A lot of the responders here seem confused as to what X resources are, thinking they have something to do with Xt or that Xt is required. Xt bloated it up horribly, but the useful part is defined in Xlib. Having seen some of the ugly stuff people use for "resources" now, especially that awful "INI" format, makes me respect what was done a lot.
The X resources are a single block of text, usually copied from a file in your home directory when X starts up. This text is put on a property of the root window (XA_RESOURCE_MANAGER) and the only actual communication is to get the entire text sent over the wire to the application (thus it should not be huge, certainly not like Xt wants it to be).
Xlib provides a single call to make it easier to use this block of text as a database (and also to cache the copy of the database in local memory):
const char* XGetDefault(Display*, const char* A, const char* B)
If the two strings are "A" and "B" the above function searches the data for a line of the form A.B:{whitespace}C and returns a pointer to C. It returns null if not found.
It is common that A is a word naming your application and B is the name of a piece of your application. B may contain periods but there is no need to obey any of the Xt rules, Xlib does not care. If the entry is not found, you should change A and try again. Usually A is changed to "*". So "*.background: blue" could set all programs blue, while "Clock.background: red" will make the clock red.
Xresources are quite useful for appearance preferences. Unlike Xt (or Windows' registry, which has the same problems) they should not be used for required options.
The big missing element is that there is no standard for X resource names. However I think a good start would be to use KDE's "affect other Xlib applications" and use what it writes to the resources for it's color settings as a standard.
I have looked at this some. The main addition I would do is to allow images for widget backgrounds to be specified by X pixmap number, this requires another program to maintain the pixmaps and modify the resource database, but avoids the need to put code for reading images into all the programs and allows the pixmaps to be shared.
If MicroSoft's player played QT movies, that would remove any incentive for sites to use MicroSoft's format (since the QT movies would play anywhere, and even a tiny precentage increase in sites would be worth it if the support required zero effort). I would think this would be an enormous win for Apple, since they could still control the *trademark* of QT and thus a lot of mindshare. MicroSoft would likely compete by either releasing information about their format, or at least making a Macintosh player (maybe even a Linux one) which would be a good thing too.
My real complaint is that everybody thinks that whatever MicroSoft does is "standard" and "consistent". Yet X does exactly the same thing and nobody seems to think any big deal about it.
In fact, on my Irix machine, I can type Alt+F4 and IT CLOSES THE WINDOW. In fact it is the same for every application, since the window manager does it! I thought maybe this was a problem with different window managers, so I tried my Linux box running an old FVWM and (suprise!) Alt+F4 does the same thing! And it seems to work under KDE, too (granted they copy windows). It did not work under Gnome, and it does not work on my own window manager (flwm), but that was because I was unaware of this shortcut being a standard.
Yet nobody goes around claiming that X is some great model of user interface consistency. In fact I bet if MicroSoft had been smart enough to use Alt+Q or something, everybody would be pointing at X and saying "they are so stupid they use an unintuitive thing like Alt+F4". But MicroSoft does it and everybody says "look how consistent they are".
In fact I was totally unaware that MicroSoft had copied the CDE keybindings. I thought the correct way to quit was to pick the "quit" or "exit" off the applications menu. This does not seem to be Alt+F4, but seems to be Ctrl+Q or Alt+Q, depending on the application, exactly as inconsistent as all the modern X programs, and exactly the same problem you are complaining about!
"Geeks" put the words "ON" and "OFF" on the power switches. If you don't believe me, please look at ANY computer equipment manufactured before 1983.
This 1/0 nonsense is entirely the result of non-geeks, ie. management. They were the ones that insisted that there should be an "internationalized icon language". Any self-respecting geek would have said "Well at least the word 'ON' is understood by some fraction of the Earth's population, while your symbol is understood by none".
It is quite scary that people like you now believe the foibles of management and political-correctness were actually caused by the "geeks". It is us poor "geeks" who are fighting this losing battle day and night.
I did not know that Alt+F4 was "quit" on Windoze. In fact I have an NT machine right here, and it appears that Alt+Q quits most of the programs (some seem to need Ctrl+Q). Oh, wait! There it is, on the "close box menu" or "window menu" or whatever. Alt+F4... hmm that's really intuitively obvious, seeing that I have never used it.
But where does Alt+F4 come from? Could it be? NOOOO! It comes from the CDE desktop environment! (try it, type Alt+F4 to MWM!). Gee, who is copying who?
In reality it is MicroSoft that is screwing up. Why do some programs use Ctrl+Q and some use Alt+Q? Well, the Macintosh, the first one to really insist on standardization between programs, used "Apple+Q". Take a look at an older Macintosh keyboard, and take a look at a PC keyboard from the same era. Gosh, which key is in the same place as the "Apple" key? Could it be: ALT? Well guess what: long before Windows 3.1, people were copying the Mac interface on X and there was NO QUESTION as to what key to use, they all used Alt+Q to quit (and Alt+X to cut, etc).
Even Windoze 3.0 used Alt+letter for items on the menu. However MSWord used Ctrl+letter for many editing functions. Somebody realized that an easy way to be user-friendly was to make those editing functions appear on the menu. But rather than say "well a menu shortcut can use either Alt or Ctrl" they starting switching ALL of them. And they made Alt "navigate" to the menu, thus making it making it difficult to press it and then decide "I don't want to do that" and release, reducing the ability of the shortcuts to do anything.
Actually what we really need is a command-line Lightwave *renderer* ported to Linux. Currently we have a several-hundred machine renderfarm and are forced to run NT on this just so it can render Lightwave. All other software of interest would work on Linux (mostly RenderMan and in-house stuff). Linux occupies about 1/10th the memory (because it is not running X) and the NFS performance is far better, and the filenames can be the same on all machines, thus making a huge win for us if we could use Linux. But NewTek definately has said they will not do this.
It does seem odd that NewTek, once huge proponents of the Amiga, now refuse to consider alternative systems...
I still think it has to be in the server. I cannot see any other way to efficiently take advantage of new hardware, or to allow efficient remote rendering. Also huge amounts of data (like true-type fonts) can be cached only in a single place without weird and complex communication protocols, if the server does it.
There will be a client-side API that hides where the rendering is being done. This is necessary so that the interface can be emulated atop X (like Mesa does). But unless there is some promise that this is going to move to the server, there is very little incentive to try to figure out these libraries.
I'm going to be very blunt here. This stuff should be IN THE X SERVER!!!.
I don't want to link with a giant imaging library for all my programs, I don't want to send image maps to X for all my drawing, and I really want my advanced imaging model to be able to take advantage of advanced hardware!
If the code exists, lets put somewhere where a mortal programmer can actually figure out how to use it, and better programmers may have a slight chance of improving it! It is absolutely disgusting that we have a worse graphics interface that NT, or than NeWS (which was created in 1983!). And it is quite alarming that people are saying that gigantic shared libraries running in my program's memory space will save us. It is theroetically possible to draw everything using a library that calls XDrawPoint(), that does not mean it is a good idea!
PS: although there is a lot of push for it because "thats how MicroSoft did it", there is no need for X to do printing. What is needed is the ability to send *IDENTICAL* streams to two different things and get an image on the screen and on the printer. The screen thing can be a wrapper driver around the lower-level X interface.
I can't blame MS for adding open/close quote characters to the 8-bit character set (they really are in demand by normal users, and there is no reason for the "C1 hole" in the character set). It actually is a good idea and they are in the position to force this to be a standard and adopted everywhere.
But their implementation of "smart quotes" shows just how bad of programmers they are, they took a reasonable idea and completely broke it.
Their so-called "smart" quotes puts a single-close-quote in where apostrophes go. This violates their own description of the character set, and breaks typography where apostrophe is different than close quote (and also breaks all search engines for words with apostrophe in them).
It really should not be very hard for "smart" quotes to only put in a single close if there is a matching open single close before it, or if locality is required, that there is a non-letter after the apostrophe.
But this broken implementation probably "looks ok" to the normal dumb user, so they just ignore it. Or possibly they are completely unaware of it.
For what it's worth, Microsoft has allowed many domains to include its trademarks for years -- windows95.com and activex.com are two examples
There are lots of domains with Linux in them too. I think Microsoft would be justified to stop things if somebody tried to sell "windows95.com", or used it to point at some page that has nothing to do with MicroSoft or Windows or attacked them, or perhaps provided false information that misled consumers.
If somebody does "window95sux.com" and uses it to attack MicroSoft, I don't think MicroSoft can do anything about that, since it is obvious from the URL that it is not an official site. Same thing goes for "linuxsucks.com".
Taskbar: I would agree with the taskbar. Microsoft did make IMHO two major innovations that I have not seen before, though they seem obvious now:
1. There is an "icon" even if the window is open. This idea seems to have eluded all the X and Mac (and the older Windoze) designers for years. Everybody else was convinced that the window icon should only be visible if the window was "iconized".
2. They finally realized that the TEXT is important, far more important than some image "icon". Though they did not get rid of the image, which might have been far too daring, they did shrink it down a lot, so that it is almost invisible. (now if only they would do that for their "desktop icons".
MicroSoft also made a major innovation in making a desktop design that got rid of a divider line between the "window border" and the window contents. I actually did this many years earlier with some work I did on the NeXT machine, and I'm sure others did, but it was never seen in a real product until Windows 95.
I would not call Plug&Play an innovation, the idea is rather obvious and apparently the implementation is bogus, seeing as to how much trouble they are having. Working around bad original machine design, no matter how difficult, is really not innovative since it is obvious it needs to be done.
DirectX is also pretty obvious. Apparently there are no real clever ideas in the enormous amount of interface that DirectX defines. For instance it is rather uniformly believed that OpenGL provides a superior 3-D interface, it would seem MicroSoft could have "innovated" something better, seeing as they had all of OpenGL already existing to refer to!
I believe Office contains many innovations in GUI. MicroSoft did invent the Shift+navigation to extend text selections. Also the use of squiggly lines to indicate spelling errors and many other little things that have greatly expanded the common knowledge database of graphical icons, making it easier for programs to present information without lots of "help" info.
"MDI" was designed for Windows 3.1 (or earlier) as a technique to avoid swapping in inactive applications. This was because the user could move around the "documents" and resize or iconize them, and no exposure events would be sent to anything other than other documents belonging to the same program, or the base mdi window. This was vitally important to get around the very slow swap-the-entire-task-to-disk multitasking used by Windows 3.1 (required by back compatability with MSDOS). Of course resizing or moving the "mdi" window caused swapping, this was discouraged by having it come up maximized initially (this behavior disappeared with Windows 95).
There is absolutely no other reason for MDI. There was no precedent in any user interface existing before it, or in previous versions of Windows (which tried to do CMU-style tiled windows to solve the problem).
24fps was originally used because it was the LOWEST framerate that could fool the brain.
Actually, no. The original filmmakers were so cheap that most silent films were filmed at more like 18 fps. Yea, it blinked, but it saved film. The standard was raised to 24fps because the optical sound track did not have sufficient quality unless the film was made to move faster!
Also, your brain can easily see 24fps flicker. The projectors have a spinning shutter that blocks the light twice per frame (once when the frame moves, and once while it is sitting still), just so the flicker is at 48fps. I remember that old 18 fps super-8 projectors had a three vane shutter so that it blinked 54fps, even though the picture only changed 18 times, so you would not see the flicker, I would guess that old silent movie projectors did this, too.
In any case, one big advantage of 48fps or more film projection is that the extra shutter is eliminated, which means a lot more light reaches the screen, making the image brighter. Digital projection also wins here, as there is no shutter at all so (with the mirror chips) almost all the lamp's light hits the screen.
Re:What about the following FUD?
on
Stopping the FUD
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· Score: 1
That is NOT "FUD". "FUD" is when information is distorted or not true.
It is an absolute statement of fact that most hardware manufacturers, including the DVD and USB people, do not support Linux. Every single person working with Linux, including it's most ardent supporters, would agree with this 100%. Thus this is not "FUD".
What is "FUD" is distorting the truth. And you have just done so. You have pretty much said "Linux supporters call anything negative said about their systems FUD". THAT IS NOT TRUE. READ THE PARAGRAPH I JUST TYPED and stop being a child.
Re:Of Keyboards and Repeat
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 1
Since the CapsLock key does not allow you to type shifted punctuation like '#' or '!' or '?' it does not actaully avoid the need for Chords or help handicapped people at all.
It does seem perfectly legal to say that your warranty does not apply if the user modifies the source code and tries to use it.
Re:I think that what Maxtor did is great.
on
FreeBSD at COMDEX
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· Score: 1
If you want to use my GPL code in your closed product, YOU CAN PAY ME!
Or perhaps the fact that I can release the code under multiple licences has not sunk into your thick head yet.
I want people to freely see my code, but if they want to close it up they had better pay! You want to steal my code, and are trying to make it sound like it is my fault (or RMS's) that you can't. Well, sorry, no, it is YOUR fault.
From patches I have seen (mostly for Linux, of course) it appears the main culprit is sprintf or vsprintf.
These can be replaced with snprintf and vsnprintf... oops! Only if you have glibc, does not appear to be in the VC++ libraries:-) (to be honest they are also missing from Irix and many Unixes).
strncat and strncpy are both too hard to use because of brain-dead original implementations and the need to be compatable (strncpy *always* copies n characters, which is a waste of time, and strncat truncates the *addition* at n, rather than the total length). Then again we live with strchr returning null instead of a pointer to the null and many other atrocities.
There are in fact 4 things the user of my GPL'd software can do:
1) release their software under the GPL
2) remove the GPL'd code
3) not release the software
4) Pay me $150,000 so that I release my GPL'd software under a different parallel license that they can use.
Option 4 is allowed under the GPL! The "General Public Virus" whiners want to eliminate this option: they want to deprive me of my rights to make money or do what I want with my code! They want to remove the very rights they pretend to "defend".
PS: I in fact write LGPL library software. The biggest problem with a GPL library is that if there is a proprietary (and probably Windoze-specific) equivalent library, commercial software will use it and probably just say "we can't port to Linux". End-user software should be GPL if possible.
I if I write a cool Smart Media Divice driver do I have to realse it to the rest of the world? Under GPL I think I do
No. Linux explicitly allows binary closed-source "modules" (ie device drivers).
If you need to modify the actual kernel source to use your module, you have to release that code. Most likely that code is not going to reveal your Kool Secret Stuff (TM), since it just calls some new module interface. I think you will get some pretty nasty remarks from OSS if you do this and your code will never go into the main source, so try to avoid this.
PS: This is all my opinion, I don't know for sure.
Is "how to write a driver for the Mac" open? If it is, I would expect this information to be useful for writing a good Mac driver, too!
Even more shocking, some day soon somebody is going to write a better Windoze driver than the one shipped, for one of these cards that released their specs. This I think will be the big clue needed to convince the hardware manufacuters that it just may not kill them to reveal how to talk to their device.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, there is this amazing technology called static linking. Perhaps you've heard of it. I think it was invented about 1955.
The X resources are a single block of text, usually copied from a file in your home directory when X starts up. This text is put on a property of the root window (XA_RESOURCE_MANAGER) and the only actual communication is to get the entire text sent over the wire to the application (thus it should not be huge, certainly not like Xt wants it to be).
Xlib provides a single call to make it easier to use this block of text as a database (and also to cache the copy of the database in local memory):
const char* XGetDefault(Display*, const char* A, const char* B)
If the two strings are "A" and "B" the above function searches the data for a line of the form A.B:{whitespace}C and returns a pointer to C. It returns null if not found.
It is common that A is a word naming your application and B is the name of a piece of your application. B may contain periods but there is no need to obey any of the Xt rules, Xlib does not care. If the entry is not found, you should change A and try again. Usually A is changed to "*". So "*.background: blue" could set all programs blue, while "Clock.background: red" will make the clock red.
Xresources are quite useful for appearance preferences. Unlike Xt (or Windows' registry, which has the same problems) they should not be used for required options.
The big missing element is that there is no standard for X resource names. However I think a good start would be to use KDE's "affect other Xlib applications" and use what it writes to the resources for it's color settings as a standard.
I have looked at this some. The main addition I would do is to allow images for widget backgrounds to be specified by X pixmap number, this requires another program to maintain the pixmaps and modify the resource database, but avoids the need to put code for reading images into all the programs and allows the pixmaps to be shared.
If MicroSoft's player played QT movies, that would remove any incentive for sites to use MicroSoft's format (since the QT movies would play anywhere, and even a tiny precentage increase in sites would be worth it if the support required zero effort). I would think this would be an enormous win for Apple, since they could still control the *trademark* of QT and thus a lot of mindshare. MicroSoft would likely compete by either releasing information about their format, or at least making a Macintosh player (maybe even a Linux one) which would be a good thing too.
In fact, on my Irix machine, I can type Alt+F4 and IT CLOSES THE WINDOW. In fact it is the same for every application, since the window manager does it! I thought maybe this was a problem with different window managers, so I tried my Linux box running an old FVWM and (suprise!) Alt+F4 does the same thing! And it seems to work under KDE, too (granted they copy windows). It did not work under Gnome, and it does not work on my own window manager (flwm), but that was because I was unaware of this shortcut being a standard.
Yet nobody goes around claiming that X is some great model of user interface consistency. In fact I bet if MicroSoft had been smart enough to use Alt+Q or something, everybody would be pointing at X and saying "they are so stupid they use an unintuitive thing like Alt+F4". But MicroSoft does it and everybody says "look how consistent they are".
In fact I was totally unaware that MicroSoft had copied the CDE keybindings. I thought the correct way to quit was to pick the "quit" or "exit" off the applications menu. This does not seem to be Alt+F4, but seems to be Ctrl+Q or Alt+Q, depending on the application, exactly as inconsistent as all the modern X programs, and exactly the same problem you are complaining about!
"Geeks" put the words "ON" and "OFF" on the power switches. If you don't believe me, please look at ANY computer equipment manufactured before 1983.
This 1/0 nonsense is entirely the result of non-geeks, ie. management. They were the ones that insisted that there should be an "internationalized icon language". Any self-respecting geek would have said "Well at least the word 'ON' is understood by some fraction of the Earth's population, while your symbol is understood by none".
It is quite scary that people like you now believe the foibles of management and political-correctness were actually caused by the "geeks". It is us poor "geeks" who are fighting this losing battle day and night.
I did not know that Alt+F4 was "quit" on Windoze. In fact I have an NT machine right here, and it appears that Alt+Q quits most of the programs (some seem to need Ctrl+Q). Oh, wait! There it is, on the "close box menu" or "window menu" or whatever. Alt+F4... hmm that's really intuitively obvious, seeing that I have never used it.
But where does Alt+F4 come from? Could it be? NOOOO! It comes from the CDE desktop environment! (try it, type Alt+F4 to MWM!). Gee, who is copying who?
In reality it is MicroSoft that is screwing up. Why do some programs use Ctrl+Q and some use Alt+Q? Well, the Macintosh, the first one to really insist on standardization between programs, used "Apple+Q". Take a look at an older Macintosh keyboard, and take a look at a PC keyboard from the same era. Gosh, which key is in the same place as the "Apple" key? Could it be: ALT? Well guess what: long before Windows 3.1, people were copying the Mac interface on X and there was NO QUESTION as to what key to use, they all used Alt+Q to quit (and Alt+X to cut, etc).
Even Windoze 3.0 used Alt+letter for items on the menu. However MSWord used Ctrl+letter for many editing functions. Somebody realized that an easy way to be user-friendly was to make those editing functions appear on the menu. But rather than say "well a menu shortcut can use either Alt or Ctrl" they starting switching ALL of them. And they made Alt "navigate" to the menu, thus making it making it difficult to press it and then decide "I don't want to do that" and release, reducing the ability of the shortcuts to do anything.
It does seem odd that NewTek, once huge proponents of the Amiga, now refuse to consider alternative systems...
There will be a client-side API that hides where the rendering is being done. This is necessary so that the interface can be emulated atop X (like Mesa does). But unless there is some promise that this is going to move to the server, there is very little incentive to try to figure out these libraries.
I'm going to be very blunt here. This stuff should be IN THE X SERVER!!!.
I don't want to link with a giant imaging library for all my programs, I don't want to send image maps to X for all my drawing, and I really want my advanced imaging model to be able to take advantage of advanced hardware!
If the code exists, lets put somewhere where a mortal programmer can actually figure out how to use it, and better programmers may have a slight chance of improving it! It is absolutely disgusting that we have a worse graphics interface that NT, or than NeWS (which was created in 1983!). And it is quite alarming that people are saying that gigantic shared libraries running in my program's memory space will save us. It is theroetically possible to draw everything using a library that calls XDrawPoint(), that does not mean it is a good idea!
PS: although there is a lot of push for it because "thats how MicroSoft did it", there is no need for X to do printing. What is needed is the ability to send *IDENTICAL* streams to two different things and get an image on the screen and on the printer. The screen thing can be a wrapper driver around the lower-level X interface.
But their implementation of "smart quotes" shows just how bad of programmers they are, they took a reasonable idea and completely broke it.
Their so-called "smart" quotes puts a single-close-quote in where apostrophes go. This violates their own description of the character set, and breaks typography where apostrophe is different than close quote (and also breaks all search engines for words with apostrophe in them).
It really should not be very hard for "smart" quotes to only put in a single close if there is a matching open single close before it, or if locality is required, that there is a non-letter after the apostrophe.
But this broken implementation probably "looks ok" to the normal dumb user, so they just ignore it. Or possibly they are completely unaware of it.
There are lots of domains with Linux in them too. I think Microsoft would be justified to stop things if somebody tried to sell "windows95.com", or used it to point at some page that has nothing to do with MicroSoft or Windows or attacked them, or perhaps provided false information that misled consumers.
If somebody does "window95sux.com" and uses it to attack MicroSoft, I don't think MicroSoft can do anything about that, since it is obvious from the URL that it is not an official site. Same thing goes for "linuxsucks.com".
I don't get it. Why isn't the hardware designed so that it always does the Macrovision stuff to the output signal, no matter what?
1. There is an "icon" even if the window is open. This idea seems to have eluded all the X and Mac (and the older Windoze) designers for years. Everybody else was convinced that the window icon should only be visible if the window was "iconized".
2. They finally realized that the TEXT is important, far more important than some image "icon". Though they did not get rid of the image, which might have been far too daring, they did shrink it down a lot, so that it is almost invisible. (now if only they would do that for their "desktop icons".
MicroSoft also made a major innovation in making a desktop design that got rid of a divider line between the "window border" and the window contents. I actually did this many years earlier with some work I did on the NeXT machine, and I'm sure others did, but it was never seen in a real product until Windows 95.
I would not call Plug&Play an innovation, the idea is rather obvious and apparently the implementation is bogus, seeing as to how much trouble they are having. Working around bad original machine design, no matter how difficult, is really not innovative since it is obvious it needs to be done.
DirectX is also pretty obvious. Apparently there are no real clever ideas in the enormous amount of interface that DirectX defines. For instance it is rather uniformly believed that OpenGL provides a superior 3-D interface, it would seem MicroSoft could have "innovated" something better, seeing as they had all of OpenGL already existing to refer to!
I believe Office contains many innovations in GUI. MicroSoft did invent the Shift+navigation to extend text selections. Also the use of squiggly lines to indicate spelling errors and many other little things that have greatly expanded the common knowledge database of graphical icons, making it easier for programs to present information without lots of "help" info.
And if you think porting to Linux requires releasing the source code, you are either a total ignoramous, or this is flamebait.
There is absolutely no other reason for MDI. There was no precedent in any user interface existing before it, or in previous versions of Windows (which tried to do CMU-style tiled windows to solve the problem).
Actually, no. The original filmmakers were so cheap that most silent films were filmed at more like 18 fps. Yea, it blinked, but it saved film. The standard was raised to 24fps because the optical sound track did not have sufficient quality unless the film was made to move faster!
Also, your brain can easily see 24fps flicker. The projectors have a spinning shutter that blocks the light twice per frame (once when the frame moves, and once while it is sitting still), just so the flicker is at 48fps. I remember that old 18 fps super-8 projectors had a three vane shutter so that it blinked 54fps, even though the picture only changed 18 times, so you would not see the flicker, I would guess that old silent movie projectors did this, too.
In any case, one big advantage of 48fps or more film projection is that the extra shutter is eliminated, which means a lot more light reaches the screen, making the image brighter. Digital projection also wins here, as there is no shutter at all so (with the mirror chips) almost all the lamp's light hits the screen.
It is an absolute statement of fact that most hardware manufacturers, including the DVD and USB people, do not support Linux. Every single person working with Linux, including it's most ardent supporters, would agree with this 100%. Thus this is not "FUD".
What is "FUD" is distorting the truth. And you have just done so. You have pretty much said "Linux supporters call anything negative said about their systems FUD". THAT IS NOT TRUE. READ THE PARAGRAPH I JUST TYPED and stop being a child.
Since the CapsLock key does not allow you to type shifted punctuation like '#' or '!' or '?' it does not actaully avoid the need for Chords or help handicapped people at all.
xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock" -e "add Control = Caps_Lock"
It does seem perfectly legal to say that your warranty does not apply if the user modifies the source code and tries to use it.
Or perhaps the fact that I can release the code under multiple licences has not sunk into your thick head yet.
I want people to freely see my code, but if they want to close it up they had better pay! You want to steal my code, and are trying to make it sound like it is my fault (or RMS's) that you can't. Well, sorry, no, it is YOUR fault.
These can be replaced with snprintf and vsnprintf... oops! Only if you have glibc, does not appear to be in the VC++ libraries :-) (to be honest they are also missing from Irix and many Unixes).
strncat and strncpy are both too hard to use because of brain-dead original implementations and the need to be compatable (strncpy *always* copies n characters, which is a waste of time, and strncat truncates the *addition* at n, rather than the total length). Then again we live with strchr returning null instead of a pointer to the null and many other atrocities.
There are in fact 4 things the user of my GPL'd software can do:
1) release their software under the GPL
2) remove the GPL'd code
3) not release the software
4) Pay me $150,000 so that I release my GPL'd software under a different parallel license that they can use.
Option 4 is allowed under the GPL! The "General Public Virus" whiners want to eliminate this option: they want to deprive me of my rights to make money or do what I want with my code! They want to remove the very rights they pretend to "defend".
PS: I in fact write LGPL library software. The biggest problem with a GPL library is that if there is a proprietary (and probably Windoze-specific) equivalent library, commercial software will use it and probably just say "we can't port to Linux". End-user software should be GPL if possible.
No. Linux explicitly allows binary closed-source "modules" (ie device drivers).
If you need to modify the actual kernel source to use your module, you have to release that code. Most likely that code is not going to reveal your Kool Secret Stuff (TM), since it just calls some new module interface. I think you will get some pretty nasty remarks from OSS if you do this and your code will never go into the main source, so try to avoid this.
PS: This is all my opinion, I don't know for sure.
Even more shocking, some day soon somebody is going to write a better Windoze driver than the one shipped, for one of these cards that released their specs. This I think will be the big clue needed to convince the hardware manufacuters that it just may not kill them to reveal how to talk to their device.