Wow lots of lawyers on slashdot nowadays. Might be a difference in venue though. IANAL but am pretty sure the other guy is right when it comes to belgian copyright law (and by extension, probably most western european). Not so sure about US specifics. I believe the way I have been thought about the subject (a while back) there had to be some sort of distinguishing value in the original photograph, i.e. it mainly relates to art where the position of people/objects is important to the end result.
I totally agree with you, and if you've read Goslings reasoning behind WHY he didn't include signedness, you'll need to pick your jaw up off the floor. Do you happen to have a link for that? Haven't read it yet.
Re:Is it any faster for client-side apps?
on
Java SE 6 Released
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· Score: 1
Once you go to a newer pc (e.g. something like a P4+ with 1GB RAM) it improves considerably. What I find really annoying is that it still varies a lot from platform to platform. I've run azureus (a popular bittorrent app in SWT) on both windows and linux and several parts of the interface just worked better under windows. It links to the GTK-java libraries under linux so should in theory be pretty snappy, but the difference (especially in the 'peers' dialog) is very noticeable. As to your comment about slower PC's, I've tried running jEdit on a P3 with win2000 and it was indeed not pretty.
A thing with clientside java apps you might have also noticed, they really try very hard at reaching their OOM condition. Having done some java coding myself, I believe a big portion of it is simply bad coding, e.g. not clearing your references, keeping way too much info in memory, not using java.nio when you should, etc. This is more of a developer problem, but I believe inevitable when you abstract away as much as you do in java. Still prefer its memory handling to that of C though.:-)
I don't know, just how much support do you need on this kind of software anyway? Accountability? What can you keep Microsoft accountable for? I know support is really handy when your sun server just went down because of a hardware issue and you need it back up within the hour, but for anything else I think a big enough company can just do in-house support.
That and I thought Sun still offered staroffice, so you can go with that no?
I don't agree with your comment about MWAST. It's not because Microsoft made it that it doesn't work. However I was also wondering about their OOM errors. A president is a 7KB (on average) picture plus a start date, end date, name, and a summary. Consider that this might be an extra 3KB. So 10KB per row, you're returning 300 rows per client, the memory usage is supposedly linear in the number of rows.
So that's about 47 megs as a lower bound for 16 users (16*10*300). A strict upper bound would be about 750 megs (previous *16), and in fact much lower. In any case it's lower than 1024 megs, which is what you'd expect a server to at least have. It should take a lot longer by these measurements, though I might be missing something here. The article doesn't really include a lot of details about the ways the measurements were taken, which make them a bit suspect.
Hmm that's a very well thought out point but I can't really agree with your comparison with World War II. After all, the casus belli was much greater, the attack on Pearl Harbor gave the government a lot more goodwill and getting "out" of the war wasn't exactly an option (unless you could somehow convince the Japanese to stop attacking). Spin goes either way in American media and if I remember my history lessons correctly, America (except for its president) was unwilling to join the battle at first, but Japanese hostility left them no real choice.
Fast forward to Vietnam. No attack on US soil, US are 'stopping communism' which is supported by a lot of government propaganda but how far would the public be willing to go? I think people realised that WWII wasn't a cakewalk but they didn't really see any choice. (the mood must have been quite belligerent after Pearl Harbor, and remained so for a long time) Vietnam was generally thought of as an easy victory though: troops go in, shoot up the place, victory, go out. It was also a conflict in which the US presence in Vietnam was a target, not necessarily the US itself. Neither could the US claim moral high ground.
The guerilla tactics and the persistence of the enemy surprised a lot of people. After that new troops kept being sent in, again and again. As the war grew longer, it became clear that it would not be an easy victory. The Vietnamese people it seemed, didn't want the Americans' help anyway. After a while, morale hit zero and kept on falling. It is at this point that America lost the war. Whether the US army could have won in a world without morale is a theoretical argument at best, wars are not fought independently of the people that fight them and the economy that supports them. I don't believe that people at the time of WWII were unaware of the casualties. It was just a much more conventional war. True, media might have been a bit more sympathetic to the government's point of view. Is it such a bad thing that the general public started viewing the atrocities committed by US troops as just plain wrong?
I think your point about starship troopers is very good. Your interventionist attitude is typical of current and past US international doctrine (from the second part of the 20th century at least), but the devil is in the details. You automatically assume communism is 'evil'. On the other hand, not getting involved in the Vietnam war would probably have saved the lives of a lot of civilians (not to mention soldiers). Which is the more evil, allowing communism to take hold or killing thousands upon thousands of people? The answer is certainly not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
In the current international climate one can agree that governments should take collective action against genocide. Other 'crimes against humanity' are much harder to agree on. I assume you're partly talking about the Iraq war, but the parallels to Vietnam are astounding. How many people in Iraq really wanted the Americans' help? There's years of propaganda, not to mention the fact that the country is effectively occupied by a foreign nation now.
War is sometimes a necessary evil, but once you stop talking about self-defence you end up in a really murky and grayish moral area. Was the NATO intervention in serbia a good thing? Yes, because it stopped a genocide and both countries seem on their way to recovery. Was the Iraq invasion a good thing? We don't know yet but on the short term it is certainly disastrous. Did you actually 'free' anybody or are you just responsible for triggering a civil war that could go on for decades? Does your definition of 'free' even agree with theirs? If it doesn't, how do you know which one is correct? In the end, that's not a question a soldier should really be asking himself, but at least the government officials (usually civilians) who start the war should be and somehow I don't think they do.
Perhaps a democracy is not the right form of government for a country like Iraq. Perhaps they needed some more time to figure
Vietnam was a fiasco due to the media messing with the morale of the American People
Seriously? How many soldiers do you have to lose before you declare a defeat? (the source I found said 58,000 americans, wounded a multiple of that). Vietnam is widely recognized as being a war the US lost. The reason? Gross mismanagement of course. There's a lot that could be argued about it but it was definitely not "the media" who made the US lose the war and morale certainly is a problem, when 58,000 boxes with young americans get shipped home.
Tomb Raider - saw the first one, not the second. Sadly, while utterly dire, it was perfectly pitched for the target audience (hint: not people who read slashdot)[...]
No 14 year old boys on slashdot? I highly doubt that.
Doom - ugh, I quite liked this one, in a "guilty pleasure" kind of way. It captured the atmosphere of the third game reasonably well. I doubt it's really had much of an impact one way or the other on the success of the Doom games, though.
Speaking of guilty pleasures, aren't you all forgetting the resident evil movies?
I currently have mod points but I won't use em on your posts because I see all these comments about 'mod points abuse' around and I thought I should respond.
Whenever I see someone flinging wild accusations around, accusing people of stuff they didn't do, swearing like a sailor and/or insulting people, including telling them to "get fucked" then I consider modding them troll or flamebait.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that since the modding system clearly indicates a value judgement (e.g. there's also an insightful mod). I usually take the stance that people browsing at 1+ don't want that kind of overagressive crap in their discussions and would be glad to skip it.
Also, screaming bloody murder every time you get modded down is pretty childish. You should maybe think about what you said in your post first before assuming you were modded down just because the modder disagrees with you. Usually that's not the reason. I even make it a point to mod people I disagree with up +1 interesting if they manage to make their point in a clear and nonvolatile way. If I think they're absolute morons (of the tinfoil hat variety) I go for overrated which doesn't affect their karma.
Now go ahead and respond with one of those ad hominem attacks, but don't expect anyone to be modding you up.
It seems to me that, in the US at least, Ballmer is 100% right. If you define intellectual property as including patents, and that is including the very ridiculous ones microsoft has, I think you can be sure that Linux is infringing on one of them. Whether the patent holds up in court is another thing, but I'm sure at least a couple of them would (even though they're obvious). I don't see how you could take action against his claims, since he's most likely correct.
Of course, you can do as Red Hat does and indemnify your customers from legal action. That is the real response they've made. A better solution would be the abolishment of software patents but I don't see that one coming any time soon in the US.
I had to go back and install, and manually configure, with no aid of any kind, **everything** -- the multiple ethernet connections, time server, DHCP server, samba, etc -- EVERYTHING defaults to not installed. Worse, even some things that I consider basic stuff --/usr/bin/strings -- isn't installed. And the package system there stinks. I had no idea what package provides stuff like strings, and there's no way to say "Here's a filename, which package owns it".
dpkg -L, apt-file, etc. Didn't know about those? Google could have told you, it's probably in the APT howto. Ubuntu is mostly sold as a desktop OS anyway, if you use it for a server you should know what you're doing first. Note that at this point you have already installed the operating system so the GP was correct. It is easy to install. A server system is meant for experts, e.g. people who actually bother to read the docs to find out the server install option installs a minimum amount of software.
Easy to use? The command line package installer doesn't install recommended packages, at all. The graphical one will default to installing them, but won't tell you why a given package is being installed, and the install for samba turned out to be horrendously huge -- it turns out that besides required, and recommended, there's "suggested", which was a no-no, that defaulted true.
You installed a GUI on a server box? Why? You claim that the command line installer doesn't install recommended packages while aptitude can easily be configured to do so. Basically, you were clueless and are blaming it on the OS.
Easy to use? There's no good way to find out what isn't installed. There's no tool for automatically updating the init.d script links, at least not that I could find (probably in some package that didn't install). The last time I installed from scratch, redhat 7 had a nice configuration tool for controlling all the main parts of the system -- kinda like windows control panel. Granted, it was a first version -- it didn't work properly if a panel was larger than the screen (no scroll bars), but it was a mostly functional, working system.
I call bullshit. No good way to find out what isn't installed? How about the package listing? No tool for updating init.d links? update-rc.d. Yeah debian (and debian-based) systems default to a more unixy way of configuring things. Again, Ubuntu is meant as a desktop OS. What kind of desktop user manually updates init.d links anyway? You failed to educate yourself even in the slightest, got bit by it and blamed it on ubuntu. In fact, slashdot is full with morons who never bother to read even the slightest bit of documentation then complain when it doesn't work EXACTLY like windows. Perhaps there's a good reason it doesn't work like that, ever think of that?
Belgium has a similar system to this. It's a bit less strict since party contributions are allowed but they're capped at a certain amount. Any party that manages to make the voting treshold in a certain area (5% of votes) will get government funding for their next campaign. I personally think it's a very good system since it greatly reduces the influence big business can exert on candidates. Would be interesting to see how it would scale to a bigger country though.
Actually bots would be at a disadvantage since they must grind and grinding is of little value in wow. Real players don't grind in wow because the quest system gives far better points.
You haven't been playing the game long have you? There are tons of different mechanisms involved in the game that require grinding. Even if you can only enable your bot 3 hours at a time, that's still 3 hours or more that you go out and get a drink, while some other poor SOB is grinding away for mats/rep/items. Even (or should I say, especially) the big raiding guilds do a lot of grinding, just to be able to pay for their expensive habits. (the first couple of runs into a new instance are almost never profitable)
So bots do give you a clear advantage. Many people running them still get caught, but as someone else pointed out, the bot writers will get better and better at it. And some stuff, such as fishing in WoW can be really easily simulated. I know the time I've spent on that particular endeavour can be established as being quite machine like, since it consists of about three different actions, repeated endlessly over an hour or so. Someone who would want to get his fishing level up could surely save time by having a bot do it for them. It is the same idea behind buying gold of the internet really, it saves you the time needed to grind all that money. And Blizzard tries to curb that too for the exact same reason.
I was merely pointing out that both cases were widely mediatized and you don't need sources to be able to discuss them. Attributing the AC's sentiments to me is rude to say the least. I have no intent to argue his points for him.
And how do you suggest finding out whether the hardware is sub-standard? How would you even diagnose a problem with your PC? Heck, most small-store owners probably wouldn't be able to track this problem down, let alone joe sixpack when his windows locks up for the xth time and he decides to buy a new comp.
The truth is, most computers more than 3 years old don't do powersaving correctly, and you're gonna be introducing a lot of problems that will make your OS seem buggy and crash-prone (well, no great loss there). Why not let people change the defaults themselves, instead of relying on OS makers to do it? I think people are smart enough to figure some things out on their own, especially considering windows doesn't exactly hide the powersaving settings.
If you ask me, the GPL was always somewhat of a political statement. Never heard of the 4 inherent user freedoms? That's a political statement, and the GPL is its implementation.
The benefit of bots is also in the fact that you can set up a bunch of them with only a few humans operating them. Or set up one and leave it unattended. I dare venture this is more important to the people using them than the actual speed gain. After all, if your bot is running 24/7 you'll still outgrind any human quickly enough.
Slightly OT but on the topic of firefox, the previous version had memory leaks when you opened a bunch of tabs together. I'm thinking about 30 or something. Not all people work like this. My sister will start a browser, open a bunch of tabs, then open another bunch of tabs, then another and it will still be running the same instance hours later. My usage is more "open tabs, read stuff, close browser" so the browser doesn't actually stay open long enough to detect a memory leak.
Firefox 2 often goes to 100% CPU for no apparent reason though, and I have no idea why. It definitely is a regression as compared to firefox 1.5. Then again, I've used IE 7 and I was not impressed. Browsers are such a complicated piece of work nowadays that bugs like these seem inevitable. In the old days we used to call it feature bloat, now it's Web 2.0.
The only way you could require a source on anything he said is if you've been living in a hole for the last 5 years. Here's where you can find your source though.
Couldn't agree more. The whole point of the thing is code sharing in an informal atmosphere. If they don't have the rights to redistribute, copy, etc. they can't do that. People are simply overreacting. Microsoft might have a bad track record, but there's very little reason to believe they'd actually be after your code. I'm assuming we're talking about a pastebin kind of service here, which would just be snippets anyway. Sure, some of it might end up in a Microsoft program. If you don't want other people to use your code, don't post it on there.
I very much doubt Microsoft will provide application support for Linux any time soon. If you're a windows developer then it's pretty logical you'll be using windows for your development (unless you're lucky enough to work on something cross platform).
Linux has some interesting features (especially its software ecosystem) that Windows doesn't have, but I agree that it doesn't apply to everyone. For the average person doing web browsing and mail it'll work well enough though. There's replacements out there for quicken too. (though I have no idea how well they work)
My point being that you can't simply expect it to have the exact same software as windows available. For something with a 5% market share (number pulled out of my ass) you'll have to look at some alternative apps if you actually want the same functionality, quicken right now has no real incentive to get ported to Linux. Though it seems that, by its apparent popularity, a Linux port of it would be a real selling point for the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
modding this down is ridiculous. He has a point and is not looking for a flamewar.
Wow lots of lawyers on slashdot nowadays. Might be a difference in venue though. IANAL but am pretty sure the other guy is right when it comes to belgian copyright law (and by extension, probably most western european). Not so sure about US specifics. I believe the way I have been thought about the subject (a while back) there had to be some sort of distinguishing value in the original photograph, i.e. it mainly relates to art where the position of people/objects is important to the end result.
Thanks :-) Exactly what I was looking for.
Once you go to a newer pc (e.g. something like a P4+ with 1GB RAM) it improves considerably. What I find really annoying is that it still varies a lot from platform to platform. I've run azureus (a popular bittorrent app in SWT) on both windows and linux and several parts of the interface just worked better under windows. It links to the GTK-java libraries under linux so should in theory be pretty snappy, but the difference (especially in the 'peers' dialog) is very noticeable. As to your comment about slower PC's, I've tried running jEdit on a P3 with win2000 and it was indeed not pretty.
:-)
A thing with clientside java apps you might have also noticed, they really try very hard at reaching their OOM condition. Having done some java coding myself, I believe a big portion of it is simply bad coding, e.g. not clearing your references, keeping way too much info in memory, not using java.nio when you should, etc. This is more of a developer problem, but I believe inevitable when you abstract away as much as you do in java. Still prefer its memory handling to that of C though.
I don't know, just how much support do you need on this kind of software anyway? Accountability? What can you keep Microsoft accountable for? I know support is really handy when your sun server just went down because of a hardware issue and you need it back up within the hour, but for anything else I think a big enough company can just do in-house support.
That and I thought Sun still offered staroffice, so you can go with that no?
I don't agree with your comment about MWAST. It's not because Microsoft made it that it doesn't work. However I was also wondering about their OOM errors. A president is a 7KB (on average) picture plus a start date, end date, name, and a summary. Consider that this might be an extra 3KB. So 10KB per row, you're returning 300 rows per client, the memory usage is supposedly linear in the number of rows.
So that's about 47 megs as a lower bound for 16 users (16*10*300). A strict upper bound would be about 750 megs (previous *16), and in fact much lower. In any case it's lower than 1024 megs, which is what you'd expect a server to at least have. It should take a lot longer by these measurements, though I might be missing something here. The article doesn't really include a lot of details about the ways the measurements were taken, which make them a bit suspect.
Hmm that's a very well thought out point but I can't really agree with your comparison with World War II. After all, the casus belli was much greater, the attack on Pearl Harbor gave the government a lot more goodwill and getting "out" of the war wasn't exactly an option (unless you could somehow convince the Japanese to stop attacking). Spin goes either way in American media and if I remember my history lessons correctly, America (except for its president) was unwilling to join the battle at first, but Japanese hostility left them no real choice.
Fast forward to Vietnam. No attack on US soil, US are 'stopping communism' which is supported by a lot of government propaganda but how far would the public be willing to go? I think people realised that WWII wasn't a cakewalk but they didn't really see any choice. (the mood must have been quite belligerent after Pearl Harbor, and remained so for a long time) Vietnam was generally thought of as an easy victory though: troops go in, shoot up the place, victory, go out. It was also a conflict in which the US presence in Vietnam was a target, not necessarily the US itself. Neither could the US claim moral high ground.
The guerilla tactics and the persistence of the enemy surprised a lot of people. After that new troops kept being sent in, again and again. As the war grew longer, it became clear that it would not be an easy victory. The Vietnamese people it seemed, didn't want the Americans' help anyway. After a while, morale hit zero and kept on falling. It is at this point that America lost the war. Whether the US army could have won in a world without morale is a theoretical argument at best, wars are not fought independently of the people that fight them and the economy that supports them. I don't believe that people at the time of WWII were unaware of the casualties. It was just a much more conventional war. True, media might have been a bit more sympathetic to the government's point of view. Is it such a bad thing that the general public started viewing the atrocities committed by US troops as just plain wrong?
I think your point about starship troopers is very good. Your interventionist attitude is typical of current and past US international doctrine (from the second part of the 20th century at least), but the devil is in the details. You automatically assume communism is 'evil'. On the other hand, not getting involved in the Vietnam war would probably have saved the lives of a lot of civilians (not to mention soldiers). Which is the more evil, allowing communism to take hold or killing thousands upon thousands of people? The answer is certainly not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
In the current international climate one can agree that governments should take collective action against genocide. Other 'crimes against humanity' are much harder to agree on. I assume you're partly talking about the Iraq war, but the parallels to Vietnam are astounding. How many people in Iraq really wanted the Americans' help? There's years of propaganda, not to mention the fact that the country is effectively occupied by a foreign nation now.
War is sometimes a necessary evil, but once you stop talking about self-defence you end up in a really murky and grayish moral area. Was the NATO intervention in serbia a good thing? Yes, because it stopped a genocide and both countries seem on their way to recovery. Was the Iraq invasion a good thing? We don't know yet but on the short term it is certainly disastrous. Did you actually 'free' anybody or are you just responsible for triggering a civil war that could go on for decades? Does your definition of 'free' even agree with theirs? If it doesn't, how do you know which one is correct? In the end, that's not a question a soldier should really be asking himself, but at least the government officials (usually civilians) who start the war should be and somehow I don't think they do.
Perhaps a democracy is not the right form of government for a country like Iraq. Perhaps they needed some more time to figure
The rest of your points can be argued for but:
Seriously? How many soldiers do you have to lose before you declare a defeat? (the source I found said 58,000 americans, wounded a multiple of that). Vietnam is widely recognized as being a war the US lost. The reason? Gross mismanagement of course. There's a lot that could be argued about it but it was definitely not "the media" who made the US lose the war and morale certainly is a problem, when 58,000 boxes with young americans get shipped home.
No 14 year old boys on slashdot? I highly doubt that.
Speaking of guilty pleasures, aren't you all forgetting the resident evil movies?
I currently have mod points but I won't use em on your posts because I see all these comments about 'mod points abuse' around and I thought I should respond.
Whenever I see someone flinging wild accusations around, accusing people of stuff they didn't do, swearing like a sailor and/or insulting people, including telling them to "get fucked" then I consider modding them troll or flamebait.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that since the modding system clearly indicates a value judgement (e.g. there's also an insightful mod). I usually take the stance that people browsing at 1+ don't want that kind of overagressive crap in their discussions and would be glad to skip it.
Also, screaming bloody murder every time you get modded down is pretty childish. You should maybe think about what you said in your post first before assuming you were modded down just because the modder disagrees with you. Usually that's not the reason. I even make it a point to mod people I disagree with up +1 interesting if they manage to make their point in a clear and nonvolatile way. If I think they're absolute morons (of the tinfoil hat variety) I go for overrated which doesn't affect their karma.
Now go ahead and respond with one of those ad hominem attacks, but don't expect anyone to be modding you up.
It seems to me that, in the US at least, Ballmer is 100% right. If you define intellectual property as including patents, and that is including the very ridiculous ones microsoft has, I think you can be sure that Linux is infringing on one of them. Whether the patent holds up in court is another thing, but I'm sure at least a couple of them would (even though they're obvious). I don't see how you could take action against his claims, since he's most likely correct.
Of course, you can do as Red Hat does and indemnify your customers from legal action. That is the real response they've made. A better solution would be the abolishment of software patents but I don't see that one coming any time soon in the US.
I must have missed it or something, but nobody seemed to have point out that these people weren't actually naked.
dpkg -L, apt-file, etc. Didn't know about those? Google could have told you, it's probably in the APT howto. Ubuntu is mostly sold as a desktop OS anyway, if you use it for a server you should know what you're doing first. Note that at this point you have already installed the operating system so the GP was correct. It is easy to install. A server system is meant for experts, e.g. people who actually bother to read the docs to find out the server install option installs a minimum amount of software.
You installed a GUI on a server box? Why? You claim that the command line installer doesn't install recommended packages while aptitude can easily be configured to do so. Basically, you were clueless and are blaming it on the OS.
I call bullshit. No good way to find out what isn't installed? How about the package listing? No tool for updating init.d links? update-rc.d. Yeah debian (and debian-based) systems default to a more unixy way of configuring things. Again, Ubuntu is meant as a desktop OS. What kind of desktop user manually updates init.d links anyway? You failed to educate yourself even in the slightest, got bit by it and blamed it on ubuntu. In fact, slashdot is full with morons who never bother to read even the slightest bit of documentation then complain when it doesn't work EXACTLY like windows. Perhaps there's a good reason it doesn't work like that, ever think of that?
Belgium has a similar system to this. It's a bit less strict since party contributions are allowed but they're capped at a certain amount. Any party that manages to make the voting treshold in a certain area (5% of votes) will get government funding for their next campaign. I personally think it's a very good system since it greatly reduces the influence big business can exert on candidates. Would be interesting to see how it would scale to a bigger country though.
You haven't been playing the game long have you? There are tons of different mechanisms involved in the game that require grinding. Even if you can only enable your bot 3 hours at a time, that's still 3 hours or more that you go out and get a drink, while some other poor SOB is grinding away for mats/rep/items. Even (or should I say, especially) the big raiding guilds do a lot of grinding, just to be able to pay for their expensive habits. (the first couple of runs into a new instance are almost never profitable)
So bots do give you a clear advantage. Many people running them still get caught, but as someone else pointed out, the bot writers will get better and better at it. And some stuff, such as fishing in WoW can be really easily simulated. I know the time I've spent on that particular endeavour can be established as being quite machine like, since it consists of about three different actions, repeated endlessly over an hour or so. Someone who would want to get his fishing level up could surely save time by having a bot do it for them. It is the same idea behind buying gold of the internet really, it saves you the time needed to grind all that money. And Blizzard tries to curb that too for the exact same reason.
I was merely pointing out that both cases were widely mediatized and you don't need sources to be able to discuss them. Attributing the AC's sentiments to me is rude to say the least. I have no intent to argue his points for him.
And how do you suggest finding out whether the hardware is sub-standard? How would you even diagnose a problem with your PC? Heck, most small-store owners probably wouldn't be able to track this problem down, let alone joe sixpack when his windows locks up for the xth time and he decides to buy a new comp.
The truth is, most computers more than 3 years old don't do powersaving correctly, and you're gonna be introducing a lot of problems that will make your OS seem buggy and crash-prone (well, no great loss there). Why not let people change the defaults themselves, instead of relying on OS makers to do it? I think people are smart enough to figure some things out on their own, especially considering windows doesn't exactly hide the powersaving settings.
If you ask me, the GPL was always somewhat of a political statement. Never heard of the 4 inherent user freedoms? That's a political statement, and the GPL is its implementation.
The benefit of bots is also in the fact that you can set up a bunch of them with only a few humans operating them. Or set up one and leave it unattended. I dare venture this is more important to the people using them than the actual speed gain. After all, if your bot is running 24/7 you'll still outgrind any human quickly enough.
Well there's always ITER. It's a step in the right direction.
Slightly OT but on the topic of firefox, the previous version had memory leaks when you opened a bunch of tabs together. I'm thinking about 30 or something. Not all people work like this. My sister will start a browser, open a bunch of tabs, then open another bunch of tabs, then another and it will still be running the same instance hours later. My usage is more "open tabs, read stuff, close browser" so the browser doesn't actually stay open long enough to detect a memory leak.
Firefox 2 often goes to 100% CPU for no apparent reason though, and I have no idea why. It definitely is a regression as compared to firefox 1.5. Then again, I've used IE 7 and I was not impressed. Browsers are such a complicated piece of work nowadays that bugs like these seem inevitable. In the old days we used to call it feature bloat, now it's Web 2.0.
The only way you could require a source on anything he said is if you've been living in a hole for the last 5 years. Here's where you can find your source though.
Couldn't agree more. The whole point of the thing is code sharing in an informal atmosphere. If they don't have the rights to redistribute, copy, etc. they can't do that. People are simply overreacting. Microsoft might have a bad track record, but there's very little reason to believe they'd actually be after your code. I'm assuming we're talking about a pastebin kind of service here, which would just be snippets anyway. Sure, some of it might end up in a Microsoft program. If you don't want other people to use your code, don't post it on there.
I very much doubt Microsoft will provide application support for Linux any time soon. If you're a windows developer then it's pretty logical you'll be using windows for your development (unless you're lucky enough to work on something cross platform).
Linux has some interesting features (especially its software ecosystem) that Windows doesn't have, but I agree that it doesn't apply to everyone. For the average person doing web browsing and mail it'll work well enough though. There's replacements out there for quicken too. (though I have no idea how well they work)
My point being that you can't simply expect it to have the exact same software as windows available. For something with a 5% market share (number pulled out of my ass) you'll have to look at some alternative apps if you actually want the same functionality, quicken right now has no real incentive to get ported to Linux. Though it seems that, by its apparent popularity, a Linux port of it would be a real selling point for the OS.