I'm not sure if I understand what you mean, so I shall rephrase what I understand of it:
The government will spend money on anything with a good lobbyist
This is not entirely true. They have a limited amount of money. They do pay schools and hospitals (at least here in the Netherlands), although they also buy fighter jets for too much money. But in general, if they have more money, they spend more, and I think that about the same fraction goes to good things. And that in turn means that if they do more good things than bad things (in other words, what they do now is better than nothing), them having more money is something to be happy about.
So you think the rules are wrong? Prestation contracts don't sound good to me, either. But stopping new technology which will most probably save them money (cameras with OCR, including the errors they make, are expensive) for it doesn't seem right to me. Remember that they can pay for schools and hospitals (and fighter jets and wars... sigh) with the money they save.
The RFID in your license plate doesn't hold any information that isn't on the plate already. It's only easier to read it with a computer. And nowadays, license plates are mostly read by computers, so that doesn't sound like a bad thing.
If the rules are wrong, change the rules. That means writing to politicians and telling people to vote for persons who aren't currently in power (I wouldn't advise the ones who have recently been in power and done nothing about it either;-) )
What are you saying? That isn't going to change anything? Well, tough luck. Then the choices are to try and start a revolution or to live with it.
There are lots of privacy-invading technologies that are very serious, but this is not one of them.
I think RFID tags in license plates can very well be a substitute for camera's, and they're probably cheaper. Which means they save money which (supposing they catch as many people as before breaking the law) they can spend on other things, like better public transport.
Not that they will, they'll probably start a war in the middle east or something. But if you don't like the way the government spends your money, then you should better get yourself a different government;-)
He hasn't been modded up, he has excellent karma which gives him a +1 bonus. I get the bonus, too, but I switched it off for this message, because this isn't anywhere near insightful;-)
Claims 1 - 12 are about holding a button for a certain time (doesn't sound useful to me, but if ms implements it, I guess everybody is going to sigh and live with it). However, claims 13 - 26 are about the same things when double clicking instead of holding the button. Claim 27 is a program which has a button which does any of it.
I'll quote claim 13 for convenience:
13. A method for expanding the functionality of an application button on a limited resource computing device, comprising:
(a) detecting that an application button associated with a limited resource computing device application has been pressed a first time;
(b) determining the length of time the application button has been pressed said first time;
(c) opening an application if the application button pressed a first time is released prior to the expiration of a first threshold time limit;
(d) detecting that the same application button has been pressed a second time;
(e) determining the length of time the same application button has been pressed said second time; and
(f) opening the application and automatically causing a further action associated with the application to occur if the application button pressed a second time is released prior to the expiration of a second threshold time limit.
They definitely did patent double clicking, and I don't think anyone feels like sueing them (or risk being sued by them) over it, even if it is a rediculous claim. Welcome to Microsoft's business model.
So when I use GNU utilities on my Windows system I should call it 'GNU/Windows 2000'?
No, just as you shouldn't call a BSD system which uses gcc and bash GNU/BSD. This is however not comparable, Windows is a running system without GNU (as you say, you'd only use the tools, which is only part of the system.) Linux is not. It is nothing without libc, and not much without bash.
Most people either don't know or intentionally gloss over the fact that early on Linus made an offer to the GNU folks for the Linux kernel to be the official GNU kernel.
As I said in my previous post, the history is of no importance here. Personally, I think the architecture of the hurd is much better than a monolitic kernel, so I wouldn't want Linux to be the GNU kernel. But that is completely irrelevant in this discussion.
They turned him down because they thought HURD was just a short while away. Now, several years later, with HURD still several years from completion, they want to co-opt the Linux kernel.
They don't want to take credit from Linus. They just want people to know about freedom to use, study, change and redistribute software. People use a modified GNU system, which is pretty much indistinguishable from the unmodified version for the end user. They want people to know about that. They want people to know why they created it. Because if people don't know they have freedom, then they will lose it.
Linux is an operating system which utilizies many GNU utilities
Linux is not a system at all. It is a single program. GNU/Linux is a system, solely because the fsf put in the work to make it a system. GNU is not just a random bunch of utilities. They carefully work together, there are no "holes" of utilities which accidentily don't exist. All holes were filled. And that was not a coincidence: the fsf set out to make a system, and that's what they did. One of the parts of a system is the kernel. It is very important, but not nearly the only one. libc, for example is just as important.
The whole situation is comparable with a person who had his heart transplanted. When you refer to that person, you don't say the guy over there with a transplanted heart. That is what RMS suggests and really gives more credit to Linus than he deserves. I'm not saying Linus didn't do a great job, just that it's not his system, and I don't think his name should be in it. Linus (and you, appearantly) keeps calling him the transplanted heart over there, which sounds quite ridiculous to me. Personally, I would say that guy over there, if I'm not referring to the fact that his heart was transplanted.
but it is not a GNU project, therefore there is no reason to bolt 'GNU' onto the name.
Very true. Nobody suggests that the kernel should be called GNU/Linux. However, many people insist that the operating system (including libc, X, gnome/kde, etc) is "Linux". The kernel documentation even states:
Linux is a Unix clone written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX compliance.
This is simply untrue. Linux is not a unix clone, it is a clone of a unix kernel. And not even that, it is a kernel which can perform the same functions as a unix kernel. There is nothing POSIX compiant about Linux, that's in libc. Linux + GNU libc is a part of a POSIX compliant system. What I think they mean is Linux aims to provide system calls which can be wrapped in libc to make it POSIX compliant. However, it is stated as if libc is part of the kernel.
I know he wanted to create an OS, and started with the kernel. Then he simply took the complete GNU system and used it with his kernel (which wasn't so trivial, it took work which both the fsf and linus did.) This is not a bad thing: GNU was meant to be taken away and used like that.
However, what results is a GNU system. A Linux based GNU system, as RMS calls it, but still a GNU system. There are historic reasons RMS didn't ask Linus right away to use GNU in the name. Those reasons are not important here.
The fact is that many people call the whole system "Linux", and think most of it was written by Linus. This is simply not true, and if you are told about this (and don't think the person telling you is lying), then it would be unethical to continue calling it "Linux".
Re:... a win98 edit.com clone for linux?
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Mutt may be wonderful, but for one of my prime daily applications, I'm not about to go back to a text-mode application for anyone or anything. I live and work in 2004, not 1974.
Just because GUIs didn't exist in 1974 doesn't mean they're good. There are advantages about them, but mutt gives me all I need (and actually more than a gui based mailer could), and it's text mode is not an argument for or against anything. If you think it is, I'd really like to hear a reasoning behind that.
I'll give you an argument why text mode is good for me: I want to read my mail over an ssh link, and I don't always have X where I'm reading. Therefore text mode is preferrable for me. Note that I'm not saying "it's text mode, therefore it's better", but "I need..., therefore text mode is better for me". I say this just to avoid a "you just said text mode wasn't an argument" kind of reaction.
Re:... a win98 edit.com clone for linux?
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I don't think you got my point. I wasn't arguing that everyone should go use mutt and vi. I am, I like it, and I think the idea behind not having an editor in a mail program is good. Most mail programs open a new window to edit anyway. Starting a new program (which may open the window, for example nedit) is just as easy for the user.
What I was saying is that I want to learn to use one editor, and I want it to have all the features I need. (It may have many more features, as long as I don't have to see them.) And when I'm used to those features, I want to be able to use them any time I'm editing a text. This has nothing to do with using a GUI or not.
Re:Speak for yourself!
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I'm sorry, you misunderstood me. I was talking about the well-known "stupid computer user" who doesn't want to know anything about it, and only wants it to work. Of course there are also many people using Windows who are not in that category. I wasn't talking about them, because I think they will like one of the available editors very much, especially if they're used to notepad (which they probably aren't.)
Re:Joe vs. vi vs. GUI based editors
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Well, be thankful they didn't use ctrl-alt-delete for anything else than an emergency reset.
Oh, wait... never mind.
Re:... a win98 edit.com clone for linux?
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ways that are similar between different programs.
What do you mean similar? If I write e-mail, I tell mutt to start vi. If I edit a crontab, I tell it to open vi. If I edit a config file, I use vi. Etcetera. I don't want similar editors everywhere. If every program has to implement its own editor, most editors are bound to miss the features that I want. After all, the editor is only a part of the mailing program/compiler/... I want a powerful editor, which I have to learn only once. This is exactly what vi + unix-style applications give me.
What people want...
Not all people want the same. Many people will not realise at all that it is possible to have one editor for all tasks. There are people who want what you say. I recommend joe or nano to them. Dos edit.com (AFAIK win98 edit.com is exactly the same) may be used by a few people. But I don't think cloning it would be worth my time. People who come from Windows don't want to use an editor at all. And if they need to anyway, then I don't think joe will disappoint them.
Re:Joe vs. vi vs. GUI based editors
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I find it truly perverse that you need to read a manual, or a tutorial just to use a text editor.
Nowadays there are many editors. Feel free to use whatever you like. But fact is that vi has an amazingly powerful way of editing once you have learned it. Unlike emacs you can actually remember the commands, because to do the same in different contexts, you use the same commands with different prefixes.
Learning vi takes some time, but you get something for it. If you have a job without a computer and edit a file once a week or something, then I would recommend joe or nano. But if you edit many text files every day, learning vi is a very useful investment.
In other words, stop whining that vi is not useful for everyone. No editor is. That's why is't good that there are many;-)
I didn't read the link, and I don't know what the Borland lawsuit was about, so I might be completely missing the point, but I think you're wrong so I'll tell you anyway;-)
This sounds very much to me like draining the competition of valuable people. It also sounds very much like Microsoft hiring all the anti-trust lawyers and putting them on any case they can find, just to make sure they aren't hired by the government in the anti-trust case against them.
Perhaps they just think he's good and they want him. But it sounds a lot like they simply don't want anyone else to have him, and hiring him works very well for that purpose.
You have a point that you cannot expect people to always have the newest version of their browser. But asking them to upgrade from Netscape 4 to something higher should not be too much to ask.
If you can expect people to have a reasonably new version of their browser (where IE5 is reasonably new according to that definition), you can just use the w3c recommendations. If you are expecting visitors using IE5, then you should not use XHTML and CSS (I think), but you can still make your page valid HTML 3.2 transitional.
For example, most pages don't specify a document type definition or a character encoding. There is no browser in the world which will break on those being specified (as far as I know. If there is, it deserves to not be used;-).)
Ethics is about what's good or bad for the world. I'm saying that forcing everyone to buy more memory (you need more memory to run Windows has nothing to do with choice for most people) is a bad thing, and therefore unethical.
There are two reasons it is bad: First, you are giving the user unneccesary costs. And second, in a multitasking operating system, as most are nowadays, all resources which are used by one program could otherwise have been used by an other one. No program should think the user probably has at least 256M in his machine, I can use that. Because if your program uses all the memory, you are effectively saying buy more memory if you actually want to do multitasking.
If you really need the memory, then it's acceptable. If you're simply too lazy to do a good job (or your boss doesn't pay you for it), then that's antisocial and unethical (of you or your boss respectively.)
Any page following the w3c standards will be very well viewable with any browser on any existing, real platform. Well, of course not all the newest features of the recommendations are included in all browsers (think alpha transparency in PNG's in IE), but if you really want all platforms to be able to view your page, then you should not use those features. The w3c maintains more than just the newest standards.
Asking people to upgrade their browser is no problem IMO. Asking people to get a different browser is. The blind have browsers which only show text. It is not even possible for them to use IE.
I have no idea if this is true, and I don't care much either. The w3c standards allow web designers to do just about everything. They allow browser writers to display whatever the web designers want to show. In other words, they are good and usable standards.
In many cases it matters a lot who the people are that are supporting something. This is not one of those cases.
Seriously, I don't think the Linux kernel supports anything other than the standard Unix filesystem layout.
The linux kernel will look at/sbin/init for its first process if you don't specify a location for it with init=/somewhere/else in the kernel arguments (given with lilo, grub, loadlin, or whatever loader you use.) If you specify a -b argument, it tries to start/sbin/sulogin before that. That's all Linux knows of the filesystem (and how to handle request for it, of course.)
Oh, and it knows about/proc and/dev, but they could be mounted anywhere as far as the kernel is concerned. It only knows about their contents (because it generates them, for/dev only in the case of devfs.)
Perhaps you are confused with system files such as GNU init, GNU libc, GNU bash, and so on? Perhaps what you call the Linux kernel is in fact mostly GNU then. Please do some reading before making fun of RMS, just because he wants to make a better world.
A quote from the link: [I]f there were nothing at stake except credit, perhaps it would be wiser to let the matter drop. But we are not in that position. To inspire people to do the work that needs to be done, we need to be recognized for what we have already done. Please help us, by calling the operating system GNU/Linux.
This is not about the user's time, it's about the developer's time. If the developer is too lazy to write a good application, and therefore the user needs to put more memory into his or her computer, then most users will not think that was a good idea.
Of course they don't know, they just read the system requirements on the box and buy if it says they should. The developer has no incentive at all to use less resources. Except if the competition would, but they don't either. So only ethics remains, and that appears to be completely ignored in business decisions nowadays.:-(
which allows you to view the internet as a file system from which you can directly run applications.
I guess you need quite a hack in Linux to do that... I suppose you'd need to catch all filesystem related function calls and check them, probably with an LD_PRELOAD-ed library...
GNU Hurd does all this without any hacks. It's designed allow users many things, among which creating their own filesystems (this is really just a filesystem implementation.) Too bad the Hurd isn't quite ready for the desktop yet.
But I still see an extraordinary number of successful, consumer oriented, Windows apps that have no decent "free" Linux equivalents.
I totally agree with RMS that we should all try to make the whole software world free (as in speech). But in this argument, it's about comparing Windows with GNU/Linux, from a simple user's perspective. Why do you demand the GUN/Linux equivalent to be free? Joe doesn't care. If he would care, he would have dropped Windows and all the Windows applications you're talking about long ago.
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I'm not sure if I understand what you mean, so I shall rephrase what I understand of it:
This is not entirely true. They have a limited amount of money. They do pay schools and hospitals (at least here in the Netherlands), although they also buy fighter jets for too much money. But in general, if they have more money, they spend more, and I think that about the same fraction goes to good things. And that in turn means that if they do more good things than bad things (in other words, what they do now is better than nothing), them having more money is something to be happy about.
However, this would mean Bart is a female, which doesn't seem to be the case ;-)
So you think the rules are wrong? Prestation contracts don't sound good to me, either. But stopping new technology which will most probably save them money (cameras with OCR, including the errors they make, are expensive) for it doesn't seem right to me. Remember that they can pay for schools and hospitals (and fighter jets and wars... sigh) with the money they save.
The RFID in your license plate doesn't hold any information that isn't on the plate already. It's only easier to read it with a computer. And nowadays, license plates are mostly read by computers, so that doesn't sound like a bad thing.
If the rules are wrong, change the rules. That means writing to politicians and telling people to vote for persons who aren't currently in power (I wouldn't advise the ones who have recently been in power and done nothing about it either ;-) )
What are you saying? That isn't going to change anything? Well, tough luck. Then the choices are to try and start a revolution or to live with it.
There are lots of privacy-invading technologies that are very serious, but this is not one of them.
I think RFID tags in license plates can very well be a substitute for camera's, and they're probably cheaper. Which means they save money which (supposing they catch as many people as before breaking the law) they can spend on other things, like better public transport.
Not that they will, they'll probably start a war in the middle east or something. But if you don't like the way the government spends your money, then you should better get yourself a different government ;-)
Logged in users start at 1, anonymous cowards start at 0.
He hasn't been modded up, he has excellent karma which gives him a +1 bonus. I get the bonus, too, but I switched it off for this message, because this isn't anywhere near insightful ;-)
Claims 1 - 12 are about holding a button for a certain time (doesn't sound useful to me, but if ms implements it, I guess everybody is going to sigh and live with it). However, claims 13 - 26 are about the same things when double clicking instead of holding the button. Claim 27 is a program which has a button which does any of it.
I'll quote claim 13 for convenience:
They definitely did patent double clicking, and I don't think anyone feels like sueing them (or risk being sued by them) over it, even if it is a rediculous claim. Welcome to Microsoft's business model.
No, just as you shouldn't call a BSD system which uses gcc and bash GNU/BSD. This is however not comparable, Windows is a running system without GNU (as you say, you'd only use the tools, which is only part of the system.) Linux is not. It is nothing without libc, and not much without bash.
As I said in my previous post, the history is of no importance here. Personally, I think the architecture of the hurd is much better than a monolitic kernel, so I wouldn't want Linux to be the GNU kernel. But that is completely irrelevant in this discussion.
They don't want to take credit from Linus. They just want people to know about freedom to use, study, change and redistribute software. People use a modified GNU system, which is pretty much indistinguishable from the unmodified version for the end user. They want people to know about that. They want people to know why they created it. Because if people don't know they have freedom, then they will lose it.
Linux is not a system at all. It is a single program. GNU/Linux is a system, solely because the fsf put in the work to make it a system. GNU is not just a random bunch of utilities. They carefully work together, there are no "holes" of utilities which accidentily don't exist. All holes were filled. And that was not a coincidence: the fsf set out to make a system, and that's what they did. One of the parts of a system is the kernel. It is very important, but not nearly the only one. libc, for example is just as important.
The whole situation is comparable with a person who had his heart transplanted. When you refer to that person, you don't say the guy over there with a transplanted heart. That is what RMS suggests and really gives more credit to Linus than he deserves. I'm not saying Linus didn't do a great job, just that it's not his system, and I don't think his name should be in it. Linus (and you, appearantly) keeps calling him the transplanted heart over there, which sounds quite ridiculous to me. Personally, I would say that guy over there, if I'm not referring to the fact that his heart was transplanted.
Very true. Nobody suggests that the kernel should be called GNU/Linux. However, many people insist that the operating system (including libc, X, gnome/kde, etc) is "Linux". The kernel documentation even states:
This is simply untrue. Linux is not a unix clone, it is a clone of a unix kernel. And not even that, it is a kernel which can perform the same functions as a unix kernel. There is nothing POSIX compiant about Linux, that's in libc. Linux + GNU libc is a part of a POSIX compliant system. What I think they mean is Linux aims to provide system calls which can be wrapped in libc to make it POSIX compliant. However, it is stated as if libc is part of the kernel.
Linus created an OS you say? Which one?
I know he wanted to create an OS, and started with the kernel. Then he simply took the complete GNU system and used it with his kernel (which wasn't so trivial, it took work which both the fsf and linus did.) This is not a bad thing: GNU was meant to be taken away and used like that.
However, what results is a GNU system. A Linux based GNU system, as RMS calls it, but still a GNU system. There are historic reasons RMS didn't ask Linus right away to use GNU in the name. Those reasons are not important here.
The fact is that many people call the whole system "Linux", and think most of it was written by Linus. This is simply not true, and if you are told about this (and don't think the person telling you is lying), then it would be unethical to continue calling it "Linux".
Just because GUIs didn't exist in 1974 doesn't mean they're good. There are advantages about them, but mutt gives me all I need (and actually more than a gui based mailer could), and it's text mode is not an argument for or against anything. If you think it is, I'd really like to hear a reasoning behind that.
I'll give you an argument why text mode is good for me: I want to read my mail over an ssh link, and I don't always have X where I'm reading. Therefore text mode is preferrable for me. Note that I'm not saying "it's text mode, therefore it's better", but "I need ..., therefore text mode is better for me". I say this just to avoid a "you just said text mode wasn't an argument" kind of reaction.
I don't think you got my point. I wasn't arguing that everyone should go use mutt and vi. I am, I like it, and I think the idea behind not having an editor in a mail program is good. Most mail programs open a new window to edit anyway. Starting a new program (which may open the window, for example nedit) is just as easy for the user.
What I was saying is that I want to learn to use one editor, and I want it to have all the features I need. (It may have many more features, as long as I don't have to see them.) And when I'm used to those features, I want to be able to use them any time I'm editing a text. This has nothing to do with using a GUI or not.
I'm sorry, you misunderstood me. I was talking about the well-known "stupid computer user" who doesn't want to know anything about it, and only wants it to work. Of course there are also many people using Windows who are not in that category. I wasn't talking about them, because I think they will like one of the available editors very much, especially if they're used to notepad (which they probably aren't.)
Well, be thankful they didn't use ctrl-alt-delete for anything else than an emergency reset.
Oh, wait... never mind.
What do you mean similar? If I write e-mail, I tell mutt to start vi. If I edit a crontab, I tell it to open vi. If I edit a config file, I use vi. Etcetera. I don't want similar editors everywhere. If every program has to implement its own editor, most editors are bound to miss the features that I want. After all, the editor is only a part of the mailing program/compiler/... I want a powerful editor, which I have to learn only once. This is exactly what vi + unix-style applications give me.
Not all people want the same. Many people will not realise at all that it is possible to have one editor for all tasks. There are people who want what you say. I recommend joe or nano to them. Dos edit.com (AFAIK win98 edit.com is exactly the same) may be used by a few people. But I don't think cloning it would be worth my time. People who come from Windows don't want to use an editor at all. And if they need to anyway, then I don't think joe will disappoint them.
Nowadays there are many editors. Feel free to use whatever you like. But fact is that vi has an amazingly powerful way of editing once you have learned it. Unlike emacs you can actually remember the commands, because to do the same in different contexts, you use the same commands with different prefixes.
Learning vi takes some time, but you get something for it. If you have a job without a computer and edit a file once a week or something, then I would recommend joe or nano. But if you edit many text files every day, learning vi is a very useful investment.
In other words, stop whining that vi is not useful for everyone. No editor is. That's why is't good that there are many ;-)
What is GC in this context? Garbage collector? What does GC-safe mean then?
I didn't read the link, and I don't know what the Borland lawsuit was about, so I might be completely missing the point, but I think you're wrong so I'll tell you anyway ;-)
This sounds very much to me like draining the competition of valuable people. It also sounds very much like Microsoft hiring all the anti-trust lawyers and putting them on any case they can find, just to make sure they aren't hired by the government in the anti-trust case against them.
Perhaps they just think he's good and they want him. But it sounds a lot like they simply don't want anyone else to have him, and hiring him works very well for that purpose.
You have a point that you cannot expect people to always have the newest version of their browser. But asking them to upgrade from Netscape 4 to something higher should not be too much to ask.
If you can expect people to have a reasonably new version of their browser (where IE5 is reasonably new according to that definition), you can just use the w3c recommendations. If you are expecting visitors using IE5, then you should not use XHTML and CSS (I think), but you can still make your page valid HTML 3.2 transitional.
For example, most pages don't specify a document type definition or a character encoding. There is no browser in the world which will break on those being specified (as far as I know. If there is, it deserves to not be used ;-) .)
Ethics is about what's good or bad for the world. I'm saying that forcing everyone to buy more memory (you need more memory to run Windows has nothing to do with choice for most people) is a bad thing, and therefore unethical.
There are two reasons it is bad: First, you are giving the user unneccesary costs. And second, in a multitasking operating system, as most are nowadays, all resources which are used by one program could otherwise have been used by an other one. No program should think the user probably has at least 256M in his machine, I can use that. Because if your program uses all the memory, you are effectively saying buy more memory if you actually want to do multitasking.
If you really need the memory, then it's acceptable. If you're simply too lazy to do a good job (or your boss doesn't pay you for it), then that's antisocial and unethical (of you or your boss respectively.)
Any page following the w3c standards will be very well viewable with any browser on any existing, real platform. Well, of course not all the newest features of the recommendations are included in all browsers (think alpha transparency in PNG's in IE), but if you really want all platforms to be able to view your page, then you should not use those features. The w3c maintains more than just the newest standards.
Asking people to upgrade their browser is no problem IMO. Asking people to get a different browser is. The blind have browsers which only show text. It is not even possible for them to use IE.
I have no idea if this is true, and I don't care much either. The w3c standards allow web designers to do just about everything. They allow browser writers to display whatever the web designers want to show. In other words, they are good and usable standards.
In many cases it matters a lot who the people are that are supporting something. This is not one of those cases.
The linux kernel will look at /sbin/init for its first process if you don't specify a location for it with init=/somewhere/else in the kernel arguments (given with lilo, grub, loadlin, or whatever loader you use.) If you specify a -b argument, it tries to start /sbin/sulogin before that. That's all Linux knows of the filesystem (and how to handle request for it, of course.)
Oh, and it knows about /proc and /dev, but they could be mounted anywhere as far as the kernel is concerned. It only knows about their contents (because it generates them, for /dev only in the case of devfs.)
Perhaps you are confused with system files such as GNU init, GNU libc, GNU bash, and so on? Perhaps what you call the Linux kernel is in fact mostly GNU then. Please do some reading before making fun of RMS, just because he wants to make a better world.
A quote from the link: [I]f there were nothing at stake except credit, perhaps it would be wiser to let the matter drop. But we are not in that position. To inspire people to do the work that needs to be done, we need to be recognized for what we have already done. Please help us, by calling the operating system GNU/Linux.
This is not about the user's time, it's about the developer's time. If the developer is too lazy to write a good application, and therefore the user needs to put more memory into his or her computer, then most users will not think that was a good idea.
Of course they don't know, they just read the system requirements on the box and buy if it says they should. The developer has no incentive at all to use less resources. Except if the competition would, but they don't either. So only ethics remains, and that appears to be completely ignored in business decisions nowadays. :-(
I guess you need quite a hack in Linux to do that... I suppose you'd need to catch all filesystem related function calls and check them, probably with an LD_PRELOAD-ed library...
GNU Hurd does all this without any hacks. It's designed allow users many things, among which creating their own filesystems (this is really just a filesystem implementation.) Too bad the Hurd isn't quite ready for the desktop yet.
I totally agree with RMS that we should all try to make the whole software world free (as in speech). But in this argument, it's about comparing Windows with GNU/Linux, from a simple user's perspective. Why do you demand the GUN/Linux equivalent to be free? Joe doesn't care. If he would care, he would have dropped Windows and all the Windows applications you're talking about long ago.