...where the penguins live! Didn't you know that? Jacques just needed an excuse to get away from the horribly failing project;-)
But seriously, why didn't you just compile with FreePascal? A bit of porting might be needed, but that is probably easier than installing and configuring wine...
People don't regularly "upgrade" their cars with fatter engines and new accessories or want them to do things nobody ever thought of, like swimming or flying, just by attaching some wings and fins. On the pro side, cars don't get infested by worms nor do they pop up advertisements or spy on you.
On the other hand, there are people who "upgrade" their cars. This is called tuning and the guys who do it, do know how the car works.
As long as people view their computer like their car and still try to install software on it, something is in serious disorder.
It almost looks as if you never looked closely at Linux and will never bother to do so. Instead you just whine how complicated it is. Whatever "we" do, it will never be easy enough for your type.
maybe even make them install dependencies automatically
You know, apt has been around for... uhm... like 7 years or something?
You know what comes out of this study. In some constructed situation (desktop system, heavily firewalled, used to write letters to people who refuse to use anything other than MS Word) windows will be "better" in some sense. MSFT will heavily market this "fact from an independent study", omitting all the necessary conditions and not mentioning the cases where Linux is superior.
The sensible thing for OSDL is to tell them off: "We don't have time for silly games, we're busy providing value to out customers."
And yet, despite this, it's been my experience that women in general are TERRIBLE at reading men's minds.
Amen to that!
Women communicate using non-verbal language among themselves all the time, they expect the same from men, which is a completely bogus assumption. In any communication between a man and a women, the man will listen to what is being said while the woman will listen to how it is being said. Can't work.
Whether you frame this as men being unable to pick up subtle clues or women being likely to ignore explicit hints doesn't matter; only two incompatible languages are at work here.
Your 1-year-plan is limiting you to open source software that has been ported over to windows. Since not sane person would put up with the pains of *both* GTK and Win32 without good reason, you're missing out on quite a lot.
I switched over to Linux by installing a dual boot system first. It took me about a year until I never booted windows anymore.
Light signals race down the information superhighway at about 186,000 miles per second. But information cannot be processed at this speed, because with current technology light signals cannot be stored, routed or processed without first being transformed into electrical signals, which work much more slowly.
I see, if photons go into the photo transistor in a fiber optical NIC, the poor thing gets congested, because the electrons can't get out as fast on the other side! Wonder how these thing work, they must somehow vent excess photons or something.
Or they probably just messed up two different notions of "speed". That's what one gets for following a link into a blog, of all things...
What are you talking there? 60K is not the same as nothing, no matter how you spin it.
So, the options were: a) pay 100K now, no recurring charges and b) pay 60K every year.
To me this reads as if option a) wins just one year down the road and continues to get cheaper afterwards. They signed a three year contract, which amounts to 180K. Even depreciated for one year this is *more* expensive than the custom development of said application.
If you're making an argument, at least get the math right.
The only problem is that this uses Pu-238, which is synthetic and damn rare. One gram is estimated to cost around $10.000, if you can get it at all. This one gram will give you around 0.15W of electrical power.
On the other hand, the same technology powered by Sr-90 could be feasible. Some nuclear power plant operators might even pay you if you take that stuff from them:)
- Is not too verbose (Hello World is not daunting)
Compared to what? Even the C version of HelloWorld is shorter! For larger programs, Haskell tends to be 10x shorter than Java. If Java is not verbose, what is?
- Supports modern programming techniques like functional
Certainly it does, with all that support for higher order functions, dynamic closures, lambda abstraction, easily constructed lists and tuples, algebraic datatypes and pattern matching.
Because every little mistake blows up in your face. Oh, arrays index from 0, not 1 as I thought? Segfault. You mean I need to allocate another char for the terminating 0? Segfault. gets cannot know where the buffer ends? Segfault again.
If this teaches anything, it is that computers are mean machines with bad temper, best to be operated with full protection and long handled tools.
Seriously, use something friendly for teaching, such as Scheme, Logo, Smalltalk, Haskell. Something that produces valuable error messages.
Come on, if you had to write one crud screen, you will have to write another. It will be different, but share the structure. It will be another instance of the same general problem. And suddenly the general solution is astonishingly efficient! This is also true if another person has to write the next crud screen.
Of course, the reward structure in many companies makes efficient work in this manner impossible. But somehow that strikes me as a more fundamental problem, one that can't be overcome by hiring any programmers, whether good or bad.
I, for one, have no patience for writing simple test UIs
Then you might be doing it the wrong way. To make the drudgery interesting again, you generalize to an interesting problem, then solve the original problem as a special case. In the case of UIs, you should probably write a tool that makes writing UIs easier.
"I'd rather write code to write code than write code."
the number of possible configurations is 2.817E4515. That's a STAGGERING number for so few packages!
Yeah, that's more than the number of electrons in the universe, probably even more than the number of electrons the universe has space for. So what, it's still irrelevant.
Certainly, if there are no guidelines and any package could realistically interfere with any other, then every possible (legal) combination of packages would have to be tested. There's good reason nobody works this way.
First off, we expect that packages that are pairwise compatible, will be compatible in every combination. No, that's not universally true, but often enough. That cuts the testing down to p^2 possible interactions, which is tractable. Even that is not necessary.
In practice, packages interact in an organized way. If done in a sensible way, the number of interfaces grows roughly logarithmically with the number of packages. The total cost of checking every package against every policy is in O(p log p) and I can certainly live with that.
No, it's not perfect. That's why Debian (the distribution I'm most familiar with) has mechanism to repair mistakes. There are bugs, and they get fixed. That there will be bugs is just part of the universe's perversity.
For example, if a dependency package is missing (say, because it's considered old and was removed) how does the user resolve that dependency?
This should not happen, and it happens rarely. The trick is that packages can declare that they "provide" and/or "replace" another package. Old packages that are phased out are renamed and placed in the "oldlibs" section. They still work. This takes care of ancient binary packages, source packages cause even less trouble. Heck, Debian Sarge still contains libc5, which was replaced five(!) generations ago in 1998! That is plenty of time to update your proprietary application by simply recompiling it.
Well, binary compatibility could be improved. IBM's mainframes have a history of 40(!) years of binary compatibility. But do we want to go there? The CPUs have gotten clunky, expensive and energy hungry. Source code compatibility is just sooo much better. Software vendors could also adapt a bit, me thinks. Hell, commercial software verdors survived dos, windows 3, windows 9x and windows nt. They can manage with updated libraries.
What's wrong is assuming that/usr/local is the right place to put software. According to the FHS, Mozilla and FireFox should go in/opt. Can you name a distro that does this?
You got it backwards. First off, if Mozilla and Firefox are considered part of the distro, they go in/usr. Debian does it this way. Think: if it is in/usr, it is controlled by ipkg.
Local additions go in/usr/local. Management is left to you, I find compiling myself and using stow works well. (Oh come on, not that argument again! Compiling is 4 or 5 commands, I could whip up some dialog based shell script to do it for you and Aunt Tillie probably won't be required to do it anyway.)
Anything not organized in the traditional way gets a directory under/opt. If you must, assign a directory to your company, then manage/opt/foo.com any way you see fit. Simple and effective (though I like my/opt the way it is -- empty).
Something that an average user can actually *DO*. My wife would have my head on a platter...
No, I did not say the end user should build a.deb. You, the software vendor, should build it. It's actually quite simple and the Debianites tend to give helpful advice in hard cases. Once you have the deb, installation degenerates to a single command, download of dependencies included. That single command could even be in the context menu of your favorite file manager. How much easier could it get?
They used a model head to do the measurements, then they measured locally. In a sense, they built a voxel image of the head with a resolution of 10 grams. The hottest voxel received 1.3 milliwatts, all others got less. That's what they were interested in: the maximum. As long as nobody misreads it and erroneously applies the number to the eye lens, this is entirely valid.
How much exposure the eye got remains unclear. Just estimating that it is ten times more removed from the antenna than the earlobe is, that's already just 13 microwatt, and that will surely be handled.
Having 2^P (where P is the number of packages available) as the possible number of software combinations (any of which can interfere with each other) is not a good situation to be in!
Thanks for proving that Debian (where P is around 15.000) cannot possibly exist.
Making a system work with that many packages is actually straightforward: define stable interfaces. Debian has quite a number of them, collectively called "Debian Policy".
These OSes are closed systems where no new software can be introduced without the blessing of the distro maintainers.
Wrong. All you have to is adhere to the FHS and install into/usr/local and/var/local. Or don't think about sensible layout and install into/opt... And leave the option to install to/home/user open.
Granted, you don't get to fiddle with menu structures or starting daemons this way. You don't have to, most of the time. And if you absolutely must, you can read the Policy Manual and do the necessary manipulations. Better yet, you can a.deb yourself.
What else do you want? That your software is shipped with the distro? Exactly the way Microsoft is certainly not doing it?
Linux (the community) NEEDS commercial software.
Quick, remind me... Linux NEEDS commercial software to do what exactly? Are you really sure that NEEDS to be done? And are you also sure it would have the effect you're dreaming up (whatever it is)?
Better do more coding and less talking. Thats more productive in the long run.
typical cellphone exposure @ 900 MHz is around 1.3W/kg of body weight
You should quote correctly: maximum exposure is 1.3W/kg, for some 10g of body tissue. These 10g are some tiny part of your skull, right where you place the phone. This is certainly not the eye! And not for 80 hours straight.
There are still only 0.6W in total. Right after reading your post, I was under the impression I am constantly bombarded with over 90W from base stations or something.
Complete bullshit. Resonances of vibrating and rotating molecules are in the IR part of the spectrum, electronic excitation energies are in the visible or UV part, ionization energies in UV or even X-ray part. There is no resonance at 2.4GHz.
The reason that water gets hot in the microwave (as opposed to ceramics or plastics) is that water has polarized molecules that absorb RF energy far better than unpolarized ones.
Besides, 1/4 watt is still 1/4 watt, no matter what gain the antenna has. You can concentrate the radiation, but then it no longer makes sense to talk about power, then power density (W/cm or W/kg) is what counts.
The overhead for recursive functions is many times more than that for implimenting queues.
Bullshit. Whether you push everything on the stack or onto the end of a queue makes no difference. DFS vs. BFS on the other hand does make a difference: BFS uses much more memory, which your cache has to cope with, which probably eats up any benefit it might have gotten you.
Apart from that, anyone spouting nonsense about "more efficiency" without having a profiler handy, should be drawn and quartered right on the spot.
Linux is not a bad system, it just doesn't have anything to offer that its competitors don't already do as well or better.
Wrong. GNU/Linux is Free, you can poke around in its innards, understand and modify the complete system. This is not true of any "competitor". It's also dirt cheap compared to Windows+Office+virus killer+firewall product+all that other crap you eventually need to license.
Speaking of competitors... what do we actually compete for? Certainly not money or marketshare. Mindshare probably. But frankly, I don't want a share of the mind of an average Windows user. Many of them are stupid.
Has been tested more than once and the teeth are sharp. Best of all, it has been tested in Germany and resulted in injunctions, while it wasn't even clear if a license written for US american law would apply in Germany at all. Now the silly discussion can end: the GPL is legal binding document.
Please name one serious, high-profile hacking case (to include authoring viriii & worms) in which the perpetrator was caught and didn't turn out to be a teenager or a still adolescent 20 something.
Nice, placing the burden of proof on the other party makes the argument much easier, doesn't it?
Anyway, consider "dialers", programs that reconfigure your Windows internet setting to dial in via the equivalent of a very expensive 1-900 number. These programs have a "tendency" to install through some security holes in Internet Explorer against the will of the PC's owner. They caused enough financial damage to warrant a federal regulation. Today a legal "dialer" has to explicitly ask for permission to install itself, thereby presenting the incurred cost. Guess what, there is JavaScript in circulation which clicks OK in this dialog without the user even noticing.
None of this crap has been written by teenage hackers, this is paid for by shady corporations, and they are not caught, because chains of subcontractors have to be tracked through countries you have never heard of.
Second example: in Feb 2004 german computer magazine c't reported a connection between virus authors and spam senders. Basically spammers paid for the ip-adresses of "owned" PCs and used them as spam drones. (German article)
Don't tell me all this happens for fun. It happens for profit.
I have a Win2k print server. I have tried (easily) a dozen distros to get things working. One will see the network. One won't without downgrading Samba. One will, but can't access anything. One sees everything and accesses everything but can't print.
To be read as: "I have this print server speaking a broken, ill-defined, undocumented protocol and I DEMAND that it works out of the box!"
Well, duh. These things can't be fixed by deciding to do something about it. Driving a printer, sound card, video card or what-have-you is only possible if you know how the damn thing works. Hardware manufacturers are unhelpful, Microsoft deliberately sabotages samba. Fixing these problems is a frustrating uphill battle and it is just so much more rewarding to just install a decent print server using lpr or ipp.
I'm not saying Linux is perfect this way. But unusable hardware support is not a problem of boneheaded developers, it is just part of the perversity of the universe.
By the way, if you even have the faintest idea how to fix the printer problem, stop bitching about it and go fix it or at least tell the developers how to fix it. They will be grateful. If you don't have an idea, stop bitching about it anyway, you're not helping. (Note that you just made me write a comment instead of some code. You are really not helping, see?)
Just imagine, in lynx my links and text areas are numbered. Instead of pointing at them, I enter their number. This is faster than reaching for the mouse, never mind actually moving it. In the textarea I press C-x e to get an external editor, which is vi, because that was made for editing, unlike the feeble textbox in konqueror or any other point-and-click-browser. This is also faster.
Therefore, lynx is superior on any website that hasn't been overloaded with images or even imagemaps. The ultimate tool for editing wikis. (For reading slashdot I hear emacs is better, it pretends slashdot was a newsgroup.)
Slashdot Mirror
...where the penguins live! Didn't you know that? Jacques just needed an excuse to get away from the horribly failing project ;-)
But seriously, why didn't you just compile with FreePascal? A bit of porting might be needed, but that is probably easier than installing and configuring wine...
People don't regularly "upgrade" their cars with fatter engines and new accessories or want them to do things nobody ever thought of, like swimming or flying, just by attaching some wings and fins. On the pro side, cars don't get infested by worms nor do they pop up advertisements or spy on you.
On the other hand, there are people who "upgrade" their cars. This is called tuning and the guys who do it, do know how the car works.
As long as people view their computer like their car and still try to install software on it, something is in serious disorder.
things like roots
So tell me, WTF are roots?!
It almost looks as if you never looked closely at Linux and will never bother to do so. Instead you just whine how complicated it is. Whatever "we" do, it will never be easy enough for your type.
maybe even make them install dependencies automatically
You know, apt has been around for... uhm... like 7 years or something?
You know what comes out of this study. In some constructed situation (desktop system, heavily firewalled, used to write letters to people who refuse to use anything other than MS Word) windows will be "better" in some sense. MSFT will heavily market this "fact from an independent study", omitting all the necessary conditions and not mentioning the cases where Linux is superior.
The sensible thing for OSDL is to tell them off: "We don't have time for silly games, we're busy providing value to out customers."
And yet, despite this, it's been my experience that women in general are TERRIBLE at reading men's minds.
Amen to that!
Women communicate using non-verbal language among themselves all the time, they expect the same from men, which is a completely bogus assumption. In any communication between a man and a women, the man will listen to what is being said while the woman will listen to how it is being said. Can't work.
Whether you frame this as men being unable to pick up subtle clues or women being likely to ignore explicit hints doesn't matter; only two incompatible languages are at work here.
It's almost like computer science...
I'll list a few big ones:
Certain programs.
HEARSAY, your Honor!
Very specified. What moron modded this troll up?
Your 1-year-plan is limiting you to open source software that has been ported over to windows. Since not sane person would put up with the pains of *both* GTK and Win32 without good reason, you're missing out on quite a lot.
I switched over to Linux by installing a dual boot system first. It took me about a year until I never booted windows anymore.
Light signals race down the information superhighway at about 186,000 miles per second. But information cannot be processed at this speed, because with current technology light signals cannot be stored, routed or processed without first being transformed into electrical signals, which work much more slowly.
I see, if photons go into the photo transistor in a fiber optical NIC, the poor thing gets congested, because the electrons can't get out as fast on the other side! Wonder how these thing work, they must somehow vent excess photons or something.
Or they probably just messed up two different notions of "speed". That's what one gets for following a link into a blog, of all things...
What are you talking there? 60K is not the same as nothing, no matter how you spin it.
So, the options were: a) pay 100K now, no recurring charges and b) pay 60K every year.
To me this reads as if option a) wins just one year down the road and continues to get cheaper afterwards. They signed a three year contract, which amounts to 180K. Even depreciated for one year this is *more* expensive than the custom development of said application.
If you're making an argument, at least get the math right.
...deep-space powercell...
:)
The only problem is that this uses Pu-238, which is synthetic and damn rare. One gram is estimated to cost around $10.000, if you can get it at all. This one gram will give you around 0.15W of electrical power.
On the other hand, the same technology powered by Sr-90 could be feasible. Some nuclear power plant operators might even pay you if you take that stuff from them
- Is not too verbose (Hello World is not daunting)
Compared to what? Even the C version of HelloWorld is shorter! For larger programs, Haskell tends to be 10x shorter than Java. If Java is not verbose, what is?
- Supports modern programming techniques like functional
Certainly it does, with all that support for higher order functions, dynamic closures, lambda abstraction, easily constructed lists and tuples, algebraic datatypes and pattern matching.
Please stop the bad propaganda.
Because every little mistake blows up in your face. Oh, arrays index from 0, not 1 as I thought? Segfault. You mean I need to allocate another char for the terminating 0? Segfault. gets cannot know where the buffer ends? Segfault again.
If this teaches anything, it is that computers are mean machines with bad temper, best to be operated with full protection and long handled tools.
Seriously, use something friendly for teaching, such as Scheme, Logo, Smalltalk, Haskell. Something that produces valuable error messages.
Come on, if you had to write one crud screen, you will have to write another. It will be different, but share the structure. It will be another instance of the same general problem. And suddenly the general solution is astonishingly efficient! This is also true if another person has to write the next crud screen.
Of course, the reward structure in many companies makes efficient work in this manner impossible. But somehow that strikes me as a more fundamental problem, one that can't be overcome by hiring any programmers, whether good or bad.
I, for one, have no patience for writing simple test UIs
Then you might be doing it the wrong way. To make the drudgery interesting again, you generalize to an interesting problem, then solve the original problem as a special case. In the case of UIs, you should probably write a tool that makes writing UIs easier.
"I'd rather write code to write code than write code."
the number of possible configurations is 2.817E4515. That's a STAGGERING number for so few packages!
/usr/local is the right place to put software. According to the FHS, Mozilla and FireFox should go in /opt. Can you name a distro that does this?
/usr. Debian does it this way. Think: if it is in /usr, it is controlled by ipkg.
/usr/local. Management is left to you, I find compiling myself and using stow works well. (Oh come on, not that argument again! Compiling is 4 or 5 commands, I could whip up some dialog based shell script to do it for you and Aunt Tillie probably won't be required to do it anyway.)
/opt. If you must, assign a directory to your company, then manage /opt/foo.com any way you see fit. Simple and effective (though I like my /opt the way it is -- empty).
.deb. You, the software vendor, should build it. It's actually quite simple and the Debianites tend to give helpful advice in hard cases. Once you have the deb, installation degenerates to a single command, download of dependencies included. That single command could even be in the context menu of your favorite file manager. How much easier could it get?
Yeah, that's more than the number of electrons in the universe, probably even more than the number of electrons the universe has space for. So what, it's still irrelevant.
Certainly, if there are no guidelines and any package could realistically interfere with any other, then every possible (legal) combination of packages would have to be tested. There's good reason nobody works this way.
First off, we expect that packages that are pairwise compatible, will be compatible in every combination. No, that's not universally true, but often enough. That cuts the testing down to p^2 possible interactions, which is tractable. Even that is not necessary.
In practice, packages interact in an organized way. If done in a sensible way, the number of interfaces grows roughly logarithmically with the number of packages. The total cost of checking every package against every policy is in O(p log p) and I can certainly live with that.
No, it's not perfect. That's why Debian (the distribution I'm most familiar with) has mechanism to repair mistakes. There are bugs, and they get fixed. That there will be bugs is just part of the universe's perversity.
For example, if a dependency package is missing (say, because it's considered old and was removed) how does the user resolve that dependency?
This should not happen, and it happens rarely. The trick is that packages can declare that they "provide" and/or "replace" another package. Old packages that are phased out are renamed and placed in the "oldlibs" section. They still work. This takes care of ancient binary packages, source packages cause even less trouble. Heck, Debian Sarge still contains libc5, which was replaced five(!) generations ago in 1998! That is plenty of time to update your proprietary application by simply recompiling it.
Well, binary compatibility could be improved. IBM's mainframes have a history of 40(!) years of binary compatibility. But do we want to go there? The CPUs have gotten clunky, expensive and energy hungry. Source code compatibility is just sooo much better. Software vendors could also adapt a bit, me thinks. Hell, commercial software verdors survived dos, windows 3, windows 9x and windows nt. They can manage with updated libraries.
What's wrong is assuming that
You got it backwards. First off, if Mozilla and Firefox are considered part of the distro, they go in
Local additions go in
Anything not organized in the traditional way gets a directory under
Something that an average user can actually *DO*. My wife would have my head on a platter...
No, I did not say the end user should build a
If the Linux co
Nonono! They did not even average over the head!
They used a model head to do the measurements, then they measured locally. In a sense, they built a voxel image of the head with a resolution of 10 grams. The hottest voxel received 1.3 milliwatts, all others got less. That's what they were interested in: the maximum. As long as nobody misreads it and erroneously applies the number to the eye lens, this is entirely valid.
How much exposure the eye got remains unclear. Just estimating that it is ten times more removed from the antenna than the earlobe is, that's already just 13 microwatt, and that will surely be handled.
Having 2^P (where P is the number of packages available) as the possible number of software combinations (any of which can interfere with each other) is not a good situation to be in!
/usr/local and /var/local. Or don't think about sensible layout and install into /opt... And leave the option to install to /home/user open.
.deb yourself.
Thanks for proving that Debian (where P is around 15.000) cannot possibly exist.
Making a system work with that many packages is actually straightforward: define stable interfaces. Debian has quite a number of them, collectively called "Debian Policy".
These OSes are closed systems where no new software can be introduced without the blessing of the distro maintainers.
Wrong. All you have to is adhere to the FHS and install into
Granted, you don't get to fiddle with menu structures or starting daemons this way. You don't have to, most of the time. And if you absolutely must, you can read the Policy Manual and do the necessary manipulations. Better yet, you can a
What else do you want? That your software is shipped with the distro? Exactly the way Microsoft is certainly not doing it?
Linux (the community) NEEDS commercial software.
Quick, remind me... Linux NEEDS commercial software to do what exactly? Are you really sure that NEEDS to be done? And are you also sure it would have the effect you're dreaming up (whatever it is)?
Better do more coding and less talking. Thats more productive in the long run.
typical cellphone exposure @ 900 MHz is around 1.3W/kg of body weight
You should quote correctly: maximum exposure is 1.3W/kg, for some 10g of body tissue. These 10g are some tiny part of your skull, right where you place the phone. This is certainly not the eye! And not for 80 hours straight.
There are still only 0.6W in total. Right after reading your post, I was under the impression I am constantly bombarded with over 90W from base stations or something.
Complete bullshit. Resonances of vibrating and rotating molecules are in the IR part of the spectrum, electronic excitation energies are in the visible or UV part, ionization energies in UV or even X-ray part. There is no resonance at 2.4GHz.
The reason that water gets hot in the microwave (as opposed to ceramics or plastics) is that water has polarized molecules that absorb RF energy far better than unpolarized ones.
Besides, 1/4 watt is still 1/4 watt, no matter what gain the antenna has. You can concentrate the radiation, but then it no longer makes sense to talk about power, then power density (W/cm or W/kg) is what counts.
The overhead for recursive functions is many times more than that for implimenting queues.
Bullshit. Whether you push everything on the stack or onto the end of a queue makes no difference. DFS vs. BFS on the other hand does make a difference: BFS uses much more memory, which your cache has to cope with, which probably eats up any benefit it might have gotten you.
Apart from that, anyone spouting nonsense about "more efficiency" without having a profiler handy, should be drawn and quartered right on the spot.
Linux is not a bad system, it just doesn't have anything to offer that its competitors don't already do as well or better.
Wrong. GNU/Linux is Free, you can poke around in its innards, understand and modify the complete system. This is not true of any "competitor". It's also dirt cheap compared to Windows+Office+virus killer+firewall product+all that other crap you eventually need to license.
Speaking of competitors... what do we actually compete for? Certainly not money or marketshare. Mindshare probably. But frankly, I don't want a share of the mind of an average Windows user. Many of them are stupid.
Has been tested more than once and the teeth are sharp. Best of all, it has been tested in Germany and resulted in injunctions, while it wasn't even clear if a license written for US american law would apply in Germany at all. Now the silly discussion can end: the GPL is legal binding document.
See http://www.gpl-violations.org/ for more.
Please name one serious, high-profile hacking case (to include authoring viriii & worms) in which the perpetrator was caught and didn't turn out to be a teenager or a still adolescent 20 something.
Nice, placing the burden of proof on the other party makes the argument much easier, doesn't it?
Anyway, consider "dialers", programs that reconfigure your Windows internet setting to dial in via the equivalent of a very expensive 1-900 number. These programs have a "tendency" to install through some security holes in Internet Explorer against the will of the PC's owner. They caused enough financial damage to warrant a federal regulation. Today a legal "dialer" has to explicitly ask for permission to install itself, thereby presenting the incurred cost. Guess what, there is JavaScript in circulation which clicks OK in this dialog without the user even noticing.
None of this crap has been written by teenage hackers, this is paid for by shady corporations, and they are not caught, because chains of subcontractors have to be tracked through countries you have never heard of.
Second example: in Feb 2004 german computer magazine c't reported a connection between virus authors and spam senders. Basically spammers paid for the ip-adresses of "owned" PCs and used them as spam drones. (German article)
Don't tell me all this happens for fun. It happens for profit.
I have a Win2k print server. I have tried (easily) a dozen distros to get things working. One will see the network. One won't without downgrading Samba. One will, but can't access anything. One sees everything and accesses everything but can't print.
To be read as: "I have this print server speaking a broken, ill-defined, undocumented protocol and I DEMAND that it works out of the box!"
Well, duh. These things can't be fixed by deciding to do something about it. Driving a printer, sound card, video card or what-have-you is only possible if you know how the damn thing works. Hardware manufacturers are unhelpful, Microsoft deliberately sabotages samba. Fixing these problems is a frustrating uphill battle and it is just so much more rewarding to just install a decent print server using lpr or ipp.
I'm not saying Linux is perfect this way. But unusable hardware support is not a problem of boneheaded developers, it is just part of the perversity of the universe.
By the way, if you even have the faintest idea how to fix the printer problem, stop bitching about it and go fix it or at least tell the developers how to fix it. They will be grateful. If you don't have an idea, stop bitching about it anyway, you're not helping. (Note that you just made me write a comment instead of some code. You are really not helping, see?)
Just imagine, in lynx my links and text areas are numbered. Instead of pointing at them, I enter their number. This is faster than reaching for the mouse, never mind actually moving it. In the textarea I press C-x e to get an external editor, which is vi, because that was made for editing, unlike the feeble textbox in konqueror or any other point-and-click-browser. This is also faster.
Therefore, lynx is superior on any website that hasn't been overloaded with images or even imagemaps. The ultimate tool for editing wikis. (For reading slashdot I hear emacs is better, it pretends slashdot was a newsgroup.)