There's also a perl script in there (which I didn't write, just found somewhere else) which does more nice analysis of X memory usage.
Grab it ASAP, as the server is going down permanently within a couple of days. Matter of fact, if you want to make it available yourself for anyone interested, I'd appreciate it.
I use the XRes extension, which is relatively new...you can't be using an ancient copy of XFree86.
Forget price protection for a moment -- the thing the stores don't like is specifically price scraping. Why do we have any justification to put up legal barriers to block price scraping? It benefits consumers and drives prices down. I'd call it a *positive* factor that is necessary for a free market.
Hell, I could see *requiring* retail outlets to make their prices publically available.
No, I think this is likely it. You're right that it's not certain -- it's not worth saying "Okay, this is what SCO claimed, and there's nothing to it" yet, but I'm very dubious, especially given the statements in the slides, that there are two IP issues so similar to each other.
Aqua is the most dog-slow, RAM-hungry POS in existence. I've always considered it the biggest *problem* with using OS X, since you can't use OS X without having to have this huge beast bogging down your machine.
My favorite complaint is that it's bloated or eats too much memory. It's bogus -- X uses relatively little memory itself, but pixmaps are stored in X instead of in apps. So Linux GUI apps tend to use less memory than they would with a Windows-like environment, but X's memory usage go up.
I actually sat down and modified some code to query X how much memory is being used by each program in pixmap memory. This is memory that would have to be used under Windows. Little things -- gkrellm, a simple dock program that I have running, caches about 2.7MB of pixmaps in X all by itself. This doesn't show up as gkrellm memory usage in top, but it *is* being consumed by gkrellm.
X11 allows network transparency, 3d support, hardware scaling of video, support for more font formats than Windows does, zooming in and out. When combined with a window manager, the X11 architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible.
I wish people would stop complaining about and learn to use X's features.
So we use SHA-1 or another cryptographically secure hash to refer to data, and trusted sources of hash information. You use a hash tree, so that you can have your client detect bogus files partway through download and delete them. The MP/RIAA cannot afford to pay for 1 byte of bandwidth for each bogus byte sent to a user. They depend on propagation of bogus files.
Hell, Razor and other clearly illegal cracking and warez groups have had well-orchestrated release policies for years. (As a matter of fact, warez releases have reached a point where they are more consistently packaged than commercial software.) It's far easier to do so with P2P. Use cryptographic signatures. "Yup, this hash tree file was signed by Razor." Piece o' cake. Releasing databases of signed hash trees in an anonymous, distributed manner is also easy -- Freenet can already do this.
I have some other ideas that I'm working on for some of the other attacks on P2P networks, but this really isn't a problem -- we've had folks putting spam files on P2P for years, and there are good solutions for it.
I guess my central point is, don't turn down Harvard just because someone else tells you they'll let you play games for 4 years, and don't expect to be programming Civ V when you're 24.
This point stands on its own.
A lot of people get into game programming because they like playing video games. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and many people enjoy entertainment software development, but it's kind of important to recognize what you're getting into. Game development is software development under a lot of pressure, for companies that often don't have a great life expectancy (publishers last -- developers come and go). You often make less money than your general software developer. Game engines tend to have short lifespans, so a lot of your code is going in the rubbish heap after you're done with it -- which, at least for me, tends to discourage me from perfecting what I'm working on, which in turn doesn't give me the same feeling of pride that more traditional software development does. If you don't like matrix math, you're not going to like most current game graphics coding.
There are a few other issues with game development in general. I remember a fan of Final Fantasy saying "Boy, I wish I could work at Square". That's exactly what you *don't* want to do. When you've played a game ten million times to tweak features, and you see all the artifacts that you couldn't quite get exactly the way you want, and you know what gaps there are in the AI, the illusion breaks, and the game isn't fun to *play*. There are no secrets to discover. The characters are sprites, not people. All that would win you is the loss of your favorite series. Do something else, and keep playing and enjoying that series.
Video game development is an *extremely* new field. If you're going to a college that promises a game-oriented curriculum, be aware that the courses are going to be rough around the edges. If you're entering a new program at a college, you're going to catch all the assignments that are too hard or too easy, bugs or mistakes in the material, etc.
I have a few misgivings about teaching game programming, just because the paradigms move so quickly. Most things in game programming are easy to pick up if you have a CS background, but you don't want to waste money learning techniques that will be going out of style just after you graduate. If you learn polygon-based graphic techniques, or hardware reverb 3d sound tricks, it might not be worth much in a few years.
Finally, a lot of people have game design confused with game software development. Programming and designing a game are very different tasks. A person may well wear two hats (especially at smaller houses), but just because you're doing software dev for a developer does not mean that you'll get the opportunity to incorporate all those ideas that you've been thinking about.
There are people who are very happy doing game development. I just think that it's important that people realize what they're getting into.
This is exactly what I thought, though I was a bit more cynical...if I worked at an audio supply place, I might post something to Slashdot...free advertising on a high-traffic site for only the effort of fabricating an RIAA tie-in.
Of course, it could just be the poster wanting to get his story put up, but the paranoid view is much more fun...
I just can't figure out why they're locked in. Surely OpenDivx doesn't have licensing fees and is patent unencumbered? They have the masters of the movies, unless they purchased a license with the artists only to use the movies in a particular format...which seems fairly unlikely.
It seems like they could just compress the things into Divx format and ship 'em. I think most folks could live without extensive Q&A, especially when the alternative is no movies. Just add an option to disable cinematics to the game, and you're gold.
Or MPEG2, even if it's lower quality, and use smpeg, which Loki used for its movies.
I mean, I do think that Bioware is going to catch *some* undeserved flak for this, but OTOH, the decision to use Bink or nothing for the Linux client seems just plain *dumb*. There aren't any phenomonal features that Bink provides that another format can't provide, and using something like SMPEG can't possibly be more than a week of development time for a single developer.
The fact that mail systems that require PTR records before accepting mail significantly reduces spam is reason enough that PTR records should be required.
And this is a short-term fix which produces long-term issues. You reduce spam for eighteen months, spammers start just going through PTR-listed servers, and you're back to square one...except now you're using a broken mail system. Or spammers buy a throwaway domain -- they buy throwaway accounts, and a throwaway domain is no more trouble.
I personally run a mail server on my computer, and don't gateway mail it sends. That's the way email was designed to work, and still the way it works best. I think that's pretty legitimate. I get an immediate response when mail delivery fails, can set how long I want resends to be done, and don't have to remember to change my gateway when I move from home to college and back. I have no reason to run out and buy a domain -- I don't have any reason to present a domain to the world.
People requiring PTR records are running broken name servers. Most people that like this mindset -- restrict users for a short term gain -- have in my experience been fairly technically incompetent admins. Block everything except 80 TCP outbound, plop transparent proxies all over, try to convince people to use webmail, block mailservers...they see a short term gain. They aren't engineers, so to them, they've just "solved the problem". Then they wait a year, run into problems (people tunneling everything over 80 or setting up their own VPNs to get reasonable functionality, FTP to a similarly crippled site not working, etc), and try to find a policy-based, rather than a technical, solution. For the rest of the world, they're jerks with a bit of administrative power to abuse. IT people like this are easy to find -- they're the ones that the users resent, the ones that are making tasks more of a pain in the ass for core users, rather than easier.
I have to disagree. Today, we have a vast, rich, and varied array of MUDs and MOOS. Every player can find the MUD/MOO that fits exactly what they like. If we take the approach that you're promoting, instead of thousands of MUDs with a good match for each player, we would have had a single (potentially very good) game, something more like Ultima Online. Sure, might have been fun, but people can MUD for years and always have a huge library of free and high-quality content still available to wander through. Granted, there's some shoddy stuff mixed in...but the sheer amount of *stuff* is wonderful.
Finally, it may well be that the developers are not good at world design...but I'd say that it's better that they recognize that and let someone else do the world design than try to do it themselves. Quite a few commercial game developers that can code but not design good games have taken this route. It produces bad games...that cannot be fixed.
Okay, you're certainly right that civil engineers cannot be absolutely certain that their bridges will work -- but they can get a pretty high degree of guarantee.
Software is harder to deal with not only in the rate of advance (as you pointed out), but the immaturity of the field (civil engineering, in admittedly more rudimentary forms, has been around for thousands of years), and in complexity (a suspension bridge will pretty much operate the way any other suspension bridge will, and the problems to check for are the same for just about any suspension bridge).
In software, there isn't a small battery of checks that one can use to make it extremely likely that a program is correct. Programs differ much more internally than bridges do.
Finally, most civil engineering involves a fair degree of redundancy. The first ten feet of a dam are probably fairly similar to the next ten feet of a dam. As long as your principles are sound for the first ten feet, it's likely that they'll hold for the next ten. The first ten thousand lines of code in a program are unlike the second ten thousand lines of code, and require individual rechecking.
I do agree that over time, quality standards for software engineering will probably go up. There really *is* currently a more haphazard approach to writing software than there is to other forms of engineering. There will be restrictrictions ("we will always build programs using framework "foo", conventions "bar", with a highly limited and checkable language), procedures, and different approaches to try to ensure quality. However, I don't think that, short of a very significant jump in compiler/AI technology, it is possible to ensure the kind of quality currently in bridges in large scale software projects.
For extremely small (in lines of code) projects, where good funding is available and functionality cannot break (pacemakers, antilock braking systems), I think that a zero bugs assurance is pretty reasonable even today.
Why is legal liability for faulty software such a bad thing? I just don't understand why so many/.'ers are so against this.
Every other profession is legally liable for what they do.
There's kind of a pragmatic issue here.
Knowing about an issue and not releasing a patch or at least an alert could reasonably be considered neglient. We *have* the technology to do so, and there's good reason for having the justice system punish people who do not do so.
However, we do not currently have tools that can check for any and all errors in programs, and do not currently have the ability to write bug-free programs that are in the hundreds of thousands of lines or more. Thus, there's not much point in punishing people who release buggy code -- because it can't possibly make people produce bug-free code.
Now, there are a few exceptions. Civil engineering can involve quite complex systems, and at one point we didn't have good methods to see whether a civil engineering project is flawed. However, they're generally well understood, and conceptually simpler than a large software package. Furthermore, the failure of a civil engineering project can frequently cause immediately and unavoidable loss of life. Computer software can *sometimes* do so...and software developers that are in this position generally are considered to be liable.
It's good that people are giving their thanks to the smart people that have given them so much good stuff on the GNOME project -- but remember also the folks on other projects. Drop the guy that maintains your favorite program a quick thank you note, or consider doing so the next time you come across the next "oh, that's so *cool*" feature that someone's written in a program that you're using -- it really means a lot to them, goes a long way to encourage them to write more, and just keeps the good will flowing. It's just a moment for you, but it's the grease that keeps Open Source running smoothly.
Essentially, the story is either BS (and these people want to make money off the gene themselves) or the people don't understand the patent system.
A defensive patent is acquired so that you have IP to club other people with.
You *never* acquire a patent to ensure that something stays in the public domain. A patent is specifically a document ensuring that information is *not* publically usable. If you simply publically publish the information that these people are claiming they need to patent, it immediately becomes unpatentable by anyone.
Poor little Microsoft, trying to eke out a living on the fringes of the computer industry, threatened by the monopoly held by Apple and their free software buddies!
They didn't imply anything like that.
MS has a monopoly, and is fending off challengers. Nothing making fun of their position in stating that, which is what the article said.
Things could get very interesting when a critical mass of Microsoft's customer start realizing that something like MySQL is actually superior to SQL Server, and look Ma, no price tag!
I haven't used SQL Server or MySQL, but the people in the know that I've talked to have been very reluctant to put MySQL on the same level as SQL Server. Oracle is there, maybe postgres...not my.
Apple for taking some steps in the right direction, such as eliminating floppy drives and switching to LCD monitors for home models.
Err...okay, I'm not sure what your hangup is with CRTs (still better color accuracy, brightness, contrast, higher frame rates). LCDs are sharper and show less flicker. Each is good for different tasks -- for gaming or movie watching, a CRT is slightly nicer, for emacs an LCD.
As for *Apple* dealing with the problem, Apple has had more crummy legacy hardware lying around than anyone else for years and years. I remember for years wishing that NuBus would *die* already...
and endless arguments about sticking with Emacs and the X11 standard are all so inbred and meaningless
What's the problem with using X11?
I will make fun of Microsoft along with everyone else as long as Bill Gates & company are stagnant and producing poor products. But as much as I hate to say it, they're moving forward with some interesting ideas. Sure, those ideas aren't original (what is?) but the key is that they have a direction and purpose.
Their interesting ideas consist of adding telephony to the computer (been done by *lots* of people before, including your buddy Apple) and a one-handed input device (also been done by lots of people...stuff like the BAT)?
Frankly, I've seen a lot more new and interesting ideas in KDE and GNOME than I have in Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
NT 4.0 might be a better Windows contender.
Once you get used to low-latency response and VM that isn't almost totally useless, 98 starts to feel pretty nasty, even on fast machines.
Of course, Linux (with process priorities properly set, naturally) is damn snappy...
Feel free to grab it here.
There's also a perl script in there (which I didn't write, just found somewhere else) which does more nice analysis of X memory usage.
Grab it ASAP, as the server is going down permanently within a couple of days. Matter of fact, if you want to make it available yourself for anyone interested, I'd appreciate it.
I use the XRes extension, which is relatively new...you can't be using an ancient copy of XFree86.
Forget price protection for a moment -- the thing the stores don't like is specifically price scraping. Why do we have any justification to put up legal barriers to block price scraping? It benefits consumers and drives prices down. I'd call it a *positive* factor that is necessary for a free market.
Hell, I could see *requiring* retail outlets to make their prices publically available.
No, I think this is likely it. You're right that it's not certain -- it's not worth saying "Okay, this is what SCO claimed, and there's nothing to it" yet, but I'm very dubious, especially given the statements in the slides, that there are two IP issues so similar to each other.
I'll second the AC that responded -- if this is the right document, LKML should probably know about it.
Because many people are very stupid.
Aqua is the most dog-slow, RAM-hungry POS in existence. I've always considered it the biggest *problem* with using OS X, since you can't use OS X without having to have this huge beast bogging down your machine.
Most people that dislike X don't understand it.
My favorite complaint is that it's bloated or eats too much memory. It's bogus -- X uses relatively little memory itself, but pixmaps are stored in X instead of in apps. So Linux GUI apps tend to use less memory than they would with a Windows-like environment, but X's memory usage go up.
I actually sat down and modified some code to query X how much memory is being used by each program in pixmap memory. This is memory that would have to be used under Windows. Little things -- gkrellm, a simple dock program that I have running, caches about 2.7MB of pixmaps in X all by itself. This doesn't show up as gkrellm memory usage in top, but it *is* being consumed by gkrellm.
X11 allows network transparency, 3d support, hardware scaling of video, support for more font formats than Windows does, zooming in and out. When combined with a window manager, the X11 architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible.
I wish people would stop complaining about and learn to use X's features.
Hah! I'd rather cram $20 worth of pennies up my poop chute that let it fall into the hands of those b*stards!
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Not exactly. Streaming might not provide support for retransmits, which makes lossless downloads of large files a bitch.
So we use SHA-1 or another cryptographically secure hash to refer to data, and trusted sources of hash information. You use a hash tree, so that you can have your client detect bogus files partway through download and delete them. The MP/RIAA cannot afford to pay for 1 byte of bandwidth for each bogus byte sent to a user. They depend on propagation of bogus files.
Hell, Razor and other clearly illegal cracking and warez groups have had well-orchestrated release policies for years. (As a matter of fact, warez releases have reached a point where they are more consistently packaged than commercial software.) It's far easier to do so with P2P. Use cryptographic signatures. "Yup, this hash tree file was signed by Razor." Piece o' cake. Releasing databases of signed hash trees in an anonymous, distributed manner is also easy -- Freenet can already do this.
I have some other ideas that I'm working on for some of the other attacks on P2P networks, but this really isn't a problem -- we've had folks putting spam files on P2P for years, and there are good solutions for it.
Actually, I was wrong about one thing -- smpeg is MPEG1, not MPEG2...so yeah, it'll be non-patent encumbered.
So DivX (well, sans license) is currently illegal in the US? This is news to me...
I guess my central point is, don't turn down Harvard just because someone else tells you they'll let you play games for 4 years, and don't expect to be programming Civ V when you're 24.
This point stands on its own.
A lot of people get into game programming because they like playing video games. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and many people enjoy entertainment software development, but it's kind of important to recognize what you're getting into. Game development is software development under a lot of pressure, for companies that often don't have a great life expectancy (publishers last -- developers come and go). You often make less money than your general software developer. Game engines tend to have short lifespans, so a lot of your code is going in the rubbish heap after you're done with it -- which, at least for me, tends to discourage me from perfecting what I'm working on, which in turn doesn't give me the same feeling of pride that more traditional software development does. If you don't like matrix math, you're not going to like most current game graphics coding.
There are a few other issues with game development in general. I remember a fan of Final Fantasy saying "Boy, I wish I could work at Square". That's exactly what you *don't* want to do. When you've played a game ten million times to tweak features, and you see all the artifacts that you couldn't quite get exactly the way you want, and you know what gaps there are in the AI, the illusion breaks, and the game isn't fun to *play*. There are no secrets to discover. The characters are sprites, not people. All that would win you is the loss of your favorite series. Do something else, and keep playing and enjoying that series.
Video game development is an *extremely* new field. If you're going to a college that promises a game-oriented curriculum, be aware that the courses are going to be rough around the edges. If you're entering a new program at a college, you're going to catch all the assignments that are too hard or too easy, bugs or mistakes in the material, etc.
I have a few misgivings about teaching game programming, just because the paradigms move so quickly. Most things in game programming are easy to pick up if you have a CS background, but you don't want to waste money learning techniques that will be going out of style just after you graduate. If you learn polygon-based graphic techniques, or hardware reverb 3d sound tricks, it might not be worth much in a few years.
Finally, a lot of people have game design confused with game software development. Programming and designing a game are very different tasks. A person may well wear two hats (especially at smaller houses), but just because you're doing software dev for a developer does not mean that you'll get the opportunity to incorporate all those ideas that you've been thinking about.
There are people who are very happy doing game development. I just think that it's important that people realize what they're getting into.
This is exactly what I thought, though I was a bit more cynical...if I worked at an audio supply place, I might post something to Slashdot...free advertising on a high-traffic site for only the effort of fabricating an RIAA tie-in.
Of course, it could just be the poster wanting to get his story put up, but the paranoid view is much more fun...
I just can't figure out why they're locked in. Surely OpenDivx doesn't have licensing fees and is patent unencumbered? They have the masters of the movies, unless they purchased a license with the artists only to use the movies in a particular format...which seems fairly unlikely.
It seems like they could just compress the things into Divx format and ship 'em. I think most folks could live without extensive Q&A, especially when the alternative is no movies. Just add an option to disable cinematics to the game, and you're gold.
Or MPEG2, even if it's lower quality, and use smpeg, which Loki used for its movies.
I mean, I do think that Bioware is going to catch *some* undeserved flak for this, but OTOH, the decision to use Bink or nothing for the Linux client seems just plain *dumb*. There aren't any phenomonal features that Bink provides that another format can't provide, and using something like SMPEG can't possibly be more than a week of development time for a single developer.
The fact that mail systems that require PTR records before accepting mail significantly reduces spam is reason enough that PTR records should be required.
And this is a short-term fix which produces long-term issues. You reduce spam for eighteen months, spammers start just going through PTR-listed servers, and you're back to square one...except now you're using a broken mail system. Or spammers buy a throwaway domain -- they buy throwaway accounts, and a throwaway domain is no more trouble.
I personally run a mail server on my computer, and don't gateway mail it sends. That's the way email was designed to work, and still the way it works best. I think that's pretty legitimate. I get an immediate response when mail delivery fails, can set how long I want resends to be done, and don't have to remember to change my gateway when I move from home to college and back. I have no reason to run out and buy a domain -- I don't have any reason to present a domain to the world.
People requiring PTR records are running broken name servers. Most people that like this mindset -- restrict users for a short term gain -- have in my experience been fairly technically incompetent admins. Block everything except 80 TCP outbound, plop transparent proxies all over, try to convince people to use webmail, block mailservers...they see a short term gain. They aren't engineers, so to them, they've just "solved the problem". Then they wait a year, run into problems (people tunneling everything over 80 or setting up their own VPNs to get reasonable functionality, FTP to a similarly crippled site not working, etc), and try to find a policy-based, rather than a technical, solution. For the rest of the world, they're jerks with a bit of administrative power to abuse. IT people like this are easy to find -- they're the ones that the users resent, the ones that are making tasks more of a pain in the ass for core users, rather than easier.
Just my two cents.
I do believe you just managed to get your MOO Slashdotted. It's running terribly slowly...
I have to disagree. Today, we have a vast, rich, and varied array of MUDs and MOOS. Every player can find the MUD/MOO that fits exactly what they like. If we take the approach that you're promoting, instead of thousands of MUDs with a good match for each player, we would have had a single (potentially very good) game, something more like Ultima Online. Sure, might have been fun, but people can MUD for years and always have a huge library of free and high-quality content still available to wander through. Granted, there's some shoddy stuff mixed in...but the sheer amount of *stuff* is wonderful.
Finally, it may well be that the developers are not good at world design...but I'd say that it's better that they recognize that and let someone else do the world design than try to do it themselves. Quite a few commercial game developers that can code but not design good games have taken this route. It produces bad games...that cannot be fixed.
Okay, you're certainly right that civil engineers cannot be absolutely certain that their bridges will work -- but they can get a pretty high degree of guarantee.
Software is harder to deal with not only in the rate of advance (as you pointed out), but the immaturity of the field (civil engineering, in admittedly more rudimentary forms, has been around for thousands of years), and in complexity (a suspension bridge will pretty much operate the way any other suspension bridge will, and the problems to check for are the same for just about any suspension bridge).
In software, there isn't a small battery of checks that one can use to make it extremely likely that a program is correct. Programs differ much more internally than bridges do.
Finally, most civil engineering involves a fair degree of redundancy. The first ten feet of a dam are probably fairly similar to the next ten feet of a dam. As long as your principles are sound for the first ten feet, it's likely that they'll hold for the next ten. The first ten thousand lines of code in a program are unlike the second ten thousand lines of code, and require individual rechecking.
I do agree that over time, quality standards for software engineering will probably go up. There really *is* currently a more haphazard approach to writing software than there is to other forms of engineering. There will be restrictrictions ("we will always build programs using framework "foo", conventions "bar", with a highly limited and checkable language), procedures, and different approaches to try to ensure quality. However, I don't think that, short of a very significant jump in compiler/AI technology, it is possible to ensure the kind of quality currently in bridges in large scale software projects.
For extremely small (in lines of code) projects, where good funding is available and functionality cannot break (pacemakers, antilock braking systems), I think that a zero bugs assurance is pretty reasonable even today.
Why is legal liability for faulty software such a bad thing? I just don't understand why so many /.'ers are so against this.
Every other profession is legally liable for what they do.
There's kind of a pragmatic issue here.
Knowing about an issue and not releasing a patch or at least an alert could reasonably be considered neglient. We *have* the technology to do so, and there's good reason for having the justice system punish people who do not do so.
However, we do not currently have tools that can check for any and all errors in programs, and do not currently have the ability to write bug-free programs that are in the hundreds of thousands of lines or more. Thus, there's not much point in punishing people who release buggy code -- because it can't possibly make people produce bug-free code.
Now, there are a few exceptions. Civil engineering can involve quite complex systems, and at one point we didn't have good methods to see whether a civil engineering project is flawed. However, they're generally well understood, and conceptually simpler than a large software package. Furthermore, the failure of a civil engineering project can frequently cause immediately and unavoidable loss of life. Computer software can *sometimes* do so...and software developers that are in this position generally are considered to be liable.
The fact that Bush mushes together the Koreas for the masses is kind of in line with him claiming that we bombed Iraq because of terrorism.
It's good that people are giving their thanks to the smart people that have given them so much good stuff on the GNOME project -- but remember also the folks on other projects. Drop the guy that maintains your favorite program a quick thank you note, or consider doing so the next time you come across the next "oh, that's so *cool*" feature that someone's written in a program that you're using -- it really means a lot to them, goes a long way to encourage them to write more, and just keeps the good will flowing. It's just a moment for you, but it's the grease that keeps Open Source running smoothly.
Essentially, the story is either BS (and these people want to make money off the gene themselves) or the people don't understand the patent system.
A defensive patent is acquired so that you have IP to club other people with.
You *never* acquire a patent to ensure that something stays in the public domain. A patent is specifically a document ensuring that information is *not* publically usable. If you simply publically publish the information that these people are claiming they need to patent, it immediately becomes unpatentable by anyone.
Poor little Microsoft, trying to eke out a living on the fringes of the computer industry, threatened by the monopoly held by Apple and their free software buddies!
They didn't imply anything like that.
MS has a monopoly, and is fending off challengers. Nothing making fun of their position in stating that, which is what the article said.
Things could get very interesting when a critical mass of Microsoft's customer start realizing that something like MySQL is actually superior to SQL Server, and look Ma, no price tag!
I haven't used SQL Server or MySQL, but the people in the know that I've talked to have been very reluctant to put MySQL on the same level as SQL Server. Oracle is there, maybe postgres...not my.
Apple for taking some steps in the right direction, such as eliminating floppy drives and switching to LCD monitors for home models.
Err...okay, I'm not sure what your hangup is with CRTs (still better color accuracy, brightness, contrast, higher frame rates). LCDs are sharper and show less flicker. Each is good for different tasks -- for gaming or movie watching, a CRT is slightly nicer, for emacs an LCD.
As for *Apple* dealing with the problem, Apple has had more crummy legacy hardware lying around than anyone else for years and years. I remember for years wishing that NuBus would *die* already...
and endless arguments about sticking with Emacs and the X11 standard are all so inbred and meaningless
What's the problem with using X11?
I will make fun of Microsoft along with everyone else as long as Bill Gates & company are stagnant and producing poor products. But as much as I hate to say it, they're moving forward with some interesting ideas. Sure, those ideas aren't original (what is?) but the key is that they have a direction and purpose.
Their interesting ideas consist of adding telephony to the computer (been done by *lots* of people before, including your buddy Apple) and a one-handed input device (also been done by lots of people...stuff like the BAT)?
Frankly, I've seen a lot more new and interesting ideas in KDE and GNOME than I have in Windows.