The RIAA has said as much. I'm paraphrasing from memory from one of their press releases: "We will be working with operating system providers like Microsoft to ensure that their systems contain binary-only systems that are difficult to reverse engineer for protecting our rights". The RIAA (and probably the MPAA) have swallowed fully the idea of security through obscurity and binary-only distribution. The DMCA provides further protection to them, allowing them to go after people even if someone reverse engineers the information. Obviously, there is no room in that world for open source operating systems or open source multimedia formats; in fact, such open efforts may well end up being considered "circumvention devices" in this new world.
I wouldn't mind that much if Hollywood tried to lock up its junk tightly, but the problem is that in such a world of DRM and controlled platforms, independent content producers end up having to go to the software publishers for the privilege of publishing. That's not because the software publishers provide any useful service, or because the software publishers have any particularly great technology, but because they hold the keys that independent publishers need to get access to the multimedia clients and document readers. This gives Microsoft and places like that an unacceptable level of control.
PS: I would try to dig up this information on the RIAA site, but when I try to connect to it, I get the message "ODBC Error Code = 08004 (Data source rejected establishment of connection) [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Unable to connect."
It didn't occur to me that anybody might be computing during the day:-)
Seriously, though: a reasonably well-designed IrDA system will work fine in diffuse daylight. IrDA may not work if the receiver looks directly at the sun, but that's not so good for electronics anyway. The IR signals can be amplified to allow for diffuse reflections. If two devices don't communicate even if there is a cover, then clearly the problem isn't sunlight, it's a hardware or software problem.
Why isn't the Madge driver in the Linux distribution? Did it come in source form or in binary form? In any case, if the driver doesn't work, it's Madge's fault, doubly so if it is binary only or proprietary. The fact that a malfunctioning driver easily brings down a ring is an inherent problem with TokenRing.
You do have a way out: use the IBM card. It was working a few years ago, and I imagine it's still working today. Yes, you do have to patch the kernel--what's the problem with that?
If that's not to your liking, you can throw money at the problem and buy a TokenRing/Ethernet bridge and use an Ethernet card on the Linux machine. Maybe your managers will see the light and convert more of your network to Ethernet.
In general, TokenRing is dead technology. Many operating systems just don't support it at all anymore. How long should Linux carry the burden of supporting outdated and flaky technologies?
I don't see why you think that IR has poor interoperability. In my experience, IrDA works pretty well, allowing data objects to be exchanged between different devices reasonably well.
IR seems like a much better choice than Bluetooth in many applications because it is intrinsically more secure and doesn't suffer from RF interference. The latest IrDA standards are also a lot faster than Bluetooth. Visibility and propagation restrictions for IR are usually not all that serious in an office environment.
There are a few niche applications where Bluetooth may be better, but I'd like to see IrDA used much more widely. Too bad that IrDA has lost its buzz.
Huh? I wasn't talking about trademarks, I was talking about what end users expect when an open source program calls itself "...Office". End users will compare KOffice with MSOffice, because of its name, and KOffice just isn't a drop-in replacement: it lacks some of the functionality, it has a rather different UI, and it can't read/write complex documents in MSOffice format. End users don't care whether this is because Microsoft made its system overly complex, they'll simply say that open source failed to deliver. Call "KOffice" something different, and the reviews will start sounding a lot more positive and focus on the wealth of functionality that is already implemented.
By choosing the name "KOffice", KDE is really setting itself up for a head-on competition with Microsoft Office. I think that's very dangerous: even if KOffice offered all the features of Microsoft Office, gaining user acceptance would still be hard because of differences in UIs and file formats.
I think it would be much better not to claim head-on competition with MS Office. Instead, produce nice, usable, stand-alone applications and think carefully about how to allow people to integrate them.
I have experince in all three languages, Java is no where NEAR the speed of C
Sure it is, but it's harder than in C. Basically, in C, it's easy to write code that runs fast, but it's hard to write code that's correct and robust. In Java, it's easy to write code that's correct and robust, but it's hard to write code that runs fast. If you invest enough effort, you can write code that runs fast and is correct in either language. Which language makes the better tradeoff? 20 years ago, the choice was clearly C. On today's hardware, the choice is pretty clearly Java.
[Java] must be run through in an interpreter in order to run (which is most of the slow down)
Sun's JDK and IBM's runtime both are compiled implementations; they run Java at machine speeds, not interpreted.
However, in middle ground (nontrivial objects that can be allocated solely on the stack), C++ blows Java away.
What you are complaining about there is that a particular coding style you are used to from C++ doesn't carry over to Java. However, there are reasonable, alternative ways of expressing the same kind of code in Java. They aren't ideal (and Java isn't perfect), but they are workable.
(Aside: In my experience, a rule-of-thumb is that most dynamic memory allocations in any language seem to take on the order of 1000 CPU clocks, and most dynamic "objects" end up consuming about 1000 bytes.)
That may be a good rule for C++ (whose storage allocators generally have high overhead), but in a language like Java, a good implementation should have about one word of overhead for a large object and no overhead for small objects, and it should take about as much time as one store on average per word of storage allocated. The current JDK is a bit worse, but it still seems to beat most C++ allocators.
Extracting data from a web site and graphing it is a useful skill, but I would expect any reasonably smart college student to be able to figure this stuff out. It takes a lot more than that to succeed and innovate when it comes to computers.
The fact is many of us in the corporate world outsource our IT needs to foreign companies and professionals simply because this practice is cheaper.
And your point is? This is how global markets work. This has happened to many industries: agriculture, cars, steel, etc.
Programmers from foreign countries are willing to work for much lower wages than their U.S. counterparts, especially if they stay
overseas. The inefficiencies caused by such remote operations are more than covered by the savings in compensation.
What makes you think it's "inefficient"? Right now, many information technology companies are located in the US because skilled foreign labor can come to the US and work here. If skilled foreign labor can't come to the US, those jobs won't go to US citizens. Instead, more and more of US-based operations and management would move to Europe and the more developed parts of Asia. See, no inefficiencies there.
Palm has already given indications that they are moving to a StrongARM platform. And they desparately need to do that, since their current 68k-based system has many problem and limitations when you try to go beyond simple calendaring and an address list.
Since PalmOS itself is basically a 16bit OS and would be difficult to turn into a 32bit OS (just think of DOS to WinNT), they need something new. BeOS is simple and small enough to serve as a 32bit OS for their new StrongARM platform.
Why does Palm have to "go beyond"? Because the market for simple calendaring/organizing is nearly saturated and the price keeps going down. Money is in vertical apps, and PalmOS is not an attractive proposition there.
However ditto.com is collecting, processing and republishing images without a real person looking at the bottom of the page for this copyright statement.
Yes, and that kind of functionality is very useful. Arguably, it falls under "fair use", whether or not Kelly likes it. But the web actually gives him a way of expressing his preferences in a machine-readable way that imposes no burden on him.
If natural-language statements like Kelly's are found to be sufficient to exclude indexing robots, the web would suffer greatly, and for no good reason whatsoever.
Is it Kelly, who will have to track all image cataloging spyders and manually disallow them while still allowing text indexing if he wants to promote his site?
Kelly has to do no such thing: the robots.txt mechanism is flexible enough that he can include and exclude parts of his site from indexing according to his preferences; he doesn't have to know what robot is used for what purpose.
Not that Kelly has any legal right to make such choices to begin with: text search engines are under no obligation to index part of his site (in fact, I think any self-respecting search engine should blacklist him). Giving him an all-or-nothing choice would be entirely sufficient. He should count himself lucky that the mechanism he actually has at his disposal is so flexible.
The guy's site (http://www.goldrush1849.com/) still does not have a robots.txt file. Either Kelly is incompetent, or he does this deliberately to get other people to trick other people into "using" his content and sue them later.
There have been lots of research labs at software-only firms. In fact, there have been lots of research-only firms. Of course, none of those have been as large as Microsoft, but then, who is?
On balance, so far, I'm pretty disappointed with the output from Microsoft's research lab. Most of the interesting stuff that has come out of it seems to be things people were doing before they came to Microsoft. I think it remains to be seen whether Microsoft Research will manage to develop a decent research culture, comparable to IBM and Bell Labs. One thing that is clear: Microsoft Research seems to be struggling as much with trying to get their research results into products as any of their predecessors.
While you're right about things being murky, you do have to remember that the University does fund a great deal, including lab space, supplies, and even simple administrative stuff like waste disposal (critical for biohazard), mail, phone, and internet.
That may be true in the biosciences, but in computer science and signal processing, even ten years ago, buying a research-capable workstation was a matter of a few thousand dollars (cheaper than today's high-end PCs), and the incremental cost of Internet access was pretty low even back then. Office space isn't all that expensive either in most places, and universities generally pay less. As others have pointed out, universities cover those expenses as "overhead" out of grants anyway. (I hope digital television research doesn't generate a lot of biohazards, btw.)
But as of today, even with the huge progress of the last JDK, it's still not a viable solution for the typical desktop machine. Too slow, too big.
I just counted up how much memory a simple KDE desktop takes on my machine, without running any KDE applications: 63Mbytes; if small size (or speed, for that matter) was a goal of KDE's design, it has failed.
A Java-based desktop would run within a single virtual machine, and it would likely come in far below that. As for speed, Sun's JDK and Intel's (free) ORP come close to C++ speed.
And the fact that Java bytecode is so easily turned back into source code is also a major problem for commercial, licensed software.
Java bytecode can easily be obscured so that it is no easier to decode than Pentium machine code. Also, if it's really critical, you can compile it to native code and then load it as a native library.
A lot of the truly novel ideas at a place like MIT are developed by graduate students, often with little or no input from professors. That can make the ethical question of ownership of those ideas a bit murky: graduate students aren't exactly getting paid a lot, and what they do get paid often doesn't come from MIT funds (but instead from fellowships and government grants). Of course, legally, you can be sure that MIT's lawyers have it all nailed down airtight.
I believe that in comparison to other educational institutions, MIT is quite a bit more enlightened, giving inventors 1/3 of any licensing revenues (at least in some departments). Universities like USF (hint: a place probably best avoided by smart students) have their student inventors thrown in jail if they want the exclusive rights to a promising invention.
As for these specific patents, it would be interesting to know what they are for: do they really represent interesting inventions, or is it the kind of patent that claims "any television that uses a framebuffer and a CPU".
Re:You've never seen how a house is built, have yo
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Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 2
You've apparently never seen how a house is built. While the exterior finish looks very nice to the final occupants, the construction process and actual "code" (if you will) of a new home is quite sloppy; easily the equal to typical ugly code.
Let me second this: most housing construction I have seen (in particular in the US) is pretty shoddy. However, as with software, if you build your house yourself using non-mass-production techniques, you know what goes into it, and you will end up with something that's more livable, more suited to your needs, more efficient, and often cheaper as well.
I agree that software aesthetics matters, and a lot of software is written without it. But when it comes to aesthetics, there are still a lot of differences of opinion. Some people really like the design of a certain widely used C++ GUI toolkit, while others think it's pedestrian and cumbersome. Some people think Swing is the greatest thing since sliced bread, others think it's a messy, bloated piece of overdesigned software.
So, by all means, be guided by aesthetics. But don't expect that everybody will agree with your sense of beauty.
I've worked for several large and less large companies, among which IBM and Lucent,
Funny, I have worked for the same companies.on request of a team.
Buying something like a software license is usually decided by a specific department, It's never the decision of a single engineer.
So? What does that have to do with anything? It's still expense money, and it is still a large fraction of, if not more than, what is budgeted for each individual developer.
No, [belief in Qt's quality is a statement] of my experience.
I have seen lots of these great commercial software packages come and go. People like you make a lot of noise about it and how wonderful it is, they talk managers into buying this stuff, tens of thousands of dollars get spent on buying licenses, and a few years later the project disbands and the people picking up the pieces are left with high software licensing costs and oddball tools that they can't get experienced developers for. No, thanks.
Qt simply has no contestants on Unix today.
That isn't the point we are discussing. I claimed that at the time that KDE started, there were a number of free toolkits that were at least comparable in quality to Qt at the time. The KDE project founders didn't pick a bad toolkit, they just exercised bad judgement when it came to licensing.
I'd be curious to see you naming one, actually.
If you do want to discuss today's toolkit choices, Swing, in my opinion, beats Qt hands down.
It's the best development platform available on Linux today (and yes, I've tried Gnome, GnuStep and Tcl/Tk). [lots more like this]
That's supposed to be an argument? It's merely a statement of your beliefs. (And, no, you haven't even scratched the surface of toolkits available for Linux.)
The cost of a Qt license is negligeable compared to the total cost of development of a typical desktop application. It's less than a month worth of salary for an average engineer.
Obviously, you have no idea how corporate budgeting works; a Qt license happens to be more than the annual expense budget most engineers have.
Given the apparently poor track record of the Australian government on Internet, privacy, security, and free speech matters, it seems hardly surprising that they would hand off control of the.com.au domain to a private company, and that they wouldn't let anything interfere with that decision.
But, then, does it really matter much anyway?.com.au doesn't seem like prime internet real-estate anyway and there are more TLDs on the way, as well as numerous "slightly used".com domains.
What I don't get is: why do people invest a lot of time in writing KDE applications? What is the motivation? It can't be because the functionality is missing from Linux: many of the KDE applications had excellent, free, non-Qt-based equivalents before the KDE project even started. And many of the KDE applications are easily implemented as little Tk or expect scripts.
KDE seems to be all about redoing everything within a single framework and toolkit to give users a Windows-like experience and to compete with Windows. To quote from the KDE web site:KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar to the desktop environments found under the MacOS or Window95/NT.
But why? Who actually benefits from this? What is the point of creating a Windows-like environment for non-expert users on top of Linux? If I wanted a Windows-like environment, why wouldn't I just use Windows? And if KDE goes through all this trouble, why pick a toolkit that makes it more expensive for commercial entities to develop for KDE than it is to develop for Windows?
And why is KDE embracing an approach, large C++ libraries and dynamic loading of native code, that Microsoft is already beginning to abandon?
The KDE desktop is impressive looking, but I just can't figure out the motivation for working on it or for using it. After giving it a try for about a year (mostly because Konqueror was the best open source browser around until Mozilla0.9.3/Galeon came along), I'm back to using a simple window manager and a desktop menu.
Don't they come from East Asia anyway?
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HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 2
Aren't most of these machines and their parts assembled in East Asia anyway? So, what difference does it really make what US label is put on them? What value do Compaq and HP actually add to these products, other than a brand name?
Linux community needs to produce a quality set of serif and non-serif hinted fonts. Only then will Linux desktop look as good as MS Windows one.
I think it's worth pointing out that TrueType is neither the only, nor the first, hinting technology. It does give font designers a lot of control, but it also requires a lot of work.
Maybe the TrueType tradeoffs are wrong for the open source community (not having minions of font designers that we can hire), and we should focus more on using a different hinting technology that automates the process, even if the end product is slightly less good than what you might get out of TrueType.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't mind that much if Hollywood tried to lock up its junk tightly, but the problem is that in such a world of DRM and controlled platforms, independent content producers end up having to go to the software publishers for the privilege of publishing. That's not because the software publishers provide any useful service, or because the software publishers have any particularly great technology, but because they hold the keys that independent publishers need to get access to the multimedia clients and document readers. This gives Microsoft and places like that an unacceptable level of control.
PS: I would try to dig up this information on the RIAA site, but when I try to connect to it, I get the message "ODBC Error Code = 08004 (Data source rejected establishment of connection) [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Unable to connect."
Seriously, though: a reasonably well-designed IrDA system will work fine in diffuse daylight. IrDA may not work if the receiver looks directly at the sun, but that's not so good for electronics anyway. The IR signals can be amplified to allow for diffuse reflections. If two devices don't communicate even if there is a cover, then clearly the problem isn't sunlight, it's a hardware or software problem.
You do have a way out: use the IBM card. It was working a few years ago, and I imagine it's still working today. Yes, you do have to patch the kernel--what's the problem with that?
If that's not to your liking, you can throw money at the problem and buy a TokenRing/Ethernet bridge and use an Ethernet card on the Linux machine. Maybe your managers will see the light and convert more of your network to Ethernet.
In general, TokenRing is dead technology. Many operating systems just don't support it at all anymore. How long should Linux carry the burden of supporting outdated and flaky technologies?
IR seems like a much better choice than Bluetooth in many applications because it is intrinsically more secure and doesn't suffer from RF interference. The latest IrDA standards are also a lot faster than Bluetooth. Visibility and propagation restrictions for IR are usually not all that serious in an office environment.
There are a few niche applications where Bluetooth may be better, but I'd like to see IrDA used much more widely. Too bad that IrDA has lost its buzz.
Huh? I wasn't talking about trademarks, I was talking about what end users expect when an open source program calls itself "...Office". End users will compare KOffice with MSOffice, because of its name, and KOffice just isn't a drop-in replacement: it lacks some of the functionality, it has a rather different UI, and it can't read/write complex documents in MSOffice format. End users don't care whether this is because Microsoft made its system overly complex, they'll simply say that open source failed to deliver. Call "KOffice" something different, and the reviews will start sounding a lot more positive and focus on the wealth of functionality that is already implemented.
I think it would be much better not to claim head-on competition with MS Office. Instead, produce nice, usable, stand-alone applications and think carefully about how to allow people to integrate them.
Sure it is, but it's harder than in C. Basically, in C, it's easy to write code that runs fast, but it's hard to write code that's correct and robust. In Java, it's easy to write code that's correct and robust, but it's hard to write code that runs fast. If you invest enough effort, you can write code that runs fast and is correct in either language. Which language makes the better tradeoff? 20 years ago, the choice was clearly C. On today's hardware, the choice is pretty clearly Java.
[Java] must be run through in an interpreter in order to run (which is most of the slow down)
Sun's JDK and IBM's runtime both are compiled implementations; they run Java at machine speeds, not interpreted.
What you are complaining about there is that a particular coding style you are used to from C++ doesn't carry over to Java. However, there are reasonable, alternative ways of expressing the same kind of code in Java. They aren't ideal (and Java isn't perfect), but they are workable.
(Aside: In my experience, a rule-of-thumb is that most dynamic memory allocations in any language seem to take on the order of 1000 CPU clocks, and most dynamic "objects" end up consuming about 1000 bytes.)
That may be a good rule for C++ (whose storage allocators generally have high overhead), but in a language like Java, a good implementation should have about one word of overhead for a large object and no overhead for small objects, and it should take about as much time as one store on average per word of storage allocated. The current JDK is a bit worse, but it still seems to beat most C++ allocators.
Extracting data from a web site and graphing it is a useful skill, but I would expect any reasonably smart college student to be able to figure this stuff out. It takes a lot more than that to succeed and innovate when it comes to computers.
And your point is? This is how global markets work. This has happened to many industries: agriculture, cars, steel, etc.
Programmers from foreign countries are willing to work for much lower wages than their U.S. counterparts, especially if they stay overseas. The inefficiencies caused by such remote operations are more than covered by the savings in compensation.
What makes you think it's "inefficient"? Right now, many information technology companies are located in the US because skilled foreign labor can come to the US and work here. If skilled foreign labor can't come to the US, those jobs won't go to US citizens. Instead, more and more of US-based operations and management would move to Europe and the more developed parts of Asia. See, no inefficiencies there.
Since PalmOS itself is basically a 16bit OS and would be difficult to turn into a 32bit OS (just think of DOS to WinNT), they need something new. BeOS is simple and small enough to serve as a 32bit OS for their new StrongARM platform.
Why does Palm have to "go beyond"? Because the market for simple calendaring/organizing is nearly saturated and the price keeps going down. Money is in vertical apps, and PalmOS is not an attractive proposition there.
Yes, and that kind of functionality is very useful. Arguably, it falls under "fair use", whether or not Kelly likes it. But the web actually gives him a way of expressing his preferences in a machine-readable way that imposes no burden on him.
If natural-language statements like Kelly's are found to be sufficient to exclude indexing robots, the web would suffer greatly, and for no good reason whatsoever.
Is it Kelly, who will have to track all image cataloging spyders and manually disallow them while still allowing text indexing if he wants to promote his site?
Kelly has to do no such thing: the robots.txt mechanism is flexible enough that he can include and exclude parts of his site from indexing according to his preferences; he doesn't have to know what robot is used for what purpose.
Not that Kelly has any legal right to make such choices to begin with: text search engines are under no obligation to index part of his site (in fact, I think any self-respecting search engine should blacklist him). Giving him an all-or-nothing choice would be entirely sufficient. He should count himself lucky that the mechanism he actually has at his disposal is so flexible.
The guy's site (http://www.goldrush1849.com/) still does not have a robots.txt file. Either Kelly is incompetent, or he does this deliberately to get other people to trick other people into "using" his content and sue them later.
On balance, so far, I'm pretty disappointed with the output from Microsoft's research lab. Most of the interesting stuff that has come out of it seems to be things people were doing before they came to Microsoft. I think it remains to be seen whether Microsoft Research will manage to develop a decent research culture, comparable to IBM and Bell Labs. One thing that is clear: Microsoft Research seems to be struggling as much with trying to get their research results into products as any of their predecessors.
That may be true in the biosciences, but in computer science and signal processing, even ten years ago, buying a research-capable workstation was a matter of a few thousand dollars (cheaper than today's high-end PCs), and the incremental cost of Internet access was pretty low even back then. Office space isn't all that expensive either in most places, and universities generally pay less. As others have pointed out, universities cover those expenses as "overhead" out of grants anyway. (I hope digital television research doesn't generate a lot of biohazards, btw.)
I just counted up how much memory a simple KDE desktop takes on my machine, without running any KDE applications: 63Mbytes; if small size (or speed, for that matter) was a goal of KDE's design, it has failed.
A Java-based desktop would run within a single virtual machine, and it would likely come in far below that. As for speed, Sun's JDK and Intel's (free) ORP come close to C++ speed.
And the fact that Java bytecode is so easily turned back into source code is also a major problem for commercial, licensed software.
Java bytecode can easily be obscured so that it is no easier to decode than Pentium machine code. Also, if it's really critical, you can compile it to native code and then load it as a native library.
I believe that in comparison to other educational institutions, MIT is quite a bit more enlightened, giving inventors 1/3 of any licensing revenues (at least in some departments). Universities like USF (hint: a place probably best avoided by smart students) have their student inventors thrown in jail if they want the exclusive rights to a promising invention.
As for these specific patents, it would be interesting to know what they are for: do they really represent interesting inventions, or is it the kind of patent that claims "any television that uses a framebuffer and a CPU".
Let me second this: most housing construction I have seen (in particular in the US) is pretty shoddy. However, as with software, if you build your house yourself using non-mass-production techniques, you know what goes into it, and you will end up with something that's more livable, more suited to your needs, more efficient, and often cheaper as well.
So, by all means, be guided by aesthetics. But don't expect that everybody will agree with your sense of beauty.
Funny, I have worked for the same companies.on request of a team.
Buying something like a software license is usually decided by a specific department, It's never the decision of a single engineer.
So? What does that have to do with anything? It's still expense money, and it is still a large fraction of, if not more than, what is budgeted for each individual developer.
No, [belief in Qt's quality is a statement] of my experience.
I have seen lots of these great commercial software packages come and go. People like you make a lot of noise about it and how wonderful it is, they talk managers into buying this stuff, tens of thousands of dollars get spent on buying licenses, and a few years later the project disbands and the people picking up the pieces are left with high software licensing costs and oddball tools that they can't get experienced developers for. No, thanks.
Qt simply has no contestants on Unix today.
That isn't the point we are discussing. I claimed that at the time that KDE started, there were a number of free toolkits that were at least comparable in quality to Qt at the time. The KDE project founders didn't pick a bad toolkit, they just exercised bad judgement when it came to licensing.
I'd be curious to see you naming one, actually.
If you do want to discuss today's toolkit choices, Swing, in my opinion, beats Qt hands down.
That's supposed to be an argument? It's merely a statement of your beliefs. (And, no, you haven't even scratched the surface of toolkits available for Linux.)
The cost of a Qt license is negligeable compared to the total cost of development of a typical desktop application. It's less than a month worth of salary for an average engineer.
Obviously, you have no idea how corporate budgeting works; a Qt license happens to be more than the annual expense budget most engineers have.
But, then, does it really matter much anyway? .com.au doesn't seem like prime internet real-estate anyway and there are more TLDs on the way, as well as numerous "slightly used" .com domains.
KDE seems to be all about redoing everything within a single framework and toolkit to give users a Windows-like experience and to compete with Windows. To quote from the KDE web site: KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar to the desktop environments found under the MacOS or Window95/NT.
But why? Who actually benefits from this? What is the point of creating a Windows-like environment for non-expert users on top of Linux? If I wanted a Windows-like environment, why wouldn't I just use Windows? And if KDE goes through all this trouble, why pick a toolkit that makes it more expensive for commercial entities to develop for KDE than it is to develop for Windows? And why is KDE embracing an approach, large C++ libraries and dynamic loading of native code, that Microsoft is already beginning to abandon?
The KDE desktop is impressive looking, but I just can't figure out the motivation for working on it or for using it. After giving it a try for about a year (mostly because Konqueror was the best open source browser around until Mozilla0.9.3/Galeon came along), I'm back to using a simple window manager and a desktop menu.
Aren't most of these machines and their parts assembled in East Asia anyway? So, what difference does it really make what US label is put on them? What value do Compaq and HP actually add to these products, other than a brand name?
I think it's worth pointing out that TrueType is neither the only, nor the first, hinting technology. It does give font designers a lot of control, but it also requires a lot of work.
Maybe the TrueType tradeoffs are wrong for the open source community (not having minions of font designers that we can hire), and we should focus more on using a different hinting technology that automates the process, even if the end product is slightly less good than what you might get out of TrueType.