Not quite true. Most applications use the printer driver to optimize the output. While it is confusing and it rather sucks, it makes more sense to have the printer say "I have an internal font which represents this TrueType font as though it were a postscript font."
It also makes a difference for various resolutions. 150dpi will print characters better with particular properties than than will 180, 300, 360, or 600 dpi.
Tack on other limitations such as the printable area and it makes sense that the document will reformat itself for the printer.
If you take several reasonably well written printer drivers for printers genuinely capable of printing the same resolution ( 300dpi doesn't mean each pixel is 1/300th of an inch. ), and you disable font substitution and other similar printer based enhancements... or if you simply run the printers in compatability mode (using the same drivers), then you will not have this "problem."
If you want the same thing output every time regardless of the person's machine (scaled down depending on the printable area) use a PDF. You can also use a generic postscript driver and Ghostscript... the same way that Linux prints.
In one of your other posts, you mentioned banner ads without font smoothing/antialiasing. The GIMP does antialiasing. As for colour matching, I never had a need for it, but I never did professional publishing. When I need colour accuracy, I paint by numbers.
I see the lack of Truetype as a greater impedement to amateur desktop publishing. Truetype is excellent for people who care about what their work looks like while they're making it, but it is not as good as other font formats for the final output (Think small caps, character kerning etc.). And Linux, unlike Windows 3.1 doesn't support Truetype, it supports hacking truetype into an X-like font, or rendering truetype on the screen, but linux, unlike Windows 3.1 has no underlying printing architecture.
Read up on why Abiword uses Truetype under Windows, but not under Linux for more information:
I still have the WP5.1 for Windows floppies. It was a terrible product. WP5.2 was a very significant improvement. It was actually usable.
But remember something else about the time period in which Wordperfect was dealing. This was the time of killer apps, and people on PCs usually ran only one application at a time. 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were great.
At the time Microsoft had its own products which it was trying to sell. Windows was built around running Excel. It didn't have the complex memory limitations of 1-2-3 and it could run several tasks simultaneously. I've heard some rumoured compromises concerning the features of Windows which are supposedly related to Excel, but I've never been able to confirm them.
Now think about Wordperfect and other application developers. Which GUI do you target? Desqview/X, which was showing remarkable promise, Do you feed into the hands of a ruthless competitor and develop for their GUI?, Do you target Geos?, MacOS?, or wait for something better?
Then Microsoft saw that it had a unique advantage... they could bundle their OS with their GUI, and their Spreadsheet with their Wordprocessor. Undercutting everybody at every turn. If Lotus and Wordperfect merged, there may have been a very different outcome.
5.2 was slow to market, but WP was still strong when Word was trying to take hold. Wordperfect didn't kill Wordperfect, Microsoft's tying and bundling killed Wordperfect. Yes, the GUI version of 5.1 sucked horridly, but so did many versions of Word.
If doubt the diversity of platforms and the reluctance to be controlled by the likes of Microsoft, think about the control Microsoft exercised over Lotus, and think about the fact that over time WordPerfect has existed for DOS, OS/2, Linux, almost Java and even Windows.
Public domain was/is one step less restrictive than open source, only the source code wasn't necessarily available, and modifiers of the code didn't necessarily have to release their modifications (although I think fair use strongly prohibits presenting it as entirely your own work.)
More akin to BSD than GPL or Open Source.
If the GPL existed, I imagnine people would have slapped it on this code.
OB archie comment: I could never get it to actually work, even in 1995. I would search for a file, knowing its name, and it would fail. I tried many servers, but I was better off with the web.
I have also noticed a trend away from FTP archives towards HTTP archives. I think the rationale is that HTTP servers are heavily optimized, whereas the same focus wasn't placed into FTP servers.
IMHO, that sucks. It's easier to find files surfing through unlabeled ftp directories (or using regular expressions on things like "Allfiles.txt", than it is to use these really, really crappy search engines. Don't get me started on Yahoo's implied OR searches... where a highly ranked match with one word always outranks a lowly ranked match with all of them.
It shows up in the Ask Slashdot side-box. There are a lot of stories which wind up there. I think they're just not considered exciting enough to make the main page.
Absolutely true, but think a few years down the road when high-speed wireless access begins to creep into home stereo systems... sort of like digital radio on speed. Kick in micropayments, consumer profiling, the DMCA and encrypted streams. Although something as primitive as creditcard information would probably not make it in to the stream, some identifying information might.
On the upside, you'll never actually own the song, you'll just pay $.03 every time you want to listen to it. (recording it on your analog player will be illegal, and the watermark will contain information which makes any digital recorder halt when trying to record.)
I don't think these guys are worried about the next five years of home piracy, the general population still prefers to have CDs. I think they're trying to set themselves up for a whole new marketing model.
What if the Watermark contains information to the effect of:
"Purchased on 11/09/2000, by g_mcbay. By listening to this music, g_mcbay agrees that he/she will not copy this music. BTW, his credit card number is xxx111222333"
If that gets all over the world, you could be tracked down and potentially held responsible for the unauthorized duplication of the music. So how do you ensure that the message is scrubbed clean without degrading the sound quality?
My University had a stipulation that you were not allowed to submit previously published works for assignments. This applied to the arts as well as the sciences.
And the question was about work done while under the employ of the university.
Personally, I like the idea of working from a base of GPL'ed code. That way they can't do anything other than scorn you for creating code they can't distribute unless it is under GPL. It depends what you're doing. If you're doing some simple web forms or something, then using GPL'ed libraries is a good thing. If you're developing something which is meant to be distributed without the source code, then you're just sabotaging a project. (I know libraries are probably not the best example...)
Unfortunately it won't have the same bite if you wholly own the GPL'ed code because they could try to force you to grant them full license and ownership... effectively forking the code.
Yes, but there are some clauses in the contract which are vague.
The product has to be in competition with IBM and,
This applies to all works... "Within the limits of the law"
IMHO, They've effectively said that "we own everything you do, say or work on which may be considered to be in competition with anything we do anywhere in the world".... "Within the limits of the law"
I'm pretty sure the laws would frown on a tech support person being sued by IBM for independantly developing Linux code. Especially if IBM did not pay for equipment, training, or anything even slightly related to what the person was doing in their own spare time.
It is a spooky document though. I know of a few people who refused to sign it, and nothing has appeared to come of it. If you're getting hired by IBM, try asking "Is signing this paper a condition of my employment?" and get an authoritative answer.
On a similar note, you can get your manager to contact the legal dept to find out if you can work on X, Y or Z, without the company chasing after you. And the contract also has some stipulations about charity which makes it far less restrictive if you aren't trying to profit from it.
An IBM lawyer would be the person to ask though. Maybe they could post an anonymous reply... so long as the proxy server isn't watching:-)
If you do get it running, visit one or two simple websites and check the memory/CPU utilization in the Task Monitor. Be careful not to misinterpret the numbers.
This is the most bloated software I have ever seen... and it doesn't appear to be leaking. This triples Lotus Notes R5 with the Client and Designer running!!!
The Virtual Memory utilization creeps up to 100MB, and judging by the sluggish performance of my machine, and how long it takes to bring up the process when it has been idle for a few hours, I have no reason to believe that these numbers are not a close reflection of the truth. Right now, with six windows open, and my mail open with over 20 MB of mail, Netscape 4.7 shows less than 14MB in use.
I can't even read newsgroups in mozilla, the video refresh on a P-Pro 200 w. 128MB of RAM is unbearable. It is as sluggish as 256 colours on an unaccelerated ISA video card.
I keep hoping this all gets cleared up before release, but there is no indication of it. While it appears to be a very slick product, and in many areas there are definately speed improvements, I cannot burden my machine with that bloated code.
I just launched m17 on my K6-2 500 w. 96M of RAM and it took 26 seconds. I hit the about button and over 16MB were being consumed. I've seen little difference between memory utilization of M17 and Beta3
The worst part used to be that it offers no new features. Now the worst part is that it offers no new features, is bloated, all the while adding more complexity to web development.
Every bit of FUD I have read has confirmed what I have personally witnessed.
Funny, I don't see any clause in the GPL stating that I am required to produce proof of compliance upon demand.
Oddly, compliance doesn't rest on the person who has the software, only the people who distribute it.
So I suppose the conclusion would be that Virginia ignores the request. There is no legal obligation to do otherwise.
Now if an employee made the request, the conclusion might be "you can obtain the source for your platform and applications here..." If they did not, then the employee could contact the authors of the software and indicate to them that their work was illegally redistributed.
ooohhh.. I'm quaking.
Maybe we should write some GPL software to manage Microsoft licenses? It could help Microsoft cut down the TCO for their platform.
It is a particular problem which has repeated itself again and again throughout history. There is no way to defend against the government throwing down legislation after a reliance on these services comes into play, and the damage caused by it is only realized when it is too late.
The analogy to aviation is not a good one. The laws of physics are much more rigid than the laws of any particular government.
I also don't think the goals here are quite so noble. At the cost of potentially throwing away privacy, how does it help the world except to open up oportunities for a few individuals to make a buck?
And in times of crisis the government could cut the wires and dig through the data to find out who their enemies are. Concentrating data and technology in companies which outsource means that you no longer have absolute control over access.
Now while I think encryption technology could prevent Microsoft or whomever your host is from reading your mail... while still permitting you to work on it, government legislation could enforce software clipper-chip like backdoors, permitting transparent searching of records... including consumer profiles.
I know it sounds completely insane, but more and more, evidence of these kinds of goals are comming into place. It doesn't require conspiracy, these are natural forces.
People want to consume products. Manufacturers want to sell product. People cannot hide information from their employers, and it is difficult to not provide companies you buy from with information.
The govenment on the other hand wants to protect its citizens and ensure the lawful, and profitable behavior of corporations.
Outsourcing applications and storage is like holding your data in escrow.
What happens to that information in a time of national crisis?
You've turned the question around. You're asking if it is wrong to forbid people to develop for a platform. I don't like it, but I don't think it is wrong.
Is it right or wrong to go to great efforts to protect a free codebase in order to comply with Sony's business model even though you happen to be enhancing their market?
I personally think it is quite morally wrong.
Yes, I'm ignoring market forces, the network effect and percieved value... If you were to include those, the objectives will have changed from freedom to dominance... which in turn can compel corporations to see your point of view and ensure your survival... but it doesn't make it moral. RMS answered on grounds of morality... and I agree with him. If I were to ask on the grounds of business strategy I would have been very clear about it, and I probably wouldn't have asked RMS.
(And I'm not saying to boycott the PS2, simply to boycott developing for it... ditto for your microwave, and for other uncooperative hardware manufacturers.)
I think it is a very clear, noble and realistic point of view. Sony has manufactured a playstation. Why would they force you to sign an NDA to develop for it? Why shouldn't they make the consessions, open up their API and allow people to develop freely for their closed platform.
This problem happens all the time in Linux. How many times have linux drivers had to reverse-engineer drivers becuause the manufacturers are not willing to share their product information.
It is absurd. If you are not free to have the information about how to use a product, you should not buy the product. Never mind signing an NDA and tainting your codebase to expand the market for the uncoopertative manufacturer
I figured out what is wrong with legaleeze. It is as though through carefully constructed statements, people are writing logical programs in the English language.
The only problem is that nobody ever documents their code.
It is not uncommon that there are bad bits in stored files on tape or floppy. Do any of these cryptosystems permit data recovery... ie, bad bits will be noticed and only cause bad blocks.. rather than generating completely toasted filesystems?
Does anybody else find the technologies Corel is investing in questionable?
Debian is great. KDE is great. Debian and KDE is just weird from a licensing standpoint (I'm talking pre QPL days here... not GPL.)
Wine, while a cool technology unto itself, is memory hungry and not terribly stable. Certianly less stable than Windows at running Windows applications, and less rich in features. Wine is also restricted to the Intel architecture, shooting the splintered HCC(Rebel) in the foot.
Debian makes a great server OS, KDE makes a great desktop, Wine makes a great pseudoemulator. Put them all together and you get...
An easy to use GUI with extremely bloated unstable applications, and very little application interoperability... locked to the Intel Architecture no less. I would honestly rather run Windows.
The only reason I can think that they would choose such technologies would be because they were in a hurry... otherwise they should have cooperated with Redhat, ported their apps to GTK, and run Gnome (pre QPL becoming GPL days here! No Gnome/KDE flames!)
On the upside, they gave Wine a boost.. but as somebody commented regarding the Corel/Microsoft combination, new Corel contributions to the Wine codebase may now be tainted by NDAs and anti-compete clauses or something dumb like that.
This.net thing might make Corel kick butt on the markets in the short term, but in the long term they're doomed.
Can a user install packages without being root? I mean, most of the time you would install as root, but for some cases, like games, applications or the like, you should be able to install yourlelf... into your own home directory.
I've had to use tarballs to install IRC clients, Zmodem protocols, games and more on remote systems.
Without user-mode installations, it is just one more reason to give mobile users root access to their own systems.
I'm not a big fan of package management, it has caused me to rebuild more systems than manually solving dependencies has ever. As soon as somebody starts using the phrase "You'll have to rebuild if your corrupt your XXX" where XXX != "Filesystem", it generally means that XXX is a bad idea.
I have to get around to reading that Maximum RPM book...
I strongly doubt they would notice... for a while. As soon as cash is involved I think the whole system may break down.
Another thought which occurred to me is that it would be easy to greatly reduce the value of the service by an over-population of servers. If (for example) AOL puts up a gazillion server farms, you or I with our 1Mbps connections and K7-1GHz CPUs won't be able to earn anything from this, and all the information we retrieve will send micropayments to AOL. Getting paid for system resources should ideally offset the cost of the information we request.
On the other hand, success may kill the service, but it would be cool watching it get there. I guess this whole thought could be slain by placing a stipulation in the protocol that no one body can posess more than a certain percentage of the network (or recieve a certain percentage of mojo...).
What might be fun would be to define a set of pages, loads and requirements. Have two teams run off and build a solution. One using a Microsoft solution, the other using a Linux solution.
Then measure the solutions based on critera such as remote management, scalability, performance at the prescribed load, performance when overloaded, and of course, cost.
Other things I might like to see would be graphical web development tools and other stuff people have considered Windows to be particularly good at.
Linux might get slaughtered, but at least it would have merit.
It's acutally not a joke. I've heard of one case where 2000 was used as a router, and it made sense.
A training institute running courses on Windows 2000 found it more appropriate to use Windows machines as routers. I suppose when you're teaching MS operating systems, it is better to demonstrate pecuilar uses for Windows than normal uses for Routers.
I forgot what it can do... IIRC, it's not terribly impressive, VPNs, RIP, NAT, a few other tidbits. All the kinds of things you would imagine a small company would need.
Oh and now you can administer Windows with Telnet! Security and authentication is provided through IPSec and Kerberos.
I agree that it is a bit obscene, but technical skills cost money. If you have a Win2k guru on staff, you might as well let them do things the hard way, rather than forcing them to pick up a Cisco manual.
There's no way I was implying that they could cram that much text onto a television display. A C=64 could barely do that.
The ZX81 did something weird with the programming language too. It was BASIC, but the way statements were constructed made me think that they were not relying on the characters to make up statements, but on the order of character sequences.
I.e. A couple characters for a line number, a single character for a command (goto, print, for, DIM etc) another single character for the parameters for that command, or several characters for a line number.
If that is not how it was stored internally, it certianly was how you would program the thing.
My comment on how little 1024 bytes was only to emphasize how terribly small that was.
Gawd... I remember noticing all these strange things for the first time... somewhere in a New Brunswick campsite with an extension cord, a picnic table and a black and white T.V.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite true. Most applications use the printer driver to optimize the output. While it is confusing and it rather sucks, it makes more sense to have the printer say "I have an internal font which represents this TrueType font as though it were a postscript font."
It also makes a difference for various resolutions. 150dpi will print characters better with particular properties than than will 180, 300, 360, or 600 dpi.
Tack on other limitations such as the printable area and it makes sense that the document will reformat itself for the printer.
If you take several reasonably well written printer drivers for printers genuinely capable of printing the same resolution ( 300dpi doesn't mean each pixel is 1/300th of an inch. ), and you disable font substitution and other similar printer based enhancements... or if you simply run the printers in compatability mode (using the same drivers), then you will not have this "problem."
If you want the same thing output every time regardless of the person's machine (scaled down depending on the printable area) use a PDF. You can also use a generic postscript driver and Ghostscript... the same way that Linux prints.
In one of your other posts, you mentioned banner ads without font smoothing/antialiasing. The GIMP does antialiasing. As for colour matching, I never had a need for it, but I never did professional publishing. When I need colour accuracy, I paint by numbers.
I see the lack of Truetype as a greater impedement to amateur desktop publishing. Truetype is excellent for people who care about what their work looks like while they're making it, but it is not as good as other font formats for the final output (Think small caps, character kerning etc.). And Linux, unlike Windows 3.1 doesn't support Truetype, it supports hacking truetype into an X-like font, or rendering truetype on the screen, but linux, unlike Windows 3.1 has no underlying printing architecture.
Read up on why Abiword uses Truetype under Windows, but not under Linux for more information:
http://www.abisource.com/faquser.phtml #2. 7
Besides, with no printing architecture (which I believe Gnome is working on correcting), you certainly couldn't do ICC on printers anyways.
http://developer.gnome.org /ar ch/imaging/printing.html -- I hope somebody's touched that since its September 1998 date.
That about exhausts my knowledge of printing, fonts and graphics. Some day I'll have to get my hands dirty on these projects.
I still have the WP5.1 for Windows floppies. It was a terrible product. WP5.2 was a very significant improvement. It was actually usable.
But remember something else about the time period in which Wordperfect was dealing. This was the time of killer apps, and people on PCs usually ran only one application at a time. 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were great.
At the time Microsoft had its own products which it was trying to sell. Windows was built around running Excel. It didn't have the complex memory limitations of 1-2-3 and it could run several tasks simultaneously. I've heard some rumoured compromises concerning the features of Windows which are supposedly related to Excel, but I've never been able to confirm them.
Now think about Wordperfect and other application developers. Which GUI do you target? Desqview/X, which was showing remarkable promise, Do you feed into the hands of a ruthless competitor and develop for their GUI?, Do you target Geos?, MacOS?, or wait for something better?
Then Microsoft saw that it had a unique advantage... they could bundle their OS with their GUI, and their Spreadsheet with their Wordprocessor. Undercutting everybody at every turn. If Lotus and Wordperfect merged, there may have been a very different outcome.
5.2 was slow to market, but WP was still strong when Word was trying to take hold. Wordperfect didn't kill Wordperfect, Microsoft's tying and bundling killed Wordperfect. Yes, the GUI version of 5.1 sucked horridly, but so did many versions of Word.
If doubt the diversity of platforms and the reluctance to be controlled by the likes of Microsoft, think about the control Microsoft exercised over Lotus, and think about the fact that over time WordPerfect has existed for DOS, OS/2, Linux, almost Java and even Windows.
Public domain was/is one step less restrictive than open source, only the source code wasn't necessarily available, and modifiers of the code didn't necessarily have to release their modifications (although I think fair use strongly prohibits presenting it as entirely your own work.)
More akin to BSD than GPL or Open Source.
If the GPL existed, I imagnine people would have slapped it on this code.
OB archie comment: I could never get it to actually work, even in 1995. I would search for a file, knowing its name, and it would fail. I tried many servers, but I was better off with the web.
I have also noticed a trend away from FTP archives towards HTTP archives. I think the rationale is that HTTP servers are heavily optimized, whereas the same focus wasn't placed into FTP servers.
IMHO, that sucks. It's easier to find files surfing through unlabeled ftp directories (or using regular expressions on things like "Allfiles.txt", than it is to use these really, really crappy search engines. Don't get me started on Yahoo's implied OR searches... where a highly ranked match with one word always outranks a lowly ranked match with all of them.
It shows up in the Ask Slashdot side-box. There are a lot of stories which wind up there. I think they're just not considered exciting enough to make the main page.
Hmmm... maybe in the early days they cookied me with settings that don't work on my browser. I'll have to hack around a bit. Thanks for the info.
Absolutely true, but think a few years down the road when high-speed wireless access begins to creep into home stereo systems... sort of like digital radio on speed. Kick in micropayments, consumer profiling, the DMCA and encrypted streams. Although something as primitive as creditcard information would probably not make it in to the stream, some identifying information might.
On the upside, you'll never actually own the song, you'll just pay $.03 every time you want to listen to it. (recording it on your analog player will be illegal, and the watermark will contain information which makes any digital recorder halt when trying to record.)
I don't think these guys are worried about the next five years of home piracy, the general population still prefers to have CDs. I think they're trying to set themselves up for a whole new marketing model.
What if the Watermark contains information to the effect of:
"Purchased on 11/09/2000, by g_mcbay. By listening to this music, g_mcbay agrees that he/she will not copy this music. BTW, his credit card number is xxx111222333"
If that gets all over the world, you could be tracked down and potentially held responsible for the unauthorized duplication of the music. So how do you ensure that the message is scrubbed clean without degrading the sound quality?
Has Anybody been able to log on to hotmail using Mozilla?
My University had a stipulation that you were not allowed to submit previously published works for assignments. This applied to the arts as well as the sciences.
And the question was about work done while under the employ of the university.
Personally, I like the idea of working from a base of GPL'ed code. That way they can't do anything other than scorn you for creating code they can't distribute unless it is under GPL. It depends what you're doing. If you're doing some simple web forms or something, then using GPL'ed libraries is a good thing. If you're developing something which is meant to be distributed without the source code, then you're just sabotaging a project. (I know libraries are probably not the best example...)
Unfortunately it won't have the same bite if you wholly own the GPL'ed code because they could try to force you to grant them full license and ownership... effectively forking the code.
Yes, but there are some clauses in the contract which are vague.
IMHO, They've effectively said that "we own everything you do, say or work on which may be considered to be in competition with anything we do anywhere in the world".... "Within the limits of the law"
I'm pretty sure the laws would frown on a tech support person being sued by IBM for independantly developing Linux code. Especially if IBM did not pay for equipment, training, or anything even slightly related to what the person was doing in their own spare time.
It is a spooky document though. I know of a few people who refused to sign it, and nothing has appeared to come of it. If you're getting hired by IBM, try asking "Is signing this paper a condition of my employment?" and get an authoritative answer.
On a similar note, you can get your manager to contact the legal dept to find out if you can work on X, Y or Z, without the company chasing after you. And the contract also has some stipulations about charity which makes it far less restrictive if you aren't trying to profit from it.
An IBM lawyer would be the person to ask though. Maybe they could post an anonymous reply... so long as the proxy server isn't watching :-)
If you do get it running, visit one or two simple websites and check the memory/CPU utilization in the Task Monitor. Be careful not to misinterpret the numbers.
This is the most bloated software I have ever seen... and it doesn't appear to be leaking. This triples Lotus Notes R5 with the Client and Designer running!!!
The Virtual Memory utilization creeps up to 100MB, and judging by the sluggish performance of my machine, and how long it takes to bring up the process when it has been idle for a few hours, I have no reason to believe that these numbers are not a close reflection of the truth. Right now, with six windows open, and my mail open with over 20 MB of mail, Netscape 4.7 shows less than 14MB in use.
I can't even read newsgroups in mozilla, the video refresh on a P-Pro 200 w. 128MB of RAM is unbearable. It is as sluggish as 256 colours on an unaccelerated ISA video card.
I keep hoping this all gets cleared up before release, but there is no indication of it. While it appears to be a very slick product, and in many areas there are definately speed improvements, I cannot burden my machine with that bloated code.
I just launched m17 on my K6-2 500 w. 96M of RAM and it took 26 seconds. I hit the about button and over 16MB were being consumed. I've seen little difference between memory utilization of M17 and Beta3
The worst part used to be that it offers no new features. Now the worst part is that it offers no new features, is bloated, all the while adding more complexity to web development.
Every bit of FUD I have read has confirmed what I have personally witnessed.
(I'll go to Karma hell for this.)
Funny, I don't see any clause in the GPL stating that I am required to produce proof of compliance upon demand.
Oddly, compliance doesn't rest on the person who has the software, only the people who distribute it.
So I suppose the conclusion would be that Virginia ignores the request. There is no legal obligation to do otherwise.
Now if an employee made the request, the conclusion might be "you can obtain the source for your platform and applications here..." If they did not, then the employee could contact the authors of the software and indicate to them that their work was illegally redistributed.
ooohhh.. I'm quaking.
Maybe we should write some GPL software to manage Microsoft licenses? It could help Microsoft cut down the TCO for their platform.
It is a particular problem which has repeated itself again and again throughout history. There is no way to defend against the government throwing down legislation after a reliance on these services comes into play, and the damage caused by it is only realized when it is too late.
The analogy to aviation is not a good one. The laws of physics are much more rigid than the laws of any particular government.
I also don't think the goals here are quite so noble. At the cost of potentially throwing away privacy, how does it help the world except to open up oportunities for a few individuals to make a buck?
And in times of crisis the government could cut the wires and dig through the data to find out who their enemies are. Concentrating data and technology in companies which outsource means that you no longer have absolute control over access.
Now while I think encryption technology could prevent Microsoft or whomever your host is from reading your mail... while still permitting you to work on it, government legislation could enforce software clipper-chip like backdoors, permitting transparent searching of records... including consumer profiles.
I know it sounds completely insane, but more and more, evidence of these kinds of goals are comming into place. It doesn't require conspiracy, these are natural forces.
People want to consume products. Manufacturers want to sell product. People cannot hide information from their employers, and it is difficult to not provide companies you buy from with information.
The govenment on the other hand wants to protect its citizens and ensure the lawful, and profitable behavior of corporations.
Outsourcing applications and storage is like holding your data in escrow.
What happens to that information in a time of national crisis?
You've turned the question around. You're asking if it is wrong to forbid people to develop for a platform. I don't like it, but I don't think it is wrong.
Is it right or wrong to go to great efforts to protect a free codebase in order to comply with Sony's business model even though you happen to be enhancing their market?
I personally think it is quite morally wrong.
Yes, I'm ignoring market forces, the network effect and percieved value... If you were to include those, the objectives will have changed from freedom to dominance... which in turn can compel corporations to see your point of view and ensure your survival... but it doesn't make it moral. RMS answered on grounds of morality... and I agree with him. If I were to ask on the grounds of business strategy I would have been very clear about it, and I probably wouldn't have asked RMS.
(And I'm not saying to boycott the PS2, simply to boycott developing for it... ditto for your microwave, and for other uncooperative hardware manufacturers.)
I think it is a very clear, noble and realistic point of view. Sony has manufactured a playstation. Why would they force you to sign an NDA to develop for it? Why shouldn't they make the consessions, open up their API and allow people to develop freely for their closed platform.
This problem happens all the time in Linux. How many times have linux drivers had to reverse-engineer drivers becuause the manufacturers are not willing to share their product information.
It is absurd. If you are not free to have the information about how to use a product, you should not buy the product. Never mind signing an NDA and tainting your codebase to expand the market for the uncoopertative manufacturer
I figured out what is wrong with legaleeze. It is as though through carefully constructed statements, people are writing logical programs in the English language.
The only problem is that nobody ever documents their code.
It is not uncommon that there are bad bits in stored files on tape or floppy. Do any of these cryptosystems permit data recovery... ie, bad bits will be noticed and only cause bad blocks.. rather than generating completely toasted filesystems?
Does anybody else find the technologies Corel is investing in questionable?
Debian is great. KDE is great. Debian and KDE is just weird from a licensing standpoint (I'm talking pre QPL days here... not GPL.)
Wine, while a cool technology unto itself, is memory hungry and not terribly stable. Certianly less stable than Windows at running Windows applications, and less rich in features. Wine is also restricted to the Intel architecture, shooting the splintered HCC(Rebel) in the foot.
Debian makes a great server OS, KDE makes a great desktop, Wine makes a great pseudoemulator. Put them all together and you get...
An easy to use GUI with extremely bloated unstable applications, and very little application interoperability... locked to the Intel Architecture no less. I would honestly rather run Windows.
The only reason I can think that they would choose such technologies would be because they were in a hurry... otherwise they should have cooperated with Redhat, ported their apps to GTK, and run Gnome (pre QPL becoming GPL days here! No Gnome/KDE flames!)
On the upside, they gave Wine a boost.. but as somebody commented regarding the Corel/Microsoft combination, new Corel contributions to the Wine codebase may now be tainted by NDAs and anti-compete clauses or something dumb like that.
This .net thing might make Corel kick butt on the markets in the short term, but in the long term they're doomed.
Can a user install packages without being root? I mean, most of the time you would install as root, but for some cases, like games, applications or the like, you should be able to install yourlelf... into your own home directory.
I've had to use tarballs to install IRC clients, Zmodem protocols, games and more on remote systems.
Without user-mode installations, it is just one more reason to give mobile users root access to their own systems.
I'm not a big fan of package management, it has caused me to rebuild more systems than manually solving dependencies has ever. As soon as somebody starts using the phrase "You'll have to rebuild if your corrupt your XXX" where XXX != "Filesystem", it generally means that XXX is a bad idea.
I have to get around to reading that Maximum RPM book...
http://bell.sympatico.ca/DynamicContentServlet.dyn ?/english/hse/faq.html#q18
I strongly doubt they would notice... for a while. As soon as cash is involved I think the whole system may break down.
Another thought which occurred to me is that it would be easy to greatly reduce the value of the service by an over-population of servers. If (for example) AOL puts up a gazillion server farms, you or I with our 1Mbps connections and K7-1GHz CPUs won't be able to earn anything from this, and all the information we retrieve will send micropayments to AOL. Getting paid for system resources should ideally offset the cost of the information we request.
On the other hand, success may kill the service, but it would be cool watching it get there. I guess this whole thought could be slain by placing a stipulation in the protocol that no one body can posess more than a certain percentage of the network (or recieve a certain percentage of mojo...).
What might be fun would be to define a set of pages, loads and requirements. Have two teams run off and build a solution. One using a Microsoft solution, the other using a Linux solution.
Then measure the solutions based on critera such as remote management, scalability, performance at the prescribed load, performance when overloaded, and of course, cost.
Other things I might like to see would be graphical web development tools and other stuff people have considered Windows to be particularly good at.
Linux might get slaughtered, but at least it would have merit.
It's acutally not a joke. I've heard of one case where 2000 was used as a router, and it made sense.
A training institute running courses on Windows 2000 found it more appropriate to use Windows machines as routers. I suppose when you're teaching MS operating systems, it is better to demonstrate pecuilar uses for Windows than normal uses for Routers.
I forgot what it can do... IIRC, it's not terribly impressive, VPNs, RIP, NAT, a few other tidbits. All the kinds of things you would imagine a small company would need.
Oh and now you can administer Windows with Telnet! Security and authentication is provided through IPSec and Kerberos.
I agree that it is a bit obscene, but technical skills cost money. If you have a Win2k guru on staff, you might as well let them do things the hard way, rather than forcing them to pick up a Cisco manual.
There's no way I was implying that they could cram that much text onto a television display. A C=64 could barely do that.
The ZX81 did something weird with the programming language too. It was BASIC, but the way statements were constructed made me think that they were not relying on the characters to make up statements, but on the order of character sequences.
I.e. A couple characters for a line number, a single character for a command (goto, print, for, DIM etc) another single character for the parameters for that command, or several characters for a line number.
If that is not how it was stored internally, it certianly was how you would program the thing.
My comment on how little 1024 bytes was only to emphasize how terribly small that was.
Gawd... I remember noticing all these strange things for the first time... somewhere in a New Brunswick campsite with an extension cord, a picnic table and a black and white T.V.