Hmm... Quite right, but could you distribute it to the U.S. if the recipient of the software were forced to pay a royalty?
Something else which is a little odd about that clause... I realized it after posting it. Does the (alleged) royalty apply to distribution or to usage?
It seems absurd of the GPL to state "distribution" since as far as I know, patents and royalties apply to usage. Nobody can charge royalties for distribution of an invention. Unless the invention itself is a distrubtion method and is being used in the process.
Prediciton: It turns out to be some Visual Basic application which uses built-in windows components such as media player... thus allowing "All media formats, and DVD playing capabilities"
Quadrupling "Surfing Speed" is so bizzare a claim that I have no idea what it could mean. Maybe he's blocking banner ads... at 56k it could make a difference.
As for the "lines of code" I strongly doubt that a kid is using the same criteria for lines of code that everyone else is using... it probably includes his html test suite, and all his test code, abandoned code and documentation added together. Or maybe he didn't know how to write a function, so it is a big cut-and-paste one-function VB program with Goto's.
It's not that I doubt that a kid can pull this sort of thing off, it is that I doubt the school teachers nor the media have enough knowledge to judge it or report it accurately.
5% still breaks the GPL's patent encumbrument clause (Section 7):
If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.
For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
Which means that if this holds, Linux can no longer be distrubuted. Period.
Most GNU and free software apps have been ported to it at one time or another. GCC, Xfree86, Mozilla, all were ported long before they were ported to Win32.
It still has a heap of useful software apps, and it has some things which Linux has been working on since at least 1995.
Like:
Smooth True Type font integration and management
Easy printer setup and support
Support for multiple simultaneous streams of audio (without the lag of ESD, or kludging about with multiple audio devices presented by one card)
Win16 application support (who cares if it doesn't fully or even partially support Win32, neither does Linux)
A desktop environment with a good clipboard
It lacked:
A slick security model on the filesystem
Multiuser support
Good marketing and incentive for companies to develop native apps.
The GUI also had a message queueing problem which prevented apps from responding when one app seized the queue.
In the late days of BBSes, OS/2 was the prefered platform. You could strip out the GUI and the multitasking was very good. Desqview was the only competitor in that field, Linux was too new and strange for the BBS world -- BBSes were a PC phenomenon. Unix and variants were part of an educational and business world which didn't cross into the PC world.
IBM never released the package for free (short of betas back in the early '90s), and now I believe it costs a fortune to get a copy... if you can get it at all.
There are a bunch of analogies flying around comparing computer technicians to engineers and doctors.
If you want that level of service, you'll have to pay for it.
What is the technician supposed to do when working on your machine? take your machine, extract the HDD, take an image of it, make a backup of that image just in case the first one fails, then boot your machine and realize the problem is a 5-second fix because the boot sector was toasted by faulty antivirus software?
Then they can send you a bill for $5k for the hour's work, citing the cost of mal-practice insurance and the costs of being certified by a professional body.
Stuff like jumping gets hairy, I'm not sure how you could really "run backwards". But you should be able to save a program trace in a circular queue and simulate the behaviour of running backwards. The instructions combined with the changes to the processor state should let you use a core-dump to walk backwards through the changes.
That is, you store all the changes to the registers, along with the intstruction pointer, any changes in memory, anything done anywhere using the CPU.
When the app cores, you could then watch it in the debugger like a movie... forwards and backwards. You couldn't make changes to variables or anything fancy since you would be limited as to how much state information you've stored... but I know it would help me from time to time.
I doubt the CPU could help create such a dump... but an emulator could.
Agreed... until it occured to me while reading the article that maybe by posting a feature request in a public forum, you would get lots of feedback similar to yours.
You might also get lots of people simply saying "it already exists if you do this that or the other".
On the other hand, consistency is extremely important. Too many independent thinkers with divergent goals would lead to a nightmare application... all software development would converge to an emacs-like blob.
But that might come out in the forum... and if the software application (or fork thereof) is 'lead' by a single mind, like the kernel, then it might work.
You can't GPL a specification, that doesn't make any sense. You can GPL a document which contains a specification, but to protect the specification itself, you would have to patent it.
The GPL has nothing to do with patents, it has to do with copyright. If patents try to assert control over copy-rights, then the GPL has something to say.
If that is it, I suppose an illustration of the implementation and the problem, would be that if GIFs were part of the standard, then we could read them from the web, and generate them for the web, but using the software for non-web purposes would be restricted?
I think what they're saying here is that people could patent use of software outside the domain of the web, and use the patented technology as part of the web standard... crippling implementations of free software in such a way that they cannot evolve beyond the web. Could intranets be a problem?
I don't really get it, as a patent is a patent is a patent. There are plenty of things free software can't do now just because of patents. This may actually be to our bennefit as patent-encumbured technologies would have to shed control if they wanted to be incorporated into the web...
Insert obligatory "patents are stupid" comment here.
Computers are useful if you are teaching subjects which necessarily require them.
Computer Programming, wordprocessing, keyboarding, Drafting/CAD, video editing and photography are all subjects for which I have seen computers effectively used.
What do these have in common?
You don't teach them in elementary school!
I really think that computers in elementary school classrooms has more to do with principals obsessed with whiz-bang technology rather than anything to do with a "need" to "teach" students something they couldn't learn without them, or couldn't learn as quickly or effectively.
I hear arguments about basic computer literacy... but basic computer literacy is difficult to teach, I don't think it can be taught properly in the current classroom environment. That is, kids need lots of time alone with the computer. You can't develop that literacy a little bit at a time with multiple kids to a system interrupted constantly by a teacher who doesn't understand the technology.
To me, the first step in teaching somebody computer literacy, is getting them to overcome the fear of breaking something. Most teachers I've met are still at the stage of "Just click the icons... and hope it doesn't crash."
I can't wait until people realize that computers in elementary school classrooms are a stupid idea.
without taking a significant hit to your overall quality of life.
That is, if working to stay a step ahead of the creditors, being gainfully employed and commuting in a nice car could be called anything other than slavery.
If I did go, I would tell my coworkers that I went camping. I find that if people hear you're out doing things, they tend to think you're pretending to be something your not.
You're calling somebody a communist and acusing them of being extremist in the same breath?
QT has the potential to make commercial development on Linux more restrictive than commercial development on Windows.
Yes, commercial interests don't have to use QT if they don't want to, and yes today it is only $2k per developer, and yes, you can develop GPL apps and make money off them... but
The QT commercial license can change
You don't have to use a GPL-ish license to develop free software under Windows, why should QT force you to do so under Linux?
Forking into a different toolkit for commercial development is a detriment to free software
So I guess if you really want, GTK can be used for:
Apps with BSD and similar licenses
Commercial internally developed applications for which funding would never be approved, and GPLing them would be out of the question
Shareware
In short... anything which would not get commercial licensing and would not use a GPL-ish license.
There is a reason the LGPL exists. There is a reason why a library struggling for wide acceptance in Linux should not be using the GPL (or QPL for that matter) for distribution.
The only reasons to accept the restrictions of QT are 1. you con't care in the slightest about non GPL-ish development (even BSD-ish), or 2. you think that having a slick, easy to use, free library NOW is more important than anything else.
But for those two reasons, you might as well just develop under Windows. There are fewer restrictions.
The bobble-headed doll is probably not the product of the CEO, but the product of someone thinking that this is a good way to kiss management butt.
If the Christmas party was paid for by the company, and it wasn't manditory, then they didn't just get a bobble-head of the CEO.
Someone I know at a temp agency last year actually got a letter for Christmas; "For your Christmas bonus, we have made a charitable donation in your name... " (No mention of the tax writeoff).
You don't do that to people who scrimp and save to pay their bills. Even $50 would make a difference.
...if more of these wack-jobs would get themselves into some science classes and study up on ways to create renewable fuels or, better efficiency from solar products, this whole problem would go away.
No, they'd be outcompeted by the guys who don't have the overhead of studying or practicing renewable techniques.
The change has to come from the marketplace or from the government... it's pretty hard to get the marketplace to do anything ethical, and the government is corrupt.
The marketplace won't change for the same reason as industry... only the wealthy can afford to spend ethically, everyone else has to go as cheap as they can.
The government is corrupt IMHO because capitalism broke democracy... through campaign contributions, employing citizens and feeding the taxbase, corporations have too much sway over government.
So how do you fix democracy so that it can take control back from capitalism and focus on what is right for the people? and not for the corporation?
You can't... for the same reason the marketplace and corporations can't change; Changing the government means changing a country and countries must compete on an international scale. Any country to toughen up on its corporations looses domestic jobs and international power.
The only way to recover that power is to build new jobs by slashing down forests, building factory farms etc.
We're all stuck in a rut. Renewable forestry will become popular only when it is either 1. absolutely necessary, or 2. every other country in the world is forced to adopt it due to (1) and the last country to hold out is wealthy enough to choose the ethics they want to practice.
Agreed... people swear by certain manufacturers, but they all have streaks of good products and bad products.
Samsung is hit-and-miss, recently they've been more hit than miss.
On the other hand, I don't know why I buy Sony anymore, their products have been more miss than hit for a while now. Which is not to say they suck, but they don't live up to their reputation or the premium they charge for their name.
My early 1990's 4 watt Sony stereo has far better sound than my late 1990's Sony stereo, or my Wega T.V. Oddly, I was using that stereo for years with a Commodore monitor and a Zenith VCR as a T.V. When I replaced it with a Wega, it was disappointing. Reasonable picture, bad sound. No depth or power. Remember... I'm comparing the Wega to a 4 watt stereo from the same manufacturer driven from a Zenith VCR.
They seemed to reach a certain very economical style of production in the early 1990's which resulted in inexpensive but surprisingly high quality products. But just when you thought it couldn't get any better... it didn't.
Now with Sony, you get nothing more than what you pay for. Top dollar for top systems, while their cheap stuff sucks. To get good sound out of the Wega, I'll need to buy their home-theatre system. Their earlier T.V.s weren't like that.
I sent some nicely worded feedback to Sony regarding this, they didn't care about my opinion, nor did they seem to care about retaining any customers.
I'm afraid to try Samsung for a DVD player... unless I buy it from Radio Shack... great return policy.
Then I can send Sony an email describing how their reply to my feedback prompted me to by Samsung.
If they bought QT, they would have a great toolkit with a strong foundation of open source software along with a toll-both for all derived closed-source development.
I imagine they would just have to leverage their patent library against Troll Tech to encourage them to accept any offers they may have refused on moral grounds.
Printing is still a little flaky under Linux, most apps try for Postscript, and you had better hope you have everything configured properly. There are still heaps of problems rendering fonts consistently on the printer and on the screen, but those are being addressed.
Last I checked, Abiword still hasn't quite gotten that font issue sorted out, which still puts it a bit behind MS Write, neither do footnotes, so both apps are out of the question for students taking any arts courses.
OpenOffice also has some ugly fonts, but some people have figured out how to make them look pretty. I don't know how well it prints on their machines though.
Adding and removing fonts can be done graphically, which is something I've read that Linux can do recently. I don't think it is in Debian stable though. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Windows 3.1 seems to have the sound thing figured out. Yeah you need to load a DOS driver to get your DOS applications to recognise your card, but the Windows apps don't seem to have any problem figuring out OSS vs. ALSA vs. esd.
MS Office works well on Windows 3.1, as does Internet Explorer. The versions are a little old, but they're easier to use and more version-compatible with modern versions of MS Office than anything on Linux. The dialer is dead easy to set up with IE too.
The desktop metaphor is poor on Win3.1. But then it is probably easier to figure out the Program Manager and alt-tab than it is to figure out any given Linux setup.
The file manager is pretty slick. It's not consistent with the other apps, but the same can be said for any given file manager on Linux.
The Win3.1 clipboard is to die for. It beats Linux hands-down. OLE was a bad idea, but working with grapics and text throughout dissimilar applications and in just about any application or dialogue box is dead easy. Printscreen and Alt-printscreen is a nice touch too.
On the other hand, Win3.1 can't multitask for its life, won't do 3d, has trouble with unstable applications taking down the OS, hits resource limitations if you get the colour depth too high, has a big DLL hell issue... but then what do you expect for an OS designed 10 years ago for 1/10th of the hardware.
Still, Linux is getting there... soon it will be better than Windows 3.1 on hardware 10 to 20 times as large and fast.
Why is it that some people insist on saying that 'x' is not a firewall, but they can't clearly define what a firewall is without using marketing speak?
IMHO, if it sits between network A and network B and does anything from scan for viruses to block ports, and the guy who put together the network wants to call it a firewall, then it is a firewall. Not necessarily a good firewall or a bad firewall, but it is a firewall.
For a home user, a NAT device alone is a good firewall to block unexpected incoming connections. Personal Firewall software is a good firewall to block unexpected outgoing connections.
For all but the tiniest of corporate offices, this would of course be a laughable solution.
Do it the other way around... instead of putting the file name in the filesystem, put the file names in the file.
Directories become database views and files are records.
There are some screwy implications, like being able to create "user filespace", where users only see what wants to be seen (no/etc, no application directories etc.). Configuration information can be stored in a configuration style filespace (/configuration/packages/core/ls.cfg). Simple package management through apps storing themselves as (for example)/bin/ls,/packages/core/1.0/ls and in/path/ls. Which leads me to another advantage -- you have neat ways to resolve the path. It's just a directory. The only files in your path are the ones you have access to.
There are some serious problems though... if you think about it. Like controlling which files are allowed to declare themselves members of which directories.
Dealing with legacy applications shouldn't be too hard, as the mappings could be done through a package-management application. Archive utilities can interpret the files as hard links... the filesystem can use hard links as an indication to append the additional filenames to the file-records
But it is just an idle idea... it hurts my head thinking about it. I have a hunch it is the sort of thing that MS is moving to by using SQL server as a core of a new filesystem.
Think of stuff like drugs, suicide, fictional pornography, and you'll have lots of laws which can get you arrested for doing things in the privacy of your own home. On the other hand, I like to think that the actions are only criminal if you get caught which means, by definition that you are no longer affecting only yourself.
However... I have a theory about this. As an armchair political theorist, I will make the broad statement that capitalism is anti-democratic. In the eyes of government, the will of the corporation has long outweighed the will of the people.
International government power is found in economic well-being and competativeness. Corporations provide that power and are thus more important than citizens.
So if a corporation says "we can be more competative if you support digital-etcetera laws", the government is compelled to assist them. Why? Because if your country slips in the capitalist system, you loose international power.
From this perspective, the Microsoft case was one where the government was torn between defending the internal free market, and defending a great international economic power. From the microscopic perspective... hurting the corporation could do more damage to domestic jobs than could be recovered by a healthy domestic marketplace. A battle between the tangible and immediate (jobs) and the abstract (healthy internal economy).
So do you use government might to empower Disney, Warner Bros and other domestic corporations? or do you risk loosing those corporations in the interest of personal freedom. That is, do you preserve your healthy and powerful global industry at the cost of individual liberties?
What could the people gain by the government supporting individual liberties?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Quite right, but could you distribute it to the U.S. if the recipient of the software were forced to pay a royalty?
Something else which is a little odd about that clause... I realized it after posting it. Does the (alleged) royalty apply to distribution or to usage?
It seems absurd of the GPL to state "distribution" since as far as I know, patents and royalties apply to usage. Nobody can charge royalties for distribution of an invention. Unless the invention itself is a distrubtion method and is being used in the process.
Prediciton: It turns out to be some Visual Basic application which uses built-in windows components such as media player... thus allowing "All media formats, and DVD playing capabilities"
Quadrupling "Surfing Speed" is so bizzare a claim that I have no idea what it could mean. Maybe he's blocking banner ads... at 56k it could make a difference.
As for the "lines of code" I strongly doubt that a kid is using the same criteria for lines of code that everyone else is using... it probably includes his html test suite, and all his test code, abandoned code and documentation added together. Or maybe he didn't know how to write a function, so it is a big cut-and-paste one-function VB program with Goto's.
It's not that I doubt that a kid can pull this sort of thing off, it is that I doubt the school teachers nor the media have enough knowledge to judge it or report it accurately.
5% still breaks the GPL's patent encumbrument clause (Section 7):
Which means that if this holds, Linux can no longer be distrubuted. Period.
I don't use it, but I ran it for quite some time.
Most GNU and free software apps have been ported to it at one time or another. GCC, Xfree86, Mozilla, all were ported long before they were ported to Win32.
It still has a heap of useful software apps, and it has some things which Linux has been working on since at least 1995.
Like:
It lacked:
The GUI also had a message queueing problem which prevented apps from responding when one app seized the queue.
In the late days of BBSes, OS/2 was the prefered platform. You could strip out the GUI and the multitasking was very good. Desqview was the only competitor in that field, Linux was too new and strange for the BBS world -- BBSes were a PC phenomenon. Unix and variants were part of an educational and business world which didn't cross into the PC world.
IBM never released the package for free (short of betas back in the early '90s), and now I believe it costs a fortune to get a copy... if you can get it at all.
There are a bunch of analogies flying around comparing computer technicians to engineers and doctors.
If you want that level of service, you'll have to pay for it.
What is the technician supposed to do when working on your machine? take your machine, extract the HDD, take an image of it, make a backup of that image just in case the first one fails, then boot your machine and realize the problem is a 5-second fix because the boot sector was toasted by faulty antivirus software?
Then they can send you a bill for $5k for the hour's work, citing the cost of mal-practice insurance and the costs of being certified by a professional body.
There was a saying in my high school:
Those who can't teach, teach phys-ed.
Those who can't teach phys-ed become guidance councellors.
Stuff like jumping gets hairy, I'm not sure how you could really "run backwards". But you should be able to save a program trace in a circular queue and simulate the behaviour of running backwards. The instructions combined with the changes to the processor state should let you use a core-dump to walk backwards through the changes.
That is, you store all the changes to the registers, along with the intstruction pointer, any changes in memory, anything done anywhere using the CPU.
When the app cores, you could then watch it in the debugger like a movie... forwards and backwards. You couldn't make changes to variables or anything fancy since you would be limited as to how much state information you've stored... but I know it would help me from time to time.
I doubt the CPU could help create such a dump... but an emulator could.
Agreed... until it occured to me while reading the article that maybe by posting a feature request in a public forum, you would get lots of feedback similar to yours.
You might also get lots of people simply saying "it already exists if you do this that or the other".
On the other hand, consistency is extremely important. Too many independent thinkers with divergent goals would lead to a nightmare application... all software development would converge to an emacs-like blob.
But that might come out in the forum... and if the software application (or fork thereof) is 'lead' by a single mind, like the kernel, then it might work.
I'm just not so sure that the idea would fail.
School hasn't started yet in most of North America -- the first-post trolls are having a planning session and a smoke.
You can't GPL a specification, that doesn't make any sense. You can GPL a document which contains a specification, but to protect the specification itself, you would have to patent it.
The GPL has nothing to do with patents, it has to do with copyright. If patents try to assert control over copy-rights, then the GPL has something to say.
If that is it, I suppose an illustration of the implementation and the problem, would be that if GIFs were part of the standard, then we could read them from the web, and generate them for the web, but using the software for non-web purposes would be restricted?
I think what they're saying here is that people could patent use of software outside the domain of the web, and use the patented technology as part of the web standard... crippling implementations of free software in such a way that they cannot evolve beyond the web. Could intranets be a problem?
I don't really get it, as a patent is a patent is a patent. There are plenty of things free software can't do now just because of patents. This may actually be to our bennefit as patent-encumbured technologies would have to shed control if they wanted to be incorporated into the web...
Insert obligatory "patents are stupid" comment here.
I am very unsurprised by this.
Computers are useful if you are teaching subjects which necessarily require them.
Computer Programming, wordprocessing, keyboarding, Drafting/CAD, video editing and photography are all subjects for which I have seen computers effectively used.
What do these have in common?
You don't teach them in elementary school!
I really think that computers in elementary school classrooms has more to do with principals obsessed with whiz-bang technology rather than anything to do with a "need" to "teach" students something they couldn't learn without them, or couldn't learn as quickly or effectively.
I hear arguments about basic computer literacy... but basic computer literacy is difficult to teach, I don't think it can be taught properly in the current classroom environment. That is, kids need lots of time alone with the computer. You can't develop that literacy a little bit at a time with multiple kids to a system interrupted constantly by a teacher who doesn't understand the technology.
To me, the first step in teaching somebody computer literacy, is getting them to overcome the fear of breaking something. Most teachers I've met are still at the stage of "Just click the icons... and hope it doesn't crash."
I can't wait until people realize that computers in elementary school classrooms are a stupid idea.
That is, if working to stay a step ahead of the creditors, being gainfully employed and commuting in a nice car could be called anything other than slavery.
If I did go, I would tell my coworkers that I went camping. I find that if people hear you're out doing things, they tend to think you're pretending to be something your not.
You're calling somebody a communist and acusing them of being extremist in the same breath?
QT has the potential to make commercial development on Linux more restrictive than commercial development on Windows.
Yes, commercial interests don't have to use QT if they don't want to, and yes today it is only $2k per developer, and yes, you can develop GPL apps and make money off them... but
So I guess if you really want, GTK can be used for:
In short... anything which would not get commercial licensing and would not use a GPL-ish license.
There is a reason the LGPL exists. There is a reason why a library struggling for wide acceptance in Linux should not be using the GPL (or QPL for that matter) for distribution.
The only reasons to accept the restrictions of QT are 1. you con't care in the slightest about non GPL-ish development (even BSD-ish), or 2. you think that having a slick, easy to use, free library NOW is more important than anything else.
But for those two reasons, you might as well just develop under Windows. There are fewer restrictions.
It took my brain a few minutes to click that people aren't talking about Printed Circuit Boards.
The bobble-headed doll is probably not the product of the CEO, but the product of someone thinking that this is a good way to kiss management butt.
If the Christmas party was paid for by the company, and it wasn't manditory, then they didn't just get a bobble-head of the CEO.
Someone I know at a temp agency last year actually got a letter for Christmas; "For your Christmas bonus, we have made a charitable donation in your name... " (No mention of the tax writeoff).
You don't do that to people who scrimp and save to pay their bills. Even $50 would make a difference.
No, they'd be outcompeted by the guys who don't have the overhead of studying or practicing renewable techniques.
The change has to come from the marketplace or from the government... it's pretty hard to get the marketplace to do anything ethical, and the government is corrupt.
The marketplace won't change for the same reason as industry... only the wealthy can afford to spend ethically, everyone else has to go as cheap as they can.
The government is corrupt IMHO because capitalism broke democracy... through campaign contributions, employing citizens and feeding the taxbase, corporations have too much sway over government.
So how do you fix democracy so that it can take control back from capitalism and focus on what is right for the people? and not for the corporation?
You can't... for the same reason the marketplace and corporations can't change; Changing the government means changing a country and countries must compete on an international scale. Any country to toughen up on its corporations looses domestic jobs and international power.
The only way to recover that power is to build new jobs by slashing down forests, building factory farms etc.
We're all stuck in a rut. Renewable forestry will become popular only when it is either 1. absolutely necessary, or 2. every other country in the world is forced to adopt it due to (1) and the last country to hold out is wealthy enough to choose the ethics they want to practice.
Agreed... people swear by certain manufacturers, but they all have streaks of good products and bad products.
Samsung is hit-and-miss, recently they've been more hit than miss.
On the other hand, I don't know why I buy Sony anymore, their products have been more miss than hit for a while now. Which is not to say they suck, but they don't live up to their reputation or the premium they charge for their name.
My early 1990's 4 watt Sony stereo has far better sound than my late 1990's Sony stereo, or my Wega T.V. Oddly, I was using that stereo for years with a Commodore monitor and a Zenith VCR as a T.V. When I replaced it with a Wega, it was disappointing. Reasonable picture, bad sound. No depth or power. Remember... I'm comparing the Wega to a 4 watt stereo from the same manufacturer driven from a Zenith VCR.
They seemed to reach a certain very economical style of production in the early 1990's which resulted in inexpensive but surprisingly high quality products. But just when you thought it couldn't get any better... it didn't.
Now with Sony, you get nothing more than what you pay for. Top dollar for top systems, while their cheap stuff sucks. To get good sound out of the Wega, I'll need to buy their home-theatre system. Their earlier T.V.s weren't like that.
I sent some nicely worded feedback to Sony regarding this, they didn't care about my opinion, nor did they seem to care about retaining any customers.
I'm afraid to try Samsung for a DVD player... unless I buy it from Radio Shack... great return policy.
Then I can send Sony an email describing how their reply to my feedback prompted me to by Samsung.
IIRC to lighten the system requirements with OS/2 3.0, they did a lot of fine-tuning in assembly.
If they bought QT, they would have a great toolkit with a strong foundation of open source software along with a toll-both for all derived closed-source development.
I imagine they would just have to leverage their patent library against Troll Tech to encourage them to accept any offers they may have refused on moral grounds.
I know... conspiracy theory....
Printing is still a little flaky under Linux, most apps try for Postscript, and you had better hope you have everything configured properly. There are still heaps of problems rendering fonts consistently on the printer and on the screen, but those are being addressed.
Last I checked, Abiword still hasn't quite gotten that font issue sorted out, which still puts it a bit behind MS Write, neither do footnotes, so both apps are out of the question for students taking any arts courses.
OpenOffice also has some ugly fonts, but some people have figured out how to make them look pretty. I don't know how well it prints on their machines though.
Adding and removing fonts can be done graphically, which is something I've read that Linux can do recently. I don't think it is in Debian stable though. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Windows 3.1 seems to have the sound thing figured out. Yeah you need to load a DOS driver to get your DOS applications to recognise your card, but the Windows apps don't seem to have any problem figuring out OSS vs. ALSA vs. esd.
MS Office works well on Windows 3.1, as does Internet Explorer. The versions are a little old, but they're easier to use and more version-compatible with modern versions of MS Office than anything on Linux. The dialer is dead easy to set up with IE too.
The desktop metaphor is poor on Win3.1. But then it is probably easier to figure out the Program Manager and alt-tab than it is to figure out any given Linux setup.
The file manager is pretty slick. It's not consistent with the other apps, but the same can be said for any given file manager on Linux.
The Win3.1 clipboard is to die for. It beats Linux hands-down. OLE was a bad idea, but working with grapics and text throughout dissimilar applications and in just about any application or dialogue box is dead easy. Printscreen and Alt-printscreen is a nice touch too.
On the other hand, Win3.1 can't multitask for its life, won't do 3d, has trouble with unstable applications taking down the OS, hits resource limitations if you get the colour depth too high, has a big DLL hell issue... but then what do you expect for an OS designed 10 years ago for 1/10th of the hardware.
Still, Linux is getting there... soon it will be better than Windows 3.1 on hardware 10 to 20 times as large and fast.
Real soon now...
Nature has a bad habit of changing relative to what?
Why is it that some people insist on saying that 'x' is not a firewall, but they can't clearly define what a firewall is without using marketing speak?
IMHO, if it sits between network A and network B and does anything from scan for viruses to block ports, and the guy who put together the network wants to call it a firewall, then it is a firewall. Not necessarily a good firewall or a bad firewall, but it is a firewall.
For a home user, a NAT device alone is a good firewall to block unexpected incoming connections. Personal Firewall software is a good firewall to block unexpected outgoing connections.
For all but the tiniest of corporate offices, this would of course be a laughable solution.
Do it the other way around... instead of putting the file name in the filesystem, put the file names in the file.
Directories become database views and files are records.
There are some screwy implications, like being able to create "user filespace", where users only see what wants to be seen (no /etc, no application directories etc.). Configuration information can be stored in a configuration style filespace (/configuration/packages/core/ls.cfg). Simple package management through apps storing themselves as (for example) /bin/ls, /packages/core/1.0/ls and in /path/ls. Which leads me to another advantage -- you have neat ways to resolve the path. It's just a directory. The only files in your path are the ones you have access to.
There are some serious problems though... if you think about it. Like controlling which files are allowed to declare themselves members of which directories.
Dealing with legacy applications shouldn't be too hard, as the mappings could be done through a package-management application. Archive utilities can interpret the files as hard links... the filesystem can use hard links as an indication to append the additional filenames to the file-records
But it is just an idle idea... it hurts my head thinking about it. I have a hunch it is the sort of thing that MS is moving to by using SQL server as a core of a new filesystem.
The corporation is required to act in the best interest of the shareholders, not the best interest of the employees.
Votes by shareholders are not one-person, one-vote.
Think of stuff like drugs, suicide, fictional pornography, and you'll have lots of laws which can get you arrested for doing things in the privacy of your own home. On the other hand, I like to think that the actions are only criminal if you get caught which means, by definition that you are no longer affecting only yourself.
However... I have a theory about this. As an armchair political theorist, I will make the broad statement that capitalism is anti-democratic. In the eyes of government, the will of the corporation has long outweighed the will of the people.
International government power is found in economic well-being and competativeness. Corporations provide that power and are thus more important than citizens.
So if a corporation says "we can be more competative if you support digital-etcetera laws", the government is compelled to assist them. Why? Because if your country slips in the capitalist system, you loose international power.
From this perspective, the Microsoft case was one where the government was torn between defending the internal free market, and defending a great international economic power. From the microscopic perspective... hurting the corporation could do more damage to domestic jobs than could be recovered by a healthy domestic marketplace. A battle between the tangible and immediate (jobs) and the abstract (healthy internal economy).
So do you use government might to empower Disney, Warner Bros and other domestic corporations? or do you risk loosing those corporations in the interest of personal freedom. That is, do you preserve your healthy and powerful global industry at the cost of individual liberties?
What could the people gain by the government supporting individual liberties?