No, it is the intellectual property that is imaginary.
I refer of course to the lack of intellect of certain persons well known both here and on Groklaw, not to any thing which may be construed as being source code of an operating system.
Indeed, and the family get the Bill for the bullet! Talking of which, is the Illegal Monopoly not being investigated in China right now? Who will they execute?
Yes, possibly Novell and even AT&T and others may own various bits.
But, it would be a fitting end if the courts finally put the whole lot into the public domain, as the commercial value of Unix source is now virtually nil. Its intellectual value as a fine example of how to write an OS remains as high as ever, as do the sources of Linux, BSD and lots of other things, so it would be very bad indeed for it to be destroyed.
IANAL, but I think if the base code was published (IBM, Sun, HP etc would keep the added bits in AIX, Solaris, HP/UX etc, (which are their property, not SCO's despite claims to the contrary), and the possibility of a stupid situation like this happening again would be prevented. I don't see how any surviving Unix companies would be harmed, their proprietary bits, which differentiate one Unix from another, would remain just that, and they would still have viable business models.
But the problem of the Uncontrollable Criminal Monopoly run by the Uncontrollable Tantrum-Infested Brat in Redmond would remain, that is far more serious and damaging to the world than the antics of Daft Darl, or indeed anything that has ever happened within *nix.
Yes, the SCOundrel is just an expendable puppett in the hands of the worlds most illegal monopoly, ever.
I expect they have plans for a few more attacks to keep Linux from becoming established before Latehorn finally arrives, with a million new security holes. It will be interesting to see what the next strategy is, the first is patents, and especially in Europe, but they stand to lose that one also.
Of course, if Sir Bill had the slightest degree of technical competence, he would know that to beat Linux he would have to have a better product, one which he, as Chief Software Architect (read: untrained, unqualified hacker, and part author of a very buggy basic interpreter) is incapable of delivering.
You have amazing confifdence in a system that has been proved time and again to not work. The big problem is that in the US, light aircraft, and worse, skydivers, seem to be able to go anywhere, the danger is, as we do seem to agree, mainly near airports. But the air traffic control system is far from being infallible. I suggest you get hold of some reports on accidents and near misses, you will soon see what I mean.
I don't object to inexpensive modern, efficient and small aircraft by the way, in fact we may see some real innovative designs here, my entire objection is that it makes way for a lot of inadequately trained pilots to take to the skies. The present training methods in most, propbably all, developed countries ensure that it is fairly hard for the more irresponsible types to get a licence, and it should remain so. But if every aggressive idiot who drives a black BMW (at least that is what the aggressive idiots drive in the UK, it may be different in the US) gets their hands on an aircraft instead, the accident rate is bound to escalate. That is the problem, plus the fact that the air traffic control system does not have sufficient capacity, or controllers, in fact it failed abysmally in the very accident I mentioned, because the controllers were not required to act when a certain alarm sounded.
BTW most of Europe, Australia and a number of other countries regard the FAA as very lax, their standards are not nearly as high as elsewhere in terms of aircraft design for example, it is the fact that most manufacturers do need to sell their aircraft worldwide that keeps standards up. And yes, before you ask, I have been directly involved in getting aircraft systems certified, I do know whose regulations and procedures were the toughest, and whose were simply designed to keep the lawyers busy.
But just watch what happens when the first major disaster happens as a result of this, a smart lawyer will bankrupt the FAA, who AFAIK can be held accountable.
The difference has nothing to do with ultimate strength, it is to get adequate fatigue life. Airliners have pulled 5 or 6G, and having had an unknown proportion of their fatigue life used up in one incident, may be of no further use, or major parts may have to be replaced. But the design life of an airliner may be 80,000 hours or more.
Light and ultra-lite aircraft have very short life in comparison, so the loads can be higher, but unfortunately the probability of structural failure, even within the shorter lifespan, is very much higher because they don't have failsafe structure.
A typical airliner operated by one of the more responsible airlines and excluding terrorism etc is probably 10 to 100 times safer than a light aircraft. but, when it crashes, it gets a lot more publicity.
It is not so long ago that an airliner (727 IIRC) was brought down by a collision with a light aircraft, and there are very many near misses each year.
Any relaxation of the rules is utterly stupid and criminally irresponsible, and will result in one or more very big disasters.
I hope that the incompetent idiots behind this can be held personally responsible (the charge should be murder, because the outcome is certain) when a 747 crashes having hit one of these, flown by some incompetent idiot.
The FAA has now sunk to below the level of respectability of the USPTO, it can't go much lower.....
An excellent analogy, and houses often end up being similar, because people and their needs are similar. It may look as if one has been copied from another quite often, but I suspect actual copying is fairly uncommon. Architects are creative people, like software developers, they would rather create than copy as a rule, even without considering the legality. But, like software developers, they get inspiration, consciously or otherwise, from having seen the work of others, so some similarity will follow.
Oh dear, my new kitchen which I am slowly installing, might just resemble some small corner of Darl's kitchen, the washing machine, tumble drier and dishwasher might be arranged in the same order for example...... I think I need a good schyster!
.... governments acted to outlaw this vile security threat. The Department of Homeland Security has made a clear recommendation, and now we have even more holes...... People will not do the sensible thing until it is made law, and even then, it will have to be blocked by ISPs before certain elements of society will bother do do anything about their own security and that of others.
To be credible, the DHS recommendation needs the unambiguous backing of governments, whether democratically elected, or like Dubya, otherwise.... Hopefully someone somewhere will start the trend to do the sensible thing, or is that impossible for a politician?
It applies to every short term or temporary low-power radio station, which can be licensed for up to a month. AFAIK it also applies to permanent broadcasters. Apart from the nuisance factor in teh case of a temporary station, no-one seems to mind. It is a reasonable precaution for all parties to have a record.
There seem to be a lot of stupid people here on Slashdot today, who automatically assume that becasue something includes source, it is open source. There is in fact, in the laws of the US, UK, most of Europe, and anywhere else signatory to the berne conventions, implied copyright on anything which is written, including software. It actually needs an explicit statement to release anything as "open source" (which needs a licence to be defined or referred to) or as "public domaon".
In some countries it is illegal, and in others, although not illegal, it would likely result in arrest on suspicion of something or other, and a trip to the police station. They would keep you waiting for a few hours while they checked yout ID etc, just to make the point, find no evidence of other wrongdoing, and release you. It works well, and is fair enough, if you are abusive to the police you can expect to suffer at least inconvenience. In the UK they could likely add a real charge of "breach of the peace", which would get you up before the magistrates, and fined a modest amount. Quite right too, there is no need for abusive behaviour anywhere. But it works both ways.....
I wonder why Canada and NZ were not involved? And for that matter, any other country with broadly compatible legal systems.
However, it does seem to explicitly allow each country to try to get others on board, so there may be some hope.
But, the process of requesting one another to deal with spam is too slow and inefficient, and the requesting party will pay the costs.... I really can't imagine the UK coming up with the cash to fund legal actions in the US. Of course it shows that the respective politicians have no idea about what they are dealing with.
As someone who suffers from a lot of spam, I think that faster and more draconiam measures are required, tracing spam automatically back to source and immediately blocking that IP address would be a good start. Yes, before I get flamed, I know it is not as simple as that, but it would do two things, firstly make the relevant ISP clean up their act and remove troublesome users, and secondly teach those idiots who are running non-firewalled Windoze PCs on broadband and are harbouring trojans a lesson that they may just about understand.
I think that a technical definition of exactly what constitutes spam and methods for its automatic detection is also necessary. Political weasel words are too vague.
Maybe best if they would simply fund the IETF, W3C or some other internationally recognised body, or consortium of relevant bodies, to deal with the technical side, sort of like giving the internet a legal status of its own.
Don't use my real initials, you Anonymous Coward! They are copyright. I will sue. There is also an impostor about, not so far on Slashdot, who dares to use my actual name......
Seriously though, the link you gave will hopefully be interesting once it recovers from having been Slashdotted. But, there will be an optimum number of users per PC, not a very big number. I have been on a Vax with 120 users long ago, running WordPerfect on serial terminals, it was actually quite tolerable. That is because the VAX has decent I/O architecture, with few bottlenecks, whereas PCs are sadly lacking in many places.
As I posted earlier, I have 3 screens running on one PC, that is quite OK for any normal purpose, 4 should still be fast enough for most tasks, but I don't think we are going to find that going above 8, with a GUI, will be sensible on crippled architecture like a PC. The CPU is crippled too, not just the PCI bus etc.
It would not need significantly more silicon to make something which would happily support many more users, but the market would be so small that it would not be economic, in other words it would cost as much (nearly) as a VAX.....
But we will be hearing more of this, mainly in areas where money is in short supply, such as education. Fine idea, and as you suggest, there is room for tweaking it a bit more. If you could offload the GUI work to X-terminals, you could get more people on one PC, something like an Amiga or Atari architecture of many tears ago with a 68xxx family processor in the (slightly enlarged) keyboard might make a very low-cost X-terminal. There are many other combinations of things that will achieve the desired end result, but at any time (and costs do change with time as we know), one particular configuration will be optimal.
Unlike the Criminal Monopoly, whose software gets ever more expensive, despite the volume of sales rising with each new generation, hardware (limited to silicon, and components that go on the PCB) invariably gets cheaper. Other hardware, metalwork and so on increases in cost, but very slowly. Next year's configuration may be quite different, it will become cheaper to have 2 or 4 motherboards in one box than to have separate boxes (already happened with certain servers I think). And, one day LCDs "may" be cheaper than CRTs, so the optimal (lowest cost) configuration will be constantly changing. One thing is sure, this approach guarantees to minimise the software costs. You can't get cheaper than free.
Ah, you mean the X Window system, possibly aided and abetted by one of the variants of VNC, in case anyone does not get the joke.
And yes, it is a really excellent idea in the appropriate circumstances. I know a certain Sir who will not like it, if educational establishments can equip themselves with many more terminals, and no licence fees to his Criminal Monopoly!
I hope the sort of people who develop educational applications (most probably teachers or ex-teachers at least, with programming skill) are goingto respond to this by porting things to linux that might currently need an expensive OS and single-user PC. It will happen in the developing world, where they are clued up about Linux etc, I am thinking of the UK, where many schools are very short of cash.
In the UK I could get 4 CRTs, keyboards and mice for the cost of the PC, approximately. The saving is very worthwhile and would be for almost any educational establishment.
I have an Nvidia twinhead AGP card and single PCI card in an Athlon right now. That is 3/4 of what they are doing as regards heat. Not a problem, but I would spread out the PCI cards if they were full-size, e.g. put the next PCI graphics card in the bottom slot, as far from the AGP as possible, and only little ones like the network card in between, to allow good airflow.
My machine has been running for a few weeks and is not noticeably hot, however they are not the latest state of the art graphics cards, especially the PCI one which I found difficult to obtain. I would like to get a twinhead PCI to have 4 monitors, but they are rarer than hen's teeth in the UK.
BTW the graphics setup is OK in Linux or FreeBSD, once the Nvidia drivers are loaded, and with SuSE you must forget all about SAX and edit XF86Config by hand, as per the comprehensive info from Nvidia. The same file, with possibly minor tweaks can then be ported across to the FreeBSD partition, and the FreeBSD version of the Nvidia driver loaded, for those who want to dual-boot it with two decent OSs.
BTW I did this just to get lots of working space on my screens, 3 cheap LCDs at 1280*1024, great for programming and debug, and whatever else you need to do at the same time such as reading manuals, but takes less desktop than the two 1600*1200 CRTs I had contemplated. The Athlon is nothing special, 1600+ I think (not at that machine right now) but it has 2 HDDs, / on one, swap on the other, the usual speedup trick, not that it needs much swapping with 768MB RAM. Definitely not a top performer or games machine, but it works great, and most of the cost was the monitors.
This concept would be great for schools, it may be how Linux or BSD, or both, can make serious inroads into a big market, currently filled by the Criminal Monopoly. I think 6 screens might just about be viable with a top of the range Athlon, and some extra fans in the case, but I will not be building one of these for myself, it would be very OTT.
It is going back to the mainframe in a sense, but in areas where maintenance of the software is a major burden, this reduces that by a factor of 4, approximately. I would love to see this concept trialled in schools in the UK, it could free up money to be spent on other important things. If using a fairly basic PC, and cheap CRT monitors, it ought to be possible to get the cost to a very competitive level indeed, with no extortionate licence fees to you know who.
I t would also be good in offices where they do mainly word processing, hardly a heavy load, one PC for 4 secretaries.....
My 3-head monster has spare disk partitions, but I have not dared to try loading my redundant copy of Windoze 2000. It is rock-solid in Linux, FreeBSD is getting there (I am using 5.2.1 which is not a "stable" version, and have lots of apps loaded, so there is still a bit of tweaking needed, although the GUI etc are solid.)
Just had a thought, did Matrox not do a 4-head AGP card some time ago? Maybe that would do the job also, and leave slots free. I hope we are going to hear more of this sort of thing, on one front we have those who need, or want, performance goimng for multiple CPUs, all the way up to Beowulf clusters, and on the other hand the economy version has several users on one PC. Now whose OS is the scaleable one? Here is the proof!
Utterly incorrect. A rare earth magnet can be 40,000 gauss, amybe more now, and the coercivity of a HDD is relatively low, maybe 100 gauss, so it can be written, fast, with the small amount of power which the head can handle.
An API, like an ABI, is a mythical thing with no physical existence which can't be copyrighted. The code on one or both sides of the interface can be, of course, but a clean-room re-implementation is always possible. I think that has been established by the courts over many years, dating back to the original IBM PC bios code, and involving Unix etc. Darl McBride is going to fall flat on his face over this very issue, in another context.
And it will keep Eben Moglen busy for a while, not that I am suggesting that he does not have a very full workload already. I think he would love to be able to sue the Criminal Monopoly for GPL violations.
If such a situation were to happen, I think the FOSS community should be invited to each contribute a nominal amount via PayPal or similar, with a small levy on each copy of distros sold. The FOSS community could raise sufficient funds to do battle, and win.
Wonderful. The Criminal Monopoly has unwittingly funded documentation useful to the FOSS community. I sense a tantrum coming soon.....
But the real place to watch will be O'Reilly, and possibly a few other publishers which do a lot of Linux-type stuff. Authors, get writing! Serious developers will want books, and lots of them.
I think historians, and casual observers of human behaviour, would agree with your psychologists. I also think that hardened criminals will continue to commit crime until they are dealt a very severe sentence, and naughty, spoiled brats will continue to misbehave and have tantrums until their toys are taken away. These observations may, or may not, be significant.....
I hope you have got a licence from the SCOundrel to use AIX, and are not running unlicensed Unix code, which IBM has no licence to distribute, illegally!
Seriously though, I hope the problem gets fixed and you have success with your non-Windoze projects.
Slashdot Mirror
I refer of course to the lack of intellect of certain persons well known both here and on Groklaw, not to any thing which may be construed as being source code of an operating system.
Indeed, and the family get the Bill for the bullet! Talking of which, is the Illegal Monopoly not being investigated in China right now? Who will they execute?
But, it would be a fitting end if the courts finally put the whole lot into the public domain, as the commercial value of Unix source is now virtually nil. Its intellectual value as a fine example of how to write an OS remains as high as ever, as do the sources of Linux, BSD and lots of other things, so it would be very bad indeed for it to be destroyed.
IANAL, but I think if the base code was published (IBM, Sun, HP etc would keep the added bits in AIX, Solaris, HP/UX etc, (which are their property, not SCO's despite claims to the contrary), and the possibility of a stupid situation like this happening again would be prevented. I don't see how any surviving Unix companies would be harmed, their proprietary bits, which differentiate one Unix from another, would remain just that, and they would still have viable business models.
But the problem of the Uncontrollable Criminal Monopoly run by the Uncontrollable Tantrum-Infested Brat in Redmond would remain, that is far more serious and damaging to the world than the antics of Daft Darl, or indeed anything that has ever happened within *nix.
I expect they have plans for a few more attacks to keep Linux from becoming established before Latehorn finally arrives, with a million new security holes. It will be interesting to see what the next strategy is, the first is patents, and especially in Europe, but they stand to lose that one also.
Of course, if Sir Bill had the slightest degree of technical competence, he would know that to beat Linux he would have to have a better product, one which he, as Chief Software Architect (read: untrained, unqualified hacker, and part author of a very buggy basic interpreter) is incapable of delivering.
But, I suspect the obvious Puppetmaster of the whole show, and Twice Convicted Monopolist, via multiple layers of indirection so it is well obscured.
Hopefully the end of the SCOundrel will now follow quickly.
When you bring a pack of lies and no actual evidence to court, what can you expect?
I don't object to inexpensive modern, efficient and small aircraft by the way, in fact we may see some real innovative designs here, my entire objection is that it makes way for a lot of inadequately trained pilots to take to the skies. The present training methods in most, propbably all, developed countries ensure that it is fairly hard for the more irresponsible types to get a licence, and it should remain so. But if every aggressive idiot who drives a black BMW (at least that is what the aggressive idiots drive in the UK, it may be different in the US) gets their hands on an aircraft instead, the accident rate is bound to escalate. That is the problem, plus the fact that the air traffic control system does not have sufficient capacity, or controllers, in fact it failed abysmally in the very accident I mentioned, because the controllers were not required to act when a certain alarm sounded.
BTW most of Europe, Australia and a number of other countries regard the FAA as very lax, their standards are not nearly as high as elsewhere in terms of aircraft design for example, it is the fact that most manufacturers do need to sell their aircraft worldwide that keeps standards up. And yes, before you ask, I have been directly involved in getting aircraft systems certified, I do know whose regulations and procedures were the toughest, and whose were simply designed to keep the lawyers busy.
But just watch what happens when the first major disaster happens as a result of this, a smart lawyer will bankrupt the FAA, who AFAIK can be held accountable.
Light and ultra-lite aircraft have very short life in comparison, so the loads can be higher, but unfortunately the probability of structural failure, even within the shorter lifespan, is very much higher because they don't have failsafe structure.
A typical airliner operated by one of the more responsible airlines and excluding terrorism etc is probably 10 to 100 times safer than a light aircraft. but, when it crashes, it gets a lot more publicity.
Any relaxation of the rules is utterly stupid and criminally irresponsible, and will result in one or more very big disasters.
I hope that the incompetent idiots behind this can be held personally responsible (the charge should be murder, because the outcome is certain) when a 747 crashes having hit one of these, flown by some incompetent idiot.
The FAA has now sunk to below the level of respectability of the USPTO, it can't go much lower.....
Oh dear, my new kitchen which I am slowly installing, might just resemble some small corner of Darl's kitchen, the washing machine, tumble drier and dishwasher might be arranged in the same order for example...... I think I need a good schyster!
To be credible, the DHS recommendation needs the unambiguous backing of governments, whether democratically elected, or like Dubya, otherwise.... Hopefully someone somewhere will start the trend to do the sensible thing, or is that impossible for a politician?
It applies to every short term or temporary low-power radio station, which can be licensed for up to a month. AFAIK it also applies to permanent broadcasters. Apart from the nuisance factor in teh case of a temporary station, no-one seems to mind. It is a reasonable precaution for all parties to have a record.
There seem to be a lot of stupid people here on Slashdot today, who automatically assume that becasue something includes source, it is open source. There is in fact, in the laws of the US, UK, most of Europe, and anywhere else signatory to the berne conventions, implied copyright on anything which is written, including software. It actually needs an explicit statement to release anything as "open source" (which needs a licence to be defined or referred to) or as "public domaon".
In some countries it is illegal, and in others, although not illegal, it would likely result in arrest on suspicion of something or other, and a trip to the police station. They would keep you waiting for a few hours while they checked yout ID etc, just to make the point, find no evidence of other wrongdoing, and release you. It works well, and is fair enough, if you are abusive to the police you can expect to suffer at least inconvenience. In the UK they could likely add a real charge of "breach of the peace", which would get you up before the magistrates, and fined a modest amount. Quite right too, there is no need for abusive behaviour anywhere. But it works both ways.....
However, it does seem to explicitly allow each country to try to get others on board, so there may be some hope.
But, the process of requesting one another to deal with spam is too slow and inefficient, and the requesting party will pay the costs.... I really can't imagine the UK coming up with the cash to fund legal actions in the US. Of course it shows that the respective politicians have no idea about what they are dealing with.
As someone who suffers from a lot of spam, I think that faster and more draconiam measures are required, tracing spam automatically back to source and immediately blocking that IP address would be a good start. Yes, before I get flamed, I know it is not as simple as that, but it would do two things, firstly make the relevant ISP clean up their act and remove troublesome users, and secondly teach those idiots who are running non-firewalled Windoze PCs on broadband and are harbouring trojans a lesson that they may just about understand.
I think that a technical definition of exactly what constitutes spam and methods for its automatic detection is also necessary. Political weasel words are too vague.
Maybe best if they would simply fund the IETF, W3C or some other internationally recognised body, or consortium of relevant bodies, to deal with the technical side, sort of like giving the internet a legal status of its own.
Seriously though, the link you gave will hopefully be interesting once it recovers from having been Slashdotted. But, there will be an optimum number of users per PC, not a very big number. I have been on a Vax with 120 users long ago, running WordPerfect on serial terminals, it was actually quite tolerable. That is because the VAX has decent I/O architecture, with few bottlenecks, whereas PCs are sadly lacking in many places.
As I posted earlier, I have 3 screens running on one PC, that is quite OK for any normal purpose, 4 should still be fast enough for most tasks, but I don't think we are going to find that going above 8, with a GUI, will be sensible on crippled architecture like a PC. The CPU is crippled too, not just the PCI bus etc.
It would not need significantly more silicon to make something which would happily support many more users, but the market would be so small that it would not be economic, in other words it would cost as much (nearly) as a VAX.....
But we will be hearing more of this, mainly in areas where money is in short supply, such as education. Fine idea, and as you suggest, there is room for tweaking it a bit more. If you could offload the GUI work to X-terminals, you could get more people on one PC, something like an Amiga or Atari architecture of many tears ago with a 68xxx family processor in the (slightly enlarged) keyboard might make a very low-cost X-terminal. There are many other combinations of things that will achieve the desired end result, but at any time (and costs do change with time as we know), one particular configuration will be optimal.
Unlike the Criminal Monopoly, whose software gets ever more expensive, despite the volume of sales rising with each new generation, hardware (limited to silicon, and components that go on the PCB) invariably gets cheaper. Other hardware, metalwork and so on increases in cost, but very slowly. Next year's configuration may be quite different, it will become cheaper to have 2 or 4 motherboards in one box than to have separate boxes (already happened with certain servers I think). And, one day LCDs "may" be cheaper than CRTs, so the optimal (lowest cost) configuration will be constantly changing. One thing is sure, this approach guarantees to minimise the software costs. You can't get cheaper than free.
The real A.C. (and no, my last name is not Cox).
And yes, it is a really excellent idea in the appropriate circumstances. I know a certain Sir who will not like it, if educational establishments can equip themselves with many more terminals, and no licence fees to his Criminal Monopoly!
I hope the sort of people who develop educational applications (most probably teachers or ex-teachers at least, with programming skill) are goingto respond to this by porting things to linux that might currently need an expensive OS and single-user PC. It will happen in the developing world, where they are clued up about Linux etc, I am thinking of the UK, where many schools are very short of cash.
In the UK I could get 4 CRTs, keyboards and mice for the cost of the PC, approximately. The saving is very worthwhile and would be for almost any educational establishment.
My machine has been running for a few weeks and is not noticeably hot, however they are not the latest state of the art graphics cards, especially the PCI one which I found difficult to obtain. I would like to get a twinhead PCI to have 4 monitors, but they are rarer than hen's teeth in the UK.
BTW the graphics setup is OK in Linux or FreeBSD, once the Nvidia drivers are loaded, and with SuSE you must forget all about SAX and edit XF86Config by hand, as per the comprehensive info from Nvidia. The same file, with possibly minor tweaks can then be ported across to the FreeBSD partition, and the FreeBSD version of the Nvidia driver loaded, for those who want to dual-boot it with two decent OSs.
BTW I did this just to get lots of working space on my screens, 3 cheap LCDs at 1280*1024, great for programming and debug, and whatever else you need to do at the same time such as reading manuals, but takes less desktop than the two 1600*1200 CRTs I had contemplated. The Athlon is nothing special, 1600+ I think (not at that machine right now) but it has 2 HDDs, / on one, swap on the other, the usual speedup trick, not that it needs much swapping with 768MB RAM. Definitely not a top performer or games machine, but it works great, and most of the cost was the monitors.
This concept would be great for schools, it may be how Linux or BSD, or both, can make serious inroads into a big market, currently filled by the Criminal Monopoly. I think 6 screens might just about be viable with a top of the range Athlon, and some extra fans in the case, but I will not be building one of these for myself, it would be very OTT.
It is going back to the mainframe in a sense, but in areas where maintenance of the software is a major burden, this reduces that by a factor of 4, approximately. I would love to see this concept trialled in schools in the UK, it could free up money to be spent on other important things. If using a fairly basic PC, and cheap CRT monitors, it ought to be possible to get the cost to a very competitive level indeed, with no extortionate licence fees to you know who.
I t would also be good in offices where they do mainly word processing, hardly a heavy load, one PC for 4 secretaries.....
My 3-head monster has spare disk partitions, but I have not dared to try loading my redundant copy of Windoze 2000. It is rock-solid in Linux, FreeBSD is getting there (I am using 5.2.1 which is not a "stable" version, and have lots of apps loaded, so there is still a bit of tweaking needed, although the GUI etc are solid.)
Just had a thought, did Matrox not do a 4-head AGP card some time ago? Maybe that would do the job also, and leave slots free. I hope we are going to hear more of this sort of thing, on one front we have those who need, or want, performance goimng for multiple CPUs, all the way up to Beowulf clusters, and on the other hand the economy version has several users on one PC. Now whose OS is the scaleable one? Here is the proof!
Utterly incorrect. A rare earth magnet can be 40,000 gauss, amybe more now, and the coercivity of a HDD is relatively low, maybe 100 gauss, so it can be written, fast, with the small amount of power which the head can handle.
An API, like an ABI, is a mythical thing with no physical existence which can't be copyrighted. The code on one or both sides of the interface can be, of course, but a clean-room re-implementation is always possible. I think that has been established by the courts over many years, dating back to the original IBM PC bios code, and involving Unix etc. Darl McBride is going to fall flat on his face over this very issue, in another context.
If such a situation were to happen, I think the FOSS community should be invited to each contribute a nominal amount via PayPal or similar, with a small levy on each copy of distros sold. The FOSS community could raise sufficient funds to do battle, and win.
But the real place to watch will be O'Reilly, and possibly a few other publishers which do a lot of Linux-type stuff. Authors, get writing! Serious developers will want books, and lots of them.
I think historians, and casual observers of human behaviour, would agree with your psychologists. I also think that hardened criminals will continue to commit crime until they are dealt a very severe sentence, and naughty, spoiled brats will continue to misbehave and have tantrums until their toys are taken away. These observations may, or may not, be significant.....
Seriously though, I hope the problem gets fixed and you have success with your non-Windoze projects.