It's hard for some of us not to look at grammatical or spelling errors and wince.
Proofreading text isn't that different from proofreading code. Maybe it's part of the way geek brains are wired. Reading a paragraph and noticing that the author used "their" instead of "they're" might use a similar part of the brain that alarms you when you see a missing semicolon, or the wrong variable name, or "p++" instead of "++p," etc.
And when I see sloppy but functional code -- written by someone else, of course;-) -- I instantly question the compentency of the coder, whether that's fair or not. Having the same reaction to poor grammar/spelling is understandable, since most of us have been reading English longer than we've been reading code.
Obviously, there are different levels of formality (in spoken as well as written English), but deliberate slang, jargon, abbreviations, etc. are different than errors (which are either accidental or a result of laziness or ignorance). Non-native speakers do get some slack, but their English is often better...
I've read a lot of the comments, most of them seem to go something like this:
The USA invented the internet, US defense money paid for DARPANET, etc.
Response to above: Europeans invented the world-wide web, HTTP, etc.
The UN can't do anything right
The USA does whatever it wants
X% of internet servers are outside of the US, where X is a value between 0 and 100;-)
I've been an internet user since the early 1990s, (before there was a "world-wide web," so I have some of my own opinions. I don't really know if I'm for or against this, so here are some random musings:
First, it's been a long time coming. If the US hadn't wanted non-US sites on the internet, they had the capacity to close that door long ago. IIRC, the main reason that the US controlled the root servers (aside from the fact that it all started in the US), was that pretty much any non-US net was connected to the USA, although not necessarily to any other country's net. Putting them in the US ensured that they would be reasonably "central" in the net topology. But once the net became a commercial entity (not just a research and military network), ownership of the root servers should have been internationalized -- ICANN should have been international from the start.
Assuming the UN took control of the root servers, I presume they would set up a committee very similar to ICANN; In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of this new committee's members came directly from ICANN. In other words, don't expect Kofi Annan or the career diplomats to be on this board.
Finally, I'll admit that it must be galling for a non-USA citizen to go to the TLD "army.mil" and find a web page about the US Army... I wouldn't be surprised if the UN ever does take over the domain system, if the.mil wouldn't get moved into the.mil.us or similar. Don't know if.org or.edu would have the same effect, and.com is too big for anyone to tackle...
If I understand correctly, you're saying that if Apple came out with a two button mouse with scroll wheel (hereafter TBMWSW), this theoretical Apple TBMWSW would "steal away" market share from Logitech and Microsoft (the largest branded manufacturers of TBMWSWs, at least in the USA).
I really don't think this would have much of an impact on either Microsoft's or Apple's bottom lines, as I expect the margin on mice to be razor-thin. Maybe a dollar per unit, I don't really know. It might have more of an adverse impact on Logitech, since manufacturing input devices is their core business.
In other words: sure, people might buy Apple's TBMWSW and connect them to their Dells, but will it really affect anyone except Logitech?
Of course, if one came bundled with my Mini, I would have used it. Instead, I'm happy using Sony's keyboard and TBMWSW that came with the PS2 Linux kit...
... we'll spend billions on highways (the interstate system?) before we put a penny into public transportation.
This is one of the reasons why freight railroads in the US have difficulty competing... in essense the trucking industry is federally subsidized (in the form of the Interstate Highway System).
Don't believe those stickers you occasionally see on 18-wheelers ("This vehicle pays over $1200 in highway taxes") -- they're the biggest beneficiaries of all of those "taxes." If they paid their fair share, it would be closer to 10x what they actually pay. The railways, on the other hand, own their roads (in addition to the rolling stock), and must pay the maintenance, improvements, etc.
One of the problems w/ MAME in particular (though not it's exclusively limited to MAME) is copyright issues. The OP didn't mention how things are in his office, but most corporate environments are pretty picky about what you put on *their* machines and networks, especially with respect to licensing issues.
In other words, whether it's Half-Life or a ROM for "Crazy Climber," you had better make sure that you either have the appropriate number of licenses, or proof that the game allows unlimited distribution. Otherwise your IS department will (rightfully) come down on you. Some companies even have a "grounds for immediate termination" clause in there -- you might want to check.
(I don't want to start a flamewar about when something crosses from abandonware to public domain. Your IS department will likely look at it from the most conservative approach, namely, "can we potentially be sued by the license holder if this is on one of our assets." Plus, they're worried about viruses, and so forth, which can have a much bigger impact in the coroporate world than on your home LAN.)
Back in my day, *all* games were one-button. And you had to share the button with the other players, because we couldn't afford enough buttons for everyone.
(insert random "you insensitive clods" drivel here)
The Linux Kit is still in demand, and no longer available. If you're not using it, consider putting it on ebay or similar. I know several people trying to get it.
In addition to the OS, HDD, KB, and mouse, you also get the developers guides for the EE, GS/GIF, VU/VIF, etc., which is almost worth the price of the kit, IMHO. And it's a pretty decent keyboard and mouse -- no "windows keys" on the KB...
And (as another poster mentioned), it will run on an NTSC or PAL TV, if you press the magic buttons during the bootup sequence. It will look quite crappy if you're using a composite video connector; SVGA or component video is remarkably more readable.
Which is to say that once the 18-34 demographic starts buying $400 PS3s instead of $400 video cards, developers may have no choice but to follow suit.
I'm confused as to why this is viewed as an either/or situation. One isn't forced into buying a console or a gaming PC. Many people have both, and I see no reason why this wouldn't continue in the future. In fact, I wonder how many people with a current-gen console *don't* have a reasonably decent PC for games as well?
And what demographic groups do they think are currently buying consoles? I'd bet 75% of console sales in the US is to that same 18-34 demographic -- a group to which I (sadly) no longer belong...
I'm amazed at the fact that people are so fearful of terrorists that they would allow this. The murder rate in America is between about 10,000 and 25,000 people. Even at the low number, each year about four times more Americans get murdered by fellow Americans than died in 9/11.
It's not the *people* that are demanding this, it's the government. Sure, more people are murdered in DC every year than can fit on a 747, but land that 747 on the White House or the US Capitol, and you'll find out whose life is worth more (in the government's eyes).
I'm not passing judgement on this, but a hundred dead civilians concerns people a lot less than a hundred dead senators.
It's been a long time since I read it, but the ship in the novel Alien, (and in the movie as well, but it wasn't mentioned as prominently) was an oil refinery. Apparently, Earth had long since depleted its own oil reserves, but:
Earth could live without energy more easily than it could without plastics
(to quote the book from my sketchy memory)
In other words, don't think that BTUs are the only end product of an oil well -- pretty much every plastic is petroleum-based in some way or another.
Why do you think all the jobs are being outsourced? American workers are getting too fat with their outrageous pay. Why? Because of the Unions - they're useless now and that's why things made in the US cost so much.
I think you've been listening to the AM talkshows too much, or to some other mouthpieces of the Bush administration.
I'll admit that the unions are a factor in making US-manufactured goods less competetive than those produced in the third world, but there's a reason for this. Do you know what working conditions were like in the mines and factories of the USA before unions? Do you have any idea what they're like, today, in China, India, Indonesia, etc.? Get rid of the unions, and that's the kind of place where your 12-year old daughter could be working, right here in the good ole US of A (that is until she loses her arm in a packing machine, at which point she'll be fired on the spot, and made to pay for the damage to the machine).
Here's an interesting quote I found here, attributed to Business Week:
In 2000, the average CEO salary reached an unbelievable 531 times that of the average hourly worker.
Executive salaries and the ever-increasing cost of litigation and employee benefits (since the government seems to think we don't need health insurance) adds a lot more to the cost of your "Made in the USA" article than any union could.
My view of the Cell chip is that it's actually 2 different kinds of chips put together.
... which isn't that different, architecturally, from the Emotion Engine -- a main processor, and the Vector Units.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, this led to the hype (before the PS2 launch) about how the EE was going to be the fastest mainstream processor (at least in terms of MFlops), but it took a long time for the developers to be able to produce code to take full advantage of it. Coupled with the somewhat-lackluster 300MHz MIPS core, it was eventually outpaced by 2GHz P4s (with a separate GPU on the video card).
As a result, the EE makes for a fine gaming platform, but not too useful for general purpose use these days. As anyone with the PS2 Linux kit will attest, gcc and X11 suffer terribly from the low clock speed and poor integer performance.
Of course, that's not to say that Sony et al. haven't learned from this -- and having IBM in their corner can't hurt. They're investing a lot of money into this which would be hard to recover by just selling under-$300 gaming consoles...
The problem I have with both KDE and GNOME is that some packages offered as part of the desktop are so dependent on various other components that they're unusable on their own.
The problem I have with both KDE (which I use) and GNOME is that they both require that ancient bloatware package known as "The X Window System."
Much as I dislike Microsoft Windows, the Win32 GDI (which ain't that much different from the Win16 GDI) is very thin and provides more than enough functionality and device independence for 99.9% of the users out there. How often do you need to run an X app across the wire? How many times do you need to support multiple displays and screens (OK, this is slashdot, so I know some of you do -- I have myself, but it's very rare).
I'd love to see a thin, fast, cross-platform replacement for X.
Hmm, after posting, I did some googling and found this:
Western Digital had a contract with DEC to supply chipsets for the DEC LSI-11 computer. When DEC suddenly canceled the contract, Western Digital found themselves stuck with a warehouse full of useless LSI-11 chipsets. In an attempt to salvage at least some of their investment they went looking for something else to do with the parts. The chipsets were microprogrammed and consisted of up to six chips: a RALU (Register ALU) chip, a controller sequencer chip, and up to four microcode ROMs. The UCSD p-System and UCSD Pascal were very popular at the time and Western Digital decided that there might be a market for a machine that ran the p-System as its native Operating System. They disposed of the useless LSI-11 microcode ROMs and developed new microcode for the UCSD p-Machine instruction set (p-Code). Thus creating a new machine from the ashes of an old one.
At my first job (in 1980) we did some programming with UCSD Pascal, although the majority of our work was in assembly (Z80 and friends). We dabbled around with UCSD Pascal on our CP/M machines and on a customer's Apple ][ and the performance was quite acceptable.
Then we got this strange beast -- I think it was a modified DEC PDP-11/03. IIRC, the 11/03's CPU was actually 3 chips: a core and what was essentially two microcode PALs. The microcode chips were replaced with ones that executed p-code (rather than PDP machine code). There was no interpreter -- raw execution of the p-code in hardware. It was so blazingly fast that we couldn't believe it. It was probably a 16-bit architecture too, so that may have helped (or was the PDP-11 one of those oddball 18-bit machines, 6 octal digits to a word...)
We never had a case for it, it just sat on the workbench on antistatic foam, with wires leading out to the floppy drives and the terminal. We did all of our Pascal development on that box, then moved it to the Apple (the customer's machine) for the "beta testing." It was mostly UI, so the performance didn't really matter.
Eventually, we switched to using C, since Pascal wasn't too practical for the embedded systems we were designing: we were mortified to see a compiled "hello world" was 8K bytes in size! That was four ROMs in those days... C had a much smaller footprint, so we began using it.
But I still wonder whatever happened to that machine...
Re:It's like a free ride when you've already paid.
on
GTA: San Andreas Leaked
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not wrong to get something for free. It's wrong to take something that doesn't belong to you and that wasn't freely given to you.
Well said. Although I hate feeding trolls (like the grandparent), I can't resist this one...
There's only one reason the programmers* get paid: because their employer (the studio) and the publisher expect to make enough money from sales to cover their costs (and hopefully a little extra).
So what if the programmers already got paid? If the studio has already spent all of its money paying employees, but doesn't get anything in return, how long do you think that studio will stay alive? Then the programmers are out of a job, and if studios aren't making money, there won't be any jobs for them to get.
Sorry if you consider this to be "capitalistic crap," but it's the reality of the way the world works. No, I take that back -- I'm not sorry at all.
* -- There are a lot more people involved in the production of a game than just programmers: there are 2D and 3D artists, mission designers, musicians and audio engineers, voice actors, producers, etc. Plus all of the people in the other departments that any company needs to survive, such as accounting, human resources, and, of course, legal...
Did you actually worry in the least bit about your physical safety while you made that post?
Did you worry that you or any member of your family might be dragged out of the house and raped or shot?
You know, worrying about it now *before* it gets to that state is OK. Because if it ever reaches that point, we won't be discussing it on/.
A gradual deterioration of liberty, in the long run, is just as harmful as one that happens overnight -- the end result is the same. And all of these arguments like "Well, it's not as bad here as in [insert third world country]" have a disturbing sound to me.
I started with Word 2.x -- it was a huge improvement over the dominant word processor of the day, WordPerfect (which didn't support Windows very well). I think the next version was 5.1, then 6.0, then they started into the "95" versioning.
The pinnacle, IMHO, was Word 6.0. I don't think they've added a useful feature to Word since version 6.0, only bloat. Oh yeah, and the ability to save as "HTML" (quoted because it's only readable by MSIE).
I would continue to use Word 6.0, except that the file format continues to be "upgraded," so that prior versions cannot read files written by newer versions.
IE has supported PNGs for a long time. It just doesn't support transparency in PNGs.
I think you mean "It doesn't support the alpha channel in PNGs." There's a difference between alpha and transparency, you know.
And only supporting transparency (not full alpha) would be like only displaying images in green, and then claiming that images were being displayed in color.
"We don't need a large operating system. We just want to communicate with memory and disc, the I/O [input/output] system," Phillips said.
Seems like it should be distribution-agnostic if this were the case. They shouldn't even need libc.
Instead of "GNU/Linux" it would be "Oracle/Linux." Certainly the "lines of source code" argument the FSF uses to support "GNU/Linux" should apply to Oracle as well, and I suspect Oracle 10 just might have a line or two more than the kernel...
Slashdot Mirror
Proofreading text isn't that different from proofreading code. Maybe it's part of the way geek brains are wired. Reading a paragraph and noticing that the author used "their" instead of "they're" might use a similar part of the brain that alarms you when you see a missing semicolon, or the wrong variable name, or "p++" instead of "++p," etc.
And when I see sloppy but functional code -- written by someone else, of course ;-) -- I instantly question the compentency of the coder, whether that's fair or not. Having the same reaction to poor grammar/spelling is understandable, since most of us have been reading English longer than we've been reading code.
Obviously, there are different levels of formality (in spoken as well as written English), but deliberate slang, jargon, abbreviations, etc. are different than errors (which are either accidental or a result of laziness or ignorance). Non-native speakers do get some slack, but their English is often better...
I've read a lot of the comments, most of them seem to go something like this:
- The USA invented the internet, US defense money paid for DARPANET, etc.
- Response to above: Europeans invented the world-wide web, HTTP, etc.
- The UN can't do anything right
- The USA does whatever it wants
- X% of internet servers are outside of the US, where X is a value between 0 and 100
;-)
I've been an internet user since the early 1990s, (before there was a "world-wide web," so I have some of my own opinions. I don't really know if I'm for or against this, so here are some random musings:First, it's been a long time coming. If the US hadn't wanted non-US sites on the internet, they had the capacity to close that door long ago. IIRC, the main reason that the US controlled the root servers (aside from the fact that it all started in the US), was that pretty much any non-US net was connected to the USA, although not necessarily to any other country's net. Putting them in the US ensured that they would be reasonably "central" in the net topology. But once the net became a commercial entity (not just a research and military network), ownership of the root servers should have been internationalized -- ICANN should have been international from the start.
Assuming the UN took control of the root servers, I presume they would set up a committee very similar to ICANN; In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of this new committee's members came directly from ICANN. In other words, don't expect Kofi Annan or the career diplomats to be on this board.
Finally, I'll admit that it must be galling for a non-USA citizen to go to the TLD "army.mil" and find a web page about the US Army... I wouldn't be surprised if the UN ever does take over the domain system, if the .mil wouldn't get moved into the .mil.us or similar. Don't know if .org or .edu would have the same effect, and .com is too big for anyone to tackle...
If I understand correctly, you're saying that if Apple came out with a two button mouse with scroll wheel (hereafter TBMWSW), this theoretical Apple TBMWSW would "steal away" market share from Logitech and Microsoft (the largest branded manufacturers of TBMWSWs, at least in the USA).
I really don't think this would have much of an impact on either Microsoft's or Apple's bottom lines, as I expect the margin on mice to be razor-thin. Maybe a dollar per unit, I don't really know. It might have more of an adverse impact on Logitech, since manufacturing input devices is their core business.
In other words: sure, people might buy Apple's TBMWSW and connect them to their Dells, but will it really affect anyone except Logitech?
Of course, if one came bundled with my Mini, I would have used it. Instead, I'm happy using Sony's keyboard and TBMWSW that came with the PS2 Linux kit...
IT'S THE BASE OF THE NATURAL LOGARITHM. LN(E) = 1.0
SHEESH, WHAT DO THEY TEACH IN SCHOOLS THESE DAYS.
Don't believe those stickers you occasionally see on 18-wheelers ("This vehicle pays over $1200 in highway taxes") -- they're the biggest beneficiaries of all of those "taxes." If they paid their fair share, it would be closer to 10x what they actually pay. The railways, on the other hand, own their roads (in addition to the rolling stock), and must pay the maintenance, improvements, etc.
Amusingly, this post was by an AC...
In other words, whether it's Half-Life or a ROM for "Crazy Climber," you had better make sure that you either have the appropriate number of licenses, or proof that the game allows unlimited distribution. Otherwise your IS department will (rightfully) come down on you. Some companies even have a "grounds for immediate termination" clause in there -- you might want to check.
(I don't want to start a flamewar about when something crosses from abandonware to public domain. Your IS department will likely look at it from the most conservative approach, namely, "can we potentially be sued by the license holder if this is on one of our assets." Plus, they're worried about viruses, and so forth, which can have a much bigger impact in the coroporate world than on your home LAN.)
(insert random "you insensitive clods" drivel here)
The Linux Kit is still in demand, and no longer available. If you're not using it, consider putting it on ebay or similar. I know several people trying to get it.
In addition to the OS, HDD, KB, and mouse, you also get the developers guides for the EE, GS/GIF, VU/VIF, etc., which is almost worth the price of the kit, IMHO. And it's a pretty decent keyboard and mouse -- no "windows keys" on the KB...
And (as another poster mentioned), it will run on an NTSC or PAL TV, if you press the magic buttons during the bootup sequence. It will look quite crappy if you're using a composite video connector; SVGA or component video is remarkably more readable.
I'm confused as to why this is viewed as an either/or situation. One isn't forced into buying a console or a gaming PC. Many people have both, and I see no reason why this wouldn't continue in the future. In fact, I wonder how many people with a current-gen console *don't* have a reasonably decent PC for games as well?
And what demographic groups do they think are currently buying consoles? I'd bet 75% of console sales in the US is to that same 18-34 demographic -- a group to which I (sadly) no longer belong...
Well, how much does a single heath pack or one clip of ammo weigh? 'Cause that's all I ever find in crates in games...
It's not the *people* that are demanding this, it's the government. Sure, more people are murdered in DC every year than can fit on a 747, but land that 747 on the White House or the US Capitol, and you'll find out whose life is worth more (in the government's eyes).
I'm not passing judgement on this, but a hundred dead civilians concerns people a lot less than a hundred dead senators.
It's been a long time since I read it, but the ship in the novel Alien, (and in the movie as well, but it wasn't mentioned as prominently) was an oil refinery. Apparently, Earth had long since depleted its own oil reserves, but:
(to quote the book from my sketchy memory)In other words, don't think that BTUs are the only end product of an oil well -- pretty much every plastic is petroleum-based in some way or another.
Some Anonymous Coward wrote:
I think you've been listening to the AM talkshows too much, or to some other mouthpieces of the Bush administration.
I'll admit that the unions are a factor in making US-manufactured goods less competetive than those produced in the third world, but there's a reason for this. Do you know what working conditions were like in the mines and factories of the USA before unions? Do you have any idea what they're like, today, in China, India, Indonesia, etc.? Get rid of the unions, and that's the kind of place where your 12-year old daughter could be working, right here in the good ole US of A (that is until she loses her arm in a packing machine, at which point she'll be fired on the spot, and made to pay for the damage to the machine).
Here's an interesting quote I found here, attributed to Business Week:
Executive salaries and the ever-increasing cost of litigation and employee benefits (since the government seems to think we don't need health insurance) adds a lot more to the cost of your "Made in the USA" article than any union could.
... which isn't that different, architecturally, from the Emotion Engine -- a main processor, and the Vector Units.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, this led to the hype (before the PS2 launch) about how the EE was going to be the fastest mainstream processor (at least in terms of MFlops), but it took a long time for the developers to be able to produce code to take full advantage of it. Coupled with the somewhat-lackluster 300MHz MIPS core, it was eventually outpaced by 2GHz P4s (with a separate GPU on the video card).
As a result, the EE makes for a fine gaming platform, but not too useful for general purpose use these days. As anyone with the PS2 Linux kit will attest, gcc and X11 suffer terribly from the low clock speed and poor integer performance.
Of course, that's not to say that Sony et al. haven't learned from this -- and having IBM in their corner can't hurt. They're investing a lot of money into this which would be hard to recover by just selling under-$300 gaming consoles...
Time will tell.
So if the Honda CVVC became the Honda Civic, then I guess the Intel VIIV would become... the Intel Viiiv?
The problem I have with both KDE (which I use) and GNOME is that they both require that ancient bloatware package known as "The X Window System."
Much as I dislike Microsoft Windows, the Win32 GDI (which ain't that much different from the Win16 GDI) is very thin and provides more than enough functionality and device independence for 99.9% of the users out there. How often do you need to run an X app across the wire? How many times do you need to support multiple displays and screens (OK, this is slashdot, so I know some of you do -- I have myself, but it's very rare).
I'd love to see a thin, fast, cross-platform replacement for X.
Hmm, after posting, I did some googling and found this:
At my first job (in 1980) we did some programming with UCSD Pascal, although the majority of our work was in assembly (Z80 and friends). We dabbled around with UCSD Pascal on our CP/M machines and on a customer's Apple ][ and the performance was quite acceptable.
Then we got this strange beast -- I think it was a modified DEC PDP-11/03. IIRC, the 11/03's CPU was actually 3 chips: a core and what was essentially two microcode PALs. The microcode chips were replaced with ones that executed p-code (rather than PDP machine code). There was no interpreter -- raw execution of the p-code in hardware. It was so blazingly fast that we couldn't believe it. It was probably a 16-bit architecture too, so that may have helped (or was the PDP-11 one of those oddball 18-bit machines, 6 octal digits to a word...)
We never had a case for it, it just sat on the workbench on antistatic foam, with wires leading out to the floppy drives and the terminal. We did all of our Pascal development on that box, then moved it to the Apple (the customer's machine) for the "beta testing." It was mostly UI, so the performance didn't really matter.
Eventually, we switched to using C, since Pascal wasn't too practical for the embedded systems we were designing: we were mortified to see a compiled "hello world" was 8K bytes in size! That was four ROMs in those days... C had a much smaller footprint, so we began using it.
But I still wonder whatever happened to that machine...
Well said. Although I hate feeding trolls (like the grandparent), I can't resist this one...
There's only one reason the programmers* get paid: because their employer (the studio) and the publisher expect to make enough money from sales to cover their costs (and hopefully a little extra).
So what if the programmers already got paid? If the studio has already spent all of its money paying employees, but doesn't get anything in return, how long do you think that studio will stay alive? Then the programmers are out of a job, and if studios aren't making money, there won't be any jobs for them to get.
Sorry if you consider this to be "capitalistic crap," but it's the reality of the way the world works. No, I take that back -- I'm not sorry at all.
* -- There are a lot more people involved in the production of a game than just programmers: there are 2D and 3D artists, mission designers, musicians and audio engineers, voice actors, producers, etc. Plus all of the people in the other departments that any company needs to survive, such as accounting, human resources, and, of course, legal...
You know, worrying about it now *before* it gets to that state is OK. Because if it ever reaches that point, we won't be discussing it on /.
A gradual deterioration of liberty, in the long run, is just as harmful as one that happens overnight -- the end result is the same. And all of these arguments like "Well, it's not as bad here as in [insert third world country]" have a disturbing sound to me.
I started with Word 2.x -- it was a huge improvement over the dominant word processor of the day, WordPerfect (which didn't support Windows very well). I think the next version was 5.1, then 6.0, then they started into the "95" versioning.
The pinnacle, IMHO, was Word 6.0. I don't think they've added a useful feature to Word since version 6.0, only bloat. Oh yeah, and the ability to save as "HTML" (quoted because it's only readable by MSIE).
I would continue to use Word 6.0, except that the file format continues to be "upgraded," so that prior versions cannot read files written by newer versions.
I think you mean "It doesn't support the alpha channel in PNGs." There's a difference between alpha and transparency, you know.
And only supporting transparency (not full alpha) would be like only displaying images in green, and then claiming that images were being displayed in color.
Seems like it should be distribution-agnostic if this were the case. They shouldn't even need libc.
Instead of "GNU/Linux" it would be "Oracle/Linux." Certainly the "lines of source code" argument the FSF uses to support "GNU/Linux" should apply to Oracle as well, and I suspect Oracle 10 just might have a line or two more than the kernel...