> Even if M$ had a.Net platform for Linux, would anyone actually us it?
Maybe - it depends on how they wanted to integrate with MS platforms in the enterprise. I can see this as potential a way to get more Linux boxes into an enterprise - if you can port the IT-blessed.NET app up and running on Linux you maye be allowed to have a Linux box doing something that would otherwise have to use an MS product. Imagine slowly replacing all of your Win2K boxes with Linux boxes running.NET servers of some sort. On the other hand, I'm willing to bet that the.NET implementations for non-MS OSes will be broken, incompatible and incomplete compared to the Windows versions, if they ever exist beyond the vapor stage.
> The only fair way to protect these people from being gang raped by the IRS when the owner dies is to abolish this unjust, regressive, predatory, and visciously confiscatory tax.
The *only* way? I guess you don't have much imagination. If there is a group that is being unjustly affected by this tax then the tax should be adjusted to exclude these people as it excludes 98% of all other estates. One way to do this would be to raise the minimum estate size from 1.2 million for a couple to maybe 3 million or so. Or to reduce the tax rate on the low end of the tax to a lower rate. There are any number of ways to address any unfairness in this tax without giving the richest one or two percent a huge tax break.
I do agree that our tax system is set up to screw small businesses and meduim income people while giving huge breaks to the rich and large corporations. The thing that made this possible is the tremendous influence the money these groups have on the political process. If this is not class warfare by the wealthy and influential against everyone else I don't know what is.
> Ah, that is a good idea. However, I don't know too many employers that hire history majors to write software.
Well, I'm a history major and I have been writing software for a living since 1983. Of course, I was writing software for money in high school back in 1978 and I did take quite a few computer science courses in college. I guess you could call me a history major with a CS minor, but they didn't have a minors program where I went to school.
>> I'm all for choice, but a selection between a few strong distros that have what we want vs. a plethora of distros that each have a little bit of what we want is a good thing
Why is this a good thing? What really make a distro strong? Is it a big company backing it like RedHat, or a big developer community like Debian, or something else? What is a weak distro, one only a few people use or something else? There are *many* Linux distributors who are completely non profit but who target a very specific market niche. Would you have people who fit that niche be forced to custom tailor their RedHat for each machine they need to load? I say that as long any distribution has something in it that provides a useful distinction from others, it should be kept for those who get some use out of it. Of course if you want to make money distributing Linux you better have some pretty strong differentiations that give you some kind of market advantage or you are screwed.
TurboLinux has for years targeted the Asian market - when I interviewed there about a year ago they were the market leader in Asia with no challengers on the horizon. Would you have them shut down just because no one you know in the US runs their distro?
I would bet layoffs just get rid of duplication - you can lay off a bunch of HR people, managers and so on because there is now only one position in the merged company.
I think your scenario proves his point exactly. Research and design are much more important than coding. In your example, if MS had really done market research (as I assure you they do) they would have known that they need some sort of converter, and it would be designed into the product. This has in fact happened every time the Word.doc format has changed, which is with just about every release of the product.
If you get to the end stage of a project and discover that design decisions you made at the very beginning were flawed it is a sure sign that you did not spend enough time in the design phase and instead fell victim to the "Why Isn't Anyone Coding Yet" syndrome that dooms many projects. A proper design cycle would have revealed flaws in basic design before they were finalized in code.
Many developers call themselves software engineers but have terrible engineering practice compared to the "real" engineering fields. Imagine if you were building a bridge and discovered half way through construction that it would not be able to span the channel, or that it would collapse under its own weight. Many software projects suffer from analagous failures because nobody bothered to design before they started coding.
Not really - unlike most Unix developers I am quite familiar with OS/400. What I want is something with some features of OS/400, some features of Windows, some features of Unix/Linux/GNU/BSD and so on. Just about the only thing I liked about OS/400 was the fact that if you didn't know the command to do a particular thing you could, with the assistance of the OS, find the command and get all the parameters and options. That was pretty handy for me, a Unix guy given this machine to port software to without any real training or instruction on it.
To all those who see my ideas as similar to the Widndows registry i say that I agree to a certain degree. The registry is great for storing config info, but I hate the binary-only aspect of it, and the "corrupted for one, corrupted for all" aspect. IBM actually implemented a registry-like database called the ODM under AIX. It works, but suffers many of the drawbacks of the Windows registry. What I would propose is just a standard place for each app to put its config files, and a standard format for the files. I would want text-only config files so that the could be hand-hacked. Something like a/config directory at the top level, with each app making a subdir with the app name, and maybe a version number under that - for example/config/WindowMaker/0.62.1/configfile This hierarchy could be duplicated in each user's home directory for their local config if there is any -/home/eric/config/.....
Many other re-organizations of where files go are possible if you throw out any backwards compatibility. I have not thought this out to any great degree or read any relevant documents for existing system. I guess I should do some research and make some proposals!
I have wanted to do something like this for a long long time. Unix, GNU and Linux have accumulated such a huge amount of inconsistencies, variations and obscurities that I can see why it is so frustrating for newbies. If I could re-architect all the programs to get rid of all of the inconsistencies without having to have any backwould compatibility it would be great. Imagine having all programs on your system store all their configuration information in one consistent place - or just one place for systemwide stuff and one place for each user's local configs. Imagine if all the configuration files had the same format. Imagine if command line switches for all commands had some sort of pattern or predictability. It would be a big programming job to make things work like this, but it would make a system that was easier to learn, use, administer and develop for. It would also be just plain more fun. The Linux kernel lends itself to exactly this kind of development, and I have been wanting to start a project like this but have not had either the time nor the energy for it. It would also be fun to participate in all the design discussions to hash out how it all would work - tha twould really be the most fun!
> In this case RedHat is the only major distro to support the new Pentium VI
Pentium VI? Wow, they are truly advanced in their technology! Here I am lusting after a Pentium IV and RedHat already supports two generations further ahead:-)
your sig - "Jesus died for somebodies sins, but not mine." may have been said by Billy Idol, but it was said FIRST by the incomparable Patti Smith. It was in 1975 on her album Horses. If billy Idol ever said it I'm sure it was an omage of some sort to Patti Smith.
>> Take a look at the gunslinger series by Steven King.
Fiction. Just remember, they are fiction. If you had a reliable supply of pure heroin you could know exactly what dosage to take, eliminating the possibility of an overdose. Much of the "darkening lesions" are caused by irritations and infections from impurities in the drug, dirty needles and so on. The main problem you would have long term with pure drug would be finding usable injection sites. If your supply was steady enough, you might no need to inject, smoking would probably be enough to get you by. The original poster was correct - the main reason most junkies are in such bad shape is because the drug is illegal and the tools needed to inject it are too. Since it is illegal it is impure, difficult and dangerous to get and hard to use.
I'm not saying someone addicted with a steady supply of pure drug would live a good life, just that they could live an OK one.
> Why didn't you just go get your wife's cc and get the password reset?
> This whole story is bullshit flamebait.
If you had paid attention you would have noticed that they refused to let HIM do anything, because it was not his account but his wife's account. This was on the phone. Now why didn't he go get her credit card when he was asked about it by the webpage? Maybe she wasn't in the room. Maybe he does not know which one she used out of several possiblities. Maybe he felt that they were asking for too much info. Maybe it was just too much of a hassle. Who knows, but I don't think it really matters. Why should they need all that info to email you your lost password? I can't see a good reason why but they probably have one they use. I don't think the article was flamebait, but a reasonable complaint about Amazon's policies.
>> Debian is having trouble getting it's IA64 port flying for lack of the right hardware environment. I don't want to think about what it would have to do to get a s390 to port to.
There are micro-S390's that are relatively inexpensive, in IBM terms. I believe a new one can be had for about $25,000 and it will have enough power to run all the popular mainframe OSes, including OS/390. We had one at my last job - it was a cool machine for a very small development shop. Of course, finding someone willing to work on Debian who knows how to set up and run the beast might be a bit hard to come by.
With a little research, I found out that he is still at the University of Tübingen in Germany - If the search I did is correct, I think his email address is :
ott@zdv.uni-tuebingen.de
He may have his data in a more modern format, or be able to point you to a place where you can find it.
I don't read German, but the German Amazon.com has his books listed - here is a sample link:
> What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?
Price - I bought a used Sun SparcStation 10 that did not come with an OS on it. I was not about to pay big bucks to Sun to get a new copy of an OS when I could get a Debian Sparc CD for $3.00 from CheapBytes.
You obviously didn't read the previous comment carefully. The coffee was not just hot - it was so hot that it would have been undrinkable at that temperature. The woman in question suffered second degree burns from the coffee she spilled on her lap - she suffered a pretty severe injury, and needed significant medical attention as a result. The McDonalds in question was serving a beverage that was on the face of it unsafe, despite complaints about it. That seems like a reasonable basis for a negligence suit to me. Finally, the initial jury award was reduced considerably on appeal.
> No, that wasn't Andrew Tanenbaum, the Minix guy. That was me, I spell my name Tannenbaum. Tanenbaum was around at that time, of course. He would sometimes come to Bell Labs in the summers to work with the CS research folks and we'd get each other's mail.
Wow, I knew there were some serious net "old farts" on/. but this is the best I've seen so far! I would love to have known about the netnews in 1981, and to have known enough to read it. I've been aound PCs since 1977 in one way or another, but did not have any net experience until about 1990.
> Yes I hate Microsoft as well, but at least let them bring something out before we hound them.
I don't see why this is strictly necessary. MS has made vapor announcements many times over the years, and has pre-annonced products as part of cooridinated FUD campaigns designed to impact competitors' products. I think that it is perfectly fair to criticise any announcment based on the merits of the announcement and the intended product.
Re:This has been discussed on /. before
on
XFree & Rendering
·
· Score: 1
Thanks Keith - I appreciate your detailed response. I just want to encourage a wide-ranging discussion of the design of a new rendering model. As I said before, this is not an area I have much expertise in, but I thought that the writer of the original comment had some interesting-sounding ideas. As I stated in another comment, I think that any new new rendering system should add all the features that are missing in the old model, but should also take as long a view to future graphics system developments as possible.
Thanks for making a great start on the code. Its about time that someone has actually done some coding rather than just bitching about why things aren't better.
The point of my post was this - If someone is designing a new rendering model for the X Windows System, they need to take a very long term view as to the capabilities of the system, rather than just adding the features that are missing from any current rendering system. There are few things that serious Linux/Unix critics complain about more than X's rendering shortcoming, but if a solution to these problems is promulgated that does not take into account potential future developments in graphics hardware and software, it will do little good.
As far as my supposed "Karma Whoring" goes, if I was truly a Karma whore, I'd have alot more Karma! I read/. daily, and have since the early days of the site, but I post rarely and moderate even less often. Normally, anything I would want to say is said by someone else before I get a chance to post, and I just can't be bothered with the moderation system.
I do think it is valid to post a link to an older article that addresses the same issue - many of the arguments that will be made in response to this article have been made before, but not all readers may be aware of them. I think that many good proposals were made in the old article, and people can benefit from re-reading them.
I'm sorry I didn't post the article reference as a link. Next time I promise I will!
This has been discussed on /. before
on
XFree & Rendering
·
· Score: 1
Most recently on May 7th, in this article:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/05/07/2316257.sh tml
Pay particular attention to comment #275 as it is a concrete
suggestion for what a new rendering model should support.
I'm no expert on graphics rendering models or on the X Windows System and cannot comment on the merits of this new rendering model versus any other model.
I do have this to say - if there is to be a major re-structuring of the X Windows rendering model, it should be designed and architected by a group of people who work together to design a system that will last for ten more years.
It is great that someone is doing real work to address X's very real shortcomings. I just want to make sure that any new rendering model is truly architected to last for as long as possible.
The more well informed and experienced people that get involved in the design, the better off we will all be.
> I have a minidisk recorder, and it has the best of both worlds, plus it's more portable than either!
Not really - it just seems that way. Minidisk technology uses an inferior, lossy compression scheme to record data to the disk - DAT does not. For recording quality live digital audio DAT is clearly the best solution. Of course minidisk recorders are smaller which can be an advantage in some situations, but don't think that you are getting the same recording as you would with a DAT.
But seriously, folks, I'm betting M$ drags it through the appeals process until the feds run out of money and give up.
The feds run out of money????? Are you serious? You know, they print the stuff, so there is no chance they will every run out. If it drags on like the IBM litigation it could become unpopular enough that they will give up, but they will never run out of money. Now that it is in the appeals system there are only two steps up the chain it can go so I don't think it will take very long to get resolved. Remember, the IBM case never even came to trial but went on for like 15 years. Now that the trial is over there is much less to be decided.
In college at Berkeley. I was whacking Pascal on a PDP-11 for CS classes. I guess that was also about the time I was using front panel switches to toggle data into a PDP-11/10 (or was it a 11/7) for the assembly language programming course. Those were the days:-)
Slashdot Mirror
> Even if M$ had a .Net platform for Linux, would anyone actually us it?
.NET app up and running on Linux you maye be allowed to have a Linux box doing something that would otherwise have to use an MS product. Imagine slowly replacing all of your Win2K boxes with Linux boxes running .NET servers of some sort. On the other hand, I'm willing to bet that the .NET implementations for non-MS OSes will be broken, incompatible and incomplete compared to the Windows versions, if they ever exist beyond the vapor stage.
Maybe - it depends on how they wanted to integrate with MS platforms in the enterprise. I can see this as potential a way to get more Linux boxes into an enterprise - if you can port the IT-blessed
> The only fair way to protect these people from being gang raped by the IRS when the owner dies is to abolish this unjust, regressive, predatory, and visciously confiscatory tax.
The *only* way? I guess you don't have much imagination. If there is a group that is being unjustly affected by this tax then the tax should be adjusted to exclude these people as it excludes 98% of all other estates. One way to do this would be to raise the minimum estate size from 1.2 million for a couple to maybe 3 million or so. Or to reduce the tax rate on the low end of the tax to a lower rate. There are any number of ways to address any unfairness in this tax without giving the richest one or two percent a huge tax break.
I do agree that our tax system is set up to screw small businesses and meduim income people while giving huge breaks to the rich and large corporations. The thing that made this possible is the tremendous influence the money these groups have on the political process. If this is not class warfare by the wealthy and influential against everyone else I don't know what is.
> Ah, that is a good idea. However, I don't know too many employers that hire history majors to write software.
Well, I'm a history major and I have been writing software for a living since 1983. Of course, I was writing software for money in high school back in 1978 and I did take quite a few computer science courses in college. I guess you could call me a history major with a CS minor, but they didn't have a minors program where I went to school.
>> I'm all for choice, but a selection between a few strong distros that have what we want vs. a plethora of distros that each have a little bit of what we want is a good thing
Why is this a good thing? What really make a distro strong? Is it a big company backing it like RedHat, or a big developer community like Debian, or something else? What is a weak distro, one only a few people use or something else? There are *many* Linux distributors who are completely non profit but who target a very specific market niche. Would you have people who fit that niche be forced to custom tailor their RedHat for each machine they need to load? I say that as long any distribution has something in it that provides a useful distinction from others, it should be kept for those who get some use out of it. Of course if you want to make money distributing Linux you better have some pretty strong differentiations that give you some kind of market advantage or you are screwed.
TurboLinux has for years targeted the Asian market - when I interviewed there about a year ago they were the market leader in Asia with no challengers on the horizon. Would you have them shut down just because no one you know in the US runs their distro?
I would bet layoffs just get rid of duplication - you can lay off a bunch of HR people, managers and so on because there is now only one position in the merged company.
> And what about if the design was flawed?
.doc format has changed, which is with just about every release of the product.
I think your scenario proves his point exactly. Research and design are much more important than coding. In your example, if MS had really done market research (as I assure you they do) they would have known that they need some sort of converter, and it would be designed into the product. This has in fact happened every time the Word
If you get to the end stage of a project and discover that design decisions you made at the very beginning were flawed it is a sure sign that you did not spend enough time in the design phase and instead fell victim to the "Why Isn't Anyone Coding Yet" syndrome that dooms many projects. A proper design cycle would have revealed flaws in basic design before they were finalized in code.
Many developers call themselves software engineers but have terrible engineering practice compared to the "real" engineering fields. Imagine if you were building a bridge and discovered half way through construction that it would not be able to span the channel, or that it would collapse under its own weight. Many software projects suffer from analagous failures because nobody bothered to design before they started coding.
>> the OS you describe is OS/400...
Not really - unlike most Unix developers I am quite familiar with OS/400. What I want is something with some features of OS/400, some features of Windows, some features of Unix/Linux/GNU/BSD and so on. Just about the only thing I liked about OS/400 was the fact that if you didn't know the command to do a particular thing you could, with the assistance of the OS, find the command and get all the parameters and options. That was pretty handy for me, a Unix guy given this machine to port software to without any real training or instruction on it.
To all those who see my ideas as similar to the Widndows registry i say that I agree to a certain degree. The registry is great for storing config info, but I hate the binary-only aspect of it, and the "corrupted for one, corrupted for all" aspect. IBM actually implemented a registry-like database called the ODM under AIX. It works, but suffers many of the drawbacks of the Windows registry. What I would propose is just a standard place for each app to put its config files, and a standard format for the files. I would want text-only config files so that the could be hand-hacked. Something like a /config directory at the top level, with each app making a subdir with the app name, and maybe a version number under that - for example /config/WindowMaker/0.62.1/configfile This hierarchy could be duplicated in each user's home directory for their local config if there is any - /home/eric/config/.....
Many other re-organizations of where files go are possible if you throw out any backwards compatibility. I have not thought this out to any great degree or read any relevant documents for existing system. I guess I should do some research and make some proposals!
I have wanted to do something like this for a long long time. Unix, GNU and Linux have accumulated such a huge amount of inconsistencies, variations and obscurities that I can see why it is so frustrating for newbies. If I could re-architect all the programs to get rid of all of the inconsistencies without having to have any backwould compatibility it would be great. Imagine having all programs on your system store all their configuration information in one consistent place - or just one place for systemwide stuff and one place for each user's local configs. Imagine if all the configuration files had the same format. Imagine if command line switches for all commands had some sort of pattern or predictability. It would be a big programming job to make things work like this, but it would make a system that was easier to learn, use, administer and develop for. It would also be just plain more fun. The Linux kernel lends itself to exactly this kind of development, and I have been wanting to start a project like this but have not had either the time nor the energy for it. It would also be fun to participate in all the design discussions to hash out how it all would work - tha twould really be the most fun!
> In this case RedHat is the only major distro to support the new Pentium VI
:-)
Pentium VI? Wow, they are truly advanced in their technology! Here I am lusting after a Pentium IV and RedHat already supports two generations further ahead
your sig - "Jesus died for somebodies sins, but not mine." may have been said by Billy Idol, but it was said FIRST by the incomparable Patti Smith. It was in 1975 on her album Horses. If billy Idol ever said it I'm sure it was an omage of some sort to Patti Smith.
They should have named it the Free Hardware foundation - the obvious extension of the Free software foundation!
>> Take a look at the gunslinger series by Steven King.
Fiction. Just remember, they are fiction. If you had a reliable supply of pure heroin you could know exactly what dosage to take, eliminating the possibility of an overdose. Much of the "darkening lesions" are caused by irritations and infections from impurities in the drug, dirty needles and so on. The main problem you would have long term with pure drug would be finding usable injection sites. If your supply was steady enough, you might no need to inject, smoking would probably be enough to get you by. The original poster was correct - the main reason most junkies are in such bad shape is because the drug is illegal and the tools needed to inject it are too. Since it is illegal it is impure, difficult and dangerous to get and hard to use.
I'm not saying someone addicted with a steady supply of pure drug would live a good life, just that they could live an OK one.
> Why didn't you just go get your wife's cc and get the password reset?
> This whole story is bullshit flamebait.
If you had paid attention you would have noticed that they refused to let HIM do anything, because it was not his account but his wife's account. This was on the phone. Now why didn't he go get her credit card when he was asked about it by the webpage? Maybe she wasn't in the room. Maybe he does not know which one she used out of several possiblities. Maybe he felt that they were asking for too much info. Maybe it was just too much of a hassle. Who knows, but I don't think it really matters. Why should they need all that info to email you your lost password? I can't see a good reason why but they probably have one they use. I don't think the article was flamebait, but a reasonable complaint about Amazon's policies.
>> Debian is having trouble getting it's IA64 port flying for lack of the right hardware environment. I don't want to think about what it would have to do to get a s390 to port to.
There are micro-S390's that are relatively inexpensive, in IBM terms. I believe a new one can be had for about $25,000 and it will have enough power to run all the popular mainframe OSes, including OS/390. We had one at my last job - it was a cool machine for a very small development shop. Of course, finding someone willing to work on Debian who knows how to set up and run the beast might be a bit hard to come by.
With a little research, I found out that he is still at the University of Tübingen in Germany - If the search I did is correct, I think his email address is :
4 /qid=971051419/sr=1-6/028-4345424-2850943
ott@zdv.uni-tuebingen.de
He may have his data in a more modern format, or be able to point you to a place where you can find it.
I don't read German, but the German Amazon.com has his books listed - here is a sample link:
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/348460031
Good luck!
> What benefits are there to Linux that don't already exist on a Sun?
Price - I bought a used Sun SparcStation 10 that did not come with an OS on it. I was not about to pay big bucks to Sun to get a new copy of an OS when I could get a Debian Sparc CD for $3.00 from CheapBytes.
You obviously didn't read the previous comment carefully. The coffee was not just hot - it was so hot that it would have been undrinkable at that temperature. The woman in question suffered second degree burns from the coffee she spilled on her lap - she suffered a pretty severe injury, and needed significant medical attention as a result. The McDonalds in question was serving a beverage that was on the face of it unsafe, despite complaints about it. That seems like a reasonable basis for a negligence suit to me. Finally, the initial jury award was reduced considerably on appeal.
> No, that wasn't Andrew Tanenbaum, the Minix guy. That was me, I spell my name Tannenbaum. Tanenbaum was around at that time, of course. He would sometimes come to Bell Labs in the summers to work with the CS research folks and we'd get each other's mail.
Wow, I knew there were some serious net "old farts" on
> Yes I hate Microsoft as well, but at least let them bring something out before we hound them.
I don't see why this is strictly necessary. MS has made vapor announcements many times over the years, and has pre-annonced products as part of cooridinated FUD campaigns designed to impact competitors' products. I think that it is perfectly fair to criticise any announcment based on the merits of the announcement and the intended product.
Thanks Keith - I appreciate your detailed response. I just want to encourage a wide-ranging discussion of the design of a new rendering model. As I said before, this is not an area I have much expertise in, but I thought that the writer of the original comment had some interesting-sounding ideas. As I stated in another comment, I think that any new new rendering system should add all the features that are missing in the old model, but should also take as long a view to future graphics system developments as possible.
Thanks for making a great start on the code. Its about time that someone has actually done some coding rather than just bitching about why things aren't better.
The point of my post was this - If someone is designing a new rendering model for the X Windows System, they need to take a very long term view as to the capabilities of the system, rather than just adding the features that are missing from any current rendering system. There are few things that serious Linux/Unix critics complain about more than X's rendering shortcoming, but if a solution to these problems is promulgated that does not take into account potential future developments in graphics hardware and software, it will do little good.
/. daily, and have since the early days of the site, but I post rarely and moderate even less often. Normally, anything I would want to say is said by someone else before I get a chance to post, and I just can't be bothered with the moderation system.
As far as my supposed "Karma Whoring" goes, if I was truly a Karma whore, I'd have alot more Karma! I read
I do think it is valid to post a link to an older article that addresses the same issue - many of the arguments that will be made in response to this article have been made before, but not all readers may be aware of them. I think that many good proposals were made in the old article, and people can benefit from re-reading them.
I'm sorry I didn't post the article reference as a link. Next time I promise I will!
Most recently on May 7th, in this article:h tml
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/05/07/2316257.s
Pay particular attention to comment #275 as it is a concrete
suggestion for what a new rendering model should support.
I'm no expert on graphics rendering models or on the X Windows System and cannot comment on the merits of this new rendering model versus any other model.
I do have this to say - if there is to be a major re-structuring of the X Windows rendering model, it should be designed and architected by a group of people who work together to design a system that will last for ten more years.
It is great that someone is doing real work to address X's very real shortcomings. I just want to make sure that any new rendering model is truly architected to last for as long as possible.
The more well informed and experienced people that get involved in the design, the better off we will all be.
> I have a minidisk recorder, and it has the best of both worlds, plus it's more portable than either!
Not really - it just seems that way. Minidisk technology uses an inferior, lossy compression scheme to record data to the disk - DAT does not. For recording quality live digital audio DAT is clearly the best solution. Of course minidisk recorders are smaller which can be an advantage in some situations, but don't think that you are getting the same recording as you would with a DAT.
But seriously, folks, I'm betting M$ drags it through the appeals process until the feds run out of money and give up.
The feds run out of money????? Are you serious? You know, they print the stuff, so there is no chance they will every run out. If it drags on like the IBM litigation it could become unpopular enough that they will give up, but they will never run out of money. Now that it is in the appeals system there are only two steps up the chain it can go so I don't think it will take very long to get resolved. Remember, the IBM case never even came to trial but went on for like 15 years. Now that the trial is over there is much less to be decided.
In college at Berkeley. I was whacking Pascal on a PDP-11 for CS classes. I guess that was also about the time I was using front panel switches to toggle data into a PDP-11/10 (or was it a 11/7) for the assembly language programming course. Those were the days :-)