"MacOS is a pointer oriented system , even if you can use shortcuts for almost everything, it doesn't feel "native"."
Windows, Gnome and KDE are all pointer oriented systems. How are the shortcuts for things any less "native" in OS X than in these systems?
Almost every menu item in OS X has a keyboard shortcut written right next to it.
There are plenty of things to complain about when it comes to OS X, but there are a lot less of these niggling issues than you find in either of the systems you mention.
Windows for instance.
1. How about the Start button in the classic interface being two pixels above the screen edge, so that it violates Fitt's law?
2. Every program installs itself into an awfully messy directory structure $COMPANY NAME\$PRODUCT, despite the fact that you only have one product from most companies. You have to navigate through no less than FIVE submenus for a typical program (START->Applications->Company->Program->Executable ) just to get to most applications. OS X on average is three (Finder->Applications->Program) steps (and it is less if you drop the Application folder down into the dock), and this is not some flimsy submenu that you can easily drop out of if you miss with the mouse, or if some application does something while you try to navigate. This whole menu structure is also very much "non native" as it is only shortcuts to applications and not the applications themselves. This leads on to....
3. Deleting a program requires going into the control center and using an uninstall system that definitely feels slapped on top of the operating system like an afterthought. In OS X on the other hand you simply delete the application using your file manager.
4. Too many ways of doing everything, which leads to too much GUI and too much complexity. There are probably at least four ways of finding your display settings.
5. Too many wizards. While OS X mostly tries to make tasks easy by simplifying the GUI, Microsoft slaps a Wizard on top of it, creating even more complexity and ways of doing things. A wizard should be the last resort, not a crutch for not being able to create a sane dialog. Apple is guilty of this in one application afaics, namely Mail.app, which has a startup wizard that you can not skip (Doh!).
.. although I wish there was some care being taken about the interface. Most of my comments are about the Mac version, but some of them should be relevant to other versions as well.
1. The OS X version shows the video with controls in the same window as the video, but ALSO shows a separate controller window. This is redundant. All the necessary options should be able to fit into the video window.
2. There is a stop button that afaics just closes the video window. Why the need for this redundant option?
3. Skip buttons have been combined with the fast forward button in almost any interface by now. Just do that in VLC as well.
2. and 3. gets rid of three redundant buttons in the interface.
4. The equaliser is not important enough to warrant a button of it's own. The menu is fine.
5. There is an awful lot of so-called "unbreak me" options. Options to make things work if your system is somehow weird. Just check this automatically. I know this can be a lot of effort from the programmer, so I can understand a Free Software project not doing to much about it. Nevertheless, there are too many weird options that clutter up the interface.
6. The preferences window has a "Reset All", "Cancel" and "Save" button. These are completely out of place in a program in OS X. Instant apply and a reset button would be better.
The "30 million physical lines" included a massive amount of code that is totally separate from the operating system and is not maintained and developed by Red Hat or Debian. They simply package them (and sometimes patch them).
Each Linux distribution is the product of a combination of lots of independent and desentralised software groups. Yes, Microsoft consists of lots of departments operating semi-independently, but Red Hat does not have to pay for the efforts of these software groups.
Desentralisation is normally the way to handle complexity.
It does actually use the menubar, but the person taking the screenshot seems to have selected the file/save dialog in which case NeoOffice does something weird and only shows the application menu.
"In other words, a copyright term of 70 years, 90 years or whatnot is no more of an incentive to a business than a term limited to 28 years after renewals."
Not entirely true, because there can be "predictable" long term business around to purchase your copyrights, and these will pay you more if the copyright term is 30 years than if it is 20 years. More than that and chances are investors will not think that far ahead and it becomes pointless, UNLESS you are talking about extensions to already existing work, which can be very lucrative if you are on year 49 of the 50 year period. This is, however, theft from the public.
"SO the supposed £270 million lost suddenly disappeared from the British economy?"
In quite a few cases, probably yes. The money probably went abroad by illegal channels. The sale of illegal DVDs is something I really can't condone and is quite different from illegal downloads where there is no profit being made.
But all of the £270 million obviously did not disappear, but are being used in Britain. However, no tax is being paid on it either, so it definitely is cheating "the people" if not as much as the industry claim. It is obviously also benefitting a lot of people since they get cheap DVDs.
"Public schools are a mess. Parents have no leverage. Abolish public schools, quit taxing property to pay for schools and let the parents be responsible for their children's educations."
This is just shocking. I know public schools can be a mess and are certainly in need of reform (AND more funds) but abolishing them? How exactly are the underprivileged supposed to send their kids to school? I thought America was supposed to be about everyone being able to make something out of themselves? Well, without basic level education that is fucking hard.
Just to inform you, public education works pretty well in a lot of countries. It may have flaws everywhere, but in most countries it provides a decent level of education no matter your income, thus making it possible for even the under priviliged to work their way out of poverty.
Putin's Russia is hardly a democracy and anyone paying attention would have known this for quite some time.
If you think THIS is bad, you ought to read up on all the seemingly government ordered assasinations of people opposed to Putin recently. There has been a series of high profile murders. The lesson being that "thou shalt not oppose Putin".
I'll trust Joel Spolsky above some random Slashdot "dude" anytime. Also you fail to mention that this story also links to the blog of a former Microsoft employee working on this "feature" that happens to agree with Joel completely.
"Any laptop user will tell you important basic difference between Sleep and Hibernate"
Can you back that up with some proper study? It is blatantly false, as anyone who has worked in PC World or Walmart will tell you. Most laptop users have no clue about the difference, and could care less. All they want is the laptop to be available to them quickly.
Apple has realised this, and there is NO WAY of Hibernating from the GUI of an Apple laptop. Even the term hibernation was to ambiguous for Apple and they call it "safe sleep" instead. It starts automatically when the laptop is running out of power, even if the laptop is asleep at the time.
The standard use-case for laptop users is to close the lid to make it sleep and open it to make it wake, nothing more, nothing less.
"What he is also not understanding is that those are actually options, signified by them being located on option button-arrow which is supposed to provide you more options. It is actually one of the 3 main icons/choices, and is the smallest one - big icon is Power icon which shuts down your computer (60% of screen), lock is next to it and slightly smaller (25% of the screen, while option arrow is smallest (15% of the screen)."
What has them being "options" got to do with anything? The Microsoft way here has been to throw in every conceivable option in order to make everyone happy. But Joel points out (and backs it with the well established scientific theories) that too much options and choice makes people confused and unhappy.
What an incredible lame argument McCormack makes. I had to stop myself from laughing. "Suddenly they're gone"? Didn't the copyright holder know fifty years ago that the record would have it's copyright expire in 2005? The songwriter just didn't see those 50 years creep up on him did he?
It didn't just suddenly disappear. In 1955 the public agreed to give the copyright owner 50 years of monopoly on that song, they didn't agree to first give 50 years and then give a further 25 if the record was popular. Taking an existing record and giving it 25 more years of copyright is akin to theft from the public.
If the songwriter wants to provide for his children and grandchildren he can save up and invest his earnings like everyone else. Yes, artists are important, but nobody else gets 50 years of income from a few years of work. Back when copyright was introduced, the public basically agreed that art was important and that artists needed a bit of protection in order to encourage art and to provide a living for artists. I doubt that the politicians that introduced it actually meant that a songwriter should earn enough money from a single song for 50 years so that he never had to work again.
Surely, whether something is illegal or not should be completely independent of your method of correspondence. If I use the internet, I am in reality doing nothing different from using the postal service, fedex, telephone or fax.
Otherwise, you just end up piling on new laws whenever some new medium is introduced.
I'm glad the judge can decide that IM or Email is irrelevant in this case, but should he have to make that call of common sense?
.. and it should come as no surprise than anyone would turn it down.
What IS disappointing about Edgy Eft is that the release was at first intended to be edgy and risky, because they had the Long Term Support release, Dapper Drake, to suggest to anyone wanting something conservative and stable.
In the end the only thing edgy in the release was the new event based startup system which isn't yet that visible for the end-user. People can say what they want about 'Edgy Eft' just being a name, but it was fairly clear from Shuttleworth's early emails that the name wasn't just chosen at random.
Edgy is thus the most (and possibly the only) disappointing Ubuntu release so far. It is not bad, it is just nothing like what was intended.
Currently the quad-core is pretty useless for gamers unless you like to run video encoding apps at the same time as you play your game.
The reason is of course, that most games are barely optimised for dual cores, let alone four cores. It is not simple either as balancing several cores to get the most out of them requires a redesign of the game engine.
It will be significant for future games, but you are better off buying a high-end dual core now and replacing it with quad-core later on.
It really just comes down to a VERY simple fact - $600. Even at $500, it's a bad deal. $500 is right around the price for a lot of people where purchases move from "do I want this?" to "do I need this?".
The standard version of the PS3 costs $500 ($499). Unlike the base version of the Xbox 360 it isn't horribly crippled. It still comes with a hard drive, although smaller. I've heard plenty of people comparin the $600 PS3 price with price of the Xbox and Wii, but it isn't fair. The premium Xbox unit only has a 20GB hard drive, the same as the base PS3.
IANAL, but the main thing is currently there is no known patents and no lawsuits.
Microsoft has promised Novell not to sue them or their customers, but there is no specific patent licenses and no mention of specific patents. Thus, they have just created a Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt situation towars other Linuxdistributors, basically getting potential customers to think "if they are doing this, there must be patents" and thus helping Novell get customers, since they are "immune".
In reality, Novell would probably lose their rights to distribution if Microsoft DID sue and this is what Eben Moglen will uncover. Thus for Linux and the GNU Tools, Novell may not be any better off than the rest. The exception is Mono.
Novell are the primary Copyright holders of Mono, and while there are probably contributors that hold some copyright, Novell would just need to rip those bits of code out and replace them, and then being the only ones that can distribute Mono. The GPL can do many things, but stopping the Copyright owner from distributing their own intellectual property, it can not.
I've always been favorable towards Mono, mainly because I trusted Novell about it. I no longer do, and neither should the GNOME developers. Currently it is only in as part of 'Tomboy' the sticky notes app, which can be easily replaced. Do not let it go further.
1. Use of a bit of GPL code mixed with proprietary code does not mean that All Your Code Are Belong To Us, it means that Microsoft would have to remove the GPL infringing code, and possibly pay damages to the copyright owner.
2. Nothing at all is stopping you from running proprietary code on a GNU/Linux system, as long as the GPL license on the GNU/Linux parts of the system is honoured. You can easily use the Linux kernel, the GNU Tools and put a proprietary graphical system on it or just running proprietary software packages. Apple uses quite a few GNU tools, yet keeps Aqua closed, and lots of vendors have released proprietary software packages for Linux.
.. to the most important and popular iPod: the iPod nano. Lots and lots of features is not going to change anything, because features are not the reason the iPod nano sells so well.
The main reasons are iTunes integration, portability, has has a cool brand name and is fricking gorgeous. The Zune is neither of those things, and is currently an overhyped competitor to the regular iPod, which to be honest is becoming more of a niche market.
"Generally speaking, people would rather spend $100 to buy books for a bunch of underprivileged children rather than spend it to buy one computer for one child."
I hope you realise that the idea is to actually use these laptops as eBook-readers for cheap and updated school books, including lots of free material from sources such as Wikipedia.
Also, the political and economical situation in Africa is much more complex than the image of starving children. There are many countries in Africa where most people aren't starving, even if they are poor by European/American standards. If the continent is to blossom and improve it is crucially important to provide good education, and the OLPC is one of the attempts at helping this. I admire this project, and it could potentially have an impact in the developed countries as well.
"So, I'm sure they're compensating the networks for the commercials they're overwriting, right?"
If they don't get agreement from their providers they are committing copyright infringement. They have no right to redistribute the content to their users in other ways than what the agreement between them and their provider states. Thus if they CHANGE the content before redistributing, they are in breach of copyright.
An end-user is not subject to the same kind of copyright rules as long as he does not redistribute the material. Thus the user can strip away commercials for himself.
The content providers are, however, pressuring for legislation so that software makers or hardware makers can't build in automatic commercial skipping.
An interesting work-around would be to have a skip button that simply skips forward in time a certain number of minutes, and have the system automatically set this skip time to be equal to the usual length of commercials on that particular channel.
"There has never been any technical reason for a computer to take more than a few seconds to begin operation when it is turned on." I can name half a dozen; power consumption for suspend to RAM, system process cleanup for suspend to disk, disk space storage for suspend to disk, driver software that doesn't gracefully handle failing down to a hibernate state, plug-and-play hardware detection on bootup... not to mention the whole raft of problems that occur when users never shut down and clog their system up by never ending processes."
What I think Raskin means is that there aren't any VALID technical reasons. Bugs in the driver software is hardly valid technical reasons. They just get away with it because suspend isn't used as much as it should. Also, the hardware has been designed for the current boot system, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be redone.
The major OSes and hardware manufacturers really ought to have solved this by now, but people seems to have accepted the whole boot procedure.
"All of those things make sense in the context they are being used in, and they're relatively intuitive. After all, it's not the programmers fault the user is an idiot, especially with something as simple as a yes/no dialog box, as long as the dialog box is written in language comprehensible for the designed userbase."
The users are not idiots, they just are acustomed to the system asking stupid questions so often they get used to just mindlessly clicking 'yes'. Many times people think they understand a dialog and click yes before they have fully read it. Removing yes/no in support of "delete file / save file" helps, but the problem lies deeper.
"I see it in the same light as arresting automobile manufacturers for the hit-and-run death of an innocent pedestrian. Sure, the car was used as the lethal weapon of choice, and it was productive in doing its task, but it's not Chevrolet's fault that their Silverado 1500 was used to kill someone. BitTorrent has a valid use, just as an automobile. When it's misused though, it's not the responsibility of the manufacturer, the used car dealer, or even the gas station!"
What an incredibly lame analogy. You could have at least used the "guns don't kill people, people do". Most of the use of cars is completely legitimate and when a automobile manufacturer sells a car he knows that most people will use it for completely legitimate purposes. Also, extremely few people intend on using cars for hit-and-run.
Bittorrent, the technology itself is very useful and certainly has legitimate uses. Ubuntu and Fedora both uses bittorrent for distribution among other things. Posting a legitimate torrent on your own web page is certainly kosher. The guy who invented bittorrent also has no blame for people using it for copyright infringement, because the technology itself is useful for legal purposes.
When you are setting up a site in which users exchange torrents with strangers, however, you KNOW that almost everyone is going to be using it for illegitimate purposes. Hardly anyone is going to use this site for legitimate purposes and if they do, it is mostly in order to say that "see it has legitimate uses".
If 99.99% of all cars where bought simply to murder people, you would probably see a change in legislation about them as well.
"I think the recent history of the Balkans show this. Yugoslavia was unified, but on a superficial level. As soon as the force of censorship was removed, the country flew apart."
I agree with most of your sentiment, but your choice of example is odd. If anything this sounds like an argument FOR censorship. If lack of censorship is the only thing that keeps a country from war, ethnic clensing and mass murder, then for all that is sacred do not simply disband all censorship. Free speech means nothing if there is nobody left to say anything.
In reality, nothing in this world is ever as simple and black and white as "free speech" == good, "censorship == evil". Freedom is a complex issue built up of many facets, the right to say what you please is is just one of these facets and sometimes it conflicts with others.
Slashdot Mirror
"MacOS is a pointer oriented system , even if you can use shortcuts for almost everything, it doesn't feel "native"."
e ) just to get to most applications. OS X on average is three (Finder->Applications->Program) steps (and it is less if you drop the Application folder down into the dock), and this is not some flimsy submenu that you can easily drop out of if you miss with the mouse, or if some application does something while you try to navigate. This whole menu structure is also very much "non native" as it is only shortcuts to applications and not the applications themselves. This leads on to ....
Windows, Gnome and KDE are all pointer oriented systems. How are the shortcuts for things any less "native" in OS X than in these systems?
Almost every menu item in OS X has a keyboard shortcut written right next to it.
There are plenty of things to complain about when it comes to OS X, but there are a lot less of these niggling issues than you find in either of the systems you mention.
Windows for instance.
1. How about the Start button in the classic interface being two pixels above the screen edge, so that it violates Fitt's law?
2. Every program installs itself into an awfully messy directory structure $COMPANY NAME\$PRODUCT, despite the fact that you only have one product from most companies. You have to navigate through no less than FIVE submenus for a typical program (START->Applications->Company->Program->Executabl
3. Deleting a program requires going into the control center and using an uninstall system that definitely feels slapped on top of the operating system like an afterthought. In OS X on the other hand you simply delete the application using your file manager.
4. Too many ways of doing everything, which leads to too much GUI and too much complexity. There are probably at least four ways of finding your display settings.
5. Too many wizards. While OS X mostly tries to make tasks easy by simplifying the GUI, Microsoft slaps a Wizard on top of it, creating even more complexity and ways of doing things. A wizard should be the last resort, not a crutch for not being able to create a sane dialog. Apple is guilty of this in one application afaics, namely Mail.app, which has a startup wizard that you can not skip (Doh!).
First, do you work for the FBI, the NSA, the KGB, the MI5, the MI6 or the Chinese secret service?
Or, are you just a professional voyeur?
What I watch using Videolan is my own business.
.. although I wish there was some care being taken about the interface. Most of my comments are about the Mac version, but some of them should be relevant to other versions as well.
1. The OS X version shows the video with controls in the same window as the video, but ALSO shows a separate controller window. This is redundant. All the necessary options should be able to fit into the video window.
2. There is a stop button that afaics just closes the video window. Why the need for this redundant option?
3. Skip buttons have been combined with the fast forward button in almost any interface by now. Just do that in VLC as well.
2. and 3. gets rid of three redundant buttons in the interface.
4. The equaliser is not important enough to warrant a button of it's own. The menu is fine.
5. There is an awful lot of so-called "unbreak me" options. Options to make things work if your system is somehow weird. Just check this automatically. I know this can be a lot of effort from the programmer, so I can understand a Free Software project not doing to much about it. Nevertheless, there are too many weird options that clutter up the interface.
6. The preferences window has a "Reset All", "Cancel" and "Save" button. These are completely out of place in a program in OS X. Instant apply and a reset button would be better.
The "30 million physical lines" included a massive amount of code that is totally separate from the operating system and is not maintained and developed by Red Hat or Debian. They simply package them (and sometimes patch them).
Each Linux distribution is the product of a combination of lots of independent and desentralised software groups. Yes, Microsoft consists of lots of departments operating semi-independently, but Red Hat does not have to pay for the efforts of these software groups.
Desentralisation is normally the way to handle complexity.
It does actually use the menubar, but the person taking the screenshot seems to have selected the file/save dialog in which case NeoOffice does something weird and only shows the application menu.
"In other words, a copyright term of 70 years, 90 years or whatnot is no more of an incentive to a business than a term limited to 28 years after renewals."
Not entirely true, because there can be "predictable" long term business around to purchase your copyrights, and these will pay you more if the copyright term is 30 years than if it is 20 years. More than that and chances are investors will not think that far ahead and it becomes pointless, UNLESS you are talking about extensions to already existing work, which can be very lucrative if you are on year 49 of the 50 year period. This is, however, theft from the public.
"SO the supposed £270 million lost suddenly disappeared from the British economy?"
In quite a few cases, probably yes. The money probably went abroad by illegal channels. The sale of illegal DVDs is something I really can't condone and is quite different from illegal downloads where there is no profit being made.
But all of the £270 million obviously did not disappear, but are being used in Britain. However, no tax is being paid on it either, so it definitely is cheating "the people" if not as much as the industry claim. It is obviously also benefitting a lot of people since they get cheap DVDs.
There are ways of getting iTunes to sync to other mp3 players as long as they operate as a simple USB-disk.
"Public schools are a mess. Parents have no leverage. Abolish public schools, quit taxing property to pay for schools and let the parents be responsible for their children's educations."
This is just shocking. I know public schools can be a mess and are certainly in need of reform (AND more funds) but abolishing them? How exactly are the underprivileged supposed to send their kids to school? I thought America was supposed to be about everyone being able to make something out of themselves? Well, without basic level education that is fucking hard.
Just to inform you, public education works pretty well in a lot of countries. It may have flaws everywhere, but in most countries it provides a decent level of education no matter your income, thus making it possible for even the under priviliged to work their way out of poverty.
Putin's Russia is hardly a democracy and anyone paying attention would have known this for quite some time.
If you think THIS is bad, you ought to read up on all the seemingly government ordered assasinations of people opposed to Putin recently. There has been a series of high profile murders. The lesson being that "thou shalt not oppose Putin".
I'll trust Joel Spolsky above some random Slashdot "dude" anytime. Also you fail to mention that this story also links to the blog of a former Microsoft employee working on this "feature" that happens to agree with Joel completely.
"Any laptop user will tell you important basic difference between Sleep and Hibernate"
Can you back that up with some proper study? It is blatantly false, as anyone who has worked in PC World or Walmart will tell you. Most laptop users have no clue about the difference, and could care less. All they want is the laptop to be available to them quickly.
Apple has realised this, and there is NO WAY of Hibernating from the GUI of an Apple laptop. Even the term hibernation was to ambiguous for Apple and they call it "safe sleep" instead. It starts automatically when the laptop is running out of power, even if the laptop is asleep at the time.
The standard use-case for laptop users is to close the lid to make it sleep and open it to make it wake, nothing more, nothing less.
"What he is also not understanding is that those are actually options, signified by them being located on option button-arrow which is supposed to provide you more options. It is actually one of the 3 main icons/choices, and is the smallest one - big icon is Power icon which shuts down your computer (60% of screen), lock is next to it and slightly smaller (25% of the screen, while option arrow is smallest (15% of the screen)."
What has them being "options" got to do with anything? The Microsoft way here has been to throw in every conceivable option in order to make everyone happy. But Joel points out (and backs it with the well established scientific theories) that too much options and choice makes people confused and unhappy.
What an incredible lame argument McCormack makes. I had to stop myself from laughing. "Suddenly they're gone"? Didn't the copyright holder know fifty years ago that the record would have it's copyright expire in 2005? The songwriter just didn't see those 50 years creep up on him did he?
It didn't just suddenly disappear. In 1955 the public agreed to give the copyright owner 50 years of monopoly on that song, they didn't agree to first give 50 years and then give a further 25 if the record was popular. Taking an existing record and giving it 25 more years of copyright is akin to theft from the public.
If the songwriter wants to provide for his children and grandchildren he can save up and invest his earnings like everyone else. Yes, artists are important, but nobody else gets 50 years of income from a few years of work. Back when copyright was introduced, the public basically agreed that art was important and that artists needed a bit of protection in order to encourage art and to provide a living for artists. I doubt that the politicians that introduced it actually meant that a songwriter should earn enough money from a single song for 50 years so that he never had to work again.
Disagreeing with these people is perfectly fine, calling them savages is not.
Surely, whether something is illegal or not should be completely independent of your method of correspondence. If I use the internet, I am in reality doing nothing different from using the postal service, fedex, telephone or fax.
Otherwise, you just end up piling on new laws whenever some new medium is introduced.
I'm glad the judge can decide that IM or Email is irrelevant in this case, but should he have to make that call of common sense?
.. and it should come as no surprise than anyone would turn it down.
What IS disappointing about Edgy Eft is that the release was at first intended to be edgy and risky, because they had the Long Term Support release, Dapper Drake, to suggest to anyone wanting something conservative and stable.
In the end the only thing edgy in the release was the new event based startup system which isn't yet that visible for the end-user. People can say what they want about 'Edgy Eft' just being a name, but it was fairly clear from Shuttleworth's early emails that the name wasn't just chosen at random.
Edgy is thus the most (and possibly the only) disappointing Ubuntu release so far. It is not bad, it is just nothing like what was intended.
Currently the quad-core is pretty useless for gamers unless you like to run video encoding apps at the same time as you play your game.
The reason is of course, that most games are barely optimised for dual cores, let alone four cores. It is not simple either as balancing several cores to get the most out of them requires a redesign of the game engine.
It will be significant for future games, but you are better off buying a high-end dual core now and replacing it with quad-core later on.
The standard version of the PS3 costs $500 ($499). Unlike the base version of the Xbox 360 it isn't horribly crippled. It still comes with a hard drive, although smaller. I've heard plenty of people comparin the $600 PS3 price with price of the Xbox and Wii, but it isn't fair. The premium Xbox unit only has a 20GB hard drive, the same as the base PS3.
IANAL, but the main thing is currently there is no known patents and no lawsuits.
Microsoft has promised Novell not to sue them or their customers, but there is no specific patent licenses and no mention of specific patents. Thus, they have just created a Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt situation towars other Linuxdistributors, basically getting potential customers to think "if they are doing this, there must be patents" and thus helping Novell get customers, since they are "immune".
In reality, Novell would probably lose their rights to distribution if Microsoft DID sue and this is what Eben Moglen will uncover. Thus for Linux and the GNU Tools, Novell may not be any better off than the rest. The exception is Mono.
Novell are the primary Copyright holders of Mono, and while there are probably contributors that hold some copyright, Novell would just need to rip those bits of code out and replace them, and then being the only ones that can distribute Mono. The GPL can do many things, but stopping the Copyright owner from distributing their own intellectual property, it can not.
I've always been favorable towards Mono, mainly because I trusted Novell about it. I no longer do, and neither should the GNOME developers. Currently it is only in as part of 'Tomboy' the sticky notes app, which can be easily replaced. Do not let it go further.
1. Use of a bit of GPL code mixed with proprietary code does not mean that All Your Code Are Belong To Us, it means that Microsoft would have to remove the GPL infringing code, and possibly pay damages to the copyright owner.
2. Nothing at all is stopping you from running proprietary code on a GNU/Linux system, as long as the GPL license on the GNU/Linux parts of the system is honoured. You can easily use the Linux kernel, the GNU Tools and put a proprietary graphical system on it or just running proprietary software packages. Apple uses quite a few GNU tools, yet keeps Aqua closed, and lots of vendors have released proprietary software packages for Linux.
.. to the most important and popular iPod: the iPod nano. Lots and lots of features is not going to change anything, because features are not the reason the iPod nano sells so well.
The main reasons are iTunes integration, portability, has has a cool brand name and is fricking gorgeous. The Zune is neither of those things, and is currently an overhyped competitor to the regular iPod, which to be honest is becoming more of a niche market.
"Generally speaking, people would rather spend $100 to buy books for a bunch of underprivileged children rather than spend it to buy one computer for one child."
I hope you realise that the idea is to actually use these laptops as eBook-readers for cheap and updated school books, including lots of free material from sources such as Wikipedia.
Also, the political and economical situation in Africa is much more complex than the image of starving children. There are many countries in Africa where most people aren't starving, even if they are poor by European/American standards. If the continent is to blossom and improve it is crucially important to provide good education, and the OLPC is one of the attempts at helping this. I admire this project, and it could potentially have an impact in the developed countries as well.
"So, I'm sure they're compensating the networks for the commercials they're overwriting, right?"
If they don't get agreement from their providers they are committing copyright infringement. They have no right to redistribute the content to their users in other ways than what the agreement between them and their provider states. Thus if they CHANGE the content before redistributing, they are in breach of copyright.
An end-user is not subject to the same kind of copyright rules as long as he does not redistribute the material. Thus the user can strip away commercials for himself.
The content providers are, however, pressuring for legislation so that software makers or hardware makers can't build in automatic commercial skipping.
An interesting work-around would be to have a skip button that simply skips forward in time a certain number of minutes, and have the system automatically set this skip time to be equal to the usual length of commercials on that particular channel.
"There has never been any technical reason for a computer to take more than a few seconds to begin operation when it is turned on."
I can name half a dozen; power consumption for suspend to RAM, system process cleanup for suspend to disk, disk space storage for suspend to disk, driver software that doesn't gracefully handle failing down to a hibernate state, plug-and-play hardware detection on bootup... not to mention the whole raft of problems that occur when users never shut down and clog their system up by never ending processes."
What I think Raskin means is that there aren't any VALID technical reasons. Bugs in the driver software is hardly valid technical reasons. They just get away with it because suspend isn't used as much as it should. Also, the hardware has been designed for the current boot system, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be redone.
The major OSes and hardware manufacturers really ought to have solved this by now, but people seems to have accepted the whole boot procedure.
"All of those things make sense in the context they are being used in, and they're relatively intuitive. After all, it's not the programmers fault the user is an idiot, especially with something as simple as a yes/no dialog box, as long as the dialog box is written in language comprehensible for the designed userbase."
The users are not idiots, they just are acustomed to the system asking stupid questions so often they get used to just mindlessly clicking 'yes'. Many times people think they understand a dialog and click yes before they have fully read it. Removing yes/no in support of "delete file / save file" helps, but the problem lies deeper.
"I see it in the same light as arresting automobile manufacturers for the hit-and-run death of an innocent pedestrian. Sure, the car was used as the lethal weapon of choice, and it was productive in doing its task, but it's not Chevrolet's fault that their Silverado 1500 was used to kill someone. BitTorrent has a valid use, just as an automobile. When it's misused though, it's not the responsibility of the manufacturer, the used car dealer, or even the gas station!"
What an incredibly lame analogy. You could have at least used the "guns don't kill people, people do". Most of the use of cars is completely legitimate and when a automobile manufacturer sells a car he knows that most people will use it for completely legitimate purposes. Also, extremely few people intend on using cars for hit-and-run.
Bittorrent, the technology itself is very useful and certainly has legitimate uses. Ubuntu and Fedora both uses bittorrent for distribution among other things. Posting a legitimate torrent on your own web page is certainly kosher. The guy who invented bittorrent also has no blame for people using it for copyright infringement, because the technology itself is useful for legal purposes.
When you are setting up a site in which users exchange torrents with strangers, however, you KNOW that almost everyone is going to be using it for illegitimate purposes. Hardly anyone is going to use this site for legitimate purposes and if they do, it is mostly in order to say that "see it has legitimate uses".
If 99.99% of all cars where bought simply to murder people, you would probably see a change in legislation about them as well.
"I think the recent history of the Balkans show this. Yugoslavia was unified, but on a superficial level. As soon as the force of censorship was removed, the country flew apart."
I agree with most of your sentiment, but your choice of example is odd. If anything this sounds like an argument FOR censorship. If lack of censorship is the only thing that keeps a country from war, ethnic clensing and mass murder, then for all that is sacred do not simply disband all censorship. Free speech means nothing if there is nobody left to say anything.
In reality, nothing in this world is ever as simple and black and white as "free speech" == good, "censorship == evil". Freedom is a complex issue built up of many facets, the right to say what you please is is just one of these facets and sometimes it conflicts with others.