The whole idea of it being formula anything racing, is that the vehicles have to conform to certain specifications; the idea being to make it as fair as possible. It's called homologation and it occurs to some extent in every sport {imagine chess with one player having extra queens instead of bishops}. If you move too far towards "anything goes" then you create an unfair situation, and every competitor simply ends up pushing whatever limits there are. If you regulate too tightly, then it becomes more like a game of chance.
If they over-regulate or under-regulate, the sport -- and hence the sponsors -- lose audience, in the worst case even competitors; and the governing body must make changes or risk becoming irrelevant.
MS made their own code hard to work with without touching anyone else. I don't appreciate it, but respect their right to do so nevertheless.
The Microsoft EULA seeks, by pseudo-legal means, to deny users the freedom to work with MS code. That's not something anyone has a right to do; which is why those provisions are unenforcible in law. If you make gas boilers, and you make radiators, preventing other people from making radiators which will work with the boilers you make is called "anti-competitive behaviour".
MS didn't force anyone to buy their code either.
Um, how do you figure that offering PC builders the choice: include a Microsoft OS pre-loaded on every system you sell, or we won't sell you our OSes at all, is anything other than "forcing people to buy their code" ?
Babies and young children learn by rote {means-oriented}. Older children learn more in terms of abstract concepts {end-oriented}. This is an evolutionary necessity; a three-year-old probably hasn't worked out the likely consequences of tumbling over a cliff edge, so a harsh reprimand from an adult can literally be a lifesaver. Teenagers think they know it all and are continually experimenting with boundaries. Adults have a tendency to revert spontaneously to means-oriented learning if they think they cannot understand something.
Now, as things currently stand, Microsoft have achieved a monopoly through a combination of illegal and immoral practices. So schools are teaching Microsoft because "it's what they'll encounter in the real world", and meanwhile businesses are buying Microsoft because "it's what they learned in school".
Schools today are basically free Microsoft training centres. The kids don't learn word processing, they learn MS Word. They don't learn spreadsheets, they learn Excel. They don't learn to design web pages, they learn FrontPage. The teachers are just parrotting from the Microsoft textbook. All those unreliable Windows machines need resetting from time to time, so a full-time "IT technician" is required to go around rebooting them and never understanding what went wrong in the first place. This demeans the job title of technician {it used to mean "someone who knows just as much as an engineer, works just as hard as an engineer and gets paid half as much as an engineer"}. A monkey could be trained to do that, for crying out loud. Maybe somewhere in the world there is an organisation which has actually trained a monkey to reboot misbehaving Windows boxes. Actually, Microsoft are working on lowering the status of "engineer" as well {it used to mean "someone who did more mathematics at university than someone on a mathematics course"}.
Maybe if schools weren't indoctrinating impressionable minds into The Microsoft Way from an early age, then businesses wouldn't all be buying MS Office "because it's what they learned in school".
I was actually around in the 1980s, and I was forced to listen to all the music that doesn't get played at "80s nights" because it was shite. In order to survive around computers in those days, you had to pick up on abstract concepts because there was no consistency. BBCs, Commodore 64s, Orics, Spectrums, Dragon 32s, Amstrad CPCs, and the obsolete models they had replaced -- they were all different. Get yourself an emulator and some tape images, and have a play. Newsagents sold magazines with listings that the truly masochistic could spend hours typing in. Some people actually managed to hack a program written in one computer's dialect of BASIC to run on another {I accomplished this feat at least twice myself, modifying a PILOT interpreter originally meant for the Apple ][, and a text adventure game meant for the Oric, to run on the BBC model B}. As the next-generation machines like the Amiga took over, type-in listings disappeared; due in no small measure to the lack of a useful bundled programming language. {AmigaBASIC was like a poor-quality "1970s crate" emulator; barely computationally-complete, and certainly couldn't be used for writing any sort of application programs.} When I left school and went to university, there was a curious mix of DOS, VAX/VMS; and, later, more or less heavily modified versions of Unix. The VT220-alikes in a room wouldn't even necessarily have the same keyboard layout.
Just because something is yours does not mean that you have the right to do absolutely anything you like with it. Otherwise I could say "This is my knife and I will stab whoever I want with it". By your logic that is acceptable, so please come and meet my friend Mr Sharp here.
In the marketplace, there are certain rules to make sure everyone gets a fair bite of the cherry. Certain business practices are expressly forbidden because they do direct harm to others. You are free to make cars, but you must not try to stop anyone else from making accessories that fit the cars you make. And you are free to write software, but other people have to be allowed to write software that will work in conjunction with your software -- e.g. reading its saved files and speaking its network protocols.
Microsoft have been deliberately withholding information from developers. This means that other software companies cannot produce software which interoperates properly with Microsoft software. Worse, Microsoft even try to pretend in their licence agreement that you aren't allowed to probe about in an attempt to discover for yourself how to do it {although the Law of the Land gives you a statutory right to do just that, so that part of the licence is invalid; but how many people knew that?}
Thanks to Microsoft's misleading and incomplete documentation, supposedly-interoperable software products suffer mysterious failures, costing time and money in lost productivity. And otherwise-perfectly-serviceable hardware becomes unusable in the absence of working drivers, costing money to replace it and more money to dispose of it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if at least one death somewhere in the world could be attributed to Microsoft's behaviour {funds that could have been used for medication spent on unnecessary software licences, prescribed wrong drug due to error introduced by poor interoperability, ambulance arrived too late due to rebooting computer, killed by pollution from improper disposal of unnecessarily-obsolete hardware, just unlucky and got kicked by IT tech in abject frustration, &c}.
It may have something to do with the Linux source code having meaningful comments and sensible variable and function names. But I think the most important difference is that you can look at the Linux {and, for that matter, BSD -- but Microsoft already know that} source code without having to promise never to program anything ever again.
Failure to comply with a court order is contempt of court, which is indeed a criminal offence. But there would have to be a new court order imposed for MS to be in contempt of, in order for them to be fined at the new level. It's quite simple: you cannot apply a newly-passed law to events which took place before the law was written into the statute books. This means that, for example, if they legalised software patents in Europe, everyone would have to apply for brand new patents {since the old ones were issued illegally and thus, null and void} and such applications would most probably crash and burn spectacularly, since anything which might formerly have violated said patents {except it did not because they were not valid in the first place} can now be cited as Prior Art.
Well, you'll just have to write your own operating system, won't you?
And lay off the queer-bashing. It's just nature's form of contraception, which is exactly what an overpopulated world needs right now. You needn't worry about receiving any unwarranted attention: if women don't want to sleep with you, then men definitely won't want to sleep with you.
I believe quite strongly in making fines relative to your income. Otherwise a rich person could potentially keep committing petty crimes and paying the fine, while poor people suffer. Mandatory custodial sentences for repeat offenders are of limited help in this case, because you can't send a corporation to prison.
But that's the whole point. This could just never, ever happen with Free Software. All that would happen is that we would go back to an earlier version -- which we had already been granted an irrevocable licence to use -- and modify it to behave just like {or, preferably, better than} the latest, restricted version.
In fact, that's exactly what did happen with the X Window System.
Anyway, governments can issue Compulsory Purchase Orders e.g. to buy land that is required for road building projects or similar schemes, where the importance to Society At Large is deemed great enough. If "intellectual property" is so much like real property, it ought to be equally subject to CPOs. I suggest to compulsorily purchase the copyright on all versions of Windows for 0.01 {which will have to be paid as a cheque, since the smallest coin is 5; this probably will be swallowed up by bank charges, since Microsoft is a company and so doesn't get free banking} and immediately dedicate it to the Public Domain.
Well, CP/M {an OS originally written for the Intel 8080 8-bit processor, but which happened to work with the binary-compatible 8085 and Z-80 processors} used to support multiple users after a fashion. MS-DOS was originally QDOS, a cheap and nasty CP/M work-alike for the 8086 processor. QDOS was based on an obsolete CP/M version, and in any case Microsoft bought it before it was properly finished.
Sometime later, the University of California at Berkeley managed to get a version of unix to run on an 80386 PC. This eventually became FreeBSD. And a printer manufacturer managed, by withholding driver source code, to annoy a hairy MIT hacker enough to motivate him to start writing his own operating system; which ended up almost complete, bar the kernel. Later still, a Finnish student got into a row with a lecturer about macro- vs. micro-kernels, wrote his own macrokernel {but, alas, no userland utilities} just to prove his point. Then a guy called Ian tried to pull a chick called Debra by combining the Linux kernel with the GNU userland. Amazingly, against all probabilities, the venture was successful on both counts and both couples ended up happily married; however, whilst Mrs Murdock liked her new name, there was much rumbling {and not from The Finn} that the other partnership ought to have kept both their names.
Whilst all this was going on, the creators of VAX/VMS {a somewhat temperamental operating system for the DEC VAX, a 32-bit extension to the venerable PDP-11} were sucked up by Microsoft and set to writing a replacement for MS-DOS, which it was hoped would also be portable to other processors {except for the slight flaw that the target processors would end up being discontinued before a port was ready}. This ended up becoming Windows NT. When it became apparent that Windows NT was worse than VAX/VMS, which was always seen by many VAX owners as the poor relation to BSD unix, Microsoft began ripping off bits of FreeBSD and grafting them into NT in place of the unstable parts. This was OK, because the BSD licence basically says "This is our hard work, which we tried to make available freely to everybody, but hey! if you want to pretend you wrote it, and lock it up so people can't have a copy of the Source Code, that's fine, we'll just rollover and play dead like good little doggies". The result ended up becoming Windows 2000 -- arguably the most stable Windows ever, though that's still a bit like saying "tallest midget". To make this new Windows even more attractive to complete idiots, a "Tellytubbies" theme was added and the name changed to XP so people would be able to spell it.
So yes, DOS should have been multiuser. But hey, if it had been right from the start, Microsoft would never have been able to sell upgrades. That's the Closed Source Way: Do half a job, then a quarter of a job, then an eighth of a job, and so on..... After a certain number of such "upgrades" it becomes increasingly hard to convince the public to upgrade, so you have to build in a Nuclear Option such as inherent insecurity.
No no no, cellulite is manufactured by marketing people. Stupidity is what makes people get bothered by it, which is why the marketing people have an easy time over it. One day, perhaps sooner than you think, it will be fashionable again to be what we now call "overweight"; and then it'll be the thin people's turn to get the dirty end of the stick.
The patent's bound to wear off sooner or later, though.
I only ever managed to get my homemade perl freedb client to work once. Tried it with a different disc and it went Tango Uniform. It's a shame, but maybe the replacement -- because there will be a replacement -- will have a better hashing scheme. Preferably still generated from the TOC alone, so as to make it quicker to calculate.
You do know that you can flash the firmware in a phone, don't you? Once the first year is up, you own the instrument, and so aren't damaging someone else's property. You might technically be invalidating regulatory approval {since it's no longer strictly identical to the type-approval sample}, but as long as your phone doesn't hog the airwaves or make unattended calls, that shouldn't be a problem -- you have to actually do something illegal to get caught, and ringing tones and so forth are beyond the remit of the relevant regulatory agencies {RA/BABT in the UK, FCC in the USA}.
Fortunately, I have a Sony-Ericsson k750i {forerunner of the Walkman w810i; uses the same recharger and accessories} so I can get all the ringing tones I like, for free! You can record any sound you can hear through the built-in mic, and use that as a ringing tone. Being an application where fidelity is less importance than volume, this works much better than one might suspect.
The people who want linux to "standardize" are the people who want to sell closed source apps.
I had this idea for a totally virus-proof, malware-proof secure computing system. Basically, every single processor has a different instruction set. There's no way to run a binary compiled for anyone else's computer on yours, and no way for anyone except you to compile binaries that will run on your computer. According to which, if a binary is running on your computer then you must, at some stage, have had the source code for it.
It wouldn't exclude proprietary software, if only vendors would get it into their thick heads that source code and distribution rights are not the same thing. I'd gladly consider paying for software that did not come with distribution rights, as long as I was allowed to look at the source code and adapt it for my personal use. Not supplying users with the source code has worked really well to prevent anyone from copying Windows, hasn't it? Of course, in the 8-bit days when games and applications were written in assembler, then everything effectively came with user-readable and -modifiable source code.....
The funny thing is that this scheme can't be patented, because there is Prior Art. Back in the days, nearly all computers really did have different instruction sets. That is exactly why C was invented.
First let me say how I'd like a Linux smartphone to work. I'd like to plug it into my computer with a USB cable and see various peripherals. A hard drive, that goes without saying. A network adaptor with a DHCP server; a web server on port 80 with the phone's web-based configuration; a database server on port 3306 containing the phone book, call logs and sundry housekeeping information, e.g. remaining talktime; a gateway to the outside world {via GPRS or 3G}; and assorted other servers, possibly including a SIP / IAX gateway. Two sound cards: one being the phone's own mic and speaker, and the other being the phone line.
Since the business of charging for a call is handled by the base station and not the handset, there are no implications for making things open that benefit the subscriber at the expense of the telephone company {though I can think of some that might benefit the telco at your expense..... you would have to keep a close watch on how much talktime you bought while developing applications, for fear of eating it all up}.
But it's unlikely to happen without government intervention, because keeping things closed and proprietary benefits the handset manufacturers {to a limited extent} and the telcos {to a greater extent}. The easier it is for the likes of me and thee to muck about with our phones, the harder it is for the corporations to charge us money for cheesy applications.
You'll get a hangman's noose round my neck before you get a tie around it. Ten years now and counting..... and that was a funeral. Since then, I've attended weddings, funerals, job interviews and discovered from experience that a tie is no less effective at warding off evil spirits {I presume that's its intended function, since it doesn't appear to do anything else} if it's folded up in your pocket. Or, for that matter, folded up in somebody else's drawer. I've also saved the NHS, and therefore taxpayers like you, a fortune in Salbutamol and Beclomethasone -- since I quit wearing a tie, I've had just one fairly mild asthma attack which required me to borrow some Ventolin.
Last job I had before this one, the management tried to make me wear a tie. I draped a tie over the back of my chair and took two days off. When I returned, I asked my boss whether the tie without me had done a better job than me without a tie? because he had to pick one out of the two.
Note that if you plan to try this yourself, it does help if you're the only person alive who actually knows how to work a very important piece of equipment.
It does not appear to come with Source Code, and that's going to be the big show-stopper.
If you don't know what Source Code is, and why it's so important that you should have access to it, then you probably will just use Windows and wallow in your own ignorance until you drown. If, on the other hand, you do know what Source Code is, then you almost certainly will want to be running an Operating System that includes the Source Code. If you buy an operating system knowing full well that you cannot repair any faults you may find in it, nor adapt it to meet your specific requirements then, not to put too fine a point on it, you're an idiot.
I really think they will have a very hard job selling an operating system without the source code. Harder at any rate than selling it with the source code {so at least savvy people can tweak it} but without distribution rights {so as to protect their profits}. Just because something doesn't come with Source Code, never stopped anyone pirating it..... except people who specifically wanted the Source Code, and they wouldn't even have bought it if it didn't come with it.
That probably is because they used literals for constants {which, let's face it, is a pretty standard practice in one-liners}. BSD and System V -- i.e., what was to become Solaris -- used different constants internally in some places. It was never an issue for software supplied in source form, because the correct values could always be got from the kernel headers {with a #include statement in C, for example, or a use statement in Perl}. Linux inherited a curious mixture of both and probably introduced some new ones of its own. So depending how you misuse literals, you might have scripts that work only on one operating system; or on Linux and Solaris; or only on Linux and BSD. If something works on BSD and Solaris, chances are it probably will work on Linux too.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole idea of it being formula anything racing, is that the vehicles have to conform to certain specifications; the idea being to make it as fair as possible. It's called homologation and it occurs to some extent in every sport {imagine chess with one player having extra queens instead of bishops}. If you move too far towards "anything goes" then you create an unfair situation, and every competitor simply ends up pushing whatever limits there are. If you regulate too tightly, then it becomes more like a game of chance.
If they over-regulate or under-regulate, the sport -- and hence the sponsors -- lose audience, in the worst case even competitors; and the governing body must make changes or risk becoming irrelevant.
Except that trespassing is merely a civil tort, not a crime.
Human beings have two modes of learning.
Babies and young children learn by rote {means-oriented}. Older children learn more in terms of abstract concepts {end-oriented}. This is an evolutionary necessity; a three-year-old probably hasn't worked out the likely consequences of tumbling over a cliff edge, so a harsh reprimand from an adult can literally be a lifesaver. Teenagers think they know it all and are continually experimenting with boundaries. Adults have a tendency to revert spontaneously to means-oriented learning if they think they cannot understand something.
Now, as things currently stand, Microsoft have achieved a monopoly through a combination of illegal and immoral practices. So schools are teaching Microsoft because "it's what they'll encounter in the real world", and meanwhile businesses are buying Microsoft because "it's what they learned in school".
Schools today are basically free Microsoft training centres. The kids don't learn word processing, they learn MS Word. They don't learn spreadsheets, they learn Excel. They don't learn to design web pages, they learn FrontPage. The teachers are just parrotting from the Microsoft textbook. All those unreliable Windows machines need resetting from time to time, so a full-time "IT technician" is required to go around rebooting them and never understanding what went wrong in the first place. This demeans the job title of technician {it used to mean "someone who knows just as much as an engineer, works just as hard as an engineer and gets paid half as much as an engineer"}. A monkey could be trained to do that, for crying out loud. Maybe somewhere in the world there is an organisation which has actually trained a monkey to reboot misbehaving Windows boxes. Actually, Microsoft are working on lowering the status of "engineer" as well {it used to mean "someone who did more mathematics at university than someone on a mathematics course"}.
Maybe if schools weren't indoctrinating impressionable minds into The Microsoft Way from an early age, then businesses wouldn't all be buying MS Office "because it's what they learned in school".
I was actually around in the 1980s, and I was forced to listen to all the music that doesn't get played at "80s nights" because it was shite. In order to survive around computers in those days, you had to pick up on abstract concepts because there was no consistency. BBCs, Commodore 64s, Orics, Spectrums, Dragon 32s, Amstrad CPCs, and the obsolete models they had replaced -- they were all different. Get yourself an emulator and some tape images, and have a play. Newsagents sold magazines with listings that the truly masochistic could spend hours typing in. Some people actually managed to hack a program written in one computer's dialect of BASIC to run on another {I accomplished this feat at least twice myself, modifying a PILOT interpreter originally meant for the Apple ][, and a text adventure game meant for the Oric, to run on the BBC model B}. As the next-generation machines like the Amiga took over, type-in listings disappeared; due in no small measure to the lack of a useful bundled programming language. {AmigaBASIC was like a poor-quality "1970s crate" emulator; barely computationally-complete, and certainly couldn't be used for writing any sort of application programs.} When I left school and went to university, there was a curious mix of DOS, VAX/VMS; and, later, more or less heavily modified versions of Unix. The VT220-alikes in a room wouldn't even necessarily have the same keyboard layout.
I survived.
Just because something is yours does not mean that you have the right to do absolutely anything you like with it. Otherwise I could say "This is my knife and I will stab whoever I want with it". By your logic that is acceptable, so please come and meet my friend Mr Sharp here.
In the marketplace, there are certain rules to make sure everyone gets a fair bite of the cherry. Certain business practices are expressly forbidden because they do direct harm to others. You are free to make cars, but you must not try to stop anyone else from making accessories that fit the cars you make. And you are free to write software, but other people have to be allowed to write software that will work in conjunction with your software -- e.g. reading its saved files and speaking its network protocols.
Microsoft have been deliberately withholding information from developers. This means that other software companies cannot produce software which interoperates properly with Microsoft software. Worse, Microsoft even try to pretend in their licence agreement that you aren't allowed to probe about in an attempt to discover for yourself how to do it {although the Law of the Land gives you a statutory right to do just that, so that part of the licence is invalid; but how many people knew that?}
Thanks to Microsoft's misleading and incomplete documentation, supposedly-interoperable software products suffer mysterious failures, costing time and money in lost productivity. And otherwise-perfectly-serviceable hardware becomes unusable in the absence of working drivers, costing money to replace it and more money to dispose of it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if at least one death somewhere in the world could be attributed to Microsoft's behaviour {funds that could have been used for medication spent on unnecessary software licences, prescribed wrong drug due to error introduced by poor interoperability, ambulance arrived too late due to rebooting computer, killed by pollution from improper disposal of unnecessarily-obsolete hardware, just unlucky and got kicked by IT tech in abject frustration, &c}.
It may have something to do with the Linux source code having meaningful comments and sensible variable and function names. But I think the most important difference is that you can look at the Linux {and, for that matter, BSD -- but Microsoft already know that} source code without having to promise never to program anything ever again.
Failure to comply with a court order is contempt of court, which is indeed a criminal offence. But there would have to be a new court order imposed for MS to be in contempt of, in order for them to be fined at the new level. It's quite simple: you cannot apply a newly-passed law to events which took place before the law was written into the statute books. This means that, for example, if they legalised software patents in Europe, everyone would have to apply for brand new patents {since the old ones were issued illegally and thus, null and void} and such applications would most probably crash and burn spectacularly, since anything which might formerly have violated said patents {except it did not because they were not valid in the first place} can now be cited as Prior Art.
Well, you'll just have to write your own operating system, won't you?
And lay off the queer-bashing. It's just nature's form of contraception, which is exactly what an overpopulated world needs right now. You needn't worry about receiving any unwarranted attention: if women don't want to sleep with you, then men definitely won't want to sleep with you.
I believe quite strongly in making fines relative to your income. Otherwise a rich person could potentially keep committing petty crimes and paying the fine, while poor people suffer. Mandatory custodial sentences for repeat offenders are of limited help in this case, because you can't send a corporation to prison.
But that's the whole point. This could just never, ever happen with Free Software. All that would happen is that we would go back to an earlier version -- which we had already been granted an irrevocable licence to use -- and modify it to behave just like {or, preferably, better than} the latest, restricted version.
In fact, that's exactly what did happen with the X Window System.
Anyway, governments can issue Compulsory Purchase Orders e.g. to buy land that is required for road building projects or similar schemes, where the importance to Society At Large is deemed great enough. If "intellectual property" is so much like real property, it ought to be equally subject to CPOs. I suggest to compulsorily purchase the copyright on all versions of Windows for 0.01 {which will have to be paid as a cheque, since the smallest coin is 5; this probably will be swallowed up by bank charges, since Microsoft is a company and so doesn't get free banking} and immediately dedicate it to the Public Domain.
Starvation.
Well, CP/M {an OS originally written for the Intel 8080 8-bit processor, but which happened to work with the binary-compatible 8085 and Z-80 processors} used to support multiple users after a fashion. MS-DOS was originally QDOS, a cheap and nasty CP/M work-alike for the 8086 processor. QDOS was based on an obsolete CP/M version, and in any case Microsoft bought it before it was properly finished.
..... After a certain number of such "upgrades" it becomes increasingly hard to convince the public to upgrade, so you have to build in a Nuclear Option such as inherent insecurity.
Sometime later, the University of California at Berkeley managed to get a version of unix to run on an 80386 PC. This eventually became FreeBSD. And a printer manufacturer managed, by withholding driver source code, to annoy a hairy MIT hacker enough to motivate him to start writing his own operating system; which ended up almost complete, bar the kernel. Later still, a Finnish student got into a row with a lecturer about macro- vs. micro-kernels, wrote his own macrokernel {but, alas, no userland utilities} just to prove his point. Then a guy called Ian tried to pull a chick called Debra by combining the Linux kernel with the GNU userland. Amazingly, against all probabilities, the venture was successful on both counts and both couples ended up happily married; however, whilst Mrs Murdock liked her new name, there was much rumbling {and not from The Finn} that the other partnership ought to have kept both their names.
Whilst all this was going on, the creators of VAX/VMS {a somewhat temperamental operating system for the DEC VAX, a 32-bit extension to the venerable PDP-11} were sucked up by Microsoft and set to writing a replacement for MS-DOS, which it was hoped would also be portable to other processors {except for the slight flaw that the target processors would end up being discontinued before a port was ready}. This ended up becoming Windows NT. When it became apparent that Windows NT was worse than VAX/VMS, which was always seen by many VAX owners as the poor relation to BSD unix, Microsoft began ripping off bits of FreeBSD and grafting them into NT in place of the unstable parts. This was OK, because the BSD licence basically says "This is our hard work, which we tried to make available freely to everybody, but hey! if you want to pretend you wrote it, and lock it up so people can't have a copy of the Source Code, that's fine, we'll just rollover and play dead like good little doggies". The result ended up becoming Windows 2000 -- arguably the most stable Windows ever, though that's still a bit like saying "tallest midget". To make this new Windows even more attractive to complete idiots, a "Tellytubbies" theme was added and the name changed to XP so people would be able to spell it.
So yes, DOS should have been multiuser. But hey, if it had been right from the start, Microsoft would never have been able to sell upgrades. That's the Closed Source Way: Do half a job, then a quarter of a job, then an eighth of a job, and so on
I always say to anybody putting down poison for rats, "I hope your dog eats it".
Well, now I'm saying to everyone who thinks these land mines are a good idea, I hope your kids find them.
No no no, cellulite is manufactured by marketing people. Stupidity is what makes people get bothered by it, which is why the marketing people have an easy time over it. One day, perhaps sooner than you think, it will be fashionable again to be what we now call "overweight"; and then it'll be the thin people's turn to get the dirty end of the stick.
What is the use in telling him that?
The patent's bound to wear off sooner or later, though.
I only ever managed to get my homemade perl freedb client to work once. Tried it with a different disc and it went Tango Uniform. It's a shame, but maybe the replacement -- because there will be a replacement -- will have a better hashing scheme. Preferably still generated from the TOC alone, so as to make it quicker to calculate.
Single men travelling by air are already getting asked to move if they find themselves next to a child. see here.
You do know that you can flash the firmware in a phone, don't you? Once the first year is up, you own the instrument, and so aren't damaging someone else's property. You might technically be invalidating regulatory approval {since it's no longer strictly identical to the type-approval sample}, but as long as your phone doesn't hog the airwaves or make unattended calls, that shouldn't be a problem -- you have to actually do something illegal to get caught, and ringing tones and so forth are beyond the remit of the relevant regulatory agencies {RA/BABT in the UK, FCC in the USA}.
Fortunately, I have a Sony-Ericsson k750i {forerunner of the Walkman w810i; uses the same recharger and accessories} so I can get all the ringing tones I like, for free! You can record any sound you can hear through the built-in mic, and use that as a ringing tone. Being an application where fidelity is less importance than volume, this works much better than one might suspect.
It wouldn't exclude proprietary software, if only vendors would get it into their thick heads that source code and distribution rights are not the same thing. I'd gladly consider paying for software that did not come with distribution rights, as long as I was allowed to look at the source code and adapt it for my personal use. Not supplying users with the source code has worked really well to prevent anyone from copying Windows, hasn't it? Of course, in the 8-bit days when games and applications were written in assembler, then everything effectively came with user-readable and -modifiable source code
The funny thing is that this scheme can't be patented, because there is Prior Art. Back in the days, nearly all computers really did have different instruction sets. That is exactly why C was invented.
First let me say how I'd like a Linux smartphone to work. I'd like to plug it into my computer with a USB cable and see various peripherals. A hard drive, that goes without saying. A network adaptor with a DHCP server; a web server on port 80 with the phone's web-based configuration; a database server on port 3306 containing the phone book, call logs and sundry housekeeping information, e.g. remaining talktime; a gateway to the outside world {via GPRS or 3G}; and assorted other servers, possibly including a SIP / IAX gateway. Two sound cards: one being the phone's own mic and speaker, and the other being the phone line.
..... you would have to keep a close watch on how much talktime you bought while developing applications, for fear of eating it all up}.
Since the business of charging for a call is handled by the base station and not the handset, there are no implications for making things open that benefit the subscriber at the expense of the telephone company {though I can think of some that might benefit the telco at your expense
But it's unlikely to happen without government intervention, because keeping things closed and proprietary benefits the handset manufacturers {to a limited extent} and the telcos {to a greater extent}. The easier it is for the likes of me and thee to muck about with our phones, the harder it is for the corporations to charge us money for cheesy applications.
You'll get a hangman's noose round my neck before you get a tie around it. Ten years now and counting ..... and that was a funeral. Since then, I've attended weddings, funerals, job interviews and discovered from experience that a tie is no less effective at warding off evil spirits {I presume that's its intended function, since it doesn't appear to do anything else} if it's folded up in your pocket. Or, for that matter, folded up in somebody else's drawer. I've also saved the NHS, and therefore taxpayers like you, a fortune in Salbutamol and Beclomethasone -- since I quit wearing a tie, I've had just one fairly mild asthma attack which required me to borrow some Ventolin.
Last job I had before this one, the management tried to make me wear a tie. I draped a tie over the back of my chair and took two days off. When I returned, I asked my boss whether the tie without me had done a better job than me without a tie? because he had to pick one out of the two.
Note that if you plan to try this yourself, it does help if you're the only person alive who actually knows how to work a very important piece of equipment.
It does not appear to come with Source Code, and that's going to be the big show-stopper.
..... except people who specifically wanted the Source Code, and they wouldn't even have bought it if it didn't come with it.
If you don't know what Source Code is, and why it's so important that you should have access to it, then you probably will just use Windows and wallow in your own ignorance until you drown. If, on the other hand, you do know what Source Code is, then you almost certainly will want to be running an Operating System that includes the Source Code. If you buy an operating system knowing full well that you cannot repair any faults you may find in it, nor adapt it to meet your specific requirements then, not to put too fine a point on it, you're an idiot.
I really think they will have a very hard job selling an operating system without the source code. Harder at any rate than selling it with the source code {so at least savvy people can tweak it} but without distribution rights {so as to protect their profits}. Just because something doesn't come with Source Code, never stopped anyone pirating it
That probably is because they used literals for constants {which, let's face it, is a pretty standard practice in one-liners}. BSD and System V -- i.e., what was to become Solaris -- used different constants internally in some places. It was never an issue for software supplied in source form, because the correct values could always be got from the kernel headers {with a #include statement in C, for example, or a use statement in Perl}. Linux inherited a curious mixture of both and probably introduced some new ones of its own. So depending how you misuse literals, you might have scripts that work only on one operating system; or on Linux and Solaris; or only on Linux and BSD. If something works on BSD and Solaris, chances are it probably will work on Linux too.
Except that paruresis is probably considered a disability, and posting an image of prying eyes might well run afoul of the DDA1995.