It is an interesting article for its summary of the things that NOS customers are looking for. However, it seems to substitute overgeneralization for real information in the case of Linux. Here's one of the things I tripped over:
In most cases, the choice of CPU is determined by the operating system. For example, Unix implementations optimally run on RISC-based systems, whereas NetWare and NT servers are nearly always Intel based.
That would have been okay, except that it didn't go on to explain that Linux, while widely ported, is native to the i386 family and most widely used on Intel processors.
Okay, flame me for the Star Trek analogy. I went for something obvious and politically neutral, or so I thought. As for the brown noser comment, think whatever you want. I spend a lot of my time at work translating ideas between groups that are talking about the same things and misunderstanding each other. Being a programmer, I am familiar with the impulse to be exasperatingly precise. It comes from being deliberately misunderstood too often. So I have developed a habit of seeing, and commenting on, the underlying meaning of what the people around me are saying. If that is brown nosing, get me a can of brown paint and a brush because my nose isn't dark enough yet.
While your point is obviously not entirely serious, it is valid. As far as I know, the intent of Unicode is to encode the glyphs of every human language. However, there is the very real issue of encoding dead languages which may not have been discovered yet, and new sets of symbols for fields of study that have not yet been formalized.
As for i18n and l10n saving you, that is one of the joys of free software. It adheres nicely to well-documented interfaces for internationalization. Build yourself a.xmodmaprc file to map your keyboard the way you want, create a set of fonts, and design a MULE definition of your new character set and language so that you can edit the text in Emacs. I18n can make it possible for you to accomplish that, which was my point.
Part of the reason that I spoke up is that I am working on localization of free software into Esperanto. It is going rather slowly for a numbr of reasons. The obvious one that most people would cite isn't actually correct. Esperanto has 1-2 million speakers, so there are plenty of potential users. The problem is that all of them are at least bilingual. None of the translators on the team need the localization. And all of us have real jobs to keep us busy.
Esperanto is frequently viewed as a fictional language. In a sense that characterization is honest if misleading. It was artificially created in the 1880's. It's creator is long dead, and it has been evolving naturally since then. There are even a few families that use it at home, generally because the couples met through Esperanto conventions and don't share a native language. Thanks to free software, we don't have to convince the world that we are worthy of support. We do it ourselves.
Why, Hemos, why is it good that anyone teams up with AOL?
The use of the words "interesting" and "play nice with" wasn't exactly an endorsement of the deal. The way I read the comment is that it is interesting, in much the same way that the recent alliance between the Klingons and Romulans is interesting. Whether it is good or bad depends entirely on whether they are shooting, and at whom. But the situation is clearly worth watching.
The Free Translation Project has been handling the internationalization and localization of free software (primarily, but not exclusively GNU software) for quite some time. If you are interested in help internationalizing a program, or in participating in a translation team, it is a good place to start.
Flame on, Pike. Some of us are actually doing something about it. I hardly think that people should use a different OS or a different compiler simply because they have different native languages. That doesn't make any sense. However, with free software, it doesn't make any sense to whine about not having translations into your own language. If you want them, do them yourself. I'm doing exactly that.
However, there are a few pieces of underlying support necessary:
The underlying software must actually read translated messages from somewhere (the GNU gettext mechanism works pretty well).
Character sets and fonts that support your alphabet must be supported.
The messages to be translated must be made available, and preferrably, the translations should be rolled back into the main distribution of the program.
As for native speakers of American English (of which I am one), even if you are monolingual, there is a decent chance that you would like to have customers in other countries with names constructed out of funny characters. Having the software you run handle their names correctly doesn't hurt. Frankly, I'm not at a disadvantage if all the menus, error messages and help files are in English. But I need to be able to enter data that contains foreign characters. Internationalization benefits more people than you realize.
I'm pleased that the referenced, and even quoted, The New Hacker's Dictionary/Jargon File. The only point I think they missed is that there is a perception among the hacker community that the word had its positive connotations first. The negative association with what we call "crackers" appeared later. We have been struggling against the careless aggregation of hackers and crackers lest we, the hackers, be mistaken for them, the crackers, in the public's mind.
We might have better luck teaching the press the term script kiddies and the reasons why we use it. I think even some of the crackers out there hold the script kiddies in contempt.
The market goes up and down. We refer to this as business cycles, booms and busts, or expansion and recession. The easiest bet to win is that the next recession will happen. This author at least has the guts to give reasons and work some numbers. But nothing about that prediction is revolutionary. And none of it should be any more alarming than the arrival of any previous recession. And that appears to be part of the message. We have not seen the end of business cycles. They are driven, in part, by human emotions: greed and fear. Technology is far from eliminating those.
Personally, I look on the possibility of a serious correction in the markets as a buying opportunity. The secret is to find the companies that are fundamentally strong. Their stock prices will take a hit too. But they will come back, faster and stronger than the rest. If you are worried about whether good companies will be able to get funding, go find them and supply it yourself. Buy their stock. It could make both you and them rich and successful.
Re:Open Source movement == Communism.
on
Product Placement
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There are a couple of flaws in your logic. No wait, you simply set up straw men in place of actual logic. But here are the flaws nonetheless. Under communism, everything belongs to The People. And we all know by example that The People are the people running the government. You get no choice and you retain no rights over your work.
Now, for Open Source. To the best of my knowledge, no piece of software has been made Open Source without the consent and cooperation of the programmer(s) involved. Few people in the Open Source community insist that every program should be open sourced. What we fight for passionately is sufficient recognition for the quality of open source software that we can use it for our work. And every Open Source license I have seen is based on the premise that the author of the code can limit what it is used for. Most open source licenses grant users certain rights and prohibit any reuse or redistribution in a way that would deny those rights to anyone else.
There are a fair number of hard core libertarians in Open Source. I suspect both communists and libertarians are over-represented here. There is certainly some tension between the groups. But we seem to agree that people can largely be trusted with our software if we spell out our intensions formally through a license. How many lawyers are there out there enforcing open source licenses full time? How many bureaucrats dedicate their days to protecting the intellectual property of the open source movement?
Communism is merely one of the formal definitions of a theory of left-wing anarchy. Free Software is compatible with a lack of central authority. Thus, it is compatible with communist theory. It is also compatible with anarcho-capitalism. But, as has been amply demonstrated, it can thrive in any environment where no one has the power to seize it and deny others continued use of it.
The point is, your laptop is your private property and nobody can take a look at what's inside without a court warrant.
Or if you grant access to it, but then you can set the terms. Personally, I am willing to grant access to some of my own machines, under certain conditions. The conditions are just a bit... extreme. They include:
payment
an agreement that anything found that was not included in the original reason for the search will not be copied or discussed
that when the search proves my innocence I will receive a public written apology, a large payment, and the person instigating the search will be fired with prejudice for the unwarranted accusation
None of these terms is unreasonable, and few people would be willing to accept them.
When I was first introduced to SGML a decade ago, I remember appreciating it's merits, but asking what it offered that TeX didn't. Yes, HTML offers us links, which TeX didn't. But I've watched people discover the reasons that drove me to start using TeX for documents with long lifetimes or automatically generated content. It's format is:
human-readable
portable
fully documented
consistent from release to release
If you have any documents generated with early word processors, can you still read them with anything?
I don't mean to say that SGML, HTML, XML or FOOML is a bad thing. But they are simply another way of given us what we've had with TeX for years, with a few enhancements. Let's remember TeX's strengths and not allow them to be lost with newer tools.
Just this afternoon, I generated an HTML document with some on-the-fly keyboard macros in Emacs. I needed to produce a simple table that corrolated the error codes our software received from a server with the error codes we returned to the user. I could have cut and pasted that by hand, but what I did is almost certainly complete and correct. I wouldn't be confident of that if I had pointed and clicked for a couple of hours. Besides, the whole thing took less time this way.
The assumption that you will use a particular application to manipulate data is a poor one. It limits you to the capabilities that it provides. Word processors generally provide limited or non-existent scripting capabilities. So when you want to automatically generate tables in a document from some other files, you are stuck doing it manually. That is a recipe for documentation that is out-of-date and full of errors.
Have never meet anyone that speaks Esperanto I do find the 2 to 10 million mark to be very high but I tend to hang out in countries where English is the offical language.
Actually, you probably have met several Esperantists. We look just like everyone else.;-) I didn't realize that I had met other Esperantists in person until the day that I picked up an Esperanto text that I had ordered. Both the clerk at the bookstore and a coworker I had known for more than a year mentioned knowing Esperanto. Had I not had that book, I never would have found out.
That means that language has no "right" or "wrong." Whatever is in use is right. And what's more, languages which were created, like Esperanto, are bound to fail, because they attempt to reverse-engineer a part of the human brain (and evolution is one top-notch engineer).
Artificial creation is not necessarily an inicator of whether a language will succeed or fail in the long run. As you correctly emphasized, adapting to new conditions, evolution, is necessary for a language's survival. A good indicator of its health is the degree to which its vocabulary is keep pace with those needs. The reasons that nearly every artificial language has failed are probably all related to a failure to attract a large enough body of speakers to keep the language alive. Esperanto probably has somewhere around 1-2 million, but there is no definite figure. Related to that would be artificial languages that are too hard to learn, or that aren't kept up-to-date by a community of speakers using them.
There are two reasons that English speakers in particular perceive Esperanto as not being widely spoken. First, English speakers need Esperanto less. Ours is currently one of the most desirable languages to learn for participation in international business, science, travel, etc. The second is not specific to English speakers. Esperantists are unusual. We are universally multilingual (at least bilingual). Thus, we are even harder to spot than most foreigners unless we make ourselves known. A less significant reason is that Esperanto is often mistaken for Spanish or Italian by people who speak neither of those languages.
Esperanto was never intended to take over the world, just to help people talk to each other.
I must also add that while the technical process of parsing is simplified by artificial languages like Lojban, Esperanto, or Klingon;-), they lose by their very accuracy and lack of ambiguity the richness, slight nuances, and shades of meaning that most naturally evolved languages possess.
I can't speak for the other two, since I don't speak them, but Esperanto is quite capable of handling subtle nuance. That was part of how it was designed. And there are some ambiguities that are (or have been) the subject of heated debates. The word building (vortfarado) rules in Esperanto allow speakers to simply build the words they need on the fly, and as a general rule they are understood. This leads to some types of word play that are quite common in Esperanto, but are restricted mostly to hackers in English. As an example, verbigi is a perfectly valid Esperanto word. The grammatically correct English translation would likely be to make into a verb, but to capture the flavor, verbify would be better.
Now, in all honesty, in regular conversation, Esperantists do not make certain distinctions most of the time. We say both, I sit and I am sitting as mi sidas. But the tense distinction can be made if necessary.
I have always been more concerned with a mentality that it far too prevalent: Since lots of people use a particular OS/Application, it is a standard. I don't care whether my Mom or my employer choose Windows, if the overall package is the best fit for their needs. Whether that is the case is a separate issue that I am not trying to debate right now. I want the freedom to choose the tools that best fit my needs. GNU/Linux provides a set of tools that is close to ideal for me. But then I run into problems with people who send me Word documents and PowerPoint presentations.
Now, what does this have to do with government action. One of the things that has come out over the past couple of years is that several of the hardware suppliers were not getting the quality of deals from MS that they were led to believe they were. As the sole supplier of an OS that conforms to the Windows "standard", MS priced deals differently to different companies. There's nothing wrong with that when the other terms differ as well. Volume discounts are a common feature in business. They represent the very real fact that selling 100,000 units in one contract costs less per transaction than selling one. But if MS's big customers aren't getting honest deals, that is an issue for them to sue over, not the DoJ and state attorneys general.
But MS has created a de facto "standard" that is only standard in the sense of being widely used. It is not documented in a way that makes it feasible for there to be a number of conformant products that interoperate with the "standard". If I can read the Word and PowerPoint files I get, I don't care whether MS sells hundreds or millions of copies. Windows doesn't meet my needs. It is not an environment for people who script every routine task out of existance. It is not an OS that just stays running for weeks at a time. It's strength is in being easier for new and casual users. Fine, let's have it interoperate with GNU/Linux and the tools I use there.
No! No! No! Security through obscurity is not a viable solution. Mom may be unable to find your (ahem) personal files, but your blackmailing younger brother will threaten to show them to her. What you need is good encryption.
I think you're waaaaaay overly-optimistic on a number of your suggestions, particularly with your imagined timeline ("Just a couple of hundred years or so at this rate"). Still it was extremely interesting, thanks.
I happen to think that he has roughly the right timeframe. High speed input is limited right now by the speed we can handle through the human senses. However, given the rates that some speed readers have achieved, it is reasonable to assume that we can significantly exceed the speed of human speech. However, I am unaware of any recent breakthroughs that are going to provide us with greater output bandwidth from a human brain. While we can certainly measure human brain activity in a number of ways, turning it into something meaningful is a hard problem. There is loss of significant information.
Nonetheless, simply having a wearable computer and a wireless, always-on connection to the net would allow me to share ideas around the globe without regard to where I am. I could hold realtime collaborations with quite a few people. There would no longer be a lag involving when we got to our e-mail. Even assuming that e-mail was the only communication tool involved, imagine routinely responding within minutes any time you are awake. It will give a boost to every kind of communication that doesn't require physical presence.
When fixing the code is an option, there is a solution that eliminates most of the issues involved with buffer sizes. It can allow values of arbitrary length to be handled in cases where you don't want to set an upper limit, such as free-form text fields. And it has been around in glibc for ages. Obstacks! If libsafe is an airbag, then obstacks is a tank. Each makes the road safer (for you) in its own way.
Without decent encryption, this practically begs to be wiretapped. I can certainly see some excellent uses for it though. As a data link for sites that want to limit RF interference (radio telescopes, for example) this could be a good thing.
According to the man page, libsafe implements versions of several library functions (strcpy, etc.) in such a way that any data written is limited to the current stack frame. Yes, that does prevent overwriting return addresses and the like. However, it does not prevent overwriting other arguments to the same function. If the object of the attack is merely denial of service, that may well be sufficient. Data that you can access, you can corrupt, this just limits your reach somewhat.
Some good points have been made here about the relative merits of print vs. electronic manuals. Judging from the fact that a quick search didn't turn up any references to translation, I don't think that issue has been dealt with. One of the things that online documentation makes possible is the distribution of a single software package with documentation in a number of languages. This can be extremely important for open source projects where there is no way to recover the cost of translation and printing in many minority languages. Sure, there are large, easily definable markets for Linux with English, German, French, or Spanish documentation, as well as others. What about less widely used languages?
In thanks for some open source translations I did, MandrakeSoft sent me a copy of Mandrake 7.0 (thanks, especially to Pablo). Somehow I got on the list for a copy with Spanish documentation. My conversational Spanish is rusty and my technical Spanish is non-existant. And it doesn't matter. The full English documentation is on the CD ROM. Besides, I translated the quick install instructions, so I ought to be able to find them again.
The point I am driving at is that no Linux distribution is going to make money selling a distribution with printed documentation in Esperanto. The potential market is rather small, and is spread throughout the world. Yet because of the nature of Esperanto as an interlanguage, Esperantists have a need for an internationalized computing platform that can handle their own native language and Esperanto. Given the open source model, and volunteers, it is possible to have support for many languages, each for the tiny cost of the space it's documentation occupies on a CD ROM. If there is a market for the printed documentation, the printing and distribution of that can be handled separately.
I can see why/. wouldn't post this. There would be quite a bit of posts if every lug got announcements regarding their "vital information" or such activities posted on Slashdot.
We already get "Quickies" articles with lots of news items, none of which individual merited an article. I don't see anything wrong with something similar containing important activities of various LUGs. It should probably be limited to protests, participation in larger events (appearances at non-Linux-related conventions, etc.), special appearances by open source personalities who have achieved wider fame, etc.
Seems like everytime there is a book review here, someone is slamming ThinkGeek for being more expensive.
It appears that by brevity may well be the soul of wit, it doesn't make for a good price comparison. Your point is the reason I did what I did. While ThinkGeek's discount was not great, I was pointing out that the other's either weren't discounted, or in one case had a trivial discount.
I checked ThinkGeek and noticed that the discount wasn't very much. I checked around. Fatbrain, Borders and Amazon have it listed at full price. Barnes and Noble is selling it at (I am not making this up) $.25 off.
Slashdot Mirror
That would have been okay, except that it didn't go on to explain that Linux, while widely ported, is native to the i386 family and most widely used on Intel processors.
Okay, flame me for the Star Trek analogy. I went for something obvious and politically neutral, or so I thought. As for the brown noser comment, think whatever you want. I spend a lot of my time at work translating ideas between groups that are talking about the same things and misunderstanding each other. Being a programmer, I am familiar with the impulse to be exasperatingly precise. It comes from being deliberately misunderstood too often. So I have developed a habit of seeing, and commenting on, the underlying meaning of what the people around me are saying. If that is brown nosing, get me a can of brown paint and a brush because my nose isn't dark enough yet.
While your point is obviously not entirely serious, it is valid. As far as I know, the intent of Unicode is to encode the glyphs of every human language. However, there is the very real issue of encoding dead languages which may not have been discovered yet, and new sets of symbols for fields of study that have not yet been formalized.
.xmodmaprc file to map your keyboard the way you want, create a set of fonts, and design a MULE definition of your new character set and language so that you can edit the text in Emacs. I18n can make it possible for you to accomplish that, which was my point.
As for i18n and l10n saving you, that is one of the joys of free software. It adheres nicely to well-documented interfaces for internationalization. Build yourself a
Part of the reason that I spoke up is that I am working on localization of free software into Esperanto. It is going rather slowly for a numbr of reasons. The obvious one that most people would cite isn't actually correct. Esperanto has 1-2 million speakers, so there are plenty of potential users. The problem is that all of them are at least bilingual. None of the translators on the team need the localization. And all of us have real jobs to keep us busy.
Esperanto is frequently viewed as a fictional language. In a sense that characterization is honest if misleading. It was artificially created in the 1880's. It's creator is long dead, and it has been evolving naturally since then. There are even a few families that use it at home, generally because the couples met through Esperanto conventions and don't share a native language. Thanks to free software, we don't have to convince the world that we are worthy of support. We do it ourselves.
The use of the words "interesting" and "play nice with" wasn't exactly an endorsement of the deal. The way I read the comment is that it is interesting, in much the same way that the recent alliance between the Klingons and Romulans is interesting. Whether it is good or bad depends entirely on whether they are shooting, and at whom. But the situation is clearly worth watching.
The Free Translation Project has been handling the internationalization and localization of free software (primarily, but not exclusively GNU software) for quite some time. If you are interested in help internationalizing a program, or in participating in a translation team, it is a good place to start.
However, there are a few pieces of underlying support necessary:
As for native speakers of American English (of which I am one), even if you are monolingual, there is a decent chance that you would like to have customers in other countries with names constructed out of funny characters. Having the software you run handle their names correctly doesn't hurt. Frankly, I'm not at a disadvantage if all the menus, error messages and help files are in English. But I need to be able to enter data that contains foreign characters. Internationalization benefits more people than you realize.
I'm pleased that the referenced, and even quoted, The New Hacker's Dictionary/Jargon File. The only point I think they missed is that there is a perception among the hacker community that the word had its positive connotations first. The negative association with what we call "crackers" appeared later. We have been struggling against the careless aggregation of hackers and crackers lest we, the hackers, be mistaken for them, the crackers, in the public's mind.
We might have better luck teaching the press the term script kiddies and the reasons why we use it. I think even some of the crackers out there hold the script kiddies in contempt.
The market goes up and down. We refer to this as business cycles, booms and busts, or expansion and recession. The easiest bet to win is that the next recession will happen. This author at least has the guts to give reasons and work some numbers. But nothing about that prediction is revolutionary. And none of it should be any more alarming than the arrival of any previous recession. And that appears to be part of the message. We have not seen the end of business cycles. They are driven, in part, by human emotions: greed and fear. Technology is far from eliminating those.
Personally, I look on the possibility of a serious correction in the markets as a buying opportunity. The secret is to find the companies that are fundamentally strong. Their stock prices will take a hit too. But they will come back, faster and stronger than the rest. If you are worried about whether good companies will be able to get funding, go find them and supply it yourself. Buy their stock. It could make both you and them rich and successful.
There are a couple of flaws in your logic. No wait, you simply set up straw men in place of actual logic. But here are the flaws nonetheless. Under communism, everything belongs to The People. And we all know by example that The People are the people running the government. You get no choice and you retain no rights over your work.
Now, for Open Source. To the best of my knowledge, no piece of software has been made Open Source without the consent and cooperation of the programmer(s) involved. Few people in the Open Source community insist that every program should be open sourced. What we fight for passionately is sufficient recognition for the quality of open source software that we can use it for our work. And every Open Source license I have seen is based on the premise that the author of the code can limit what it is used for. Most open source licenses grant users certain rights and prohibit any reuse or redistribution in a way that would deny those rights to anyone else.
There are a fair number of hard core libertarians in Open Source. I suspect both communists and libertarians are over-represented here. There is certainly some tension between the groups. But we seem to agree that people can largely be trusted with our software if we spell out our intensions formally through a license. How many lawyers are there out there enforcing open source licenses full time? How many bureaucrats dedicate their days to protecting the intellectual property of the open source movement?
Communism is merely one of the formal definitions of a theory of left-wing anarchy. Free Software is compatible with a lack of central authority. Thus, it is compatible with communist theory. It is also compatible with anarcho-capitalism. But, as has been amply demonstrated, it can thrive in any environment where no one has the power to seize it and deny others continued use of it.
Or if you grant access to it, but then you can set the terms. Personally, I am willing to grant access to some of my own machines, under certain conditions. The conditions are just a bit
None of these terms is unreasonable, and few people would be willing to accept them.
If you have any documents generated with early word processors, can you still read them with anything?
I don't mean to say that SGML, HTML, XML or FOOML is a bad thing. But they are simply another way of given us what we've had with TeX for years, with a few enhancements. Let's remember TeX's strengths and not allow them to be lost with newer tools.
Just this afternoon, I generated an HTML document with some on-the-fly keyboard macros in Emacs. I needed to produce a simple table that corrolated the error codes our software received from a server with the error codes we returned to the user. I could have cut and pasted that by hand, but what I did is almost certainly complete and correct. I wouldn't be confident of that if I had pointed and clicked for a couple of hours. Besides, the whole thing took less time this way.
The assumption that you will use a particular application to manipulate data is a poor one. It limits you to the capabilities that it provides. Word processors generally provide limited or non-existent scripting capabilities. So when you want to automatically generate tables in a document from some other files, you are stuck doing it manually. That is a recipe for documentation that is out-of-date and full of errors.
Actually, you probably have met several Esperantists. We look just like everyone else.
Artificial creation is not necessarily an inicator of whether a language will succeed or fail in the long run. As you correctly emphasized, adapting to new conditions, evolution, is necessary for a language's survival. A good indicator of its health is the degree to which its vocabulary is keep pace with those needs. The reasons that nearly every artificial language has failed are probably all related to a failure to attract a large enough body of speakers to keep the language alive. Esperanto probably has somewhere around 1-2 million, but there is no definite figure. Related to that would be artificial languages that are too hard to learn, or that aren't kept up-to-date by a community of speakers using them.
There are two reasons that English speakers in particular perceive Esperanto as not being widely spoken. First, English speakers need Esperanto less. Ours is currently one of the most desirable languages to learn for participation in international business, science, travel, etc. The second is not specific to English speakers. Esperantists are unusual. We are universally multilingual (at least bilingual). Thus, we are even harder to spot than most foreigners unless we make ourselves known. A less significant reason is that Esperanto is often mistaken for Spanish or Italian by people who speak neither of those languages.
Esperanto was never intended to take over the world, just to help people talk to each other.
I can't speak for the other two, since I don't speak them, but Esperanto is quite capable of handling subtle nuance. That was part of how it was designed. And there are some ambiguities that are (or have been) the subject of heated debates. The word building (vortfarado) rules in Esperanto allow speakers to simply build the words they need on the fly, and as a general rule they are understood. This leads to some types of word play that are quite common in Esperanto, but are restricted mostly to hackers in English. As an example, verbigi is a perfectly valid Esperanto word. The grammatically correct English translation would likely be to make into a verb, but to capture the flavor, verbify would be better.
Now, in all honesty, in regular conversation, Esperantists do not make certain distinctions most of the time. We say both, I sit and I am sitting as mi sidas. But the tense distinction can be made if necessary.
I have always been more concerned with a mentality that it far too prevalent: Since lots of people use a particular OS/Application, it is a standard. I don't care whether my Mom or my employer choose Windows, if the overall package is the best fit for their needs. Whether that is the case is a separate issue that I am not trying to debate right now. I want the freedom to choose the tools that best fit my needs. GNU/Linux provides a set of tools that is close to ideal for me. But then I run into problems with people who send me Word documents and PowerPoint presentations.
Now, what does this have to do with government action. One of the things that has come out over the past couple of years is that several of the hardware suppliers were not getting the quality of deals from MS that they were led to believe they were. As the sole supplier of an OS that conforms to the Windows "standard", MS priced deals differently to different companies. There's nothing wrong with that when the other terms differ as well. Volume discounts are a common feature in business. They represent the very real fact that selling 100,000 units in one contract costs less per transaction than selling one. But if MS's big customers aren't getting honest deals, that is an issue for them to sue over, not the DoJ and state attorneys general.
But MS has created a de facto "standard" that is only standard in the sense of being widely used. It is not documented in a way that makes it feasible for there to be a number of conformant products that interoperate with the "standard". If I can read the Word and PowerPoint files I get, I don't care whether MS sells hundreds or millions of copies. Windows doesn't meet my needs. It is not an environment for people who script every routine task out of existance. It is not an OS that just stays running for weeks at a time. It's strength is in being easier for new and casual users. Fine, let's have it interoperate with GNU/Linux and the tools I use there.
No! No! No! Security through obscurity is not a viable solution. Mom may be unable to find your (ahem) personal files, but your blackmailing younger brother will threaten to show them to her. What you need is good encryption.
I happen to think that he has roughly the right timeframe. High speed input is limited right now by the speed we can handle through the human senses. However, given the rates that some speed readers have achieved, it is reasonable to assume that we can significantly exceed the speed of human speech. However, I am unaware of any recent breakthroughs that are going to provide us with greater output bandwidth from a human brain. While we can certainly measure human brain activity in a number of ways, turning it into something meaningful is a hard problem. There is loss of significant information.
Nonetheless, simply having a wearable computer and a wireless, always-on connection to the net would allow me to share ideas around the globe without regard to where I am. I could hold realtime collaborations with quite a few people. There would no longer be a lag involving when we got to our e-mail. Even assuming that e-mail was the only communication tool involved, imagine routinely responding within minutes any time you are awake. It will give a boost to every kind of communication that doesn't require physical presence.
When fixing the code is an option, there is a solution that eliminates most of the issues involved with buffer sizes. It can allow values of arbitrary length to be handled in cases where you don't want to set an upper limit, such as free-form text fields. And it has been around in glibc for ages. Obstacks! If libsafe is an airbag, then obstacks is a tank. Each makes the road safer (for you) in its own way.
Without decent encryption, this practically begs to be wiretapped. I can certainly see some excellent uses for it though. As a data link for sites that want to limit RF interference (radio telescopes, for example) this could be a good thing.
According to the man page, libsafe implements versions of several library functions (strcpy, etc.) in such a way that any data written is limited to the current stack frame. Yes, that does prevent overwriting return addresses and the like. However, it does not prevent overwriting other arguments to the same function. If the object of the attack is merely denial of service, that may well be sufficient. Data that you can access, you can corrupt, this just limits your reach somewhat.
Some good points have been made here about the relative merits of print vs. electronic manuals. Judging from the fact that a quick search didn't turn up any references to translation, I don't think that issue has been dealt with. One of the things that online documentation makes possible is the distribution of a single software package with documentation in a number of languages. This can be extremely important for open source projects where there is no way to recover the cost of translation and printing in many minority languages. Sure, there are large, easily definable markets for Linux with English, German, French, or Spanish documentation, as well as others. What about less widely used languages?
In thanks for some open source translations I did, MandrakeSoft sent me a copy of Mandrake 7.0 (thanks, especially to Pablo). Somehow I got on the list for a copy with Spanish documentation. My conversational Spanish is rusty and my technical Spanish is non-existant. And it doesn't matter. The full English documentation is on the CD ROM. Besides, I translated the quick install instructions, so I ought to be able to find them again.
The point I am driving at is that no Linux distribution is going to make money selling a distribution with printed documentation in Esperanto. The potential market is rather small, and is spread throughout the world. Yet because of the nature of Esperanto as an interlanguage, Esperantists have a need for an internationalized computing platform that can handle their own native language and Esperanto. Given the open source model, and volunteers, it is possible to have support for many languages, each for the tiny cost of the space it's documentation occupies on a CD ROM. If there is a market for the printed documentation, the printing and distribution of that can be handled separately.
We already get "Quickies" articles with lots of news items, none of which individual merited an article. I don't see anything wrong with something similar containing important activities of various LUGs. It should probably be limited to protests, participation in larger events (appearances at non-Linux-related conventions, etc.), special appearances by open source personalities who have achieved wider fame, etc.
It appears that by brevity may well be the soul of wit, it doesn't make for a good price comparison. Your point is the reason I did what I did. While ThinkGeek's discount was not great, I was pointing out that the other's either weren't discounted, or in one case had a trivial discount.
I checked ThinkGeek and noticed that the discount wasn't very much. I checked around. Fatbrain, Borders and Amazon have it listed at full price. Barnes and Noble is selling it at (I am not making this up) $.25 off.