Patents were designed for inventions that needed a machine shop to construct. The lonely inventor in his garage could design and hand-mill a sample of his machine, but could never mass-produce one. The patent allowed him to get some money by selling the rights to manufacture it to a company that could. Without the patent, the large company had a huge advantage in that the little inventor would have to construct an entire manufacturing facility, while the large company already had one.
Unfortunately for software (and also for business ideas) the costs are exactly reversed. Anybody capable of inventing something already has spent 100% of the manufacturing costs and already possesses the machinery necessary to produce the invention (ie a computer). The patent does not protect the small guy. I expect if you check you will find that there are absolutly NO examples of any single inventors owning a patent on software or business methods.
Instead patents can be used now by large companies as the only method they have to prevent the little guy from starting up. This was true before but completely dwarfed by the need for expensive manufacturing facilities, so before patents did not screw up the market.
There is also the problem that due to the average public's poor understanding of software, the equivalents of nuts and bolts are being patentened. Or a certain thread spacing on bolts is being patented after it has been adapted by virtually every manufacturer, forcing the inventor who cannot afford to license the patent to mill their own bolts and make a machine that nobody can fix because standard bolts don't fit.
Today it is impossible to write any piece of software without violating patents. Linux probably violates hundreds. Windows probably violates hundreds as well (many of the same ones as Linux). Nobody knows.
Any real invention in software is large and complex enough that it covers many pages of paper. It is easily protected by copyright. Or you can make it a trade secret and try to obfuscate the invention in the resulting product (this works very well, simple compiling seems to hide the original in a way that makes it very difficult to retrieve). There is absolutely no reason for patents in this area, their only purpose is to deprive the small inventors patents are designed to protect, and move power to those able to afford the patents.
That was my point. The problems with simple stuff prevented me from ever finding out if VMS provided technical advantages. RMS and those filenames made it impossible.
A simple C program to copy files on VMS would only copy some files, those designed to run with the C subsystem. The revelation for Unix was that this was all files.
Several people have mentioned "help" and I do remember using it. I do not remember what the problem was but "man" did work better at least on the systems I was using. The main advantage of "man" was that you could do "man blah" where blah was the name of a system call and you got information about it, and you could do "man cmd" where cmd was a shell command and you would get percise information about the switches that command took. I don't think this was true about "help" as it was set up. However "man" certainly was useless if you did not know the name of a command or call, I think "help" did much better here, but once you knew something "man" was used much more often. I have never figured out why nobody made a system that did both commands and concepts as keywords, the sets don't intersect. Man pages also had "see also" on the bottom that did not really exist in Help, I really relied on this a lot, and later Unixes where "less" cleared the screen on exit really drove me crazy because it made the "see also" stuff useless. I have to admit "help" is a much better name than "man", I think a lot of the Unix stupid names is due to the fact that they chose the obvious name for a first version of the program, and it was broken but they could not delete it without breaking scripts using it, and K&R and so on are too embarrassed to admit they made these mistakes.
Fork at least allowed me to get two programs running at the same time. I did nothing more than calculate in the background and wait for exit. But this was way more than I ever did on VMS where getting any kind of parallel execution required months of study of complex stuff.
Okay, please list all the filenames that match a name containing the ISO-8859-1 character for the lower-case german double-s. The upper-case version is two letters, "SS". Now, does "ss" match? How about "Ss" or "sS". And does this mean that any file with "ss" in it matches a file with a german double-s? And can you figure out an algorithim that reliably does this with 100% accuracy. And once you have done this, how do you prove that the file system's algorithim is doing exactly the same thing?
Now you are surely saying "but we won't change the case of the german double s". But again there is no guarantee that nobody else does. There are rules, but the rules are complicated and keep changing. Currently the most common rule for Unicode is to ignore any attempts at case matching except for the ISO-8859-1 characters that have matching case. But there are others who say that only the ASCII characters should case-match. And there are others that say that we should obey the complete rules of Unicode. Then there is UTF-8 and the fact that the same Unicode character can be encoded multiple ways. Are these equivalent?
Even in Ascii you will find systems that consider '@' and backquote to be the same character, and '[' and '{' to be the same character, due to simple bit masking algorithims. You even get sorting bugs if systems disagree about whether tolower() or toupper() is done before comparing.
The truth is that this is a terrible problem and it is complete nonsense that a bit of "user friendliness" needs to be buried in a deep part of the OS where it can complicate implementations and produce security errors.
Also there is absolutely no reason for this. People want a friendly GUI that does this for the user (and also does filename completion and spelling correction and version numbers and many other nice things) and case independence in the system is at best irrelevant, and at worst a hinderance to such things (I know as I have written file choosers for both systems and Unix is immensely easier to deal with because of this).
I worked at Dec in 1982-4 and part of that time worked with a group on porting the Clu compiler (Clu was an early smalltalk-like OO language) from BSD Unix to VMS. The calling convention really bit bad as it was as much as six times slower than what Clu was using for BSD. You could not use the Clu convention because they wanted to call existing services without a wrapper, also I think the functions relied on register layout different than VMS used, or trapped, or something.
The project apparently died because it was unreasonably slow due to the fact that the Clu compiler produced lots of function calls, like for every multiply.
So I'm not sure if the uniform calling convention is a win. Linux actually is doing ok with wrapper libraries around C code like all the Perl and Python wrapper libs.
On the shells: The NT shell (command.exe) has nothing to do with the VMS one. It was designed to be compatable with the DOS command line. The DOS command line was designed mostly to match CP/M. As far as I can tell, CP/M was mostly influenced by RSX-11M from Dec. DOS version 2.0 also introduced a lot of Unix C-shell like things into the command line. The Unix C-shell was also influenced by RSX-11M and perhaps other companies command lines from the 70's. But there is no way that the NT shell would have been influenced by the VMS one at all.
Case-insensitivity is a user-interface issue that has unfortunately infected many systems other than Unix. It is a HUGE security bug and makes programming much, much harder. This is because a program can no longer assumme that non-matching series of bytes name different files. (these bugs also infect any system that tries to interpret sequences of bytes, for instance systems that take UTF-8 but consider different encodings of the same Unicode to be equal have this problem and should be fixed).
I find it incredible that people will keep saying this crap, the same people that say "Unix is hard because you have to use the CLI". They then bring up this case-sensitivity issue, a feature that is useless except if a CLI is used. The average dummy using Windows would never notice if files were case-sensitive, and in fact would never notice if the file system allowed more than one file to have the same name!
It is also trivial to provide the ability at the program level rather than in the system. While you are at it you can provide spelling correction of file names, filename completion, and lots of other things that are enormously more user friendly than just the fact that 'a' and 'A' can be interchanged.
VMS did not let you put a lot of nice characters like space or multiple periods in the filenames, a far, far worse problem for the user than case sensitivity.
Absolutely agree. I worked on VMS at Dec and first encountered Unix when they broght in BSD Vaxen in order to port the compiler for the Clu language. This was in 1982. I (and some other people unfamiliar with Unix) were blown away by the absolutly absurd amount it was easier to program using Unix.
On Unix I could easily determine exactly what files existed with a few commands, easily open any file on the system with the same call, and parse a filename into it's parts with 3 lines of C. A program to copy a file was ten lines at most, while due to RMS "pip" on VMS was larger than any other program on the system and an absolute nightmare of bugs and patches.
It was also trivial to run a program in the background, and fork allowed me to experiment with multithreading, something that only the ultimate wizards could try on VMS.
From more advanced programmers I heard the CLU compiler used a method of calling that was as much as six times faster than the calling sequence VMS required and that one of the big problems was cutting down the number of function calls Clu generated to get the speed acceptable because of this.
Unix had "man", a way to look at documentation using the computer (another revelation at that time), and you could really find what you needed. Also all the documentation fit in two 3-ring binders, while VMS had an entire wall of books.
I never heard a single statement by anybody that Unix failed relative to VMS and I was dumbfounded that Dec did not scrap VMS right then and there and switch to this better system.
Now I was in high school, and I did not know much then. Quite likely I missed the advanced areas where VMS was better. But to a novice there was no comparison and no competition, Unix blew VMS away completely and utterly.
You do not need the DMCA to allow Apple to say "this is unsupported except on our hardware". You are implying that without the DMCA Apple has an implied guarantee that their software works on any hardware whatsoever. That is totally insane and I find it unbelievable that somebody would think this.
After reading more of this stuff, I absolutely agree with this poster. Using the DMCA is stupid. They should have used copyright law, I suspect that the store is violating it by giving away copies of Apple's software, or by giving away something that is useless unless the user violates Apple's copyright by copying the software themselves.
Copyright law is well respected here as it is the basis of the GPL.
This is a good question. It does seem that it is impossible to prevent this because that would clearly violate free-speech laws.
However it requires distributing the code so the receiver can see how it works. I think anything where you precompile the code could be defied as a derived work (because the compiler incorporated information from the copyrighted header files) so it is almost impossible to obscure your code.
But it does seem you can put rules on the code like "you can't give it to anybody else" which seems not in the spirit of the GPL.
I would think that because of this reason, ALL GPL code can be considered LGPL for programs that use it and are distributed as source code.
None of these are problems, they are allowed under the GPL.
The GPL does not restrict *use* of the software in any way. What it restricts is the *distribution* of software. You can link a piece of GPL code with closed software. So can the person you give your copy to. This is OK, no matter how much MicroSoft tries to claim it is not.
What you are not allowed to do is modify the GPL software so it only works when linked to the closed-source software and then give that modified copy away. You have then violated the rules of the GPL about when you are allowed to give copies away, therefore it reverts back to copyright law and you are violating US (or whatever countrie's) copyright laws.
I think that was the "Discovery", the ship going to Jupiter, that they considered making bomb-powered, and in the end certainly had some sort of nuclear engines. They tried to put the huge fins needed for heat dispersal onto it but they never looked good so they left them off in the movie.
The shuttle was always intented to be chemical powered, I think, unless those are some sort of nuclear rockets.
Before this argument goes to far, this poster is exactly right in the common thinking before about 1998. Like usual MicroSoft messed things up and now everybody accusses everybody else of being inconsistent because some of them follow the old convention and some follow MicroSoft, rather than putting the blame on MicroSoft where it belongs.
There are exactly two types of these exit boxes. Before Windows 98 everybody used the "Exit without saving text?" question. Try an old Macintosh if you do not believe me. "Yes" meant exit and discard the text, "no" returned you back to the program exactly as though you had not tried to exit. Though there are variations in the question and in the two buttons, I never saw any other type of exit box before 98.
The other type is the "Changes not saved" with "save", "dont save", and "cancel" buttons. Again the question is worded differently and the buttons are different, but the idea is that you can hit a button that is like going back to the program, saving this document, then exiting again. The other two buttons are the same as the yes and no in the previous versions. The problem here is that a lot of time the yes/no is swapped randomly, as the question is worded "Save this text before exiting?". I have lost untold amounts of data because I instantly hit "no" when I think I made a mistake, this three-button exit panel is a serious user interface goof. More recently they have realized this and changed the buttons to "save" and "don't save" though escape is often the don't save button so you can still screw yourself.
The exact same thing is true of Alt verses Ctrl for menu shortcuts. Until Windows 95 EVERYBODY (including MicroSoft) used Alt as the meta key for menu items. Take a look at some old software someday before you start accussing Linux GUI of being inconsistent!
No, you think about exactly what a piece of technology that refuses to allow you to record a piece of copyrighted music will do.
Think about the current state of artificial intelligence, and try to figure out if they are really, really, going to be able to make a system that works that does not prevent independent music and non-copyrighted music to be recorded.
The fact is that the sky is going to fall, and sane people are going to have to realize this NOW. All information and communication is going to be eventually tied up and censored in ways that Stalin could only dream of, and our government and our corporations are making this happen right now. This is serious shit and denying it is not what is needed.
Despite the fact that they kill cute puppies, I have to respect the fact that they were smart enough to find the simple, technical, and completely legal way to get what they wanted, rather than throwing lawyers at the problem and costing both themselves and you a trememdous amount of money.
What? Any such scam would not involve "deep linking". It would involve replicating the American Cancer Society web site completely. Links to the real site would be a giveaway both to an alert user and to the American Cancer Society.
What I meant is that you were not allowed, for your $100, to redistribute the source code at all. You could compile your own version and distribute the binary. Anybody who wanted to look at the source code, even your version, had to fork over the $100. This is clearly in violation of what RMS considers correct, although others (including maybe me) consider it ok.
I am not sure of the actual requirements of X, that is just what I seem to remember.
As far as I know neither the way NeWS or the way X was distributed would be considered truly free by the FSF.
I think getting access to NeWS required a very large amount of money and a NDA-style contract so I don't think anybody would consider this free.
My understanding of X is that you were not allowed to do anything unless you paid the $100. I think this violates the rules of the FSF for a true Free software (because it limits the ability to redistribute the source code) but for a lot of people this would be considered reasonably free.
Making amateur filmmaking (and music recording) illegal is the whole point of this.
Don't be fooled by all this "pirate" stuff, none of this stuff is going to do the tiniest bit to change piracy. Real pirates in Asia who are making money on duplicated disks do not care about encryption (they copy the entire disk), can steal or threaten or bribe to get any piece of technology they need, and certainly don't care about DMCA type laws (they are breaking far more serious ones).
The MPAA/RIAA are well aware that they are not going to have one iota of change on how much piracy is happening. And they are not stupid, they would not waste the time, money, and effort, and bad publicity, of these schemes if it were not for a higher goal.
That goal is to make all possible competitors illegal by making any kind of recording device where the data can be removed or played back on any device other than the original recorder illegal.
Re:A Miasma of Bad Science
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Going Up?
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Yes I think it would slow down, by an infintesimal amount, if you assumme the cable is made out of mass that used to lie on the surface of the earth. I'm not sure what would happen if the counterweight or cable were made from mass that was not part of earth (such as an asteroid), though. Anybody know?
Re:Design Problem? Here's the design problem:
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 2
The cable is tied to something *higher* than geosynchronous orbit, and travelling faster than something at that orbit level would. It works like swinging a rock tied to a string around your head. The string is kept straight.
Anything let go from this far end would be travelling faster than orbital speed. Apparently it is fast enough that it is escape velocity from Earth and thus the cable can be used to "throw" things to other planets.
Several posters here have said that IE on the Mac is one of the best programs for CSS2 (and whatever) standards support out there. So this is well known.
This also implies that it must be a different code base than IE on Windows. In that case, is it really all that compatable with IE? I would not be suprised if Mozilla/Gecko are more compatable with Windows IE because they had a need to test sites and get as many as possible to work, while MicroSoft had no incentive to do such testing since it would have no effect on how many copies of Mac IE they sold.
Does anybody know of sites that work on Windows IE that don't work on Mac IE (ignoring windows-only plugins, of course). Are there any examples of sites that don't work on Mac IE that work in Mozilla?
It is quite possible that AOL is risking nothing by switching the Mac version to Gecko. In fact they may be reducing their risk.
Actually the first implementation was pretty good. The second version (that most people saw) was seriously broken by an attempt to make it X11 compatable in a parallel way (rather than emulate X11 atop it like was first attempted).
The real reason NeWS died was that the source code was not open. For $100 you could buy a tape from the X consortium and that gave you the right to produce your own version of an X server (note it was not free-as-in-beer, but "open", RMS would disagree about open because there were limits on what you could do with the code, but most people would call it "open".) I'm not sure what Sun wanted, but only SGI was able to afford it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately for software (and also for business ideas) the costs are exactly reversed. Anybody capable of inventing something already has spent 100% of the manufacturing costs and already possesses the machinery necessary to produce the invention (ie a computer). The patent does not protect the small guy. I expect if you check you will find that there are absolutly NO examples of any single inventors owning a patent on software or business methods.
Instead patents can be used now by large companies as the only method they have to prevent the little guy from starting up. This was true before but completely dwarfed by the need for expensive manufacturing facilities, so before patents did not screw up the market.
There is also the problem that due to the average public's poor understanding of software, the equivalents of nuts and bolts are being patentened. Or a certain thread spacing on bolts is being patented after it has been adapted by virtually every manufacturer, forcing the inventor who cannot afford to license the patent to mill their own bolts and make a machine that nobody can fix because standard bolts don't fit.
Today it is impossible to write any piece of software without violating patents. Linux probably violates hundreds. Windows probably violates hundreds as well (many of the same ones as Linux). Nobody knows.
Any real invention in software is large and complex enough that it covers many pages of paper. It is easily protected by copyright. Or you can make it a trade secret and try to obfuscate the invention in the resulting product (this works very well, simple compiling seems to hide the original in a way that makes it very difficult to retrieve). There is absolutely no reason for patents in this area, their only purpose is to deprive the small inventors patents are designed to protect, and move power to those able to afford the patents.
That was my point. The problems with simple stuff prevented me from ever finding out if VMS provided technical advantages. RMS and those filenames made it impossible.
Several people have mentioned "help" and I do remember using it. I do not remember what the problem was but "man" did work better at least on the systems I was using. The main advantage of "man" was that you could do "man blah" where blah was the name of a system call and you got information about it, and you could do "man cmd" where cmd was a shell command and you would get percise information about the switches that command took. I don't think this was true about "help" as it was set up. However "man" certainly was useless if you did not know the name of a command or call, I think "help" did much better here, but once you knew something "man" was used much more often. I have never figured out why nobody made a system that did both commands and concepts as keywords, the sets don't intersect. Man pages also had "see also" on the bottom that did not really exist in Help, I really relied on this a lot, and later Unixes where "less" cleared the screen on exit really drove me crazy because it made the "see also" stuff useless. I have to admit "help" is a much better name than "man", I think a lot of the Unix stupid names is due to the fact that they chose the obvious name for a first version of the program, and it was broken but they could not delete it without breaking scripts using it, and K&R and so on are too embarrassed to admit they made these mistakes.
Fork at least allowed me to get two programs running at the same time. I did nothing more than calculate in the background and wait for exit. But this was way more than I ever did on VMS where getting any kind of parallel execution required months of study of complex stuff.
Now you are surely saying "but we won't change the case of the german double s". But again there is no guarantee that nobody else does. There are rules, but the rules are complicated and keep changing. Currently the most common rule for Unicode is to ignore any attempts at case matching except for the ISO-8859-1 characters that have matching case. But there are others who say that only the ASCII characters should case-match. And there are others that say that we should obey the complete rules of Unicode. Then there is UTF-8 and the fact that the same Unicode character can be encoded multiple ways. Are these equivalent?
Even in Ascii you will find systems that consider '@' and backquote to be the same character, and '[' and '{' to be the same character, due to simple bit masking algorithims. You even get sorting bugs if systems disagree about whether tolower() or toupper() is done before comparing.
The truth is that this is a terrible problem and it is complete nonsense that a bit of "user friendliness" needs to be buried in a deep part of the OS where it can complicate implementations and produce security errors.
Also there is absolutely no reason for this. People want a friendly GUI that does this for the user (and also does filename completion and spelling correction and version numbers and many other nice things) and case independence in the system is at best irrelevant, and at worst a hinderance to such things (I know as I have written file choosers for both systems and Unix is immensely easier to deal with because of this).
The project apparently died because it was unreasonably slow due to the fact that the Clu compiler produced lots of function calls, like for every multiply.
So I'm not sure if the uniform calling convention is a win. Linux actually is doing ok with wrapper libraries around C code like all the Perl and Python wrapper libs.
On the shells: The NT shell (command.exe) has nothing to do with the VMS one. It was designed to be compatable with the DOS command line. The DOS command line was designed mostly to match CP/M. As far as I can tell, CP/M was mostly influenced by RSX-11M from Dec. DOS version 2.0 also introduced a lot of Unix C-shell like things into the command line. The Unix C-shell was also influenced by RSX-11M and perhaps other companies command lines from the 70's. But there is no way that the NT shell would have been influenced by the VMS one at all.
I find it incredible that people will keep saying this crap, the same people that say "Unix is hard because you have to use the CLI". They then bring up this case-sensitivity issue, a feature that is useless except if a CLI is used. The average dummy using Windows would never notice if files were case-sensitive, and in fact would never notice if the file system allowed more than one file to have the same name!
It is also trivial to provide the ability at the program level rather than in the system. While you are at it you can provide spelling correction of file names, filename completion, and lots of other things that are enormously more user friendly than just the fact that 'a' and 'A' can be interchanged.
VMS did not let you put a lot of nice characters like space or multiple periods in the filenames, a far, far worse problem for the user than case sensitivity.
On Unix I could easily determine exactly what files existed with a few commands, easily open any file on the system with the same call, and parse a filename into it's parts with 3 lines of C. A program to copy a file was ten lines at most, while due to RMS "pip" on VMS was larger than any other program on the system and an absolute nightmare of bugs and patches.
It was also trivial to run a program in the background, and fork allowed me to experiment with multithreading, something that only the ultimate wizards could try on VMS.
From more advanced programmers I heard the CLU compiler used a method of calling that was as much as six times faster than the calling sequence VMS required and that one of the big problems was cutting down the number of function calls Clu generated to get the speed acceptable because of this.
Unix had "man", a way to look at documentation using the computer (another revelation at that time), and you could really find what you needed. Also all the documentation fit in two 3-ring binders, while VMS had an entire wall of books.
I never heard a single statement by anybody that Unix failed relative to VMS and I was dumbfounded that Dec did not scrap VMS right then and there and switch to this better system.
Now I was in high school, and I did not know much then. Quite likely I missed the advanced areas where VMS was better. But to a novice there was no comparison and no competition, Unix blew VMS away completely and utterly.
This does seem simple enough that it should be fixed, even if it is some IE non-standard.
You do not need the DMCA to allow Apple to say "this is unsupported except on our hardware". You are implying that without the DMCA Apple has an implied guarantee that their software works on any hardware whatsoever. That is totally insane and I find it unbelievable that somebody would think this.
Copyright law is well respected here as it is the basis of the GPL.
However it requires distributing the code so the receiver can see how it works. I think anything where you precompile the code could be defied as a derived work (because the compiler incorporated information from the copyrighted header files) so it is almost impossible to obscure your code.
But it does seem you can put rules on the code like "you can't give it to anybody else" which seems not in the spirit of the GPL.
I would think that because of this reason, ALL GPL code can be considered LGPL for programs that use it and are distributed as source code.
The GPL does not restrict *use* of the software in any way. What it restricts is the *distribution* of software. You can link a piece of GPL code with closed software. So can the person you give your copy to. This is OK, no matter how much MicroSoft tries to claim it is not.
What you are not allowed to do is modify the GPL software so it only works when linked to the closed-source software and then give that modified copy away. You have then violated the rules of the GPL about when you are allowed to give copies away, therefore it reverts back to copyright law and you are violating US (or whatever countrie's) copyright laws.
I think that was the "Discovery", the ship going to Jupiter, that they considered making bomb-powered, and in the end certainly had some sort of nuclear engines. They tried to put the huge fins needed for heat dispersal onto it but they never looked good so they left them off in the movie.
The shuttle was always intented to be chemical powered, I think, unless those are some sort of nuclear rockets.
There are exactly two types of these exit boxes. Before Windows 98 everybody used the "Exit without saving text?" question. Try an old Macintosh if you do not believe me. "Yes" meant exit and discard the text, "no" returned you back to the program exactly as though you had not tried to exit. Though there are variations in the question and in the two buttons, I never saw any other type of exit box before 98.
The other type is the "Changes not saved" with "save", "dont save", and "cancel" buttons. Again the question is worded differently and the buttons are different, but the idea is that you can hit a button that is like going back to the program, saving this document, then exiting again. The other two buttons are the same as the yes and no in the previous versions. The problem here is that a lot of time the yes/no is swapped randomly, as the question is worded "Save this text before exiting?". I have lost untold amounts of data because I instantly hit "no" when I think I made a mistake, this three-button exit panel is a serious user interface goof. More recently they have realized this and changed the buttons to "save" and "don't save" though escape is often the don't save button so you can still screw yourself.
The exact same thing is true of Alt verses Ctrl for menu shortcuts. Until Windows 95 EVERYBODY (including MicroSoft) used Alt as the meta key for menu items. Take a look at some old software someday before you start accussing Linux GUI of being inconsistent!
Think about the current state of artificial intelligence, and try to figure out if they are really, really, going to be able to make a system that works that does not prevent independent music and non-copyrighted music to be recorded.
The fact is that the sky is going to fall, and sane people are going to have to realize this NOW. All information and communication is going to be eventually tied up and censored in ways that Stalin could only dream of, and our government and our corporations are making this happen right now. This is serious shit and denying it is not what is needed.
Despite the fact that they kill cute puppies, I have to respect the fact that they were smart enough to find the simple, technical, and completely legal way to get what they wanted, rather than throwing lawyers at the problem and costing both themselves and you a trememdous amount of money.
What? Any such scam would not involve "deep linking". It would involve replicating the American Cancer Society web site completely. Links to the real site would be a giveaway both to an alert user and to the American Cancer Society.
I am not sure of the actual requirements of X, that is just what I seem to remember.
As far as I know neither the way NeWS or the way X was distributed would be considered truly free by the FSF.
I think getting access to NeWS required a very large amount of money and a NDA-style contract so I don't think anybody would consider this free.
My understanding of X is that you were not allowed to do anything unless you paid the $100. I think this violates the rules of the FSF for a true Free software (because it limits the ability to redistribute the source code) but for a lot of people this would be considered reasonably free.
Don't be fooled by all this "pirate" stuff, none of this stuff is going to do the tiniest bit to change piracy. Real pirates in Asia who are making money on duplicated disks do not care about encryption (they copy the entire disk), can steal or threaten or bribe to get any piece of technology they need, and certainly don't care about DMCA type laws (they are breaking far more serious ones).
The MPAA/RIAA are well aware that they are not going to have one iota of change on how much piracy is happening. And they are not stupid, they would not waste the time, money, and effort, and bad publicity, of these schemes if it were not for a higher goal.
That goal is to make all possible competitors illegal by making any kind of recording device where the data can be removed or played back on any device other than the original recorder illegal.
Yes I think it would slow down, by an infintesimal amount, if you assumme the cable is made out of mass that used to lie on the surface of the earth. I'm not sure what would happen if the counterweight or cable were made from mass that was not part of earth (such as an asteroid), though. Anybody know?
Anything let go from this far end would be travelling faster than orbital speed. Apparently it is fast enough that it is escape velocity from Earth and thus the cable can be used to "throw" things to other planets.
This also implies that it must be a different code base than IE on Windows. In that case, is it really all that compatable with IE? I would not be suprised if Mozilla/Gecko are more compatable with Windows IE because they had a need to test sites and get as many as possible to work, while MicroSoft had no incentive to do such testing since it would have no effect on how many copies of Mac IE they sold.
Does anybody know of sites that work on Windows IE that don't work on Mac IE (ignoring windows-only plugins, of course). Are there any examples of sites that don't work on Mac IE that work in Mozilla?
It is quite possible that AOL is risking nothing by switching the Mac version to Gecko. In fact they may be reducing their risk.
The real reason NeWS died was that the source code was not open. For $100 you could buy a tape from the X consortium and that gave you the right to produce your own version of an X server (note it was not free-as-in-beer, but "open", RMS would disagree about open because there were limits on what you could do with the code, but most people would call it "open".) I'm not sure what Sun wanted, but only SGI was able to afford it.