A constitutional amendment? God help us. If the world can learn one thing from California, it's that you can't solve a state's economic problems by mandating economic policy in its constitution.
while OSX cannot adjust its system font size at all
When I read that, I thought it couldn't possibly be true, but a quick google suggests you're right. Weird; you'ld think Macs, with their popularity among designers, would be more likely than any other platform to support accurate DPI settings.
No, that's not right. The gconf business was, and still is, to change the button position of these two themes. The button position of the other themes has never been affected.
No, the backported feature patch was added in November last year; that is, it's been in Lucid for pretty much all of its development. The patch that was pushed a week ago was a fix to a bug that was discovered during Lucid's beta testing. A bug in a last-minute patch to fix a serious bug that was only itself discovered at the last minute is a problem, but it's not a sign of poor engineering practices.
Actually, IRC strikes me as a pretty good comparison - I started using Twitter when it occurred to me that it was a bit like being able to use IRC with people I would never be able to persuade to install an IRC client. One of the main ways people use IRC is idling in a common channel with a few friends, with people mentioning stuff occasionally as it occurs to them, which sometimes sparks conversation and sometimes just serves to keep you in touch with what your friends are thinking. That's exactly how Twitter works.
Perhaps you should take your own advice, and find out what "subject-verb agreement" means? Neither "user" nor "they" is a verb or a subject, so I'm not sure how subject-verb agreement could be relevant here.
If you meant "pronoun agreement," you're still wrong. "They" agrees perfectly with a singular noun of indeterminate gender.
GConf isn't a binary-only registry, it's XML files stored in a directory structure. More importantly, it's a library that provides a convenient way to update and monitor the information in these files.
Linux audio is a bit of a mess, but the mess is due to there being lots of different ways to access the sound hardware (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, Jack, whatver else there may be). GStreamer doesn't really contribute to that mess, as it's at a higher level; if you standardized on, say, pulseaudio, you'ld still want something like GStreamer to handle file formats and codecs.
I can mount my network drive using GVFS all I want, but I still can't watch anything on it, since VLC has no clue about it.
Yes, you can, that's what the parent means about the FUSE integration. GVFS mounts show up as directories accessible by all applications at ~/.gvfs . VLC doesn't need to know anything about GVFS to access these files.
No, basically. But back in the early nineties, when Qt was first developed, the various C++ features that make these pure-C++ signal and slot libraries usable weren't widely available.
dbus was actually initially developed for GNOME; other GNOME-originated libraries that are still in use include GVFS, gconf, and gstreamer. And GTK, though of course not originally developed from GNOME, is now developed in parallel with GNOME (much of the stuff in the depracted GNOME libs is no longer needed because GTK itself provides solutions for the same problems). So I think GNOME is still a pretty vibrant development platform.
AIUI, in the US, the protection against design infringement is a patent, specifically, a design patent; that's what MS is alleging is being infringed in this case. If the particular appearance is necessary for the functioning of the object, it can't be covered by a design patent; I can imagine that the general button layout would count as necessary for the functioning, for instance, and the general curved shape to fit into people's hands. However, the ring of four lights around the central circle, which is one of the patents, does seem like the kind of ornamentation that can be protected by a design patent.
I don't think that's right - the patents are design patents, not utility patents. So they cover "controllers that look like this" (followed by a drawing of the controllers). So the "device having an illuminated region" patent covers the four colored lights around the central circle thing on the controller; it does look like the Datel controller copies that specific ornamentation.
You can't easily launch a search engine now without a massively improved user experience over what is already available.
Well, from those awful "search overload" ads, it appears Bing's target market is people who are somehow still using 1999's version of AltaVista. For them, I guess Bing would be a pretty massive improvement.
Try taking some MS code, and improving on it. IF MS approves of it, they will put their name on it, making it their own, then they will either use it, or drown it in the sea of obscurity surrounding Redmond.
That's not entirely true. Microsoft do release some things under open source languages; the most notable that I'm aware of is the Dynamic Language Runtime for.NET
Well, in your parentheses there lies the whole thing. It's the MPEG-LA who specify the license for the encoder, and they won't license an encoder to be used to produce material for distribution. I'm not sure whether that kind of restriction on use will fly, but it doesn't seem totally implausible, and it doesn't quite depend on them claiming some kind of patent rights over the data stream itself.
1024 is just as arbitrary as 1000; indeed, the only reason why it as chosen is because it is close to 1000. There are cases where using powers of two is genuinely useful in measuring things related to computers, but in those cases, 1024 isn't a particularly relevant value; 1024 would only be a significant number on machines with ten-bit bytes, of which there are not very many. The only reason 1024 is used is because of a bizarre superstition about powers of two.
Why not? Six and nine bit bytes used not to be that uncommon. The only reason eight-bit bytes have become standard is because of the same superstition about powers of two that leads people to insist on the ridiculous "K=1024" nonsense.
The '.net trap' is just another version of the Java trap
No, it isn't, and it's entirely because of Icaza's work that it isn't. The "Java trap" refers to writing free software programs that require non-free platforms (as Java was at the time) to run. But mono is an entirely free software platform, and so writing programs for mono introduces no dependence on non-free software. As the FSF article on the Java trap says:
The reliable way to avoid the Java Trap is to have only a free implementation of Java on your system.
Likewise, by developing for a free implementation of.Net, i.e., mono, you avoid the ".Net trap."
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed five days ago.
A constitutional amendment? God help us. If the world can learn one thing from California, it's that you can't solve a state's economic problems by mandating economic policy in its constitution.
while OSX cannot adjust its system font size at all
When I read that, I thought it couldn't possibly be true, but a quick google suggests you're right. Weird; you'ld think Macs, with their popularity among designers, would be more likely than any other platform to support accurate DPI settings.
No, that's not right. The gconf business was, and still is, to change the button position of these two themes. The button position of the other themes has never been affected.
No, the backported feature patch was added in November last year; that is, it's been in Lucid for pretty much all of its development. The patch that was pushed a week ago was a fix to a bug that was discovered during Lucid's beta testing. A bug in a last-minute patch to fix a serious bug that was only itself discovered at the last minute is a problem, but it's not a sign of poor engineering practices.
Actually, IRC strikes me as a pretty good comparison - I started using Twitter when it occurred to me that it was a bit like being able to use IRC with people I would never be able to persuade to install an IRC client. One of the main ways people use IRC is idling in a common channel with a few friends, with people mentioning stuff occasionally as it occurs to them, which sometimes sparks conversation and sometimes just serves to keep you in touch with what your friends are thinking. That's exactly how Twitter works.
Perhaps you should take your own advice, and find out what "subject-verb agreement" means? Neither "user" nor "they" is a verb or a subject, so I'm not sure how subject-verb agreement could be relevant here.
If you meant "pronoun agreement," you're still wrong. "They" agrees perfectly with a singular noun of indeterminate gender.
GConf isn't a binary-only registry, it's XML files stored in a directory structure. More importantly, it's a library that provides a convenient way to update and monitor the information in these files.
Linux audio is a bit of a mess, but the mess is due to there being lots of different ways to access the sound hardware (OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio, Jack, whatver else there may be). GStreamer doesn't really contribute to that mess, as it's at a higher level; if you standardized on, say, pulseaudio, you'ld still want something like GStreamer to handle file formats and codecs.
Typically, but not always.
You go find the clause that covers third parties and get back to me.
Here you go.
I can mount my network drive using GVFS all I want, but I still can't watch anything on it, since VLC has no clue about it.
Yes, you can, that's what the parent means about the FUSE integration. GVFS mounts show up as directories accessible by all applications at ~/.gvfs . VLC doesn't need to know anything about GVFS to access these files.
is MOC really needed
No, basically. But back in the early nineties, when Qt was first developed, the various C++ features that make these pure-C++ signal and slot libraries usable weren't widely available.
dbus was actually initially developed for GNOME; other GNOME-originated libraries that are still in use include GVFS, gconf, and gstreamer. And GTK, though of course not originally developed from GNOME, is now developed in parallel with GNOME (much of the stuff in the depracted GNOME libs is no longer needed because GTK itself provides solutions for the same problems). So I think GNOME is still a pretty vibrant development platform.
GConf, GStreamer and the other interdependent crud are simply an annoyance.
Unless you want to write apps that store a configuration, or handle sound or video.
AIUI, in the US, the protection against design infringement is a patent, specifically, a design patent; that's what MS is alleging is being infringed in this case. If the particular appearance is necessary for the functioning of the object, it can't be covered by a design patent; I can imagine that the general button layout would count as necessary for the functioning, for instance, and the general curved shape to fit into people's hands. However, the ring of four lights around the central circle, which is one of the patents, does seem like the kind of ornamentation that can be protected by a design patent.
I don't think that's right - the patents are design patents, not utility patents. So they cover "controllers that look like this" (followed by a drawing of the controllers). So the "device having an illuminated region" patent covers the four colored lights around the central circle thing on the controller; it does look like the Datel controller copies that specific ornamentation.
Windows has never had a spatial file manager, hasn't it? That's one of the things that pisses me off every time I find myself using Windows.
You can't easily launch a search engine now without a massively improved user experience over what is already available.
Well, from those awful "search overload" ads, it appears Bing's target market is people who are somehow still using 1999's version of AltaVista. For them, I guess Bing would be a pretty massive improvement.
Try taking some MS code, and improving on it. IF MS approves of it, they will put their name on it, making it their own, then they will either use it, or drown it in the sea of obscurity surrounding Redmond.
That's not entirely true. Microsoft do release some things under open source languages; the most notable that I'm aware of is the Dynamic Language Runtime for .NET
If I encode a movie with a (licensed) encoder
Well, in your parentheses there lies the whole thing. It's the MPEG-LA who specify the license for the encoder, and they won't license an encoder to be used to produce material for distribution. I'm not sure whether that kind of restriction on use will fly, but it doesn't seem totally implausible, and it doesn't quite depend on them claiming some kind of patent rights over the data stream itself.
1024 is just as arbitrary as 1000; indeed, the only reason why it as chosen is because it is close to 1000. There are cases where using powers of two is genuinely useful in measuring things related to computers, but in those cases, 1024 isn't a particularly relevant value; 1024 would only be a significant number on machines with ten-bit bytes, of which there are not very many. The only reason 1024 is used is because of a bizarre superstition about powers of two.
Whatever next? Ten bits in a byte?
Why not? Six and nine bit bytes used not to be that uncommon. The only reason eight-bit bytes have become standard is because of the same superstition about powers of two that leads people to insist on the ridiculous "K=1024" nonsense.
I assume he means S-Video out, although I'm not sure what problem he's having; S-Video works fine on the Intel GM965 on my laptop.
The '.net trap' is just another version of the Java trap
No, it isn't, and it's entirely because of Icaza's work that it isn't. The "Java trap" refers to writing free software programs that require non-free platforms (as Java was at the time) to run. But mono is an entirely free software platform, and so writing programs for mono introduces no dependence on non-free software. As the FSF article on the Java trap says:
The reliable way to avoid the Java Trap is to have only a free implementation of Java on your system.
Likewise, by developing for a free implementation of .Net, i.e., mono, you avoid the ".Net trap."
Microsoft owns the platform
The entire Mono project is available under a free software license. In what sense does Microsoft "own" it?