What you have to do is migrate in a series of stages. First you configure your desktop Outlook clients to listen to a POP3 server. Then you set up a new mail server with something like exim and qpopper. Then you reconfigure Outlook to send via SMTP. Then you turn off the Exchange server altogether. Then you migrate your desktops from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Windows. Then to Thunderbird on GNU/Linux.
Corporate internal web application developers will simply have to learn to cope with non-IE browsers. That will happen when there's a demand for it (which will be soon; Microsoft can't fool everyone forever). Firefox is particularly good to test against, as it runs on both Windows and GNU/Linux.
It's an example of the Law of Diminishing Returns. The nearer you are getting to perfection, the smaller the difference each improvement makes. Apache httpd really hasn't got a lot more to do before it's perfect, so its development has naturally slowed.
When some new technology is developed which builds on http, then the bar will be raised. Apache httpd will make a large initial improvement as it tries to implement the new standard; as it gets wider deployment and testing, developers receive more fedback. Then, once most of the bugs have been ironed out, development will slow again.
Of course there is a replacement for Outlook and Exchange! It's called sendmail and it's part of every unix-like system. You install an MTA (either the original sendmail or a compatiblereplacement) and a POP3server on a machine (an old desktop is fine), configure your firewall to route incoming traffic on port 25 to that machine, log into your DNS control panel, and set its internet hostname as the MX for your domain. Then you run a normal mail client on each desktop. Specify your mail server's inside IP address as the SMTP and POP3 server in your mail client, and away you go.
Well, I can still see there being some sort of PETG (People for the Ethical Treatment of Germs) -type movement, and they'll probably find some sort of justification for the unavoidable, natural deaths of so many bacteria at the hands of the body's immune system. Just because micro-organisms aren't cute and fluffy, doesn't mean some poor misguided sod somewhere won't try to make out that they have rights. It's been going on ever since some caveman lit a fire with flint and a group of bystanders immediately objected to the use of fire as too dangerous and tried to ban it.
When we burn bio-fuel, we still release the greenhouse gases responsible for causing climate change.
Please re-read your O-level chemistry textbook, specifically the chapter headed "The Carbon Cycle", and do not emerge from your basement until you understand it. Thank you in advance for your co-operation.
Well, that's exactly what they do with milk bottles.
Our baguette-munching continental cousins even do the same with beer bottles; any that are recovered intact from the bottle bank are cleaned (breweries actually produce a lot of hot waste water) and refilled. It's not uncommon to see different colour bottles in a case of cheap French lager.
What we really need is a hefty tax on virgin raw materials wherever recycled materials are available. This would increase the value of recyclable goods. If someone was melting down used syringes to make them into Rawlplugs, and paying for them, junkies would actually tidy up after themselves instead of leaving their works all over the streets.
Actually, particulates aren't worth bothering about. If they're big enough for you to see, then they certainly won't get into your body (and they're only graphite anyway). The chemicals in packs of fags are far worse, and all the most damaging ones are the ones you can't see. The anti-diesel lobby have stirred up fears of a largely non-existent problem, playing on perception (particulates can certainly look ugly) for their own ends, which is now working against biodiesel.
If this is for real, it could be great news. It's already easy to make mono- and disaccharides (sugar) from polysaccharides (starch, plant fibre) using an acid and mechanical agitation, but it should be possible to breed bacteria to transform P.S. into fuel. And since you're using biology, the energy for the process comes straight out of the feedstock.
However, I can see a latent problem waiting to develop. Historically there have been people who ate no land-meat but thought nothing of killing a fish. Recently there was a big vegetarian movement, and of course it was understood that fish is still m**t, but now anything short of vegan is frowned upon, and one should "ideally" be raw vegan or fruitarian. How long till someone decides that exploiting bacteria is a form of cruelty to animals?
It can. The only thing is, the Devil (to whom all heat belongs, obviously) has negotiated a deal which entitles him to "rake off" a little bit of heat for himself, everytime any energy changes from one state to another. Over time, the transactions -- and thus the rake-off -- build up rapidly. What the Devil doesn't realise is that this heat is slowly escaping from his grasp. Heat can only be changed into some other type of energy where there are things at different temperatures, but releasing heat tends to bring things towards the same temperature. Once all the matter in the universe is at the same temperature, that heat is effectively worthless.
However, you can beat the system a little by specifying, instead of a simple heating boiler, a water-cooled engine (which must run on the same fuel as your heating) and produces as much waste heat as you would require of a boiler; plumbing in the cooling system to your central heating; and attaching an alternator to the spindle. The engine costs a bit more to run than a simple heating boiler would, but you're getting electricity for no more than the difference. If you put in 4 units of fuel to get 3 units of heat and 1 unit of electricity (not an unreasonable expectation), you're effectively getting 1 unit of electricity for the price of 1 unit of heating fuel. Electricity is usually more expensive than oil or gas, so it's a win all around. If you can't use it all on-site, you can sell any surplus back to the electric company at the going rate. If you can run your equipment on a fuel costing less than one-quarter of the price of electricity, then your heating costs actually go negative!
You may even be able to get a tax break! Sell all your heating and generating equipment to a specially-formed spin-off company. Continue buying fuel in the name of your own company. Declare it to be waste, so you can write it off against tax, and pay your heating company to "recycle" it for you (by heating your buildings, flogging the excess juice and claiming a subsidy for proper disposal of the hazardous waste).
How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?
I answered: Neither more nor less important than that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are using Microsoft software. The BBC's services must remain independent of any particular proprietary technology. It is not for the BBC to act as a marketing tool for any company.
The BBC Trust has proposed setting a limit of 30 days as the amount of time that programmes can be stored on a computer before being viewed. As this is a nascent market, there is currently no clear standard on the length of the storage window. On balance, the Trust thinks 30 days is the right length of time. How long do you think consumers should be able to store BBC programmes on their computers before viewing them?
They're 128Kbit/s. precisely so that you won't rely on them as a main source. Real classical music bores tend to prefer LP for its unique reproductive qualities (CD necessarily has a sharp cut-off at 20kHz., which is only about 5kHz. higher than the human ear can hear); or reel-to-reel tape at 19cm./s. for home recordings (which have a cut-off somewhere between 15 and 19kHz., to avoid interfering with the stereo pilot tone at 19kHz.). The other type of classical music bores insist to have as many different recordings, performed by as many orchestras, in as many concert halls as possible.
The sort of person who buys Classical Music on LPs and CDs isn't going to be put off from buying them by the existence of 128K MP3s. Some people, on the other hand, will be encouraged to buy "proper" gramophone records by the existence of MP3s, if they discover that they like a particular piece sufficiently to care about listening to a more faithful reproduction or perhaps an alternative interpretation. The rest were never going to buy the CDs anyway.
Copyright infringement is already a criminal offence in the UK, but Fair Dealing is a defence.
Since it's up to the courts to decide what actually constitutes Fair Dealing (i.e. you have to let yourself get taken to court, protesting your innocence; and if you get acquitted, then whatever it was that you did is now officially legal for anyone else to do), it's not in anyone's interest actually to prosecute. No jury in the land is going to send someone down for keeping a library of their favourite recorded programmes (find twelve people and you can bet your arse that two of them have video collections taped off the telly), but the rights holders don't want to risk having home taping declared legal.
British law is full of unprosecutable offences. None of them are worth bothering about, because everyone except the Queen breaks the law several times a day. The only time it might be worth worrying about is if you have committed some other, prosecutable offence, because evidence pointing to one, minor offence can be used as an excuse to search for evidence of other, more major offences. (This is often called a "blatant fishing trip" by magistrates denying a search warrant to police officers in crime drama series on the BBC.)
Linux has a standard driver model -- it's just the "wrong" side of an abstraction layer for "some" people.
First, you have to realise that Linux utterly eschews binary compatibility. It's simply not relevant to Linux, which -- unlike Windows, Solaris or Mac OS X -- was designed from the very beginning to be Open Source Software, with the full source code unconditionally available. What is relevant is source compatibility. If you write a piece of code properly -- obtaining constants from header files, for instance, and not using dodgy coding conventions that have been dropped from the C compiler over the years -- then it should compile against any Linux kernel ever written. If you do stuff such as assuming everything is 32 bits and the units will always come first, then of course it will break.
As long as you respect established conventions and release your Source Code, there is no reason why any code you write should not work with any version of Linux ever written or to be written. The only people who complain about this are the people who write substandard code, and the people who do not wish to release their Source Code (actually, there isn't a lot of difference between these two groups. Look at the OpenOffice.org 1.0 tree, which is full of former StarDivision closed-source code, for an example of the sort of shite people will turn out if they don't think anyone's ever going to see it).
There is already a stable interface, and that interface is at the Source Code level. The Linux kernel team are not going to maintain out-of-date, legacy interfaces, and implement security patches for all of them, just for the purpose of allowing old binaries -- which would only need a recompilation to make them work properly -- to run.
There are no issues with any regulatory authority and software-alterable radio devices. Approval is granted against the device working within a particular specification. If as the result of something the user does the device no longer works within that specification, then approval is automatically withdrawn.
It's an utterly bogus argument, similar to "No bare feet by order of the Health Department" -- an attempt on the part of someone seeking to impose an unjust rule which they invented, to pretend that the rule was not their idea.
You don't put fences where they look pretty, you put fences where they get the least amount of traffic through them. Ultimately, it's for the kernel to decide what can talk to a hardware device and what it can say. If some userspace program can talk to random hardware, then your hardware isn't secure. You need at least a sanity-checker and gatekeeper in kernel space. And when you look at the logistics of sanity-checking, which requires a backchannel and a communications overhead, you might as well combine that with the driver itself. Then the backchannel isn't between processes: it's within a process.
Precisely to prevent having to recompile the kernel to accommodate new hardware, Linux uses the compromise approach of having loadable kernel modules, which can (in theory, at least; I think I've even done it in practice, once, during my brief flirtation with Gentoo) be compiled retrospectively if you forgot to include them in the kernel first time around. They run in kernel space, and combine the functions of sanity-checking, gatekeeping and emulating ideal hardware. Of course, because something is being loaded into kernel space, there's a potential security hole, and so it's possible to disable loadable modules.
It bothers me that companies don't advertise that their products are supported by Linux
Perhaps someone is providing them with a reason not to advertise the fact that their products work with Linux?
I mean, if I was the head of a firm making disposable batteries, I'd not exactly be keen for the manufacturers of battery-powered appliances to fit DC-in jacks. (My most-hated competitor isn't any other battery manufacturer, but the mains. To all intents and purposes, mains electricity is free; worse than that, it represents independence from battery companies.) I'd for sure be spending money to lobby against any legislation which would require a DC-in jack on every appliance. And I'd be doing anything within my power to discredit rechargeable batteries and mains adaptors. (I might also accept a bung from a consortium of appliance manufacturers to bring out new cell sizes, make the ones they replaced obsolete and take out all the old appliances with them in one fell swoop; they'd sell more new devices and I might be able to charge more for the new batteries. Or I'd keep a "heritage" range alive for awhile at double the old price. But that's by the by.)
If you were the head of a small firm making portable, battery-operated appliances, would you take a bung from a disposable battery manufacturer not to fit DC-in jacks?
If you were the head of a small firm making computer peripherals, would you take a bung from Microsoft not to advertise that your products were compatible with Linux? How would you react to being told that Microsoft would refuse to certify your Windows drivers if you advertised that your products were compatible with Linux?
Wow. Just like I remember it, only not monochrome anymore -- it's in full ANSI colour! I will have to sign up for an account -- my old login and password from c.15 years ago seem to have expired..... Better not do it from work, though; it's more addictive than nicotine. But oh, the memories! See, this is what happens when you try to write a text editor..... and then you introduce one more feature.....
And they seem to have the mother of all termcaps.
Oh, the memories! Thank you, thank you, thank you for this.
The lesson we learn from this: If you think you might want duplex printing sometime within the lifetime of the printer you are about to buy, you should buy a duplex printer in the first place!
In fact, this pretty much goes for any feature on any hardware, not just duplex ability on printers. Remember, it's a climate of cheese-paring out there. If they can save a few pence on a moulding tool by omitting the necessary attachment points for retro-fitting a duplexer, they will do so rather than risk losing business to a competitor. (This behaviour, of course, does nothing to engender the sort of brand loyalty which once encouraged customers to stick with a particular manufacturer rather than choose a competitor over a small price difference.)
Ah, yes, I remember a few trips over to Warwick Uni on the 900 for awhile. That was in the days of Cheeseplant's House (wow, I got a great thrill writing my own version of something like that, many years later!) and Monochrome (kind of Slashdot forerunner, fondly missed). Those clunky ADM-3 terminals (evidently designed by somebody who liked vi) left me thinking that VT-100s were modern..... mind, Aston had some old Newbury Data terminals (that were used with microprocessor development boards) that were even worse; the VAX couldn't handle them properly and tret them as a dumb terminal without backspace. When you tried correcting a mistake it would look like tji\ij/his (We'd recently scrapped an old Harris mainframe, probably where they came from.) And they had an absolutely awful display font, with bad attempts at rounding that really hurt the eyes.
Also, while it's correct that VT-3xx terminals had some graphics capabilities, I don't think they were bitmapped. And the charcell was incompatible with the VT-220, meaning that your carefully-created user-defined prompts (remember them?) had the odd row or column doubled. So did the Qume terminals at Aston, for that matter.
Well, if Trolltech won't let you use Qt in a closed-source application, you know what the alternative is!
As GPL-bashers are so fond of saying, if Trolltech wrote it, they should be allowed to licence it however they like. Surely what's Source for the goose is Source for the gander?
Ah, the good old days. At Aston Uni, we had mainly VT-220s and QVT-203+s. Some VT-100 clones, too; even at least one real VT-100 with the remotely programmable indicator lights! {Why did they stop putting those on terminals? Even the VT-220s didn't have them, not even emulated on the status line.}
VT-xxx machines were all character-mapped and text-only. But I suppose if you needed graphics, you could have a machine running just a very cut-down OS and X server, straight from ROM.
On the face of it, that sounds entirely reasonable to me -- Trolltech are obviously seeking to discourage developers from developing Closed Source software. However, the licence agreement as you've stated it is unenforcible.
A derivative work which is not distributed outside of an organisation is still technically Open Source, since there are no recipients who have an unsatisfied right to the Source Code.
This means that you could, irrespective of the licence terms Qt are trying to impose (you can't not give permission for something someone has already done, especially if some other authorised party already gave them permission to do that), develop an "Open Source" application (since it's being kept strictly in-house, it fulfils the letter if not the spirit of the GPL) using the Open Source version of Qt; then, as soon as you were ready to distribute it, create a closed, proprietary fork using the closed-source version of Qt. (Question: what would happen if an employee of an organisation "misappropriated" source code of an in-house application which was a derivative of a GPL work? If they took only a binary version, would they be entitled to the Source Code, which they would need if they were to distribute the work?)
Of course, if you are creating proprietary, closed applications then you deserve to burn in hell for all eternity anyway:)
We actually got raided by FAST (Fucking Arseholes and Stupid Tossers -- the UK arm of the closed-source-peddling wankers' price-fixing cartel) once. We had about half a dozen Windows boxes (all fully licenced, for running legacy software needed at the time to be compatible with Group Head Office) and everything else was Linux. The gestapo agent was horrified at first when my boss told him that we had no procedure in place for preventing employees copying software from their workstation. He shut up when we explained that since there was nothing on any employee's workstation that it would be illegal for them to copy, there wasn't a lot of point preventing it.
We now have a few fingers in the Open Source Migration Strategy pie, so we obviously have a positive interest in seeing Windows "pirates" get busted -- it gives us an opening to sell our services:) Which would you rather have -- a litre of milk that you aren't allowed to let anyone else drink; or a cow that once you've learned how to feed and milk her, which really isn't as hard as the dairies like to make out, you can get unrestricted milk for life?
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What you have to do is migrate in a series of stages. First you configure your desktop Outlook clients to listen to a POP3 server. Then you set up a new mail server with something like exim and qpopper. Then you reconfigure Outlook to send via SMTP. Then you turn off the Exchange server altogether. Then you migrate your desktops from Outlook on Windows to Thunderbird on Windows. Then to Thunderbird on GNU/Linux.
Corporate internal web application developers will simply have to learn to cope with non-IE browsers. That will happen when there's a demand for it (which will be soon; Microsoft can't fool everyone forever). Firefox is particularly good to test against, as it runs on both Windows and GNU/Linux.
It's an example of the Law of Diminishing Returns. The nearer you are getting to perfection, the smaller the difference each improvement makes. Apache httpd really hasn't got a lot more to do before it's perfect, so its development has naturally slowed.
When some new technology is developed which builds on http, then the bar will be raised. Apache httpd will make a large initial improvement as it tries to implement the new standard; as it gets wider deployment and testing, developers receive more fedback. Then, once most of the bugs have been ironed out, development will slow again.
Of course there is a replacement for Outlook and Exchange! It's called sendmail and it's part of every unix-like system. You install an MTA (either the original sendmail or a compatible replacement) and a POP3 server on a machine (an old desktop is fine), configure your firewall to route incoming traffic on port 25 to that machine, log into your DNS control panel, and set its internet hostname as the MX for your domain. Then you run a normal mail client on each desktop. Specify your mail server's inside IP address as the SMTP and POP3 server in your mail client, and away you go.
Well, I can still see there being some sort of PETG (People for the Ethical Treatment of Germs) -type movement, and they'll probably find some sort of justification for the unavoidable, natural deaths of so many bacteria at the hands of the body's immune system. Just because micro-organisms aren't cute and fluffy, doesn't mean some poor misguided sod somewhere won't try to make out that they have rights. It's been going on ever since some caveman lit a fire with flint and a group of bystanders immediately objected to the use of fire as too dangerous and tried to ban it.
Well, that's exactly what they do with milk bottles.
Our baguette-munching continental cousins even do the same with beer bottles; any that are recovered intact from the bottle bank are cleaned (breweries actually produce a lot of hot waste water) and refilled. It's not uncommon to see different colour bottles in a case of cheap French lager.
What we really need is a hefty tax on virgin raw materials wherever recycled materials are available. This would increase the value of recyclable goods. If someone was melting down used syringes to make them into Rawlplugs, and paying for them, junkies would actually tidy up after themselves instead of leaving their works all over the streets.
Actually, particulates aren't worth bothering about. If they're big enough for you to see, then they certainly won't get into your body (and they're only graphite anyway). The chemicals in packs of fags are far worse, and all the most damaging ones are the ones you can't see. The anti-diesel lobby have stirred up fears of a largely non-existent problem, playing on perception (particulates can certainly look ugly) for their own ends, which is now working against biodiesel.
If this is for real, it could be great news. It's already easy to make mono- and disaccharides (sugar) from polysaccharides (starch, plant fibre) using an acid and mechanical agitation, but it should be possible to breed bacteria to transform P.S. into fuel. And since you're using biology, the energy for the process comes straight out of the feedstock.
However, I can see a latent problem waiting to develop. Historically there have been people who ate no land-meat but thought nothing of killing a fish. Recently there was a big vegetarian movement, and of course it was understood that fish is still m**t, but now anything short of vegan is frowned upon, and one should "ideally" be raw vegan or fruitarian. How long till someone decides that exploiting bacteria is a form of cruelty to animals?
It can. The only thing is, the Devil (to whom all heat belongs, obviously) has negotiated a deal which entitles him to "rake off" a little bit of heat for himself, everytime any energy changes from one state to another. Over time, the transactions -- and thus the rake-off -- build up rapidly. What the Devil doesn't realise is that this heat is slowly escaping from his grasp. Heat can only be changed into some other type of energy where there are things at different temperatures, but releasing heat tends to bring things towards the same temperature. Once all the matter in the universe is at the same temperature, that heat is effectively worthless.
However, you can beat the system a little by specifying, instead of a simple heating boiler, a water-cooled engine (which must run on the same fuel as your heating) and produces as much waste heat as you would require of a boiler; plumbing in the cooling system to your central heating; and attaching an alternator to the spindle. The engine costs a bit more to run than a simple heating boiler would, but you're getting electricity for no more than the difference. If you put in 4 units of fuel to get 3 units of heat and 1 unit of electricity (not an unreasonable expectation), you're effectively getting 1 unit of electricity for the price of 1 unit of heating fuel. Electricity is usually more expensive than oil or gas, so it's a win all around. If you can't use it all on-site, you can sell any surplus back to the electric company at the going rate. If you can run your equipment on a fuel costing less than one-quarter of the price of electricity, then your heating costs actually go negative!
You may even be able to get a tax break! Sell all your heating and generating equipment to a specially-formed spin-off company. Continue buying fuel in the name of your own company. Declare it to be waste, so you can write it off against tax, and pay your heating company to "recycle" it for you (by heating your buildings, flogging the excess juice and claiming a subsidy for proper disposal of the hazardous waste).
They're 128Kbit/s. precisely so that you won't rely on them as a main source. Real classical music bores tend to prefer LP for its unique reproductive qualities (CD necessarily has a sharp cut-off at 20kHz., which is only about 5kHz. higher than the human ear can hear); or reel-to-reel tape at 19cm./s. for home recordings (which have a cut-off somewhere between 15 and 19kHz., to avoid interfering with the stereo pilot tone at 19kHz.). The other type of classical music bores insist to have as many different recordings, performed by as many orchestras, in as many concert halls as possible.
The sort of person who buys Classical Music on LPs and CDs isn't going to be put off from buying them by the existence of 128K MP3s. Some people, on the other hand, will be encouraged to buy "proper" gramophone records by the existence of MP3s, if they discover that they like a particular piece sufficiently to care about listening to a more faithful reproduction or perhaps an alternative interpretation. The rest were never going to buy the CDs anyway.
Copyright infringement is already a criminal offence in the UK, but Fair Dealing is a defence.
Since it's up to the courts to decide what actually constitutes Fair Dealing (i.e. you have to let yourself get taken to court, protesting your innocence; and if you get acquitted, then whatever it was that you did is now officially legal for anyone else to do), it's not in anyone's interest actually to prosecute. No jury in the land is going to send someone down for keeping a library of their favourite recorded programmes (find twelve people and you can bet your arse that two of them have video collections taped off the telly), but the rights holders don't want to risk having home taping declared legal.
British law is full of unprosecutable offences. None of them are worth bothering about, because everyone except the Queen breaks the law several times a day. The only time it might be worth worrying about is if you have committed some other, prosecutable offence, because evidence pointing to one, minor offence can be used as an excuse to search for evidence of other, more major offences. (This is often called a "blatant fishing trip" by magistrates denying a search warrant to police officers in crime drama series on the BBC.)
What are you talking about? Looks fine in Konqueror, no popups or nothing. Just the crappy double-underlining thing.
I'm also running through a Squid proxy that blocks all known advertising sites.
Linux has a standard driver model -- it's just the "wrong" side of an abstraction layer for "some" people.
First, you have to realise that Linux utterly eschews binary compatibility. It's simply not relevant to Linux, which -- unlike Windows, Solaris or Mac OS X -- was designed from the very beginning to be Open Source Software, with the full source code unconditionally available. What is relevant is source compatibility. If you write a piece of code properly -- obtaining constants from header files, for instance, and not using dodgy coding conventions that have been dropped from the C compiler over the years -- then it should compile against any Linux kernel ever written. If you do stuff such as assuming everything is 32 bits and the units will always come first, then of course it will break.
As long as you respect established conventions and release your Source Code, there is no reason why any code you write should not work with any version of Linux ever written or to be written. The only people who complain about this are the people who write substandard code, and the people who do not wish to release their Source Code (actually, there isn't a lot of difference between these two groups. Look at the OpenOffice.org 1.0 tree, which is full of former StarDivision closed-source code, for an example of the sort of shite people will turn out if they don't think anyone's ever going to see it).
There is already a stable interface, and that interface is at the Source Code level. The Linux kernel team are not going to maintain out-of-date, legacy interfaces, and implement security patches for all of them, just for the purpose of allowing old binaries -- which would only need a recompilation to make them work properly -- to run.
There are no issues with any regulatory authority and software-alterable radio devices. Approval is granted against the device working within a particular specification. If as the result of something the user does the device no longer works within that specification, then approval is automatically withdrawn.
It's an utterly bogus argument, similar to "No bare feet by order of the Health Department" -- an attempt on the part of someone seeking to impose an unjust rule which they invented, to pretend that the rule was not their idea.
Wrong.
You don't put fences where they look pretty, you put fences where they get the least amount of traffic through them. Ultimately, it's for the kernel to decide what can talk to a hardware device and what it can say. If some userspace program can talk to random hardware, then your hardware isn't secure. You need at least a sanity-checker and gatekeeper in kernel space. And when you look at the logistics of sanity-checking, which requires a backchannel and a communications overhead, you might as well combine that with the driver itself. Then the backchannel isn't between processes: it's within a process.
Precisely to prevent having to recompile the kernel to accommodate new hardware, Linux uses the compromise approach of having loadable kernel modules, which can (in theory, at least; I think I've even done it in practice, once, during my brief flirtation with Gentoo) be compiled retrospectively if you forgot to include them in the kernel first time around. They run in kernel space, and combine the functions of sanity-checking, gatekeeping and emulating ideal hardware. Of course, because something is being loaded into kernel space, there's a potential security hole, and so it's possible to disable loadable modules.
I mean, if I was the head of a firm making disposable batteries, I'd not exactly be keen for the manufacturers of battery-powered appliances to fit DC-in jacks. (My most-hated competitor isn't any other battery manufacturer, but the mains. To all intents and purposes, mains electricity is free; worse than that, it represents independence from battery companies.) I'd for sure be spending money to lobby against any legislation which would require a DC-in jack on every appliance. And I'd be doing anything within my power to discredit rechargeable batteries and mains adaptors. (I might also accept a bung from a consortium of appliance manufacturers to bring out new cell sizes, make the ones they replaced obsolete and take out all the old appliances with them in one fell swoop; they'd sell more new devices and I might be able to charge more for the new batteries. Or I'd keep a "heritage" range alive for awhile at double the old price. But that's by the by.)
If you were the head of a small firm making portable, battery-operated appliances, would you take a bung from a disposable battery manufacturer not to fit DC-in jacks?
If you were the head of a small firm making computer peripherals, would you take a bung from Microsoft not to advertise that your products were compatible with Linux? How would you react to being told that Microsoft would refuse to certify your Windows drivers if you advertised that your products were compatible with Linux?
Wow. Just like I remember it, only not monochrome anymore -- it's in full ANSI colour! I will have to sign up for an account -- my old login and password from c.15 years ago seem to have expired ..... Better not do it from work, though; it's more addictive than nicotine. But oh, the memories! See, this is what happens when you try to write a text editor ..... and then you introduce one more feature .....
And they seem to have the mother of all termcaps.
Oh, the memories! Thank you, thank you, thank you for this.
The lesson we learn from this: If you think you might want duplex printing sometime within the lifetime of the printer you are about to buy, you should buy a duplex printer in the first place!
In fact, this pretty much goes for any feature on any hardware, not just duplex ability on printers. Remember, it's a climate of cheese-paring out there. If they can save a few pence on a moulding tool by omitting the necessary attachment points for retro-fitting a duplexer, they will do so rather than risk losing business to a competitor. (This behaviour, of course, does nothing to engender the sort of brand loyalty which once encouraged customers to stick with a particular manufacturer rather than choose a competitor over a small price difference.)
The Epson EPL6200 did PostScript in hardware and cost under £200. Don't know about its successor models, though.
Ah, yes, I remember a few trips over to Warwick Uni on the 900 for awhile. That was in the days of Cheeseplant's House (wow, I got a great thrill writing my own version of something like that, many years later!) and Monochrome (kind of Slashdot forerunner, fondly missed). Those clunky ADM-3 terminals (evidently designed by somebody who liked vi) left me thinking that VT-100s were modern ..... mind, Aston had some old Newbury Data terminals (that were used with microprocessor development boards) that were even worse; the VAX couldn't handle them properly and tret them as a dumb terminal without backspace. When you tried correcting a mistake it would look like tji\ij/his (We'd recently scrapped an old Harris mainframe, probably where they came from.) And they had an absolutely awful display font, with bad attempts at rounding that really hurt the eyes.
Also, while it's correct that VT-3xx terminals had some graphics capabilities, I don't think they were bitmapped. And the charcell was incompatible with the VT-220, meaning that your carefully-created user-defined prompts (remember them?) had the odd row or column doubled. So did the Qume terminals at Aston, for that matter.
Well, if Trolltech won't let you use Qt in a closed-source application, you know what the alternative is!
As GPL-bashers are so fond of saying, if Trolltech wrote it, they should be allowed to licence it however they like. Surely what's Source for the goose is Source for the gander?
Ah, the good old days. At Aston Uni, we had mainly VT-220s and QVT-203+s. Some VT-100 clones, too; even at least one real VT-100 with the remotely programmable indicator lights! {Why did they stop putting those on terminals? Even the VT-220s didn't have them, not even emulated on the status line.}
VT-xxx machines were all character-mapped and text-only. But I suppose if you needed graphics, you could have a machine running just a very cut-down OS and X server, straight from ROM.
On the face of it, that sounds entirely reasonable to me -- Trolltech are obviously seeking to discourage developers from developing Closed Source software. However, the licence agreement as you've stated it is unenforcible.
:)
A derivative work which is not distributed outside of an organisation is still technically Open Source, since there are no recipients who have an unsatisfied right to the Source Code.
This means that you could, irrespective of the licence terms Qt are trying to impose (you can't not give permission for something someone has already done, especially if some other authorised party already gave them permission to do that), develop an "Open Source" application (since it's being kept strictly in-house, it fulfils the letter if not the spirit of the GPL) using the Open Source version of Qt; then, as soon as you were ready to distribute it, create a closed, proprietary fork using the closed-source version of Qt. (Question: what would happen if an employee of an organisation "misappropriated" source code of an in-house application which was a derivative of a GPL work? If they took only a binary version, would they be entitled to the Source Code, which they would need if they were to distribute the work?)
Of course, if you are creating proprietary, closed applications then you deserve to burn in hell for all eternity anyway
But they do also licence under the GPL; which means you don't have to tell them even how many developers you're employing, let alone their names.
We actually got raided by FAST (Fucking Arseholes and Stupid Tossers -- the UK arm of the closed-source-peddling wankers' price-fixing cartel) once. We had about half a dozen Windows boxes (all fully licenced, for running legacy software needed at the time to be compatible with Group Head Office) and everything else was Linux. The gestapo agent was horrified at first when my boss told him that we had no procedure in place for preventing employees copying software from their workstation. He shut up when we explained that since there was nothing on any employee's workstation that it would be illegal for them to copy, there wasn't a lot of point preventing it.
:) Which would you rather have -- a litre of milk that you aren't allowed to let anyone else drink; or a cow that once you've learned how to feed and milk her, which really isn't as hard as the dairies like to make out, you can get unrestricted milk for life?
We now have a few fingers in the Open Source Migration Strategy pie, so we obviously have a positive interest in seeing Windows "pirates" get busted -- it gives us an opening to sell our services