How is it different than GTK 1 and GTK 2? QT 1 and QT 2 and QT 3? As far as I know, most, if not all, applications have to be rewritten, so X
widget sets *also have* broken user level compatibility on a regular basis.
The difference is that the program using GTK1 can continue to use GTK1, despite the existence of GTK2. You cannot do that unless you support multiple toolkits. In fact as soon as Windows adds a "new" way to do some widget, they are supporting multiple toolkits. One advantage of the X method is that if everybody stops using GTK1, the whole thing goes away, while that back-compatability call in Windows will be there forever
Anybody with any familiarity with programming would know that if X had a toolkit, it would be frozen right now to look exactly like Athena in 1983, just like Windows is frozen to look like Windows95 (which added several widgets over 93). The fact that X could be made to look just like Windows, jumping over 12 years of invention, without changing X itself, is proof that not having a toolkit is a good idea.
Show me a good way of pasting one selection over another selection under X without retyping.
Select the text and type Ctrl+V?
Don't talk about that middle-mouse thing. As I have tried to point out a dozen times, that is drag & drop, not cut & paste. X's mistake was to think that drag & drop was sufficient. Suprisingly enough, Windows is starting to make the same mistake, but they lack the advantage of the middle mouse which is that you can move, reorder, and open/close windows between when you start and when you finish the drag & drop.
Bad example. Any such "prepress image editing" has nothing to do with a low-level display server, and would be done by the application talking to the server. However there is fear that a pure GPL display system would prevent closed-source drivers from being implemented. Even allowing Linux-like loadable modules may prevent algorithims from being moved from the plain server code to the hardware, thus failing to allow the acceleration of things that the original authors did not think could be accelerated.
Even the most cursory reading of the linked article would show that he intends to replace X, not build on top of it. Try not to make yourself look so stupid next time you post by actually reading the articles.
NeWS did not use Adobe's PostScript (or DPS or Display PostScript as it is often called). It used an interpreter written at Sun by James Gosling. This interpreter was actually much faster and efficient, though some complained that it was not 100% PostScript compatable (exampes are that null could be used as a dictionary index, and any expression could be used in an if statemtent, not just booleans).
I agree that Y sounds a lot like he is reinventing NeWS. I am unconvinced that putting widgets into the server will do anything useful, but if it has to be done I would very much like to see it done in the programmable NeWS model.
"Trailers" once upon a time were put after the movie, that's why they were called that. Of course they were commercials, but they had that name to distinguish them from print ads or radio commercials or billboards.
Showing a film you made to a bunch of invited guests has long been called "screening" the film. Thus a DVD made especially for this purpose (showing it to an invited guest) is called a "screener".
Now maybe my sample is biased because I work in the film industry, but literally 100% of the movie rips I have seen people play on their computers have had the "Property of 20th Century Fox" (or whatever) logo on the bottom. From what I have seen getting rid of screeners will literally get rid of all piracy.
If SCO "wins" they will have to reveal where the infringing code is so that it can be removed. After providing this information, they can legally go after any Linux distributor who refuses to remove the infringing code now that it has been identified. They can also go after the original copyright infringer (perhaps IBM).
However in no way will SCO winning invalidate the GPL.
Although IBM made patent threats in their original claim (and some people here were quite upset by that), the new claim is entirely based on copyright. The general feeling here is that copyrights are good, and technically the GPL requires copyright for legal support.
Anybody who says "but Slashdot users want music for free so they must not like copyright": downloading a copy of song from Metallica without paying is nothing compared to selling Metallica's music for profit and convincing people that you wrote and performed it yourself. This sort of copyright violation is what everybody agrees should be illegal.
You seem to be easily misled. Microsoft *was* the good guy at one time, but it was several years before OS/2. I have no idea where you got such an idea, perhaps you are too young and to remember?
When Microsoft was cheered was when it replaced the overpriced CPM86 with a technically superior produce (MSDOS) for 1/10th the price, and for retaining the rights to it so that competitors for the IBM-PC could come into existence, resulting in a very rapid improvement of the hardware. Technically I also thought 100% of the stupid things about the IBM-PC were IBM's fault, such as the BIOS that required *TWO* calls to draw one character on the screen (one to move the cursor, the other to draw the letter).
I also remember MSDOS 2.0 being a very improvement over 1 and felt great hope that Microsoft would continue to merge Unix and MSDOS into a unified and better product and get us out of the crap that was used on home computers (they were already far more powerful than the machines Unix was designed for and it was disgusting that they continued to fail to take advantage of modern designs from Unix).
By the time of OS/2 Microsoft was already considered an abusive monopoly and despised. I had friends who worked with OS/2 and Windows and they universally praised OS/2. The only people I ever heard argue against it were Unix/X people who did not want Windows either.
If it were the case that Linux has SCO IP in the kernel, then IBM's case would have no merit.
No, this is wrong, as many other people pointed out. Eric Raymond's IP is in Linux: that does not mean IBM's or SCO's case has no merit. I think a tiny bit of MY IP is in Linux, that does not mean IBM or SCO or Erir Raymond's claims have no merit, either!
Legally the only thing SCO can do is claim their code was put into Linux by mistake, and that they have to identify exactly what it is so it can be removed. They can then sue any Linux distributor who refuses to remove the code (since they have now indicated how), and they can also go after the person or organization who did the original copyright infraction. (this all assummes there is any SCO IP in Linux, which some posters here doubt. Personally I would prefer that there really be some code, so that the proper procedure for removing it can be demonstrated).
This new claim by IBM is pretty clever, I think. Originally I thought the GPL claims were a smokescreen designed to get SCO to blurt out all kinds of stupid anti-GPL statements, while the real claim was the later one that SCO refuses to identify the infringing code or do any other steps designed to lessed the infringment.
However it is quite possible that this GPL claim, that SCO's distribution violates IBM's OWN copyrights, is really devastating. (rather than the copyrights of a whole lot of Linux authors who everybody knows are just commie hippies living in their mom's basements and thus have no rights).
SCO is miniscule compared to IBM. Even if 100% of the people selling SCO stock immediately invested the sale price in IBM, it would make only a microscopic rise in IBM's price.
Yes it will be available immediately. Not only that, if it is difficult enough, they have increased the incentive to download the music illegally, and decreased the incentive to buy the disk. Good work there...
Of course I suspect all the RIAA moves are designed to in fact increase piracy. The RIAA has much more insidious plans: they want to eventually outlaw all high-quality recording devices, because they will prove that all such devices allow, and are used primarily for, piracy (and that will be true). Outlawing those devices will also make it impossible for any individuals to compete with the RIAA because they will be unable to record their own music, and the RIAA will say "well, that is SUCH a shame, but it was those evil pirates that made competition illegal".
If you have a "real" list, why the hell do you need to care about DNC list. You must have an opt-in list, which the DNC law still allows you to call. Oh, it's NOT an opt-in list? I see...
Also, wouldn't all this horrible work of having to remove the DNC numbers from your list *need* programmers, not put them out of work?
Though I see nothing wrong with throttling the speeds, I don't think it can be selected on the type of service. All that will happen is that the throttled clients will be rewritten to appear to be a different type of service to get around the throttling. This will probably *add* overhead and thus use *more* bandwidth.
Every program I ever saw back then that copied the Mac (mostly non-Windows paint applications, and FrameMaker) used Alt+XCV for the copy operations. My complaint was more that "shortcuts for menu items" in general used Alt, not Ctrl, in absolutely everything I saw. The only other way shortcuts were given was to use the numbered function keys for them. I think Microsoft screwed everybody up by saying that ctrl should be the shortcut modifier. This is unrelated to actually putting cut/copy/paste onto menus, early programs did not do that.
The Shift+Insert etc combinations in fact were the CDE and Motif standard as well as what Microsoft officially supported in early versions of Windows. I believe they originated from MSWord (pre Windows) and were invented by Microsoft, although it is possible they came originally from somewhere else, anybody know? These were invented again at a time when cut/copy/paste were not considered "menu items". I vaguely remember early versions of Word for Windows actually showing these combinations in the menus as the shortcuts, but they changed very quickly to showing Ctrl+XCV.
The shortcuts still work in modern Windows mostly, and they seem to work in KDE and Gnome programs. I also added them to FLTK, though I received only one request to do so. I would say that 95% of Windows users think that Ctrl+XCV are the only shortcuts for cut/copy/paste, and the old shortcuts could be eliminated and hardly anybody would notice, though I would recommened against making those keys do anything else. Microsoft should have tried printing the meanings on the keys when they started making their own keyboard layout, the fact that they did not may indicate that even internally they did not care about these shortcuts.
Did you LOOK at a Mac, like I suggested, and try to figure out what ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the companies other than Microsoft used as the menu shortcut key before they made Windows 95?
No, you probably were not born then, were you.
Microsoft is at fault for apparenltly completely ignoring outside standards. And yes Linux IS copying Microsoft. If it was not copying it, it *would* be "consistent", because EVERYBODY used Alt.
Go try some pre-Windows programs if you don't believe me. THEY ALL USED ALT! EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!
Somebody who really gets it! SCO's claims are outright wrong. And the arguments against them have nothing to do with the GPL.
SCO would be equally wrong if Linux was a closed-source piece of code being sold by a company. In fact Microsoft was sued for exactly this. What was the result? 1. Microsoft removed the code. 2. Microsoft (the infringing party) paid a fine. 3. NOTHING happened to Microsoft's customers they were not even forced to upgrade to non-infringing versions.
If SCO was actually doing anything based on reality, they would immediately indicate what code was infringing, and insist that it be removed from all future Linux distributions. Then (perhaps with the cooperation of the "open source community") the persons responsible for this infringement would be identified, and SCO can go and sue them. With any luck for SCO it will be shown that the infringers belonged to a place with deep pockets, like IBM.
Both sides are foolishly trying to turn this into an argument about GPL and public domain and open source. It has NOTHING to do with that, the problems with SCO are in basic copyright laws and precedence.
Unfortunatly, no. That is standard X window managers, not some big all-java system.
Sun had the right idea about 16 years ago with NeWS, but they blew it. Now everybody (including Microsoft) believes that the borders of the windows must be drawn by a different process than the contents, so we will never have true unified configurability...
1. The "X clipboard" that most people are talking about is NOT the "clipboard" from Windows. It is DRAG & DROP!!!! With the huge advantage that you can move windows around, raise and lower them, and close them, before you drop. Basically selecting something is the start of a drag, and clicking the middle mouse button is a drop. It is EXACTLY the same (the normal complaint that you can't select the text to replace? Try doing the same action in Windows using drag & drop) Therefore X invented drag & drop first, something Microsofties are loath to admit.
X's problem is that they failed to provide any kind of clipboard, thinking this drag & drop was sufficient. This led a lot of idiots to thinking the drag & drop WAS the clipboard, and stupid things like adding cut & copy actions modify the currently dragged item. When people started doing this correctly (all Gnome and KDE and most other toolkit based programs do) by putting the clipboard into a different buffer, people then complained about that (look at one of the other letters who said exactly this, apparently that person is too stupid to realize that if Ctrl+X modified the selected text, then selecting text would also modify the Ctrl+X text and thus completely defeat the purpose of the clipboard).
Microsoft is 100% to blame for the fact that some programs use Alt and some use Ctrl for the shortcuts. When the GUI programs were being developed, they copied the Mac. Now LOOK at a Mac, and check where the Command key is. Nobody in their right mind would use any key other than Alt to emulate that. But Microsoft is not in their right mind. Almost all MSDOS programs and most early Windows programs were "inconsistent" too and used Alt instead of the Microsoft standard of Ctrl.
If you discount old character-terminal programs like Emacs and VI (which both incidentally run on Windows and are just as "inconsistent" there) then I have never seen an X program that uses anything other than Ctrl+XCV or Alt+XCV for cut & copy & paste. There are however a lot of programs that mess with the drag & drop buffer instead of the clipboard for these actions, so I guess there are 4 arrangments.
As for data other than Text, well here Microsoft is doing a lot better. Interestingly enough, both X and Windows have almost identical mechanisms for sending data other than text (lists of atoms identifying what types are available, and the dropped-on program chooses the type to get, and the called program converts to that type). Where Microsoft was smart and X was idiots is that Microsoft ASSIGNED some symbols, such as one for a BMP image. Stupid X consortium thought these assignments would be worked out by users and so now all X has is about a dozen ways to identify text and nothing else. Fortunatly it looks like the whole idea is going to be scrapped on both systems, to a system by which the dragged data is either plain text, or a URL identifying where the data is stored. This has the huge advantage that programs can reuse code that reads/writes files to interpret the dropped data, and programs that cannot understand the URL can easily run other programs that do. Because of this massive change it may be possible for X to catch up.
Now really, these things should be running ONE program. It listens to keystrokes and it talks to the the bank's computers (which may as well be running NT) and after much negotiation and care it then expels bills from the machine. Any possible screwup makes it "reboot" which takes 1/100 of a millesecond and consists of a jump to the start of the program.
This should NOT be running Windows. It should NOT be running Linux, or even BSD. It is pretty scary that people even consider these "solutions". Same thing for those voting machines.
Nobody in their right mind is suggesting Linux for this either. It should be something TINY like QNX.
The true anger here is at all the clueless dolts hired by these companines that know nothing except VB and so that is their solution to anything, no matter what the cost or security implications. It would be just as bad as if they hired a clueless Linux zealot who wrote the whole thing as a Perl script.
Hey on those apostrophe things, I can't blame them too much. I really blame the stupid standards organizations who thought that a block of useful 1-byte codes (0x80 through 0x9f) have to be reserved because some machines may strip the high bit and confuse them with control characters.
Those codes should have been filled in with the most useful punctuation marks and missing accented letters. It would be better if this had been decided more carefully, but instead the standards organizations kept trying to do the "right" thing (by their weird definition of "right" which is to make the most complex standard possible) so Microsoft (probably not with any evil intent or world-domination plan) went and filled it in with their own set, chosen to make American secretaries happy.
So too late. Those codes have been assigned by Microsoft, and it is time for the standards to realize they made a stupid mistake, and alter Unicode and ISO-8859-1 to contain the Microsoft assignments and say that is the new standard.
This is the sort of standards interopability that Billy is talking about. When the organizations are too slow or stupid to do something reasonable, I'm all for Microsoft or somebody going in there and forcing a change. As long as it is completely open and easy to copy, which these assignments are. Now what most people fear hear are closed or obfuscated "standards" and in that area Microsoft has a lot of bad history and a silly speech by Billy is not going to convince anybody they are changing their ways.
PS: I would respect Microsoft more if their software was not so stupid. So they added punctuation so that single quotes can be a different character than apostrophe, good. But then they make word so stupid that it turns all apostrophes into close single quotes, thus breaking the entire reason for this. This sort of idiocy is where Microsoft is truly evil. If it were not for competing processes, they would have pretty much changed the code for apostrophe, by accident, due to the unbelievable incompetence of some of their programmers.
Good work guys you have shown that you are stupider than Microsoft.
XML is structured. So why the hell is there "extra" structure by dividing the document up into parts, rather than just using XML?
I know, it's so the parts can be "shared" and that somehow that will save memory or something, right. The exact same thinking leads to the Linux desktop environments that need hundreds of shared libraries of exactly the right version. This feature is either not going to be used at all or will just cause users headaches when "the shared style sheet is the wrong version" errors come up.
Also to the Microsoft dolt who said the XML was large because it contains "default settings". Default settings are indicated by NOT being there!!! Moron.
I'm sorry but we are seeing crap from everybody: Microsoft, Linux desktops, other companies, standards organizations. The only projects I really can respect are perhaps the Linux kernel and some programming tools. Also Plan9 looked good, why not study how they design things?
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If you read the article you would see that double-buffering is part of his system.
widget sets *also have* broken user level compatibility on a regular basis.
The difference is that the program using GTK1 can continue to use GTK1, despite the existence of GTK2. You cannot do that unless you support multiple toolkits. In fact as soon as Windows adds a "new" way to do some widget, they are supporting multiple toolkits. One advantage of the X method is that if everybody stops using GTK1, the whole thing goes away, while that back-compatability call in Windows will be there forever
Anybody with any familiarity with programming would know that if X had a toolkit, it would be frozen right now to look exactly like Athena in 1983, just like Windows is frozen to look like Windows95 (which added several widgets over 93). The fact that X could be made to look just like Windows, jumping over 12 years of invention, without changing X itself, is proof that not having a toolkit is a good idea.
Show me a good way of pasting one selection over another selection under X without retyping.
Select the text and type Ctrl+V?
Don't talk about that middle-mouse thing. As I have tried to point out a dozen times, that is drag & drop, not cut & paste. X's mistake was to think that drag & drop was sufficient. Suprisingly enough, Windows is starting to make the same mistake, but they lack the advantage of the middle mouse which is that you can move, reorder, and open/close windows between when you start and when you finish the drag & drop.
Bad example. Any such "prepress image editing" has nothing to do with a low-level display server, and would be done by the application talking to the server. However there is fear that a pure GPL display system would prevent closed-source drivers from being implemented. Even allowing Linux-like loadable modules may prevent algorithims from being moved from the plain server code to the hardware, thus failing to allow the acceleration of things that the original authors did not think could be accelerated.
Even the most cursory reading of the linked article would show that he intends to replace X, not build on top of it. Try not to make yourself look so stupid next time you post by actually reading the articles.
NeWS did not use Adobe's PostScript (or DPS or Display PostScript as it is often called). It used an interpreter written at Sun by James Gosling. This interpreter was actually much faster and efficient, though some complained that it was not 100% PostScript compatable (exampes are that null could be used as a dictionary index, and any expression could be used in an if statemtent, not just booleans).
I agree that Y sounds a lot like he is reinventing NeWS. I am unconvinced that putting widgets into the server will do anything useful, but if it has to be done I would very much like to see it done in the programmable NeWS model.
"Trailers" once upon a time were put after the movie, that's why they were called that. Of course they were commercials, but they had that name to distinguish them from print ads or radio commercials or billboards.
Showing a film you made to a bunch of invited guests has long been called "screening" the film. Thus a DVD made especially for this purpose (showing it to an invited guest) is called a "screener".
Now maybe my sample is biased because I work in the film industry, but literally 100% of the movie rips I have seen people play on their computers have had the "Property of 20th Century Fox" (or whatever) logo on the bottom. From what I have seen getting rid of screeners will literally get rid of all piracy.
If SCO "wins" they will have to reveal where the infringing code is so that it can be removed. After providing this information, they can legally go after any Linux distributor who refuses to remove the infringing code now that it has been identified. They can also go after the original copyright infringer (perhaps IBM).
However in no way will SCO winning invalidate the GPL.
Anybody who says "but Slashdot users want music for free so they must not like copyright": downloading a copy of song from Metallica without paying is nothing compared to selling Metallica's music for profit and convincing people that you wrote and performed it yourself. This sort of copyright violation is what everybody agrees should be illegal.
You seem to be easily misled. Microsoft *was* the good guy at one time, but it was several years before OS/2. I have no idea where you got such an idea, perhaps you are too young and to remember?
When Microsoft was cheered was when it replaced the overpriced CPM86 with a technically superior produce (MSDOS) for 1/10th the price, and for retaining the rights to it so that competitors for the IBM-PC could come into existence, resulting in a very rapid improvement of the hardware. Technically I also thought 100% of the stupid things about the IBM-PC were IBM's fault, such as the BIOS that required *TWO* calls to draw one character on the screen (one to move the cursor, the other to draw the letter).
I also remember MSDOS 2.0 being a very improvement over 1 and felt great hope that Microsoft would continue to merge Unix and MSDOS into a unified and better product and get us out of the crap that was used on home computers (they were already far more powerful than the machines Unix was designed for and it was disgusting that they continued to fail to take advantage of modern designs from Unix).
By the time of OS/2 Microsoft was already considered an abusive monopoly and despised. I had friends who worked with OS/2 and Windows and they universally praised OS/2. The only people I ever heard argue against it were Unix/X people who did not want Windows either.
No, this is wrong, as many other people pointed out. Eric Raymond's IP is in Linux: that does not mean IBM's or SCO's case has no merit. I think a tiny bit of MY IP is in Linux, that does not mean IBM or SCO or Erir Raymond's claims have no merit, either!
Legally the only thing SCO can do is claim their code was put into Linux by mistake, and that they have to identify exactly what it is so it can be removed. They can then sue any Linux distributor who refuses to remove the code (since they have now indicated how), and they can also go after the person or organization who did the original copyright infraction. (this all assummes there is any SCO IP in Linux, which some posters here doubt. Personally I would prefer that there really be some code, so that the proper procedure for removing it can be demonstrated).
This new claim by IBM is pretty clever, I think. Originally I thought the GPL claims were a smokescreen designed to get SCO to blurt out all kinds of stupid anti-GPL statements, while the real claim was the later one that SCO refuses to identify the infringing code or do any other steps designed to lessed the infringment.
However it is quite possible that this GPL claim, that SCO's distribution violates IBM's OWN copyrights, is really devastating. (rather than the copyrights of a whole lot of Linux authors who everybody knows are just commie hippies living in their mom's basements and thus have no rights).
SCO is miniscule compared to IBM. Even if 100% of the people selling SCO stock immediately invested the sale price in IBM, it would make only a microscopic rise in IBM's price.
Yes it will be available immediately. Not only that, if it is difficult enough, they have increased the incentive to download the music illegally, and decreased the incentive to buy the disk. Good work there...
Of course I suspect all the RIAA moves are designed to in fact increase piracy. The RIAA has much more insidious plans: they want to eventually outlaw all high-quality recording devices, because they will prove that all such devices allow, and are used primarily for, piracy (and that will be true). Outlawing those devices will also make it impossible for any individuals to compete with the RIAA because they will be unable to record their own music, and the RIAA will say "well, that is SUCH a shame, but it was those evil pirates that made competition illegal".
If you have a "real" list, why the hell do you need to care about DNC list. You must have an opt-in list, which the DNC law still allows you to call. Oh, it's NOT an opt-in list? I see...
Also, wouldn't all this horrible work of having to remove the DNC numbers from your list *need* programmers, not put them out of work?
Though I see nothing wrong with throttling the speeds, I don't think it can be selected on the type of service. All that will happen is that the throttled clients will be rewritten to appear to be a different type of service to get around the throttling. This will probably *add* overhead and thus use *more* bandwidth.
Every program I ever saw back then that copied the Mac (mostly non-Windows paint applications, and FrameMaker) used Alt+XCV for the copy operations.
My complaint was more that "shortcuts for menu items" in general used Alt, not Ctrl, in absolutely everything I saw. The only other way shortcuts were given was to use the numbered function keys for them. I think Microsoft screwed everybody up by saying that ctrl should be the shortcut modifier. This is unrelated to actually putting cut/copy/paste onto menus, early programs did not do that.
The Shift+Insert etc combinations in fact were the CDE and Motif standard as well as what Microsoft officially supported in early versions of Windows. I believe they originated from MSWord (pre Windows) and were invented by Microsoft, although it is possible they came originally from somewhere else, anybody know? These were invented again at a time when cut/copy/paste were not considered "menu items". I vaguely remember early versions of Word for Windows actually showing these combinations in the menus as the shortcuts, but they changed very quickly to showing Ctrl+XCV.
The shortcuts still work in modern Windows mostly, and they seem to work in KDE and Gnome programs. I also added them to FLTK, though I received only one request to do so. I would say that 95% of Windows users think that Ctrl+XCV are the only shortcuts for cut/copy/paste, and the old shortcuts could be eliminated and hardly anybody would notice, though I would recommened against making those keys do anything else. Microsoft should have tried printing the meanings on the keys when they started making their own keyboard layout, the fact that they did not may indicate that even internally they did not care about these shortcuts.
Did you LOOK at a Mac, like I suggested, and try to figure out what ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the companies other than Microsoft used as the menu shortcut key before they made Windows 95?
No, you probably were not born then, were you.
Microsoft is at fault for apparenltly completely ignoring outside standards. And yes Linux IS copying Microsoft. If it was not copying it, it *would* be "consistent", because EVERYBODY used Alt.
Go try some pre-Windows programs if you don't believe me. THEY ALL USED ALT! EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM!
SCO would be equally wrong if Linux was a closed-source piece of code being sold by a company. In fact Microsoft was sued for exactly this. What was the result? 1. Microsoft removed the code. 2. Microsoft (the infringing party) paid a fine. 3. NOTHING happened to Microsoft's customers they were not even forced to upgrade to non-infringing versions.
If SCO was actually doing anything based on reality, they would immediately indicate what code was infringing, and insist that it be removed from all future Linux distributions. Then (perhaps with the cooperation of the "open source community") the persons responsible for this infringement would be identified, and SCO can go and sue them. With any luck for SCO it will be shown that the infringers belonged to a place with deep pockets, like IBM.
Both sides are foolishly trying to turn this into an argument about GPL and public domain and open source. It has NOTHING to do with that, the problems with SCO are in basic copyright laws and precedence.
Unfortunatly, no. That is standard X window managers, not some big all-java system.
Sun had the right idea about 16 years ago with NeWS, but they blew it. Now everybody (including Microsoft) believes that the borders of the windows must be drawn by a different process than the contents, so we will never have true unified configurability...
1. The "X clipboard" that most people are talking about is NOT the "clipboard" from Windows. It is DRAG & DROP!!!! With the huge advantage that you can move windows around, raise and lower them, and close them, before you drop. Basically selecting something is the start of a drag, and clicking the middle mouse button is a drop. It is EXACTLY the same (the normal complaint that you can't select the text to replace? Try doing the same action in Windows using drag & drop) Therefore X invented drag & drop first, something Microsofties are loath to admit.
X's problem is that they failed to provide any kind of clipboard, thinking this drag & drop was sufficient. This led a lot of idiots to thinking the drag & drop WAS the clipboard, and stupid things like adding cut & copy actions modify the currently dragged item. When people started doing this correctly (all Gnome and KDE and most other toolkit based programs do) by putting the clipboard into a different buffer, people then complained about that (look at one of the other letters who said exactly this, apparently that person is too stupid to realize that if Ctrl+X modified the selected text, then selecting text would also modify the Ctrl+X text and thus completely defeat the purpose of the clipboard).
Microsoft is 100% to blame for the fact that some programs use Alt and some use Ctrl for the shortcuts. When the GUI programs were being developed, they copied the Mac. Now LOOK at a Mac, and check where the Command key is. Nobody in their right mind would use any key other than Alt to emulate that. But Microsoft is not in their right mind. Almost all MSDOS programs and most early Windows programs were "inconsistent" too and used Alt instead of the Microsoft standard of Ctrl.
If you discount old character-terminal programs like Emacs and VI (which both incidentally run on Windows and are just as "inconsistent" there) then I have never seen an X program that uses anything other than Ctrl+XCV or Alt+XCV for cut & copy & paste. There are however a lot of programs that mess with the drag & drop buffer instead of the clipboard for these actions, so I guess there are 4 arrangments.
As for data other than Text, well here Microsoft is doing a lot better. Interestingly enough, both X and Windows have almost identical mechanisms for sending data other than text (lists of atoms identifying what types are available, and the dropped-on program chooses the type to get, and the called program converts to that type). Where Microsoft was smart and X was idiots is that Microsoft ASSIGNED some symbols, such as one for a BMP image. Stupid X consortium thought these assignments would be worked out by users and so now all X has is about a dozen ways to identify text and nothing else. Fortunatly it looks like the whole idea is going to be scrapped on both systems, to a system by which the dragged data is either plain text, or a URL identifying where the data is stored. This has the huge advantage that programs can reuse code that reads/writes files to interpret the dropped data, and programs that cannot understand the URL can easily run other programs that do. Because of this massive change it may be possible for X to catch up.
If it is "pared down" then it is not Windows.
Now really, these things should be running ONE program. It listens to keystrokes and it talks to the the bank's computers (which may as well be running NT) and after much negotiation and care it then expels bills from the machine. Any possible screwup makes it "reboot" which takes 1/100 of a millesecond and consists of a jump to the start of the program.
This should NOT be running Windows. It should NOT be running Linux, or even BSD. It is pretty scary that people even consider these "solutions". Same thing for those voting machines.
Nobody in their right mind is suggesting Linux for this either. It should be something TINY like QNX.
The true anger here is at all the clueless dolts hired by these companines that know nothing except VB and so that is their solution to anything, no matter what the cost or security implications. It would be just as bad as if they hired a clueless Linux zealot who wrote the whole thing as a Perl script.
Um, yea. Didn't you read my post?
I guess you have the "everything said on Slashdot must be anti-microsoft" blinders and were confused. Sorry about that.
Hey on those apostrophe things, I can't blame them too much. I really blame the stupid standards organizations who thought that a block of useful 1-byte codes (0x80 through 0x9f) have to be reserved because some machines may strip the high bit and confuse them with control characters.
Those codes should have been filled in with the most useful punctuation marks and missing accented letters. It would be better if this had been decided more carefully, but instead the standards organizations kept trying to do the "right" thing (by their weird definition of "right" which is to make the most complex standard possible) so Microsoft (probably not with any evil intent or world-domination plan) went and filled it in with their own set, chosen to make American secretaries happy.
So too late. Those codes have been assigned by Microsoft, and it is time for the standards to realize they made a stupid mistake, and alter Unicode and ISO-8859-1 to contain the Microsoft assignments and say that is the new standard.
This is the sort of standards interopability that Billy is talking about. When the organizations are too slow or stupid to do something reasonable, I'm all for Microsoft or somebody going in there and forcing a change. As long as it is completely open and easy to copy, which these assignments are. Now what most people fear hear are closed or obfuscated "standards" and in that area Microsoft has a lot of bad history and a silly speech by Billy is not going to convince anybody they are changing their ways.
PS: I would respect Microsoft more if their software was not so stupid. So they added punctuation so that single quotes can be a different character than apostrophe, good. But then they make word so stupid that it turns all apostrophes into close single quotes, thus breaking the entire reason for this. This sort of idiocy is where Microsoft is truly evil. If it were not for competing processes, they would have pretty much changed the code for apostrophe, by accident, due to the unbelievable incompetence of some of their programmers.
Good work guys you have shown that you are stupider than Microsoft.
XML is structured. So why the hell is there "extra" structure by dividing the document up into parts, rather than just using XML?
I know, it's so the parts can be "shared" and that somehow that will save memory or something, right. The exact same thinking leads to the Linux desktop environments that need hundreds of shared libraries of exactly the right version. This feature is either not going to be used at all or will just cause users headaches when "the shared style sheet is the wrong version" errors come up.
Also to the Microsoft dolt who said the XML was large because it contains "default settings". Default settings are indicated by NOT being there!!! Moron.
I'm sorry but we are seeing crap from everybody: Microsoft, Linux desktops, other companies, standards organizations. The only projects I really can respect are perhaps the Linux kernel and some programming tools. Also Plan9 looked good, why not study how they design things?