You are talking about copyright, which most people here think are the proper way to protect your programs from being reused by others. Also the GPL relies on copyright as it actually does not prevent you from doing anything, copyright does and the GPL lets you do a few things copyright does not allows.
Patents would be more like somebody saying "I invented the idea of condemming the vietnam war in a book and therefore nobody else can write a book condemming the Vietnam war".
Apparenlty a lot of people are under the delusion that if anybody can see their code then it is in the public domain or it is GPL. Actually you can let people see it but not use it. The GPL is in fact a grant of an exception to the normal state where you cannot reuse the code.
They could reimplement it, but most real inventions and work would be quite intricate algorithims and tables of data (for instance a program to speak natural language) and nobody could reuse anything really valuable without violating copyright.
I thought you were claiming that a company is better off releasing stuff BSD than GPL. But you just said right there the same thing I did, which was that if they don't like GPL stuff, they must like BSD even less, since all the GPL people can "steal" their code, but now even *more* people can "steal" their code.
In the real world somebody trying to control their code would be much better off with GPL than BSD, but neither approaches just copyrighting the work and letting nobody redistribute it.
Installling software has not been clear to me at all on the Mac. In fact it seems needlessly baroque:
LAME was the worst: the file I get is some sort of box. I double-click the box and I get a disk (!). On that disk (at least it opens, since I would never find that rather non-descript icon on the desktop) is something I drag to applications, and then the program works, finally. I then think things are ok, so I close the window and eject the disk, and the program stops working! Okay, I'll leave the disk open. No, the program still does not work, I have to drag it again to the applications folder again! I finally give up, leave that original box, the disk icon, and the opened disk window on my desktop, and double-click the application. I have never gotton it better than that. To add insult to injury, I thought I'd figure out what is going on, and discovered it is impossible to get a pathname out of one of those mounted disks! I cannot even locate it so I can look in the terminal! That is just insane.
I did manage to install software from Apple, such as the developer tools, in a way that allowed me to throw away the disk and the box icons, but I remember even they were not very friendly.
I know an application can be an entire directory called an "app bundle". Why the hell are the files I download not resulting in such a directory on my desktop and then I double-click and it runs the program? I should be able to drag the resulting thing to the app directory and it is "installed" and there is no crap left on my desktop!
Can somebody explain what is going on? And why nobody is calling out OSX for having this baroque mess?
I keep seeing lots of claims of a "reversal" on predictions from cold to hot. However I distinctly remember as a child being told that pollution was going to heat the world up. The fact that opponents of global warming are willing to lie about history is pretty revealing, but I don't have proof, perhaps I am just not remembering things correctly. But I do suspect they are trying to confuse Nuclear Winter with the earlier "Earth Day" type predictions and thus get people to think the popular theory was for cold. All attempts to get proof of this results in the opponents posting exactly one article from Newsweek, which however reads like somebody trying to challenge prevailing theory, not support it. In fact I vaguely recall that from when Nuclear Winter appeared, and that it reminded me of some contrary opinions that I had noticed earlier.
It is also possible that cold was predicted lots earlier, such as in the 1950's. There is some indication that popular literature was saying the ice ages returned periodically, and confused people into thinking we would be entering one soon, or may have made people think that human pollution would trigger an ice age. Though I think most popular opinion then was that the ice age would be a natural phenonemon, though.
If some company is worried about a GPL project "stealing" their code that they release under the GPL, then they certainly won't release it BSD, becasuse that allows anybody to "steal" it, including the very same GPL people, plus many other!. Trying to use this as an argument for the BSD license is just stupid.
You are talking about the '286 memory protection scheme. I did mention that this allowed "NX" memory because you could only execute by loading the segment number into a particular register and this could be trapped and prevented by the OS.
The problem is the '286 scheme was useless due to the '86 design that overlapped the segments. Most MSDOS programs assummed and relied on this overlap, making it impossible to write a '286 version of any system that could emulate MSDOS enough to run old programs. The '86 should never have overlapped the segments, and it is a mystery why they did, since it required additional circuitry to do the addition.
The virtual memory that appeared in the '386 allowed MSDOS to be emulated since the overlap could be preserved and was unrelated to the virtual memory scheme.
There are, I believe, a whole lot of technical reasons why the '386 style vm is better, but the inability to emulate MSDOS was probably the real reason the '286 scheme was not attempted by anybody.
RGB with the components limited to 0-1 represents a cube. One corner (0,0,0) is black, diagonally opposite (1,1,1) is white. (1,0,0) is the red primary, other corners are the green and blue, and the three remaining colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow (not the same as the CMYK primaries, however).
This cube is normally called the "gamut" and a big complaint about RGB is that it is not big enough to cover all the colors a human can see. However the 3D space it is imbedded in can cover all the possible colors (at least according to XYZ color space theory). That 3D space also contains a lot of impossible colors, such as where the luminance is negative.
If you allow the components to go outside the 0,1 range the cube expands to fill all of space.
And "ultra white" is very very useful. We usually refer to it as "high dynamic range". Actualy scenes in nature can contain a ratio of millions to one in brightness (ie the sun in the sky is that many times brighter than a shadow) and unless we display this clipped on a monitor it would be completely black except for the sun.
Good one, you are right, my explanation was over-simplified. The fact that Windows eats the "windows" key makes most programs avoid using it, so there are 3 working shift keys, which map to the 3 available on the Mac if ctrl is for context menus.
The real problem is that another shift combination is eaten by emulating the middle button for programs that use that (and most 3D systems do). Also for small operations, changing the word "ctrl" to "command" in all the documentation is not easy, especially if that documentation includes things like wiki's written by Windows and Linux users.
You can represent any color using RGB if you allow numbers outside the range of 0 to 1. This is probably a better solution than trying to change the colorspace and relying on all programs managing to implement identical conversions.
This is true, but for larger GPL projects it will require tracking down every single author and getting permission to change the license. Maybe this is possible for KWrite, but I'm not sure about Open Office.
I wonder if it is possible to have a new GPL-like license that would not have an "advertising clause" and would disallow you from adding an advertising clause for your modifications, but explicitly allows the addition of "advertising clauses" provided they are required to incorporate otherwise open source software. The added software and advertising clause would have to be explicitly well documented and allowed to be removed. RMS would not like this, but it would stop Microsoft's childish attempts to be incompatable with GPL.
The patent clause sounds very much like the ones in other open source licenses. There is a strict limit, "for patent infingement over claims relating to reading or writing of files that comply with Office Schemas".
If I understand this right, if your company examines these schemas and thinks they violate one of your patents and sues, you lose the right to use the schema (including the parts that are not covered by your patent). However if you see one of your patents violated by some other part of Windows, you can sue, and still use the schema.
This is a good thing.
It appears the only bug in the license is the "advertising clause". This probably is going to mean converter plugins rather than having GPL software directly read/write this.
If you want your stuff to be GPL-incompatable, you also have to be BSD-incompatable.
As many GPL opponents point out, GPL code can incorporate BSD code but not the other way around. This is the real true argument about GPL being "viral" (this is usually twisted into arguments that using the GPL will "infect" code even if you don't want it to, which is false. But it is true that if you want to release your code GPL, you can absorb BSD and similar code into it. The BSD lets anybody "steal" your code, including both Microsoft and GPL programmers.
Basically Microsoft wants to make sure the GPL is unusable. As another poster pointed out, the GPL is "viral" in that code can more easily flow into it than out of it. A GPL program can incorporate BSD licensed code, but not the other way around.
Therefore, if Microsoft's license allowed it to be used in BSD code then it could be used in GPL code.
You may be thinking of the original BSD "advertising clause" license which this resembles, but this is not what "BSD license" means today.
If you just look at most Mac software, including from Apple, it is obvious that they all were forced to have a context menu. You have to hold down ctrl or option or something and click, and you get a menu very similar to the right-button on a Windows or Linux program.
This is all fine and you can argue all you want about which is an easier or clearer way of getting at the context menu.
However the problem with the Apple design for software is that it has now consumed the ctrl+click (or option+click) action, making it impossible to reuse that action for another thing. For most user-friendly programs this is not a problem. But advanced graphics programs have figured out that there are many things you want to drag on the screen (position, rotation, the view, etc) and for power users the ability to hold down various sets of modifier keys and drag is pretty useful. This is making it a pain to transfer such programs to the Mac. Even if you plug in a 3-button mouse, the ctrl+click is still taken (unless you either detect the mouse, which is frustrating for users who may sometimes unplug it, or you insist on a 3-button mouse, which is a solution programs like Maya do, but I don't like that).
I believe if Apple had made a 2-button mouse initially, and printed the word "menu" on the right button, there would be no problems. We probably would be using context menus for everything now, with no menu bar (complaints about Fitt's law can be countered by using pie menus, by remembering and popping up with the previous item selected, and by many other innovations that probably would have happened with much more extensive use of context menus).
Even the first PDP-11 to run Unix had a form of hardware memory protection (basically segmented memory, a program was incapable of addressing other than the 64K assigned to it). There is no way for the most carefully written Unix kernel to prevent an arbitrary program from writing all over memory unless there is hardware to prevent it.
It appears most of the problem is the lack of this NX bit on Intel processors. If it had been there initially both Windows and Linux would be using it and nobody would think much of this at all. I don't understand why this was not included in the 80386, though, there was plenty of precedent. The VAX certainly had these styles of protection bits. The 80286 which did "virtual memory" by allowing attempts to load the segment registers be trapped, would have made it trivial to fake an NX bit, since it had a unique segment register used only by the program counter.
We now can watch the Microsoft, Intel, and even Linux guys all congratualting themselves on how smart they are, rather than pointing out that a stupid mistake was made long ago. It's in everybody's interest to pretend that mistakes are never made by designers.
Others here have posted stuff about scientists saying different things than cooling in the past. But I also want to point out that I quite distinctly remember in the 1970's in elementary school being told that pollution was going to heat the earth up, to disasterous "Venus" levels. At that time the problem was considered CO2 making a more insulating earth's atmosphere. It probably was bogus, probably just a lot of misinformation from my decidely liberal teachers, but it certainly did predict HEAT, not cold! I also distinctly remember "nuclear winter" in approximately 1979 or 1980, and that it was intially attacked precisely because it predicted the opposite of common knowledge, and Carl Sagan and other proponents of that explaining that the winter was a short-term effect in order to deflect this criticism.
You have basically said that Macintosh is 20-25% of the market, which is 2.5 times better than anybody has ever claimed! Yet somehow this indicates why Microsoft is doing better? Huh?
There was a time when EVERY SINGLE ONE of the laptops you would see would be running Windows.
Nowadays in the theatre you will see two aspect ratios, 1.85 and 2.35. Pay attention and you will see that they either move curtains left/right at the edges or (in modern theatres) move black bands up and down at the top/bottom to make the screen the right size for the current film. Also you will often see preview trailers that are at the other aspect ratio and don't fill the screen.
1.85 movies are shot "flat" with the 1.85 rectangle filling the width but centered vertically in the 1.33 frame. Originally what was in the rest of the frame was whatever the camera saw there (such as boom mikes, lens shades, the top edge of the set, tape marks and wires on the floor, and the lens itself, and all kinds of fun stuff). On all modern films what is there is either stuff the director intended (such as the Princess Bride) or it is black. Any movie in the past 30 years with significant special effects would put black there, at least for the effects shots. All modern films with digital processing put black there, since it is trivial to throw away that data after the film is scanned.
2.35 movies are anamorphic, or "Panavision". In this case the rectangle is distorted by squeezing it horizontally to fit in the 1.33 frame (actually slightly taller than 1.33). In this case there certainly is no information out the top and bottom of the frame.
It does sound to me that MGM did nothing wrong, the "wide screen" ones being complained about are actually replicating what was seen in the theatres by cutting the top/bottom off the 1.33 frame to just give you the 1.85 rectangle. Saying "more information" is a lie, but can really be considered a typo by the advertising department, where it was true for the 2.35 films. Besides they haven't been sued for printing "the even more exciting sequel" on the boxes, and that is a lie too!
You used your left hand to return the carriage. The carraige moved to the left (because the letters were being printed further and further right on the page). To return it there was a big lever on the left side which you used your left hand to push the carraige back to the right. If the lever was on the right you would have to pull it which would be much harder.
I'm suprised more people have not pointed this out.
However the solution is to have a fairly short default copyright that you have to opt-out of. Not just for GPL but to get rid of the legal loophole that *anything* somebody writes is apparenty free for the taking until they manage to get the paperwork done. In a practical sense a short default copyright would stop a lot of unnecessary paperwork because the contributors could think about whether it is worth copyrighting or not, rather than being forced to submit it as fast as possible.
I'm not sure but a length of perhaps 5 years or so would be good. Even a five-year old copy of Linux is not much use so it may not matter for GPL code if nobody filed for the copyright. After that you have to opt-in, and you have to renew the opt-in every 10 years or so after that.
It may also help that the threat that your stuff will go into the public domain if you don't change it and you don't do the paperwork will get some of the authors to work a little more on their stuff and keep it up to date.
No, MSDOS was designed to be compatable with CP/M, which itself was based on older DEC operating systems, in particular RSX-11. The design of these machines had absolutly no attempt to be compatable with IBM mainframes. They used CR+LF because the earliest PDP-1 software had as an output device a teletype that required that to print, and storage was done by punching a tape on the same device, thus the punched tape had CR+LF on it.
IBM mainframes used EBCDIC and had no concept of an imbedded new line character or characters. They used "line control" which was a normal ascii letter at the start of each block, to indicate if it was a new line, an overprint of the previous line, or to be appended to the previous line. This of course required a communication medium that would preserve the blocks, which is pretty much an obsolete idea. In any case there was only one character (actually the absence of a special character meant a newline).
If you think Unix was irrelevant when MSDOS was being designed you obviously have no knowledge of computer history. Unix and C had extreme impact on the design of CP/M which predates MSDOS.
I think you may be confusing Windows with IBM's TopView, which was a few years earlier.
Windows was always intended to run in graphics mode with a cursor, and 1.0 did exactly that. The windows version and the age of the machine in the video seem about right so it was probably filmed then.
In 1986 a reasonable computer (with a hard disk) cost $3500.
Also I worked for a software company then (Mark of the Unicorn) and we were initially selling the FinalWord word processor for $99. This price was calculated to give a hefty profit and is probably a good indication of the actual value of a piece of software from a small company. The weird thing was that people thought it was cheap. So without changing anything, we changed the price to $295 and sales actually increased! Those were pretty good days...
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You are talking about copyright, which most people here think are the proper way to protect your programs from being reused by others. Also the GPL relies on copyright as it actually does not prevent you from doing anything, copyright does and the GPL lets you do a few things copyright does not allows.
Patents would be more like somebody saying "I invented the idea of condemming the vietnam war in a book and therefore nobody else can write a book condemming the Vietnam war".
You can copyright your code.
Apparenlty a lot of people are under the delusion that if anybody can see their code then it is in the public domain or it is GPL. Actually you can let people see it but not use it. The GPL is in fact a grant of an exception to the normal state where you cannot reuse the code.
They could reimplement it, but most real inventions and work would be quite intricate algorithims and tables of data (for instance a program to speak natural language) and nobody could reuse anything really valuable without violating copyright.
Perhaps I didn't understand your original post.
I thought you were claiming that a company is better off releasing stuff BSD than GPL. But you just said right there the same thing I did, which was that if they don't like GPL stuff, they must like BSD even less, since all the GPL people can "steal" their code, but now even *more* people can "steal" their code.
In the real world somebody trying to control their code would be much better off with GPL than BSD, but neither approaches just copyrighting the work and letting nobody redistribute it.
Installling software has not been clear to me at all on the Mac. In fact it seems needlessly baroque:
LAME was the worst: the file I get is some sort of box. I double-click the box and I get a disk (!). On that disk (at least it opens, since I would never find that rather non-descript icon on the desktop) is something I drag to applications, and then the program works, finally. I then think things are ok, so I close the window and eject the disk, and the program stops working! Okay, I'll leave the disk open. No, the program still does not work, I have to drag it again to the applications folder again! I finally give up, leave that original box, the disk icon, and the opened disk window on my desktop, and double-click the application. I have never gotton it better than that. To add insult to injury, I thought I'd figure out what is going on, and discovered it is impossible to get a pathname out of one of those mounted disks! I cannot even locate it so I can look in the terminal! That is just insane.
I did manage to install software from Apple, such as the developer tools, in a way that allowed me to throw away the disk and the box icons, but I remember even they were not very friendly.
I know an application can be an entire directory called an "app bundle". Why the hell are the files I download not resulting in such a directory on my desktop and then I double-click and it runs the program? I should be able to drag the resulting thing to the app directory and it is "installed" and there is no crap left on my desktop!
Can somebody explain what is going on? And why nobody is calling out OSX for having this baroque mess?
Thank you for backing up what I was saying.
I keep seeing lots of claims of a "reversal" on predictions from cold to hot. However I distinctly remember as a child being told that pollution was going to heat the world up. The fact that opponents of global warming are willing to lie about history is pretty revealing, but I don't have proof, perhaps I am just not remembering things correctly. But I do suspect they are trying to confuse Nuclear Winter with the earlier "Earth Day" type predictions and thus get people to think the popular theory was for cold. All attempts to get proof of this results in the opponents posting exactly one article from Newsweek, which however reads like somebody trying to challenge prevailing theory, not support it. In fact I vaguely recall that from when Nuclear Winter appeared, and that it reminded me of some contrary opinions that I had noticed earlier.
It is also possible that cold was predicted lots earlier, such as in the 1950's. There is some indication that popular literature was saying the ice ages returned periodically, and confused people into thinking we would be entering one soon, or may have made people think that human pollution would trigger an ice age. Though I think most popular opinion then was that the ice age would be a natural phenonemon, though.
If some company is worried about a GPL project "stealing" their code that they release under the GPL, then they certainly won't release it BSD, becasuse that allows anybody to "steal" it, including the very same GPL people, plus many other!. Trying to use this as an argument for the BSD license is just stupid.
You are talking about the '286 memory protection scheme. I did mention that this allowed "NX" memory because you could only execute by loading the segment number into a particular register and this could be trapped and prevented by the OS.
The problem is the '286 scheme was useless due to the '86 design that overlapped the segments. Most MSDOS programs assummed and relied on this overlap, making it impossible to write a '286 version of any system that could emulate MSDOS enough to run old programs. The '86 should never have overlapped the segments, and it is a mystery why they did, since it required additional circuitry to do the addition.
The virtual memory that appeared in the '386 allowed MSDOS to be emulated since the overlap could be preserved and was unrelated to the virtual memory scheme.
There are, I believe, a whole lot of technical reasons why the '386 style vm is better, but the inability to emulate MSDOS was probably the real reason the '286 scheme was not attempted by anybody.
RGB with the components limited to 0-1 represents a cube. One corner (0,0,0) is black, diagonally opposite (1,1,1) is white. (1,0,0) is the red primary, other corners are the green and blue, and the three remaining colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow (not the same as the CMYK primaries, however).
This cube is normally called the "gamut" and a big complaint about RGB is that it is not big enough to cover all the colors a human can see. However the 3D space it is imbedded in can cover all the possible colors (at least according to XYZ color space theory). That 3D space also contains a lot of impossible colors, such as where the luminance is negative.
If you allow the components to go outside the 0,1 range the cube expands to fill all of space.
And "ultra white" is very very useful. We usually refer to it as "high dynamic range". Actualy scenes in nature can contain a ratio of millions to one in brightness (ie the sun in the sky is that many times brighter than a shadow) and unless we display this clipped on a monitor it would be completely black except for the sun.
Good one, you are right, my explanation was over-simplified. The fact that Windows eats the "windows" key makes most programs avoid using it, so there are 3 working shift keys, which map to the 3 available on the Mac if ctrl is for context menus.
The real problem is that another shift combination is eaten by emulating the middle button for programs that use that (and most 3D systems do). Also for small operations, changing the word "ctrl" to "command" in all the documentation is not easy, especially if that documentation includes things like wiki's written by Windows and Linux users.
You can represent any color using RGB if you allow numbers outside the range of 0 to 1. This is probably a better solution than trying to change the colorspace and relying on all programs managing to implement identical conversions.
This is true, but for larger GPL projects it will require tracking down every single author and getting permission to change the license. Maybe this is possible for KWrite, but I'm not sure about Open Office.
I wonder if it is possible to have a new GPL-like license that would not have an "advertising clause" and would disallow you from adding an advertising clause for your modifications, but explicitly allows the addition of "advertising clauses" provided they are required to incorporate otherwise open source software. The added software and advertising clause would have to be explicitly well documented and allowed to be removed. RMS would not like this, but it would stop Microsoft's childish attempts to be incompatable with GPL.
The patent clause sounds very much like the ones in other open source licenses. There is a strict limit, "for patent infingement over claims relating to reading or writing of files that comply with Office Schemas".
If I understand this right, if your company examines these schemas and thinks they violate one of your patents and sues, you lose the right to use the schema (including the parts that are not covered by your patent). However if you see one of your patents violated by some other part of Windows, you can sue, and still use the schema.
This is a good thing.
It appears the only bug in the license is the "advertising clause". This probably is going to mean converter plugins rather than having GPL software directly read/write this.
If you want your stuff to be GPL-incompatable, you also have to be BSD-incompatable.
As many GPL opponents point out, GPL code can incorporate BSD code but not the other way around. This is the real true argument about GPL being "viral" (this is usually twisted into arguments that using the GPL will "infect" code even if you don't want it to, which is false. But it is true that if you want to release your code GPL, you can absorb BSD and similar code into it. The BSD lets anybody "steal" your code, including both Microsoft and GPL programmers.
Basically Microsoft wants to make sure the GPL is unusable. As another poster pointed out, the GPL is "viral" in that code can more easily flow into it than out of it. A GPL program can incorporate BSD licensed code, but not the other way around.
Therefore, if Microsoft's license allowed it to be used in BSD code then it could be used in GPL code.
You may be thinking of the original BSD "advertising clause" license which this resembles, but this is not what "BSD license" means today.
If you just look at most Mac software, including from Apple, it is obvious that they all were forced to have a context menu. You have to hold down ctrl or option or something and click, and you get a menu very similar to the right-button on a Windows or Linux program.
This is all fine and you can argue all you want about which is an easier or clearer way of getting at the context menu.
However the problem with the Apple design for software is that it has now consumed the ctrl+click (or option+click) action, making it impossible to reuse that action for another thing. For most user-friendly programs this is not a problem. But advanced graphics programs have figured out that there are many things you want to drag on the screen (position, rotation, the view, etc) and for power users the ability to hold down various sets of modifier keys and drag is pretty useful. This is making it a pain to transfer such programs to the Mac. Even if you plug in a 3-button mouse, the ctrl+click is still taken (unless you either detect the mouse, which is frustrating for users who may sometimes unplug it, or you insist on a 3-button mouse, which is a solution programs like Maya do, but I don't like that).
I believe if Apple had made a 2-button mouse initially, and printed the word "menu" on the right button, there would be no problems. We probably would be using context menus for everything now, with no menu bar (complaints about Fitt's law can be countered by using pie menus, by remembering and popping up with the previous item selected, and by many other innovations that probably would have happened with much more extensive use of context menus).
Even the first PDP-11 to run Unix had a form of hardware memory protection (basically segmented memory, a program was incapable of addressing other than the 64K assigned to it). There is no way for the most carefully written Unix kernel to prevent an arbitrary program from writing all over memory unless there is hardware to prevent it.
It appears most of the problem is the lack of this NX bit on Intel processors. If it had been there initially both Windows and Linux would be using it and nobody would think much of this at all. I don't understand why this was not included in the 80386, though, there was plenty of precedent. The VAX certainly had these styles of protection bits. The 80286 which did "virtual memory" by allowing attempts to load the segment registers be trapped, would have made it trivial to fake an NX bit, since it had a unique segment register used only by the program counter.
We now can watch the Microsoft, Intel, and even Linux guys all congratualting themselves on how smart they are, rather than pointing out that a stupid mistake was made long ago. It's in everybody's interest to pretend that mistakes are never made by designers.
Others here have posted stuff about scientists saying different things than cooling in the past. But I also want to point out that I quite distinctly remember in the 1970's in elementary school being told that pollution was going to heat the earth up, to disasterous "Venus" levels. At that time the problem was considered CO2 making a more insulating earth's atmosphere. It probably was bogus, probably just a lot of misinformation from my decidely liberal teachers, but it certainly did predict HEAT, not cold! I also distinctly remember "nuclear winter" in approximately 1979 or 1980, and that it was intially attacked precisely because it predicted the opposite of common knowledge, and Carl Sagan and other proponents of that explaining that the winter was a short-term effect in order to deflect this criticism.
You have basically said that Macintosh is 20-25% of the market, which is 2.5 times better than anybody has ever claimed! Yet somehow this indicates why Microsoft is doing better? Huh?
There was a time when EVERY SINGLE ONE of the laptops you would see would be running Windows.
Nowadays in the theatre you will see two aspect ratios, 1.85 and 2.35. Pay attention and you will see that they either move curtains left/right at the edges or (in modern theatres) move black bands up and down at the top/bottom to make the screen the right size for the current film. Also you will often see preview trailers that are at the other aspect ratio and don't fill the screen.
1.85 movies are shot "flat" with the 1.85 rectangle filling the width but centered vertically in the 1.33 frame. Originally what was in the rest of the frame was whatever the camera saw there (such as boom mikes, lens shades, the top edge of the set, tape marks and wires on the floor, and the lens itself, and all kinds of fun stuff). On all modern films what is there is either stuff the director intended (such as the Princess Bride) or it is black. Any movie in the past 30 years with significant special effects would put black there, at least for the effects shots. All modern films with digital processing put black there, since it is trivial to throw away that data after the film is scanned.
2.35 movies are anamorphic, or "Panavision". In this case the rectangle is distorted by squeezing it horizontally to fit in the 1.33 frame (actually slightly taller than 1.33). In this case there certainly is no information out the top and bottom of the frame.
It does sound to me that MGM did nothing wrong, the "wide screen" ones being complained about are actually replicating what was seen in the theatres by cutting the top/bottom off the 1.33 frame to just give you the 1.85 rectangle. Saying "more information" is a lie, but can really be considered a typo by the advertising department, where it was true for the 2.35 films. Besides they haven't been sued for printing "the even more exciting sequel" on the boxes, and that is a lie too!
You used your left hand to return the carriage. The carraige moved to the left (because the letters were being printed further and further right on the page). To return it there was a big lever on the left side which you used your left hand to push the carraige back to the right. If the lever was on the right you would have to pull it which would be much harder.
I'm suprised more people have not pointed this out.
However the solution is to have a fairly short default copyright that you have to opt-out of. Not just for GPL but to get rid of the legal loophole that *anything* somebody writes is apparenty free for the taking until they manage to get the paperwork done. In a practical sense a short default copyright would stop a lot of unnecessary paperwork because the contributors could think about whether it is worth copyrighting or not, rather than being forced to submit it as fast as possible.
I'm not sure but a length of perhaps 5 years or so would be good. Even a five-year old copy of Linux is not much use so it may not matter for GPL code if nobody filed for the copyright. After that you have to opt-in, and you have to renew the opt-in every 10 years or so after that.
It may also help that the threat that your stuff will go into the public domain if you don't change it and you don't do the paperwork will get some of the authors to work a little more on their stuff and keep it up to date.
No, MSDOS was designed to be compatable with CP/M, which itself was based on older DEC operating systems, in particular RSX-11. The design of these machines had absolutly no attempt to be compatable with IBM mainframes. They used CR+LF because the earliest PDP-1 software had as an output device a teletype that required that to print, and storage was done by punching a tape on the same device, thus the punched tape had CR+LF on it.
IBM mainframes used EBCDIC and had no concept of an imbedded new line character or characters. They used "line control" which was a normal ascii letter at the start of each block, to indicate if it was a new line, an overprint of the previous line, or to be appended to the previous line. This of course required a communication medium that would preserve the blocks, which is pretty much an obsolete idea. In any case there was only one character (actually the absence of a special character meant a newline).
If you think Unix was irrelevant when MSDOS was being designed you obviously have no knowledge of computer history. Unix and C had extreme impact on the design of CP/M which predates MSDOS.
I think you may be confusing Windows with IBM's TopView, which was a few years earlier.
Windows was always intended to run in graphics mode with a cursor, and 1.0 did exactly that. The windows version and the age of the machine in the video seem about right so it was probably filmed then.
Well, no duh, captain obvious. No, it's not a real commercial. Bet you think you are real smart for figuring that out.
In 1986 a reasonable computer (with a hard disk) cost $3500.
Also I worked for a software company then (Mark of the Unicorn) and we were initially selling the FinalWord word processor for $99. This price was calculated to give a hefty profit and is probably a good indication of the actual value of a piece of software from a small company. The weird thing was that people thought it was cheap. So without changing anything, we changed the price to $295 and sales actually increased! Those were pretty good days...