Sure it does: at some point, in some application, it popped up a dialog box asking you to authorize it; it's just that you told it to remember.
so that once you've entered a login and password (and confirm that Keychain should handle it in the future) the login happens without presenting the user with a login panel at all.
You say that as if it's a good thing.
However different the UI implementation is, it seems to me that the basic concept is the same and I'm not sure why any company (at this point) should be awarded a patent for it.
The UI is what the patent is on.
And I really don't see why people need to drag Apple into everything. Apple didn't invent keyrings and they weren't the first to deliver them commercially either.
There's nothing wrong with blacklisting as long as each customer can choose which blacklist they want to use (if any). That's the way most blacklists work: they are opt-in.
What is wrong here is that the ISP itself makes the decision unilaterally and uniformly for all its customers.
The key behind the patent seems to be (from the summary--the actual link doesn't seem to be working) that the user types the master password into the same space where the original password went. Current keychains use a separate dialog box.
Does it have prior art? I really don't know. Is it a silly patent? You bet. But thanks to its patent portfolion, IBM can beat up SCO and hold Microsoft at bay. Until software patents are abolished, companies need to keep applying for this kind of stuff.
We should really require "definitive, scientific proof" that other pens are safe before using them.
Let me add that there are probably many alcohol-based markers that are safe to use on CDs. But as long as it's not been specifically and carefully tested on CDs, you don't know. And it's hard to tell what kinds of solvents and inks any non-water-based pen uses anyway. In fact, even water-based pens and inks could damage CDs (depending on what the manufacturer added), it's just that given the various choices, they seem like the safest choice right now. And some of them are specifically marketed for CDs.
I call FUD on this. The alcohol solvent used with permanent markers evaporates quickly into the air.
Permanent markers use all sorts of solvents, not just alcohol. They also use all sorts of inks, including oil-based inks.
And as a poster below has mentioned, Sanford states that in all of the testing they have done they cannot reproduce a case of the solvent attacking polycarbonate.
But CDs aren't just polycarbonate; they contain glues, dyes, and other components.
I've been unable to find a definitive, scientific study that shows any link whatsoever between the alcohol solvent and the polycarbonate CD substrate.
Your thinking is analogous to the bogus arguments people make about global warming. First, you use an absurdly simplified model. Then, you require "definitive" proof before stopping to engage in something that is potentially risky.
It's really simple: water-based pens are, by their nature, less likely to do damage to the various components of a CD. Since they are cheap and effective, they are the prudent choice. We should really require "definitive, scientific proof" that other pens are safe before using them.
While this may sound like it's really high-tech, these kinds of user interfaces have been part of science fiction movies and television shows for a long time. After all, you don't need a lot of props or complicated screen simulations to make it look good.
Permanent markers use solvents that can easily damage CDs.
There are special water-based CD marking pens. They are both convenient and probably safe. I would guess that water-based overhead pens are probably OK as well.
It seems to me that many of the same Slashdotters ranting and raving against environmentalists, energy conservation, and solar power here on earth also are ardent proponents of colonizing the moon and the planets.
Why is solar power good if it is a light second away but bad if it is in much more accessible places like the Sahara desert? Why not first deploy solar power stations in the Sahara and then figure out how to do it on the moon?
And how do you think people are going to manage to live on the moon, where everything needs to be recycled, when we can't even manage to even keep our resource needs from growing disproportionately, let alone live in balance, here on earth?
I think manned space exploration is a waste of money and time. But perhaps there is one good thing that would come out of it: a lot of people would finally begin to understand what environmentalists have been saying all along.
Buying an Opteron machine at Sun makes about as much sense as buying meatballs-and-potatoes at an expensive French restaurant--it's probably going to be fairly good eating, but it just kind of misses the point and end up paying way too much for it.
I think Sun is basically doomed. Unlike the restaurant industry, the computer industry doesn't have much of an expensive vanity market. Sun has nothing to offer in their hardware product line that AMD and Intel-based solutions don't do better and cheaper, and Solaris is an antiquated behemoth. Sun probably isn't making any money from Java either.
Let's just hope Sun won't get vicious on their way out, like SCO did. With their legal teeth sunk firmly into Java and the Java specifications (check their patent portfolio and licenses), Sun's legal team can do enormous amounts of damage to the open source Java community.
Sure, it's Qt based. Qt is doing just fine, it seems (watch KDE for proof), Trooltech are considering expanding their business.
Yes, KDE is a popular desktop, but most vendors that have to pick a toolkit for their platform (rather than a single application) pick Gtk+ over Qt, not because it's better, but because of its license. That's why Sun used Gtk+ as the basis for their native GUI efforts, and why IBM used Gtk+ as the basis for SWT.
You still fail to understand: Lorentz only showed that the detailed dynamics of that system were impossible to predict. But you could certainly predict such things as long-term average values. And that's what climate is concerned with.
In fact, in the long term, global average temperature prediction mainly depends on how much energy comes in, how much goes out, and how much gets converted into heat. The major uncertainties we have are how the reflectance of the globe will change as temperatures change and what the lifetimes of various greenhouse gasses will be in the atmosphere. But we know enough about those to know with certainty that devastating global warming will occur if we continue along our current course. The only question is when.
Club of Rome. Back in the early 70's there was an outfit called the Club of Rome. They ran their computer models and claimed that the world would run out of gas in 1985. Got a lot of press when they made their claim. None of them were around in 1985 to admit they were wrong.
Yes, they were wrong because huge new oil and gas reserves were discovered. But their warning was well-justified: nobody could predict that those reserves actually were going to be discovered.
Even with those reserves, many people believe that oil and gas production is at its peak and will slowly decline from here because we really are using up a finite resource.
Ehrlich and Simon. In 1980, Julian Simon (Univ. of Maryland) challenged Paul Ehrlich (Stanford) to a bet. Erhlich had been harping on how with the exploding world population we were going to run out resources real soon and prices were going to skyrocket.
Well, we solved that problem by simply not giving access to those resources to the billions of people added to the world population. So, yes, prices didn't explode for the people with access to resources, but the means by which we achieved that is roughly the equivalent of Soviet price controls.
Weather forecasting. In 1963, Lorenz demonstrated that you can't make reliable long term weather forecasts even when you have a perfect weather model and all the data accurate to 6 decimal places. It was a key finding and yet you still have people making global warming forecasts for the next 100 years as if Lorenz hadn't already demonstrated they can't possibly know what they're talking about.
Global warming isn't about "weather forecasting", which is short-term dynamics, it is about long-term average trends. Chaos is not involved in there. The only uncertainty in predicting global warming is what kinds of feedback mechanisms exist. Without positive feedback, current greenhouse gas levels have little influence on the climate, with positive feedback, current greenhouse gas levels are already responsible for a rise in temperature. Negative feedback is a possibility but seems unlikely and would only operate over a limited range of greenhouse gas concentrations anyway. But no matter which model you believe in, growth in greenhouse gas concentrations will sooner or later lead to devastating global warming; the only question is whether disaster results from current growth levels within a decade or within a century.
The earth may be getting warmer right now but it's not likely that it's due to us pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Look at the CO2 and Methane data and the temperature correlation isn't all that great.
Again, you are barking up the wrong tree. Whether current greenhouse gas emissions have already caused global warming is an interesting academic debate with almost no policy implications. What matters is that continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions invariably will cause global warming at some point--we simply don't know when. And it is clear that the consequences will be devastating when that occurs and that it will be far too late to do anything about it (because the half life of CO2 in the atmosphere is of the order of centuries).
"... Now a team of scientists from Britain, Germany and Indonesia has reported that as Indonesia's forests burned in 1997, the smouldering peat beneath released as much as 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon into the air.
That is equivalent to 40 percent of the global emissions from burning fossil fuels that year, and was the prime cause of the biggest annual increase in atmospheric CO2 levels since records began more than 40 years ago."
And what is your point exactly? That because we already get lots of CO2 emissions one way, it's OK to dump even more into the air? Some people do their financial management that way, too: "well, we've already spent $21k on a new car, why not spend another $5k on a vacation, what harm can it do". They often end up bankrupt.
Besides, CO2 released from forest fires is obviously self-limiting and non-fossil: those peat bogs won't be able to burn again until the forest has recaptured the carbon from the atmosphere.
But fossil fuels represent a huge amount of stored carbon, possibly many times of what all organic material on land current contains. And that carbon has not been present in the atmosphere for a long time (if ever).
Because environmentalists want to change a lot more than power generation. The big sources of greenhouse gasses aren't power plants so much as factories, the ones that make the things than we use to maintain our standard of living.
Other nations manage to produce goods and services far more efficiently (both in terms of energy and human resources) than the US. So, no, emissions at US levels are clearly not necessary to maintain our standard of living. The only reason the US gets away with it is because it has managed to procure itself an unreasonably cheap supply of energy.
Basically, the US is externalizing some of its costs and asking the rest of the world to put up with it. That may seem like a good deal for the US in the short run, but it cannot be justified either ethically or legally, and it will sooner or later cause serious conflict.
It doesn't matter whether current temperature trends are due to human greenhouse gas emissions. What matters is that greenhouse gas emissions will, in the foreseeable future, cause warming. That's not anything people are debating, it's elementary physics. The only question is how soon and how much.
Why do people like you want to submit the entire world to this kind of risk? How can you justify that given that any benefits are distributed very unevenly? And, in fact, where is the factual evidence that continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions even help our economy?
The unproven and dangerous thing is what proponents of the current economic policy are advocating: emitting climate-changing gasses into the atmosphere, putting the world at risk, and without any clearcut evidence that it is either safe or economically beneficial to do so. Show us your proof and evidence.
Remember, having what one thinks in ones brain is a "good" motive does not justify acts that potentially harm (physically, financially, or otherwise) others.
But physical and financial harm are not the same. Global warming threatens to kill hundreds of millions of people. It is not a certainty that it will, but it likely, and it becomes a certainty beyond some (unknown) level of greenhouse gas concentrations. If we keep growing, we will hit that.
Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions threaten what, exactly? So far, anti-environmentalists haven't even been able to demonstrate that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be economically harmful. All they really do is threaten a few economically powerful special interests.
So it is something that warrants careful study, and re-study, and checks and balances to come about to a proper conclusion (or as close as you can reasonbly get).
So, why do you want to do the unproven, risky thing? We know we can live well at lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Europe demonstrates that relative to the US, and the US demonstrates it in comparison with its own history. But people like you want to continue to increase greenhouse gas emissions and put our global climate at risk, because, well, why exactly?
I would say that anyone completely believing in EITHER side is just as bad as anyone completely believing in the OTHER side.
You are under the mistaken assumption that environmentalists "completely believe" in a causal connection between greenhouse gas emissions and measurable climate change.
In reality, that causal connection doesn't even matter. Greenhouse gas emissions clearly will affect our climate beyond some level. Whether we have already reached that level or whether that is yet to happen is a minor detail. You completely believe that it is harmless, while environmentalists say "let's not continue on this path until we have reasonable scientific proof that it is safe and until we have reasonable economic proof that it is beneficial".
but there are thousands of lines of copied code...
on
IBM Puts Pressure On SCO
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Here is one:
break;
Here is another one:
}
This blatant violation of SCO's intellectual property has occurred all over the Linux kernel and many GNU user programs.
You seem to be under the illusion that there is some good solution for this problem. There isn't. If you have crowded streets, emergency vehicles often will not have a clear way, that's just the way it is. And motorists cannot always pull to the right: there may be no room or it may be unsafe. And just because it seems obvious to you sitting in an emergency vehicle that people should move one way or another to let you go where you want to go, and that it would be safe for them to do so, doesn't mean it is obvious to them. Life isn't perfect. Sorry.
And do you suppose corporations and politicians with billions of dollars at stake are not "biased"?
I prefer the folks who are biased for the safe, conservative thing to do: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until we can be certain that they are safe in the long term.
Not to sound like a mean old man (well ok, I am a mean old man), but the hardest part of any such project would be sifting the bullshit out from the data.
Odds of actually achieving a useful, properly updated, set of data aren't actually zero, but they're pretty damn close.
Yeah, just like we never will be able to create software collaboratively with hundreds of developers involved. Too much opportunity for mischief and error. It will never happen. Oh, wait...
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's Keychain doesn't work that way, however.
Sure it does: at some point, in some application, it popped up a dialog box asking you to authorize it; it's just that you told it to remember.
so that once you've entered a login and password (and confirm that Keychain should handle it in the future) the login happens without presenting the user with a login panel at all.
You say that as if it's a good thing.
However different the UI implementation is, it seems to me that the basic concept is the same and I'm not sure why any company (at this point) should be awarded a patent for it.
The UI is what the patent is on.
And I really don't see why people need to drag Apple into everything. Apple didn't invent keyrings and they weren't the first to deliver them commercially either.
There's nothing wrong with blacklisting as long as each customer can choose which blacklist they want to use (if any). That's the way most blacklists work: they are opt-in.
What is wrong here is that the ISP itself makes the decision unilaterally and uniformly for all its customers.
That "blue card thingie" is not a photograph of a real object, it's a computer-generated illustration.
The key behind the patent seems to be (from the summary--the actual link doesn't seem to be working) that the user types the master password into the same space where the original password went. Current keychains use a separate dialog box.
Does it have prior art? I really don't know. Is it a silly patent? You bet. But thanks to its patent portfolion, IBM can beat up SCO and hold Microsoft at bay. Until software patents are abolished, companies need to keep applying for this kind of stuff.
We should really require "definitive, scientific proof" that other pens are safe before using them.
Let me add that there are probably many alcohol-based markers that are safe to use on CDs. But as long as it's not been specifically and carefully tested on CDs, you don't know. And it's hard to tell what kinds of solvents and inks any non-water-based pen uses anyway. In fact, even water-based pens and inks could damage CDs (depending on what the manufacturer added), it's just that given the various choices, they seem like the safest choice right now. And some of them are specifically marketed for CDs.
I see no photographs of a real product on that site, not even a prototype. I kind of doubt that they "have arrived". Looks like vaporware to me.
I call FUD on this. The alcohol solvent used with permanent markers evaporates quickly into the air.
Permanent markers use all sorts of solvents, not just alcohol. They also use all sorts of inks, including oil-based inks.
And as a poster below has mentioned, Sanford states that in all of the testing they have done they cannot reproduce a case of the solvent attacking polycarbonate.
But CDs aren't just polycarbonate; they contain glues, dyes, and other components.
I've been unable to find a definitive, scientific study that shows any link whatsoever between the alcohol solvent and the polycarbonate CD substrate.
Your thinking is analogous to the bogus arguments people make about global warming. First, you use an absurdly simplified model. Then, you require "definitive" proof before stopping to engage in something that is potentially risky.
It's really simple: water-based pens are, by their nature, less likely to do damage to the various components of a CD. Since they are cheap and effective, they are the prudent choice. We should really require "definitive, scientific proof" that other pens are safe before using them.
While this may sound like it's really high-tech, these kinds of user interfaces have been part of science fiction movies and television shows for a long time. After all, you don't need a lot of props or complicated screen simulations to make it look good.
Permanent markers use solvents that can easily damage CDs.
There are special water-based CD marking pens. They are both convenient and probably safe. I would guess that water-based overhead pens are probably OK as well.
It seems to me that many of the same Slashdotters ranting and raving against environmentalists, energy conservation, and solar power here on earth also are ardent proponents of colonizing the moon and the planets.
Why is solar power good if it is a light second away but bad if it is in much more accessible places like the Sahara desert? Why not first deploy solar power stations in the Sahara and then figure out how to do it on the moon?
And how do you think people are going to manage to live on the moon, where everything needs to be recycled, when we can't even manage to even keep our resource needs from growing disproportionately, let alone live in balance, here on earth?
I think manned space exploration is a waste of money and time. But perhaps there is one good thing that would come out of it: a lot of people would finally begin to understand what environmentalists have been saying all along.
Buying an Opteron machine at Sun makes about as much sense as buying meatballs-and-potatoes at an expensive French restaurant--it's probably going to be fairly good eating, but it just kind of misses the point and end up paying way too much for it.
I think Sun is basically doomed. Unlike the restaurant industry, the computer industry doesn't have much of an expensive vanity market. Sun has nothing to offer in their hardware product line that AMD and Intel-based solutions don't do better and cheaper, and Solaris is an antiquated behemoth. Sun probably isn't making any money from Java either.
Let's just hope Sun won't get vicious on their way out, like SCO did. With their legal teeth sunk firmly into Java and the Java specifications (check their patent portfolio and licenses), Sun's legal team can do enormous amounts of damage to the open source Java community.
Sure, it's Qt based. Qt is doing just fine, it seems (watch KDE for proof), Trooltech are considering expanding their business.
Yes, KDE is a popular desktop, but most vendors that have to pick a toolkit for their platform (rather than a single application) pick Gtk+ over Qt, not because it's better, but because of its license. That's why Sun used Gtk+ as the basis for their native GUI efforts, and why IBM used Gtk+ as the basis for SWT.
That's interesting: I didn't know it was QT based (I assumed it was yet-another-toolkit); I might look at it now.
Have fun.
Gtk is easier to program but the results are very ugly.
Gtk+ looks whichever you want it to look: it's completely themable, down to using SVG. Maybe you need to pick a different theme.
You still fail to understand: Lorentz only showed that the detailed dynamics of that system were impossible to predict. But you could certainly predict such things as long-term average values. And that's what climate is concerned with.
In fact, in the long term, global average temperature prediction mainly depends on how much energy comes in, how much goes out, and how much gets converted into heat. The major uncertainties we have are how the reflectance of the globe will change as temperatures change and what the lifetimes of various greenhouse gasses will be in the atmosphere. But we know enough about those to know with certainty that devastating global warming will occur if we continue along our current course. The only question is when.
Club of Rome. Back in the early 70's there was an outfit called the Club of Rome. They ran their computer models and claimed that the world would run out of gas in 1985. Got a lot of press when they made their claim. None of them were around in 1985 to admit they were wrong.
Yes, they were wrong because huge new oil and gas reserves were discovered. But their warning was well-justified: nobody could predict that those reserves actually were going to be discovered.
Even with those reserves, many people believe that oil and gas production is at its peak and will slowly decline from here because we really are using up a finite resource.
Ehrlich and Simon. In 1980, Julian Simon (Univ. of Maryland) challenged Paul Ehrlich (Stanford) to a bet. Erhlich had been harping on how with the exploding world population we were going to run out resources real soon and prices were going to skyrocket.
Well, we solved that problem by simply not giving access to those resources to the billions of people added to the world population. So, yes, prices didn't explode for the people with access to resources, but the means by which we achieved that is roughly the equivalent of Soviet price controls.
Weather forecasting. In 1963, Lorenz demonstrated that you can't make reliable long term weather forecasts even when you have a perfect weather model and all the data accurate to 6 decimal places. It was a key finding and yet you still have people making global warming forecasts for the next 100 years as if Lorenz hadn't already demonstrated they can't possibly know what they're talking about.
Global warming isn't about "weather forecasting", which is short-term dynamics, it is about long-term average trends. Chaos is not involved in there. The only uncertainty in predicting global warming is what kinds of feedback mechanisms exist. Without positive feedback, current greenhouse gas levels have little influence on the climate, with positive feedback, current greenhouse gas levels are already responsible for a rise in temperature. Negative feedback is a possibility but seems unlikely and would only operate over a limited range of greenhouse gas concentrations anyway. But no matter which model you believe in, growth in greenhouse gas concentrations will sooner or later lead to devastating global warming; the only question is whether disaster results from current growth levels within a decade or within a century.
The earth may be getting warmer right now but it's not likely that it's due to us pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. Look at the CO2 and Methane data and the temperature correlation isn't all that great.
Again, you are barking up the wrong tree. Whether current greenhouse gas emissions have already caused global warming is an interesting academic debate with almost no policy implications. What matters is that continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions invariably will cause global warming at some point--we simply don't know when. And it is clear that the consequences will be devastating when that occurs and that it will be far too late to do anything about it (because the half life of CO2 in the atmosphere is of the order of centuries).
" ... Now a team of scientists from Britain, Germany and Indonesia has reported that as Indonesia's forests burned in 1997, the smouldering peat beneath released as much as 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon into the air.
That is equivalent to 40 percent of the global emissions from burning fossil fuels that year, and was the prime cause of the biggest annual increase in atmospheric CO2 levels since records began more than 40 years ago."
And what is your point exactly? That because we already get lots of CO2 emissions one way, it's OK to dump even more into the air? Some people do their financial management that way, too: "well, we've already spent $21k on a new car, why not spend another $5k on a vacation, what harm can it do". They often end up bankrupt.
Besides, CO2 released from forest fires is obviously self-limiting and non-fossil: those peat bogs won't be able to burn again until the forest has recaptured the carbon from the atmosphere.
But fossil fuels represent a huge amount of stored carbon, possibly many times of what all organic material on land current contains. And that carbon has not been present in the atmosphere for a long time (if ever).
Because environmentalists want to change a lot more than power generation. The big sources of greenhouse gasses aren't power plants so much as factories, the ones that make the things than we use to maintain our standard of living.
Other nations manage to produce goods and services far more efficiently (both in terms of energy and human resources) than the US. So, no, emissions at US levels are clearly not necessary to maintain our standard of living. The only reason the US gets away with it is because it has managed to procure itself an unreasonably cheap supply of energy.
Basically, the US is externalizing some of its costs and asking the rest of the world to put up with it. That may seem like a good deal for the US in the short run, but it cannot be justified either ethically or legally, and it will sooner or later cause serious conflict.
It doesn't matter whether current temperature trends are due to human greenhouse gas emissions. What matters is that greenhouse gas emissions will, in the foreseeable future, cause warming. That's not anything people are debating, it's elementary physics. The only question is how soon and how much.
Why do people like you want to submit the entire world to this kind of risk? How can you justify that given that any benefits are distributed very unevenly? And, in fact, where is the factual evidence that continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions even help our economy?
The unproven and dangerous thing is what proponents of the current economic policy are advocating: emitting climate-changing gasses into the atmosphere, putting the world at risk, and without any clearcut evidence that it is either safe or economically beneficial to do so. Show us your proof and evidence.
Remember, having what one thinks in ones brain is a "good" motive does not justify acts that potentially harm (physically, financially, or otherwise) others.
But physical and financial harm are not the same. Global warming threatens to kill hundreds of millions of people. It is not a certainty that it will, but it likely, and it becomes a certainty beyond some (unknown) level of greenhouse gas concentrations. If we keep growing, we will hit that.
Reductions in greenhouse gas emissions threaten what, exactly? So far, anti-environmentalists haven't even been able to demonstrate that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be economically harmful. All they really do is threaten a few economically powerful special interests.
So it is something that warrants careful study, and re-study, and checks and balances to come about to a proper conclusion (or as close as you can reasonbly get).
So, why do you want to do the unproven, risky thing? We know we can live well at lower levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Europe demonstrates that relative to the US, and the US demonstrates it in comparison with its own history. But people like you want to continue to increase greenhouse gas emissions and put our global climate at risk, because, well, why exactly?
I would say that anyone completely believing in EITHER side is just as bad as anyone completely believing in the OTHER side.
You are under the mistaken assumption that environmentalists "completely believe" in a causal connection between greenhouse gas emissions and measurable climate change.
In reality, that causal connection doesn't even matter. Greenhouse gas emissions clearly will affect our climate beyond some level. Whether we have already reached that level or whether that is yet to happen is a minor detail. You completely believe that it is harmless, while environmentalists say "let's not continue on this path until we have reasonable scientific proof that it is safe and until we have reasonable economic proof that it is beneficial".
No charges pressed, only people who suffer are SCO's employees. SCO gets taken over or closed for good.
SCO investors stand the most to lose--the dummies that just paid top $$$ for inflated SCO stock prices.
You seem to be under the illusion that there is some good solution for this problem. There isn't. If you have crowded streets, emergency vehicles often will not have a clear way, that's just the way it is. And motorists cannot always pull to the right: there may be no room or it may be unsafe. And just because it seems obvious to you sitting in an emergency vehicle that people should move one way or another to let you go where you want to go, and that it would be safe for them to do so, doesn't mean it is obvious to them. Life isn't perfect. Sorry.
And do you suppose corporations and politicians with billions of dollars at stake are not "biased"?
I prefer the folks who are biased for the safe, conservative thing to do: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until we can be certain that they are safe in the long term.
Not to sound like a mean old man (well ok, I am a mean old man), but the hardest part of any such project would be sifting the bullshit out from the data.
You mean like this?
Odds of actually achieving a useful, properly updated, set of data aren't actually zero, but they're pretty damn close.
Yeah, just like we never will be able to create software collaboratively with hundreds of developers involved. Too much opportunity for mischief and error. It will never happen. Oh, wait...
That's easy: there is lots of competition in the IDE market. Why would people buy Kylix if they can get so many IDEs for free?
Furthermore, it's Qt-based and Qt isn't doing so well: IBM, Sun, RedHat, and other major players are putting most of their efforts into Gtk+.