I think you will have the same vulnerabilities. Media Player Classic simply uses the codecs from Real, so any flaws in the codecs will still be there despite using Media Player Classic. Real Alternative seems interesting though since it lets you install the codecs without having to actually install one of the players. I don't use Windows anymore, but I could use that to get the RealOne crap off my the computers of my family members.
Since I use Linux I can't use iTunes, so a winning bottlecap would be of no use to me. I don't really drink Pepsi much, but if I happened to get a bottlecap I might consider sending it to them since I wouldn't be able to use it myself.
Since I actually listen primarily to independent music I prefer the eMusic store, which thankfully runs on Linux. So, I'll keep on supporting independent bands with the music I buy through other means, and maybe give them a little extra support that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to redeem.
Why was this modded up? The site never claims any affiliation with Apple and even criticizes iTunes a bit. They're a group who wants to support artists on independent lables, not specifically Apple. Please read the article before moderating (or commenting, but I guess that's too much to ask).
Certainly there are situations in which server-side technology is necessary to generate the page content from the data sources, but it's pretty amazing how well you can separate layout and presentation from the page content simply by using a decent XHTML page and good CSS. A great example I recently discovered is the cssZenGarden. The site provides a basic XHTML page with no real presentation information. When viewed without the CSS it's quite bare text, no images, just some various levels of headers and some bulleted lists. However, webdesigners are challeneged to create unique/interesting designs simply through the use of CSS (no modification of the XHTML is permitted). A few of my favorite designs are sub:lime,
Not So Minimal, and
Burning , but be sure to check out the others.
This was mentioned earlier, but I didn't see much information on the Dasher website about actual input devices (though Dasher is a neat way to handle typing).
As a recent UVA grad I heard a lot about the ERICA project while I was there. It's an eye tracking system that's pretty neat, though I think it's basically just being used for research at this time and I don't know of a way to actually purchase it.
I believe there are some commercial eye tracking systems out there, but head tracking is simpler, and therefore cheaper. One I've seen is from here. For $300 you can get the package your friend would need which allows for hands-free clicking through either clicking after the mouse pauses for a second, or through use of a big external button.
I believe Windows XP includes an on-screen keyboard already, but I'm sure typing using only that would get tedious. This is where something like Dasher that was mentioned previously is helpful, as it uses a dictionary to guess which letters you're most likely to type next and make it easier to type those letters. Of course he could still use speech recognition for typing, and rely on something like the head mouse for pointer control.
I'm about to sign up for Cox internet and TV since they're the only one available in my neighborhood, plus their bandwidth speed is double the other services in the area, so I found this interesting, though when I went to their site to check on their AUP it doesn't seem to seem to support your figures at all.
For their "Preferred" (normal) service (3Mb/s down, 256kb/s up) the monthly bandwidth limits are 30GB/s down and 7.5GB/s up.
I get 92.6kb/s (11.6kB/s) average download rate over the month. Almost 4x the figure you're claiming.
Now, back when I was on the college network this was about what I pulled down on eDonkey with it running 24/7 (so after including other bandwith I would've been over). Now that I've broken that addiction, I don't really think these limits would be much of an issue for me. Plus, I doubt I'd even get good enough speeds on it over cable to keep up the same downloading I was doing back then.
If you still seem to feel that this service isn't enough for you, check on their Premier package. It's pretty expensive, but you get 4Mb/s down 384kb/s up and 50GB/month down and 12.5GB/month up.
Well, that depends on what you mean by "just works." This guy has a pretty strict set of requirements beyond not being for the iPod. Most of the services out there work quite well for quite a lot of people, but when you're looking for a service that supports a discontinued player on a discontinued operating system that gets a little tougher.
Yeah, I've seen plenty of places that want 5 years experience with XML. Now that XML has actually been out barely more than 5 years, this isn't impossible, but I definately saw this before XML had reached it's 5th birthday.
Of course I still have no idea why they think you need 5 years to learn XML, as on it's own XML isn't really much of anything. Now, if they expected a certain amount of experience with particular XML-related technologies that might be reasonable. Of course I still think a lot of these "X years of experience" are often pretty dumb. I mean, why should you pick a person who's had 5 years of experience with Java, and nothing else, over someone who has 10 years of experience with C++, but only 1 or two years of Java experience. Learning new languages isn't particularly challenging once you have a good fundamental understanding of programming.
Yeah, I haven't programmed in PostScript myself, but I have a professor who used it to write a bunch of assignments as an undergrad. He wrote a raytracer in it for one assignment. When someone noticed that he had a print job that had been sitting on the printer for several hours they got a little suspicious and asked him about it. He was just like "Yeah, it shouldn't be too much longer."
Hmm, actually the art example is interesting as this is how a lot of animation is done. The lead animators don't draw every frame, they lay down the basics and then they outsource the drawing of the intermediate frames. So, the lead animators do the real creative work, but then someone else gets the tedious task of filling in in-between.
Well, I never used it myself, but I pretty sure that the DRM can be turned off when you rip songs from a CD. I believe that would be a better option than trying to explain how you do your rips. Although you may not like to admit it, WMA is a better codec than MP3. Now, it won't match MP3 at half the bitrate as Microsoft would have you believe, but it does produce better quality for the bitrate. As long as you can turn off the DRM, WMA is really no more non-free than MP3. I can play WMA just fine in Winamp.
Oooh, supports FLAC too. This thing has me drooling over some great features and it's nice compact form factor. Now, other than the price tag, it's only problem is that it's Windows only, or at least that's what the requirements say. Now, if it will just show up as a USB harddrive it may work fine on Linux or OSX, but what about firmware updating?
For information on MP3 patent licensing see: http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html
Licensing for the decoder runs $0.75 per unit or a one time fee of $50,000. Nowhere close to your $0.5 - $1 million figure. Plus in order to save this money they would have to completely drop MP3 playback from the player, rather than supporting both it and Ogg Vorbis. Despite the fact that I use Vorbis when I rip my CDs, I still have many MP3s I've downloaded from emusic.com that I'd like to be able to play without converting them.
Hmm, well if you compare the percentage of Linux users who use Ogg versus the percentage of Windows users, it would probably be higher on the Linux side, but among the other people I know who use Ogg, plenty of them still use Windows. Reguarding running Linux on old hardware, this has not been my experience. Certainly your Linux users may have some old machines running Linux on them besides their primary machine, but as Linux users tend to be more passionate about computers I've seen them be more willing to upgrade their machines. Many Windows users are happy as long as they can run Office and use the internet.
Still, none of this goes to show that Ogg users somehow have less money to spend on hardware. People who simply don't want to pay for an operating system don't use Linux, they pirate Windows.
The real issue behind lack of Ogg players is that there's not enough of a market. Adding Ogg support would take time and money, meaning that in order for it to be profitable it's addition would either need to sell more units, or support an increase in price. I don't think the Ogg users out there would be unwilling to spend money on a player, just there aren't enough of us to make it profitable.
I understand how the existing implementations are done. The issue here is what constitutes a derivative work. If you use the Java code which exists for SWT and only implement a QT driver for it you may be stuck in a situation where you are bound under the CPL from SWT and the GPL from QT, and there is no way you can satisfy the terms of both. The ideal situation would be to reconcile the licensing issues so that a QT driver could be developed. However, my point was that it would still be possible to create a library which would be interchangeable with SWT, but built on QT, and avoid the current licensing problems.
So, would you mind telling me where you got your degree in education that makes you qualified to claim that classical education is so much better than that of today? I certainly don't believe that the emphasis on standardized tests is the appropriate way to learn, but suggesting that the schooling of the 1800s when only the upperclass were able to attend is somehow superior to that of today is absurd since the majority of the population was illiterate.
Sure, math is important and if you want to do "complex mathematics" in your head, great, but while you finish solving it I'll be playing games on my TI89 where I solved the problem much faster, and when you're finally done you'll look over and realize you got the wrong answer because you accidentally flipped a sign in you head. Now, that's not to say I won't learn math, it doesn't matter if my calculator can calculate some crazy integral if I don't know what an integral is. More importantly I need to know how to apply it to solving an actual problem.
And, if you want to learn Greek and Latin, well, go right ahead, but I'll be learning computer languages and writing software. Plus, learning a forgein language is still a common part of the curriculum at most schools, of course most people choose to learn languages that they might actually encounter another person who speaks them. Greek and Latin may be useful to some scholars, but for most people they are completely useless.
I bet Hitler didn't have a computer in his classroom either. Neither did Stalin or Sadaam Hussein. So by removing computers from the classroom we'll turn children into dictators!!!
Parent is quite uninsightful if you ask me. So is this article. They look at all the problems surrounding the use of computers in the classroom, but instead of looking at how to improve their use they want to simply get rid of them. I don't believe that computers should be the primary emphasis in education, but I do believe they can be beneficial. As a kid writing always frustrated me. When I had to write papers in pen, if I made a little mistake it could mean rewriting an entire page to fix it. Once I got a computer at home I was able to edit my papers and actually focus on the writing, rather than getting fustrated about making a mistake.
If the current software isn't effective, figure out why. Maybe schools are trying to use software to teach the wrong skills, or maybe they need new software developed which teaches the skills better. Stepping backwards by removing computers from schools doesn't solve anything. We need to look at how to push education forwards and, like it or not, computers are going to be a part of that.
Well, there may be licencing issues around Eclipse that would be nice to work out, but I'm not sure they would prevent a QT implementation of SWT. Reimplementing the SWT API should not constitute a derivative work of SWT, provided the developers are careful to just copy the API, not anything underneath it (don't want more suspicion like the JBoss/Geronimo stuff). Just like Mono and DotGNU are perfectly capable of implementing the.NET classes without a license from Microsoft, someone should be able to implement SWT using QT without being bound under the terms of the CPL. That said, it would probably make things easier if the licence issues could be reconciled since it would mean that developers could take advantage of the useful pieces of SWT which already exist.
Don't know if this was meant to be a joke, but I had to do a double take myself when I saw that mentioned on the page. The CDE mentioned is not the "Common Desktop Environment" many of us may think of, in this case it stands for "Common Data Editor."
Well, Python is relatively new, so it has not gotten as widespread of use due to people having more experience with C/C++. Also, Python requires some changes in the way you think about programming. For example C/C++ programmers are used to strong type checking where the compiler tells you if you try to pass an incorrect type to a function. In Python types aren't really important. You write your functions and assume that the parameters given will support the necessary operations, but if they don't you'll just have to catch the exception. As I haven't gotten to really learning Python myself yet, I can't explain this very well, but while it seems strange it works fairly well.
Python use is growing though. Redhat is using it for many of their configuration panels and their package updating programs which you can check out in Fedora. Debian's "reportbug" program uses it. It's also becoming popular for embedding scriptability in programs.
There's also a good article at Gamasutra(registration required) about how kid-oriented adventure game developer Humongous is using Python for their games.
Ok, first BitTorrent is written in Python, not Perl and yes it COULD be written in a low level language, but so could every program that runs on your computer. That doesn't mean that it's a good idea.
And, while this book is about frameworks, not languages, your concept of "low-level languages" seems a bit confused. Your example applications could all be written in Java or some other high-level language of your choice. Take a look at the Eclipse Java IDE which is written entirely in Java (minus the backend of the SWT toolkit it uses for the GUI). Writing lower level code is usually about optimizing for speed or memory constraints, not lack of functionality.
Just because you need low-level access to the hardware doesn't mean you can't use C# to write the GUI for your program. Using TCP/IP requires access to your networking hardware, there just happens to be a set of libraries that extracts away the details, but gives your higher level components what they need. If you need to write some assembly routines to do your hardware access, do it and then wrap it in an API that will let your.NET GUI access it. Just because your program needs some low-level code doesn't mean you have to write it all low-level.
Where's the logic in this? Sure there are people who go and buy a bunch of stuff just because it's cheap, which is equally as dumb. However if there are products that you'll probably buy anyways that happen to be on sale, you're only hurting yourself. I'm always amazed by the people who try to be "non-conformist" but end up supporting the system they're trying to fight against.
Well, as far as I can tell there is no legal way that Microsoft could shut them down at this point. The.NET languages and bytecode formats are ECMA standards, just like JavaScript. The only thing I can see Microsoft possibly being able to use against.NET and Mono would be patents that might protect some of the libraries. I am not aware of any patents MS has at this point which could be used in this way, but there is a possibility.
Now, MS may try asking DotGNU or Mono to shutdown without a legal reason, since that kind of thing seems to be so popular now, but unless they come up with some legitimate reason to do so, I don't think these projects will be idly pushed around.
I've tried out Test 3 of Fedora and I must say that it has some nice aspects. For desktop Red Hat users this is still a nice option. My biggest problem with Fedora right now is package management. As a Debian user I love apt and synaptic. Red Hat's supposed alternative "yum" is unfortunately quite broken. Updating or installing packages with new dependencies can cause yum to stall and it won't resolve these dependencies. After reading the news about the Progeny port of the Fedora installer to Debian, I wondered about what other steps could be taken to merge some of the good things about each of these distros. Like I already said, Debian's package management is ahead of that in Fedora, but the configuration tools provided by Red Hat for many system options don't have a similar alternative in Debian.
With desktop Red Hat on its way out and the free software Fedora on the way in, I think now is a good time for desktop Linux users to start looking at how they can improve the free software desktop Linux.
Windows Roaming Profiles have been mentioned, but starting with Windows XP MS offered the "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard." I think third parties have also previously provided software like this as well which allows program settings and files to be saved to a disk or transferred over the network to the new computer.
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I think you will have the same vulnerabilities. Media Player Classic simply uses the codecs from Real, so any flaws in the codecs will still be there despite using Media Player Classic. Real Alternative seems interesting though since it lets you install the codecs without having to actually install one of the players. I don't use Windows anymore, but I could use that to get the RealOne crap off my the computers of my family members.
Since I use Linux I can't use iTunes, so a winning bottlecap would be of no use to me. I don't really drink Pepsi much, but if I happened to get a bottlecap I might consider sending it to them since I wouldn't be able to use it myself.
Since I actually listen primarily to independent music I prefer the eMusic store, which thankfully runs on Linux. So, I'll keep on supporting independent bands with the music I buy through other means, and maybe give them a little extra support that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to redeem.
Why was this modded up? The site never claims any affiliation with Apple and even criticizes iTunes a bit. They're a group who wants to support artists on independent lables, not specifically Apple. Please read the article before moderating (or commenting, but I guess that's too much to ask).
Certainly there are situations in which server-side technology is necessary to generate the page content from the data sources, but it's pretty amazing how well you can separate layout and presentation from the page content simply by using a decent XHTML page and good CSS. A great example I recently discovered is the cssZenGarden. The site provides a basic XHTML page with no real presentation information. When viewed without the CSS it's quite bare text, no images, just some various levels of headers and some bulleted lists. However, webdesigners are challeneged to create unique/interesting designs simply through the use of CSS (no modification of the XHTML is permitted). A few of my favorite designs are sub:lime, Not So Minimal, and Burning , but be sure to check out the others.
This was mentioned earlier, but I didn't see much information on the Dasher website about actual input devices (though Dasher is a neat way to handle typing).
As a recent UVA grad I heard a lot about the ERICA project while I was there. It's an eye tracking system that's pretty neat, though I think it's basically just being used for research at this time and I don't know of a way to actually purchase it.
I believe there are some commercial eye tracking systems out there, but head tracking is simpler, and therefore cheaper. One I've seen is from here. For $300 you can get the package your friend would need which allows for hands-free clicking through either clicking after the mouse pauses for a second, or through use of a big external button.
I believe Windows XP includes an on-screen keyboard already, but I'm sure typing using only that would get tedious. This is where something like Dasher that was mentioned previously is helpful, as it uses a dictionary to guess which letters you're most likely to type next and make it easier to type those letters. Of course he could still use speech recognition for typing, and rely on something like the head mouse for pointer control.
I'm about to sign up for Cox internet and TV since they're the only one available in my neighborhood, plus their bandwidth speed is double the other services in the area, so I found this interesting, though when I went to their site to check on their AUP it doesn't seem to seem to support your figures at all.
For their "Preferred" (normal) service (3Mb/s down, 256kb/s up) the monthly bandwidth limits are 30GB/s down and 7.5GB/s up.
I get 92.6kb/s (11.6kB/s) average download rate over the month. Almost 4x the figure you're claiming.
Now, back when I was on the college network this was about what I pulled down on eDonkey with it running 24/7 (so after including other bandwith I would've been over). Now that I've broken that addiction, I don't really think these limits would be much of an issue for me. Plus, I doubt I'd even get good enough speeds on it over cable to keep up the same downloading I was doing back then.
If you still seem to feel that this service isn't enough for you, check on their Premier package. It's pretty expensive, but you get 4Mb/s down 384kb/s up and 50GB/month down and 12.5GB/month up.
Well, that depends on what you mean by "just works." This guy has a pretty strict set of requirements beyond not being for the iPod. Most of the services out there work quite well for quite a lot of people, but when you're looking for a service that supports a discontinued player on a discontinued operating system that gets a little tougher.
Yeah, I've seen plenty of places that want 5 years experience with XML. Now that XML has actually been out barely more than 5 years, this isn't impossible, but I definately saw this before XML had reached it's 5th birthday.
Of course I still have no idea why they think you need 5 years to learn XML, as on it's own XML isn't really much of anything. Now, if they expected a certain amount of experience with particular XML-related technologies that might be reasonable. Of course I still think a lot of these "X years of experience" are often pretty dumb. I mean, why should you pick a person who's had 5 years of experience with Java, and nothing else, over someone who has 10 years of experience with C++, but only 1 or two years of Java experience. Learning new languages isn't particularly challenging once you have a good fundamental understanding of programming.
Yeah, I haven't programmed in PostScript myself, but I have a professor who used it to write a bunch of assignments as an undergrad. He wrote a raytracer in it for one assignment. When someone noticed that he had a print job that had been sitting on the printer for several hours they got a little suspicious and asked him about it. He was just like "Yeah, it shouldn't be too much longer."
Hmm, actually the art example is interesting as this is how a lot of animation is done. The lead animators don't draw every frame, they lay down the basics and then they outsource the drawing of the intermediate frames. So, the lead animators do the real creative work, but then someone else gets the tedious task of filling in in-between.
Well, I never used it myself, but I pretty sure that the DRM can be turned off when you rip songs from a CD. I believe that would be a better option than trying to explain how you do your rips. Although you may not like to admit it, WMA is a better codec than MP3. Now, it won't match MP3 at half the bitrate as Microsoft would have you believe, but it does produce better quality for the bitrate. As long as you can turn off the DRM, WMA is really no more non-free than MP3. I can play WMA just fine in Winamp.
Oooh, supports FLAC too. This thing has me drooling over some great features and it's nice compact form factor. Now, other than the price tag, it's only problem is that it's Windows only, or at least that's what the requirements say. Now, if it will just show up as a USB harddrive it may work fine on Linux or OSX, but what about firmware updating?
For information on MP3 patent licensing see: http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html
Licensing for the decoder runs $0.75 per unit or a one time fee of $50,000. Nowhere close to your $0.5 - $1 million figure. Plus in order to save this money they would have to completely drop MP3 playback from the player, rather than supporting both it and Ogg Vorbis. Despite the fact that I use Vorbis when I rip my CDs, I still have many MP3s I've downloaded from emusic.com that I'd like to be able to play without converting them.
Hmm, well if you compare the percentage of Linux users who use Ogg versus the percentage of Windows users, it would probably be higher on the Linux side, but among the other people I know who use Ogg, plenty of them still use Windows. Reguarding running Linux on old hardware, this has not been my experience. Certainly your Linux users may have some old machines running Linux on them besides their primary machine, but as Linux users tend to be more passionate about computers I've seen them be more willing to upgrade their machines. Many Windows users are happy as long as they can run Office and use the internet.
Still, none of this goes to show that Ogg users somehow have less money to spend on hardware. People who simply don't want to pay for an operating system don't use Linux, they pirate Windows.
The real issue behind lack of Ogg players is that there's not enough of a market. Adding Ogg support would take time and money, meaning that in order for it to be profitable it's addition would either need to sell more units, or support an increase in price. I don't think the Ogg users out there would be unwilling to spend money on a player, just there aren't enough of us to make it profitable.
I understand how the existing implementations are done. The issue here is what constitutes a derivative work. If you use the Java code which exists for SWT and only implement a QT driver for it you may be stuck in a situation where you are bound under the CPL from SWT and the GPL from QT, and there is no way you can satisfy the terms of both. The ideal situation would be to reconcile the licensing issues so that a QT driver could be developed. However, my point was that it would still be possible to create a library which would be interchangeable with SWT, but built on QT, and avoid the current licensing problems.
So, would you mind telling me where you got your degree in education that makes you qualified to claim that classical education is so much better than that of today? I certainly don't believe that the emphasis on standardized tests is the appropriate way to learn, but suggesting that the schooling of the 1800s when only the upperclass were able to attend is somehow superior to that of today is absurd since the majority of the population was illiterate.
Sure, math is important and if you want to do "complex mathematics" in your head, great, but while you finish solving it I'll be playing games on my TI89 where I solved the problem much faster, and when you're finally done you'll look over and realize you got the wrong answer because you accidentally flipped a sign in you head. Now, that's not to say I won't learn math, it doesn't matter if my calculator can calculate some crazy integral if I don't know what an integral is. More importantly I need to know how to apply it to solving an actual problem.
And, if you want to learn Greek and Latin, well, go right ahead, but I'll be learning computer languages and writing software. Plus, learning a forgein language is still a common part of the curriculum at most schools, of course most people choose to learn languages that they might actually encounter another person who speaks them. Greek and Latin may be useful to some scholars, but for most people they are completely useless.
I bet Hitler didn't have a computer in his classroom either. Neither did Stalin or Sadaam Hussein. So by removing computers from the classroom we'll turn children into dictators!!!
Parent is quite uninsightful if you ask me. So is this article. They look at all the problems surrounding the use of computers in the classroom, but instead of looking at how to improve their use they want to simply get rid of them. I don't believe that computers should be the primary emphasis in education, but I do believe they can be beneficial. As a kid writing always frustrated me. When I had to write papers in pen, if I made a little mistake it could mean rewriting an entire page to fix it. Once I got a computer at home I was able to edit my papers and actually focus on the writing, rather than getting fustrated about making a mistake.
If the current software isn't effective, figure out why. Maybe schools are trying to use software to teach the wrong skills, or maybe they need new software developed which teaches the skills better. Stepping backwards by removing computers from schools doesn't solve anything. We need to look at how to push education forwards and, like it or not, computers are going to be a part of that.
Well, there may be licencing issues around Eclipse that would be nice to work out, but I'm not sure they would prevent a QT implementation of SWT. Reimplementing the SWT API should not constitute a derivative work of SWT, provided the developers are careful to just copy the API, not anything underneath it (don't want more suspicion like the JBoss/Geronimo stuff). Just like Mono and DotGNU are perfectly capable of implementing the .NET classes without a license from Microsoft, someone should be able to implement SWT using QT without being bound under the terms of the CPL. That said, it would probably make things easier if the licence issues could be reconciled since it would mean that developers could take advantage of the useful pieces of SWT which already exist.
Don't know if this was meant to be a joke, but I had to do a double take myself when I saw that mentioned on the page. The CDE mentioned is not the "Common Desktop Environment" many of us may think of, in this case it stands for "Common Data Editor."
Well, Python is relatively new, so it has not gotten as widespread of use due to people having more experience with C/C++. Also, Python requires some changes in the way you think about programming. For example C/C++ programmers are used to strong type checking where the compiler tells you if you try to pass an incorrect type to a function. In Python types aren't really important. You write your functions and assume that the parameters given will support the necessary operations, but if they don't you'll just have to catch the exception. As I haven't gotten to really learning Python myself yet, I can't explain this very well, but while it seems strange it works fairly well.
Python use is growing though. Redhat is using it for many of their configuration panels and their package updating programs which you can check out in Fedora. Debian's "reportbug" program uses it. It's also becoming popular for embedding scriptability in programs.
There's also a good article at Gamasutra(registration required) about how kid-oriented adventure game developer Humongous is using Python for their games.
Ok, first BitTorrent is written in Python, not Perl and yes it COULD be written in a low level language, but so could every program that runs on your computer. That doesn't mean that it's a good idea.
.NET GUI access it. Just because your program needs some low-level code doesn't mean you have to write it all low-level.
And, while this book is about frameworks, not languages, your concept of "low-level languages" seems a bit confused. Your example applications could all be written in Java or some other high-level language of your choice. Take a look at the Eclipse Java IDE which is written entirely in Java (minus the backend of the SWT toolkit it uses for the GUI). Writing lower level code is usually about optimizing for speed or memory constraints, not lack of functionality.
Just because you need low-level access to the hardware doesn't mean you can't use C# to write the GUI for your program. Using TCP/IP requires access to your networking hardware, there just happens to be a set of libraries that extracts away the details, but gives your higher level components what they need. If you need to write some assembly routines to do your hardware access, do it and then wrap it in an API that will let your
Where's the logic in this? Sure there are people who go and buy a bunch of stuff just because it's cheap, which is equally as dumb. However if there are products that you'll probably buy anyways that happen to be on sale, you're only hurting yourself. I'm always amazed by the people who try to be "non-conformist" but end up supporting the system they're trying to fight against.
Well, as far as I can tell there is no legal way that Microsoft could shut them down at this point. The .NET languages and bytecode formats are ECMA standards, just like JavaScript. The only thing I can see Microsoft possibly being able to use against .NET and Mono would be patents that might protect some of the libraries. I am not aware of any patents MS has at this point which could be used in this way, but there is a possibility.
Now, MS may try asking DotGNU or Mono to shutdown without a legal reason, since that kind of thing seems to be so popular now, but unless they come up with some legitimate reason to do so, I don't think these projects will be idly pushed around.
I've tried out Test 3 of Fedora and I must say that it has some nice aspects. For desktop Red Hat users this is still a nice option. My biggest problem with Fedora right now is package management. As a Debian user I love apt and synaptic. Red Hat's supposed alternative "yum" is unfortunately quite broken. Updating or installing packages with new dependencies can cause yum to stall and it won't resolve these dependencies. After reading the news about the Progeny port of the Fedora installer to Debian, I wondered about what other steps could be taken to merge some of the good things about each of these distros. Like I already said, Debian's package management is ahead of that in Fedora, but the configuration tools provided by Red Hat for many system options don't have a similar alternative in Debian.
With desktop Red Hat on its way out and the free software Fedora on the way in, I think now is a good time for desktop Linux users to start looking at how they can improve the free software desktop Linux.
Windows Roaming Profiles have been mentioned, but starting with Windows XP MS offered the "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard." I think third parties have also previously provided software like this as well which allows program settings and files to be saved to a disk or transferred over the network to the new computer.