No, it sounds like you must allow Microsoft to distribute "other" licensed implementations, not necessarily yours. Seems to be some sort of patent/lawsuit prevention. The GPL people may want to look at this and perhaps copy it if it is a clearer way of stating patent protection.
CRLF is from CP/M, which was based mostly on the Dec operating systems such as RSTS/e and RSX-11M, and on the pdp8 systems (I forget what these were called).
The original reason for it is that mechanical teletypes did not have enough power in their motors to both advance the platen and return the carriage to the left border at the same time. So they split these into two steps and built "CR" and "LF" into the 5-bit baudot code. Believe me they did this only because they needed to, the most popular baud rate then was about 50 baud so the time wasted was considerable, and certainly there was no precedence for such a design in existing typewriters. ASCII teletypes were made with minimal changes and thus inherited the CR LF pair.
It seems until K&R thought it was acceptable to put some smarts into the terminal driver so it would translate a single character into a pair, everybody was forced to copy this standard so that text files would print correctly on a teletype. Why K&R chose LF instead of CR is confusing, but I think they wanted to keep CR for overprinting, while the old function of LF was pretty useless. They should have made input turn CR into LF, however.
In any case if anybody asks, MSDOS is based on 1940's technology. At least Unix is based on 1970's technology.
yes, that's how preferential voting is supposed to work. those who voted D,R,G preferred R over G, so that's how they voted. they want their vote to go to R rather than G.
Nonsense. It is obvious that in my example 62% of the population would rather see a D in office than an R. So IRV produced an extremely bad result.
btw, your example is very contrived and simplistic.
No it isn't. The "G" platform is either extremely liked or extremely distrusted. So votors always put it first or last. And "G" votors all prefer "D" over "R". If you make the obvious connections to what parties I am talking about, I think you will find that extremely realistic.
In fact the "G" party does not even have to be distrusted. The only thing needed is that people who "D" are more likely to like "G". The weird thing is that this *HURTS* "D". Here is a "less contrived" example where nobody hates "G" (however in real life this is MORE contrived, there are huge number of votors who distrust "G"):
In the first pass, G gets 33%, D gets 32%, and R gets 35%. So the D votes are thrown out. Now G gets 49% and R gets 51%, and R wins.
But if you add up how many voters preferred D over R (marked with a * above) you get 32%+16%+16% or 64%. We got an outcome that is not liked by almost two thirds of the population!
Now you can argue that this will not happen, but the reason it won't happen is that the G votors who prefer D will know that voting for G will spoil the election and allow R to win. So they will vote insincerly and all vote D,G,R. Yes, this will mean D will win. However it will also vastly undercount the support for G. And in the above scenario, a small increase in votes for G would have made G win. So G's has no chance of getting elected, and it is still a 2-party system.
The only thing IRV voting does is allow people to vote G,D,R (or G,R,D) when G has no chance at all of winning. But several analysists have shown quite clearly that IRV is severly flawed: if people vote sincerly for their preferences then it will screw up as shown above and put losing candidates in office, if (as will really happen) people vote insincerely in order to prevent an undesirable outcome, it reduces to exactly the same results as present-day plurarity voting.
A dual license is like the New York Times saying "you can read our paper and it only costs 50 cents a copy. You can also buy rights to copy article into other publications, and that costs $1000." It should be obvious why somebody would pay $1000 for the same text that somebody else would pay 50 cents for.
For some reason, the idea of the GPL gets people so confused they can no longer see clearly. I'll try to explain: the GPL may be like the New York Times saying "it only costs 50 cents if you are only copying for educational reasons". I.E you can violate their copyright, but only under certain restrictions (such as for educational use only). It should be clear in the NYT case why somebody would still be interested in paying $1000 for the rights to republish an article in a for-profit book.
In GPL the restriction is you must also grant anybody receiving the copy the same rights the GPL gave you. Now if you don't want to give people your code, it is pretty obvious that you will not be satisfied with the conditions that you can violate the copyright on the GPL code with.
In this case you can completely ignore the fact that the GPL exists, because the rights it grants do not concern you because you don't plan to take advantage of them. Instead you can pretend it is normal copyright, and then it should be clear that you must talk to the original authors and see if you can purchase rights to violate their copyright.
I understand what you are saying, but I am troubled by this. This is similar to patenting "preview the color of your word processor output in color" back in 1983 and saying it is an innovation because all previous word processors used inverse video or brightnesses to preview the color, ignoring the fact that all previous word processors were limited by hardware that could only display monochrome.
Take a look at the pagers on existing X window managers. There is definately an attempt to preview as close as possible to the actual appearance of the desktop as can be done with X. Notice that desktop patterns and color are repliated, color and thickness of window borders are replicated, and some newer ones take snapshots of the windows and resize them. There are pop-up ones that appear in the middle of the screen and take huge amounts of area. I think this is proof that if the capabilities were available for a full-color quarter-sized previews of the desktop, these would have been used long ago. And in my opinion this is "obvious".
Now X has a lot of problems and it is annoying that such kludges are necessary, but patenting "do this on a system that does not need kludges" is a VERY troublesome development.
Really Microsoft should be patenting something about using the backing store or mapping it to the screen, which is where the real invention was (yes I know that there are several other systems that did this before them, but it is still the real "innovation", the one that GETS RID OF THE KLUDGES!!!). Why not patent the idea of using the backing store to drag the windows around (something they do ALREADY) or using the backing store to do faster preview with clever remapping of the uv coordinates, or any of a zillion other things that can be done with backing store.
This is also the same as those business patents which say "do existing business method X but using the internet". As though the inventors of X would not have used the internet if it existed back then.
Yes, the "full size preview" is sort of new. However it is an OBVIOUS extension if you assumme a backing store and hardware that can resize the images quickly to the screen. The previous implementations DID NOT HAVE SUCH HARDWARE and thus could not do this.
The Enlightenment preview can be resized to the full screen and it certainly tries WITHIN THE LIMITATIONS OF X to do everything this patent claims.
This is like patenting opaque-drag of windows and claiming it is new because all previous versions of X and Windows dragged only the outline. The reason they dragged the outline was not because nobody thought about moving the window, it is in fact because THE HARDWARE COULD NOT DO IT!!!! In fact "dragging the outline" (or in this case "tiny preview") are the actual innovations, inventions designed to get around hardware limits, when if the hardware was unlimited in speed and power the more obvious solutions (like what they are trying to patent) would have been done.
This has to be refused. Otherwise anybody could patent any obvious idea in software by patenting a method of "doing it the obvious way that we can now do because the hardware is powerful enough". The real inventors of the innovation (virtual desktops in this case) are screwed, forced to continue with the poorer implementation that they did due to hardware limitations.
This is absolutely evil and a new type of patent nonsense that must be stopped now!
You realize they can "open the source" and still prevent other people from making "distros". This is called Copyright. The GPL is a grant of an exception to copyright that *allows* other distros.
Available source code that could be compiled and patches tested would be incredibly useful for fixing Windows and improving it, even if the only thing end users could do if they wanted to see their improvements in other machines is to send them to Microsoft.
Of course if they did this they would have to admit that plain old copyright is more restrictive than GPL and they would rather die first.
Having now looked at several papers that seem to come from all kinds of political perspectives, it does appear that Instant Runoff is deeply flawed.
An obvious example is to say there are Greens (G), Democrats (D), and Republicans (R) and lets say the entire electorate is divided like this:
32% - G,D,R
30% - D,R,G
33% - R,D,G
In Instant Runoff, the D party loses the first place. So those votes are discounted and the 30% who voted D,R,G put R in the first place. Then R wins, despite the fact that 62% of the voters preferred D over R.
I don't think this is a bogus example. It is quite realistic. If you don't think it is realistic, it is because you are assumming G has very little support. It is true that in IRV, putting a little-known candidate in front is harmless. But as soon as they become a contender it suddendly becomes harmful.
The mathematical analysis shows that it is possible (in theory, probably not in practice) for IRV to do *worse* than simple 1-vote per voter voting.
Here is another site that seems to argue differently and thinks Instant Runoff is better than Condorcet. Possibly this is a liberal slant, which may indicate that there is belief that Instant Runoff helps liberals, while Condorcet helps conservatives (or libertarians, who don't want to be called conservative), though I can't think of any real reason why.
However both sites think "Approval" voting is better than Instant Runoff.
I have heard that instant runoff is mathmatically broken and somewhat of a scam. Supposedly it will allow votes for (as an example) Greens, until the point where Greens become powerful enough to actually make a difference. At that point a vote for a Green will suddenly be bad, just like it is under the current system. The main reason is (assumming you like Dems more than Republicans) is that at that point your Green vote will make your Dem vote as #2 really mean #2 and Dems will lose to Republicans who voted them #1.
There is good analysis at http:://www.votingmethods.org. This site is obviously Libertarian, but their analysis seems accurate and their arguments about how to make Libertarians get votes without Republicans losing apply just as well to how to make Greens get votes without Democrats losing.
Actually the weird thing about getting 2000 wrong (it *IS* a leap year) is that it requires more research to actually get it wrong. A very simple approach would get it right.
In order of complexity leap year algorithims are:
0. No year is a leap year (2000 is wrong) 1. All years where n%4==0 are leap years (2000 is right) 2. Except when n%100==0 (2000 is wrong) 3. Except when n%400==0 (2000 is right)
For some reason a huge number of people are at aware of the rules up through #2 above, even though knowing only #1 would make the results more correct.
Re:I've heard the New Coke disaster was planned
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Very fascinating and detailed description of the whole thing, thanks!
The short version is that Coke was already switched to corn syrup long before they did the New Coke, so the story I heard is false. However the Snopes article has lots of other information.
What might be really nice is to have the ability from the GUI to bring up a text editor and let the user edit the configuration as text. This could be a button that says "Edit the Configuration". If the text file does not exist yet the program should create it, and it should create it with a comment block for every option describing what it does and how to change it, perhaps with examples. One program that sort of does this now is Doxygen, which has the "default" config file imbedded inside it with extensive comments.
Even failing this, it would help a huge amount if the programs would at least tell you from the GUI where the configuration file is.
For advanced configuration, GUI is extremely limited. One of the most obvious problems is the inability to "comment out" setups and to refer to them when setting other parts, or recover them later. Copying more than one setting from one part to another is also often impossible, referring to one setting while making another is often impossible (on different tabs). Setups that repeat a bunch of settings an arbitrary number of times result in unweildy user interface. All of these are trivial in text-based interfaces. It seems any attempt to make a GUI for complex interfaces eventually devolves into a registry-editor style, which combines the worst problems with the GUI (no comments) with the worst problems of the text editor (no indication what values are legal at each point).
I don't believe GUI configuration will ever really work. If you think about it, programming the computers is really a configuration (ie "configure it to edit MS Word documents"). If GUI configuration was possible, all programming could also be accomplished by pressing buttons and dragging images around.
Wait, are you saying that pages don't *already* have an execution-enable bit?
I seem to remember this existed on the VAX! Now I certainly don't follow the i86 design, but I know it has a read-only bit at least, and I just figured it had an execution bit as well.
I've heard the New Coke disaster was planned
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There is a theory that the results of New Coke were exactly as planned.
"Coke Classic" is different from original Coke. Original Coke used cane sugar for sweetener, while "Coke Classic" (and "New Coke") used much cheaper corn syrup.
Supposedly Coke figured that a few-month seperation would disguise the taste change and that the loss of profits during that time was worth it.
If you were not so brain-dead as to look, you would see that the Slashdot response to the "Windows is more popular and thus gets more viruses" argument is "Apache is installed and used far more, yet IIS gets many more compromises"
So there is absolutely no inconsistency in the arguments.
I understand that wxWindows did this after getting an offer of compensation from Microsoft. The question is, why did Microsoft do this in the first place? It does nothing but give them bad publicity and piss people off at them even more, for what plausable purpose?
Maybe wxWindows or even Lindows set this up as a ploy to make Microsoft look bad? But I have no idea why Microsoft is so stupid as to take the bait.
Unless a clear explanation comes up, Microsoft has lost all my sympathy in the Lindows case. Certainly Lindows is a ploy on their name and you can even make a case that it is designed to confuse consumers. But that is not true for wxWindows, so Microsoft has proven themselves to be as big of assholes as many people claim.
Actually the name of the operating system was always "MSDOS". I also think the word processor was originally named "Microsoft Word", and the flight simulator "Microsoft Flight Simulator".
I agree about "Office", "Windows", even if these are not the official names Microsoft certainly is trying to get them called that.
And "Windows Media Player" (not Media Player), though somewhat in-between, is pretty bad because it covers the whole area of any program that runs on Windows and plays media.
You are wrong. Binary drivers are "legal". It would be trivial to make Linux not load them if they were not wanted.
The NVidea driver was written specifically for Linux. Of course it contains blocks of code that are in the Windows one (this is easily proven because the same bugs exist in both of them!) but not doing that would be pretty stupid and wasteful of them.
There is NO WAY they are liable! If they were, then manufacturers of diodes could be liable, since it is trivial to use their devices to violate FCC regulations.
In fact they should be more liable for a closed-source version that may, becuase of a bug, violate FCC regulations. Possibly they fear this sort of information being discovered and this is yet another of the real reasons they don't release the drivers.
I'm sorry, but that explanation is bogus. Anybody can go to Radio Shack and buy some parts and solder together something that will violate FCC regulations. Nobody is trying to shut electronic parts supplies down because of this.
The reason they don't release drivers is that they are unsure of the legal nature of some of the code. All they have to do is release the source code for their Windows one. It would take ZERO effort. But their legal department realizes that closed source has the advantage that any legality mistakes they made are hidden.
One: hundreds of people who have had or still have access to Microsoft's source code have contributed to GPL programs. Microsoft does not do anything about this.
Two: perhaps *thousands* of people who have had or still have access to Microsoft's source code have contributed to non-Microsoft programs, such as closed source made by a competing company. (Clue for the really stupid: sometimes people who work at Microsoft leave it and work somewhere else!!!) Again Microsoft does not do anything about this.
Conversely, Microsoft hires hundreds of people who have looked at (and are thus "tainted") by GPL code, and it does not seem to bother them.
Conclusion: the whole "tainting" argument is a giant piece of FUD being spewed by Microsoft.
XWindows was being worked on in 1983 at MIT. That would be X10. It was developed for DecStation 100's, which were 1280x1024 1-bit display screens (this is why X does pretty good with modern resolutions but is really stupid with color, somewhat different than Windows which was designed for much smaller resolutions but assummed at least 16 colors were available).
The X11 most people are familar with was developed in 1985 and really appeared in 1986. It had a different (worse, imho) rendering model (the old one had a current point and moveto/lineto like PostScript). It also introduced the seperate window manager process, Visuals, multiple colormaps, and the wacky font-naming scheme with the dashes (before that fonts were named things like "fixed12" for the 12-pixel tall fixed-pitch font).
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No, it sounds like you must allow Microsoft to distribute "other" licensed implementations, not necessarily yours. Seems to be some sort of patent/lawsuit prevention. The GPL people may want to look at this and perhaps copy it if it is a clearer way of stating patent protection.
CRLF is from CP/M, which was based mostly on the Dec operating systems such as RSTS/e and RSX-11M, and on the pdp8 systems (I forget what these were called).
The original reason for it is that mechanical teletypes did not have enough power in their motors to both advance the platen and return the carriage to the left border at the same time. So they split these into two steps and built "CR" and "LF" into the 5-bit baudot code. Believe me they did this only because they needed to, the most popular baud rate then was about 50 baud so the time wasted was considerable, and certainly there was no precedence for such a design in existing typewriters. ASCII teletypes were made with minimal changes and thus inherited the CR LF pair.
It seems until K&R thought it was acceptable to put some smarts into the terminal driver so it would translate a single character into a pair, everybody was forced to copy this standard so that text files would print correctly on a teletype. Why K&R chose LF instead of CR is confusing, but I think they wanted to keep CR for overprinting, while the old function of LF was pretty useless. They should have made input turn CR into LF, however.
In any case if anybody asks, MSDOS is based on 1940's technology. At least Unix is based on 1970's technology.
yes, that's how preferential voting is supposed to work. those who voted D,R,G preferred R over G, so that's how they voted. they want their vote to go to R rather than G.
Nonsense. It is obvious that in my example 62% of the population would rather see a D in office than an R. So IRV produced an extremely bad result.
btw, your example is very contrived and simplistic.
No it isn't. The "G" platform is either extremely liked or extremely distrusted. So votors always put it first or last. And "G" votors all prefer "D" over "R". If you make the obvious connections to what parties I am talking about, I think you will find that extremely realistic.
In fact the "G" party does not even have to be distrusted. The only thing needed is that people who "D" are more likely to like "G". The weird thing is that this *HURTS* "D". Here is a "less contrived" example where nobody hates "G" (however in real life this is MORE contrived, there are huge number of votors who distrust "G"):
32% - G,D,R *
1% - G,R,D
16% - D,G,R *
16% - D,R,G *
18% - R,D,G
17% - R,G,D
In the first pass, G gets 33%, D gets 32%, and R gets 35%. So the D votes are thrown out. Now G gets 49% and R gets 51%, and R wins.
But if you add up how many voters preferred D over R (marked with a * above) you get 32%+16%+16% or 64%. We got an outcome that is not liked by almost two thirds of the population!
Now you can argue that this will not happen, but the reason it won't happen is that the G votors who prefer D will know that voting for G will spoil the election and allow R to win. So they will vote insincerly and all vote D,G,R. Yes, this will mean D will win. However it will also vastly undercount the support for G. And in the above scenario, a small increase in votes for G would have made G win. So G's has no chance of getting elected, and it is still a 2-party system.
The only thing IRV voting does is allow people to vote G,D,R (or G,R,D) when G has no chance at all of winning. But several analysists have shown quite clearly that IRV is severly flawed: if people vote sincerly for their preferences then it will screw up as shown above and put losing candidates in office, if (as will really happen) people vote insincerely in order to prevent an undesirable outcome, it reduces to exactly the same results as present-day plurarity voting.
A dual license is like the New York Times saying "you can read our paper and it only costs 50 cents a copy. You can also buy rights to copy article into other publications, and that costs $1000." It should be obvious why somebody would pay $1000 for the same text that somebody else would pay 50 cents for.
For some reason, the idea of the GPL gets people so confused they can no longer see clearly. I'll try to explain: the GPL may be like the New York Times saying "it only costs 50 cents if you are only copying for educational reasons". I.E you can violate their copyright, but only under certain restrictions (such as for educational use only). It should be clear in the NYT case why somebody would still be interested in paying $1000 for the rights to republish an article in a for-profit book.
In GPL the restriction is you must also grant anybody receiving the copy the same rights the GPL gave you. Now if you don't want to give people your code, it is pretty obvious that you will not be satisfied with the conditions that you can violate the copyright on the GPL code with.
In this case you can completely ignore the fact that the GPL exists, because the rights it grants do not concern you because you don't plan to take advantage of them. Instead you can pretend it is normal copyright, and then it should be clear that you must talk to the original authors and see if you can purchase rights to violate their copyright.
I understand what you are saying, but I am troubled by this. This is similar to patenting "preview the color of your word processor output in color" back in 1983 and saying it is an innovation because all previous word processors used inverse video or brightnesses to preview the color, ignoring the fact that all previous word processors were limited by hardware that could only display monochrome.
Take a look at the pagers on existing X window managers. There is definately an attempt to preview as close as possible to the actual appearance of the desktop as can be done with X. Notice that desktop patterns and color are repliated, color and thickness of window borders are replicated, and some newer ones take snapshots of the windows and resize them. There are pop-up ones that appear in the middle of the screen and take huge amounts of area. I think this is proof that if the capabilities were available for a full-color quarter-sized previews of the desktop, these would have been used long ago. And in my opinion this is "obvious".
Now X has a lot of problems and it is annoying that such kludges are necessary, but patenting "do this on a system that does not need kludges" is a VERY troublesome development.
Really Microsoft should be patenting something about using the backing store or mapping it to the screen, which is where the real invention was (yes I know that there are several other systems that did this before them, but it is still the real "innovation", the one that GETS RID OF THE KLUDGES!!!). Why not patent the idea of using the backing store to drag the windows around (something they do ALREADY) or using the backing store to do faster preview with clever remapping of the uv coordinates, or any of a zillion other things that can be done with backing store.
This is also the same as those business patents which say "do existing business method X but using the internet". As though the inventors of X would not have used the internet if it existed back then.
This is a seriously troubling development.
Yes, the "full size preview" is sort of new. However it is an OBVIOUS extension if you assumme a backing store and hardware that can resize the images quickly to the screen. The previous implementations DID NOT HAVE SUCH HARDWARE and thus could not do this.
The Enlightenment preview can be resized to the full screen and it certainly tries WITHIN THE LIMITATIONS OF X to do everything this patent claims.
This is like patenting opaque-drag of windows and claiming it is new because all previous versions of X and Windows dragged only the outline. The reason they dragged the outline was not because nobody thought about moving the window, it is in fact because THE HARDWARE COULD NOT DO IT!!!! In fact "dragging the outline" (or in this case "tiny preview") are the actual innovations, inventions designed to get around hardware limits, when if the hardware was unlimited in speed and power the more obvious solutions (like what they are trying to patent) would have been done.
This has to be refused. Otherwise anybody could patent any obvious idea in software by patenting a method of "doing it the obvious way that we can now do because the hardware is powerful enough". The real inventors of the innovation (virtual desktops in this case) are screwed, forced to continue with the poorer implementation that they did due to hardware limitations.
This is absolutely evil and a new type of patent nonsense that must be stopped now!
You realize they can "open the source" and still prevent other people from making "distros". This is called Copyright. The GPL is a grant of an exception to copyright that *allows* other distros.
Available source code that could be compiled and patches tested would be incredibly useful for fixing Windows and improving it, even if the only thing end users could do if they wanted to see their improvements in other machines is to send them to Microsoft.
Of course if they did this they would have to admit that plain old copyright is more restrictive than GPL and they would rather die first.
Having now looked at several papers that seem to come from all kinds of political perspectives, it does appear that Instant Runoff is deeply flawed.
An obvious example is to say there are Greens (G), Democrats (D), and Republicans (R) and lets say the entire electorate is divided like this:
32% - G,D,R
30% - D,R,G
33% - R,D,G
In Instant Runoff, the D party loses the first place. So those votes are discounted and the 30% who voted D,R,G put R in the first place. Then R wins, despite the fact that 62% of the voters preferred D over R.
I don't think this is a bogus example. It is quite realistic. If you don't think it is realistic, it is because you are assumming G has very little support. It is true that in IRV, putting a little-known candidate in front is harmless. But as soon as they become a contender it suddendly becomes harmful.
The mathematical analysis shows that it is possible (in theory, probably not in practice) for IRV to do *worse* than simple 1-vote per voter voting.
The actual site I wanted to refer to is here
Here is another site that seems to argue differently and thinks Instant Runoff is better than Condorcet. Possibly this is a liberal slant, which may indicate that there is belief that Instant Runoff helps liberals, while Condorcet helps conservatives (or libertarians, who don't want to be called conservative), though I can't think of any real reason why.
However both sites think "Approval" voting is better than Instant Runoff.
I have heard that instant runoff is mathmatically broken and somewhat of a scam. Supposedly it will allow votes for (as an example) Greens, until the point where Greens become powerful enough to actually make a difference. At that point a vote for a Green will suddenly be bad, just like it is under the current system. The main reason is (assumming you like Dems more than Republicans) is that at that point your Green vote will make your Dem vote as #2 really mean #2 and Dems will lose to Republicans who voted them #1.
There is good analysis at http:://www.votingmethods.org. This site is obviously Libertarian, but their analysis seems accurate and their arguments about how to make Libertarians get votes without Republicans losing apply just as well to how to make Greens get votes without Democrats losing.
Actually I started at 1 and realized that I had skipped the "0" case and inserted it after typing the message.
Actually the weird thing about getting 2000 wrong (it *IS* a leap year) is that it requires more research to actually get it wrong. A very simple approach would get it right.
In order of complexity leap year algorithims are:
0. No year is a leap year (2000 is wrong)
1. All years where n%4==0 are leap years (2000 is right)
2. Except when n%100==0 (2000 is wrong)
3. Except when n%400==0 (2000 is right)
For some reason a huge number of people are at aware of the rules up through #2 above, even though knowing only #1 would make the results more correct.
Very fascinating and detailed description of the whole thing, thanks!
The short version is that Coke was already switched to corn syrup long before they did the New Coke, so the story I heard is false. However the Snopes article has lots of other information.
I think he means he has a desktop that has a Firefox window on it.
Possibly Firefox is raising itself or doing some other action to the window that convinces KWM that it should switch to that desktop automatically.
What might be really nice is to have the ability from the GUI to bring up a text editor and let the user edit the configuration as text. This could be a button that says "Edit the Configuration". If the text file does not exist yet the program should create it, and it should create it with a comment block for every option describing what it does and how to change it, perhaps with examples. One program that sort of does this now is Doxygen, which has the "default" config file imbedded inside it with extensive comments.
Even failing this, it would help a huge amount if the programs would at least tell you from the GUI where the configuration file is.
For advanced configuration, GUI is extremely limited. One of the most obvious problems is the inability to "comment out" setups and to refer to them when setting other parts, or recover them later. Copying more than one setting from one part to another is also often impossible, referring to one setting while making another is often impossible (on different tabs). Setups that repeat a bunch of settings an arbitrary number of times result in unweildy user interface. All of these are trivial in text-based interfaces. It seems any attempt to make a GUI for complex interfaces eventually devolves into a registry-editor style, which combines the worst problems with the GUI (no comments) with the worst problems of the text editor (no indication what values are legal at each point).
I don't believe GUI configuration will ever really work. If you think about it, programming the computers is really a configuration (ie "configure it to edit MS Word documents"). If GUI configuration was possible, all programming could also be accomplished by pressing buttons and dragging images around.
Wait, are you saying that pages don't *already* have an execution-enable bit?
I seem to remember this existed on the VAX! Now I certainly don't follow the i86 design, but I know it has a read-only bit at least, and I just figured it had an execution bit as well.
There is a theory that the results of New Coke were exactly as planned.
"Coke Classic" is different from original Coke. Original Coke used cane sugar for sweetener, while "Coke Classic" (and "New Coke") used much cheaper corn syrup.
Supposedly Coke figured that a few-month seperation would disguise the taste change and that the loss of profits during that time was worth it.
If you were not so brain-dead as to look, you would see that the Slashdot response to the "Windows is more popular and thus gets more viruses" argument is "Apache is installed and used far more, yet IIS gets many more compromises"
So there is absolutely no inconsistency in the arguments.
I understand that wxWindows did this after getting an offer of compensation from Microsoft. The question is, why did Microsoft do this in the first place? It does nothing but give them bad publicity and piss people off at them even more, for what plausable purpose?
Maybe wxWindows or even Lindows set this up as a ploy to make Microsoft look bad? But I have no idea why Microsoft is so stupid as to take the bait.
Unless a clear explanation comes up, Microsoft has lost all my sympathy in the Lindows case. Certainly Lindows is a ploy on their name and you can even make a case that it is designed to confuse consumers. But that is not true for wxWindows, so Microsoft has proven themselves to be as big of assholes as many people claim.
Actually the name of the operating system was always "MSDOS". I also think the word processor was originally named "Microsoft Word", and the flight simulator "Microsoft Flight Simulator".
I agree about "Office", "Windows", even if these are not the official names Microsoft certainly is trying to get them called that.
And "Windows Media Player" (not Media Player), though somewhat in-between, is pretty bad because it covers the whole area of any program that runs on Windows and plays media.
You are wrong. Binary drivers are "legal". It would be trivial to make Linux not load them if they were not wanted.
The NVidea driver was written specifically for Linux. Of course it contains blocks of code that are in the Windows one (this is easily proven because the same bugs exist in both of them!) but not doing that would be pretty stupid and wasteful of them.
There is NO WAY they are liable! If they were, then manufacturers of diodes could be liable, since it is trivial to use their devices to violate FCC regulations.
In fact they should be more liable for a closed-source version that may, becuase of a bug, violate FCC regulations. Possibly they fear this sort of information being discovered and this is yet another of the real reasons they don't release the drivers.
I'm sorry, but that explanation is bogus. Anybody can go to Radio Shack and buy some parts and solder together something that will violate FCC regulations. Nobody is trying to shut electronic parts supplies down because of this.
The reason they don't release drivers is that they are unsure of the legal nature of some of the code. All they have to do is release the source code for their Windows one. It would take ZERO effort. But their legal department realizes that closed source has the advantage that any legality mistakes they made are hidden.
One: hundreds of people who have had or still have access to Microsoft's source code have contributed to GPL programs. Microsoft does not do anything about this.
Two: perhaps *thousands* of people who have had or still have access to Microsoft's source code have contributed to non-Microsoft programs, such as closed source made by a competing company. (Clue for the really stupid: sometimes people who work at Microsoft leave it and work somewhere else!!!) Again Microsoft does not do anything about this.
Conversely, Microsoft hires hundreds of people who have looked at (and are thus "tainted") by GPL code, and it does not seem to bother them.
Conclusion: the whole "tainting" argument is a giant piece of FUD being spewed by Microsoft.
XWindows was being worked on in 1983 at MIT. That would be X10. It was developed for DecStation 100's, which were 1280x1024 1-bit display screens (this is why X does pretty good with modern resolutions but is really stupid with color, somewhat different than Windows which was designed for much smaller resolutions but assummed at least 16 colors were available).
The X11 most people are familar with was developed in 1985 and really appeared in 1986. It had a different (worse, imho) rendering model (the old one had a current point and moveto/lineto like PostScript). It also introduced the seperate window manager process, Visuals, multiple colormaps, and the wacky font-naming scheme with the dashes (before that fonts were named things like "fixed12" for the 12-pixel tall fixed-pitch font).