Under GNU/Linux, you can very easily have your distro's standard libraries in/usr/lib and newer versions of the same libraries in/usr/local/lib. Ask anyone who was running Debian Woody:)
We actually had someone come round from the Licencing Gestapo {maybe he got tipped off that we had ordered a few dozen PCs with no operating system}, so we thought we'd have a bit of fun with him..... he asked us what measures we had in place to prevent users from copying software off company PCs. We told him none at all; in fact, we actively encouraged that sort of thing. The poor sod didn't know whether to spunk his pants with glee or explode with rage. He asked us if we were serious and if we knew what the penalties were for violating an End User Licence Agreement? Then we shew him the neat rows of machines running Mandrake 9.2 {so that'll tell you how long ago it was} and asked him which bit of the GPL he thought we were violating.
As the advert says, for everything else, there's Mastercard.
Perhaps that was where the KDE team got the idea for the system-wide key bindings from?
Applications, especially curses ones, tend to have their own key bindings. For instance, in Nano, ctrl+C = display current position and ctrl+V = down one screen. Konsole passes these through untouched, but it traps ctrl+insert and shift+insert, and uses them to copy to and paste from the system-wide clipboard.
Of course I could use left-drag and middle-click, but that would mean using the mouse.....
I'm glad I'm British and Working Class. The Government takes care of my tax paperwork for me. Any money on which I owe tax, has already had to have the tax taken out of it, by law, before it gets anywhere near my bank account.
On the downside, employers are still allowed to say something like "Salary GBP25000 PA" when in actual fact employees might get only GBP18000 PA to take home.
I tell you what I miss on some of those new keyboards..... the "insert" key. There seem to be quite a few keyboard around with just a double-size "delete" key where "insert" and "delete" should be. This mucks up keyboard copy and paste {ctrl+insert and shift+insert} and also makes it harder to use links {insert and delete are used to scroll up and down by lines}.
Most of the {closed-source} software in use in the world is pirated. The big corporations know this and turn a blind eye to it; because they know that it's effectively free advertising, and free training, for their products. If Caz sees Shaz's pirate copy of Word, there's a chance -- a slim one, but a chance nonetheless -- that she might buy herself a copy; there's even a chance that Shaz might win the lottery or something, have an attack of conscience and decide to pay for all her software. Daz, meanwhile, downloads a shareware graphics editing program that the author has crippled. It will only cost him £50 if he wants to buy the full version, rather than £500 for Adobe Photoshop; so that's a £450 saving. Twenty-eight days later, of course, the program disables saving -- and rather than pay for the full version, he simply gets a pirate copy of Adobe Photoshop. Now, in Daz's mind, he has saved £500!
By swallowing piracy, the big players are reinforcing their monopolies; smaller companies might be more than able to compete with full-priced software, but not when what is rightly or wrongly touted as "THE industry standard" comes effectively for free, so they go out of business. I'm sure if I was feeling in a more RMS-ish mood I'd say it serves them right for selling closed-source software; but I also think it's wrong to shoot someone in the back. Really, if they're going to be defeated in the marketplace, then at least they deserve the honour of being defeated in a free and fair marketplace. At the moment, the market for software is neither.
Securely erasing a drive is as easy as doing a bad block scan {and anyone who does not do a bad block scan on a used drive is being seriously negligent}. This has to do at least two writes {ones and zeros} to every sector on the disk, to prove that it's good; and there's nothing to say it has to rewrite back whatever was there before, so it's enough to leave all zeros or all ones.
Nobody {outside an episode of CSI} has ever recovered data after even one overwrite. If it was easy in practice as the grossly oversimplified theory suggests, then someone would have used the phenomenon to build a storage device, using the principle of "recovering overwritten data", which would have double the capacity of a similarly-sized device. I've encountered nothing like that in all the computer history sites I've visited. The only remotely comparable thing I have ever seen is a big old reel-to-reel audio tape recorder, with a "trick recording" button: this disengaged the erase head, so the new recording sort of mixed into the old recording.
Never mind how much money Gates has given away, the fact is that he should never have had any of it in the first place! Every cent of Bill Gates's obscene personal fortune was obtained by dishonest means. From the development of 8080 BASIC {which was carried out using other people's computers, without payment; yet he had the gall to expect users of BASIC to pay him for it} in the 1970s, to the downright illegal practices of the 1980s and 1990s, to the present day, Bill Gates has been the master of finding something people do, then charging them money for it. And from the 1990s to now, Microsoft have abused their status time and time again; lying and trampling on competition, caring about nothing except their position not as market leaders but as the only players in the market -- and now they are looking to be privatised tax-collectors as well, with Microsoft taking a cut from every product sold.
Had I been at that meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, I would have liked to have dragged Gates into the Gents and given him a damn good kicking.
What I can see happening in the future is for telephone calls to be routinely and rudely interrupted for advertising. Eventually this will be tied in with speech recognition. You'll be chatting to someone and mention that you haven't had a chance to get away this year when.....
You used the word "holiday". Book your holiday in the Mediterranean with FooCruise and save pounds! To receive a free FooCruise Mediterranean Summer holidays brochure press ONE. To receive a FooSnow Ski-ing brochure press TWO. For further information about FamilyFoo holidays for families, press THREE. For a short presentation and to receive a glossy brochure on FooCruise Caribbean cruises, press FOUR. To return to your call, press HASH.
Of course, you are disconnected from your contact while you are being force-fed the adverts; and the option to return to the call will eventually disappear as the advertisements get longer and longer. If you try to hang up in the middle of an advertisement, next time you put the receiver to your ear you will get another advertisement before the dial tone. Yet almost nobody will think this is a bad thing, and those of us who do realise how intrusive it is will be dismissed as nutjobs. Until one day a woman in distress hears this.....
You used the word "rape". For further information regarding quality oil-seed products press ONE.....
By that time it will be too late.
And for what it's worth I don't think your analogy is at all flawed. Closed-source software is the electronic equivalent of slavery. Anyone who thinks not, just doesn't realise how important the Four Freedoms are.
The first phones were not exactly closed-source either, though. Anyone who grokked the physics involved {about O-level standard} could have built their own phone.
Of course, electromagnetism then was pretty advanced stuff; more like quantum physics today, so probably there weren't that many people that would have understood how a telephone works. But nobody was deliberately seeking to obscure how it worked, either.
First, thanks for pointing out some stuff I omitted to mention as "obvious". The points you mention about alternative platform support, security by obscurity and lack of improvability all spring directly from closedness of source. I forgot to mention them because {in my mind} they are so tightly bound together, but maybe they are worth mentioning again in their own right.
Secondly, your assertion that "some people are okay with such things" may be true -- but for how long? It's been shown that some kids who have been systematically abused by adults to the point where they believe that such abuse is normal, end up going on to become child abusers themselves just because they don't know any different. And although we're {mostly} discussing adults here, I've seen evidence with my own eyes to suggest that even adults still tend to apply the childish learning method around computers. Even if the majority were OK with being beholden to corporate interests, that still would not make it right: what democracy helps us to forget is that sometimes, the majority can be wrong. And when a lot of people find out at the same time that what they believe is wrong, it usually turns ugly.
There is a problem with this because, underneath it all, Skype is still a proprietary, closed technology. This creates an unacceptable barrier to anyone looking to enter the marketplace: competition is not fair and free.
It's absolutely inconceivable that in a civilised country, anyone should have to licence "intellectual property" from anyone else just to do their job. This is nothing short of privatised taxation.
The telephone network -- indeed, all public infrastructures, be they roads, railways, sewers, power lines or hospitals -- exists for the benefit of Society at Large, all of us, not just those who pay money to private corporations; and it is the place of governments -- as our elected representatives whose wages we pay -- to ensure that everyone has the ability to benefit therefrom.
I have a few ideas for simple solution to prevent anything like this ever happening again. Idea no. 1 works like this. If anybody sits on a patent, without actually working it; and somebody subsequently re-invents the same thing, and can demonstrate to the satisfaction of a court that they did so absolutely independently and without looking at the original patent documents, then the patent should be awarded to the re-inventor. Idea no. 2 is as follows: we go back to the old rule from the old days; no prototype, no patent. {What is a patent application without a prototype but a work of science fiction?} Idea no. 3: introduce a general presumption against the granting of patents; that is, every idea is assumed to be neither novel nor inventive, a bounty should be offered to anyone who can produce evidence of Prior Art which would nullify a patent application, and in the event of any dispute the courts would have the power to annul a patent, passing it into the Public Domain, and award token damages {of as little as 1 cent} for infringement. Idea no. 4 is similar to no. 1, but instead of awarding the patent to the reinventor, it would simply be annulled and the invention would pass into the Public Domain.
Seriously, the original idea of patents was to enable a hardworking amateur inventor -- who may well have invested their life savings in their invention -- to enter the marketplace on a level footing with those already able to pass an invention off as their own, by providing an official document saying "This is exactly how it works, no bits left out, and by the way I invented it"; which would be valid for long enough for the inventor to recoup their costs and make a little profit, subject to the success of the invention of course, before it being given to the whole of humankind for the benefit of everyone. This serves to balance the individual's goal of short-term gratification with the larger goal of society at large, which is for everyone to benefit in the long term from the endeavours of everyone else. It was never the original intent that patents should be used as a trip-wire, effectively to stifle innovation by pre-empting the work of others.
Just think what would have happened if Cave-man had tried to patent fire, or stone axes, or taming wolves to help with hunting.....
I got wondering the other day, what happens if an under-age child undresses within sight of a CCTV camera? Does that automatically make the CCTV tapes child porn, and the staff in the monitoring station nonces? Should they be placed on the Sex Offenders' Register and barred for life from having jobs where they might come into contact with children?
Re:Isn't XP secure? Is MS selling defective softwa
on
Buy Vista or Else
·
· Score: 1
Of course, but everything is different where there is a computer involved.
If I tried to sell you a car and then charge you another ton each for the seat belts, that would be illegal, right? because seat belts save lives {and, coincidentally, save the taxpayer money}. If I sold you a gas boiler and someone standing outside the house could shut it off -- or blow it up -- by doing something unless you bought an optional safety device costing £50, that would be illegal, right? because gas appliances are supposed to work as far as possible and fail safely.
The whole concept of "fitness for purpose" seems to have had as much effect on computer software as the Reformation had on Spain. Windows, with its focus on apparent ease-of-use at the expense of all else, sells because people don't want to believe that sometimes, doing something properly is hard.
Last I checked, you could run KDE {which includes Kivio} on OpenBSD. If not, have you tried using a pencil and paper?
Re:NOT A Selling Point-But a "must have" for secur
on
Buy Vista or Else
·
· Score: 1
"IE runs in a sandbox" ? WTF?
Now I really don't know whether to laugh or cry. Microsoft appear to have given up on making the web browser secure. Given that a web browser is just a program for displaying files {not for editing them, and definitely not for executing them}, that's a really big admission of defeat. Konqueror doesn't need to run in a sandbox.....
The open development model may be the "only" advantage Linux has over Windows, but it's a very big "only"! It's like saying that the "only" advantage television has over radio is pictures.....
Re:The problem is implementation rather than desig
on
Buy Vista or Else
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
..... And by requiring all that, you immediately nullify one of the chief "advantages" of Windows. That is, the ability just to turn on a computer and start using it, without identifying yourself or otherwise taking notice of it. You don't get a screenful of diagnostic messages ending with a bunch of green [OK]s while Windows is booting up, "in case that might confuse the poor user". {As a full-time Linux user who has had to attempt to fix a Windows box, I can say that not having those messages is way more inconvenient for the technician than having them is inconvenient for the user. Users can just ignore them, after all. On that logic, maybe we should start building cars where the oil pressure and alternator warning lights don't come on when you first turn on the ignition.} The default privilege level is administrator; but unlike root on a unix system, there are certain actions that are blocked from even an administrator on a Windows system.
I think Windows with passwords is going to be a bit like a pale imitation of KDE.
Who cares? There are programs that will run on OpenBSD that do more or less the same things as what the programs that run on Windows do. Anyone who learned how to use them the way an adult learns -- by understanding the underlying abstract concepts, rather than by simple blind repetition which is the way a child learns -- should be just fine with the alternatives.
And you have to remember that there is a lot of legitimate Windows software that takes advantage of "features" in the inherently-insecure versions of Windows; the very same features that malware takes advantage of. If Vista is built inherently-secure, these programs simply will not run under it unless the security level is downgraded. Users of such programs might be tempted to switch to a BSD variant or GNU/Linux, even if only experimentally at first, just on the basis that at least it can't be any worse than what they're already having to put up with. Learning a few new key bindings is something you only have to do once; updating anti-virus software and recovering from unexplainable crashes are continuous processes.
Between the release of Windows Vista and the release of GunCC 1.0, whenever that happens, there are going to be some interesting times. A lot of people are going to be bitten, and hard, by bad decisions from the past.
I wouldn't just say "make old software PD", simply because an old, buggy binary by itself is still about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. No. If I was going to change any law about software, I would make it so that source code would have to be included with every piece of software, irrespective of whether or not you were allowed to redistribute copies. People have already made plenty of copies of Windows, Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and so forth without the source code.....
What you do is save it as Rich Text format, then apply a bit of
for i in *rtf; do mv $i `basename $i.rtf`.doc; done
to make it look like a.doc file.
How does this work? Microsoft Office actually implements its own little operating system that runs more or less independently of Windows, hooking in at a very low level. It's smart enough to spot what kind of file something is by looking at the contents and not just at the extension {like unix has been doing for years; I'm surprised Microsoft haven't tried to patent that idea}.
Still, I'm all for sending out OpenOffice native files and telling them to deal with it. After all, anyone can run OpenOffice {they might have to download it, is all}; but not everyone can run MS Office.
The real problem is, it's human nature to ignore the Principle of Equivalence, which states that: All means to the same end are equally valid. However, human beings frequently confuse the means with the end, especially when there is one means which is more generally accepted than any other. So people confuse the means, Microsoft Word, with the end, "rich text editing". Or Adobe Photoshop with graphics editing.
From what I can tell, it's an evolutionary/survival thing. Human children are {warning: poor or predictable analogy coming up} born with just a simple bootstrap loader and receive constant, incremental firmware upgrades for the first few years of their lives. We don't "get" abstract concepts at first; we learn to do something by blind, unquestioning imitation and treat it as though it were magic before we understand it fully. And even by the time we reach the stage of abstract thinking, we often stick with whatever we learned by repetition.
It seems that some total n00bs with computers often learn the way children learn, never quite grasping the abstract concepts but content to treat them as inscrutable mysteries.
AutoCad actually used to run on Unix workstations, up to about version 11. I have vague memories from my Uni days of a horrid two-stage process for transferring files between AutoCAD on DOS and AutoCAD on SunOS, involving specially-formatted floppy disks. Chances are somebody still has an original tape with the.tar.Z file somewhere..... now, if you could only get something to read it, it just might still compile on a modern Linux system. It would be blindingly fast, too, since today's machines typically have more RAM than the older machines had HDD space.
Slashdot Mirror
Under GNU/Linux, you can very easily have your distro's standard libraries in /usr/lib and newer versions of the same libraries in /usr/local/lib. Ask anyone who was running Debian Woody :)
They would if they worked here.
..... he asked us what measures we had in place to prevent users from copying software off company PCs. We told him none at all; in fact, we actively encouraged that sort of thing. The poor sod didn't know whether to spunk his pants with glee or explode with rage. He asked us if we were serious and if we knew what the penalties were for violating an End User Licence Agreement? Then we shew him the neat rows of machines running Mandrake 9.2 {so that'll tell you how long ago it was} and asked him which bit of the GPL he thought we were violating.
We actually had someone come round from the Licencing Gestapo {maybe he got tipped off that we had ordered a few dozen PCs with no operating system}, so we thought we'd have a bit of fun with him
As the advert says, for everything else, there's Mastercard.
Perhaps that was where the KDE team got the idea for the system-wide key bindings from?
.....
Applications, especially curses ones, tend to have their own key bindings. For instance, in Nano, ctrl+C = display current position and ctrl+V = down one screen. Konsole passes these through untouched, but it traps ctrl+insert and shift+insert, and uses them to copy to and paste from the system-wide clipboard.
Of course I could use left-drag and middle-click, but that would mean using the mouse
I'm glad I'm British and Working Class. The Government takes care of my tax paperwork for me. Any money on which I owe tax, has already had to have the tax taken out of it, by law, before it gets anywhere near my bank account.
On the downside, employers are still allowed to say something like "Salary GBP25000 PA" when in actual fact employees might get only GBP18000 PA to take home.
I tell you what I miss on some of those new keyboards ..... the "insert" key. There seem to be quite a few keyboard around with just a double-size "delete" key where "insert" and "delete" should be. This mucks up keyboard copy and paste {ctrl+insert and shift+insert} and also makes it harder to use links {insert and delete are used to scroll up and down by lines}.
Where's a mod point when you need it?
Most of the {closed-source} software in use in the world is pirated. The big corporations know this and turn a blind eye to it; because they know that it's effectively free advertising, and free training, for their products. If Caz sees Shaz's pirate copy of Word, there's a chance -- a slim one, but a chance nonetheless -- that she might buy herself a copy; there's even a chance that Shaz might win the lottery or something, have an attack of conscience and decide to pay for all her software. Daz, meanwhile, downloads a shareware graphics editing program that the author has crippled. It will only cost him £50 if he wants to buy the full version, rather than £500 for Adobe Photoshop; so that's a £450 saving. Twenty-eight days later, of course, the program disables saving -- and rather than pay for the full version, he simply gets a pirate copy of Adobe Photoshop. Now, in Daz's mind, he has saved £500!
By swallowing piracy, the big players are reinforcing their monopolies; smaller companies might be more than able to compete with full-priced software, but not when what is rightly or wrongly touted as "THE industry standard" comes effectively for free, so they go out of business. I'm sure if I was feeling in a more RMS-ish mood I'd say it serves them right for selling closed-source software; but I also think it's wrong to shoot someone in the back. Really, if they're going to be defeated in the marketplace, then at least they deserve the honour of being defeated in a free and fair marketplace. At the moment, the market for software is neither.
Securely erasing a drive is as easy as doing a bad block scan {and anyone who does not do a bad block scan on a used drive is being seriously negligent}. This has to do at least two writes {ones and zeros} to every sector on the disk, to prove that it's good; and there's nothing to say it has to rewrite back whatever was there before, so it's enough to leave all zeros or all ones.
Nobody {outside an episode of CSI} has ever recovered data after even one overwrite. If it was easy in practice as the grossly oversimplified theory suggests, then someone would have used the phenomenon to build a storage device, using the principle of "recovering overwritten data", which would have double the capacity of a similarly-sized device. I've encountered nothing like that in all the computer history sites I've visited. The only remotely comparable thing I have ever seen is a big old reel-to-reel audio tape recorder, with a "trick recording" button: this disengaged the erase head, so the new recording sort of mixed into the old recording.
Never mind how much money Gates has given away, the fact is that he should never have had any of it in the first place! Every cent of Bill Gates's obscene personal fortune was obtained by dishonest means. From the development of 8080 BASIC {which was carried out using other people's computers, without payment; yet he had the gall to expect users of BASIC to pay him for it} in the 1970s, to the downright illegal practices of the 1980s and 1990s, to the present day, Bill Gates has been the master of finding something people do, then charging them money for it. And from the 1990s to now, Microsoft have abused their status time and time again; lying and trampling on competition, caring about nothing except their position not as market leaders but as the only players in the market -- and now they are looking to be privatised tax-collectors as well, with Microsoft taking a cut from every product sold.
Had I been at that meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, I would have liked to have dragged Gates into the Gents and given him a damn good kicking.
And for what it's worth I don't think your analogy is at all flawed. Closed-source software is the electronic equivalent of slavery. Anyone who thinks not, just doesn't realise how important the Four Freedoms are.
The first phones were not exactly closed-source either, though. Anyone who grokked the physics involved {about O-level standard} could have built their own phone.
Of course, electromagnetism then was pretty advanced stuff; more like quantum physics today, so probably there weren't that many people that would have understood how a telephone works. But nobody was deliberately seeking to obscure how it worked, either.
First, thanks for pointing out some stuff I omitted to mention as "obvious". The points you mention about alternative platform support, security by obscurity and lack of improvability all spring directly from closedness of source. I forgot to mention them because {in my mind} they are so tightly bound together, but maybe they are worth mentioning again in their own right.
Secondly, your assertion that "some people are okay with such things" may be true -- but for how long? It's been shown that some kids who have been systematically abused by adults to the point where they believe that such abuse is normal, end up going on to become child abusers themselves just because they don't know any different. And although we're {mostly} discussing adults here, I've seen evidence with my own eyes to suggest that even adults still tend to apply the childish learning method around computers. Even if the majority were OK with being beholden to corporate interests, that still would not make it right: what democracy helps us to forget is that sometimes, the majority can be wrong. And when a lot of people find out at the same time that what they believe is wrong, it usually turns ugly.
There is a problem with this because, underneath it all, Skype is still a proprietary, closed technology. This creates an unacceptable barrier to anyone looking to enter the marketplace: competition is not fair and free.
It's absolutely inconceivable that in a civilised country, anyone should have to licence "intellectual property" from anyone else just to do their job. This is nothing short of privatised taxation.
The telephone network -- indeed, all public infrastructures, be they roads, railways, sewers, power lines or hospitals -- exists for the benefit of Society at Large, all of us, not just those who pay money to private corporations; and it is the place of governments -- as our elected representatives whose wages we pay -- to ensure that everyone has the ability to benefit therefrom.
I have a few ideas for simple solution to prevent anything like this ever happening again. Idea no. 1 works like this. If anybody sits on a patent, without actually working it; and somebody subsequently re-invents the same thing, and can demonstrate to the satisfaction of a court that they did so absolutely independently and without looking at the original patent documents, then the patent should be awarded to the re-inventor. Idea no. 2 is as follows: we go back to the old rule from the old days; no prototype, no patent. {What is a patent application without a prototype but a work of science fiction?} Idea no. 3: introduce a general presumption against the granting of patents; that is, every idea is assumed to be neither novel nor inventive, a bounty should be offered to anyone who can produce evidence of Prior Art which would nullify a patent application, and in the event of any dispute the courts would have the power to annul a patent, passing it into the Public Domain, and award token damages {of as little as 1 cent} for infringement. Idea no. 4 is similar to no. 1, but instead of awarding the patent to the reinventor, it would simply be annulled and the invention would pass into the Public Domain.
.....
Seriously, the original idea of patents was to enable a hardworking amateur inventor -- who may well have invested their life savings in their invention -- to enter the marketplace on a level footing with those already able to pass an invention off as their own, by providing an official document saying "This is exactly how it works, no bits left out, and by the way I invented it"; which would be valid for long enough for the inventor to recoup their costs and make a little profit, subject to the success of the invention of course, before it being given to the whole of humankind for the benefit of everyone. This serves to balance the individual's goal of short-term gratification with the larger goal of society at large, which is for everyone to benefit in the long term from the endeavours of everyone else. It was never the original intent that patents should be used as a trip-wire, effectively to stifle innovation by pre-empting the work of others.
Just think what would have happened if Cave-man had tried to patent fire, or stone axes, or taming wolves to help with hunting
I got wondering the other day, what happens if an under-age child undresses within sight of a CCTV camera? Does that automatically make the CCTV tapes child porn, and the staff in the monitoring station nonces? Should they be placed on the Sex Offenders' Register and barred for life from having jobs where they might come into contact with children?
Of course, but everything is different where there is a computer involved.
If I tried to sell you a car and then charge you another ton each for the seat belts, that would be illegal, right? because seat belts save lives {and, coincidentally, save the taxpayer money}. If I sold you a gas boiler and someone standing outside the house could shut it off -- or blow it up -- by doing something unless you bought an optional safety device costing £50, that would be illegal, right? because gas appliances are supposed to work as far as possible and fail safely.
The whole concept of "fitness for purpose" seems to have had as much effect on computer software as the Reformation had on Spain. Windows, with its focus on apparent ease-of-use at the expense of all else, sells because people don't want to believe that sometimes, doing something properly is hard.
Last I checked, you could run KDE {which includes Kivio} on OpenBSD. If not, have you tried using a pencil and paper?
"IE runs in a sandbox" ? WTF?
.....
Now I really don't know whether to laugh or cry. Microsoft appear to have given up on making the web browser secure. Given that a web browser is just a program for displaying files {not for editing them, and definitely not for executing them}, that's a really big admission of defeat. Konqueror doesn't need to run in a sandbox
The open development model may be the "only" advantage Linux has over Windows, but it's a very big "only"! It's like saying that the "only" advantage television has over radio is pictures .....
..... And by requiring all that, you immediately nullify one of the chief "advantages" of Windows. That is, the ability just to turn on a computer and start using it, without identifying yourself or otherwise taking notice of it. You don't get a screenful of diagnostic messages ending with a bunch of green [OK]s while Windows is booting up, "in case that might confuse the poor user". {As a full-time Linux user who has had to attempt to fix a Windows box, I can say that not having those messages is way more inconvenient for the technician than having them is inconvenient for the user. Users can just ignore them, after all. On that logic, maybe we should start building cars where the oil pressure and alternator warning lights don't come on when you first turn on the ignition.} The default privilege level is administrator; but unlike root on a unix system, there are certain actions that are blocked from even an administrator on a Windows system.
I think Windows with passwords is going to be a bit like a pale imitation of KDE.
Who cares? There are programs that will run on OpenBSD that do more or less the same things as what the programs that run on Windows do. Anyone who learned how to use them the way an adult learns -- by understanding the underlying abstract concepts, rather than by simple blind repetition which is the way a child learns -- should be just fine with the alternatives.
And you have to remember that there is a lot of legitimate Windows software that takes advantage of "features" in the inherently-insecure versions of Windows; the very same features that malware takes advantage of. If Vista is built inherently-secure, these programs simply will not run under it unless the security level is downgraded. Users of such programs might be tempted to switch to a BSD variant or GNU/Linux, even if only experimentally at first, just on the basis that at least it can't be any worse than what they're already having to put up with. Learning a few new key bindings is something you only have to do once; updating anti-virus software and recovering from unexplainable crashes are continuous processes.
Between the release of Windows Vista and the release of GunCC 1.0, whenever that happens, there are going to be some interesting times. A lot of people are going to be bitten, and hard, by bad decisions from the past.
I wouldn't just say "make old software PD", simply because an old, buggy binary by itself is still about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. No. If I was going to change any law about software, I would make it so that source code would have to be included with every piece of software, irrespective of whether or not you were allowed to redistribute copies. People have already made plenty of copies of Windows, Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and so forth without the source code .....
How does this work? Microsoft Office actually implements its own little operating system that runs more or less independently of Windows, hooking in at a very low level. It's smart enough to spot what kind of file something is by looking at the contents and not just at the extension {like unix has been doing for years; I'm surprised Microsoft haven't tried to patent that idea}.
Still, I'm all for sending out OpenOffice native files and telling them to deal with it. After all, anyone can run OpenOffice {they might have to download it, is all}; but not everyone can run MS Office.
Has anyone tried to get the Mac version to compile on Linux? Where does it barf?
The real problem is, it's human nature to ignore the Principle of Equivalence, which states that: All means to the same end are equally valid. However, human beings frequently confuse the means with the end, especially when there is one means which is more generally accepted than any other. So people confuse the means, Microsoft Word, with the end, "rich text editing". Or Adobe Photoshop with graphics editing.
From what I can tell, it's an evolutionary/survival thing. Human children are {warning: poor or predictable analogy coming up} born with just a simple bootstrap loader and receive constant, incremental firmware upgrades for the first few years of their lives. We don't "get" abstract concepts at first; we learn to do something by blind, unquestioning imitation and treat it as though it were magic before we understand it fully. And even by the time we reach the stage of abstract thinking, we often stick with whatever we learned by repetition.
It seems that some total n00bs with computers often learn the way children learn, never quite grasping the abstract concepts but content to treat them as inscrutable mysteries.
AutoCad actually used to run on Unix workstations, up to about version 11. I have vague memories from my Uni days of a horrid two-stage process for transferring files between AutoCAD on DOS and AutoCAD on SunOS, involving specially-formatted floppy disks. Chances are somebody still has an original tape with the .tar.Z file somewhere ..... now, if you could only get something to read it, it just might still compile on a modern Linux system. It would be blindingly fast, too, since today's machines typically have more RAM than the older machines had HDD space.