There are great, shining examples - K3B, Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Openoffice, Evolution, KDE control centre etc. Let these apps serve as an example to UI designers for other projects.
You think mozilla is based on good usable design? The whole point of firefox was fixing the usability mistakes made with mozilla. It sucks. It has a preferences dialog that's so complicated someone actually created an extension that installs a newer, easier, preferences dialog.
And yet mozilla's complicated configuration disappears into nothing when compared to the beast that is the kde control centre. When you delve into kde's control center, carry a torch, a map, a compass, and provisions for 3 days, because otherwise you might not make it back out alive.
Apple still remains the example OSS should be chasing. Their stuff just works, and yet is powerful when you need it to be. Too bad apple is unlearning a lot of the things they used to know about designing good interfaces. OS X is a major step back usability wise, and they're not trying to actually fix what they broke.
The problem is in Fedora, not Cups. Cups works just fine, and more or less like he wants it to, if that is all you ever use. Fedora, using whatever configuration system it uses placed some unuseable stuff there.
Granted Cups could use a lot of help, but he wasn't using a Cups configurator, he was using some other configurator that can work with not only Cups, but also SMB, LPR, and a bunch of other stuff. I don't know the solution, but bashing the Cups guys won't get you any closer to it.
Like someone else pointed out, try reading the article. He specifically mentions using the offical cups web admin interface and getting nowhere with it (once he found out about its existance by running a locate command on the shell).
That redhat hasn't been able to fix cups's admin nightmare isn't redhat's fault.
Getting cups to work with my hp psc 2105 reliably was more difficult than writing my own ipchains masquerading firewall configuration script for the 2.2 kernel (firewall configuration has gotten easier since then). Cups sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't, with no clear evidence of why that was. It took me days of debugging to get to the bottom.
That HP is not an outlandish printer. I know a lot of people who have a psc usb printer. Had I known cups would be such hell to get running, I would have tried something else (once I got started trying to make it work, it became a matter of geek honor, so I had to persevere until it did my bidding).
The problem as I see it is that cups is designed for use in high-volume server environments, while it is being actively pushed for desktop use. The documentation is of very little help to a newbie desktop user, even with lots of prior *nix experience. And the admin interface is overpowered to the point of becoming unusable when you just want your lone, directly-connected, usb printer to work. I'm sure the cups backend tech is very nicely designed. But when even people like Eric Raymond can't get that backend to do what it claims without hours of troubleshooting, it is a problem with cups, not with anyone else.
And speaking of PNG problems - what the hell is with Adobe's Photoshop?! How many years will it be before the thing uses some actual compression? Programs like pngout and pngcrush shouldn't even be needed.
Install superpng. It integrates nicely with photoshop.
A massacre is a specific act that occurs in a specific place at a specific time. It has specific victims, and specific criminals who conduct it. Trying to paint the entire war as a massacre is nonsense. It also trivializes real war crimes, like when the VC executed between 3,000 - 6,000 civilians in Hue after capturing it during the Tet Offensive. That was a real war crime in the "dig a mass grave, line them up, and shoot/stab/choke them" school.
So, in your opinion then, the nazi concentration camps could not be declared a massacre, since the murders there were committed at different places, different times, and by different people.
From the dictionary: massacre: The act or an instance of killing a large number of humans indiscriminately and cruelly.
It was never enough to be a totalitarian dictator to be declared an enemy of the US. Lots of totalitarian dictators go unharmed even today.
This is how I understand the history of the vietnam war:
- Before WWII vietnam was in french hands - During WWII the japanese conquer vietnam from the weakened french to fortify their position - After WWII the french make an official request in the potsdam conference to get their pre-WWII colonies back, this request is granted - Britain and China make a deal to clean out the japanese from vietnam, britain will do the south, china will do the north - Neither country is interested in actually ruling the country though, and once the japanese are cleaned out in the resulting power vacuum ho chi minh declares a provisional communist government. He tries, and fails, to get US recognition. - The french move back into vietnam and start a war with the viet minh (ho chi minh's forces). They team up with the remains of the japanese leadership in the south to do this. - The US starts aiding the french (they had promised vietnam to the french) - in 1954 the french are conquered by the viet minh and withdraw from vietnam - the geneva conference on indochina is held. Vietnam is divided into north and south vietnam. The north is given to the viet minh, the south is given to the remains of the japanese leadership. It is hoped to eventually hold elections across all of vietnam to reunite the country. From here on out, both north and south are ruled by totalitarian abusive regimes. - There is an unwillingness to reunite the country, and the US fears a war between communist north vietnam and capitalist south vietnam will lead to vietnam becoming communist entirely and starts giving military aid to south vietnam. - An unofficial war breaks out between south and north. No open hostilities happen, but a lot of people get killed behind the scenes. - The us keeps ramping up military aid. Ships are sent. Among them USS Maddox. - The maddox ends up in hostilities with north vietnamese forces. The maddox escapes mostly unharmed. The official story is the north vietnamese attacked the maddox, unofficial accounts vary. North vietnam is given an official warning. - American ships open fire on perceived north vietnam enemy ships posing a threat. The media blows this out of proportion. It is still unclear whether there were actually real enemies shooting back. As a response to this second incident, congress passes the golf of tonkin resolution authorizing the use of force in defense of US forces - With US forces able to fight back, the war quickly escalates and the vietnam war starts in earnest. US political leadership has proclaimed they won't let communism take hold of south vietnam and thereby preclude a US withdrawal from south vietnam without political harm.
So. The reason for fighting north vietnam and backing south vietnam was NOT a totalitarian dictatorship. South vietnam wasn't any better than the north. The vietnam war was a result of the US fear of communism resulting in ever intensifying military aid to south vietnam, which set a fuse on a bomb that eventually went off.
It wasn't about preserving democracy, it was about preserving capitalism.
You could write a plugin for photoshop to do that exact same thing. I don't know how hard it is to write a plugin, but I can't imagine it being much harder than script-fu once you get used to it.
Uh, yes it is. That's why so many people I try to introduce Linux to don't want to switch. Linux is too much of a hassle to use....
Just today I showed a friend of mine KDE 3.2. She thought it was "too pretty" and wondered why she should change from something that "already works."
As far as I can tell windows users give two reasons not to switch:
- it doesn't look familiar
- it isn't compatible
Hardware compatibility has improved loads. I don't have a single piece of hardware left that works in windows but does not in linux. Software compatibility is getting to the point where you can even take your windows apps with you (using codeweavers' or transgaming's products). And ofcourse, for 90 percent of people, native linux software provides all the needed functionality. The only real lacking I see for home users is financial software (quicken, tax apps), but lets hope codeweavers puts that problem out of the picture.
What both of these points share with respect to ease of use is that the easiest system is the one you already know. Windows users make a good point that they don't want to relearn how to do what they already can. However, this doesn't imply linux is inherently more difficult to use, just unfamiliar. I find I solve problems quicker and more permanently in linux than in windows, and I've been using windows a lot longer than linux.
The earliest I can remember virtual desktops in a microsoft gui was symantec's pc tools 2.0 for windows 3.1. Which dates back to late 93 IIRC. Apart from the fact that it maked windows 3.1 twice as unstable (quite a feat, as anyone who ever ran windows 3.1 knows), it was a really fine environment. A powerful file manager with built-in zip folder operations, virtual desktops, 3D window borders (at the time, for me, that was a major advancement, sad, i know), and *gasp* desktop icons (which didn't appear in windows proper till windows 95).
The virtual desktop feature was especially nicely designed, since you saw minipictures of each virtual desktop and could drag windows between the minipictures. And you could password protect some desktops (which allowed you to have one desktop for the kids, and one for porn).
Well, theoretically the supreme court is supposed to do the watching. However, the inherent flaw is the way supreme court justices are appointed. This should be done by direct nationwide election to have any semblance of democracy. Secret suggestions to the president who then makes an arbitrary choice between them is not a good way to select justices.
More accurately, US dollars are woven from 25 percent linnen and 75 percent cotton. The cool factoid in that link is that money used to be woven out of silk!
So, yes, if money gets destroyed in the laundry, it was fake.
Network connections are bit based, and therefore deal in powers of two. Any computer memory is bit based, and therefore also measured in powers of two. Yes, it's possible for a hard disk's physical size to be a multiple of 1000 instead of a multiple of 1024, but once you turn it into a filesystem, you're dealing with integers again, and therefore with powers of two.
Don't be fooled. Mebi was invented so the hdd makers could keep up their lying about hdd sizes.
The point is that you are losing information. If the variable 'secretCompanyKey' is changed to 'a' there isnt a program in the world that will change it back... the information has been lost. Its like trying to reverse a hash.
In the end, it's code, it has to perform all its functionality on standardised (and therefore known) hardware. You can't throw away information necessary to do this, and a reverse engineer is only interested in that kind of information, so therefore the program still contains all the information necessary to deduce the original program from the obfuscated one.
We're talking here about people who are willing to let themselves be blown up by setting off a bomb strapped to their own bodies, just to make a point to the US.
Do you really honestly believe shock and awe will make them go "oh, sorry about wanting to destroy democracy, we'll just not bother you anymore"? If so, I have some land to sell you, at a very good price.
Shock and awe have zero longterm effect. The people you'd use it against are so motivated that once they get over their immediate shock they will start looking for weak spots, and there are always weak spots. In the end we're all human, and we all die just as easily. The soldiers in iraq are noticing this now.
I do think the only way to stop terrorists is to convince them they don't want to kill you, however I don't believe dropping bombs on them from outer space will do that.
I agree the problem is education, and most importantly a lacking in formal logic teaching. People should be taught in school to recognise a bullshit argument in a formal way. Instead, most people are vulnerable to the simplest of logical fallacies, like the straw man argument.
The word "evolution" subsumes both a process and the observable data to support it. Evolution is a proposed mechanism of changes in organisms over time. It is a fact THAT this change occurs, but the role of mutation, dominance of adaptive traits, etc., can only be said to have very strong support.
I think that you're confusing evolution, the observable fact, with natural selection, the underlying theory.
A company should really research the terms of the license, of a product they are using, but perhaps they just hope that people won't notice...
And perhaps it shouldn't be a requirement to ask lawyers for every business decision you make whether or not you're breaking the law by doing it.
In a perfect world, the GPL shouldn't even have to exist. There should be a government-mandated copyleft structure. It's because of government's failure to do anything but the most restrictive copyright that copyleft was created as an abuse of the copyright system. Imho the GPL's success is proof positive that a radical worldwide overhaul of copyright law to make it more equal again is desperately needed.
The GPL hasn't been tested in court because whenever a company asks their lawyers exactly what the GPL says, they realise that there are two choices (if they actually did use the GPL'd source):
- say the GPL is invalid, which if you win reduces it to a copyright infringement lawsuit, since the GPL is the only thing that allows you to use GPL'd code, and having it declared invalid means you lose all rights to use that code. (Courts really frown on copyright infringement, and this would become a very costly lawsuit to win.)
- say the GPL is valid, and settle.
In other words, the best thing you can do is maintain the status quo (sort of) by settling. Actually going to court makes you lose, even if you win, which is why no one has ever gone to court over it. Not even SCO.
You can say a lot of things about the FSF and the GPL, but you've got to admit it's pretty darn clever.
How is that going to get non-republicrat parties on the ballot next elections? There are always independant choices in the presidential elections which are at least "ok." People just don't count them as legitimate because they're not republicrat. If you really want things to change, start voting outside of the two parties. Otherwise it's going to be same old forever and ever.
Let me state it very clearly: the democrat and republican parties DO NOT care if only 1 percent of voters turn out. They only care whether they win or not among those that do vote. Low voter turnout will not change their viewpoints one bit. Abstaining from voting WILL NOT bring about change.
Freedesktop and Xouvert just took the XFree code and somewhat forked it.
As far as I know the freedesktop project's x server is based on kdrive (the lightweight X server meant for pda's) and not on the main XFree86 codebase.
"Learn English properly." does not mean the same thing as "Learn proper English."
The first implies that you're learning or have learnt it improperly, and you need to adapt your learning methods. The second implies that you have not learnt real, grammatically correct, English, regardless of learning methods, and you should do so. As far as I know, both are correct uses of the English language.
Unix was open source at the beginning. However, I'm not sure whether unix pioneered anything. Multitasking existed before multics even (which was unix's predecessor). TCP/IP might be a first, but originally the network interface itself was a separate machine, called an imp, which did not run unix.
As far as I know no modern OS pioneered anything. They're all copy cats.
I think most of the criticism wrt microsoft not innovating comes from the fact that microsoft constantly is wielding claims that they do in fact innovate all the time. They're the ones who need to put up or shut up.
The only example of a microsoft first I can come up with is cleartype, which I hadn't seen anywhere until microsoft started talking about it (though subpixel addressing wasn't new, cleartype's use of lcd screens to do it was). I like cleartype. It lets me read ebooks on my pc without having my eyes hurt after an hour.
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There are great, shining examples - K3B, Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Openoffice, Evolution, KDE control centre etc. Let these apps serve as an example to UI designers for other projects.
You think mozilla is based on good usable design? The whole point of firefox was fixing the usability mistakes made with mozilla. It sucks. It has a preferences dialog that's so complicated someone actually created an extension that installs a newer, easier, preferences dialog.
And yet mozilla's complicated configuration disappears into nothing when compared to the beast that is the kde control centre. When you delve into kde's control center, carry a torch, a map, a compass, and provisions for 3 days, because otherwise you might not make it back out alive.
Apple still remains the example OSS should be chasing. Their stuff just works, and yet is powerful when you need it to be. Too bad apple is unlearning a lot of the things they used to know about designing good interfaces. OS X is a major step back usability wise, and they're not trying to actually fix what they broke.
The problem is in Fedora, not Cups. Cups works just fine, and more or less like he wants it to, if that is all you ever use. Fedora, using whatever configuration system it uses placed some unuseable stuff there.
Granted Cups could use a lot of help, but he wasn't using a Cups configurator, he was using some other configurator that can work with not only Cups, but also SMB, LPR, and a bunch of other stuff. I don't know the solution, but bashing the Cups guys won't get you any closer to it.
Like someone else pointed out, try reading the article. He specifically mentions using the offical cups web admin interface and getting nowhere with it (once he found out about its existance by running a locate command on the shell).
That redhat hasn't been able to fix cups's admin nightmare isn't redhat's fault.
Getting cups to work with my hp psc 2105 reliably was more difficult than writing my own ipchains masquerading firewall configuration script for the 2.2 kernel (firewall configuration has gotten easier since then). Cups sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't, with no clear evidence of why that was. It took me days of debugging to get to the bottom.
That HP is not an outlandish printer. I know a lot of people who have a psc usb printer. Had I known cups would be such hell to get running, I would have tried something else (once I got started trying to make it work, it became a matter of geek honor, so I had to persevere until it did my bidding).
The problem as I see it is that cups is designed for use in high-volume server environments, while it is being actively pushed for desktop use. The documentation is of very little help to a newbie desktop user, even with lots of prior *nix experience. And the admin interface is overpowered to the point of becoming unusable when you just want your lone, directly-connected, usb printer to work. I'm sure the cups backend tech is very nicely designed. But when even people like Eric Raymond can't get that backend to do what it claims without hours of troubleshooting, it is a problem with cups, not with anyone else.
And speaking of PNG problems - what the hell is with Adobe's Photoshop?! How many years will it be before the thing uses some actual compression? Programs like pngout and pngcrush shouldn't even be needed.
Install superpng. It integrates nicely with photoshop.
A massacre is a specific act that occurs in a specific place at a specific time. It has specific victims, and specific criminals who conduct it. Trying to paint the entire war as a massacre is nonsense. It also trivializes real war crimes, like when the VC executed between 3,000 - 6,000 civilians in Hue after capturing it during the Tet Offensive. That was a real war crime in the "dig a mass grave, line them up, and shoot/stab/choke them" school.
So, in your opinion then, the nazi concentration camps could not be declared a massacre, since the murders there were committed at different places, different times, and by different people.
From the dictionary:
massacre: The act or an instance of killing a large number of humans indiscriminately and cruelly.
It was never enough to be a totalitarian dictator to be declared an enemy of the US. Lots of totalitarian dictators go unharmed even today.
This is how I understand the history of the vietnam war:
- Before WWII vietnam was in french hands
- During WWII the japanese conquer vietnam from the weakened french to fortify their position
- After WWII the french make an official request in the potsdam conference to get their pre-WWII colonies back, this request is granted
- Britain and China make a deal to clean out the japanese from vietnam, britain will do the south, china will do the north
- Neither country is interested in actually ruling the country though, and once the japanese are cleaned out in the resulting power vacuum ho chi minh declares a provisional communist government. He tries, and fails, to get US recognition.
- The french move back into vietnam and start a war with the viet minh (ho chi minh's forces). They team up with the remains of the japanese leadership in the south to do this.
- The US starts aiding the french (they had promised vietnam to the french)
- in 1954 the french are conquered by the viet minh and withdraw from vietnam
- the geneva conference on indochina is held. Vietnam is divided into north and south vietnam. The north is given to the viet minh, the south is given to the remains of the japanese leadership. It is hoped to eventually hold elections across all of vietnam to reunite the country. From here on out, both north and south are ruled by totalitarian abusive regimes.
- There is an unwillingness to reunite the country, and the US fears a war between communist north vietnam and capitalist south vietnam will lead to vietnam becoming communist entirely and starts giving military aid to south vietnam.
- An unofficial war breaks out between south and north. No open hostilities happen, but a lot of people get killed behind the scenes.
- The us keeps ramping up military aid. Ships are sent. Among them USS Maddox.
- The maddox ends up in hostilities with north vietnamese forces. The maddox escapes mostly unharmed. The official story is the north vietnamese attacked the maddox, unofficial accounts vary. North vietnam is given an official warning.
- American ships open fire on perceived north vietnam enemy ships posing a threat. The media blows this out of proportion. It is still unclear whether there were actually real enemies shooting back. As a response to this second incident, congress passes the golf of tonkin resolution authorizing the use of force in defense of US forces
- With US forces able to fight back, the war quickly escalates and the vietnam war starts in earnest. US political leadership has proclaimed they won't let communism take hold of south vietnam and thereby preclude a US withdrawal from south vietnam without political harm.
So. The reason for fighting north vietnam and backing south vietnam was NOT a totalitarian dictatorship. South vietnam wasn't any better than the north. The vietnam war was a result of the US fear of communism resulting in ever intensifying military aid to south vietnam, which set a fuse on a bomb that eventually went off.
It wasn't about preserving democracy, it was about preserving capitalism.
You could write a plugin for photoshop to do that exact same thing. I don't know how hard it is to write a plugin, but I can't imagine it being much harder than script-fu once you get used to it.
Uh, yes it is. That's why so many people I try to introduce Linux to don't want to switch. Linux is too much of a hassle to use. ...
Just today I showed a friend of mine KDE 3.2. She thought it was "too pretty" and wondered why she should change from something that "already works."
As far as I can tell windows users give two reasons not to switch:
- it doesn't look familiar
- it isn't compatible
Hardware compatibility has improved loads. I don't have a single piece of hardware left that works in windows but does not in linux. Software compatibility is getting to the point where you can even take your windows apps with you (using codeweavers' or transgaming's products). And ofcourse, for 90 percent of people, native linux software provides all the needed functionality. The only real lacking I see for home users is financial software (quicken, tax apps), but lets hope codeweavers puts that problem out of the picture.
What both of these points share with respect to ease of use is that the easiest system is the one you already know. Windows users make a good point that they don't want to relearn how to do what they already can. However, this doesn't imply linux is inherently more difficult to use, just unfamiliar. I find I solve problems quicker and more permanently in linux than in windows, and I've been using windows a lot longer than linux.
The earliest I can remember virtual desktops in a microsoft gui was symantec's pc tools 2.0 for windows 3.1. Which dates back to late 93 IIRC. Apart from the fact that it maked windows 3.1 twice as unstable (quite a feat, as anyone who ever ran windows 3.1 knows), it was a really fine environment. A powerful file manager with built-in zip folder operations, virtual desktops, 3D window borders (at the time, for me, that was a major advancement, sad, i know), and *gasp* desktop icons (which didn't appear in windows proper till windows 95).
The virtual desktop feature was especially nicely designed, since you saw minipictures of each virtual desktop and could drag windows between the minipictures. And you could password protect some desktops (which allowed you to have one desktop for the kids, and one for porn).
Well, theoretically the supreme court is supposed to do the watching. However, the inherent flaw is the way supreme court justices are appointed. This should be done by direct nationwide election to have any semblance of democracy. Secret suggestions to the president who then makes an arbitrary choice between them is not a good way to select justices.
Not quite that, but this guy seems to have taken the concept of stitching low-res high-zoom photo's together to get high-res to a new level.
More accurately, US dollars are woven from 25 percent linnen and 75 percent cotton. The cool factoid in that link is that money used to be woven out of silk!
So, yes, if money gets destroyed in the laundry, it was fake.
Network connections are bit based, and therefore deal in powers of two. Any computer memory is bit based, and therefore also measured in powers of two. Yes, it's possible for a hard disk's physical size to be a multiple of 1000 instead of a multiple of 1024, but once you turn it into a filesystem, you're dealing with integers again, and therefore with powers of two.
Don't be fooled. Mebi was invented so the hdd makers could keep up their lying about hdd sizes.
The point is that you are losing information. If the variable 'secretCompanyKey' is changed to 'a' there isnt a program in the world that will change it back... the information has been lost. Its like trying to reverse a hash.
In the end, it's code, it has to perform all its functionality on standardised (and therefore known) hardware. You can't throw away information necessary to do this, and a reverse engineer is only interested in that kind of information, so therefore the program still contains all the information necessary to deduce the original program from the obfuscated one.
We're talking here about people who are willing to let themselves be blown up by setting off a bomb strapped to their own bodies, just to make a point to the US.
Do you really honestly believe shock and awe will make them go "oh, sorry about wanting to destroy democracy, we'll just not bother you anymore"? If so, I have some land to sell you, at a very good price.
Shock and awe have zero longterm effect. The people you'd use it against are so motivated that once they get over their immediate shock they will start looking for weak spots, and there are always weak spots. In the end we're all human, and we all die just as easily. The soldiers in iraq are noticing this now.
I do think the only way to stop terrorists is to convince them they don't want to kill you, however I don't believe dropping bombs on them from outer space will do that.
Brain implants to give vision to the blind already exist.
This new tech is basically a way of doing it more efficiently.
I agree the problem is education, and most importantly a lacking in formal logic teaching. People should be taught in school to recognise a bullshit argument in a formal way. Instead, most people are vulnerable to the simplest of logical fallacies, like the straw man argument.
It's called the theory of evolution because it's the theory of how evolution occurs, not the theory of whether evolution occurs.
The word "evolution" subsumes both a process and the observable data to support it. Evolution is a proposed mechanism of changes in organisms over time. It is a fact THAT this change occurs, but the role of mutation, dominance of adaptive traits, etc., can only be said to have very strong support.
I think that you're confusing evolution, the observable fact, with natural selection, the underlying theory.
A company should really research the terms of the license, of a product they are using, but perhaps they just hope that people won't notice...
And perhaps it shouldn't be a requirement to ask lawyers for every business decision you make whether or not you're breaking the law by doing it.
In a perfect world, the GPL shouldn't even have to exist. There should be a government-mandated copyleft structure. It's because of government's failure to do anything but the most restrictive copyright that copyleft was created as an abuse of the copyright system. Imho the GPL's success is proof positive that a radical worldwide overhaul of copyright law to make it more equal again is desperately needed.
IANAL, but this is how I understand it works:
The GPL hasn't been tested in court because whenever a company asks their lawyers exactly what the GPL says, they realise that there are two choices (if they actually did use the GPL'd source):
- say the GPL is invalid, which if you win reduces it to a copyright infringement lawsuit, since the GPL is the only thing that allows you to use GPL'd code, and having it declared invalid means you lose all rights to use that code. (Courts really frown on copyright infringement, and this would become a very costly lawsuit to win.)
- say the GPL is valid, and settle.
In other words, the best thing you can do is maintain the status quo (sort of) by settling. Actually going to court makes you lose, even if you win, which is why no one has ever gone to court over it. Not even SCO.
You can say a lot of things about the FSF and the GPL, but you've got to admit it's pretty darn clever.
How is that going to get non-republicrat parties on the ballot next elections? There are always independant choices in the presidential elections which are at least "ok." People just don't count them as legitimate because they're not republicrat. If you really want things to change, start voting outside of the two parties. Otherwise it's going to be same old forever and ever.
Let me state it very clearly: the democrat and republican parties DO NOT care if only 1 percent of voters turn out. They only care whether they win or not among those that do vote. Low voter turnout will not change their viewpoints one bit. Abstaining from voting WILL NOT bring about change.
Freedesktop and Xouvert just took the XFree code and somewhat forked it.
As far as I know the freedesktop project's x server is based on kdrive (the lightweight X server meant for pda's) and not on the main XFree86 codebase.
"Learn English properly." does not mean the same thing as "Learn proper English."
The first implies that you're learning or have learnt it improperly, and you need to adapt your learning methods. The second implies that you have not learnt real, grammatically correct, English, regardless of learning methods, and you should do so. As far as I know, both are correct uses of the English language.
TCP/IP might be a first
D'oh. I posted this and suddenly realised tcp/ip dates back to the 60's, not to the 80's. My bad, sorry.
So, no, I can't think of anything unix did first. And I need to relax my brain for a while.
Unix was open source at the beginning. However, I'm not sure whether unix pioneered anything. Multitasking existed before multics even (which was unix's predecessor). TCP/IP might be a first, but originally the network interface itself was a separate machine, called an imp, which did not run unix.
As far as I know no modern OS pioneered anything. They're all copy cats.
I think most of the criticism wrt microsoft not innovating comes from the fact that microsoft constantly is wielding claims that they do in fact innovate all the time. They're the ones who need to put up or shut up.
The only example of a microsoft first I can come up with is cleartype, which I hadn't seen anywhere until microsoft started talking about it (though subpixel addressing wasn't new, cleartype's use of lcd screens to do it was). I like cleartype. It lets me read ebooks on my pc without having my eyes hurt after an hour.