The fact of the matter is that Slashdot's servers contain copyrighted material. The copyright holder asked that it be removed. Your response seems to be, "well, you suck, and should never have copyrighted it in the first place. Nyahh!"
While./'s servers may contain copyrighted material, I believe Andover's lawyers are entitled to obtain as much information as possible about that accusation before blindly following the suggested actions of MSFT's attorneys. If they followed up immediately on MSFT's lawyers' suggestions, and removed all the posts (or even some of the posts) there may be unforeseen consequences that they'd like to avoid. Notably, the prospect that by censoring material on/., they then become liable for all material subsequently stored here.
Just because they haven't removed one or more of the offending posts now doesn't mean that they don't intend to eventually do it should they find they are in copyright violation.
Perhaps they're thinking of taking it this the max, and seeing if there is such a thing as full unbridled freedom of speech, with regards to services provided by a US company. That being, is it possible for a US entity to provide services that allow posters to write anything in an unmoderated forum open to public viewing? Or will all 'open' US forums in the future eventually need to be moderated to some extent.
Trade secrets are only trade secrets if the company tries to keep them secret. Microsoft didn't try very hard here... silly clickwrap agreement, Kerebros is for everyone.
I've heard a viewpoint previously mentioned (maybe on linuxtoday instead of/.??) but it's a very interesting notion. At the risk of being redundant, I'll reiterate it. Perhaps, they (ie, MSFT) wanted the standards to be downloaded/publically posted/pirated/etc.
MSFT knows it cannot prevent the inevitable reverse-engineering of their proprietary protocols. So how do they combat such reverse-engineering? Do the unthinkable. Publish the trade secret, under some form of clickwrap EULA. Thus, when the reverse-engineering finally happens, they can point to the online document, and show that information on their webpage was used in the reverse-engineer. Thus, their EULA was violated, and hence SAMBA et al are in violation of the DCMA.
I really like Andovers' lawyers' responses to MSFT, though. Instead of showing why they feel Andover is operating legally, they seek specific information from MSFT's team of sharks^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers, to show why they may be violating the law in the first place. At least Andover is making MSFT's lawyers get their money's worth, instead of eagerly submitting to their legal might. This is getting very interesting indeed.
the repercussions of a victory for M$ (since it would be landmark) should be considered from a moral point of view, not just a legalistic one. (I'm talking about the kerberos debacle here too).
I completely agree. The law shouldn't just be blindly followed, especially if there is something morally wrong with it. The law needs to be constantly reviewed and tweaked, much like open-source, to better meet the needs of the citizens. If the law goes against what is moral, change it, or put up a stand.
Case in point - the Boston Tea Party. Taxation without Representation was perfectly legal within the confines of British law, yet the Colonists refused to have any part of it. Thus, the beginning of their acts of defiance.
Maybe it's time for a mass-launching of MSFT products to be thrown into the Pacific, off some Seattle dock?;-)
Unlike the "spoiled kid", Microsoft wasn't handed their large empire. Now, I do agree that Microsoft's business practices are questionable (remembering when IE first came out)... but don't forget that they had to fight to get where they are.
Don't forget that the DOJ's antitrust action against IBM is one of the great factors that helped puh MSFT's dominance on the desktop. Once it was possible for anyone to make IBM clones, everyone still opted for MS-DOS, because that was the IBM standard. So, the death of one monolopy led directly to the growth of another.
This is just hear-say, but one of my friends mentioned, many years ago, that Bill Gates was actaully complaining to the DOJ about IBM being a monopoly back in the 80's, before the DOJ took action. Can anyone confirm this?
Re:E-Commerce Collapse?
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 2
dammit, I hate that word, as well as anything starting with e- or i- besides e-mail)
Hear, hear! I'm getting so sick of everyone jumping on this e- and i- bandwagon. Is everybody just so uncreative that they can't think of a better name for their products or company? If I see a new company/product beginning with the i- or e- I pretty much ignore it, figuring it's mostly hype. (Been right for the most part, as far as my tastes go) YMMV.
If I modify GPL code for my own purposes, do I still have to release it? That is, if I don't publically distribute it then I don't have to make the code public either, right?
I believe that is correct. You can make whatever modifications for your own use that you desire. But if you give/sell/distribute a binary executable to anyone else, then they have all the same rights you have. Including the right to view the source, as well as the right to give/sell/distribute their software to others.
Why is it ok to break the DMCA but not okay for me to go break the GPL? Seems like a pretty huge double standard to me.
I don't think it's a double-standard at all. GPL'd code allows you to view the source code, and reverse engineer a protocol or standard, if you so desire. If you wish to expound further on the code, you must either make your changes public, or not use any of the GPL'd code at all. But you are always free to view it. IANAL, but I think you'd also be free to try to reverse engineer a compiled GPL binary, if you really wanted to do that, instead of look at the source.
DCMA, however, prevents one from trying to find out what is going on behind the user interface. If you attempt to figure out what's occurring, you're in violation. The DCMA seems to provide some sort of blanket behind which software houses can keep their standards secret. If the standard is ever figured out or made public, they cry "DCMA Violation", thus preventing (or slowing down) competing interoperability with said standard.
But didn't Intel usually wait before fully releasing datasheets to their CPU's? They were worried about Cyrix and AMD taking their precious instruction set and pinouts, and building Intel clones. But yet Intel also wanted to ensure that by the time their chips hit the market, people would have motherboards and other products ready to accept them. So, they only offered the full datasheets during the pre-release period to developers under some form of NDA.
So the fact that you now don't need to sign the NDA to peek at the datasheets may imply that Intel is getting pretty close to shipping out the Itaniums en masse.
I would just wish more developers released such information without the NDA. Especially with devices (ie, sound, video, network cards amongst others). What these companies don't seem to realize is that just having the information on how to interface to a device is only a drop in the bucket to actually developing and building a functionally equivalent device. And yet, if some companies goal was to clone the part in the first place, they would reverse-engineer the hell out of the device, and the datasheets would only make their jobs slightly easier. Plus, by the time the identical device came out, the original device could be much pretty outdated.
There was a study on a Japanese company that spent all their time reverse-engineering another company's GPS receiver. By the time they figured out how it worked, and built their functional equivalent, several years had passed. Nobody would use their product, because it was too inaccurate, and the original GPS company moved onwards to a better and more accurate part.
Hmmm, isn't that what a certain Bill Gates said about the 640 kB memory window of the old IBM PC's???
Remember, what seems fanciful now may soon be more than real later. Newer display mediums, for instance, with incredibly tiny pixels may come out, and/or the means of stacking many many monitors together, and/or other technologies that I'm not thinking of right now. Basically, this may be of a limit at some point.
Also, wouldn't it make more sense for use an unsigned 16-bit integer for the screen position, such that it would really be 65536 x 65536?
I'm pretty psyched. I just picked up an Alpha 21164LX Motherboard + 533MHz 21164 CPU for $200 2 weeks ago. It's a really cool system. I just got MILO up this morning, and I hope to have linux (Either RedHat or Debian) on it soon. My first foray with the Alpha!!!
Just one thing to consider, though, is the incremental cost of increasing processor speed. Much of that price is in the cost of the MB, RAM, and other peripherals. I'd wager the 21264 MB they used can support much higher clock-speed processors. So, to increase that baby from 466 to 733 or so may only be a price difference of a few hundred dollars. Now the alpha will really outperform the Athlon. Too bad you can't get the Athlon in higher speeds (yet...)
This may be off, but I thought it stemmed from several decades ago, where somebody sold something at the then-crazy price of $4.95. That way they still had the 5 cents leftover to buy a newspaper. SOmething weird like that.
Please people, get over this pointless reminiscing and go and listen to the great scores being laid down for today's games. They're far better than the old 8-bit mono "beep and plunk" music found in old games. To be somewhat pedantic, NES isn't really 8-bit audio. No, there is no digital APU in the NES (well, there is one channel of digital audio). Basically there are 5 audio channels for the NES (2 pulse, 1 triangle, 1 noise channel, and 1 digital channel). So, the first four channels of those listed above are ANALOG! That's why it's a difficult task for emulators to get the sound right. It's hard to guesstimate the bandwidths and parasitics of the analog audio channels. Check out this link for some more description of the innards of the NES.
Personally, I've always thought NES music sounded pretty cool. Of course the digitized sound output sounded like crap most times it was implemented, but the music otherwise was pretty cool (IMHO of course).
The games of that era were marked by tinny, repetitive annoying tunes which pissed you off after five minutes of playing And no, most of the time, the music didn't piss me off after 5 minutes. In fact it really made the game that much better, creating various moods and overall enhancing the game play. Perhaps when you're given the task of writing music for a very limited system (ie, 5 channels), you really do your best to exploit it as much as possible.
Video game music is classic! The old tunes are so catchy, and kick ass! Even before the NES came out was an album called "Pac Man Fever", which was in praise of the early arcade games' music. It had clips of the 'cheesy' game sounds, but then an entirely different song singing about various aspects of the games.
On a different note, my friend back in college said that his gauge of a musician was whether or not they could play the music from Super Mario Bros I. To this day I still admire the SMB I music. While the waveforms used by NES (5 channels : triangle, pulse (2 i think), noise channel, and digital channel) were quite limiting, the NES games did some remarkable scores just with these limitations.
Re:What about VA/MD residents?
on
Fighting UCITA
·
· Score: 1
Yup, JHU. Actually, the Maryland adoption of UCITA was a small factor in my consideration of schools. (CMU was my other primary grad-school consideration, but ultimately JHU won out).
Re:What about VA/MD residents?
on
Fighting UCITA
·
· Score: 2
Here is my question, which I also posted to LinuxToday yesterday. I'll be starting grad school for physics in Baltimore, Maryland next year. I hope to be able to get by using only Open Source software, however the need for closed-source software may present itself at some point.
So my question is, am I bound by UCITA only for software purchased by Maryland software houses, or am I bound by UCITA by software purchased in other states? For example, let's say I have a need to use Mathematica, by Wolfram Research. They're located in Illinois, but I'll be using Mathematica in Maryland. So, am I bound by UCITA? If I need compatibility with a Mathematica package, can I reverse engineer the algorithms in Mathematica?
Hopefully Maryland lawmakers will change their minds when they realize that they're probably deterring software companies than attracting them, with this bill.
Well, if you have a big disk, and want to boot a partition beyond 1024 cylinders, the old LILO couldn't handle this. An example is you have a 13 GB disk, with Windows installed. You decide to try linux, so you squash the windows partition to 8GB, and add a linux partition or two (including swap) at the end. If the beginning of your linux partitions is beyond 1024 cyliners (easy to happen for the larger drives), then LILO, or LInux LOader, which is supposed to bootstrap (ie, load) the kernel, chokes. Until now that is.
Older methods to get around this problem was to put a boot partition with the kernel image on a separate partition (earlier) on the disk to satisfy LILO. But now that shouldn't be necessary (unless you've got 27+ TB disks!)
Say all you want about "open source is better" and "debugging is parallel" but these sorts of things would never have slipped through the checkin/review process in any decent OS group (I should know, I've been in a few).
Well, I've never worked on an OS, so maybe I'm way out of line here. But this software is BETA, which is why it's in the UNSTABLE kernel numbering scheme. Ie, it's 2.3.xx instead of 2.4.xx. So it's NOT expected to work perfectly.
Now if they released it as 2.4, then that's a different story. I guess I'm confusing your notions of CVS check-in and my notion of release. But is it feasible to check each kernel check-in against the other 5000 things the kernel does to see if any of them broke?
And no, we're not doing MS's PR job for them, because these problems will be fixed (except the post 2.4 ones) before the 2.4 release.
About the only real visual things you might spot are comets and/or asteroids, but detection of those bodies generally requires a bit more than simply a sky survey, and you'll still need photographs of that area over time.
Not totally true. There are various surveys of the sky that count the distribution of various objects throughout the universe. For example, distribution of galaxies in a 3D space, and what their structural distribution is, such that theories of inflation can be formulated.
I don't know exactly what data is included with the Sloan survey. I should, though, because I saw some spectrographs of the first Sloan data a few weeks ago (they were many months old by then). If Sloan is full of spectrums, then you've got nice spectrums of the whole sky, which means ALOT of data to process. And alot of information is included in the spectrum. for a 2-D map of the sky, and a spectrum at each point, that's a 3D data set. Lots of info can be extracted from this.
How can it make good points about open source, when we've already heard them a million times before?
You may have heard a good point a million times, but it still is a good point. Of course, here at slashdot, we're more aware of the benefits of OSS and the like. I believe ESR was aiming his essay at the CIO's, IT peoples, and general PHB's, to show them that hey - you just don't know what's included in closed-source software.
Of course it's obvious to us, but those that buy MSFT because everybody else does, or because it's the office 'standard', may not realize these things.
I remember a quote from several months back where a MSFT chairman said something like "you just can't trust open source software, because you just don't know what's in it". Now ESR is pointing out the opposite.
Can someone explain to me why I would want to purchase a piece of proprietary Linux software? There are far better word processors available for free with the source code included such as Abiword and LaTeX.
Because you can! Or, conversely, why would someone use LaTeX if Corel WordPerfect is available. And it's the same answer, because they can! The more options the better, everybody can use whatever method they wish to compose/edit documents, and each respective person is happy. Nobody is forced to use software they don't want to. Everybody wins.
MHO supporting any commercial software for Linux is detrimental the whole open source movement. Linux is the People's OS, and Corel can keep their profiteering proprietary software.
I don't know if you're trolling here, or if you're just that close-minded. Basically, the more options that are available on Linux, the better. If you personally don't like the software, or are politically disinclined towards it, then don't buy or use it. However, many other people would like a fully-featured WYSIWYG word processor, and wouldn't mind paying some money for it. I think there is lots of potential for open-source and commercial software to work/play together. However, limiting oneself to either extreme doesn't do much good (IMHO, of course).
As someone else said, this newspaper appears to make every day an April Fool's joke. I actually bought this very issue in the store last week. I was glancing through it at the supermarket, and when I saw that computer explosion article, I just had to buy it. I'm going to cut out the article and paste it on the virus warnings bulletin board we have at work;-)
The paper is totally hysterical, though. It had me cracking up at some of the stories. Examples were the worlds fattest woman (3000+ lbs) and her dreams and goals of putting on even more weight, a country (sorry, i forget which) that has been too poor that it couldn't pay it's equivalent of social security to old folks so it offered to give them free coffins instead, and other funny stuff i really can't remember right now.
It's not news, but it sure is funny and a good read!
I feel that America wastes far too much of its national budget on useless "scientific" research like this.
Yup, this and other pointless research. I mean, look at the useless "scientific" studies Faraday and Maxwell performed over 100 years ago. Electromagnetism? What the hell is that going to do to improve our world? Yup, this kind of research was simply of no use to us. We should have spent that research money on slide rules for education, and Civil War era weapons for the military. What the hell will someone do with these obscure electric and magnetic fields? Now excuse me as I go listen to the radio, solve some finite element calculations on my computer, mark some waypoints for my flight on my GPS, and surf the internet for information about laser light shows at the planetarium...
Slashdot Mirror
While ./'s servers may contain copyrighted material, I believe Andover's lawyers are entitled to obtain as much information as possible about that accusation before blindly following the suggested actions of MSFT's attorneys. If they followed up immediately on MSFT's lawyers' suggestions, and removed all the posts (or even some of the posts) there may be unforeseen consequences that they'd like to avoid. Notably, the prospect that by censoring material on /., they then become liable for all material subsequently stored here.
Just because they haven't removed one or more of the offending posts now doesn't mean that they don't intend to eventually do it should they find they are in copyright violation.
Perhaps they're thinking of taking it this the max, and seeing if there is such a thing as full unbridled freedom of speech, with regards to services provided by a US company. That being, is it possible for a US entity to provide services that allow posters to write anything in an unmoderated forum open to public viewing? Or will all 'open' US forums in the future eventually need to be moderated to some extent.
I've heard a viewpoint previously mentioned (maybe on linuxtoday instead of /.??) but it's a very interesting notion. At the risk of being redundant, I'll reiterate it. Perhaps, they (ie, MSFT) wanted the standards to be downloaded/publically posted/pirated/etc.
MSFT knows it cannot prevent the inevitable reverse-engineering of their proprietary protocols. So how do they combat such reverse-engineering? Do the unthinkable. Publish the trade secret, under some form of clickwrap EULA. Thus, when the reverse-engineering finally happens, they can point to the online document, and show that information on their webpage was used in the reverse-engineer. Thus, their EULA was violated, and hence SAMBA et al are in violation of the DCMA.
I really like Andovers' lawyers' responses to MSFT, though. Instead of showing why they feel Andover is operating legally, they seek specific information from MSFT's team of sharks^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers, to show why they may be violating the law in the first place. At least Andover is making MSFT's lawyers get their money's worth, instead of eagerly submitting to their legal might. This is getting very interesting indeed.
I completely agree. The law shouldn't just be blindly followed, especially if there is something morally wrong with it. The law needs to be constantly reviewed and tweaked, much like open-source, to better meet the needs of the citizens. If the law goes against what is moral, change it, or put up a stand.
Case in point - the Boston Tea Party. Taxation without Representation was perfectly legal within the confines of British law, yet the Colonists refused to have any part of it. Thus, the beginning of their acts of defiance.
Maybe it's time for a mass-launching of MSFT products to be thrown into the Pacific, off some Seattle dock? ;-)
Don't forget that the DOJ's antitrust action against IBM is one of the great factors that helped puh MSFT's dominance on the desktop. Once it was possible for anyone to make IBM clones, everyone still opted for MS-DOS, because that was the IBM standard. So, the death of one monolopy led directly to the growth of another.
This is just hear-say, but one of my friends mentioned, many years ago, that Bill Gates was actaully complaining to the DOJ about IBM being a monopoly back in the 80's, before the DOJ took action. Can anyone confirm this?
Hear, hear!
I'm getting so sick of everyone jumping on this e- and i- bandwagon. Is everybody just so uncreative that they can't think of a better name for their products or company? If I see a new company/product beginning with the i- or e- I pretty much ignore it, figuring it's mostly hype. (Been right for the most part, as far as my tastes go) YMMV.
I believe that is correct. You can make whatever modifications for your own use that you desire. But if you give/sell/distribute a binary executable to anyone else, then they have all the same rights you have. Including the right to view the source, as well as the right to give/sell/distribute their software to others.
Theoretically, you could post an entire novel by doing just that, and gathering enough users. Where do you draw the line?
I don't think it's a double-standard at all. GPL'd code allows you to view the source code, and reverse engineer a protocol or standard, if you so desire. If you wish to expound further on the code, you must either make your changes public, or not use any of the GPL'd code at all. But you are always free to view it. IANAL, but I think you'd also be free to try to reverse engineer a compiled GPL binary, if you really wanted to do that, instead of look at the source.
DCMA, however, prevents one from trying to find out what is going on behind the user interface. If you attempt to figure out what's occurring, you're in violation. The DCMA seems to provide some sort of blanket behind which software houses can keep their standards secret. If the standard is ever figured out or made public, they cry "DCMA Violation", thus preventing (or slowing down) competing interoperability with said standard.
So the fact that you now don't need to sign the NDA to peek at the datasheets may imply that Intel is getting pretty close to shipping out the Itaniums en masse.
I would just wish more developers released such information without the NDA. Especially with devices (ie, sound, video, network cards amongst others). What these companies don't seem to realize is that just having the information on how to interface to a device is only a drop in the bucket to actually developing and building a functionally equivalent device. And yet, if some companies goal was to clone the part in the first place, they would reverse-engineer the hell out of the device, and the datasheets would only make their jobs slightly easier. Plus, by the time the identical device came out, the original device could be much pretty outdated.
There was a study on a Japanese company that spent all their time reverse-engineering another company's GPS receiver. By the time they figured out how it worked, and built their functional equivalent, several years had passed. Nobody would use their product, because it was too inaccurate, and the original GPS company moved onwards to a better and more accurate part.
Hmmm, isn't that what a certain Bill Gates said about the 640 kB memory window of the old IBM PC's???
Remember, what seems fanciful now may soon be more than real later. Newer display mediums, for instance, with incredibly tiny pixels may come out, and/or the means of stacking many many monitors together, and/or other technologies that I'm not thinking of right now. Basically, this may be of a limit at some point.
Also, wouldn't it make more sense for use an unsigned 16-bit integer for the screen position, such that it would really be 65536 x 65536?
I'm pretty psyched. I just picked up an Alpha 21164LX Motherboard + 533MHz 21164 CPU for $200 2 weeks ago. It's a really cool system. I just got MILO up this morning, and I hope to have linux (Either RedHat or Debian) on it soon. My first foray with the Alpha!!!
Just one thing to consider, though, is the incremental cost of increasing processor speed. Much of that price is in the cost of the MB, RAM, and other peripherals. I'd wager the 21264 MB they used can support much higher clock-speed processors. So, to increase that baby from 466 to 733 or so may only be a price difference of a few hundred dollars. Now the alpha will really outperform the Athlon. Too bad you can't get the Athlon in higher speeds (yet...)
This may be off, but I thought it stemmed from several decades ago, where somebody sold something at the then-crazy price of $4.95. That way they still had the 5 cents leftover to buy a newspaper. SOmething weird like that.
To be somewhat pedantic, NES isn't really 8-bit audio. No, there is no digital APU in the NES (well, there is one channel of digital audio). Basically there are 5 audio channels for the NES (2 pulse, 1 triangle, 1 noise channel, and 1 digital channel). So, the first four channels of those listed above are ANALOG! That's why it's a difficult task for emulators to get the sound right. It's hard to guesstimate the bandwidths and parasitics of the analog audio channels. Check out this link for some more description of the innards of the NES.
Personally, I've always thought NES music sounded pretty cool. Of course the digitized sound output sounded like crap most times it was implemented, but the music otherwise was pretty cool (IMHO of course).
The games of that era were marked by tinny, repetitive annoying tunes which pissed you off after five minutes of playing
And no, most of the time, the music didn't piss me off after 5 minutes. In fact it really made the game that much better, creating various moods and overall enhancing the game play. Perhaps when you're given the task of writing music for a very limited system (ie, 5 channels), you really do your best to exploit it as much as possible.
On a different note, my friend back in college said that his gauge of a musician was whether or not they could play the music from Super Mario Bros I. To this day I still admire the SMB I music. While the waveforms used by NES (5 channels : triangle, pulse (2 i think), noise channel, and digital channel) were quite limiting, the NES games did some remarkable scores just with these limitations.
Yup, JHU. Actually, the Maryland adoption of UCITA was a small factor in my consideration of schools. (CMU was my other primary grad-school consideration, but ultimately JHU won out).
So my question is, am I bound by UCITA only for software purchased by Maryland software houses, or am I bound by UCITA by software purchased in other states? For example, let's say I have a need to use Mathematica, by Wolfram Research. They're located in Illinois, but I'll be using Mathematica in Maryland. So, am I bound by UCITA? If I need compatibility with a Mathematica package, can I reverse engineer the algorithms in Mathematica?
Hopefully Maryland lawmakers will change their minds when they realize that they're probably deterring software companies than attracting them, with this bill.
Older methods to get around this problem was to put a boot partition with the kernel image on a separate partition (earlier) on the disk to satisfy LILO. But now that shouldn't be necessary (unless you've got 27+ TB disks!)
Well, I've never worked on an OS, so maybe I'm way out of line here. But this software is BETA, which is why it's in the UNSTABLE kernel numbering scheme. Ie, it's 2.3.xx instead of 2.4.xx. So it's NOT expected to work perfectly.
Now if they released it as 2.4, then that's a different story. I guess I'm confusing your notions of CVS check-in and my notion of release. But is it feasible to check each kernel check-in against the other 5000 things the kernel does to see if any of them broke?
And no, we're not doing MS's PR job for them, because these problems will be fixed (except the post 2.4 ones) before the 2.4 release.
Not totally true. There are various surveys of the sky that count the distribution of various objects throughout the universe. For example, distribution of galaxies in a 3D space, and what their structural distribution is, such that theories of inflation can be formulated.
I don't know exactly what data is included with the Sloan survey. I should, though, because I saw some spectrographs of the first Sloan data a few weeks ago (they were many months old by then). If Sloan is full of spectrums, then you've got nice spectrums of the whole sky, which means ALOT of data to process. And alot of information is included in the spectrum. for a 2-D map of the sky, and a spectrum at each point, that's a 3D data set. Lots of info can be extracted from this.
You may have heard a good point a million times, but it still is a good point. Of course, here at slashdot, we're more aware of the benefits of OSS and the like. I believe ESR was aiming his essay at the CIO's, IT peoples, and general PHB's, to show them that hey - you just don't know what's included in closed-source software.
Of course it's obvious to us, but those that buy MSFT because everybody else does, or because it's the office 'standard', may not realize these things.
I remember a quote from several months back where a MSFT chairman said something like "you just can't trust open source software, because you just don't know what's in it". Now ESR is pointing out the opposite.
Because you can! Or, conversely, why would someone use LaTeX if Corel WordPerfect is available. And it's the same answer, because they can! The more options the better, everybody can use whatever method they wish to compose/edit documents, and each respective person is happy. Nobody is forced to use software they don't want to. Everybody wins.
MHO supporting any commercial software for Linux is detrimental the whole open source movement. Linux is the People's OS, and Corel can keep their profiteering proprietary software.
I don't know if you're trolling here, or if you're just that close-minded. Basically, the more options that are available on Linux, the better. If you personally don't like the software, or are politically disinclined towards it, then don't buy or use it. However, many other people would like a fully-featured WYSIWYG word processor, and wouldn't mind paying some money for it. I think there is lots of potential for open-source and commercial software to work/play together. However, limiting oneself to either extreme doesn't do much good (IMHO, of course).
Wow, that was totally ironically awesome. Thanks for figuring that link out.
The paper is totally hysterical, though. It had me cracking up at some of the stories. Examples were the worlds fattest woman (3000+ lbs) and her dreams and goals of putting on even more weight, a country (sorry, i forget which) that has been too poor that it couldn't pay it's equivalent of social security to old folks so it offered to give them free coffins instead, and other funny stuff i really can't remember right now.
It's not news, but it sure is funny and a good read!
Yup, this and other pointless research. I mean, look at the useless "scientific" studies Faraday and Maxwell performed over 100 years ago. Electromagnetism? What the hell is that going to do to improve our world? Yup, this kind of research was simply of no use to us. We should have spent that research money on slide rules for education, and Civil War era weapons for the military. What the hell will someone do with these obscure electric and magnetic fields? Now excuse me as I go listen to the radio, solve some finite element calculations on my computer, mark some waypoints for my flight on my GPS, and surf the internet for information about laser light shows at the planetarium...