Other toolkits on Windows can look different than the default Windows look too, it is just that the toolkit authors go out of their way to make their widgets fit in with Windows (same situation with Mac OS and their many APIs/toolkits). As a few people have told you before, X has NOTHING to do with the fact that different unix toolkits do not display their widgets the same. X is used to draw to the screen. You might as well blame OpenGL or DirectX for the ugliness of Windows 98 (ie. you're placing the blame in the wrong places).
The reason there isn't consitency in Linux is because there was no really good dominant toolkit on X to model a look after. The QT/GTK/wxWindows/etc toolkit makers all know what their widgets need to look like in win32 and macOS in order to fit in. The closest thing to a "standard" look on X would've been motif, which is butt ugly. Sure, all of the major toolkits can be made to look like motif, but no distribution in their right mind would have their entire desktop ship with a motif look. What we are seeing are themes between GTK/KDE that have the same appearance (Red Hat's "Bluecurve" and Mandrake's "Galaxy", as well as Kermanik/Germanic).
Of course this only covers the two most used toolkits. What is really needed is a way to theme GTK/GNOME, KDE/QT, wxWindows, motif, wine, XUL, and OpenOffice to all look the same. Right now you'd have to go with a motif or win32 look to have a somewhat unified desktop (minus icon uniformity, dialogs, etc). The people at freedesktop.org are trying to address a lot of these issues, so maybe someday we'll have a framework enabling a consist look and feel across desktops/window managers/toolkits.
I haven't really given this response as much thought as it deserves, but I'll spit out what is on the top of my head anyways:
I think that Western society has a tendancy to think of the problems of the rest of the world as solveable by money. We think that all we can do is send 50 bucks to some charity to feed a hungry kid, because changing all of society is virtually impossible for one (or even a great many) indivuduals.
You are right that there is too little effort going into solving hunger, AIDs, etc. The problem is, even the effort we are currently putting into "solving" the worlds problems really comes down to treating the symptoms. Hunger and disease aren't the real problems facing the third world. They are side effects of the real problem. The real problem is the world economy and how it works.
So maybe the reason we aren't really able to help the third world (or even our own poor for that matter) is that we don't want to admit that we are the problem. At the very least, we are part of the problem.
Unfortunately changing the world's economic system can only be done by unbearably slow change or a catastrophic event. Either way, the new system that is built will be just as suseptible to human politics and greed as the old one (every organization evolves to this over time). Human nature will always prevail, at least until the Vulcans come here to show us the true path.
This may sound like a bleak view of humanity, but it really doesn't prevent us from improving ourselves and our society. It just means we need to do little things to improve ourselves or others, even if we can't be perfect. Not being able to be perfect is no reason not to continue trying to be better.
Wow, that sounds like something Jean-Luc Picard or Gene Roddenberry would say. Come to think of it, Gene's whole plot revolves around us rebuilding society after World War III and ever so slowly improving humanity. I'm just not sure he gave us enough time - and if these darn anti-aging drugs don't hit the market soon, we'll never see it;) .
First off, we'd never get to step 4 in your plan. Never. Or at least not for a long, long time.
But maybe if someone were to live 400 years and gain all sorts of experience in this world, they would have the ability to help solve the world's problems. Still, society as a whole has to change so even uber-intelligent people aren't going to help.
But maybe a shake-up of the system would help. Change doesn't happen by just keeping the status quo (which already included groups lobbying to do steps 1 and 2 with no avail). If people lived hundreds of years you'd bet that society would have to change. Maybe it would change for the better for everyone (although of course the reverse could happen - at least we'd have a chance to do it right).
Of course that said, I don't think we should only tackle step 4 and hope for the best. I also don't think we should NOT try to extend life just because we can't solve ALL of the worlds problems. That would be foolish.
What we need to do is tackle things in parallel. Work on steps 1,2,4 in parallel and see where things end up. Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm researching parallel and distributed computing, but I think it makes a lot more sense.
Why didn't I mention step 3 above? Well basically step 3 was just sit and wait until the worlds problems disappear. I can code what you propose in a few lines:
while (worldHasProblems) { //note, solveAllProblems may never return
solveAllProblems(worldProblems);
sleep(arbritraryTime); } extendLife();
Note: we'll never see extendLife() since while we're sleeping the world will come up with more problems for us.
I busted the tray off of my Sony 52X CDROM (turned in my chair and my knee knocked it right off). There was no way I could brute force it back in since the drive mechanism had already moved back to the 'closed' position. I had to open up the drive and manually turn the gear until it was in the ejected position, then put the tray back in. Then I was able to close it brute force. It still works, but it sits a bit lopsided when it is ejected, and it also closes randomly (it usually will stay open for only 3 sec at a time, causing it to grab the cd before it is centered and jam it between the tray and drive).
It never did read most CD-Rs properly and has generally sucked since I bought it, but I have a feeling it is going to last forever. Just like the song, "only the good hardware dies young".
1) If it is a significantly small project, you can probably license the code non-GPL from the copyright owners for the right price.
2) GPL your code. As the maintainer of the project you have quite a bit of power - people don't tend to like forks. Also, people will like that it uses "standard" technology instead of its own funky variants of stuff, so the GPL will make it more marketable not less marketable.
3) Write your own software instead of stealing ours and sticking it with a "COMPATIBLE WITH " tag without wanting to giving back to the little guys who wrote it.
I think people here should remember that Apple was looking at pre-Mozilla 1.0 when they first evaluated Mozilla. Since then, the Phoenix team has proven that you can strip out some of the bloat of Mozilla to get a fast and lightweight browser (3MB for Safari vs 5-6MB for Phoenix).
Mozilla was intended to be able to render itself (XUL) as well as be a mail reader, online chat tool, and web page composer. It was also intended to be a cross platform web browser and GUI development tool. Of course it is not small - that was not entirely the goal (OEOne and other application developers would have no use for Mozilla if it only rendered web pages).
Had Phoenix been around when Apple was looking at browsers, they may well have just made a Phoenix based browser for OS X branded by Apple. But at the time Apple was looking at OSS HTML engines, it was unclear how much work it would take to get Gecko/Mozilla down to the size Phoenix has now gotten it to now (due to the complexity of Mozilla's code, you can't just take a quick glance and see what needs to be done). It was also very clear that KDE already had a nice little rendering engine, even if it wasn't quite as far along.
So Apple's decision to use KHTML isn't a surprise given their goals and the circumstances at the time. What is nice about all of this is that we'll end up with two very nice rendering engines and browsers out of the deal - Apple will make improvements to KHTMLs rendering of real web pages, and Phoenix will continue to give us a lightweight Gecko browser (which already renders very nicely). Everyone but Microsoft wins. How can Slashdot not love that!?
Re:What about "chat" and "talk"?
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but AOL now owns ICQ (does that mean Mirabilis gives up any patent claims though?). But IRC, talk, chat, write, etc are also prior art.
It seems AOL didn't want to be stuck with any positive karma that they may have gotten from winning their spam lawsuit. Why not burn it away quickly at the US PTO I guess. Actually, I have a better idea - lets burn the US PTO.
Does anybody know whether they plan to do streaming video at some point? I know that they have streaming audio with IceCast (oddly enough they stream mp3, no mention of vorbis).
Considering they use the exact same protocol, I'm not sure what the holdup was. ICQ2000 onward was really just AIM protocol anyhow. I guess they need to make integration look hard so they have an excuse to not allow MSN and Yahoo! interoperability.
Copying != Theft Copyright Law != Criminal Law (or at least not the part defining theft)
It isn't just sqabbling over terms. Stealing occurs when you take an object that you do not own from someone else. In the case of the original CDs, it is one of a number of finite copies produced by the labels. Breaking copyright via p2p is taking one of an infinite number of digial copies of originals that someone has decided to share. This was done in the past with cassette tapes (legally, I might add).
There is something morally wrong-- fundamentally wrong-- with taking the property of another individual without that individual's permission. That's what we're talking about here. Whether that property is a collection of atoms or a pattern of ones and zeros is irrelevant.
There is nothing fundamentally or morally wrong with the sharing of information. The individual that owns the original (ie the CD buyer) is giving permission by listing his digital copy on a p2p network.
You have obviously never had anything stolen from you before, have you?
Stealing implies that the other person no longer has posession of the item. As far as I know, the person I'm downloading mp3s from isn't losing his copy. By downloading an mp3, I am not stealing anything from this person or the artists or the labels. Oh wait, you mean have I ever had anybody use material I had copyright on without my permission. In that case, no, I haven't had anybody infringe on my copyright that I know of.
Maybe someone has used my GPL'd code without adhering to the terms of the GPL. But I sure as hell couldn't charge them with theft for it. I could charge them for copyright infringement for breaking the terms of the GPL, assuming the GPL held up in court. The terms of copyright and fair use is even a greyer area in court, since it hasn't been defined that massive p2p copying is beyond fair use (although intuitively it is different). It has only been defined that Napster's service helped people infinge on copyright law (oddly enough, none of their users were convicted of this, so how exactly did Napster aid copyright infringement if nobody on Napster broke copyright law). Unlike theft, this area is not yet clear cut. The only thing that seems to be impending is that you might be better off stealing that CD than copying it if the RIAA has a hand in writing new copyright legislation.
"We want to hit fans with the message that downloading music illegally is, as Britney Spears explains, the same as going into a CD store and stealing the CD," said Hilary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA).
"Too many people don't realise that when you download a song you like from a peer-to-peer network or some other unauthorised internet service, you're stealing music," she said.
The problem there is that you are NOT stealing, it is NOT the same as going into the CD store and swiping the CD. "Piracy" (or preferrably Unauthorized Copying) is breaking copyright law. In the eyes of the law, this is completely different than theft. I could understand if they take the somewhat biased view that Unauthorized Copying is similar to stealing from the artists, but to say it is the exact same thing as stealing is untrue. Hilary Rosen knows that more than anybody, but it is in her best interests to associate p2p file traders with pirates and thieves.
Of course new draconian laws in the US will likely give much harsher penalties to those who share files than to those who shoplift from stores. When will the madness stop?
I know a lot of people here want OS X on stock x86 hardware, but as many people pointed out it will not be happening. Apple will have a custom motherboard and ROM to prevent OS X from booting just like they do on PPC (generic PPC can't run OS X either). But will this motherboard and ROM of theirs be able to prevent people from loading Windows on a Mac? Although some people would buy the hardware just to have the dual-boot of OS X and Windows, I think this would hurt Apple in the long run. It would only serve to increase Windows' desktop share even further - and it would allow MS to eventually get out of writing software for OS X, which would force some businesses to stay in Windows for Office. Once they're using Windows, why boot into OS X and why even buy the Mac anymore.
The other thing is that eventually people would figure out how to get OS X to run on their generic beigh box (even though I said above that this won't happen), leaving no reason to buy a Mac. Right now Apple seems to have done a decent job of not allowing OS X to run on generic PPC machines, but I think that part of this can be attributed to few hackers having a PPC machine sitting around. Nearly everyone has an x86 machine around, so there will be a much greater effort to hack OS X to run on them. Actually, since the OS X binaries would be compiled for x86, it might even be possible to lift them off an OS X install and put them on a x86 Darwin install, which would be bad news for Apple.
Anything that allows Windows and MacOS to run on the same machine can not be good for Apple. In the short term a few people might buy a new machine or OS just for the coolness of dual-booting the two, but in the long run they will have a great deal of trouble competing with Microsoft. Truthfully I'd love to see Apple position OS X against Windows and win the battle, but the chances of that happening are very slim, and the likely casualty of the war would be Apple Inc. and all of their great products. I don't want to see that.
I'm not sure if people can't read or what, but I've heard many times now that the OS X port is being done by just 2 people. And I believe that neither of them work at Apple or Sun. OpenOffice itself IS being developed in part by Sun employees, but not the OS X port. I wouldn't be surprised if that changed in the near future though, especially with the interest in the product that this reporting error has caused.
I think the problem here is people seem to be confusing the whole OpenOffice product (which has been in development for years and hit 1.0 not long ago) and the OS X port of OpenOffice (which just began recently and is a long ways from 1.0 quality). I've heard a few people who think that OpenOffice as a whole won't hit 1.0 for years now, just because they read that this port could take that long. Someone should get the word our that OpenOffice already is at 1.0 on most platforms.
- ability to add command line tools as menu/keyboard shortcuts, and can capture the console output from them (eg. can automatically add JDK compile and execute commands)
- can autodetect and display unix or dos text
- automatically adds itself to the right-click menu in Windows Explorer, as well as the Send-To menu
- it is nagware, but it hardly bothers you at all if you're evaluating it or too cheap to pay for it
Basically the above allows Textpad to work well as a very simple development environment, as well as a good all around text editor. It is one of the only programs I miss when I work in a graphical Unix environment, although KDE's Kate bears some resemblance to it (embedded console, document selector, syntax highlighting). If you're going the Cygwin route or refuse to use anything non-Free, I'd give that a try. Of course Cygwin gives the option to use command line editors like vim and emacs as well, which I prefer over Kate for simple editing tasks.
I'm pretty sure the wildlife fund was offered a good sum of money to back off of the WWF acronym so that World Wrestling Entertainment could still use it. To me it would've made sense to take the money and change the acronym, since people know the wildlife fund by the panda logo, and wrestling by the WWF acronym, which is quite apparent from this thread.
But instead they strongarm the wrestling company to give up the WWF initials, giving up the chance to get a nice 'donation' in the process. If a multi-billion dollar entertainment company's money is too good for the World Wildlife Fund to take, then I'll consider any measly potential contribution from me to be unwanted as well. Stupid tree-huggers.
How about using something like zip or tar to archive each of these smaller files for storage purposes, then having the file browser peek inside the tar and display the user the correct view. Actually, I think that something like customized tar files would be a good file format for many applications, so that metadata and data could be separated but stored together for efficiency. Most proprietary file formats use a principle somewhat like this anyhow, such as the existing ID3 tags in mp3 files.
In the short term, cooperating with others in the area of web standards would be very helpful.
In the long term, maybe they can do something similar to Apple. They could open up some of the low level OS code, or build on a current and stable core like Darwin. They could keep things like win32 functionality closed source. Since IIS is crap anyhow, they could take Apache but add their own proprietary ASP and.NET functionality to it.
By using a strategy like this, the Windows platform would support existing standards and software (eg PHP, X windows) while also presenting alternatives of their own (eg ASP, win32). The Windows platform could actually be preferrable to customers based on the many choices in the software avaiable, instead of being so dominant based on restriction of competition and vender lockin.
There were several responces to this article pointing out that the current Gnutella network is much more scalable than the one discussed in the article. Try looking here and here for articles discussing the changes since early 2000.
Come on Slashdot, its 2002 not 2000. It looks pretty bad accepting this article right after the Napster one. Does Slashdot or VA own a stake in Napster or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Other toolkits on Windows can look different than the default Windows look too, it is just that the toolkit authors go out of their way to make their widgets fit in with Windows (same situation with Mac OS and their many APIs/toolkits). As a few people have told you before, X has NOTHING to do with the fact that different unix toolkits do not display their widgets the same. X is used to draw to the screen. You might as well blame OpenGL or DirectX for the ugliness of Windows 98 (ie. you're placing the blame in the wrong places).
The reason there isn't consitency in Linux is because there was no really good dominant toolkit on X to model a look after. The QT/GTK/wxWindows/etc toolkit makers all know what their widgets need to look like in win32 and macOS in order to fit in. The closest thing to a "standard" look on X would've been motif, which is butt ugly. Sure, all of the major toolkits can be made to look like motif, but no distribution in their right mind would have their entire desktop ship with a motif look. What we are seeing are themes between GTK/KDE that have the same appearance (Red Hat's "Bluecurve" and Mandrake's "Galaxy", as well as Kermanik/Germanic).
Of course this only covers the two most used toolkits. What is really needed is a way to theme GTK/GNOME, KDE/QT, wxWindows, motif, wine, XUL, and OpenOffice to all look the same. Right now you'd have to go with a motif or win32 look to have a somewhat unified desktop (minus icon uniformity, dialogs, etc). The people at freedesktop.org are trying to address a lot of these issues, so maybe someday we'll have a framework enabling a consist look and feel across desktops/window managers/toolkits.
I haven't really given this response as much thought as it deserves, but I'll spit out what is on the top of my head anyways:
;) .
I think that Western society has a tendancy to think of the problems of the rest of the world as solveable by money. We think that all we can do is send 50 bucks to some charity to feed a hungry kid, because changing all of society is virtually impossible for one (or even a great many) indivuduals.
You are right that there is too little effort going into solving hunger, AIDs, etc. The problem is, even the effort we are currently putting into "solving" the worlds problems really comes down to treating the symptoms. Hunger and disease aren't the real problems facing the third world. They are side effects of the real problem. The real problem is the world economy and how it works.
So maybe the reason we aren't really able to help the third world (or even our own poor for that matter) is that we don't want to admit that we are the problem. At the very least, we are part of the problem.
Unfortunately changing the world's economic system can only be done by unbearably slow change or a catastrophic event. Either way, the new system that is built will be just as suseptible to human politics and greed as the old one (every organization evolves to this over time). Human nature will always prevail, at least until the Vulcans come here to show us the true path.
This may sound like a bleak view of humanity, but it really doesn't prevent us from improving ourselves and our society. It just means we need to do little things to improve ourselves or others, even if we can't be perfect. Not being able to be perfect is no reason not to continue trying to be better.
Wow, that sounds like something Jean-Luc Picard or Gene Roddenberry would say. Come to think of it, Gene's whole plot revolves around us rebuilding society after World War III and ever so slowly improving humanity. I'm just not sure he gave us enough time - and if these darn anti-aging drugs don't hit the market soon, we'll never see it
Reposting logged in this time:
//note, solveAllProblems may never return
First off, we'd never get to step 4 in your plan. Never. Or at least not for a long, long time.
But maybe if someone were to live 400 years and gain all sorts of experience in this world, they would have the ability to help solve the world's problems. Still, society as a whole has to change so even uber-intelligent people aren't going to help.
But maybe a shake-up of the system would help. Change doesn't happen by just keeping the status quo (which already included groups lobbying to do steps 1 and 2 with no avail). If people lived hundreds of years you'd bet that society would have to change. Maybe it would change for the better for everyone (although of course the reverse could happen - at least we'd have a chance to do it right).
Of course that said, I don't think we should only tackle step 4 and hope for the best. I also don't think we should NOT try to extend life just because we can't solve ALL of the worlds problems. That would be foolish.
What we need to do is tackle things in parallel. Work on steps 1,2,4 in parallel and see where things end up. Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm researching parallel and distributed computing, but I think it makes a lot more sense.
Why didn't I mention step 3 above? Well basically step 3 was just sit and wait until the worlds problems disappear. I can code what you propose in a few lines:
while (worldHasProblems) {
solveAllProblems(worldProblems);
sleep(arbritraryTime);
}
extendLife();
Note: we'll never see extendLife() since while we're sleeping the world will come up with more problems for us.
I busted the tray off of my Sony 52X CDROM (turned in my chair and my knee knocked it right off). There was no way I could brute force it back in since the drive mechanism had already moved back to the 'closed' position. I had to open up the drive and manually turn the gear until it was in the ejected position, then put the tray back in. Then I was able to close it brute force. It still works, but it sits a bit lopsided when it is ejected, and it also closes randomly (it usually will stay open for only 3 sec at a time, causing it to grab the cd before it is centered and jam it between the tray and drive).
It never did read most CD-Rs properly and has generally sucked since I bought it, but I have a feeling it is going to last forever. Just like the song, "only the good hardware dies young".
Three possibilities:
1) If it is a significantly small project, you can probably license the code non-GPL from the copyright owners for the right price.
2) GPL your code. As the maintainer of the project you have quite a bit of power - people don't tend to like forks. Also, people will like that it uses "standard" technology instead of its own funky variants of stuff, so the GPL will make it more marketable not less marketable.
3) Write your own software instead of stealing ours and sticking it with a "COMPATIBLE WITH " tag without wanting to giving back to the little guys who wrote it.
I think people here should remember that Apple was looking at pre-Mozilla 1.0 when they first evaluated Mozilla. Since then, the Phoenix team has proven that you can strip out some of the bloat of Mozilla to get a fast and lightweight browser (3MB for Safari vs 5-6MB for Phoenix).
Mozilla was intended to be able to render itself (XUL) as well as be a mail reader, online chat tool, and web page composer. It was also intended to be a cross platform web browser and GUI development tool. Of course it is not small - that was not entirely the goal (OEOne and other application developers would have no use for Mozilla if it only rendered web pages).
Had Phoenix been around when Apple was looking at browsers, they may well have just made a Phoenix based browser for OS X branded by Apple. But at the time Apple was looking at OSS HTML engines, it was unclear how much work it would take to get Gecko/Mozilla down to the size Phoenix has now gotten it to now (due to the complexity of Mozilla's code, you can't just take a quick glance and see what needs to be done). It was also very clear that KDE already had a nice little rendering engine, even if it wasn't quite as far along.
So Apple's decision to use KHTML isn't a surprise given their goals and the circumstances at the time. What is nice about all of this is that we'll end up with two very nice rendering engines and browsers out of the deal - Apple will make improvements to KHTMLs rendering of real web pages, and Phoenix will continue to give us a lightweight Gecko browser (which already renders very nicely). Everyone but Microsoft wins. How can Slashdot not love that!?
Yes, but AOL now owns ICQ (does that mean Mirabilis gives up any patent claims though?). But IRC, talk, chat, write, etc are also prior art.
It seems AOL didn't want to be stuck with any positive karma that they may have gotten from winning their spam lawsuit. Why not burn it away quickly at the US PTO I guess. Actually, I have a better idea - lets burn the US PTO.
Does anybody know whether they plan to do streaming video at some point? I know that they have streaming audio with IceCast (oddly enough they stream mp3, no mention of vorbis).
Considering they use the exact same protocol, I'm not sure what the holdup was. ICQ2000 onward was really just AIM protocol anyhow. I guess they need to make integration look hard so they have an excuse to not allow MSN and Yahoo! interoperability.
Copying != Theft
Copyright Law != Criminal Law (or at least not the part defining theft)
It isn't just sqabbling over terms. Stealing occurs when you take an object that you do not own from someone else. In the case of the original CDs, it is one of a number of finite copies produced by the labels. Breaking copyright via p2p is taking one of an infinite number of digial copies of originals that someone has decided to share. This was done in the past with cassette tapes (legally, I might add).
There is something morally wrong-- fundamentally wrong-- with taking the property of another individual without that individual's permission. That's what we're talking about here. Whether that property is a collection of atoms or a pattern of ones and zeros is irrelevant.
There is nothing fundamentally or morally wrong with the sharing of information. The individual that owns the original (ie the CD buyer) is giving permission by listing his digital copy on a p2p network.
You have obviously never had anything stolen from you before, have you?
Stealing implies that the other person no longer has posession of the item. As far as I know, the person I'm downloading mp3s from isn't losing his copy. By downloading an mp3, I am not stealing anything from this person or the artists or the labels. Oh wait, you mean have I ever had anybody use material I had copyright on without my permission. In that case, no, I haven't had anybody infringe on my copyright that I know of.
Maybe someone has used my GPL'd code without adhering to the terms of the GPL. But I sure as hell couldn't charge them with theft for it. I could charge them for copyright infringement for breaking the terms of the GPL, assuming the GPL held up in court. The terms of copyright and fair use is even a greyer area in court, since it hasn't been defined that massive p2p copying is beyond fair use (although intuitively it is different). It has only been defined that Napster's service helped people infinge on copyright law (oddly enough, none of their users were convicted of this, so how exactly did Napster aid copyright infringement if nobody on Napster broke copyright law). Unlike theft, this area is not yet clear cut. The only thing that seems to be impending is that you might be better off stealing that CD than copying it if the RIAA has a hand in writing new copyright legislation.
Quote from the article:
"We want to hit fans with the message that downloading music illegally is, as Britney Spears explains, the same as going into a CD store and stealing the CD," said Hilary Rosen of the Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA).
"Too many people don't realise that when you download a song you like from a peer-to-peer network or some other unauthorised internet service, you're stealing music," she said.
The problem there is that you are NOT stealing, it is NOT the same as going into the CD store and swiping the CD. "Piracy" (or preferrably Unauthorized Copying) is breaking copyright law. In the eyes of the law, this is completely different than theft. I could understand if they take the somewhat biased view that Unauthorized Copying is similar to stealing from the artists, but to say it is the exact same thing as stealing is untrue. Hilary Rosen knows that more than anybody, but it is in her best interests to associate p2p file traders with pirates and thieves.
Of course new draconian laws in the US will likely give much harsher penalties to those who share files than to those who shoplift from stores. When will the madness stop?
I know a lot of people here want OS X on stock x86 hardware, but as many people pointed out it will not be happening. Apple will have a custom motherboard and ROM to prevent OS X from booting just like they do on PPC (generic PPC can't run OS X either). But will this motherboard and ROM of theirs be able to prevent people from loading Windows on a Mac? Although some people would buy the hardware just to have the dual-boot of OS X and Windows, I think this would hurt Apple in the long run. It would only serve to increase Windows' desktop share even further - and it would allow MS to eventually get out of writing software for OS X, which would force some businesses to stay in Windows for Office. Once they're using Windows, why boot into OS X and why even buy the Mac anymore.
The other thing is that eventually people would figure out how to get OS X to run on their generic beigh box (even though I said above that this won't happen), leaving no reason to buy a Mac. Right now Apple seems to have done a decent job of not allowing OS X to run on generic PPC machines, but I think that part of this can be attributed to few hackers having a PPC machine sitting around. Nearly everyone has an x86 machine around, so there will be a much greater effort to hack OS X to run on them. Actually, since the OS X binaries would be compiled for x86, it might even be possible to lift them off an OS X install and put them on a x86 Darwin install, which would be bad news for Apple.
Anything that allows Windows and MacOS to run on the same machine can not be good for Apple. In the short term a few people might buy a new machine or OS just for the coolness of dual-booting the two, but in the long run they will have a great deal of trouble competing with Microsoft. Truthfully I'd love to see Apple position OS X against Windows and win the battle, but the chances of that happening are very slim, and the likely casualty of the war would be Apple Inc. and all of their great products. I don't want to see that.
I'm not sure if people can't read or what, but I've heard many times now that the OS X port is being done by just 2 people. And I believe that neither of them work at Apple or Sun. OpenOffice itself IS being developed in part by Sun employees, but not the OS X port. I wouldn't be surprised if that changed in the near future though, especially with the interest in the product that this reporting error has caused.
I think the problem here is people seem to be confusing the whole OpenOffice product (which has been in development for years and hit 1.0 not long ago) and the OS X port of OpenOffice (which just began recently and is a long ways from 1.0 quality). I've heard a few people who think that OpenOffice as a whole won't hit 1.0 for years now, just because they read that this port could take that long. Someone should get the word our that OpenOffice already is at 1.0 on most platforms.
Almost forgot a few more features:
- line numbers
- split view
- tabbed documents (if you prefer this to the selector)
- ability to open/save your workspace
- bookmarks
Other good things about textpad:
- syntax highlighting
- document selector
- ability to add command line tools as menu/keyboard shortcuts, and can capture the console output from them (eg. can automatically add JDK compile and execute commands)
- can autodetect and display unix or dos text
- automatically adds itself to the right-click menu in Windows Explorer, as well as the Send-To menu
- it is nagware, but it hardly bothers you at all if you're evaluating it or too cheap to pay for it
Basically the above allows Textpad to work well as a very simple development environment, as well as a good all around text editor. It is one of the only programs I miss when I work in a graphical Unix environment, although KDE's Kate bears some resemblance to it (embedded console, document selector, syntax highlighting). If you're going the Cygwin route or refuse to use anything non-Free, I'd give that a try. Of course Cygwin gives the option to use command line editors like vim and emacs as well, which I prefer over Kate for simple editing tasks.
I'm pretty sure the wildlife fund was offered a good sum of money to back off of the WWF acronym so that World Wrestling Entertainment could still use it. To me it would've made sense to take the money and change the acronym, since people know the wildlife fund by the panda logo, and wrestling by the WWF acronym, which is quite apparent from this thread.
But instead they strongarm the wrestling company to give up the WWF initials, giving up the chance to get a nice 'donation' in the process. If a multi-billion dollar entertainment company's money is too good for the World Wildlife Fund to take, then I'll consider any measly potential contribution from me to be unwanted as well. Stupid tree-huggers.
Damn cold in hell, is amazon turning a profit?
Well actually...
I think they want a logo for the FreeBSD Foundation, not the OS itself (which uses the devil as a mascot/logo).
How about using something like zip or tar to archive each of these smaller files for storage purposes, then having the file browser peek inside the tar and display the user the correct view. Actually, I think that something like customized tar files would be a good file format for many applications, so that metadata and data could be separated but stored together for efficiency. Most proprietary file formats use a principle somewhat like this anyhow, such as the existing ID3 tags in mp3 files.
In the short term, cooperating with others in the area of web standards would be very helpful.
.NET functionality to it.
In the long term, maybe they can do something similar to Apple. They could open up some of the low level OS code, or build on a current and stable core like Darwin. They could keep things like win32 functionality closed source. Since IIS is crap anyhow, they could take Apache but add their own proprietary ASP and
By using a strategy like this, the Windows platform would support existing standards and software (eg PHP, X windows) while also presenting alternatives of their own (eg ASP, win32). The Windows platform could actually be preferrable to customers based on the many choices in the software avaiable, instead of being so dominant based on restriction of competition and vender lockin.
There were several responces to this article pointing out that the current Gnutella network is much more scalable than the one discussed in the article. Try looking here and here for articles discussing the changes since early 2000.
Come on Slashdot, its 2002 not 2000. It looks pretty bad accepting this article right after the Napster one. Does Slashdot or VA own a stake in Napster or something?