A contract signed under duress is not enforceable. A threat of a security breech if you do not agree to the EULA would seem to be duress. This also shows how flimsy the legality of the EULA is. A contract by definition must be negotiable and agreed to by both parties.
I'm not involved in any way, but the owner of a local IT consulting company is a sponsor -- Jack Bader of NetEffects is listed as a $25K sponsor. I've interviewed with the company, and several of my co-workers work for the company. (We're all contractors; I work through a different contracting company.) I'm sure my co-workers are thrilled with such contructive use of his money.
Quite a few St. Louis companies / folks are involved, due to the Lindbergh / Spirit of St. Louis connection, as well as the historical involvement of MacDonnell-Douglas (now part of Boeing) in the space race.
It's interesting to note that Fred Fish is somewhat active in the GNU community. If you do a Google search, you can find several of his contributions and mailing list posts in several GNU projects.
Actually, Macs started out at 7 or 8 MHz. Your typical PDA these days runs at 100 to 400 MHz. Plus, the instructions-per-clock-cycle are better on modern CPUs than the old 68000. So it's very likely that he has a Mac with more limited computing power than a PDA.
I also like the explanation that my sibling posts made -- if a device doesn't have limited power, it must have infinite power.
Change the text of the message. Change the from address. Add random words. Use 1337-5p34k. Forge the headers.
Seriously, it depends on why you are getting filtered. If you are getting filtered by content, then the spammer's techniques may actually work. If you have been black-listed, then your best bet is to work with the ISPs to see what you can do to get taken off of their blacklists. If possible, have your users white-list you.
Here's my DeLorean story. The exotic car dealer down the road from me had a DeLorean in stock. (I saw 3 different DeLoreans in one day, which I took as an omen.) I did all the research to determine a good price, if I could get parts for it, and if I could get insurance for it. Everything turned out good, and the price was decent for having only 3000 miles on it. Quite a find.
So after I did all the research, I went in to take a look at it and go for a test drive. One of the struts on the gullwing door was very weak. Not the easiest to find a replacement part for, but not too difficult. The seats had a lot of wear for a car with 3000 miles. Papers in the glove compartment seemed to show that the milage was legitimate though, so I suspect that the car was shown a lot and people got to get in to sit in it.
I took a test drive, about 10 miles. The thing had absolutely no visibility. I could barely see the road out the front windsheild when I was going up the hill out of the driveway. The side-view mirrors were small, and turning to look at the blind spot didn't really cover the blind spot. The back window wasn't much better. The motor was also really under-powered. The automatic transmission didn't help. It also seemed to have some electrical problems -- when the AC kicked on, power went way down. My 1985 Fiero 4-cylinder (2.5L) had more power, better visibility, and was a lot more fun to drive.
So after all my excitement about wanting to buy such a cool and rare car, I was very disappointed to find that it wasn't any fun to drive. I considered buying it just for the collector value, but my heart wasn't in it after the test drive.
By that reasoning, we should get rid of elected (and unelected) officials in government too. Of course, I'm somewhat inclined to agree with that reasoning.
You know why blue collar workers get paid well, especially for their overtime? Because they fought hard to get there. They formed unions way back in the day to make sure that they weren't taken advantage of. Not to mention, most of them actually work hard for a living.
Unfortunately, unions have gotten a bad name due to all the corruption, mainly in the 1950s to 1980s. But the idea is valid. If IT people don't band together, they won't be treated fairly. I don't expect the IT industry workers to ever "get it". So the best I can do is look out for myself, which I'm pretty good at. I feel most sorry for those who just take it on the chin and let themselves get taken advantage of.
The proper solution is to separate the 2 tasks. Especially since the overlap between the two is not that great. Hence, I think tools like GLADE should be used much more. I think the whole GUI should be designed in such an application, with the description stored in a file and loaded dynamically at runtime. The UI designer would design the interface, and the functionality would be limited to callbacks defined in the UI file.
Note necessarily. In fact, scientist have been trying to determine the curvature of space for decades. Unfortunately, they keep coming up with a result that space is in fact not curved. They still haven't come up with a good explanation of how space can have 0 curvature yet still be finite and unbounded.
Dravcl had some good comments, but I've got a few things I'd like to add. I've been playing around with Zope for a while, but just installed Plone (2.0) the other day. I'm impressed with it, but I agree that it has some problems. I don't know if I'd attempt to use it for 50000 users. For a few hundred users, I wouldn't expect performance to be a problem. But with 50000 users, performance is going to be hard to find in any product.
I agree with you on the spaghetti code of the skins. I have a little experience with Zope Page Templates. I think it's technically the best templating system available. It's great at separating presentation from data. And the use of CSS does a good job of separating look and feel from the HTML. But the default Plone skin is hard to work with and/or replace. The METAL macros are overused, making it difficult to keep track of all the files involved in rendering a single page. I plan to create my own skin (based on a Zope template I was already using) using only a couple macros (or maybe just a single page). I think that would improve performance somewhat, and will definitely make managing the skin easier.
Another problem I came across is that it's difficult to work on the site outside of the site itself. Because all the objects are stored in the ZODB, I can't use file tools like grep, diff, etc. I can grab files in and out with WebDAV and edit in Dreamweaver, but it still doesn't quite give me the flexibility I'd like. Also, the overuse of METAL macros makes viewing the results of changes to a single file difficult to visualize.
Other than these problems, I found Plone quite intuitive for 90% of normal usage. I found the Plone web site pretty helpful for a lot of the other things. It's a lot easier to navigate and find info than the Zope site. Some of the documentation was out of date, but I didn't actually need much documentation, because it was plug and play and has an intuitive interface.
There are a ton of documentation resource for Zope. My local book store caries 5 or 6 different books, and more are available at Amazon. There are quite a few support sites: ZopeZen, ZopeUsers, ZopeMag, etc. The online docs aren't bad either.
Plone has a lot of very competitive features. The cross-platform online WYSIWYG editor is a must for me. (My main use is going to be a Linux/UNIX user group community site.) It was really easy to enable that, and it looks like I can add other online editors pretty easily. (I prefer HTMLArea to Epoz.) The workflow is pretty simple. The event/calendar applet is very nice. The other applets look pretty good for my needs.
As far as support, I really wouldn't expect too much. At least not for free. I mean Plone competes (well) with products costing $100K. You really can't expect something for nothing. The trade-off is that you get more flexibility and free code, but you have to work harder to either support it yourself or find someone else to help you. You should have been well aware of this going in. If not, you were either fooling yourself or didn't do your research.
In addition to standard XHTML, use classes to differentiate various types of paragraphs, headings, etc. For example, if you want to ensure that file names are marked up differently than normal paragraph text, just put them inside of a tag. This will let you (if you desire) use CSS to distinguish each class with a different appearance. For code snippets, use
. For sidebars, use
. A little-known fact is that you can assign multiple classes to a single entity -- just separate them by a space. If you follow these guidelines, you'll be able to easily transform your XHTML into another XML format quite easily using XSLT or something similar.
I don't really believe in God per se, but I do believe in Determinism.
I grew up Catholic, but now I'm pretty much an agnostic: God may exist, but I don't think I can make such a determination, and I'm not sure what God is like if he does exist. I suspect that if there is a God, it's more of an "energy of the Universe" thing than a conscious being. (I just read up on Pantheism on Wikipedia from a link in this thread.) I definitely don't think God is going to change the laws of physics to help me win a baseball game.
But as an amateur physicist, I believe in Determinism. Time-space is a single entity. The Universe encompasses all space, so it must encompass all space-time as well. If we anthropomorphize the Universe (or suppose that there is any omniscient being) we can imagine Him sitting at the end of time (as we view it). He can look back from the end of time to our current time and know what we will do next.
However, I also believe in Free Will. I guess that makes it Soft Determinism. (Found on Wikipedia that it's also called Compatibilism.) While my actions may be pre-determined from the perspective of all time-space, my conscious mind does not exist in that reality. From my perspective, I am free to choose. Think of a book you're reading for the second time -- you know what's going to happen at any point in time, but you can't change it. But when you read it the first time (when you were a part of the moment) you didn't know what was going to happen.
It's an interesting characteristic of the human mind that it can simultaneously hold seemingly opposing ideas.
I'd also like to point out that Science doesn't prove things to be true either. It can prove things to be false, and provide strong evidence that theories are correct. But it can never provide the truth. So we're basically putting our faith in Science, just as many put their faith in religion.
Rasmus (the original author of PHP) says that PHP doesn't need a template engine, because it is a template engine. There's nothing stopping you from separating your logic in one PHP file and your presentation in a separate PHP file. The logic PHP file would be all PHP code, and the presentation PHP file would be mostly HTML with a bit of PHP code sprinkled in where necessary. The only thing about PHP is that it doesn't require you to separate your code from your logic.
You don't seem to have much of a clue. Modern programs do not load entirely into RAM. Instead, only the portions of the program that are actually needed are loaded into RAM. So if you aren't using the spell check feature, it won't cost you any RAM, just disk space. This is done primarily with DLLs / shared libraries, but the paging system of most modern OSes is lazy -- even for the base program, it only loads what is needed.
So assuming there were something as large as a 100 MB Easter egg, it wouldn't take up much memory until you found it.
Hmm. Not sure why nobody is commenting on this one.
Science has a rich history of "standing on the shoulders of giants". (Mathematics probably has the strongest history of that.) I don't think there's a huge need for a sea change in Science; at least it's not as severe a problem as in the software and creative industries. I suppose there's some need to stem the patent problems and such.
But I don't think it needs an organization as strong as the Creative Commons or Free Software Foundation. As a "lesser evil" I think it may be harmful taking away our attention from the more important goals we need to accomplish.
Then again, I could be (and hope I am) wrong. Perhaps the various organizations will strengthen each other by bringing the problems to the attention of a wider audience.
Your method involves more subtraction, which is harder for most people. And because it's subtraction, it's more difficult to change the grouping in the later calculations. I.e. with 50 + 7 + 6, you can choose to add the first two operands first, or the last 2 operands.
One planet's pollution is another planet's rain machine
Hey, we've got plenty of extra pollution here on Earth. And Mars could use more pollution to help terraform. So why don't we just ship all our extra pollution to Mars?
Perhaps a repository is in order to list all the apps that need replacing, and possible alternatives--if one exists, PLEASE let me know.
The GNU folks (RMS) used to have a list called the GNU Task List. It appears that they've broken it out of a single file into multiple sections over at Savannah. Unfortunately, I think it's missing some of the things in the original Task List. An older version seems to have some of the other things I remember.
I'm going to have to dispute your first point. I have an MCSE (NT 4) and I don't recall having been taught anything about using the CLI in Windows. Just turning on filename completion is a nearly undocumented registry hack. There is not the wide variety of control statements in DOS BAT files as in Borne shell or bash. There is not a wide variety of text processing filters to manipulate the output. If BAT files were sufficient, why would Microsoft have bothered to come out with KiXtart?
I do have to admit that I was impressed with the number of commands that were added in Windows Server 2003. It made it look like Microsoft was starting to realize that scripting is necessary. And it sure is a heck of a lot easier to SSH into a box than pull up a Windows Terminal session.
As for AppleScript, it sounds like Apple has its act together. I've been investigating GUI scriptability on Linux recently. The only decent thing I found was DCOP, which is enabled on most KDE applications. There's Qt Scripting, but it's a new thing and not widely deployed yet. The Amiga used to have ARexx, which allowed you to create scripts to manipulate running GUI apps. Very handy.
I don't find any point in trying to claim that the CLI or the GUI is better than the other. They both have their uses and their strong points. Some things are better done with a GUI, some with a CLI. Some people are more comfortable with the CLI, some people just don't think that way.
One of the best things about Linux (and Mac OS X, and AmigaOS back in the day) is that it comes with both. You can choose which you want to use for a given purpose. Really, if you think about computer programs as tools, it's good to have as wide a variety of tools as possible. In fact, I think we'll eventually end up with CLI, GUI, voice-command, gesture, touch-screen, some sort of hand-held input device, and maybe even brainwave-based biofeedback.
I find the GUI easier for simple tasks that don't need to be repeated very often. But try doing something 1000 times in a typical GUI application. For repetitive tasks, a CLI script is your best bet. It's hard to script or automate most GUI apps. GUIs are also better at spatial tasks, such as paint programs and CAD. Text based applications are best for descriptive tasks, where the quickest way to get things done is by describing it. (I suppose this could be thought of as a programming task, although the language may be field-specific.)
I like many Windows applications. But one of my biggest complaints about Windows is that if it can't be done in the GUI, it can't be done. On Linux, I can just drop back to the CLI, or some text configuration file, or some scripting language, and do it "by hand".
I was thinking the same thing. The biggest tip-off is the talk about maximizing the amount of photons. Really, that's just techno-jargon saying that they want the screen to be bright. Any time you have to resort to techno-babble to explain simple things, it means that you probably can't even do the simple things, much less the difficult things.
Great commentary. I especially like your idea on orphaned code. One way to put that idea into practice would be to require periodic re-registration of copyrights.
As a thought to the profit motive, perhaps we could say that any patent that has created more than 10 times (or whatever number) the amount of profit than the R&D costs loses patent protection. While companies would lie and try to maximize the apparent amount of their R&D, it's likely to spur actual R&D as well. The biggest trick would be detemining when it hits that spot.
Now, take a look at those 2 alternatives -- "open sourcing" all these technologies, or locking them up for Xerox. Which benefits society more? Recall that corporations are created for the benefit of society. (Not the other way around, as current policies might have you believe.) Why would society give the company a monopoly to withhold all this wonderful technology? It doesn't make sense. Yes, it makes sense to provide some short-term incentives to create things, but not long-term incentives to prevent others from using those creations.
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A contract signed under duress is not enforceable. A threat of a security breech if you do not agree to the EULA would seem to be duress. This also shows how flimsy the legality of the EULA is. A contract by definition must be negotiable and agreed to by both parties.
Quite a few St. Louis companies / folks are involved, due to the Lindbergh / Spirit of St. Louis connection, as well as the historical involvement of MacDonnell-Douglas (now part of Boeing) in the space race.
It's interesting to note that Fred Fish is somewhat active in the GNU community. If you do a Google search, you can find several of his contributions and mailing list posts in several GNU projects.
Actually, Macs started out at 7 or 8 MHz. Your typical PDA these days runs at 100 to 400 MHz. Plus, the instructions-per-clock-cycle are better on modern CPUs than the old 68000. So it's very likely that he has a Mac with more limited computing power than a PDA.
I also like the explanation that my sibling posts made -- if a device doesn't have limited power, it must have infinite power.
Change the text of the message. Change the from address. Add random words. Use 1337-5p34k. Forge the headers.
Seriously, it depends on why you are getting filtered. If you are getting filtered by content, then the spammer's techniques may actually work. If you have been black-listed, then your best bet is to work with the ISPs to see what you can do to get taken off of their blacklists. If possible, have your users white-list you.
Here's my DeLorean story. The exotic car dealer down the road from me had a DeLorean in stock. (I saw 3 different DeLoreans in one day, which I took as an omen.) I did all the research to determine a good price, if I could get parts for it, and if I could get insurance for it. Everything turned out good, and the price was decent for having only 3000 miles on it. Quite a find.
So after I did all the research, I went in to take a look at it and go for a test drive. One of the struts on the gullwing door was very weak. Not the easiest to find a replacement part for, but not too difficult. The seats had a lot of wear for a car with 3000 miles. Papers in the glove compartment seemed to show that the milage was legitimate though, so I suspect that the car was shown a lot and people got to get in to sit in it.
I took a test drive, about 10 miles. The thing had absolutely no visibility. I could barely see the road out the front windsheild when I was going up the hill out of the driveway. The side-view mirrors were small, and turning to look at the blind spot didn't really cover the blind spot. The back window wasn't much better. The motor was also really under-powered. The automatic transmission didn't help. It also seemed to have some electrical problems -- when the AC kicked on, power went way down. My 1985 Fiero 4-cylinder (2.5L) had more power, better visibility, and was a lot more fun to drive.
So after all my excitement about wanting to buy such a cool and rare car, I was very disappointed to find that it wasn't any fun to drive. I considered buying it just for the collector value, but my heart wasn't in it after the test drive.
By that reasoning, we should get rid of elected (and unelected) officials in government too. Of course, I'm somewhat inclined to agree with that reasoning.
You know why blue collar workers get paid well, especially for their overtime? Because they fought hard to get there. They formed unions way back in the day to make sure that they weren't taken advantage of. Not to mention, most of them actually work hard for a living.
Unfortunately, unions have gotten a bad name due to all the corruption, mainly in the 1950s to 1980s. But the idea is valid. If IT people don't band together, they won't be treated fairly. I don't expect the IT industry workers to ever "get it". So the best I can do is look out for myself, which I'm pretty good at. I feel most sorry for those who just take it on the chin and let themselves get taken advantage of.
The proper solution is to separate the 2 tasks. Especially since the overlap between the two is not that great. Hence, I think tools like GLADE should be used much more. I think the whole GUI should be designed in such an application, with the description stored in a file and loaded dynamically at runtime. The UI designer would design the interface, and the functionality would be limited to callbacks defined in the UI file.
Or, in other words, space is curved.
Note necessarily. In fact, scientist have been trying to determine the curvature of space for decades. Unfortunately, they keep coming up with a result that space is in fact not curved. They still haven't come up with a good explanation of how space can have 0 curvature yet still be finite and unbounded.
Dravcl had some good comments, but I've got a few things I'd like to add. I've been playing around with Zope for a while, but just installed Plone (2.0) the other day. I'm impressed with it, but I agree that it has some problems. I don't know if I'd attempt to use it for 50000 users. For a few hundred users, I wouldn't expect performance to be a problem. But with 50000 users, performance is going to be hard to find in any product.
I agree with you on the spaghetti code of the skins. I have a little experience with Zope Page Templates. I think it's technically the best templating system available. It's great at separating presentation from data. And the use of CSS does a good job of separating look and feel from the HTML. But the default Plone skin is hard to work with and/or replace. The METAL macros are overused, making it difficult to keep track of all the files involved in rendering a single page. I plan to create my own skin (based on a Zope template I was already using) using only a couple macros (or maybe just a single page). I think that would improve performance somewhat, and will definitely make managing the skin easier.
Another problem I came across is that it's difficult to work on the site outside of the site itself. Because all the objects are stored in the ZODB, I can't use file tools like grep, diff, etc. I can grab files in and out with WebDAV and edit in Dreamweaver, but it still doesn't quite give me the flexibility I'd like. Also, the overuse of METAL macros makes viewing the results of changes to a single file difficult to visualize.
Other than these problems, I found Plone quite intuitive for 90% of normal usage. I found the Plone web site pretty helpful for a lot of the other things. It's a lot easier to navigate and find info than the Zope site. Some of the documentation was out of date, but I didn't actually need much documentation, because it was plug and play and has an intuitive interface.
There are a ton of documentation resource for Zope. My local book store caries 5 or 6 different books, and more are available at Amazon. There are quite a few support sites: ZopeZen, ZopeUsers, ZopeMag, etc. The online docs aren't bad either.
Plone has a lot of very competitive features. The cross-platform online WYSIWYG editor is a must for me. (My main use is going to be a Linux/UNIX user group community site.) It was really easy to enable that, and it looks like I can add other online editors pretty easily. (I prefer HTMLArea to Epoz.) The workflow is pretty simple. The event/calendar applet is very nice. The other applets look pretty good for my needs.
As far as support, I really wouldn't expect too much. At least not for free. I mean Plone competes (well) with products costing $100K. You really can't expect something for nothing. The trade-off is that you get more flexibility and free code, but you have to work harder to either support it yourself or find someone else to help you. You should have been well aware of this going in. If not, you were either fooling yourself or didn't do your research.
I grew up Catholic, but now I'm pretty much an agnostic: God may exist, but I don't think I can make such a determination, and I'm not sure what God is like if he does exist. I suspect that if there is a God, it's more of an "energy of the Universe" thing than a conscious being. (I just read up on Pantheism on Wikipedia from a link in this thread.) I definitely don't think God is going to change the laws of physics to help me win a baseball game.
But as an amateur physicist, I believe in Determinism. Time-space is a single entity. The Universe encompasses all space, so it must encompass all space-time as well. If we anthropomorphize the Universe (or suppose that there is any omniscient being) we can imagine Him sitting at the end of time (as we view it). He can look back from the end of time to our current time and know what we will do next.
However, I also believe in Free Will. I guess that makes it Soft Determinism. (Found on Wikipedia that it's also called Compatibilism.) While my actions may be pre-determined from the perspective of all time-space, my conscious mind does not exist in that reality. From my perspective, I am free to choose. Think of a book you're reading for the second time -- you know what's going to happen at any point in time, but you can't change it. But when you read it the first time (when you were a part of the moment) you didn't know what was going to happen.
It's an interesting characteristic of the human mind that it can simultaneously hold seemingly opposing ideas.
I'd also like to point out that Science doesn't prove things to be true either. It can prove things to be false, and provide strong evidence that theories are correct. But it can never provide the truth. So we're basically putting our faith in Science, just as many put their faith in religion.
Rasmus (the original author of PHP) says that PHP doesn't need a template engine, because it is a template engine. There's nothing stopping you from separating your logic in one PHP file and your presentation in a separate PHP file. The logic PHP file would be all PHP code, and the presentation PHP file would be mostly HTML with a bit of PHP code sprinkled in where necessary. The only thing about PHP is that it doesn't require you to separate your code from your logic.
You don't seem to have much of a clue. Modern programs do not load entirely into RAM. Instead, only the portions of the program that are actually needed are loaded into RAM. So if you aren't using the spell check feature, it won't cost you any RAM, just disk space. This is done primarily with DLLs / shared libraries, but the paging system of most modern OSes is lazy -- even for the base program, it only loads what is needed.
So assuming there were something as large as a 100 MB Easter egg, it wouldn't take up much memory until you found it.
Hmm. Not sure why nobody is commenting on this one.
Science has a rich history of "standing on the shoulders of giants". (Mathematics probably has the strongest history of that.) I don't think there's a huge need for a sea change in Science; at least it's not as severe a problem as in the software and creative industries. I suppose there's some need to stem the patent problems and such.
But I don't think it needs an organization as strong as the Creative Commons or Free Software Foundation. As a "lesser evil" I think it may be harmful taking away our attention from the more important goals we need to accomplish.
Then again, I could be (and hope I am) wrong. Perhaps the various organizations will strengthen each other by bringing the problems to the attention of a wider audience.
Umm, why don't you round each number down, and then add the differences?
Here's your method:
27 + 36 = 30 + 40 - ((30-27) + (40-36)) = 70 - (3+4) = 70 - 7 = 63
Here's my method (and what we all learned in school):
27 + 36 = 20 + 30 + (27-20) + (36-30) = 50 + 7 + 6 = 57 + 6 = 63
Your method involves more subtraction, which is harder for most people. And because it's subtraction, it's more difficult to change the grouping in the later calculations. I.e. with 50 + 7 + 6, you can choose to add the first two operands first, or the last 2 operands.
Hey, we've got plenty of extra pollution here on Earth. And Mars could use more pollution to help terraform. So why don't we just ship all our extra pollution to Mars?
The GNU folks (RMS) used to have a list called the GNU Task List. It appears that they've broken it out of a single file into multiple sections over at Savannah. Unfortunately, I think it's missing some of the things in the original Task List. An older version seems to have some of the other things I remember.
I'm going to have to dispute your first point. I have an MCSE (NT 4) and I don't recall having been taught anything about using the CLI in Windows. Just turning on filename completion is a nearly undocumented registry hack. There is not the wide variety of control statements in DOS BAT files as in Borne shell or bash. There is not a wide variety of text processing filters to manipulate the output. If BAT files were sufficient, why would Microsoft have bothered to come out with KiXtart?
I do have to admit that I was impressed with the number of commands that were added in Windows Server 2003. It made it look like Microsoft was starting to realize that scripting is necessary. And it sure is a heck of a lot easier to SSH into a box than pull up a Windows Terminal session.
As for AppleScript, it sounds like Apple has its act together. I've been investigating GUI scriptability on Linux recently. The only decent thing I found was DCOP, which is enabled on most KDE applications. There's Qt Scripting, but it's a new thing and not widely deployed yet. The Amiga used to have ARexx, which allowed you to create scripts to manipulate running GUI apps. Very handy.
I don't find any point in trying to claim that the CLI or the GUI is better than the other. They both have their uses and their strong points. Some things are better done with a GUI, some with a CLI. Some people are more comfortable with the CLI, some people just don't think that way.
One of the best things about Linux (and Mac OS X, and AmigaOS back in the day) is that it comes with both. You can choose which you want to use for a given purpose. Really, if you think about computer programs as tools, it's good to have as wide a variety of tools as possible. In fact, I think we'll eventually end up with CLI, GUI, voice-command, gesture, touch-screen, some sort of hand-held input device, and maybe even brainwave-based biofeedback.
I find the GUI easier for simple tasks that don't need to be repeated very often. But try doing something 1000 times in a typical GUI application. For repetitive tasks, a CLI script is your best bet. It's hard to script or automate most GUI apps. GUIs are also better at spatial tasks, such as paint programs and CAD. Text based applications are best for descriptive tasks, where the quickest way to get things done is by describing it. (I suppose this could be thought of as a programming task, although the language may be field-specific.)
I like many Windows applications. But one of my biggest complaints about Windows is that if it can't be done in the GUI, it can't be done. On Linux, I can just drop back to the CLI, or some text configuration file, or some scripting language, and do it "by hand".
I was thinking the same thing. The biggest tip-off is the talk about maximizing the amount of photons. Really, that's just techno-jargon saying that they want the screen to be bright. Any time you have to resort to techno-babble to explain simple things, it means that you probably can't even do the simple things, much less the difficult things.
Great commentary. I especially like your idea on orphaned code. One way to put that idea into practice would be to require periodic re-registration of copyrights.
As a thought to the profit motive, perhaps we could say that any patent that has created more than 10 times (or whatever number) the amount of profit than the R&D costs loses patent protection. While companies would lie and try to maximize the apparent amount of their R&D, it's likely to spur actual R&D as well. The biggest trick would be detemining when it hits that spot.
Now, take a look at those 2 alternatives -- "open sourcing" all these technologies, or locking them up for Xerox. Which benefits society more? Recall that corporations are created for the benefit of society. (Not the other way around, as current policies might have you believe.) Why would society give the company a monopoly to withhold all this wonderful technology? It doesn't make sense. Yes, it makes sense to provide some short-term incentives to create things, but not long-term incentives to prevent others from using those creations.