A much better equivalent would be to replace the Qt libraries with a version where the HTML renderer has been edited out. A lot of programs are not going to run as they use that to draw a lot of stuff.
I believe a lot of bitching is from astroturfers here. They get off on confusing the issue.
What I want to know: is an OEM allowed to sell a Windows machine with Firefox installed and still get normal OEM discounts on the price of Windows? Obfuscating this question with stuff about users installing/uninstalling is just a way of hiding the real question.
The TomTom I have has no removable media, and it has an installable program, but it is *on the TomTom itself*. Plugging the TomTom into a Windows machine triggers autorun and runs the installer (I have not tried this as I don't have a Windows machine). I see no way they could replicated this without FAT support (though VFAT may be avoidable). Microsoft will refuse forever to install by default support for any filesystem that competes with one they control, so EXT2 or whatever is not going to happen no matter what.
The TomTom (I have one) does have a special app. However it is on the TomTom and it is installed because the installer is an auto-run program. There is no way to make this work on Windows (as Microsoft will absolutly refuse to support by default any FS that they did not write themselves). People saying that TomTom should include an install CD are completely missing the point, no matter how cheap the CD is, it must be more expensive than not having one, and it can get lost/broken.
Microsoft forces OEM's to *not* install any browser other than IE.
All this astroturfing about users installing browsers or Microsoft removing IE is just trying to confuse the issue.
Here it is in a nutshell:
Before the ruling: Microsoft could tell the OEM "if you put Firefox on the desktop, you will lose your exclusive contract to get Windows for half price".
After: Microsoft cannot tell the OEM this, they can put Firefox on the desktop (and *keep* IE *or* remove it, whatever they want) and Microsoft cannot punish them by changing their prices for all the rest of Windows.
Now please go back and collect your check from Microsoft, and please make sure you address exactly what I said here rather than any bullshit about users or Microsoft installing/uninstalling anything.
No, the point of the public directory is to *avoid* duplicates.
Public would be a shared location like the system directories, except instead of being write-protected, it is write enabled. Thus you can change it without sudo (or "administrator privledges" in Windows speak).
This sounds like an excellent idea and Linux should copy it. Make ~public be the directory. The permissions are set up so anybody can read anything there, and create new files (not sure if they should be able to overwrite files by other users, copy what Windows does if there are no better ideas).
I may not know enough about how Windows is programmed but if I compare it to how Qt is used, it seems to me that people using an HTML library may limit the use to showing help pages and other local files. I see this as pretty harmless, though it could be annoying if the differences mean that they have to rewrite the help pages in order to port away from Windows.
It seems the astroturfers are going crazy trying to confuse the issue. This has nothing to do with end users. The important thing the EU is trying to get is for OEM's to have the ability to replace IE with (or add to IE) Firefox or some other browser.
Let's repeat this carefully:
1. An OEM (like Dell) must be able to load the computer with arbitrary programs, some of which compete with Microsoft's world domination plans, without Microsoft being able to punish them by changing the terms of their OEM contract.
2. This has NOTHING to do with what users do with their machine after they get it home. Astroturfers are trying to say this has something to do with installing alternative browsers, or some kind of installation switch to allow the users to choose, or other bullshit. That is just to make it sound like the EU is forcing the machines to be "hard to use". In fact it is making the machine easier to use because it allows end users to not have to do the "hard" installation step, this difficulty is in fact a major part of Microsoft's lock-in.
3. Yes the IE libraries are not going away. They cannot, as other programs use them and expect them. This is not relevant as the browser that people are using to talk to the outside world is not calling these libraries.
4. It does sound like the truth is that IE is somewhat more "integrated" than just the existence of libraries, and thus Microsoft had to do some work so that everything works if the ie.exe file is missing (such as apparently removing the ability to choose it as the default browser if it is missing). Good for them, they are obeying the rules.
I'm not sure if you are just dense, or perhaps all this talking about ISP's has made you forget there are other people that have something to do with what is on the internet.
Net neutrality is so that *suppliers* of data over the internet can be competitive.
If the ISP's can agree with a big existing supplier to deliver only their data at a speed whereby the service (such as video) works, a new supplier of a competing service has no chance, as end users will get an unusable experience with them. There is nothing the new supplier can do to make themselves competetitive with the existing one.
Now you can certainly argue that net neutrality has other negative effects and thus it's downsides outweigh the competitive benefits. But I think it is pretty obvious the reasoning why it might help competition.
If you read the posts, use of ext2 has been suggested several times. IFS drivers already exist.
The problem is that Microsoft can and will continue to make it a pain in the ass for an end user to use such file systems, as they will NEVER distibute the driver with Windows. The best suggestion was to make a partitioned disk with a small FAT system with short names only (thus avoiding the patents) that holds the driver, along with whatever tricks are necessary to get autorun to install it. Needless to say this requires autorun to work.
You do not seem to understand the reason there is a problem with Microsoft's monopoly. Your suggestion is useless.
I am still employed. In fact we are doing extremely well as we are supplying the entertainment industry (whether entertainment does well in a recession is another question, and hard to judge, as entertainment today is far different than in the 1920's!). It appears our main competitor badly misjudged things by ignoring Linux (they finally came out with a Wine port last year but comparing that to a native app makes them look pretty bad).
I feel now that if I lost my job and could not find another, I would be extremely bored, and I would in fact return to writing open source software for a good deal of time. Hopefully it would be useful, I want to write libraries but unless I also write some end applications that use those libraries, I am afraid that the result would be useless.
Glad somebody said this. As far as I can tell, from my own experience as well as where it is obvious most projects come from, most useful open source is produced by employed people as a side-effect of their employment (or even as the direct result). My own work on OSS pretty much stopped when my company stopped using it (they switched from fltk to Qt), despite my initial dreams that I would continue to work just as much on it and be freed from the need to obey corporate decisions.
Therefore I think layoffs are going to hurt open source. Yes, people who only spent part-time on open source might be able to spend more time on it, but may have much less incentive, or just won't do a good job, because it is not resulting in something they need anymore. And obviously somebody who's job *is* to make open source is not going to have more time to do it when laid off, at best they have the same.
Astroturfers are ignoring this because they want everybody to think open source is made by geeks living in their mother's basement. They don't want the truth known. In fact they will go so far as to claim OSS will do well in the recession because they really really want to lie about where it comes from.
CO2 can rise later than the heat if it is something other than CO2 that is causing the heat in the first place, you stupid denialist. There is more than one possible cause of global heating.
Of course you won't understand and will accuse me of being paid off by the global warming conspiracy. I have to tell you that damn check bounced.
A better solution than yours is to treat \n as a newline, and \r as ignorable whitespace (even Python does not care about whitespace on the end of a line).
The character '\' at the end of a line to indicate continuation is a pretty well-established standard, and a bit easier to see than '_' (which also is a legal character in an identifier, so you could not end a line with such an identifier?)
All the free printers I have seem to be Canon, so I'm not sure what you are talking about. There are two of those in the garage and the printer I have wired up is Canon as well.
If somebody said "Luser get another printer" it is unlikely they would say "LOL winblowz", they would instead say "lexmark blows". You seem so proud of how condescending you can be that you cannot even get it right. And your childish attitude does not help get your point across you know. If you can document people acting that way, that helps, but accusations without proof just make you look stupid.
Didn't Walmart include another free printer with the new machine? I don't think you have the explanation for Walmart.
Winmodems and Winwireless were not conquered as far as I can tell. They just dropped out of use, modems because they were obsolete, and wireless because most new hardware was more open. NDISWrapper is not really a solution and it seems likely to me that such a trick won't work for printers due to the more complex api. You said you sold low-cost Linux boxes, but generally they have the network adapter already inside it, don't they, so you may have noticed only a problem with the one device you did not include with the machine./
The 640K limit was imposed by IBM's design for the IBM PC (they placed the memory-mapped display screen at that point in memory). The limit for the 8086 was 1Mb and MSDOS was capable of using a full 1Mb of memory (though the resulting machine would not be a "clone" and thus consumers were uninterested in it).
Microsoft is not to blame for everything, in fact with the original PC and through MSDOS 2 they were generally trying to do things right, and it was IBM that was messing things up.
Open Source at least the GNU variation of it, doesn't value the creators of the work, and assumes their time making such device is such a joy that a job well done is pay enough per say.
Though I agree with the rest of your rant that somehow subsidising open source will not work (it will just waste money and there will be very little correlation between who gets money and who produces useful open source).
However this is just bogus. You are accusing the GPL of somehow not valuing the creator of the work, which is completly backwarks, especially compared to the BSD license, or to the contract almost all closed-source developers have to sign. Only the GPL offers a method by which a creator can actually distribute their work so a large number of people can see it and still retain control over it. If you really believe it somehow does not respect the creator, I'd like you to explain why only the GPL offers a workable way to dual-license your code so that you as a creator can get publicity and also sell closed source copies.
Why? If whatever the.desktop file will do does not work when running under ssh, then it will fail to run. And I can quite well imagine.desktop files that do something useful when run under ssh, or that detect this and do something different and correct.
Therefore I certainly agree with previous poster that it should #! some "run a.desktop file" program.
This solution does sound like it will help with the problem. However it is not clear how to ever fix this if any kind of installer exists that can turn on the -x bit. And without such an installer it is going to be very difficult to install software on Linux.
The article is saying that the Windows version under Wine runs faster than the Linux version. It does not compare it to the Windows version running under Windows and you do not need Vista to reproduce the result.
Most likely the Windows version on Windows is faster than the Windows version on Wine, and thus faster than the Linux version as well. However as far as the article is concerned, it could be slower than either one. It is not relevant to the question.
And there is no possible way that some difference between Windows&Linux could explain how the Windows program running atop another *Linux* program would be faster.
It sounds to me like the Linux version does something incredibly inefficient when talking to the system, so that the Windows version, plus the code to translate and execute it using something on Linux is faster! They really should identify what this is and make the Linux version use it. Supposedly if you took the relevant code out of Wine and merged it with the Windows calling code and removed the unnecessary intermediate steps, you would have a Linux interface that is faster than either one of these.
Plan 9 invented UTF-8, which is the right way of doing Unicode (since it does not require two API's if you want any kind of compatibility with ASCII software, and it forces programmers to realize that "characters" are unimportant and ambiguous in Unicode).
Windows did the same stupid thing that Unix was doing, which is use "wide characters". This is because they are a bunch of wimps who are so scared of being politically incorrect and giving English the "better" shorter encodings, that they will instead sabotage any i18n (thus defeating any real political correctness) so that they can show their egalitarian beliefs by making text processing equally difficult for everybody. One of the few benefits of the Unix wars is that it prevented "wide characters" from becoming established and thus polluting the internet standards.
UTF-16 is of course one of the first symptoms where they realize that fixed-length encoding is not going to work and thus throw away the only plausable benefit of their design.
Believe me, Windows completely ignored the knowledge of K&R. We would be in FAR better shape if they had paid a little attention and not been swamped with brainless PC attitudes and not-invented-here.
What happened to the "oh it is so EASY to install applications on Windows" statements? Seems you forget that as soon as it does not help your argument, huh?
In fact Qt could be statically linked, or included as part of the installer.
Ballmer has said Linux violates 235 patents. That is using their patents.
No, they are never going to identify any patents or do a real court case, unless there is a significant change in the environment (like they are actually threatened by a competitor using Linux). The threat is much more effective.
They refuse to ever identify any patent directly. The reason they do this is that the patent may be shot down for prior art, or that it will be shown that Linux does not violate it, or that it will take about 1 day to patch Linux to work around the patent. If this happens for even one of those 235 patents it will greatly dimish the threat perceived by pointy-haired bosses.
Slashdot Mirror
man is probably a poor example.
A much better equivalent would be to replace the Qt libraries with a version where the HTML renderer has been edited out. A lot of programs are not going to run as they use that to draw a lot of stuff.
I believe a lot of bitching is from astroturfers here. They get off on confusing the issue.
What I want to know: is an OEM allowed to sell a Windows machine with Firefox installed and still get normal OEM discounts on the price of Windows? Obfuscating this question with stuff about users installing/uninstalling is just a way of hiding the real question.
The TomTom I have has no removable media, and it has an installable program, but it is *on the TomTom itself*. Plugging the TomTom into a Windows machine triggers autorun and runs the installer (I have not tried this as I don't have a Windows machine). I see no way they could replicated this without FAT support (though VFAT may be avoidable). Microsoft will refuse forever to install by default support for any filesystem that competes with one they control, so EXT2 or whatever is not going to happen no matter what.
The TomTom (I have one) does have a special app. However it is on the TomTom and it is installed because the installer is an auto-run program. There is no way to make this work on Windows (as Microsoft will absolutly refuse to support by default any FS that they did not write themselves). People saying that TomTom should include an install CD are completely missing the point, no matter how cheap the CD is, it must be more expensive than not having one, and it can get lost/broken.
Microsoft forces OEM's to *not* install any browser other than IE.
All this astroturfing about users installing browsers or Microsoft removing IE is just trying to confuse the issue.
Here it is in a nutshell:
Before the ruling: Microsoft could tell the OEM "if you put Firefox on the desktop, you will lose your exclusive contract to get Windows for half price".
After: Microsoft cannot tell the OEM this, they can put Firefox on the desktop (and *keep* IE *or* remove it, whatever they want) and Microsoft cannot punish them by changing their prices for all the rest of Windows.
Now please go back and collect your check from Microsoft, and please make sure you address exactly what I said here rather than any bullshit about users or Microsoft installing/uninstalling anything.
No, the point of the public directory is to *avoid* duplicates.
Public would be a shared location like the system directories, except instead of being write-protected, it is write enabled. Thus you can change it without sudo (or "administrator privledges" in Windows speak).
This sounds like an excellent idea and Linux should copy it. Make ~public be the directory. The permissions are set up so anybody can read anything there, and create new files (not sure if they should be able to overwrite files by other users, copy what Windows does if there are no better ideas).
I may not know enough about how Windows is programmed but if I compare it to how Qt is used, it seems to me that people using an HTML library may limit the use to showing help pages and other local files. I see this as pretty harmless, though it could be annoying if the differences mean that they have to rewrite the help pages in order to port away from Windows.
It seems the astroturfers are going crazy trying to confuse the issue. This has nothing to do with end users. The important thing the EU is trying to get is for OEM's to have the ability to replace IE with (or add to IE) Firefox or some other browser.
Let's repeat this carefully:
1. An OEM (like Dell) must be able to load the computer with arbitrary programs, some of which compete with Microsoft's world domination plans, without Microsoft being able to punish them by changing the terms of their OEM contract.
2. This has NOTHING to do with what users do with their machine after they get it home. Astroturfers are trying to say this has something to do with installing alternative browsers, or some kind of installation switch to allow the users to choose, or other bullshit. That is just to make it sound like the EU is forcing the machines to be "hard to use". In fact it is making the machine easier to use because it allows end users to not have to do the "hard" installation step, this difficulty is in fact a major part of Microsoft's lock-in.
3. Yes the IE libraries are not going away. They cannot, as other programs use them and expect them. This is not relevant as the browser that people are using to talk to the outside world is not calling these libraries.
4. It does sound like the truth is that IE is somewhat more "integrated" than just the existence of libraries, and thus Microsoft had to do some work so that everything works if the ie.exe file is missing (such as apparently removing the ability to choose it as the default browser if it is missing). Good for them, they are obeying the rules.
I'm not sure if you are just dense, or perhaps all this talking about ISP's has made you forget there are other people that have something to do with what is on the internet.
Net neutrality is so that *suppliers* of data over the internet can be competitive.
If the ISP's can agree with a big existing supplier to deliver only their data at a speed whereby the service (such as video) works, a new supplier of a competing service has no chance, as end users will get an unusable experience with them. There is nothing the new supplier can do to make themselves competetitive with the existing one.
Now you can certainly argue that net neutrality has other negative effects and thus it's downsides outweigh the competitive benefits. But I think it is pretty obvious the reasoning why it might help competition.
Huh?
I can't even figure out if you are in favor or opposed to gay marriage from your post. What are you talking about?
If you read the posts, use of ext2 has been suggested several times. IFS drivers already exist.
The problem is that Microsoft can and will continue to make it a pain in the ass for an end user to use such file systems, as they will NEVER distibute the driver with Windows. The best suggestion was to make a partitioned disk with a small FAT system with short names only (thus avoiding the patents) that holds the driver, along with whatever tricks are necessary to get autorun to install it. Needless to say this requires autorun to work.
You do not seem to understand the reason there is a problem with Microsoft's monopoly. Your suggestion is useless.
I need to followup and perhaps contradict myself.
I am still employed. In fact we are doing extremely well as we are supplying the entertainment industry (whether entertainment does well in a recession is another question, and hard to judge, as entertainment today is far different than in the 1920's!). It appears our main competitor badly misjudged things by ignoring Linux (they finally came out with a Wine port last year but comparing that to a native app makes them look pretty bad).
I feel now that if I lost my job and could not find another, I would be extremely bored, and I would in fact return to writing open source software for a good deal of time. Hopefully it would be useful, I want to write libraries but unless I also write some end applications that use those libraries, I am afraid that the result would be useless.
Glad somebody said this. As far as I can tell, from my own experience as well as where it is obvious most projects come from, most useful open source is produced by employed people as a side-effect of their employment (or even as the direct result). My own work on OSS pretty much stopped when my company stopped using it (they switched from fltk to Qt), despite my initial dreams that I would continue to work just as much on it and be freed from the need to obey corporate decisions.
Therefore I think layoffs are going to hurt open source. Yes, people who only spent part-time on open source might be able to spend more time on it, but may have much less incentive, or just won't do a good job, because it is not resulting in something they need anymore. And obviously somebody who's job *is* to make open source is not going to have more time to do it when laid off, at best they have the same.
Astroturfers are ignoring this because they want everybody to think open source is made by geeks living in their mother's basement. They don't want the truth known. In fact they will go so far as to claim OSS will do well in the recession because they really really want to lie about where it comes from.
CO2 can rise later than the heat if it is something other than CO2 that is causing the heat in the first place, you stupid denialist. There is more than one possible cause of global heating.
Of course you won't understand and will accuse me of being paid off by the global warming conspiracy. I have to tell you that damn check bounced.
Look at the image in the article:
image
If these really are the supernovae, doesn't this mean that "model B" is right and "model A" is wrong?
A better solution than yours is to treat \n as a newline, and \r as ignorable whitespace (even Python does not care about whitespace on the end of a line).
The character '\' at the end of a line to indicate continuation is a pretty well-established standard, and a bit easier to see than '_' (which also is a legal character in an identifier, so you could not end a line with such an identifier?)
All the free printers I have seem to be Canon, so I'm not sure what you are talking about. There are two of those in the garage and the printer I have wired up is Canon as well.
If somebody said "Luser get another printer" it is unlikely they would say "LOL winblowz", they would instead say "lexmark blows". You seem so proud of how condescending you can be that you cannot even get it right. And your childish attitude does not help get your point across you know. If you can document people acting that way, that helps, but accusations without proof just make you look stupid.
Didn't Walmart include another free printer with the new machine? I don't think you have the explanation for Walmart.
Winmodems and Winwireless were not conquered as far as I can tell. They just dropped out of use, modems because they were obsolete, and wireless because most new hardware was more open. NDISWrapper is not really a solution and it seems likely to me that such a trick won't work for printers due to the more complex api. You said you sold low-cost Linux boxes, but generally they have the network adapter already inside it, don't they, so you may have noticed only a problem with the one device you did not include with the machine./
The 640K limit was imposed by IBM's design for the IBM PC (they placed the memory-mapped display screen at that point in memory). The limit for the 8086 was 1Mb and MSDOS was capable of using a full 1Mb of memory (though the resulting machine would not be a "clone" and thus consumers were uninterested in it).
Microsoft is not to blame for everything, in fact with the original PC and through MSDOS 2 they were generally trying to do things right, and it was IBM that was messing things up.
Open Source at least the GNU variation of it, doesn't value the creators of the work, and assumes their time making such device is such a joy that a job well done is pay enough per say.
Though I agree with the rest of your rant that somehow subsidising open source will not work (it will just waste money and there will be very little correlation between who gets money and who produces useful open source).
However this is just bogus. You are accusing the GPL of somehow not valuing the creator of the work, which is completly backwarks, especially compared to the BSD license, or to the contract almost all closed-source developers have to sign. Only the GPL offers a method by which a creator can actually distribute their work so a large number of people can see it and still retain control over it. If you really believe it somehow does not respect the creator, I'd like you to explain why only the GPL offers a workable way to dual-license your code so that you as a creator can get publicity and also sell closed source copies.
The mail client is not running the desktop file. Instead the mail client is saving the desktop file, and then the user is double-clicking it directly.
Why? If whatever the .desktop file will do does not work when running under ssh, then it will fail to run. And I can quite well imagine .desktop files that do something useful when run under ssh, or that detect this and do something different and correct.
Therefore I certainly agree with previous poster that it should #! some "run a .desktop file" program.
This solution does sound like it will help with the problem. However it is not clear how to ever fix this if any kind of installer exists that can turn on the -x bit. And without such an installer it is going to be very difficult to install software on Linux.
The article is saying that the Windows version under Wine runs faster than the Linux version. It does not compare it to the Windows version running under Windows and you do not need Vista to reproduce the result.
Most likely the Windows version on Windows is faster than the Windows version on Wine, and thus faster than the Linux version as well. However as far as the article is concerned, it could be slower than either one. It is not relevant to the question.
You seem to be confused.
Calling a library does not do a context switch.
And there is no possible way that some difference between Windows&Linux could explain how the Windows program running atop another *Linux* program would be faster.
It sounds to me like the Linux version does something incredibly inefficient when talking to the system, so that the Windows version, plus the code to translate and execute it using something on Linux is faster! They really should identify what this is and make the Linux version use it. Supposedly if you took the relevant code out of Wine and merged it with the Windows calling code and removed the unnecessary intermediate steps, you would have a Linux interface that is faster than either one of these.
Plan 9 invented UTF-8, which is the right way of doing Unicode (since it does not require two API's if you want any kind of compatibility with ASCII software, and it forces programmers to realize that "characters" are unimportant and ambiguous in Unicode).
Windows did the same stupid thing that Unix was doing, which is use "wide characters". This is because they are a bunch of wimps who are so scared of being politically incorrect and giving English the "better" shorter encodings, that they will instead sabotage any i18n (thus defeating any real political correctness) so that they can show their egalitarian beliefs by making text processing equally difficult for everybody. One of the few benefits of the Unix wars is that it prevented "wide characters" from becoming established and thus polluting the internet standards.
UTF-16 is of course one of the first symptoms where they realize that fixed-length encoding is not going to work and thus throw away the only plausable benefit of their design.
Believe me, Windows completely ignored the knowledge of K&R. We would be in FAR better shape if they had paid a little attention and not been swamped with brainless PC attitudes and not-invented-here.
What happened to the "oh it is so EASY to install applications on Windows" statements? Seems you forget that as soon as it does not help your argument, huh?
In fact Qt could be statically linked, or included as part of the installer.
Ballmer has said Linux violates 235 patents. That is using their patents.
No, they are never going to identify any patents or do a real court case, unless there is a significant change in the environment (like they are actually threatened by a competitor using Linux). The threat is much more effective.
They refuse to ever identify any patent directly. The reason they do this is that the patent may be shot down for prior art, or that it will be shown that Linux does not violate it, or that it will take about 1 day to patch Linux to work around the patent. If this happens for even one of those 235 patents it will greatly dimish the threat perceived by pointy-haired bosses.