As for your second link, Transgaming is not WINE, is no longer free enough to be included in the Debian non-free tree, and no longer contributes back into the WINE code base.
That claim is directly refuted by reading the link you just gave.
The posting clearly states that the license for WineX is free:
1. Does the license allow packaging? Yes, I read through it and you can distribute binaries as long as you put the source available in some common format
Debian could go ahead and put winex in the non-free tree if they wanted. They haven't, because of an expectation that transgaming.com would respond by changing to a less-free license. But that's all hypothetical.
Transgaming's license is like the GPL, with an extra restriction that redistribution cannot be profitable. Debian non-free already includes multiple packages with that restriction. This, this, or this one for example.
That's a fair rule, but it doesn't imply the necessity of Wine. Simply noting that changing the OS and applications should be done in separate steps doesn't prove which order that should happen.
Since the main Linux apps (OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc) already run on Windows, it's fully possible to change to OpenSource applications before switching the base OS to Linux.
In fact, from all the direct evidence I've seen, changing applications first and OS second looks much more likely. (It's easier to visit a friend and slip OpenOffice onto his Windows PC for him to try than it is to convince someone to repartition HDs for Linux installs)
Granted, this is from the land that produced Battletech and assorted Mech shows,
All Japanese "mecha" (including the basis for Battletech) are derived from the powered combat-armor in the (American) novel Starship Troopers. (It was conspicuously absent from the movie)
Surely a wheeled robot would be infinitely more stable that this one.
Depending on height and axel-width, a wheeled object can still be very easy to knock over (look at a Segway, or a bicycle). But legged robots, unlike wheeled, can probably get up again after falling over. Imagine R2D2 and C3PO were dumped on their backs in the sand; which one can stand up on its own?
Walk into a walking bot and you could knock it over, damaging and possibly breaking it.
If the robot was powered on, it should've been able to avoid the drunk human or catch itself as it fell. And if it was powered down, then it should've sat in a corner as part of the shutdown sequence.
or my new robot isn't going to be driving me anywhere any time soon.
That's the same argument Asimov used for building humanoid robots in his books. It didn't make sense then, and still doesn't.
However, the centaur-idea is a bad one for general-purpose servant robots; not because it couldn't fit in vehicles, but because it couldn't fit buildings. A robot meant to interact in the same space humans do mustn't be larger than a human. Some more plausible designs include a "tripedal" humanoid, an AiBo with catlike agility (to leap onto chairs and desks), or a self-propelled wheelchair bearing a robot instead of a crippled human.
We are bipeds solely because the body plan from which we evolved only had four limbs with which to work.
No. That idea is amusing as an argument against Creationism... but even if humans had been intelligently designed (or if we someday master genetic engineering to the point where extra legs are possible), they wouldn't want to be centaur-like.
A configuration with 2 arms and 4+ legs creates more problems than it solves. Your claim about "better able to navigate rough terrain" is completely backwards. For the epitomy of rough terrain, look at an armed-forces obstacle course, and just imagine how far a horse could progress through it. The hypothetical centaurs cannot climb trees, mountains, or ropes. They cannot crawl through holes. They probably couldn't even swim.
Moving the torso to the center of "the table" would worsen things further, as then you wouldn't be able to lift objects near your center of mass, or even tie your own shoelace! (front or rear)
So being quadruped brings on those many disadvantages, and actually reduces the ability to cross rough terrain. You might retort that it reduces the time needed to cross smooth terrain by a factor of 2-5, and this is true. But humans already can gain the travel-abilities of a horse: they simple sit on top of a horse and nudge it in the right direction.
The flexibility to ride an assortment of mounts or vehicles far outweighs anything we might've "lost" by not growing six limbs.
When someone *IS* paying the bills, how will things change?
Today there are already some people paying bills, of course- many OSS contributors are salaried corp employees. But sadly, those bill-payers generally have no reason to want software to be easier to use correctly. In fact, their profit margins could be best protected by keeping Linux desktops maximally challenging to install!
This is what's called the "perverse incentive of Free Software". Look at companies like RedHat or certain branches of IBM: they get their revenues from "service and support". When the software itself is free, a company can still charge to configure and maintain it. But that company will have no motivation to make the software easier or more reliable for non-experts, as this would enable users to survive without paid support contracts.
Publishers of traditional strongly copy-prohibited software, by contrast, have incentive to make the software maintenance brain-dead easy: they're paid up front, and later tech-support calls eat away their money.
So any "Open Source" oriented company can never be expected to go all the way and make usable software. The laws of capitalism dictate they'll do as much as necessary to allow their trained technicians to install it easily, but stop well short of allowing a novice customer to do the same.
You have to remember that there is a LOT of software out there, it ain't all word processors and games.
Commercial games face more stringent QA than a usual corporate DB application (the reasons are varied but include cost of post-release bugfixes and customer vs employee loyalty).
Why, a typical PS2 release is held to enormously higher standards than the software driving NASA's twin Mars rovers. (No "console" game would be allowed to ship if it rebooted the system when the disk filled up)
This sounds as useful as using a Windows.dll file in Linux-- it's not.
Wrongo. Windows DLLs have been highly useful to x86 Linux users in many situations.
If you want to write a Windows-formatted drive from Linux, for example, the safest way is to load the Windows ntfs.sys driver into Linux. (There's also native Linux NTFS support, but it's still not 100% reliable for writing to the disk)
Also, if you'd like to watch a video formatted in Microsoft ASF/WMV or Quicktime MOV, then installing a Windows DLL is your best bet (maybe only bet?). I certainly know that trailers.apple.com would be useless to my Linux system without several critical DLLs.
(Note that non-Intel-compatible Linux systems still cannot use DLLs reliably, as that would need CPU emulation as well)
Skilled OS developers have been able to achieve binary compatiblity with programs and libraries from other platforms for many years.
Not really. IBM has thousands of employees who've been porting to different sorts of hardware for decades. SCO had fewer than a dozen technical staff, and they've mostly been fired by now. So it's more plausible that IBM could handle a difficult task quickly.
Further, it's easy for a 3rd party observer to acquire the SCO LKP and test it. The public cannot truely know exactly how smoothly the Autozone transition really went.
Dude, they're not claiming parts of LINUX were stolen from them.
They claimed exactly that.
They're claiming that the shared libraries that come with SCO's UNIX weren copied onto LINUX machines contrary to the license in order to provide a binary environment for their third party applications to continue running.
That would be a moderately plausible thing to claim, but it's not what SCO is saying. Quote:
"AutoZone violated SCO's UNIX copyrights by running versions of the Linux operating system that contain code, structure, sequence and/or organization from SCO's proprietary UNIX System V code"
That very clearly alleges that Linux itself contains SCO code, not that SCO code is running hosted by or on top of Linux, as within an application.
However, that quote just comes from the press release, not the court filing. Maybe they claimed one thing to the media, and another in court. That could be a sleight-of-hand, so that winning a lawsuit on a different issue might be publicly interpreted as winning against Linux itself. Yet another way to hold off admitting that've got no claim to Linux itself.
Here are some topics that would need to be addressed:
I should point out that most of those topics are rather equivalent to just one:
Are we spending thirty times as many man-hours to develop this software as really required?
It's worse than that for FOSS, because the available total man-hours must be scaled by the funness of the task. Programming is more fun than debugging, which is itself more fun than reviewing requirement documents or measuring escaped defects. In paid work, testers are cheaper to hire than coders; but on a volunteer basis, testers can be harder to attract because the job is less emotionally rewarding.
But, always remember that in many Open Source efforts, the users are the testers. That's a valid viewpoint if something is free; Microsoft is excoriated when they periodically lure customers into paying to become testers, but the practice is more defensible when no money changes hands.
If you want solid, defect-finding, QA people who can improve your product, you'll be asked questions like these.
And yet, corporations that have an affirmative answer to everything you listed have still proven themselves fully capable of producing code that's absolute garbage. The public at large might not be aware of this, as the truely bad code dies before making it out the door. Someone who works in the industry will see veracity in the quote "Most software projects fail".
Additionally, the themes of Superprogrammer vs The Horde" are relevant to understanding why. Having seen a few SEI CMM 5 shops in action, it's clear that to fill the man-hours for all the redudant tasks requires hiring a grade of developer that's frankly sub-par. Programming is the one field where a true 20x productivity differential between two professionals is unremarkable. It seems that the prominent Open Source projects have gotten more attention from generous SuperProgrammers than a typical commercial developement is able to attract.
Nope. Pushbuttons can tell a bit of state as part of typical GUI standards. In fact, looking at any control tells you some state: they all indicate whether or not they are presently inoperative by "greying out". In this case, the state information presented is the same, but rather than turning grey, the non-usable button vanishes entirely. (And since at the same instant an additional button becomes usable, it shows up in the same place, acting like a toggle)
They are used to invoke immediate commands.
In this case, "Start Playback" is one command you can invoke, and "Pause Playback" the other. The standard isn't broken in the pedantic sense.
However it is true that conceptually, controls to handle an ongoing operation are rather different from what most GUI widgets do (either set configuration for later, or invoke immediate operations on some data). That's the excuse given by designers of media player applications use to explain why they always break the platform's interface standards (whether the author is Micrsoft, Apple, AOL, or Real, they're all guilty).
Prehaps it would be better if the standard-authors themselves had separate guidance for this type of situation... but that leads to other problems.
While we're at it, why the need for a distinction between pause and stop at all?
Yes, the whole existence of a "Stop" button is a throwback to hardware players. For a software player (including CD and DVD units, which are digital), it'd be better if "stop" was just replaced with "rewind", which is closer conceptually to what happens.
Please provide a link that shows where and when Stallman trademarked the term "Free", because I never heard about it.
That's inapplicable. The parent claimed "don't capitalize free unless it's at the beginning of a sentence". That claim is wrong; in English, words are capitalized either when they begin a sentence, or are part of a proper noun. Proper nouns can be created by titles ("North American Free Trade Agreement") or trademarking ("Free Software Foundation"), amoung other ways.
Even if RMS only has a trademark for "Free Software Foundation" and not "Free Software", it is established in the world of letters that the first author to use a new word (whether or not a compound one) defines that meaning for future discussion. Capitalizing "Free Software" is an unambiguous reference to RMS's philosophy.
think the term "Free software" could only apply to software written as a product of the Free Software Foundation
That is incorrect. Software they provide is labelled "GNU"; software published under a license they approve of is termed "Free".
Oh yea, and start now : how the hell do I tweak the mouse movement speed and acceleration in Gnome on RH9? I need it to move across the screen FASTER when I move my mouse - ARG!
Um, ok... Click the red hat icon in the lower left of the screen. In the menu that pops up, select Preferences and then Mouse. Click the tab labelled Motion, and then play around with the Acceleration and Sensitivity sliders.
That's the best I can do... those sliders are sub-optimal for motion configuration purposes. Some numeric labels would be great, and there should be a slider for an overall speed-multiplier (linear) instead of just non-linear acceleration. But the greatest failing of that dialog is unclear lablelling. The word "Sensitivity" could be interpeted as "How many screen pixels is equivalent to 1 cm of physical movement?", when instead it means "How many screen pixels must I move before the acceleration factor kicks in?".
Overall, to get highest cursor movement speeds, turn Acceleration up and Sensitivity down.
PS. Do not select "System Settings" -> "Mouse", that takes you to an entirely different dialog box. The ambiguity of two dialogs labelled "Mouse" is yet another flaw in Red Hat's design. A person who finds himself in one of those dialogs will quite possibly have been wanting the other, so there should be at least a link connecting them.
PPS. A further major design flaw of most of the configuration boxes on a Redhat desktop is the unexpectedly rapid way changes are applied. Users are accustomed to Ok/Cancel or Ok/Apply/Cancel button combos, and that common practice should've been continued. It's very important that someone be able to play around with various settings while still being able to revert to exactly how it was before the experimentation. Not only does Redhat give you no way to Cancel or Undo the changes, they don't even have tickmarks on the sliderbars so the old settings can be recovered manually!
nothing produced by Microsoft and given away for zero charge will run on anything except a Windows operating system.
Wrong. Microsoft releases several free programs for an assortment of Unix (most importantly Mac OS X) and also MS DOS.
Their motivations are still always greedy, of course. For example, one reason they invested so much into the Macintosh Internet Explorer was to prevent AOL's Mozilla program from becoming more popular, and undermining MS's web-client domination.
Honestly, free software (that's right, you don't capitalize free unless it's at the beginning of a sentence) is great,
Do you also claim we shouldn't capitalize Windows or Apple when they're not at the beginning of a sentence?
There's two different terms with different meanings, and they are distinguished by capitalization. By capitalizing Free Software, a person uses Stallman's trademarked term, with the specific definition he made up. On the other hand, "free software" is a superset of Stallman's usage and includes products like MS IE and Winamp- anything you can legally acquire for zero dollars.
This is *software*, not the foundation of our political system.
In the next 30 years software will become the media for all communication. Every piece of news/propaganda and every financial transaction and even each vote will come through software. It's nearly becoming our political foundation. Controlling software controls history. "Who controls history controls the present..."
0. Download and install libdecss, which wasn't included with the OS distribution or k3b, because trafficing it is a felony. (Skip this step if DVD in question is one of the handful made that are un-"encrypted")
I'm not saying the Windows(tm) software is immune to this problem. Until a few days ago it was; but soon their users will experience the same thrill of installing grey-market codecs.
We have a real, extensible version numbering system so a program can request a specific version of a library, or the latest of a specific version range with arbitrary degrees of specificity.
People keep saying that Linux's library-versioning scheme makes conflict-avoidance easy and automatic. I just wish somebody would mention this to Redhat Corp, so that the same dynamic binary could've worked across RH versions 6.2, 7.0, and 7.3, rather than polluting rpmfind.net with whole different versions whenever they swich to yet another quirky gcc variant.
(Of course, using a non-RPM distribution like Debian or Gentoo will protect you from those problems, but it seems most Linux desktops still use something like Redhat or SUSE, where installing non-static binaries remains a gamble)
No, not like mencoder. Or any of those GUIs slapped ontop of it. They do some, but not enough. (We're not talking about total capability, but ease of use)
No one disputed that Linux has the ability to write to optical media, or to recompress video files (I myself use mencoder in sequence with xvidcap to record AVIs of running applications).
What's lacking is the ability to put a DVD in one drive, a CD-R in the other, click 4 buttons, and come back in two hours to find a passable (if highly compressed) new VCD of the movie.
Nothing in the webpages for either acidrip or kmencoder suggests it can handle all three (rip, encode, burn) stages of the process. From afar, it seems it would be easy to add checkboxes to feed the output file to cdrecord, but then why hasn't this been done?
Furthermore, it has been anecdotally noted many times that "simple frontends" to commandline programs like mencoder, cdrecord, rpm, or smbmount can often break in end-user-inscrutable ways when the sub-process hits an enexpected failure/stall.
Funny, of the 3 dictionaries on the page you cite, only one of them has the neologim noun "disconnect", and it's the 2000 edition of the flippant "American Heritage". They wanted to seem hip, so they latched onto a quote repeated 800 times in 2000 and decided to mint a new word from it.
One reporter who happens to score some popularity does't rewrite our language.
Slashdot Mirror
So what's the plan B
That's a rhetorical question, but I'll tell you the real answer anyhow:
You get on KazaaLite and acquire Macromedia software for about $0.003 of electricity and 7 minutes effort.
That claim is directly refuted by reading the link you just gave.
The posting clearly states that the license for WineX is free:
Yes, I read through it and you can distribute binaries as long as
you put the source available in some common format
Debian could go ahead and put winex in the non-free tree if they wanted. They haven't, because of an expectation that transgaming.com would respond by changing to a less-free license. But that's all hypothetical.
Transgaming's license is like the GPL, with an extra restriction that redistribution cannot be profitable. Debian non-free already includes multiple packages with that restriction. This, this, or this one for example.
we can only propose ONE change at a time.
That's a fair rule, but it doesn't imply the necessity of Wine. Simply noting that changing the OS and applications should be done in separate steps doesn't prove which order that should happen.
Since the main Linux apps (OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc) already run on Windows, it's fully possible to change to OpenSource applications before switching the base OS to Linux.
In fact, from all the direct evidence I've seen, changing applications first and OS second looks much more likely. (It's easier to visit a friend and slip OpenOffice onto his Windows PC for him to try than it is to convince someone to repartition HDs for Linux installs)
With home automation built around the idea that every task has a specialized tools not designed to be used by humanoids,
That's a lot of text to expend on an idea without mentioning who came up with it. Asimov possibly explained it more eloquently than you.
Granted, this is from the land that produced Battletech and assorted Mech shows,
All Japanese "mecha" (including the basis for Battletech) are derived from the powered combat-armor in the (American) novel Starship Troopers. (It was conspicuously absent from the movie)
Surely a wheeled robot would be infinitely more stable that this one.
Depending on height and axel-width, a wheeled object can still be very easy to knock over (look at a Segway, or a bicycle). But legged robots, unlike wheeled, can probably get up again after falling over. Imagine R2D2 and C3PO were dumped on their backs in the sand; which one can stand up on its own?
Walk into a walking bot and you could knock it over, damaging and possibly breaking it.
If the robot was powered on, it should've been able to avoid the drunk human or catch itself as it fell. And if it was powered down, then it should've sat in a corner as part of the shutdown sequence.
or my new robot isn't going to be driving me anywhere any time soon.
That's the same argument Asimov used for building humanoid robots in his books. It didn't make sense then, and still doesn't.
However, the centaur-idea is a bad one for general-purpose servant robots; not because it couldn't fit in vehicles, but because it couldn't fit buildings. A robot meant to interact in the same space humans do mustn't be larger than a human. Some more plausible designs include a "tripedal" humanoid, an AiBo with catlike agility (to leap onto chairs and desks), or a self-propelled wheelchair bearing a robot instead of a crippled human.
We are bipeds solely because the body plan from which we evolved only had four limbs with which to work.
No. That idea is amusing as an argument against Creationism... but even if humans had been intelligently designed (or if we someday master genetic engineering to the point where extra legs are possible), they wouldn't want to be centaur-like.
A configuration with 2 arms and 4+ legs creates more problems than it solves. Your claim about "better able to navigate rough terrain" is completely backwards. For the epitomy of rough terrain, look at an armed-forces obstacle course, and just imagine how far a horse could progress through it. The hypothetical centaurs cannot climb trees, mountains, or ropes. They cannot crawl through holes. They probably couldn't even swim.
Moving the torso to the center of "the table" would worsen things further, as then you wouldn't be able to lift objects near your center of mass, or even tie your own shoelace! (front or rear)
So being quadruped brings on those many disadvantages, and actually reduces the ability to cross rough terrain. You might retort that it reduces the time needed to cross smooth terrain by a factor of 2-5, and this is true. But humans already can gain the travel-abilities of a horse: they simple sit on top of a horse and nudge it in the right direction.
The flexibility to ride an assortment of mounts or vehicles far outweighs anything we might've "lost" by not growing six limbs.
When someone *IS* paying the bills, how will things change?
Today there are already some people paying bills, of course- many OSS contributors are salaried corp employees. But sadly, those bill-payers generally have no reason to want software to be easier to use correctly. In fact, their profit margins could be best protected by keeping Linux desktops maximally challenging to install!
This is what's called the "perverse incentive of Free Software". Look at companies like RedHat or certain branches of IBM: they get their revenues from "service and support". When the software itself is free, a company can still charge to configure and maintain it. But that company will have no motivation to make the software easier or more reliable for non-experts, as this would enable users to survive without paid support contracts.
Publishers of traditional strongly copy-prohibited software, by contrast, have incentive to make the software maintenance brain-dead easy: they're paid up front, and later tech-support calls eat away their money.
So any "Open Source" oriented company can never be expected to go all the way and make usable software. The laws of capitalism dictate they'll do as much as necessary to allow their trained technicians to install it easily, but stop well short of allowing a novice customer to do the same.
You have to remember that there is a LOT of software out there, it ain't all word processors and games.
Commercial games face more stringent QA than a usual corporate DB application (the reasons are varied but include cost of post-release bugfixes and customer vs employee loyalty).
Why, a typical PS2 release is held to enormously higher standards than the software driving NASA's twin Mars rovers. (No "console" game would be allowed to ship if it rebooted the system when the disk filled up)
Why don't you tell us how you really feel?
Totemo daisuki!
This sounds as useful as using a Windows .dll file in Linux-- it's not.
Wrongo. Windows DLLs have been highly useful to x86 Linux users in many situations.
If you want to write a Windows-formatted drive from Linux, for example, the safest way is to load the Windows ntfs.sys driver into Linux. (There's also native Linux NTFS support, but it's still not 100% reliable for writing to the disk)
Also, if you'd like to watch a video formatted in Microsoft ASF/WMV or Quicktime MOV, then installing a Windows DLL is your best bet (maybe only bet?). I certainly know that trailers.apple.com would be useless to my Linux system without several critical DLLs.
(Note that non-Intel-compatible Linux systems still cannot use DLLs reliably, as that would need CPU emulation as well)
Skilled OS developers have been able to achieve binary compatiblity with programs and libraries from other platforms for many years.
Isn't this argument perfectly semetrical
Not really. IBM has thousands of employees who've been porting to different sorts of hardware for decades. SCO had fewer than a dozen technical staff, and they've mostly been fired by now. So it's more plausible that IBM could handle a difficult task quickly.
Further, it's easy for a 3rd party observer to acquire the SCO LKP and test it. The public cannot truely know exactly how smoothly the Autozone transition really went.
Look, Microsoft causes cancer!
Wrong, it's IBM that causes cancer.
They claimed exactly that.
They're claiming that the shared libraries that come with SCO's UNIX weren copied onto LINUX machines contrary to the license in order to provide a binary environment for their third party applications to continue running.
That would be a moderately plausible thing to claim, but it's not what SCO is saying. Quote:
That very clearly alleges that Linux itself contains SCO code, not that SCO code is running hosted by or on top of Linux, as within an application.
However, that quote just comes from the press release, not the court filing. Maybe they claimed one thing to the media, and another in court. That could be a sleight-of-hand, so that winning a lawsuit on a different issue might be publicly interpreted as winning against Linux itself. Yet another way to hold off admitting that've got no claim to Linux itself.
ESR will test only Gnome but will bash ALL open source environments
And once again, a slashdotter is up-modded for inventing lies about an article he didn't even read.
Go to that link and read the 2nd, 28th, or 57th paragraphs to check just how wrong RoLi was.
I should point out that most of those topics are rather equivalent to just one:
It's worse than that for FOSS, because the available total man-hours must be scaled by the funness of the task. Programming is more fun than debugging, which is itself more fun than reviewing requirement documents or measuring escaped defects. In paid work, testers are cheaper to hire than coders; but on a volunteer basis, testers can be harder to attract because the job is less emotionally rewarding.
But, always remember that in many Open Source efforts, the users are the testers. That's a valid viewpoint if something is free; Microsoft is excoriated when they periodically lure customers into paying to become testers, but the practice is more defensible when no money changes hands.
If you want solid, defect-finding, QA people who can improve your product, you'll be asked questions like these.
And yet, corporations that have an affirmative answer to everything you listed have still proven themselves fully capable of producing code that's absolute garbage. The public at large might not be aware of this, as the truely bad code dies before making it out the door. Someone who works in the industry will see veracity in the quote "Most software projects fail".
Additionally, the themes of Superprogrammer vs The Horde" are relevant to understanding why. Having seen a few SEI CMM 5 shops in action, it's clear that to fill the man-hours for all the redudant tasks requires hiring a grade of developer that's frankly sub-par. Programming is the one field where a true 20x productivity differential between two professionals is unremarkable. It seems that the prominent Open Source projects have gotten more attention from generous SuperProgrammers than a typical commercial developement is able to attract.
I don't want to fight through dialog boxes that don't seem to do anything after I hit apply.
If you run into a dialog box installing Linux, you've already made a big mistake!
pushbuttons are not used to indicate state
Nope. Pushbuttons can tell a bit of state as part of typical GUI standards. In fact, looking at any control tells you some state: they all indicate whether or not they are presently inoperative by "greying out". In this case, the state information presented is the same, but rather than turning grey, the non-usable button vanishes entirely. (And since at the same instant an additional button becomes usable, it shows up in the same place, acting like a toggle)
They are used to invoke immediate commands.
In this case, "Start Playback" is one command you can invoke, and "Pause Playback" the other. The standard isn't broken in the pedantic sense.
However it is true that conceptually, controls to handle an ongoing operation are rather different from what most GUI widgets do (either set configuration for later, or invoke immediate operations on some data). That's the excuse given by designers of media player applications use to explain why they always break the platform's interface standards (whether the author is Micrsoft, Apple, AOL, or Real, they're all guilty).
Prehaps it would be better if the standard-authors themselves had separate guidance for this type of situation... but that leads to other problems.
While we're at it, why the need for a distinction between pause and stop at all?
Yes, the whole existence of a "Stop" button is a throwback to hardware players. For a software player (including CD and DVD units, which are digital), it'd be better if "stop" was just replaced with "rewind", which is closer conceptually to what happens.
Please provide a link that shows where and when Stallman trademarked the term "Free", because I never heard about it.
That's inapplicable. The parent claimed "don't capitalize free unless it's at the beginning of a sentence". That claim is wrong; in English, words are capitalized either when they begin a sentence, or are part of a proper noun. Proper nouns can be created by titles ("North American Free Trade Agreement") or trademarking ("Free Software Foundation"), amoung other ways.
Even if RMS only has a trademark for "Free Software Foundation" and not "Free Software", it is established in the world of letters that the first author to use a new word (whether or not a compound one) defines that meaning for future discussion. Capitalizing "Free Software" is an unambiguous reference to RMS's philosophy.
think the term "Free software" could only apply to software written as a product of the Free Software Foundation
That is incorrect. Software they provide is labelled "GNU"; software published under a license they approve of is termed "Free".
Oh yea, and start now : how the hell do I tweak the mouse movement speed and acceleration in Gnome on RH9? I need it to move across the screen FASTER when I move my mouse - ARG!
Um, ok...
Click the red hat icon in the lower left of the screen. In the menu that pops up, select Preferences and then Mouse. Click the tab labelled Motion, and then play around with the Acceleration and Sensitivity sliders.
That's the best I can do... those sliders are sub-optimal for motion configuration purposes. Some numeric labels would be great, and there should be a slider for an overall speed-multiplier (linear) instead of just non-linear acceleration. But the greatest failing of that dialog is unclear lablelling. The word "Sensitivity" could be interpeted as "How many screen pixels is equivalent to 1 cm of physical movement?", when instead it means "How many screen pixels must I move before the acceleration factor kicks in?".
Overall, to get highest cursor movement speeds, turn Acceleration up and Sensitivity down.
PS. Do not select "System Settings" -> "Mouse", that takes you to an entirely different dialog box. The ambiguity of two dialogs labelled "Mouse" is yet another flaw in Red Hat's design. A person who finds himself in one of those dialogs will quite possibly have been wanting the other, so there should be at least a link connecting them.
PPS. A further major design flaw of most of the configuration boxes on a Redhat desktop is the unexpectedly rapid way changes are applied. Users are accustomed to Ok/Cancel or Ok/Apply/Cancel button combos, and that common practice should've been continued. It's very important that someone be able to play around with various settings while still being able to revert to exactly how it was before the experimentation. Not only does Redhat give you no way to Cancel or Undo the changes, they don't even have tickmarks on the sliderbars so the old settings can be recovered manually!
nothing produced by Microsoft and given away for zero charge will run on anything except a Windows operating system.
Wrong. Microsoft releases several free programs for an assortment of Unix (most importantly Mac OS X) and also MS DOS.
Their motivations are still always greedy, of course. For example, one reason they invested so much into the Macintosh Internet Explorer was to prevent AOL's Mozilla program from becoming more popular, and undermining MS's web-client domination.
Honestly, free software (that's right, you don't capitalize free unless it's at the beginning of a sentence) is great,
Do you also claim we shouldn't capitalize Windows or Apple when they're not at the beginning of a sentence?
There's two different terms with different meanings, and they are distinguished by capitalization. By capitalizing Free Software, a person uses Stallman's trademarked term, with the specific definition he made up. On the other hand, "free software" is a superset of Stallman's usage and includes products like MS IE and Winamp- anything you can legally acquire for zero dollars.
This is *software*, not the foundation of our political system.
In the next 30 years software will become the media for all communication. Every piece of news/propaganda and every financial transaction and even each vote will come through software. It's nearly becoming our political foundation. Controlling software controls history. "Who controls history controls the present..."
Oh, and you forgot the prerequisite too:
I'm not saying the Windows(tm) software is immune to this problem. Until a few days ago it was; but soon their users will experience the same thrill of installing grey-market codecs.
We have a real, extensible version numbering system so a program can request a specific version of a library, or the latest of a specific version range with arbitrary degrees of specificity.
People keep saying that Linux's library-versioning scheme makes conflict-avoidance easy and automatic. I just wish somebody would mention this to Redhat Corp, so that the same dynamic binary could've worked across RH versions 6.2, 7.0, and 7.3, rather than polluting rpmfind.net with whole different versions whenever they swich to yet another quirky gcc variant.
(Of course, using a non-RPM distribution like Debian or Gentoo will protect you from those problems, but it seems most Linux desktops still use something like Redhat or SUSE, where installing non-static binaries remains a gamble)
No, not like mencoder. Or any of those GUIs slapped ontop of it. They do some, but not enough. (We're not talking about total capability, but ease of use)
No one disputed that Linux has the ability to write to optical media, or to recompress video files (I myself use mencoder in sequence with xvidcap to record AVIs of running applications).
What's lacking is the ability to put a DVD in one drive, a CD-R in the other, click 4 buttons, and come back in two hours to find a passable (if highly compressed) new VCD of the movie.
Nothing in the webpages for either acidrip or kmencoder suggests it can handle all three (rip, encode, burn) stages of the process. From afar, it seems it would be easy to add checkboxes to feed the output file to cdrecord, but then why hasn't this been done?
Furthermore, it has been anecdotally noted many times that "simple frontends" to commandline programs like mencoder, cdrecord, rpm, or smbmount can often break in end-user-inscrutable ways when the sub-process hits an enexpected failure/stall.
Furthermore, you got it wrong:
Funny, of the 3 dictionaries on the page you cite, only one of them has the neologim noun "disconnect", and it's the 2000 edition of the flippant "American Heritage". They wanted to seem hip, so they latched onto a quote repeated 800 times in 2000 and decided to mint a new word from it.
One reporter who happens to score some popularity does't rewrite our language.