof Capra's Web of Life
Generally speaking, according to Gaia theory, the earth is one system, functioning simultaneously at all levels of scale. Those levels are only artificially segmented according to the biases of an observer, and are not atomic but a continuum, with all levels equally interdependent upon and interactive with all other levels. Soil bacteria speeds rock weathering, the chalk shells from dead oceanic algae lie on the sea floor and affect geothermal activity, etc. "We can no longer think of rocks, animals, and plants as being separate. Gaia theory shows us that there is a tight interlocking between the planet's living parts... and its non-living parts..." (p104)
So yes, once one has wrapped their head around this concept, it's no surprise that all living systems are interconnected as well, especially those so tightly coupled as to be considered classically symbiotic. We are not just their environment, they are ours, and we share causation.
From the article: "...changes in the acoustic emission with time are a sure indicator of changes in the physiological status of the peripheral auditory system. This property has been used as a sensitive indicator of changes caused by noise or therapy on a patient's ear."
So this method is sensitive to normal physiological changes within the inner ear. If I just came from a concert, can I still check my bank balance by phone? What if I spent a week at the lake? What if some lint from my pocket has found its way into my cell phone? Too many defeat scenarios for this to ever be a primary identifier.
Working in a web shop where lunch conversation was occasionally about how thoroughly we had memorized the hotkeys for our favorite dev programs, I hacked up some foot pedals for one of our designers by destroying a usb keyboard and wiring directly into the keyboard's controller chip. What we eventually found was that the average desk worker does not maintain the same posture all day long, but instead alters it, shifting weight to the left, right, or center to alleviate fatigue. This made any particular arrangement of foot pedals uncomfortable to use throughout the course of the day because it required maintaining a specific posture or rearranging the pedals at every (previously unconscious) shift in the chair. Now, we did not have $1000 chairs, so perhaps foot pedals could work with some highly ergonomic office equipment, but our relatively simple setup didn't afford further testing.
As to what difference is made by rearranging the letters on the keyboard, I believe that the primary argument should not be about speed but efficiency. Most people type only in short bursts anyway, so wpm is a diminishing return metric above a certain threshold (I've heard around 35), but highly efficient layouts dramatically reduce the finger and wrist work required to type the same text, which reduces fatigue and injury. I suggest checking out http://klausler.com/evolved.html for an example of unbiased methodology which shows that Dvorak reduces effort per text by over 50%, which I may add, has been my experience. I switched to Dvorak after I started noticing early signs of CTS (numbness, tingling, etc) and have had 0 problems since, 6 years later.
I agree with both you and the parent, so here is a brief summary for Generation Net:
1) Not enough security cameras 2) Bad (unshielded) communications cables 3) Equipment won't survive the extreme temperatures 4) No one cares, billions of dollars and national security at risk.
But, some of us really do prefer reading (and apparently, transcribing), and since google couldn't find me a transcript, here's one I made while waiting for my WoW trial to download, heh.
--- Before I begin, I want to tell you that making videos like this is not something I do as a profession, so please bear with the crudeness of the effort, and my reading from a prepared statement.
What I'm going to tell you is going to seem preposterous and unbelievable, and may be very hard for you to believe that our government and the largest defense contract in the world is capable of such alarming incompetence, and can make ethical compromises as glaring as what I'm going to describe. Having said that, I assure you that everything I'm stating here is accurate. I have resorted to creating this video because I've exhausted every avenue I can think of, and in spite of the negative effects it has had or will have on me and my family, I feel very strongly that I need to take this step in order to resolve these issues.
The purpose of this video is to ask for your assistance in helping me resolve several serious safety and security issues relating to homeland security. Specifically, the U.S. Coast Guard.
Several years ago, I was Lockheed Martin's C4ISR system engineering lead for the 123 project on the Deepwater program. The purpose of this effort was to upgrade the Coast Guard's fleet of 110-foot patrol boats, to not only lengthen their servicable life, but to add space onto the rear of the boat to accomodate the Zodiac rescue boat, and to install modern command, control, communication, computer information, and surveillance systems on these boats to prepare them for a post-9/11 world.
My responsibilities on this effort were to ensure the designs we created fulfilled requirements, and to complete the installation and delivery of the first boat. During my tenure on this project, several critical safety and security problems arose.
These issues included:
-The camera surveillance system.
We had a requirement to provide a camera surveillance system for the boats. The purpose of the system was to permit the Coast Guard to monitor these boats while in a Coast Guard port, without having to have a watch-stander on board. The main purpose of the system is to ensure that no one can access or board the boats without being seen.
The implementation that Lockheed Martin proposed, and that was finally accepted by the Coast Guard, left two extremely large blind spots leading directly to the pilot house, or the bridge, of the ship. These blind spots are over 10 feet wide on the deck, and extend to hundreds of feet wide at the horizon. I have an engineering rendering of the blind spots. [holds up image depicting blind spots] Here is the forward part of the boat, and the covered zones are here in the lighter color. As you can see here, and here, there are two very large blind spots leading all the way to the horizon that the crew cannot see, and they lead right up and into the bridge.
While this problem could have been easily remedied by simply providing another camera to fill the blind spots, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Coast Guard decided to deliver these boats without the extra camera. This situation leaves the boats and the crew in a position where someone could access the boat without beeing seen. While it is possible to augment the cameras with a watch stander, that situation puts the Coast Guard in the exact position they originally tried to avoid, with the additional expense of a system that does not meet their needs.
The next issue: -Environmental survivability of the equipment.
Just prior to the installation of the systems on the ship, we were fina
If by "killer app" you mean, "all chances of being used in a corporate environment are dead" then yes, this may turn Firefox into just that. Until FF gains central management of (amongst many other things) allowed plugins, then P2P capabilities via plugins are, in fact, a strike -against- deploying FF. I'm surprised we don't already have plugins for connecting to the popular IM services, which is another common problem.
We need to be giving corporate decision-makers -more- reasons to switch to FF, not fewer.
For any who wish to avoid such "Data Dangers", I've been using Boot & Nuke (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) for some time now. It's pretty easy to use and supposedly reaches DoD levels of secure delete. All used hard drives my shop sells get a dban scrubbing before they leave.
There are (at least) two additional party commands, Defend and Wait. I didn't know about them either until I was checking the key bindings screen. (I changed mine to D and W, since I don't use the keyboard for camera control.) Defend is similar to Mirror, but your party will attack creatures on their own if they come close enough or attack first. Wait is like a stationary Defend, they will defend themselves but not follow your active character. You can indeed use this to set up good attacks. Personally, I like to have all my ranged chars wait, and a tank go pull creatures towards the group. With the ranged attackers firing away as the creatures come towards the group, you can deal a lot of opening damage with minimal damage taken.
I agree with everything else you said, especially about the ultra-linear plot and the interesting sub-missions. The main plot bored me after about the 3rd or 4th movie, and my entire goal of the game has already shifted from "survive/progress the plot/develop character" to "find all the sub-missions", some of which are quite difficult to find. Oh, have I mentioned that this is all before the end of the 1st Act? *sigh*
the same can be said of Linux and I don't have to fight with it to beat the UI into something usable.
Are you saying that the BSD UI is less usable, or less usable for you because you are used to gnu/linux?
I'll leave it to the true zealots to debate the usability of one OS vs. the other, but your statement basically says "Linux is more useable because I know Linux." I personally grew up (unix-wise) on BSD and csh, and thus I need to beat every linux box into something "usable." This is something I accept, knowing that every OS is different. Either the OS or my norms will be beaten about until productivity is satisfactory.
Just try to seperate your preferences, habits, and past experiences from your view of the pro's/con's of an OS in the future.
Unless, of course, you want a job at one of the hundreds of ISP's or web hosts that run BSD.
I've personally built a wireless ISP/webhost entirely using BSD several years ago which now hosts several hundred sites (even though their emphasis is on the WISP,) and since worked at and with several networking companies which also use BSD.
I now work with a consulting company. I don't know if it's the old greybeards in the back offices or the new hipsters moving up into management, but I've been surprised (and delighted) at how often I discover that the medium-sized businesses I work with now use BSD at some point in their processes.
In general, apps have no control whether they get swapped out or not under Windows. In fact, when an application gets minimized, Windows pretty aggressively swaps as much of that app out to try to keep the rest of your apps snappy, whether or not you're short on RAM. However, due to a nifty hack, the moz devs have found a way to prevent or at least reduce how much of their app gets swapped out when minimized. If your desktop habits include frequently minimizing / restoring Firefox, try this:
1) Go to about:config 2) Right-click in the content area and create a new Boolean value 3) Name it "config.trim_on_minimize" and set it to false. 4) Close & relaunch
See bugzilla bug# 76831 if you'd like more details. (no linking to bugs from slashdot)
This all seems to be pretty simple to me, and fits into "the big picture" quite firmly.
From 1999 to 2002 (last available data), the number of "programming" jobs in the U.S. earning on average $64,000 fell by some 71,000. But jobs held by application and system software engineers earning on average $74,000 increased by 115,000.
So, programmers overseas are now writing the programs that businesses depend on, and we're hiring more people (44,000 more people in 3 years) to try to implement / support that software. Makes sense to me.
There's been lots of discussion on/. about how overseas programmers are less "in tune" with the business problems that the software is to provide the solution for, and how in some cases the programmers are not as well-trained.
Therefore, it should be no suprise that it takes that much more work(ers) to crowbar this software into place & pound it into submission so that it does the job, and to keep it doing so every day. Additionally, when you consider that the personnel doing the implementation/support are that much further disconnected (language barriers & such) from those who actually built it, this becomes a no-brainer.
The real question is, is the trend of software requiring more and more maintenance & support year after year for myriad reasons a good thing? This article claims that it is in the short-term (more jobs), but what about when the whole card house tumbles?
Did the web pages you looked at back then look anything like they do today? "Ooh, this page has an image!"...
Did they seperate the content from the presentation, so that you could control exactly how you wanted to see things?
Did they have any layout more complex than perhaps a center tag, or a small table?
Did they support any dynamic forms or have any concept of dynamic pages?
And finally, did your web browser work on Mac, Windows, -and- any form of X-Windows?
If you want 16Mb of RAM used to browse the web, you can still find NS3.x for download in certain places. If you want to read slashdot, or any other page remotely resembling something modern, your software's gonna need some RAM to handle it all.
No, Keen is NOT abandonware. If you download the full version, you are participating in illegal warez, and this is one of my hugest pet-peeves with the gaming industry.
Does anyone actually pay $20 freaking dollars for Commander Keen these days? There are so many good games outthere that stupidly can't be distributed as abandonware because of paranoid companies. They're not making money on these old games any more, so why the fuss?!
I just don't understand why more companies can't realize that by demanding hard cash for >15-year-old games, they're only shunning the people who love them the most. That, and they'll probably go elsewhere & find a warez copy for free.
You're absolutely right in that the "personal taxes" category for linux software is very vacant. However, while not quite geared to the home user, there are quite a few high-end financial app suites targeted at the real bean-counters. One I recently ran across is OSAS.
When you buy the software you get the source, and they do allow customizations & modifications to the source as well, just no releasing of the code to the public. [note: this is all to the best of my understanding. If someone out there knows more about this app, please correct me.]
As to your other concerns:
Kazaa: There are several re-implementations of the Kazaa client for linux. I've also heard that you can run the real thing under WINE.
Real Player: Click Here. Nuff said.
ICQ/AIM: Gaim.
You clearly do not understand what a monopoly is and isn't. Don't feel bad, as neither does a substantial portion of the/. crowd.
This is absolutely nothing like your example with BMW. To correct your analogy, the Microsoft BMW would:
1) Enforce strict legalities on BMW dealers that they are not allowed to switch out the radios. Doing so can lose them their rights to deal in BMW products.
2) Design their engine so that if you removed the radio & replaced it with another, the engine would no longer start.
3) If a 3rd-party radio manufacturer finds a way around point 2, include legalities with your car's "license" (owner's manual/lease papers) that replacing the radio, even if it works, nulls and voids any manufacturer's warranty on the car.
4) Since no radio manufacturer is going to produce radios for that line of BMW because of 1-3, perhaps an end-user will attempt that. Assuming they are intelligent enough to bypass point 2, and careless enough to ignore point 3, BMW would not release technical specifications for how the radio actually plugs into the car's wiring system. In fact, they would intentionally make the wiring as confusing as possible, so that you have little chance of creating a radio that works as well as the factory radio.
I don't mean to start a flame war either. I'm just tired of hearing poor analogies like these that only indicate a lack of understanding of what a monopoly actually is.
Finally, let me point out that most countries agree that monopolies are perfectly ok, as long as you don't illegally use your fortunate market standing to maintain your monopoly.
Ok, I admit that I have not touched a Linux box in years. Mainly because I became a necrophiliac.:)
However, I am slightly confused by the link from linux.dell.com to Dell's 2.6.x kernel patch about EDD.... is it completely normal to see code being submitted for possible inclusion with "Copyright (C) 2002, 2003 Dell Inc." attached? How does the licensing work?
I don't think Mac users have anything to worry about, as far as MS software availability for their platform in the future. MS would find themselves nearly-instantly back in Monopoly court if they announced that they were no longer going to write software for anything but Windows.
I guess they -could- escape that by writing for Linux instead, but I have a feeling that if the only person left in the world using a Mac was Steve Jobs, they'd still have a 10-person MBU.
Slashdot Mirror
My excellent philosophy professor summed it up rather succinctly: there are two types of arguments, arguments with a goal of synthesis, and arguments with a goal of victory.
I haven't read that book (and now will), but I would also recommend another classic, Fritjof Capra's Web of Life
Generally speaking, according to Gaia theory, the earth is one system, functioning simultaneously at all levels of scale. Those levels are only artificially segmented according to the biases of an observer, and are not atomic but a continuum, with all levels equally interdependent upon and interactive with all other levels. Soil bacteria speeds rock weathering, the chalk shells from dead oceanic algae lie on the sea floor and affect geothermal activity, etc. "We can no longer think of rocks, animals, and plants as being separate. Gaia theory shows us that there is a tight interlocking between the planet's living parts ... and its non-living parts ..." (p104)
So yes, once one has wrapped their head around this concept, it's no surprise that all living systems are interconnected as well, especially those so tightly coupled as to be considered classically symbiotic. We are not just their environment, they are ours, and we share causation.
From the article:
"...changes in the acoustic emission with time are a sure indicator of changes in the physiological status of the peripheral auditory system. This property has been used as a sensitive indicator of changes caused by noise or therapy on a patient's ear."
So this method is sensitive to normal physiological changes within the inner ear. If I just came from a concert, can I still check my bank balance by phone? What if I spent a week at the lake? What if some lint from my pocket has found its way into my cell phone? Too many defeat scenarios for this to ever be a primary identifier.
Working in a web shop where lunch conversation was occasionally about how thoroughly we had memorized the hotkeys for our favorite dev programs, I hacked up some foot pedals for one of our designers by destroying a usb keyboard and wiring directly into the keyboard's controller chip. What we eventually found was that the average desk worker does not maintain the same posture all day long, but instead alters it, shifting weight to the left, right, or center to alleviate fatigue. This made any particular arrangement of foot pedals uncomfortable to use throughout the course of the day because it required maintaining a specific posture or rearranging the pedals at every (previously unconscious) shift in the chair. Now, we did not have $1000 chairs, so perhaps foot pedals could work with some highly ergonomic office equipment, but our relatively simple setup didn't afford further testing.
As to what difference is made by rearranging the letters on the keyboard, I believe that the primary argument should not be about speed but efficiency. Most people type only in short bursts anyway, so wpm is a diminishing return metric above a certain threshold (I've heard around 35), but highly efficient layouts dramatically reduce the finger and wrist work required to type the same text, which reduces fatigue and injury. I suggest checking out http://klausler.com/evolved.html for an example of unbiased methodology which shows that Dvorak reduces effort per text by over 50%, which I may add, has been my experience. I switched to Dvorak after I started noticing early signs of CTS (numbness, tingling, etc) and have had 0 problems since, 6 years later.
I agree with both you and the parent, so here is a brief summary for Generation Net:
1) Not enough security cameras
2) Bad (unshielded) communications cables
3) Equipment won't survive the extreme temperatures
4) No one cares, billions of dollars and national security at risk.
But, some of us really do prefer reading (and apparently, transcribing), and since google couldn't find me a transcript, here's one I made while waiting for my WoW trial to download, heh.
---
Before I begin, I want to tell you that making videos like this is not something I do as a profession, so please bear with the crudeness of the effort, and my reading from a prepared statement.
What I'm going to tell you is going to seem preposterous and unbelievable, and may be very hard for you to believe that our government and the largest defense contract in the world is capable of such alarming incompetence, and can make ethical compromises as glaring as what I'm going to describe. Having said that, I assure you that everything I'm stating here is accurate. I have resorted to creating this video because I've exhausted every avenue I can think of, and in spite of the negative effects it has had or will have on me and my family, I feel very strongly that I need to take this step in order to resolve these issues.
The purpose of this video is to ask for your assistance in helping me resolve several serious safety and security issues relating to homeland security. Specifically, the U.S. Coast Guard.
Several years ago, I was Lockheed Martin's C4ISR system engineering lead for the 123 project on the Deepwater program. The purpose of this effort was to upgrade the Coast Guard's fleet of 110-foot patrol boats, to not only lengthen their servicable life, but to add space onto the rear of the boat to accomodate the Zodiac rescue boat, and to install modern command, control, communication, computer information, and surveillance systems on these boats to prepare them for a post-9/11 world.
My responsibilities on this effort were to ensure the designs we created fulfilled requirements, and to complete the installation and delivery of the first boat. During my tenure on this project, several critical safety and security problems arose.
These issues included:
-The camera surveillance system.
We had a requirement to provide a camera surveillance system for the boats. The purpose of the system was to permit the Coast Guard to monitor these boats while in a Coast Guard port, without having to have a watch-stander on board. The main purpose of the system is to ensure that no one can access or board the boats without being seen.
The implementation that Lockheed Martin proposed, and that was finally accepted by the Coast Guard, left two extremely large blind spots leading directly to the pilot house, or the bridge, of the ship. These blind spots are over 10 feet wide on the deck, and extend to hundreds of feet wide at the horizon. I have an engineering rendering of the blind spots. [holds up image depicting blind spots] Here is the forward part of the boat, and the covered zones are here in the lighter color. As you can see here, and here, there are two very large blind spots leading all the way to the horizon that the crew cannot see, and they lead right up and into the bridge.
While this problem could have been easily remedied by simply providing another camera to fill the blind spots, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Coast Guard decided to deliver these boats without the extra camera. This situation leaves the boats and the crew in a position where someone could access the boat without beeing seen. While it is possible to augment the cameras with a watch stander, that situation puts the Coast Guard in the exact position they originally tried to avoid, with the additional expense of a system that does not meet their needs.
The next issue:
-Environmental survivability of the equipment.
Just prior to the installation of the systems on the ship, we were fina
If by "killer app" you mean, "all chances of being used in a corporate environment are dead" then yes, this may turn Firefox into just that. Until FF gains central management of (amongst many other things) allowed plugins, then P2P capabilities via plugins are, in fact, a strike -against- deploying FF. I'm surprised we don't already have plugins for connecting to the popular IM services, which is another common problem.
We need to be giving corporate decision-makers -more- reasons to switch to FF, not fewer.
For any who wish to avoid such "Data Dangers", I've been using Boot & Nuke (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) for some time now. It's pretty easy to use and supposedly reaches DoD levels of secure delete. All used hard drives my shop sells get a dban scrubbing before they leave.
There are (at least) two additional party commands, Defend and Wait. I didn't know about them either until I was checking the key bindings screen. (I changed mine to D and W, since I don't use the keyboard for camera control.) Defend is similar to Mirror, but your party will attack creatures on their own if they come close enough or attack first. Wait is like a stationary Defend, they will defend themselves but not follow your active character. You can indeed use this to set up good attacks. Personally, I like to have all my ranged chars wait, and a tank go pull creatures towards the group. With the ranged attackers firing away as the creatures come towards the group, you can deal a lot of opening damage with minimal damage taken.
I agree with everything else you said, especially about the ultra-linear plot and the interesting sub-missions. The main plot bored me after about the 3rd or 4th movie, and my entire goal of the game has already shifted from "survive/progress the plot/develop character" to "find all the sub-missions", some of which are quite difficult to find. Oh, have I mentioned that this is all before the end of the 1st Act? *sigh*
the same can be said of Linux and I don't have to fight with it to beat the UI into something usable.
Are you saying that the BSD UI is less usable, or less usable for you because you are used to gnu/linux?
I'll leave it to the true zealots to debate the usability of one OS vs. the other, but your statement basically says "Linux is more useable because I know Linux." I personally grew up (unix-wise) on BSD and csh, and thus I need to beat every linux box into something "usable." This is something I accept, knowing that every OS is different. Either the OS or my norms will be beaten about until productivity is satisfactory.
Just try to seperate your preferences, habits, and past experiences from your view of the pro's/con's of an OS in the future.
Unless, of course, you want a job at one of the hundreds of ISP's or web hosts that run BSD.
I've personally built a wireless ISP/webhost entirely using BSD several years ago which now hosts several hundred sites (even though their emphasis is on the WISP,) and since worked at and with several networking companies which also use BSD.
I now work with a consulting company. I don't know if it's the old greybeards in the back offices or the new hipsters moving up into management, but I've been surprised (and delighted) at how often I discover that the medium-sized businesses I work with now use BSD at some point in their processes.
Ah, that must be the ActiveXXX interface to the gecko engine.
I bet he's the same guy that cast magic missile at "the darkness".
In general, apps have no control whether they get swapped out or not under Windows. In fact, when an application gets minimized, Windows pretty aggressively swaps as much of that app out to try to keep the rest of your apps snappy, whether or not you're short on RAM. However, due to a nifty hack, the moz devs have found a way to prevent or at least reduce how much of their app gets swapped out when minimized. If your desktop habits include frequently minimizing / restoring Firefox, try this:
1) Go to about:config
2) Right-click in the content area and create a new Boolean value
3) Name it "config.trim_on_minimize" and set it to false.
4) Close & relaunch
See bugzilla bug# 76831 if you'd like more details. (no linking to bugs from slashdot)
I'd never heard of that trick. Unfortunately, it sounds just as illegal as a regular shotgun.
This all seems to be pretty simple to me, and fits into "the big picture" quite firmly.
/. about how overseas programmers are less "in tune" with the business problems that the software is to provide the solution for, and how in some cases the programmers are not as well-trained.
From 1999 to 2002 (last available data), the number of "programming" jobs in the U.S. earning on average $64,000 fell by some 71,000. But jobs held by application and system software engineers earning on average $74,000 increased by 115,000.
So, programmers overseas are now writing the programs that businesses depend on, and we're hiring more people (44,000 more people in 3 years) to try to implement / support that software. Makes sense to me.
There's been lots of discussion on
Therefore, it should be no suprise that it takes that much more work(ers) to crowbar this software into place & pound it into submission so that it does the job, and to keep it doing so every day. Additionally, when you consider that the personnel doing the implementation/support are that much further disconnected (language barriers & such) from those who actually built it, this becomes a no-brainer.
The real question is, is the trend of software requiring more and more maintenance & support year after year for myriad reasons a good thing? This article claims that it is in the short-term (more jobs), but what about when the whole card house tumbles?
Did the web pages you looked at back then look anything like they do today? "Ooh, this page has an image!" ...
Did they seperate the content from the presentation, so that you could control exactly how you wanted to see things?
Did they have any layout more complex than perhaps a center tag, or a small table?
Did they support any dynamic forms or have any concept of dynamic pages?
And finally, did your web browser work on Mac, Windows, -and- any form of X-Windows?
If you want 16Mb of RAM used to browse the web, you can still find NS3.x for download in certain places. If you want to read slashdot, or any other page remotely resembling something modern, your software's gonna need some RAM to handle it all.
Wow... surely you can inform us of what industry needs this horrible product so badly without breaking your NDA ...
:)
I promise I'll hire you
... and perhaps Microsoft will consider changing their business tactics.
$50b / $613m ~= 82, or 1.2% of their on-hand CASH.
No, Keen is NOT abandonware. If you download the full version, you are participating in illegal warez, and this is one of my hugest pet-peeves with the gaming industry.
Does anyone actually pay $20 freaking dollars for Commander Keen these days? There are so many good games out there that stupidly can't be distributed as abandonware because of paranoid companies. They're not making money on these old games any more, so why the fuss?!
I just don't understand why more companies can't realize that by demanding hard cash for >15-year-old games, they're only shunning the people who love them the most. That, and they'll probably go elsewhere & find a warez copy for free.
You're absolutely right in that the "personal taxes" category for linux software is very vacant. However, while not quite geared to the home user, there are quite a few high-end financial app suites targeted at the real bean-counters. One I recently ran across is OSAS.
When you buy the software you get the source, and they do allow customizations & modifications to the source as well, just no releasing of the code to the public. [note: this is all to the best of my understanding. If someone out there knows more about this app, please correct me.]
As to your other concerns:
Kazaa: There are several re-implementations of the Kazaa client for linux. I've also heard that you can run the real thing under WINE.
Real Player: Click Here. Nuff said.
ICQ/AIM: Gaim.
You clearly do not understand what a monopoly is and isn't. Don't feel bad, as neither does a substantial portion of the /. crowd.
:
This is absolutely nothing like your example with BMW. To correct your analogy, the Microsoft BMW would
1) Enforce strict legalities on BMW dealers that they are not allowed to switch out the radios. Doing so can lose them their rights to deal in BMW products.
2) Design their engine so that if you removed the radio & replaced it with another, the engine would no longer start.
3) If a 3rd-party radio manufacturer finds a way around point 2, include legalities with your car's "license" (owner's manual/lease papers) that replacing the radio, even if it works, nulls and voids any manufacturer's warranty on the car.
4) Since no radio manufacturer is going to produce radios for that line of BMW because of 1-3, perhaps an end-user will attempt that. Assuming they are intelligent enough to bypass point 2, and careless enough to ignore point 3, BMW would not release technical specifications for how the radio actually plugs into the car's wiring system. In fact, they would intentionally make the wiring as confusing as possible, so that you have little chance of creating a radio that works as well as the factory radio.
I don't mean to start a flame war either. I'm just tired of hearing poor analogies like these that only indicate a lack of understanding of what a monopoly actually is.
Finally, let me point out that most countries agree that monopolies are perfectly ok, as long as you don't illegally use your fortunate market standing to maintain your monopoly.
Along the lines of "Musicians don't die, they just decompose," how about, "Physicists don't die, they just turn into cold, dark matter"?
Ok, I admit that I have not touched a Linux box in years. Mainly because I became a necrophiliac. :)
.... is it completely normal to see code being submitted for possible inclusion with "Copyright (C) 2002, 2003 Dell Inc." attached? How does the licensing work?
However, I am slightly confused by the link from linux.dell.com to Dell's 2.6.x kernel patch about EDD
Yep
I don't think Mac users have anything to worry about, as far as MS software availability for their platform in the future. MS would find themselves nearly-instantly back in Monopoly court if they announced that they were no longer going to write software for anything but Windows.
I guess they -could- escape that by writing for Linux instead, but I have a feeling that if the only person left in the world using a Mac was Steve Jobs, they'd still have a 10-person MBU.