If we give into terrorists demands, then terrorism becomes an incentive. BUT on the same token if we allow our government to take away more and more of our civil liberties and to become secretive and to much powerful (not enough balance, all of this because of terrorists attacks, then we give incentive to our government to provoke more terrorists attacks against us.
> So you think the invention of color TV was not patent-worthy?
Not color alone, but obviously the general technique used to achieve it. Thats what patents are to cover. In physical world the solutions are not so obvious, you cant just take 3 tubes and combine them together, you have to do the same thing with in 1 tube. In software you have more freedom because you can do more abstract operations, like instead of using a single mask for all components of an image, you give each component (RGB or HSV etc) its own mask, the operations are almost identical in an unoptimal form, although optimizing it would make it look diffrent but then copyrights cover form. This is why some countries have to debate in order to decide whether software should be patented at all, its has to do with the obviousness. Hardware like chips have the same problems as software except they take more effort and money in order to design, although there is open (source) hardware communities starting to grow (demonstraights whether something is easy or not).
> Let's recap: Apple is evil for patenting something others came up with. No, wait, they didn't. Then they are evil for patenting something "obvious" nobody else came up with.
I dont recall using the word "evil", more so then the suggestion of the use of bad or even unethical patents.
IE 1.0 was just a repackaged Mosaic. IE 2.0 was buggy as all hell. IE 3.0 was finally useable, though it lacked many of Netscape's features. IE 4.0 was useable *and* copied Netscape's features.
I'm not to savy on IEs history (I came in about 3.0) but I would think what you said is correct, as it sounds just like the history of Direct3D, except D3D started at about DX version 2 or 3, and later versions copied OpenGL, and now it surpasses it in some respects (but not all).
Microsoft has often been compared to the Borg from Star Trek; this is an excellent example of it. They adapt. They can't be stopped. You might win a few battles against them for a while, but they learn from what you're doing, and eventually your tactics stop working against them.
They are not unstoppable, especially considering that the final clenching feature any piece of software could have is open source. Once innovation drys up and newer versions of the software are becoming less important, opening the source can reinvigorate any software product (provided there is a sufficient amount of freedom in distribution).
If Microsoft had been the size of Netscape, and had to deal with earning revenues and winning accounts just like Netscape did, then this would have been a fair fight -- but since Microsoft never had to concern itself at all with actually earning money from IE to sustain its development, since they had near-infinite money to throw at it from Windows revenue, it was inevitable that it would eventually become better software than Netscape.
It should also be noted that the secondary clenching feature any software could have is a low price (free as in beer). And that can make the crappiest products better then the highest quality products. Giving it away for free, set a standard that Netscape had serious trouble meeting, no doubt.
I'll check that out when I get some time, but still I'd like to note I'm not refering to just the bundling of it, I'm also refering to the fact that IE was a better product, and I doubt Microsoft was thinking about economics when it was making up its mind to give away IE. There is also equally complex issues in standards, Microsoft is still in a rather dominant position with reguard to a number of standards, and in that they can destroy or squash as much innovation as they can create. There is also other things at issue here as well, with reguard to trust, for example IE and NS are not a big issue to me, and neither is the upcoming WMP (Windows Media Player) and RM (Real Media), in those particular cases I dont care for either of them because in most cases I dont really trust them, on the other hand I do trust open source software (I am a programming and can look at the source code), and by trust I mean in the security of my system, not necesarily in stability, on the other hand with Microsoft and the likes you dont have any idea what they are putting in your system, and with the advent of software putting spyware in your system the issue is becoming much larger in the coming years. Anyway thanks for the info, although I am not sure what you mean by economic issues, I suppose I will have to read that to find out...
While I agree with a bit of what you said, its definetly exagerating in certain points. Firstly IE5 had a few other patchs then you suggest, I recall a IE5.01 being in there and some other additions. IE has its share of problems, in terms of security, I believe we saw one the other week in which you have to turn off scripting (doh, there goes all those DHTML websites), but its not as serious as it may seem, so overall your view is correct.
As for lack of innovation being NS down fall? That may be true but that overlooks the point the previous poster made, and that is, why didnt microsoft sell it seperately? If they're product were so innovative and so good, why didnt they sell it? In the end what that means, is that users conveniently had the best product on the market for free making an even steeper hill for Netscape to climb, making it less possible for Netscape to survive off of the browser (as a matter of a fact any customer). The only reason to do such a thing is dominance, and such a practice is anti-competitive, and the issue here is not so much they gave it away, its that they gave it away in their OS.
> he also told man to exploit his creation any way he could.
Not that I am a believer in revealed religions, but he contradicted that at several points, consider the fact that everything in our universe is supposed to be Gods creation, yet some explotations are wrong, you cant sexually exploit someone (in later times you would have been stoned if you were not married). It should be aparent that just because God said that, that it does not mean it is okay to exploit children, etc. There is limitations on what that means (just look at some of the ten commandments, and look at the moral standards), so it is contradictory. Maybe wealthy and powerful people like to get caught up in the delusion that what every they do (exploting people and labor ect) is okay because God said so (inventing things like crumb/trickle down economics), but that is part of the fallacy of religion and I would wish those people bad luck/probability in their endeavours.
It sounds less novel when it is shown that way, mostly because they address limitations with an obvious solution to those limitations, not some novel way of getting around them. Its like going from black and white (monochrome) to color.
> Slashdot does those things to prevent hastiness leading to lame posts... like the two you created.
A better solution would be to force a preview before a submit... i find the wrong thing to do is usually the quickest and therefore always tempting... but oh well they would have to be a genius to think about that and the slash code has several other problems, like not being able to find a parent posts under certain circumstances, or the once in a while anoying shutdown where you cant access your account at all for periods of time.
Its a standard which covers a format structure which allows encoding and decoding mechanisms to act on it. It is not an encoding or decoding mechanism itself, but may or may not have requirements for those encoding and decoding mechanisms in order to be official called an PNG decoder. But its the mechanism itself that the patent would apply to. Just as its okay to have gif images, but its the mechanisms to which the compression patent would apply to that would cause the problem.
If no one implemented alpha channels in PNG, it would not be an issue, even though PNG is capable of storing them, and it would look bad. Several other formats implement alpha channels, and so this does not apply to them directly either, only to the mechanisms which use it to do *compositing*.
> I fully support this kind of use of intellectual property. If I create something and someone else is making money directly from my creation, I should profit as well.
Then you wont mind going to hell, when God sees you made money off of his creations with out giving him royalities. >)
Ah crap, (I cant believe how retarded slashdot is, I did it to fast and it said the "slow down cowboy" BS, when I backed up my text was gone, so I repasted but forget to correct it, grrrr)
I wasnt sure what RAND Licensing was, so I looked it up on the internet and found this scary thing...
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpo li cy-comment/2001Sep/0734.html
I guess the clarity is not a good one, maybe some clarity directed at PNG may be better, or better yet forget that and lets see how much support can be brought up to abolish this bad and obvious patent.
It sounds like something out of an anime like "Macross Plus" to me, where they use bio feedback to control an partially artificial intellegence singer, so the audience become controled by the music.
But Pfisterer is not the only one with a short fuse. While Pfisterer started spuing out about a few things about credit and none trivial things like the naming of XFree86 versioning, Lacock said Pfisterer was "ignorant" and wasting *his* valuable time (as if Pfisterer is a waste of time, which is probably the part that struck Pfisterer the hardest). Although Pfisterer probably should have clarified or made distinct that the credit is not a part of the GPL (in the context he was asking) after they got past that in the second (or so) email, so Lacock may have still thought he was being accused of violation and started an attitude, it may have also been the long email who wrote back.
Actually they both made mistakes and lost their cool. Jeshua Lacock wasnt exactly cool headed, they both started off rather cool headed, but by the third and fourth emails they both lost their tempers, any one of them could have prevented it from getting worse by keeping a cool head. I mean Jeshua Lacock went so far as to use the word ignorant. How do you tell someone they are wrong and get them to cool down by using words like "ignorant"? You dont.
There is a few other interesting facts about Japan and business. Japan has little resources to sell to the rest of the world, they had to mostly live on fish whales and other sea life, most of their resources had to be developed out of necesity (car factories etc). They have very high and strict standards for workers and even the schools represent this (they have a high suicide rate in their students because of all the pressure). Its no wonder they have such extreme cartoons of people with extreme super powers or abilities, that comes from their new culture, its an expression just like any artform. You can sleep waiting for a train (or is that subway) in little capsule like bunk beds. The old culture they had is still there in terms of that many of the top business men are also Generals in the military. In Tokyo most people don't drive, and most people with cars dont drive them that much (traffic) and are usually the rich (impractical and rich tend to go hand in hand in a number of cases). Going to the movies is usually a special occasion because of the cost of doing it, causing most of them to look towards home entertainment (video games, anime, etc). This may be old but you could buy video games from vending machines. Anyway I think it would be an interesting place to visit but I dont think I would live there.
The internet is rather a sad situation right now, it still has some promise, but no one cares because so many people cheated. The promise was similar to world trade in that you can work for someone in another country (not to mention doing this at home), but there is more buying/saling of products then actual work being contracted through the internet. There is still portals up for doing it, there was one from ebay, but its so bad, there is not enough work and even the people participating are not making enough money they have to do other work and only do the online thing when they can. What is happening is corporations take a lot of work away from people, and part of it is the fact that brand names attract people, its easier for a consumer to make a choice if there is only 1 choice, but at the same time its easier for corperations to over charge for something if they have the only product. All attempts to make it easier for consumers seems to fail, all except the strong niche markets, like computer components, where you can go to toms hardware and learn what is the best thing to buy, but then again the people more likely to do this are more likely to be competent in what they are doing (I am proud to be one of them). There is also a problem with that situation as well, if people learn what is the best product, they may all buy that product, its better if reviews then are unbiased and rather then say one product is better then another, say when one product is better and when it is not, this also helps those creating products figure out their market angle (make sure they can broaden their customer base).
Re:Globalization without rules == Corporate Heaven
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 1
That is nice, but naive. I admit the person you are responding to is on one side of the coin, but that means you are on the other side. I try to have a balanced view. Not all of us have 401ks, or are able to devine whether a product was made in a sweatshop or from well paid workers. But you are right in theory that there will always be rich and poor, those with power use that power to stay in power (money = power = freedom), those that are poor are less likely to find a way out, its all about probability, and the factors always favor those with power. But it will not always be like this, that is also a naive assumption, at some point it will stop needing the poor and they will be exterminated as a wasteproduct or a germ, and eventually all of man kind will be exterminated, except those who fight it will have a more painful death while others will be put to sleep. This is one possibility especially if mankind can not resolve its problems, before technology catchs up and surpasses man kind. Slowing down technology is not going to prevent this it is only going to make it a more painful death (look at the RIAA).
I'd like to note that the berlin wall is a bad example all together as it can not possibly be compared to globalisation in the way that it is. The Berlin Wall is definetly a more local event, Globalisation is not local (hence the name), most of it will be controlled by those with power who can afford to travel, who can afford to make deals with large amounts of money, who are not necesarily looking after the interest of people who are powerless (or have less power to be more correct). For me an average american, I can not just run down to Europe or Russia and get some kiwi, there is a big ocean that needs to be crossed first and that cost money to cross it, and further more its impractical to spend that kind of money going out there for a single kiwi, and that is why this is not the same, because it does not affect the average person who might be starving. This is about business, this is about buying and selling things in bulk and shipping those kiwis from one location to another, but that also means dependance on others to buy those kiwis so they can sell to you, but like most things this can lead to competitive and anti-competitive practices. Anyway to make a long story short in the long run this will be a good thing, in the short term it will screw our economy over.
Well the other way to view it is priority, which can also be incorporated. That is the applications/components you use the most but dont change that much, get compiled deeper in the system to get more performance. That is kind of the reasoning behind reconfigurable hardware or FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), it would be nice for most often used applications to be so optimized they become closer to hardware then software. But its a matter of priorities, and balancing the available resources. It becomes the typical trade off between memory consumption or performance consumption, memory and LUT (Look Up Tables) being ways to increase performance with out which raw calulations must be done decreaseing performance.
That is a good point, here is another way of looking at your point, software is an "abstraction" of hardware. And if you notice both have similar properties, hardware is faster then software (Video cards are an example of that), software is more flexible and configurable then hardware. So monolithic kernels are like hardware, fixed but fast, and a microkernel is like software, slow but dynamic. Eventually software will become more abstract itself, so that you can do Runtime Application Developement, or rather be able to develope your application while its running, just pause a component or two, change em and then unpause them, no restarting the application.
I always have disagreed with over generalizations like that, they dont take in to account the subtle details so they are always biased, its no diffrent then stereo typing that all black people are criminals simply because of statistics or someone told you so.
There are people on BOTH sides ignoring, laughing, fighting, and even (new concept here) WORKING together.
Why am I responding now instead of after the linux people started quoting Ghandi, because that is the way it works. First one side calls the other side a loser, then the other side calls the other side a loser, then some enlightend wise-ass person comes a long (thats me) and says the only losers here are the ones wasting their time arguing over who is *more* of a loser.:)
Slashdot Mirror
If we give into terrorists demands, then terrorism becomes an incentive. BUT on the same token if we allow our government to take away more and more of our civil liberties and to become secretive and to much powerful (not enough balance, all of this because of terrorists attacks, then we give incentive to our government to provoke more terrorists attacks against us.
> So you think the invention of color TV was not patent-worthy?
Not color alone, but obviously the general technique used to achieve it. Thats what patents are to cover. In physical world the solutions are not so obvious, you cant just take 3 tubes and combine them together, you have to do the same thing with in 1 tube. In software you have more freedom because you can do more abstract operations, like instead of using a single mask for all components of an image, you give each component (RGB or HSV etc) its own mask, the operations are almost identical in an unoptimal form, although optimizing it would make it look diffrent but then copyrights cover form. This is why some countries have to debate in order to decide whether software should be patented at all, its has to do with the obviousness. Hardware like chips have the same problems as software except they take more effort and money in order to design, although there is open (source) hardware communities starting to grow (demonstraights whether something is easy or not).
> Let's recap: Apple is evil for patenting something others came up with. No, wait, they didn't. Then they are evil for patenting something "obvious" nobody else came up with.
I dont recall using the word "evil", more so then the suggestion of the use of bad or even unethical patents.
I'm not to savy on IEs history (I came in about 3.0) but I would think what you said is correct, as it sounds just like the history of Direct3D, except D3D started at about DX version 2 or 3, and later versions copied OpenGL, and now it surpasses it in some respects (but not all).
They are not unstoppable, especially considering that the final clenching feature any piece of software could have is open source. Once innovation drys up and newer versions of the software are becoming less important, opening the source can reinvigorate any software product (provided there is a sufficient amount of freedom in distribution).
It should also be noted that the secondary clenching feature any software could have is a low price (free as in beer). And that can make the crappiest products better then the highest quality products. Giving it away for free, set a standard that Netscape had serious trouble meeting, no doubt.
I'll check that out when I get some time, but still I'd like to note I'm not refering to just the bundling of it, I'm also refering to the fact that IE was a better product, and I doubt Microsoft was thinking about economics when it was making up its mind to give away IE. There is also equally complex issues in standards, Microsoft is still in a rather dominant position with reguard to a number of standards, and in that they can destroy or squash as much innovation as they can create. There is also other things at issue here as well, with reguard to trust, for example IE and NS are not a big issue to me, and neither is the upcoming WMP (Windows Media Player) and RM (Real Media), in those particular cases I dont care for either of them because in most cases I dont really trust them, on the other hand I do trust open source software (I am a programming and can look at the source code), and by trust I mean in the security of my system, not necesarily in stability, on the other hand with Microsoft and the likes you dont have any idea what they are putting in your system, and with the advent of software putting spyware in your system the issue is becoming much larger in the coming years. Anyway thanks for the info, although I am not sure what you mean by economic issues, I suppose I will have to read that to find out...
While I agree with a bit of what you said, its definetly exagerating in certain points. Firstly IE5 had a few other patchs then you suggest, I recall a IE5.01 being in there and some other additions. IE has its share of problems, in terms of security, I believe we saw one the other week in which you have to turn off scripting (doh, there goes all those DHTML websites), but its not as serious as it may seem, so overall your view is correct.
As for lack of innovation being NS down fall? That may be true but that overlooks the point the previous poster made, and that is, why didnt microsoft sell it seperately? If they're product were so innovative and so good, why didnt they sell it? In the end what that means, is that users conveniently had the best product on the market for free making an even steeper hill for Netscape to climb, making it less possible for Netscape to survive off of the browser (as a matter of a fact any customer). The only reason to do such a thing is dominance, and such a practice is anti-competitive, and the issue here is not so much they gave it away, its that they gave it away in their OS.
> he also told man to exploit his creation any way he could.
Not that I am a believer in revealed religions, but he contradicted that at several points, consider the fact that everything in our universe is supposed to be Gods creation, yet some explotations are wrong, you cant sexually exploit someone (in later times you would have been stoned if you were not married). It should be aparent that just because God said that, that it does not mean it is okay to exploit children, etc. There is limitations on what that means (just look at some of the ten commandments, and look at the moral standards), so it is contradictory. Maybe wealthy and powerful people like to get caught up in the delusion that what every they do (exploting people and labor ect) is okay because God said so (inventing things like crumb/trickle down economics), but that is part of the fallacy of religion and I would wish those people bad luck/probability in their endeavours.
It sounds less novel when it is shown that way, mostly because they address limitations with an obvious solution to those limitations, not some novel way of getting around them. Its like going from black and white (monochrome) to color.
> Slashdot does those things to prevent hastiness leading to lame posts... like the two you created.
A better solution would be to force a preview before a submit... i find the wrong thing to do is usually the quickest and therefore always tempting... but oh well they would have to be a genius to think about that and the slash code has several other problems, like not being able to find a parent posts under certain circumstances, or the once in a while anoying shutdown where you cant access your account at all for periods of time.
Its a standard which covers a format structure which allows encoding and decoding mechanisms to act on it. It is not an encoding or decoding mechanism itself, but may or may not have requirements for those encoding and decoding mechanisms in order to be official called an PNG decoder. But its the mechanism itself that the patent would apply to. Just as its okay to have gif images, but its the mechanisms to which the compression patent would apply to that would cause the problem.
If no one implemented alpha channels in PNG, it would not be an issue, even though PNG is capable of storing them, and it would look bad. Several other formats implement alpha channels, and so this does not apply to them directly either, only to the mechanisms which use it to do *compositing*.
> I fully support this kind of use of intellectual property. If I create something and someone else is making money directly from my creation, I should profit as well.
Then you wont mind going to hell, when God sees you made money off of his creations with out giving him royalities. >)
Ah crap, (I cant believe how retarded slashdot is, I did it to fast and it said the "slow down cowboy" BS, when I backed up my text was gone, so I repasted but forget to correct it, grrrr)
i cy-comment/2001Sep/0734.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpol
oops, that space shouldnt be there...
o li cy-comment/2001Sep/0734.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentp
I wasnt sure what RAND Licensing was, so I looked it up on the internet and found this scary thing...
o li cy-comment/2001Sep/0734.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentp
I guess the clarity is not a good one, maybe some clarity directed at PNG may be better, or better yet forget that and lets see how much support can be brought up to abolish this bad and obvious patent.
It sounds like something out of an anime like "Macross Plus" to me, where they use bio feedback to control an partially artificial intellegence singer, so the audience become controled by the music.
The WIPO Troll
Yep, that is copy-paste news if I ever seen it.
But Pfisterer is not the only one with a short fuse. While Pfisterer started spuing out about a few things about credit and none trivial things like the naming of XFree86 versioning, Lacock said Pfisterer was "ignorant" and wasting *his* valuable time (as if Pfisterer is a waste of time, which is probably the part that struck Pfisterer the hardest). Although Pfisterer probably should have clarified or made distinct that the credit is not a part of the GPL (in the context he was asking) after they got past that in the second (or so) email, so Lacock may have still thought he was being accused of violation and started an attitude, it may have also been the long email who wrote back.
Actually they both made mistakes and lost their cool. Jeshua Lacock wasnt exactly cool headed, they both started off rather cool headed, but by the third and fourth emails they both lost their tempers, any one of them could have prevented it from getting worse by keeping a cool head. I mean Jeshua Lacock went so far as to use the word ignorant. How do you tell someone they are wrong and get them to cool down by using words like "ignorant"? You dont.
There is a few other interesting facts about Japan and business. Japan has little resources to sell to the rest of the world, they had to mostly live on fish whales and other sea life, most of their resources had to be developed out of necesity (car factories etc). They have very high and strict standards for workers and even the schools represent this (they have a high suicide rate in their students because of all the pressure). Its no wonder they have such extreme cartoons of people with extreme super powers or abilities, that comes from their new culture, its an expression just like any artform. You can sleep waiting for a train (or is that subway) in little capsule like bunk beds. The old culture they had is still there in terms of that many of the top business men are also Generals in the military. In Tokyo most people don't drive, and most people with cars dont drive them that much (traffic) and are usually the rich (impractical and rich tend to go hand in hand in a number of cases). Going to the movies is usually a special occasion because of the cost of doing it, causing most of them to look towards home entertainment (video games, anime, etc). This may be old but you could buy video games from vending machines. Anyway I think it would be an interesting place to visit but I dont think I would live there.
The internet is rather a sad situation right now, it still has some promise, but no one cares because so many people cheated. The promise was similar to world trade in that you can work for someone in another country (not to mention doing this at home), but there is more buying/saling of products then actual work being contracted through the internet. There is still portals up for doing it, there was one from ebay, but its so bad, there is not enough work and even the people participating are not making enough money they have to do other work and only do the online thing when they can. What is happening is corporations take a lot of work away from people, and part of it is the fact that brand names attract people, its easier for a consumer to make a choice if there is only 1 choice, but at the same time its easier for corperations to over charge for something if they have the only product. All attempts to make it easier for consumers seems to fail, all except the strong niche markets, like computer components, where you can go to toms hardware and learn what is the best thing to buy, but then again the people more likely to do this are more likely to be competent in what they are doing (I am proud to be one of them). There is also a problem with that situation as well, if people learn what is the best product, they may all buy that product, its better if reviews then are unbiased and rather then say one product is better then another, say when one product is better and when it is not, this also helps those creating products figure out their market angle (make sure they can broaden their customer base).
That is nice, but naive. I admit the person you are responding to is on one side of the coin, but that means you are on the other side. I try to have a balanced view. Not all of us have 401ks, or are able to devine whether a product was made in a sweatshop or from well paid workers. But you are right in theory that there will always be rich and poor, those with power use that power to stay in power (money = power = freedom), those that are poor are less likely to find a way out, its all about probability, and the factors always favor those with power. But it will not always be like this, that is also a naive assumption, at some point it will stop needing the poor and they will be exterminated as a wasteproduct or a germ, and eventually all of man kind will be exterminated, except those who fight it will have a more painful death while others will be put to sleep. This is one possibility especially if mankind can not resolve its problems, before technology catchs up and surpasses man kind. Slowing down technology is not going to prevent this it is only going to make it a more painful death (look at the RIAA).
I'd like to note that the berlin wall is a bad example all together as it can not possibly be compared to globalisation in the way that it is. The Berlin Wall is definetly a more local event, Globalisation is not local (hence the name), most of it will be controlled by those with power who can afford to travel, who can afford to make deals with large amounts of money, who are not necesarily looking after the interest of people who are powerless (or have less power to be more correct). For me an average american, I can not just run down to Europe or Russia and get some kiwi, there is a big ocean that needs to be crossed first and that cost money to cross it, and further more its impractical to spend that kind of money going out there for a single kiwi, and that is why this is not the same, because it does not affect the average person who might be starving. This is about business, this is about buying and selling things in bulk and shipping those kiwis from one location to another, but that also means dependance on others to buy those kiwis so they can sell to you, but like most things this can lead to competitive and anti-competitive practices. Anyway to make a long story short in the long run this will be a good thing, in the short term it will screw our economy over.
Well the other way to view it is priority, which can also be incorporated. That is the applications/components you use the most but dont change that much, get compiled deeper in the system to get more performance. That is kind of the reasoning behind reconfigurable hardware or FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), it would be nice for most often used applications to be so optimized they become closer to hardware then software. But its a matter of priorities, and balancing the available resources. It becomes the typical trade off between memory consumption or performance consumption, memory and LUT (Look Up Tables) being ways to increase performance with out which raw calulations must be done decreaseing performance.
Hmm, that sounds like a reasonable explanation, thank you. :)
That is a good point, here is another way of looking at your point, software is an "abstraction" of hardware. And if you notice both have similar properties, hardware is faster then software (Video cards are an example of that), software is more flexible and configurable then hardware. So monolithic kernels are like hardware, fixed but fast, and a microkernel is like software, slow but dynamic. Eventually software will become more abstract itself, so that you can do Runtime Application Developement, or rather be able to develope your application while its running, just pause a component or two, change em and then unpause them, no restarting the application.
I always have disagreed with over generalizations like that, they dont take in to account the subtle details so they are always biased, its no diffrent then stereo typing that all black people are criminals simply because of statistics or someone told you so.
:)
There are people on BOTH sides ignoring, laughing, fighting, and even (new concept here) WORKING together.
Why am I responding now instead of after the linux people started quoting Ghandi, because that is the way it works. First one side calls the other side a loser, then the other side calls the other side a loser, then some enlightend wise-ass person comes a long (thats me) and says the only losers here are the ones wasting their time arguing over who is *more* of a loser.
Another way to refer to it as, is a grass roots effort (or as many people call it, a movement), rather then marketting.