Until we hit that breakthrough that gets the solar efficiency past 40%, we won't see much of any daily applications of this tech.
Then again, it's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
I think you are wrong. Agreed it's only for specalised purposes, but solar power is practical and useful now. For example, a solar panel provides all the power for all the systems - navigation instruments, radio, GPS, interior lighting, navigation lights - on my boat, and it does that reliably in Scotland which is not a sunny country. As far as I'm concerned, that's a practical daily application.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the tech we use wastes a huge amount of power because we're so used to having it on tap and so cheap. For example, at least 75% of the energy used by an incandescent lightbulb gets wasted as heat. My desktop computer has a 450 watt power supply. All the little gizmos you plug into your computer which have their own little AC/DC adaptors waste energy as heat (just feel how hot those little boxes get). In warmer countries than this all the heat given off by inefficient devixces then has to be couteracted by air conditioning systems which consume still more power.
If you want to make practical use of solar power then you have to think carefully about the systems you use. You can save vast amounts of power by changing to different lighting technologies (LEDs, compact flourescents...) and by using different processor families and more integrated devices. Solar power isn't practical for powering devices designed for mains electricity, but that doesn't mean it cant be practical for doing what you want to do.
MS will just wave a few bills in their face and say "shut up, go away." And they will. Either that or MS will take some of their $40B and just buy the whole company from them.
Errr... I think you missed the point. SCO isn't SCO, it's Caldera; InterTrust isn't InterTrust, it's Sony. Sony don't like Microsoft very much, and Sony won't sell cheap. We could get a lot of laughs out of this yet...
But software patents are still a bad thing.
Just because it's Microsoft doesn't make it right
on
Microsoft's Patent Problem
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· Score: 3, Insightful
OK, OK, I'm laughing too. I'm laughing pretty hard because this is so much the biter bit. It's a great story.
Put if software patents are bad (and I believe they are) they're bad even when someone is putting the boot into Microsoft. Let's face it, this may be a 'small' company putting the boot in, but it's a 'small' company owned (mostly) by Sony. Patents still only help those with very deep warchests.
We must continue to oppose software patents and that means all software patents, because that's the only way we can maintain a playing field level enough for us small guys to play at all.
Sometimes I despair of Slashdot. Here's IBM offering us a quad processor system at a price we can afford and we go off maundering about Mac OS X. This is not about Mac OS X. It's about a quad processor machine that you can afford to put under your desk. Isn't anyone else excited about that?
What surprises me is it looks to me as if these cars are getting less, not more, aerodynamic with time. Take the Eclipse team. Their Eclipse 1 and 2 vehicles look like a solar car I would design - teardrop shape low to the ground with enclosed roadwheels. Their three and four designs are essentially flat plates relatively high above the road with a bubble in the middle for the driver, and in version four the road wheels are unshrouded, and there's no attempt to round off the body edges to reduce vortices.
The MIT teams evolution is similar if less extreme. The current car is a moderately streamlined high-deck-and-bubble job with its wheels unshrouded. The 1999 car has a similar body but shrouded wheels.
In fact, more or less streamlined high-deck-and-bubble designs seem to be the theme of this years race. These vehicles look hugely vulnerable to crosswinds.
does anyone seriously believe that enough people are going to buy an XBox and use it for non gaming purposes to actually hurt M$ financially ?.
Possibly.
Remember that XBox security is in effect a precursor to MS' proposed new 'trusted platform', the next generation of their OS and of their business model. If what is happening here is that we are developing a cadre of skilled reverse engineers who can find their way around and through MS' security schemes, then they will not be able to lock down the next generation of PCs as they propose, and it's essentially game over for them.
Remember, any business, however big, can come crashing down if the economic niche that it filled disappears. Linux will take away the market for closed proprietary operating systems. Other initiatives, mostly Open Source ones, will erode the market for closed proprietary office software. The same dynamics which made Microsoft dominant in the first place can quickly make them irrelevent.
Microsoft know this and their current strategy to avoid it is to evolve a technical and legal wall around the hardware, so that it's impossible to get 'untrusted' (read 'open source') software to run on it. The XBox hackers, by demonstrating to the world that this does not work, are undermining Microsoft's new fortress. And it's particularly delightful that Microsoft gave them the tools to do it.
Go XBox hackers! Develop and hone your skills. The real test is yet to come, but I have faith in you...
Ok, so your buddy asks you to help him fix his linux system. He thinks he's a hot HTML designer and has thus "configured" all his editors to use ugly-ass colours, fonts, and blinking.
If you're running OS X, there's a good chance you can copy your editor (one bundle only) over to his system and it will bring its preferences along with it. At that point you can use your editor to fix his sytem. Voila.
Whereas if you use Linux, you just copy your.xemacs directory, which contains two small files, and viola! At that point you can use your editor to fix his sytem. The place for an individual user's preferences is not with the package, it's with the user!
Why copy an application which takes up many megabytes of storage, when you can copy a configuration file whish uses half a dozen kilobytes?
The point is not that it's theoretically possible to move apps or RPM under linux, or it can be automated if you do some fiddling under the hood (and anything that involved touching a file that starts with a '.' is almost by definition under the hood), but that Linux should offer this functionality automagically.
Why should it? Because it's possible in Windows of Mac OS? Or because it adds some useful functionality for a user, in which case what is that functionality?
For any given app, in a properly organised Linux system, there is only one right place. Being able to move it to the wrong place is not a benefit.
And if you're going to whine but what happens if the file system is full, isn't it time you were using logical volume management?
Installing or moving apps in Linux can be a nightmare. In OS X its just drag and drop. Why can't we improve?
In what sense would it be an improvement? It looks to me like a category error, or someone who doesn't understand how UN*X systems are organised.
What the coporate world is looking for is something that is cheaper and easier to run than exchange but will work with all the existing installed software and addons. Some things are handy like having email to fax on exchage. Send an email and it becomes a fax.
I was doing automatic email to fax - selectable by the user - fifteen years ago on UN*X. I was doing automated email From and Subject headers to SMS eight years ago on Linux.
There's nothing surprising about Microsoft coming up with a 'world-beating innovation' a decade late, they've been doing it for, errm, decades.
Re:Note on Outlook compatability
on
Opengroupware
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· Score: 1
It may not involve actually spending money for the retraining but the amount of productivity that an office uses while the migration occurs as well as users getting familiar with the new product does equal a certain amount of money (unless everyone is a volunteer).
This is a ludicrous argument. Outlook does not conform to standard Windows look-and-feel, and standard Windows user interface expectations. Therefore there are considerable training costs in using Outlook. By contrast, pretty much all the alternative Windows email clients and groupware products do conform with standard Windows user interface expectations and consequently the training hit from them is negligable. So switching from Outlook is more likely to lower training costs than to raise them.
OK, we're seeing a lot of whinging here about whether the television license fee is actually a tax. Well, it sort of is, of course, but it also in important ways, sort of isn't. If it were a tax - a grant from the treasury - then the BBC could easily be forced to toe the government line. It's because the license fee is 'hypothecated' - i.e. dedicated to a particular purpose, in this case the BBC (a thing the treasury really hate) that the BBC is independent from government.
It's because the BBC is independent from Government that we can get spats like this, where the BBC very publicly say, in effect, that the Prime Minister lied to Parliament about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, and it's because of the BBC's independence that it can refuse to back down despite the most severe pressure from the government.
So, you know, let's hear it for the BBC and let's hear it for the License Fee. It's because the license fee is hypothecated - a tax paid by the people directly to an independent organisation - that we have at least one high quality media publisher with the utmost journalistic integrity which can call a sleazy and corrupt government to account, as it is doing now over the lies which led us into an illegal and unjustified war, and as it did under the Tories about MPs taking bribes.
A government run broadcaster could not do this, because the government could tell them to shut up, and cut off their funds if they didn't. A commercial broadcaster would find it much harder to do this, because the big commercial interests which pay for advertising don't want the boat to be rocked.
The BBC is, let's face it, one of the most independent, one of the most honest, one of the most fair broadcasters in the world. In a world where most media is in the hands of a very few commercial interests, mostly with fairly noxious political agendas, having one which is answerable only to the public is a very good thing in my opinion.
So, what kind of "innovations" has been created by Microsoft?
Just the one that I can think of - use-based dynamic menus. Perhaps someone can point me to earlier cases of this, but I still like it and still find them useful.
Must say I feel quite sorry for you if you think calling bullshit on Harry Potter is elitist.
Matter of fact; most people who read Harry Potter don't read much else. If they did, they might've discovered that there is more to this thing called literature than the tripe that is hyped on low brow tv.
Most things that are very popular are utter crap. Peoples taste are very different, so when a pheomenon like Harry Potter springs up, you can be sure that there are external factors that count, not the actual quality of the work.
Within 72 hours of The Order of the Phoenix being published my partner and I had both read it cover to cover; I'm currently reading it for the second time. She's 39 and I'm 47; we have no children. We've both read all of the Harry Potter books, the first long before it was filmed. There are somewhere between five and ten thousand novels in this house - we both read a lot.
J K Rowling's work is not 'bullshit'. It's not, in my opinion, great literature either, but it is superb and highly imaginative story telling, tightly plotted and compellingly told and stands repeated reading.
There are two particular things I can point to which indicate that the Harry Potter phenomenon is something genuine in terms of literature. The first is, of course, that the first Harry Potter book came out from a small independent publisher with no fanfare at all. The whole snowball effect was entirely by word of mouth, at least until The Philosopher's Stone was filmed. Up to that point there were no external factors - no marketing, no colateral - so that only the intrinsic quality of the work could have made it one of the biggest best sellers of all time.
The other thing is that, in the UK, the publishers brought out an 'adult binding' of the Harry Potter books because they found that adult readers were embarrassed to be seen reading a "children's book" on public transport. This had never been done before for any other "children's book"
Both the original binding and the 'adult binding' of several Harry Potter books have separately been on the best sellers lists in Britain for years, and an individual Harry Potter book has been the best selling book in Britain for three of the last four years (in 2001, Harry Potter books took the top four places on the best sellers list). At this moment, Harry Potter books are first, second, eighth, ninth, seventeenth, and twenty-second on The Guardian's best sellers list. That's right, six places for five books. The second place, after the "children's binding" of Order of the Phoenix is the "adult binding" of the same title. Given that many adults will have the "children's binding" (we have) this indicates that roughly as many adults as children are reading the book.
Furthermore, apart from The Order of the Phoenix, all the Harry Potter books have Booktrack Platinum Awards for selling over a million copies within five years in Britain. Only six other books have ever won this award.
Harry Potter isn't a 'flash in the pan' success. It's a solid, consistent success over a period of years. It's a series of children's books, but it has sold well to adults. Its success long predates its marketing and is still out of all proportion to the amount of marketing effort it receives.
Of course, popularity is, as you say, no indicator of aesthetic merit. However, this degree of popularity sustained over this long indicates something, and it doesn't indicate hype because the popularity (at least in Britain) predates the hype, not the other way around. Yes, it's easy to appear superficially cool by rubbishing Rowling's work. But unless you have some alternative explanation for this degree of popularity, your shallowness and lack of
The best protection open source can get is US legal precendents. The defeat of SCO would be a good start, then a decision upholding the GPL so that it gets taken seriously.
Oh, save us from small-minded, narrow, ignoratn American parochialism. There are over 150 legal jurisdictions in the world. None of them gives a monkeys about what happens in any other. There's nothing special or magic about an American court
Well, Dmitry was in Las Vegas at the time, so that's inside the border. If you rob a casino in Vegas, you get arrested, whether you're Russian or not. Better to argue that the law is flawed than to argue about jurisdiction.
Dmitri was in Moscow when he 'committed' the alleged 'crime'. Except that it wasn't a crime in Moscow, it was perfectly legal. He was later invited to a conference in the United States where he spoke on a related topic, but what he said is not alleged to have been criminal (anywhere). So he committed no crime either in the United States or anywhere else in the world. He did something in Moscow which might have been criminal if he had done it in the United States, but he didn't.
There are lots of things that are legal in one country but illegal in another. For example, carrying or even posessing any sort of hand gun is illegal here in Scotland. Do you think that if you've ever carried a handgun anywhere in the world, if you visit Scotland you should be arrested and charged?
My Logitech cordless works just fine through my Belkin Omnicube 4-port KVM to my Linux box, which, like yours, runs Debian testing with a 2.4.20 kernel and KDE 3.1.1a. Scroll wheel functionality is fine. I haven't got the side buttons working, but then I can't think of what I'd use them for.
I doubt it's the KVM that's causing the problem. It's more likely your X config. However, one hint: when I switch to a windows box and switch back, I have to do [ctrl][alt][f1]-[ctrl][alt][f7] to force X to reinitialise the mouse.
Up until early in the twentieth century, popular music and academic music were basically one and the same, and the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is doing fine. A lot of people (such as myself) listen to it daily, many radio stations remain dedicated to it, and a lot of people still perform. Sure, it's not dominating the music industry, but with so much music, there really isn't any one thing that's dominating any more.
Bollocks.
'Classical' music (and its precursers in the church and court musics of the renaissance and medieval periods) was never popular music. It was music written for an elite and one of its primary purposes was precisely to distance the elite from hoi polloi who were listening to (and enjoying) ballads, jigs, reels and other 'folk music'.
Elite music is all about snobbery, oneupmanship and ostentation. Among other values elite music has to meet at least several of these criteria. It must:
Be novel - 'I can afford to hire a composer to compose music for me'.
Be technically complex to perform - 'I can hire more skilled musicians than you can afford'.
Require large numbers of performers - 'I can hire more performers than you can afford'.
Require complex and expensive technology - 'I can afford the most modern harpsichord, or the largest and most complex organ'.
While elite music of lasting aesthetic quality has been produced, the main reason people listened to elite music in the past (and, indeed, the main reason people listen to 'classical' music now) is a wish to identify themselves as elite - 'I listen to posh music so I am posher than you'.
This has nothing whatever to do either with aesthetic quality or with popularity. Elite music has never been popular and most of it never deserved to be.
By contrast, until the twentieth century (and, to a remarkable extent, through the twentieth century and into the present one) popular music is played by small groups of performers on relatively simple portable instruments using traditional musical forms which change little over generations.
...when folks used to encode videos using codecs that worked well on any platform?
Don't worry, it doesn't run on MSWindows either. I just fired up my MSWin box to look at it, and it complained that I didn't have ActiveX enabled. Well, I don't, and I'm not going to enable it just to see a movie.
White space would obviously change the MD5 right? So all the infringer (or someone trying to hide the infringement, to take the argument SCO might use) would have to do is add some space here and there and the MD5 won't be at all the same. I don't think that's a valid method to determine if the code is stolen or not.
Changing space would change the MD5 sum, yes, but that is easily normalised out by feeding both code bases through either the same code prettyprinter or through a simple sed filter which replaces any string of whitespace with a single space character prior to the chopping and checksumming process.
You car is stolen because the manufacturer installed no locks in the doors. You say "It's the fault of the criminals"
It is.
No-one forces criminals to steal someone else's property just because it doesn't happen to be locked up, tied down, or otherwise secured. Theft is a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
...they do these things with style.
I think you are wrong. Agreed it's only for specalised purposes, but solar power is practical and useful now. For example, a solar panel provides all the power for all the systems - navigation instruments, radio, GPS, interior lighting, navigation lights - on my boat, and it does that reliably in Scotland which is not a sunny country. As far as I'm concerned, that's a practical daily application.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the tech we use wastes a huge amount of power because we're so used to having it on tap and so cheap. For example, at least 75% of the energy used by an incandescent lightbulb gets wasted as heat. My desktop computer has a 450 watt power supply. All the little gizmos you plug into your computer which have their own little AC/DC adaptors waste energy as heat (just feel how hot those little boxes get). In warmer countries than this all the heat given off by inefficient devixces then has to be couteracted by air conditioning systems which consume still more power.
If you want to make practical use of solar power then you have to think carefully about the systems you use. You can save vast amounts of power by changing to different lighting technologies (LEDs, compact flourescents...) and by using different processor families and more integrated devices. Solar power isn't practical for powering devices designed for mains electricity, but that doesn't mean it cant be practical for doing what you want to do.
Outcome one
Microsoft agree to pay InterTrust BIGNUM dollars. Microsoft hurt badly and have their eyes on other things for a while. Open Source benefits.
Outcome two
Microsoft lean on the US Government and the WTO to outlaw software patents. Open Source benefits.
Let there be singing, rejoicing and dancing in the streets!
Errr... I think you missed the point. SCO isn't SCO, it's Caldera; InterTrust isn't InterTrust, it's Sony. Sony don't like Microsoft very much, and Sony won't sell cheap. We could get a lot of laughs out of this yet...
But software patents are still a bad thing.
Put if software patents are bad (and I believe they are) they're bad even when someone is putting the boot into Microsoft. Let's face it, this may be a 'small' company putting the boot in, but it's a 'small' company owned (mostly) by Sony. Patents still only help those with very deep warchests.
We must continue to oppose software patents and that means all software patents, because that's the only way we can maintain a playing field level enough for us small guys to play at all.
... by bicycle.
Sometimes I despair of Slashdot. Here's IBM offering us a quad processor system at a price we can afford and we go off maundering about Mac OS X. This is not about Mac OS X. It's about a quad processor machine that you can afford to put under your desk. Isn't anyone else excited about that?
The MIT teams evolution is similar if less extreme. The current car is a moderately streamlined high-deck-and-bubble job with its wheels unshrouded. The 1999 car has a similar body but shrouded wheels.
In fact, more or less streamlined high-deck-and-bubble designs seem to be the theme of this years race. These vehicles look hugely vulnerable to crosswinds.
Possibly.
Remember that XBox security is in effect a precursor to MS' proposed new 'trusted platform', the next generation of their OS and of their business model. If what is happening here is that we are developing a cadre of skilled reverse engineers who can find their way around and through MS' security schemes, then they will not be able to lock down the next generation of PCs as they propose, and it's essentially game over for them.
Remember, any business, however big, can come crashing down if the economic niche that it filled disappears. Linux will take away the market for closed proprietary operating systems. Other initiatives, mostly Open Source ones, will erode the market for closed proprietary office software. The same dynamics which made Microsoft dominant in the first place can quickly make them irrelevent.
Microsoft know this and their current strategy to avoid it is to evolve a technical and legal wall around the hardware, so that it's impossible to get 'untrusted' (read 'open source') software to run on it. The XBox hackers, by demonstrating to the world that this does not work, are undermining Microsoft's new fortress. And it's particularly delightful that Microsoft gave them the tools to do it.
Go XBox hackers! Develop and hone your skills. The real test is yet to come, but I have faith in you...
Whereas if you use Linux, you just copy your .xemacs directory, which contains two small files, and viola! At that point you can use your editor to fix his sytem. The place for an individual user's preferences is not with the package, it's with the user !
Why copy an application which takes up many megabytes of storage, when you can copy a configuration file whish uses half a dozen kilobytes?
Why should it? Because it's possible in Windows of Mac OS? Or because it adds some useful functionality for a user, in which case what is that functionality?
For any given app, in a properly organised Linux system, there is only one right place. Being able to move it to the wrong place is not a benefit.
And if you're going to whine but what happens if the file system is full, isn't it time you were using logical volume management?
In what sense would it be an improvement? It looks to me like a category error, or someone who doesn't understand how UN*X systems are organised.
What a concept. Doesn't it sound good? 'Terascale sneakernet'. I think I'm going to say that about a dozen times before lunch...
I was doing automatic email to fax - selectable by the user - fifteen years ago on UN*X. I was doing automated email From and Subject headers to SMS eight years ago on Linux.
There's nothing surprising about Microsoft coming up with a 'world-beating innovation' a decade late, they've been doing it for, errm, decades.
This is a ludicrous argument. Outlook does not conform to standard Windows look-and-feel, and standard Windows user interface expectations. Therefore there are considerable training costs in using Outlook. By contrast, pretty much all the alternative Windows email clients and groupware products do conform with standard Windows user interface expectations and consequently the training hit from them is negligable. So switching from Outlook is more likely to lower training costs than to raise them.
from when I was judging ThinkQuest 2001. They were really, really bright. Needless to say they won a platinum award. Their contest entry is here.
It's because the BBC is independent from Government that we can get spats like this, where the BBC very publicly say, in effect, that the Prime Minister lied to Parliament about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, and it's because of the BBC's independence that it can refuse to back down despite the most severe pressure from the government.
So, you know, let's hear it for the BBC and let's hear it for the License Fee. It's because the license fee is hypothecated - a tax paid by the people directly to an independent organisation - that we have at least one high quality media publisher with the utmost journalistic integrity which can call a sleazy and corrupt government to account, as it is doing now over the lies which led us into an illegal and unjustified war, and as it did under the Tories about MPs taking bribes.
A government run broadcaster could not do this, because the government could tell them to shut up, and cut off their funds if they didn't. A commercial broadcaster would find it much harder to do this, because the big commercial interests which pay for advertising don't want the boat to be rocked.
The BBC is, let's face it, one of the most independent, one of the most honest, one of the most fair broadcasters in the world. In a world where most media is in the hands of a very few commercial interests, mostly with fairly noxious political agendas, having one which is answerable only to the public is a very good thing in my opinion.
Long live the license fee!
Xerox InterLISP-D/LOOPS, 1982. On a bitmapped display. With a windows and a mouse.
Within 72 hours of The Order of the Phoenix being published my partner and I had both read it cover to cover; I'm currently reading it for the second time. She's 39 and I'm 47; we have no children. We've both read all of the Harry Potter books, the first long before it was filmed. There are somewhere between five and ten thousand novels in this house - we both read a lot.
J K Rowling's work is not 'bullshit'. It's not, in my opinion, great literature either, but it is superb and highly imaginative story telling, tightly plotted and compellingly told and stands repeated reading.
There are two particular things I can point to which indicate that the Harry Potter phenomenon is something genuine in terms of literature. The first is, of course, that the first Harry Potter book came out from a small independent publisher with no fanfare at all. The whole snowball effect was entirely by word of mouth, at least until The Philosopher's Stone was filmed. Up to that point there were no external factors - no marketing, no colateral - so that only the intrinsic quality of the work could have made it one of the biggest best sellers of all time.
The other thing is that, in the UK, the publishers brought out an 'adult binding' of the Harry Potter books because they found that adult readers were embarrassed to be seen reading a "children's book" on public transport. This had never been done before for any other "children's book"
Both the original binding and the 'adult binding' of several Harry Potter books have separately been on the best sellers lists in Britain for years, and an individual Harry Potter book has been the best selling book in Britain for three of the last four years (in 2001, Harry Potter books took the top four places on the best sellers list). At this moment, Harry Potter books are first, second, eighth, ninth, seventeenth, and twenty-second on The Guardian's best sellers list. That's right, six places for five books. The second place, after the "children's binding" of Order of the Phoenix is the "adult binding" of the same title. Given that many adults will have the "children's binding" (we have) this indicates that roughly as many adults as children are reading the book.
Furthermore, apart from The Order of the Phoenix, all the Harry Potter books have Booktrack Platinum Awards for selling over a million copies within five years in Britain. Only six other books have ever won this award.
Harry Potter isn't a 'flash in the pan' success. It's a solid, consistent success over a period of years. It's a series of children's books, but it has sold well to adults. Its success long predates its marketing and is still out of all proportion to the amount of marketing effort it receives.
Of course, popularity is, as you say, no indicator of aesthetic merit. However, this degree of popularity sustained over this long indicates something, and it doesn't indicate hype because the popularity (at least in Britain) predates the hype, not the other way around. Yes, it's easy to appear superficially cool by rubbishing Rowling's work. But unless you have some alternative explanation for this degree of popularity, your shallowness and lack of
Oh, save us from small-minded, narrow, ignoratn American parochialism. There are over 150 legal jurisdictions in the world. None of them gives a monkeys about what happens in any other. There's nothing special or magic about an American court
Dmitri was in Moscow when he 'committed' the alleged 'crime'. Except that it wasn't a crime in Moscow, it was perfectly legal. He was later invited to a conference in the United States where he spoke on a related topic, but what he said is not alleged to have been criminal (anywhere). So he committed no crime either in the United States or anywhere else in the world. He did something in Moscow which might have been criminal if he had done it in the United States, but he didn't.
There are lots of things that are legal in one country but illegal in another. For example, carrying or even posessing any sort of hand gun is illegal here in Scotland. Do you think that if you've ever carried a handgun anywhere in the world, if you visit Scotland you should be arrested and charged?
I doubt it's the KVM that's causing the problem. It's more likely your X config. However, one hint: when I switch to a windows box and switch back, I have to do [ctrl][alt][f1]-[ctrl][alt][f7] to force X to reinitialise the mouse.
Bollocks.
'Classical' music (and its precursers in the church and court musics of the renaissance and medieval periods) was never popular music. It was music written for an elite and one of its primary purposes was precisely to distance the elite from hoi polloi who were listening to (and enjoying) ballads, jigs, reels and other 'folk music'.
Elite music is all about snobbery, oneupmanship and ostentation. Among other values elite music has to meet at least several of these criteria. It must:
While elite music of lasting aesthetic quality has been produced, the main reason people listened to elite music in the past (and, indeed, the main reason people listen to 'classical' music now) is a wish to identify themselves as elite - 'I listen to posh music so I am posher than you'.
This has nothing whatever to do either with aesthetic quality or with popularity. Elite music has never been popular and most of it never deserved to be.
By contrast, until the twentieth century (and, to a remarkable extent, through the twentieth century and into the present one) popular music is played by small groups of performers on relatively simple portable instruments using traditional musical forms which change little over generations.
Don't worry, it doesn't run on MSWindows either. I just fired up my MSWin box to look at it, and it complained that I didn't have ActiveX enabled. Well, I don't, and I'm not going to enable it just to see a movie.
Changing space would change the MD5 sum, yes, but that is easily normalised out by feeding both code bases through either the same code pretty printer or through a simple sed filter which replaces any string of whitespace with a single space character prior to the chopping and checksumming process.
It is.
No-one forces criminals to steal someone else's property just because it doesn't happen to be locked up, tied down, or otherwise secured. Theft is a choice.