Agreed. I submitted this interview/article about a great fellow in our community, Loïc Dachary, (well ok my community) and it was rejected. I believe my problem was in mentioning the fact that I've worked with him. I guess being an insider isn't all that it's cracked up to be.:-)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
... but will it get the exposure necessary to make an impact on normal people (ie non Slashdot nerdz)? Surely everyone has heard of Microsoft's little speech, as it was broadcast on many news channels, but will we see the same exposure for this rebuttal? Me thinks not. It sucks, but I can't see MSNBC headlining this...
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Also, the chances of it falling at a safe re-entry angle are fairly remote. Most likely it would just burn up in our atmosphere. Remember, there is a lot of *friction* when something falls to the earth from space.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Thanks for the insightful response. In retrospect, I should have been more careful, separating GNU/GPL and Open Source, but in the eyes of myself and many other programmers I know, the lines between them are blurred somewhat.
I haven't been able to figure out which parts of the GPL Open Source folks find objectional, and you've offered some insight there. I lean more towards the purist side myself, having read Mr. Stallman's work for several years, and currently working on FSF projects.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Yes! This is awesome. It allows for something I've wanted for quite a while... introspection. This means that an application can actually use document structure information to do things like build user interfaces and write automated SQL to backup arbitrary XML repositories.
I have been thinking about building a generic content management solution for a while, and schema was the only missing piece of the puzzle. With schema, I can build a document type that makes sense for a client, and an HTML content management tool for entering data can be automatically generated from the schema document! How cool would that be?
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
The following was posted *yesterday* on the FreeDevelopers list. I am not posting it as an Anonymous Coward, because I badly need karma points:-)
From: "Eric S. Raymond"
To: wire-service@thyrsus.com Subject:
Breaking story: Beware the Microsoft shell game
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:40:03 -0400
A few hours ago, a friendly journalist tipped me that Craig Mundie
of Microsoft is going to make a major speech in New York tomorrow
attacking open-source software -- specifically, attacking the GNU
General Public License. This speech is probably intended to define
Microsoft's party line on open source, and to shift the terms of the
debate over it to one that Microsoft thinks it can win.
I haven't seen the speech; the friendly journalist told me it was
embargoed. But I'm expecting it to be a masterpiece of FUD. You
watch; it's going to be a studied and ingenious attempt to create
fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of software users and the
public -- and to obscure Microsoft's underlying motives by cloaking
them in affected concern for the public welfare.
This is a heads-up to journalists, industry observers, and the public
-- as you listen to that speech tomorrow, don't get taken in by
Mundie's shell game. Keep your eye on the pea. As the perceptive
gentlemen of "The Economist" observed earlier this week [1]
Microsoft's real agenda will be to preserve its monopoly, whatever the
cost to software developers and the public.
So I can predict with fair confidence some of the things you're going
to hear -- perhaps not as explicit statements that can be refuted, but
as hints and allegations, a studied and careful attempt to disinform
without telling explicit lies.
First off, expect Mr. Mundie to try to blur the distinctions between
open-source development, use of the GPL, wholesale copyright-law
violations like Napster, and outright software piracy. These are four
different phenomena; a lot of open-source software doesn't use the
GPL, most open-source developers are supportive of
intellectual-property rights including copyright, and the open-source
community as a whole has historically taken a definite stance against
software piracy. We only give away our own work, not other peoples'.
Nevertheless, expect Mr. Mundie to lump all these phenomena togetber
and hint darkly that Linux is the spearhead of a conspiracy to destroy
trillions of dollars in intellectual-property assets. He probably
won't come right out and accuse us of being Communists; that trial
balloon popped when Jim Allchin floated it a few weeks ago with his
"un-American" crack and got laughed out of town. But he'll let the
implication hang there and hope it sticks.
What he'll hope you don't notice is that the "assets" he's mainly
interested in protecting are Microsoft's -- and not just the $26
billion it has in the bank, but the far more important asset of over 90%
desktop market share and tight control of its customer base through
proprietary lock-ins.
It's that lock-in, that control of customers, that is what open source
threatens most. With open source, customers can have real choices;
they don't need to be locked into a perpetually more expensive upgrade
treadmill, they can own and inspect and modify the software they
depend on, they can have real security because they can know exactly
what's
running on their machines.
That choice is the fundamental threat to Microsoft's business model,
and it's the reason they're getting clobbered by Linux in the server
market (every month, more Linux installations come up on web servers
alone than in Microsoft's entire Windows 2000 customer base). So it's
not just individual open-source projects like Linux and Apache
Microsoft has to defeat -- it's the open-source way of thinking about
software.
One way to defeat it is by making people afraid of it -- by conning
potential corporate purchasers into believing that using open-source
software on their machine somehow means the GPL will force them to
publish all their software or business secrets. Craig Mundie will try
very hard to make you believe that. It's not true, but a company that
blatantly falsified videotape evidence in a Federal antitrust trial is
not going to balk at lesser falsehoods.
Another way to defeat open source is to co-opt it. After Craig Mundie
gets through trying to make you fear and distrust open source, he will
tout Microsoft's new so-called openness. He will doubtless talk about
how Microsoft is willing to share source code with large customers and
universities. And he'll talk up the "open" services like SOAP that
are part of Microsoft's.NET plans (about which more later).
What Mr. Mundie will hope you don't notice is that Microsoft wants all
the "sharing" to be in one direction. What they're doing is what we
call "source under glass" -- you can see it, but you can't modify or
reuse it in other programs. They want to be able to get the huge
benefit
of having thousands of outside people review their code without allowing
any of those people to use what they learn on other projects.
We in the open-source community see this for what it is -- a
counterfeit, a trick, a scam. It's aimed at recruiting free labor for
Microsoft without giving the outside contributors any stake in or
control of the results of their effort. In true open source, all
parties are equal. When I give you my software under an open-source
license, you have exactly the same rights as I do. That's what I
trade you in return for your help in testing and improving the
software. That's the voluntary cooperation that built the Internet.
Mr. Mundie also doesn't want you to notice, or remember, Microsoft's
long history of perverting supposedly "open" standards into customer
lock-in devices, by poisoning them with proprietary extensions that
only closed Microsoft software understands. A notorious recent
example is the games Microsoft played with the Kerberos security
protocol. It would take a really cockeyed optimist to believe that
Microsoft doesn't have similar maneuvers planned for once the.NET
protocols get established, if they do.
Finally, Mr. Mundie will doubtless wind up his exhortations with a
paean to the glories of.NET, Microsoft's attempt to turn itself into
the worlds's biggest application software provider. Stripped to its
essence, under this plan you mostly would give up buying software and
instead rent networked services from Microsoft by the month.
There are two things Mr. Mundie hopes you won't notice about *this*.
One is that.NET is born out of fear. Microsoft's strategists aren't
stupid. They can see the trend curves, that falling hardware margins
are spelling the doom of any business model based on expensive
packaged-software licenses. They know the revenues from their
own software business have actually been declining for three quarters
now,
covered only by creative accounting practices for which Microsoft is
under a federal fraud investigation separate from the antitrust trial.
More fundamentally, those strategists have read Clayton Christensen's
"The Innovator's Dilemma"; they can see that open-source software in
general and Linux in particular are an unstoppable technology
disruption that will sooner or later reach the heart of Microsoft's
business -- and that the only way for Microsoft to survive is to dodge
the bullet, to be in a different business before that bullet hits
home. Hence the push to become an ASP.
But the more important thing he hopes you won't notice is that in the
brave new.NET world, you would lose even the meager rights you have
now under Microsoft's End-User License Agreement. You would own
nothing. You would instead become ever more dependent on Microsoft to
provide the basic services that your computer and your business rely
on to function. You would have to absolutely trust Microsoft to
neither deliberately violate your privacy for business advantage nor
to leave your vital data exposed to crackers like those who break into
Microsoft's own servers every few weeks.
Keep your eye on the pea, gentlemen and ladies. Because that is what
Microsoft is really after -- a fast exit out of the packaged-software
business, a lock on your critical data and network services, and an
indefinite extension of the coercive monopoly position described in
Judge Jackson's findings of fact. Higher prices, fewer choices, worse
lock-in, and Microsoft uber alles for ever and ever, amen.
-- Eric S. Raymond The right of self-defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." -- Henry St. George Tucker (in Blackstone's Commentaries)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
It's definately bad. I can't count the number of times on both hands that I've said aloud (when you get older you start talking to yourself) "Why won't this forking code compile!?!??!":-P
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I used to work 70-80 hour weeks. About 3 years ago I started reading the works of a fellow freak named Richard M. Stallman. Now I refuse to work more than 40 hour weeks, to pay the rent and keep me in , and dedicate the remaining 30-40 hours to "sticking it to the man", GPL style.:-P
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Cocoon has many of the features you describe. It doesn't have drag and drop report creation, you are on your own there. What it does provide, however, is a solid foundation for creating different views of a data set in different presentation languages. You can build a report from some input XML data as an HTML web page, or as a PDF document with line breaks, etc. It also encourages very clean implementation by total separation of content / logic and presentation code.
For a good overview of what Cocoon can do, including PDF output, check out my resume.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I built an engine for this sort of thing, written as a Java application. It could pitch two automated chess AIs against each-other, a human against chess AI, or a human against a human. The AI interface worked as long as they have HTML/CGI interfaces, and a small Java adapter class is written that supports the site. I think I even got started on a spectator interface. It had some neat special effects too [including fire animation on threatened pieces]. Anyone care to help me finish it up? I'd gladly GPL the code, and hand it over to a loving family. All it needs is some polish, bug fixing, and some new piece graphics (they were stolen from CM3000, I admit it). I would do it myself, except that I've already volunteered for too much GPL work.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
On one hand, Apple wishes to leverage the power of open source development, and on the other they want control over their intellectual property. There is no doubt that this causes internal conflicts at Apple. They *should* be very careful on how they handle this situation.
First off, if they alienate open source developers, they lose a significant portion of their developer support. I'm not sure if they care at this point, because they have a working, published product. This is still dangerous for them though because they are scaring away potential open source help for future projects.
Second, Darwin/OSX can be viewed as something of a ground breaking experiment in alternative development methodologies. As with many past projects, they are really setting future corporate development trends here. Other companies wishing to apply this development method will doubtless follow the trend Apple has already set. If these companies proceed without any notion of what an open source developer sees as right and wrong, the trend is sure to die quickly.
Ok Mr. Flame. There isn't actually any link to this site in the article BTW. Not owning one of these things, I wouldn't really know that now would I. Or was I supposed to do an hours worth of research before posting? Asshole.
I quickly installed X from the Yopy X Server Project
Wow this is quite an accomplishment, considering the project activity statistics are at 0%, with 0 downloads for the month. Also, they have no released files and no CVS access. Where, exactly, did you get this code from? vaporware.com?
My vote has to go to Pixelon. This company was created by a vagrant bum that lived out of his car. He managed to convince everyone, including several venture capatalists, that he had created a video streaming technology that would work well across the slow modem connections that prevailed at the time.
All they had done in reality is apply a custom skin to the windows media player.
They blew most of their venture capital in this crazy party (hehe the PR is still readily available), featuring Hosts David Spade and Cindy Margolis; The Who (they got back together for this!?!?!), KISS, Faith Hill, Dixie Chicks, Tony Bennett, LeAnn Rimes, The Brian Setzer Orchestra. They were going to broadcast this event on their new "technology". In the end, they folded and jerky boy is in jail.
You can read more about it here or if you're that type, here.
I'm just wondering if RedHat has any plans for supporting a standard game engine abstraction layer for GNU/Linux. The success of games under Windows seems to hinge on DirectX, and I'm wondering if we might see something like the Simple DirectMedia Layer distributed with future RedHat distributions?
When it comes to implementing standards-based software, we respect the standard and expect that our software will fully interoperate with other products that have also implemented the standard.
Yeah this is real neat. He "forgets" to mention here that they broke Java interoperability with their "extensions" and went to court over it.
Couldn't this be shot down by almost any URL encoding scheme, including CGI? It seems that the debacle regards encoding unicode in ASCII. How is this any different from encoding special ASCII characters like ' ' into '+'? They are just encoding slightly different input data.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah great, replace one plastic actor with another, just what we need :-P
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Agreed. I submitted this interview/article about a great fellow in our community, Loïc Dachary, (well ok my community) and it was rejected. I believe my problem was in mentioning the fact that I've worked with him. I guess being an insider isn't all that it's cracked up to be. :-)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
... but will it get the exposure necessary to make an impact on normal people (ie non Slashdot nerdz)? Surely everyone has heard of Microsoft's little speech, as it was broadcast on many news channels, but will we see the same exposure for this rebuttal? Me thinks not. It sucks, but I can't see MSNBC headlining this...
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Also, the chances of it falling at a safe re-entry angle are fairly remote. Most likely it would just burn up in our atmosphere. Remember, there is a lot of *friction* when something falls to the earth from space.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Thanks for the insightful response. In retrospect, I should have been more careful, separating GNU/GPL and Open Source, but in the eyes of myself and many other programmers I know, the lines between them are blurred somewhat.
I haven't been able to figure out which parts of the GPL Open Source folks find objectional, and you've offered some insight there. I lean more towards the purist side myself, having read Mr. Stallman's work for several years, and currently working on FSF projects.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
It's poetry by Jim Morrison. I don't pretend to understand, I just like it. :-P
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
- street cred
- humanity
- code review
- inspiration
- bug squashing
I was wondering what could inspire a lawyer to believe in these sentiments enough to become involved with open source software.Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Yes! This is awesome. It allows for something I've wanted for quite a while... introspection. This means that an application can actually use document structure information to do things like build user interfaces and write automated SQL to backup arbitrary XML repositories.
I have been thinking about building a generic content management solution for a while, and schema was the only missing piece of the puzzle. With schema, I can build a document type that makes sense for a client, and an HTML content management tool for entering data can be automatically generated from the schema document! How cool would that be?
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
The following was posted *yesterday* on the FreeDevelopers list. I am not posting it as an Anonymous Coward, because I badly need karma points :-)
From: "Eric S. Raymond"To: wire-service@thyrsus.com Subject:
Breaking story: Beware the Microsoft shell game
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:40:03 -0400
A few hours ago, a friendly journalist tipped me that Craig Mundie of Microsoft is going to make a major speech in New York tomorrow attacking open-source software -- specifically, attacking the GNU General Public License. This speech is probably intended to define Microsoft's party line on open source, and to shift the terms of the debate over it to one that Microsoft thinks it can win.
I haven't seen the speech; the friendly journalist told me it was embargoed. But I'm expecting it to be a masterpiece of FUD. You watch; it's going to be a studied and ingenious attempt to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of software users and the public -- and to obscure Microsoft's underlying motives by cloaking them in affected concern for the public welfare.
This is a heads-up to journalists, industry observers, and the public -- as you listen to that speech tomorrow, don't get taken in by Mundie's shell game. Keep your eye on the pea. As the perceptive gentlemen of "The Economist" observed earlier this week [1] Microsoft's real agenda will be to preserve its monopoly, whatever the cost to software developers and the public.
So I can predict with fair confidence some of the things you're going to hear -- perhaps not as explicit statements that can be refuted, but as hints and allegations, a studied and careful attempt to disinform without telling explicit lies.
First off, expect Mr. Mundie to try to blur the distinctions between open-source development, use of the GPL, wholesale copyright-law violations like Napster, and outright software piracy. These are four different phenomena; a lot of open-source software doesn't use the GPL, most open-source developers are supportive of intellectual-property rights including copyright, and the open-source community as a whole has historically taken a definite stance against software piracy. We only give away our own work, not other peoples'.
Nevertheless, expect Mr. Mundie to lump all these phenomena togetber and hint darkly that Linux is the spearhead of a conspiracy to destroy trillions of dollars in intellectual-property assets. He probably won't come right out and accuse us of being Communists; that trial balloon popped when Jim Allchin floated it a few weeks ago with his "un-American" crack and got laughed out of town. But he'll let the implication hang there and hope it sticks.
What he'll hope you don't notice is that the "assets" he's mainly interested in protecting are Microsoft's -- and not just the $26 billion it has in the bank, but the far more important asset of over 90% desktop market share and tight control of its customer base through proprietary lock-ins.
It's that lock-in, that control of customers, that is what open source threatens most. With open source, customers can have real choices; they don't need to be locked into a perpetually more expensive upgrade treadmill, they can own and inspect and modify the software they depend on, they can have real security because they can know exactly what's running on their machines.
That choice is the fundamental threat to Microsoft's business model, and it's the reason they're getting clobbered by Linux in the server market (every month, more Linux installations come up on web servers alone than in Microsoft's entire Windows 2000 customer base). So it's not just individual open-source projects like Linux and Apache Microsoft has to defeat -- it's the open-source way of thinking about software.
One way to defeat it is by making people afraid of it -- by conning potential corporate purchasers into believing that using open-source software on their machine somehow means the GPL will force them to publish all their software or business secrets. Craig Mundie will try very hard to make you believe that. It's not true, but a company that blatantly falsified videotape evidence in a Federal antitrust trial is not going to balk at lesser falsehoods.
Another way to defeat open source is to co-opt it. After Craig Mundie gets through trying to make you fear and distrust open source, he will tout Microsoft's new so-called openness. He will doubtless talk about how Microsoft is willing to share source code with large customers and universities. And he'll talk up the "open" services like SOAP that are part of Microsoft's .NET plans (about which more later).
What Mr. Mundie will hope you don't notice is that Microsoft wants all the "sharing" to be in one direction. What they're doing is what we call "source under glass" -- you can see it, but you can't modify or reuse it in other programs. They want to be able to get the huge benefit of having thousands of outside people review their code without allowing any of those people to use what they learn on other projects.
We in the open-source community see this for what it is -- a counterfeit, a trick, a scam. It's aimed at recruiting free labor for Microsoft without giving the outside contributors any stake in or control of the results of their effort. In true open source, all parties are equal. When I give you my software under an open-source license, you have exactly the same rights as I do. That's what I trade you in return for your help in testing and improving the software. That's the voluntary cooperation that built the Internet.
Mr. Mundie also doesn't want you to notice, or remember, Microsoft's long history of perverting supposedly "open" standards into customer lock-in devices, by poisoning them with proprietary extensions that only closed Microsoft software understands. A notorious recent example is the games Microsoft played with the Kerberos security protocol. It would take a really cockeyed optimist to believe that Microsoft doesn't have similar maneuvers planned for once the .NET
protocols get established, if they do.
Finally, Mr. Mundie will doubtless wind up his exhortations with a paean to the glories of .NET, Microsoft's attempt to turn itself into
the worlds's biggest application software provider. Stripped to its
essence, under this plan you mostly would give up buying software and
instead rent networked services from Microsoft by the month.
There are two things Mr. Mundie hopes you won't notice about *this*. One is that .NET is born out of fear. Microsoft's strategists aren't
stupid. They can see the trend curves, that falling hardware margins
are spelling the doom of any business model based on expensive
packaged-software licenses. They know the revenues from their
own software business have actually been declining for three quarters
now,
covered only by creative accounting practices for which Microsoft is
under a federal fraud investigation separate from the antitrust trial.
More fundamentally, those strategists have read Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma"; they can see that open-source software in general and Linux in particular are an unstoppable technology disruption that will sooner or later reach the heart of Microsoft's business -- and that the only way for Microsoft to survive is to dodge the bullet, to be in a different business before that bullet hits home. Hence the push to become an ASP.
But the more important thing he hopes you won't notice is that in the brave new .NET world, you would lose even the meager rights you have
now under Microsoft's End-User License Agreement. You would own
nothing. You would instead become ever more dependent on Microsoft to
provide the basic services that your computer and your business rely
on to function. You would have to absolutely trust Microsoft to
neither deliberately violate your privacy for business advantage nor
to leave your vital data exposed to crackers like those who break into
Microsoft's own servers every few weeks.
Keep your eye on the pea, gentlemen and ladies. Because that is what Microsoft is really after -- a fast exit out of the packaged-software business, a lock on your critical data and network services, and an indefinite extension of the coercive monopoly position described in Judge Jackson's findings of fact. Higher prices, fewer choices, worse lock-in, and Microsoft uber alles for ever and ever, amen.
[1] A Kinder, Gentler Gorilla?"-- Eric S. Raymond The right of self-defense is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." -- Henry St. George Tucker (in Blackstone's Commentaries)
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
It's definately bad. I can't count the number of times on both hands that I've said aloud (when you get older you start talking to yourself) "Why won't this forking code compile!?!??!" :-P
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I used to work 70-80 hour weeks. About 3 years ago I started reading the works of a fellow freak named Richard M. Stallman. Now I refuse to work more than 40 hour weeks, to pay the rent and keep me in , and dedicate the remaining 30-40 hours to "sticking it to the man", GPL style. :-P
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
Cocoon has many of the features you describe. It doesn't have drag and drop report creation, you are on your own there. What it does provide, however, is a solid foundation for creating different views of a data set in different presentation languages. You can build a report from some input XML data as an HTML web page, or as a PDF document with line breaks, etc. It also encourages very clean implementation by total separation of content / logic and presentation code.
For a good overview of what Cocoon can do, including PDF output, check out my resume.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
I built an engine for this sort of thing, written as a Java application. It could pitch two automated chess AIs against each-other, a human against chess AI, or a human against a human. The AI interface worked as long as they have HTML/CGI interfaces, and a small Java adapter class is written that supports the site. I think I even got started on a spectator interface. It had some neat special effects too [including fire animation on threatened pieces]. Anyone care to help me finish it up? I'd gladly GPL the code, and hand it over to a loving family. All it needs is some polish, bug fixing, and some new piece graphics (they were stolen from CM3000, I admit it). I would do it myself, except that I've already volunteered for too much GPL work.
Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;
All your jedi are belong to us!
On one hand, Apple wishes to leverage the power of open source development, and on the other they want control over their intellectual property. There is no doubt that this causes internal conflicts at Apple. They *should* be very careful on how they handle this situation.
First off, if they alienate open source developers, they lose a significant portion of their developer support. I'm not sure if they care at this point, because they have a working, published product. This is still dangerous for them though because they are scaring away potential open source help for future projects.
Second, Darwin/OSX can be viewed as something of a ground breaking experiment in alternative development methodologies. As with many past projects, they are really setting future corporate development trends here. Other companies wishing to apply this development method will doubtless follow the trend Apple has already set. If these companies proceed without any notion of what an open source developer sees as right and wrong, the trend is sure to die quickly.
With 29 minute render time, it must take days to jerk off...
What's wrong with http://dmoz.org/Business/ ? Isn't it exactly the same thing?
Ok Mr. Flame. There isn't actually any link to this site in the article BTW. Not owning one of these things, I wouldn't really know that now would I. Or was I supposed to do an hours worth of research before posting? Asshole.
That's not X. I never said "w-windows" isn't available for download. I'm just talking about this port of X that this thread is promoting.
My vote has to go to Pixelon. This company was created by a vagrant bum that lived out of his car. He managed to convince everyone, including several venture capatalists, that he had created a video streaming technology that would work well across the slow modem connections that prevailed at the time.
All they had done in reality is apply a custom skin to the windows media player.
They blew most of their venture capital in this crazy party (hehe the PR is still readily available), featuring Hosts David Spade and Cindy Margolis; The Who (they got back together for this!?!?!), KISS, Faith Hill, Dixie Chicks, Tony Bennett, LeAnn Rimes, The Brian Setzer Orchestra. They were going to broadcast this event on their new "technology". In the end, they folded and jerky boy is in jail.
You can read more about it here or if you're that type, here.
I'm just wondering if RedHat has any plans for supporting a standard game engine abstraction layer for GNU/Linux. The success of games under Windows seems to hinge on DirectX, and I'm wondering if we might see something like the Simple DirectMedia Layer distributed with future RedHat distributions?
Couldn't this be shot down by almost any URL encoding scheme, including CGI? It seems that the debacle regards encoding unicode in ASCII. How is this any different from encoding special ASCII characters like ' ' into '+'? They are just encoding slightly different input data.