I thought I would share some cheer, or at least laughter with all of you. I know many Slashdot readers have already found Strenua Inertia, but if you haven't, I suggest reading the current story arc.
you'd think no-one on the Net had kids if you didn't know better
There are things that I don't want my young children encountering without my guidance. But I'm not afraid of having to explain uncomfortable subjects to them. Nor am I afraid to set boundaries for them and tell them what the rules are. I wonder how much of the demand for censorware is from parents who want to feel safe about their children's online experiences without having to take the responsibility themselves. Responsibility for teaching children how to discriminate good ideas from bad doesn't come in a box and you can't put it on your credit card. It is a personal commitment to them as individuals.
I can almost hear the censors asking, "But what about when you aren't home?" That's what I mean about limits and rules. I expect to be able to tell my children how far they can go and then leave them as much freedom as possible within those bounds. For a young child, that takes the form of a rule not to cross the street alone or that the computer goes off at a particular time. For an older child it advances to what are and are not appropriate uses for that computer. I can't always be with my kids. The best thing I can do is teach them well. If I can't teach them to make good decisions when they are living under my roof, what hope is there that they will be able to after they are grown and move out?
There is also the issue of trust. It can be a powerful thing. A child who knows he has your trust has a reason to avoid losing it. A child who has a reason to believe he isn't trusted can't fear losing that trust.
Thanks for explaining all of the high points so well and so succinctly. The bottom line is that there are good patents and there are bad patents. The bad ones are for ideas that are overly broad and vague, things that are obvious, and anything for which there is prior art.
IP lawyers are unlikely to have anywhere near the level of specialized technical knowledge that a programmer or engineer working on a project has. Their knowledge is more superficial, but broader. It is up to the engineers to point out the obvious stuff, the prior art, etc. This is not much different from taking enough responsibility for your own health that you ask your doctor intelligent questions. It must be a collaborative effort.
Of course, I am preaching to the choir here. I think most of you reading this understand the damage that bad patents and a broken process have the potential to inflict. We are nowhere near being the majority of programmers in the world. A lawyer unfamilar with software and a programmer who treats that lawyer as a guru on IP law who is not to be questioned can still write bad patent applications. And the USPTO can't have experts in every field. If we want it fixed, we have to get out there and change it ourselves.
Re:One example doesn't make the point strongly eno
on
RMS on Java and GPL
·
· Score: 1
I understand what intellectual property law is supposed to accomplish. Stated baldly, it grants a temporary monopoly to the person or company that invents something. It creates an artificial incentive to innovate. The problem with patent law, and this article didn't touch it, is that it is prohibitively expensive and uncertain these days to even try to determine whether your new product or idea would violate somebody's patent.
The real difference between the Windows wrap-the-user-in-a-warm-fuzzy-GUI paradigm and the Linux I-can-do-it-myself-thank-you paradigm is quite simple when you examine it. It is the tension between two different sets of design criteria. On the one hand, Windows is designed to be appealing to new and occasional users. It is the even-grandma-can-use-it principle. It is not a bad idea.
On the other hand, Linux and open source in general is designed to be an environment that empowers programmers. We are the ultimate power users. We want control of everything we can see. And we have the training and skills to see a lot and know what we could do with it. Open source exposes the interfaces to any programmer or user who wants to see them. Communication protocols and file formats are documented and often come from standards. Those standards and documentation are usually available for free. That is how open source attracts programmer/users who may be potential contributers. It is not something we can abandon, or want to.
As an example, there is nothing that frustrates me more when using a piece of software than when a common task requires a a lengthy sequence of mouse clicks, and there is nothing I can do to put it on the keyboard or shorten it. I don't care how obvious the icons and menu items are when I have to click six times to accomplish something that I do a hundred time a day.
The reason for this difference in preferences and usage styles is a difference in usage patterns. Programmers tend to be deep users of a few tools. We know their features completely. And we want to tailor them to our exact needs. What could be better than open source for that. It is a paradigm that can let us find even a couple dozen people scattered around the globe who want some very low demand feature. And it allows us to collaborate to build it.
Does my mother want to be able to optimize her usage this way? No. She wants to finish placing an order at an e-commerce web site so that she can go play golf. She doesn't use any given piece of software often enough to make a long learning curve worthwhile to her.
Most of the Windows vs. Linux flaming over the years has boiled down to "Your interface sucks and if you try to make me switch you're an idiot." It leaves out the most important phrase: "for my usage pattern". The real fight should be to reach a point where those of use whose productivity profits from using Linux can use it, at home, at work, with any server on the net we want to reach, period. Windows and the software under it doesn't give me what I need to make my computing experience pleasant and productive because it limits the control I can exercise with the considerable knowledge I bring to it. On the other hand, Linux is limiting to people who don't have the knowledge to leverage and never want to spend the time to acquire it.
Can one environment satisfy both camps? Can you simultaneously expose interfaces to ann potential developers and programmer/power users while hiding those interfaces from Grandma? I think it can be done, but only if the importance of both user communities is balanced. If we ever bury the interfaces so deep that new geeks can never get to them, we will lose the open source collaboration and the software will stagnate. If we don't make it possible to use the system without seeing them, we are limited in the potential audience. We can do both, but it must be intensional, or at least one of the two goals will fail.
A Microsoft spokeswoman, however, disputes these perspectives, claiming that Microsoft's closed-source software is more secure than ever.
Well, let's see. DOS had no security. It assumed that if you could find the power switch and the keyboard, the data was yours. From there the only way to get less security would be to actively broadcast private data.
"Windows 2000 is the most secure operating system Microsoft has ever shipped," she says.
I don't doubt that it is more secure that any of their prior OSs. My house is more secure with the doors closed (but unlocked) than with them open. Then it is safe from children too small to turn the doorknob. That doesn't make it secure on an absolute scale. And maybe in all the hype over the holidays I missed the announcement. When did Windows 2000 ship?
Among other things, entire development teams were focused solely on searching out security issues within the beta code
I applaud Microsoft for doing a right thing here. Internal review is important.
Microsoft posted a public Internet beta test site for customers to test the security of the system
What was the total uptime on that site?
and new development processes were put in place to ensure that the system was built from the ground up with security as a key objective.
This would seem to imply that all of the code in which they knew there where security flaws has been rewritten from scratch using new development processes. I doubt that. If not, then we have the old flawed code developed under the old flawed process.
My point here is not that any particular criticism proves that Windows 2000 is insecure. Rather, my assertions that it isn't are as meaningful as those assertions that it is. Neither this spokeswoman nor I have offered any proof. If you want proof of the security of free software, read the source, or better still pay a team of security experts to read the source.
I noticed the article mentioned that by some accounts Mandrake is outselling Red Hat significantly. Looking for the number of units each of the distributions is shipping, I went hunting around the Red Hat site looking for theirs. I can find their estimate of their percentage of the North American market (56%) as well as the revenue generated from the sales of software ($3,369,000), but I can't find the raw number of units. I'd like to know. Now to Red Hat's credit, they clearly indicated in the latest quarterly report that the decline in software sales as a percentage of income does not represent a decrease in sales of software. They have increased their sales of service. And from the look of it as I skimmed, they are selling quite a few books as well.
One example doesn't make the point strongly enough
on
RMS on Java and GPL
·
· Score: 1
gcc, g++, glibc and Linux have all moved in the direction of standards, either real or de facto. Free software often adds enhancements beyond the standards, but it rarely violates them. It would be counterproductive to do it.
I doubt that most open source programmers do it for the money, at least not initially. There's the canonical motivation of scratching the developer's personal itch. There are others. Eric Raymond has rightly called open source a gift culture. That is not the only facit of open source economics, but it is an important one. There are some of us, myself included, who want to be heard. That is, to help shape the future directions of software in general. Open source is the single biggest lever out there. If you can offer enough help to see your own good ideas get into a project, there are plenty of open source projects that will gladly have you. And there is glory. I don't mind finding my name on a project web site.
I wouldn't turn down an offer of shares in a new open source company, and I certainly wouldn't mind if it made me independently wealthy. But I don't expect it. Smaller amounts of money from open source companies can still do a lot to motivate me. They can host project web sites, mailing lists and CVS servers. They can give credit to contributers on web sites and in manuals. They can send CD ROMS, t-shirts and bumper stickers. Or even, as the above mentioned article says about VA Linux and Eric Raymond, they can provide a location for open source developers to use to stay in touch and maybe occasionally provide a necessary piece of hardware to keep some person or project going. The bottom line is that I am unlikely to get a big pile of cash for anything I do. So what? Host my project and send me a copy of your distribution. It costs less and funds the goals we share.
I was impressed. Here is a piece about the open source IPOs that showed a knowledge of what open source is about. He asked some good questions and partially answered them. I think Leonard's conclusion that free software will be here 5 years from now is valid. Regardless of the sucess or failure of open source business models, the reasons that many of us do it aren't going to change. Whether Red Hat and VA Linux will conquer the world or wither and die remains to be seen. I wish them both well.
I guess that is why I have this wish that the USPTO upheld the patent. I just would like to see the circus show to which it would lead to...
I thought about that. Is this patent real any more or less valid than many other software patents, on the grounds of either obviousness or prior art? If the USPTO does invalidate it, it will at least tell us how high they consider the bar to be on those criteria. Maybe Andover.net should patent online flamefests via the web. There's got to be some way to write that up so it will pass the test.
I saw this when it was originally aired. I think it is instructive that it was only aired once, back in the 70s. Since then I have only been able to remember Wookies singing and dancing, and the rather odd question of why Wookie home life had so much in common with domestic Terran surburban bliss circa 1978, when the Wookies themselves resemble us only in that they are bipedal with the same sensory organs we have. If ever there was a demonstration of real repressed childhood memories, this would be it. This review is really all I need of that special. With two children in the house, I am very afraid that one of them would want to watch it a second time.
I thought it was hard the first time I typed on one of the cheap modern keyboards that provides very little resistance and no click. Typing without a keyboard is taking that to an extreme. And I just started paying more attention to the way I type. My junior high school typing teacher would be appauled. From what I can tell, I use three finger and my thumb on my left hand and one finger and my thumb on my right. Not to mention frequently stretching them. I do wonder how it will interpret odd typing styles.
Then, of course, there is the whole issue of how well it can discriminate chords. I use Emacs, The One True Editor (C-0 M-x all-hail-emacs), which is well known for some of the secondary meanings of its acronym including "Esc Meta Alt Ctrl Shift". We just express it more compactly as M-A-C-S-. Humor aside, will I be able to type M-C-v or C-@ or other three key chords with ease?
Geeks come with an incredible range of interests. I would think that would be obvious to most of us. We don't all listen to techno and read post-cyberpunk SF. Okay, I do both of those. And one of my all time favorite albums is Welcome to the Machine. I range from so mainstream my parents should be proud to so obscure that no one here would recognize every one of the artists.
One of the great things about open source is that we can each bring our ideas, skills, and needs to a project and come away with some fantastic tools. Is there a reason that our diversity would stop with software?
Oh, and Res Geek, you were one word short of a good Charlie Daniels reference.
Is society that lazy that we need a computer to dial phone numbers for us.
No, our friends and relatives have a home phone, work phone, cell phone, second line for the FAX/modem and a pager. And they keep moving every few years just when we start to remember how to find them. And the ones that don't move live in area codes that are being split. This often involves changing from a 7 digit to 10 digit dialing plan.
I can punch the numbers, but I can't remember them.
Since this topic came up here very recently, I was just thinking about a friend who most definitely would not want a GUI install. She's blind. Should she have to buy a high-end monitor to install an OS that she will never once use in a graphical mode? Her money would be much better spent on a really good sound card and speakers.
Does XFree86 provide more complete support for internationalization than the console? I think character sets and fonts are a non-issue, but X probably has more complete support for complex input methods than an off-the-shelf kernel.
First, do we have any confirmation of this story? I'm sorry to imply any distrust of the source, but I would like to see an independent sighting of something as ridiculous as this.
Second, if it does prove true, I suspect there are going to be more than a few open source project web pages carrying a brief summary of this issue and mentioning the parties involved by name, while providing links to any coverage on the web. And I trust they will provide links to each other so that they will be widely referenced and easy for search engines to find.
The real purpose regardless of whatever Time may say about their Person of the Year, is to recognize the most talked about person of the year. Furthermore, since that person must be the most talked about as remembered in late December, it must be someone who is being talked about in December. The fleeting fame of such eminent personages as Ms. Lewinski and Ms. Tripp, or the flash-in-the-pan Mr. Clinton is not enough. Whether you prompt whispers of scandal, or accolades of commercial triumph, you must have the staying power to arrive in December with your name still on the lips of the masses.
Nor is it important if they all pronounce the name the same way. Surely Amazon and E-commerce and indeed correct pronunciations of Mr. Bezos' name. There is no relevance in whether the speaker has every shopped online, or at Mr. Bezos' pixillary boutique. Such minutiae are rightfully assigned to the honourable choice, Other. Yes, by a plurality of the people who have heard of him and not of all of the other candidates, in the past two weeks, he was chosen from among the short list of finalists.
Years ago, I read a hilarious artical by James Randi explaining the scientific method might be used to test the hypothesis that some reindeer can fly. The only thing I can't remember for sure is where I saw it. I thought I found it on hi web site, but it doesn't seem to be there now. Is there a copy online? A link to it would be quite appropriate to this discussion.
There is one very important aspect of the various open source licenses that is enforceable and does not require going to court. The source is free. Regardless of what anyone tries to do with it, we can continue to use it, fix it, and enhance it. And a bunch of individual developers around the world make a really poor target for lawyers to try to wrestle control from. In other words, we don't have to sue them to get it back because they can't take open source away.
I don't mean this to say that open source projects and companies shouldn't protect themselves from abuses of open source licenses. But that is only one side of the issue.
I don't mind if Bill is getting rich. More power to him. I'll even consider buying an alternative to Linux that does a better job of providing what I chose Linux for:
Ships with standard scripting language(s) that I can expect to find anywhere the OS is installed: bash, Perl, gawk, and optionally Python, Tcl, etc.
Ships with development tools so that I can take my source code to any Linux box and compile it (possibly slipping in distribution disk first to install them).
Doesn't force me to go through GUI when scripting tasks I do repeatedly is faster.
4 important words: mean time between failures.
Nearly every standard tool can be configured for a variety of languages, including ones that the company distributing it has never heard of.
Originally I just went on listing things I like about Linux, but I thought better of it. The bottom line is that I like having a programmer's environment, and I want it accessible and a part of all of the tools. That's where Unix started. The free software community has carried the idea further. It is a different mindset. It is a different style of usage. It is the idea that the user should not be presented with an interface that makes many common tasks efficient, but in which further optimization is hard. Linux puts the UI optimization into the user's hands if the user wants it.
I have been thinking for some time how cool it would be to have educational games for Linux for my kids. Hey, there's no reason it has to be boring for adults to be educational for the kids. I wonder how hard it would be to tailor this code to a use like that. There's only two things stopping me:
I am way over-booked, and
as an artist, I make a very good programmer. In other words, I can usually draw a line.
The only upside is that I know where I can find beta-testers.
This was exactly the same issue that turned my parents off from using Priceline to book a hotel stay. They had no way of knowing that they weren't going to get a run down dive in the worst part of town. And the policy locks them in. Would it be so hard to offer a different tier of service, where they guarantee that you will be getting the service from one of a list of name-brand suppliers? I suspect that the lock-in is how they attract the suppliers to provide lower rates. However, those same suppliers might be thrilled to make an average of a dollar or two more on thousands of transactions that guarantee the same level of service they already provide. Insect infested dives by the tracks in the combat zone need not apply.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I would share some cheer, or at least laughter with all of you. I know many Slashdot readers have already found Strenua Inertia, but if you haven't, I suggest reading the current story arc.
There are things that I don't want my young children encountering without my guidance. But I'm not afraid of having to explain uncomfortable subjects to them. Nor am I afraid to set boundaries for them and tell them what the rules are. I wonder how much of the demand for censorware is from parents who want to feel safe about their children's online experiences without having to take the responsibility themselves. Responsibility for teaching children how to discriminate good ideas from bad doesn't come in a box and you can't put it on your credit card. It is a personal commitment to them as individuals.
I can almost hear the censors asking, "But what about when you aren't home?" That's what I mean about limits and rules. I expect to be able to tell my children how far they can go and then leave them as much freedom as possible within those bounds. For a young child, that takes the form of a rule not to cross the street alone or that the computer goes off at a particular time. For an older child it advances to what are and are not appropriate uses for that computer. I can't always be with my kids. The best thing I can do is teach them well. If I can't teach them to make good decisions when they are living under my roof, what hope is there that they will be able to after they are grown and move out?
There is also the issue of trust. It can be a powerful thing. A child who knows he has your trust has a reason to avoid losing it. A child who has a reason to believe he isn't trusted can't fear losing that trust.
Thanks for explaining all of the high points so well and so succinctly. The bottom line is that there are good patents and there are bad patents. The bad ones are for ideas that are overly broad and vague, things that are obvious, and anything for which there is prior art.
IP lawyers are unlikely to have anywhere near the level of specialized technical knowledge that a programmer or engineer working on a project has. Their knowledge is more superficial, but broader. It is up to the engineers to point out the obvious stuff, the prior art, etc. This is not much different from taking enough responsibility for your own health that you ask your doctor intelligent questions. It must be a collaborative effort.
Of course, I am preaching to the choir here. I think most of you reading this understand the damage that bad patents and a broken process have the potential to inflict. We are nowhere near being the majority of programmers in the world. A lawyer unfamilar with software and a programmer who treats that lawyer as a guru on IP law who is not to be questioned can still write bad patent applications. And the USPTO can't have experts in every field. If we want it fixed, we have to get out there and change it ourselves.
That's:
#pragma POSIX_ME_HARDER baby
I understand what intellectual property law is supposed to accomplish. Stated baldly, it grants a temporary monopoly to the person or company that invents something. It creates an artificial incentive to innovate. The problem with patent law, and this article didn't touch it, is that it is prohibitively expensive and uncertain these days to even try to determine whether your new product or idea would violate somebody's patent.
For a very readable discussion of intellectual property law, I recommend Chapter 11 of David Friedman's upcoming book, Law's Order: An Economic Account, entitled Clouds and Barbed Wire
The real difference between the Windows wrap-the-user-in-a-warm-fuzzy-GUI paradigm and the Linux I-can-do-it-myself-thank-you paradigm is quite simple when you examine it. It is the tension between two different sets of design criteria. On the one hand, Windows is designed to be appealing to new and occasional users. It is the even-grandma-can-use-it principle. It is not a bad idea.
On the other hand, Linux and open source in general is designed to be an environment that empowers programmers. We are the ultimate power users. We want control of everything we can see. And we have the training and skills to see a lot and know what we could do with it. Open source exposes the interfaces to any programmer or user who wants to see them. Communication protocols and file formats are documented and often come from standards. Those standards and documentation are usually available for free. That is how open source attracts programmer/users who may be potential contributers. It is not something we can abandon, or want to.
As an example, there is nothing that frustrates me more when using a piece of software than when a common task requires a a lengthy sequence of mouse clicks, and there is nothing I can do to put it on the keyboard or shorten it. I don't care how obvious the icons and menu items are when I have to click six times to accomplish something that I do a hundred time a day.
The reason for this difference in preferences and usage styles is a difference in usage patterns. Programmers tend to be deep users of a few tools. We know their features completely. And we want to tailor them to our exact needs. What could be better than open source for that. It is a paradigm that can let us find even a couple dozen people scattered around the globe who want some very low demand feature. And it allows us to collaborate to build it.
Does my mother want to be able to optimize her usage this way? No. She wants to finish placing an order at an e-commerce web site so that she can go play golf. She doesn't use any given piece of software often enough to make a long learning curve worthwhile to her.
Most of the Windows vs. Linux flaming over the years has boiled down to "Your interface sucks and if you try to make me switch you're an idiot." It leaves out the most important phrase: "for my usage pattern". The real fight should be to reach a point where those of use whose productivity profits from using Linux can use it, at home, at work, with any server on the net we want to reach, period. Windows and the software under it doesn't give me what I need to make my computing experience pleasant and productive because it limits the control I can exercise with the considerable knowledge I bring to it. On the other hand, Linux is limiting to people who don't have the knowledge to leverage and never want to spend the time to acquire it.
Can one environment satisfy both camps? Can you simultaneously expose interfaces to ann potential developers and programmer/power users while hiding those interfaces from Grandma? I think it can be done, but only if the importance of both user communities is balanced. If we ever bury the interfaces so deep that new geeks can never get to them, we will lose the open source collaboration and the software will stagnate. If we don't make it possible to use the system without seeing them, we are limited in the potential audience. We can do both, but it must be intensional, or at least one of the two goals will fail.
Well, let's see. DOS had no security. It assumed that if you could find the power switch and the keyboard, the data was yours. From there the only way to get less security would be to actively broadcast private data.
I don't doubt that it is more secure that any of their prior OSs. My house is more secure with the doors closed (but unlocked) than with them open. Then it is safe from children too small to turn the doorknob. That doesn't make it secure on an absolute scale. And maybe in all the hype over the holidays I missed the announcement. When did Windows 2000 ship?
I applaud Microsoft for doing a right thing here. Internal review is important.
What was the total uptime on that site?
This would seem to imply that all of the code in which they knew there where security flaws has been rewritten from scratch using new development processes. I doubt that. If not, then we have the old flawed code developed under the old flawed process.
My point here is not that any particular criticism proves that Windows 2000 is insecure. Rather, my assertions that it isn't are as meaningful as those assertions that it is. Neither this spokeswoman nor I have offered any proof. If you want proof of the security of free software, read the source, or better still pay a team of security experts to read the source.
I noticed the article mentioned that by some accounts Mandrake is outselling Red Hat significantly. Looking for the number of units each of the distributions is shipping, I went hunting around the Red Hat site looking for theirs. I can find their estimate of their percentage of the North American market (56%) as well as the revenue generated from the sales of software ($3,369,000), but I can't find the raw number of units. I'd like to know. Now to Red Hat's credit, they clearly indicated in the latest quarterly report that the decline in software sales as a percentage of income does not represent a decrease in sales of software. They have increased their sales of service. And from the look of it as I skimmed, they are selling quite a few books as well.
gcc, g++, glibc and Linux have all moved in the direction of standards, either real or de facto. Free software often adds enhancements beyond the standards, but it rarely violates them. It would be counterproductive to do it.
I doubt that most open source programmers do it for the money, at least not initially. There's the canonical motivation of
scratching the developer's personal itch. There are others. Eric Raymond has rightly called open source a gift culture. That is not the only facit of open source economics, but it is an important one. There are some of us, myself included, who want to be heard. That is, to help shape the future directions of software in general. Open source is the single biggest lever out there. If you can offer enough help to see your own good ideas get into a project, there are plenty of open source projects that will gladly have you. And there is glory. I don't mind finding my name on a project web site.
I wouldn't turn down an offer of shares in a new open source company, and I certainly wouldn't mind if it made me independently wealthy. But I don't expect it. Smaller amounts of money from open source companies can still do a lot to motivate me. They can host project web sites, mailing lists and CVS servers. They can give credit to contributers on web sites and in manuals. They can send CD ROMS, t-shirts and bumper stickers. Or even, as the above mentioned article says about VA Linux and Eric Raymond, they can provide a location for open source developers to use to stay in touch and maybe occasionally provide a necessary piece of hardware to keep some person or project going. The bottom line is that I am unlikely to get a big pile of cash for anything I do. So what? Host my project and send me a copy of your distribution. It costs less and funds the goals we share.
I was impressed. Here is a piece about the open source IPOs that showed a knowledge of what open source is about. He asked some good questions and partially answered them. I think Leonard's conclusion that free software will be here 5 years from now is valid. Regardless of the sucess or failure of open source business models, the reasons that many of us do it aren't going to change. Whether Red Hat and VA Linux will conquer the world or wither and die remains to be seen. I wish them both well.
I guess that is why I have this wish that the USPTO upheld the patent. I just would like to see the circus show to which it would lead to...
I thought about that. Is this patent real any more or less valid than many other software patents, on the grounds of either obviousness or prior art? If the USPTO does invalidate it, it will at least tell us how high they consider the bar to be on those criteria. Maybe Andover.net should patent online flamefests via the web. There's got to be some way to write that up so it will pass the test.
I saw this when it was originally aired. I think it is instructive that it was only aired once, back in the 70s. Since then I have only been able to remember Wookies singing and dancing, and the rather odd question of why Wookie home life had so much in common with domestic Terran surburban bliss circa 1978, when the Wookies themselves resemble us only in that they are bipedal with the same sensory organs we have. If ever there was a demonstration of real repressed childhood memories, this would be it. This review is really all I need of that special. With two children in the house, I am very afraid that one of them would want to watch it a second time.
I thought it was hard the first time I typed on one of the cheap modern keyboards that provides very little resistance and no click. Typing without a keyboard is taking that to an extreme. And I just started paying more attention to the way I type. My junior high school typing teacher would be appauled. From what I can tell, I use three finger and my thumb on my left hand and one finger and my thumb on my right. Not to mention frequently stretching them. I do wonder how it will interpret odd typing styles.
Then, of course, there is the whole issue of how well it can discriminate chords. I use Emacs, The One True Editor (C-0 M-x all-hail-emacs), which is well known for some of the secondary meanings of its acronym including "Esc Meta Alt Ctrl Shift". We just express it more compactly as M-A-C-S-. Humor aside, will I be able to type M-C-v or C-@ or other three key chords with ease?
Geeks come with an incredible range of interests. I would think that would be obvious to most of us. We don't all listen to techno and read post-cyberpunk SF. Okay, I do both of those. And one of my all time favorite albums is Welcome to the Machine. I range from so mainstream my parents should be proud to so obscure that no one here would recognize every one of the artists.
One of the great things about open source is that we can each bring our ideas, skills, and needs to a project and come away with some fantastic tools. Is there a reason that our diversity would stop with software?
Oh, and Res Geek, you were one word short of a good Charlie Daniels reference.
Is society that lazy that we need a computer to dial phone numbers for us.
No, our friends and relatives have a home phone, work phone, cell phone, second line for the FAX/modem and a pager. And they keep moving every few years just when we start to remember how to find them. And the ones that don't move live in area codes that are being split. This often involves changing from a 7 digit to 10 digit dialing plan.
I can punch the numbers, but I can't remember them.
Since this topic came up here very recently, I was just thinking about a friend who most definitely would not want a GUI install. She's blind. Should she have to buy a high-end monitor to install an OS that she will never once use in a graphical mode? Her money would be much better spent on a really good sound card and speakers.
Does XFree86 provide more complete support for internationalization than the console? I think character sets and fonts are a non-issue, but X probably has more complete support for complex input methods than an off-the-shelf kernel.
First, do we have any confirmation of this story? I'm sorry to imply any distrust of the source, but I would like to see an independent sighting of something as ridiculous as this.
Second, if it does prove true, I suspect there are going to be more than a few open source project web pages carrying a brief summary of this issue and mentioning the parties involved by name, while providing links to any coverage on the web. And I trust they will provide links to each other so that they will be widely referenced and easy for search engines to find.
The real purpose regardless of whatever Time may say about their Person of the Year, is to recognize the most talked about person of the year. Furthermore, since that person must be the most talked about as remembered in late December, it must be someone who is being talked about in December. The fleeting fame of such eminent personages as Ms. Lewinski and Ms. Tripp, or the flash-in-the-pan Mr. Clinton is not enough. Whether you prompt whispers of scandal, or accolades of commercial triumph, you must have the staying power to arrive in December with your name still on the lips of the masses.
Nor is it important if they all pronounce the name the same way. Surely Amazon and E-commerce and indeed correct pronunciations of Mr. Bezos' name. There is no relevance in whether the speaker has every shopped online, or at Mr. Bezos' pixillary boutique. Such minutiae are rightfully assigned to the honourable choice, Other. Yes, by a plurality of the people who have heard of him and not of all of the other candidates, in the past two weeks, he was chosen from among the short list of finalists.
Years ago, I read a hilarious artical by James Randi explaining the scientific method might be used to test the hypothesis that some reindeer can fly. The only thing I can't remember for sure is where I saw it. I thought I found it on hi web site, but it doesn't seem to be there now. Is there a copy online? A link to it would be quite appropriate to this discussion.
There is one very important aspect of the various open source licenses that is enforceable and does not require going to court. The source is free. Regardless of what anyone tries to do with it, we can continue to use it, fix it, and enhance it. And a bunch of individual developers around the world make a really poor target for lawyers to try to wrestle control from. In other words, we don't have to sue them to get it back because they can't take open source away.
I don't mean this to say that open source projects and companies shouldn't protect themselves from abuses of open source licenses. But that is only one side of the issue.
I don't mind if Bill is getting rich. More power to him. I'll even consider buying an alternative to Linux that does a better job of providing what I chose Linux for:
Originally I just went on listing things I like about Linux, but I thought better of it. The bottom line is that I like having a programmer's environment, and I want it accessible and a part of all of the tools. That's where Unix started. The free software community has carried the idea further. It is a different mindset. It is a different style of usage. It is the idea that the user should not be presented with an interface that makes many common tasks efficient, but in which further optimization is hard. Linux puts the UI optimization into the user's hands if the user wants it.
The only upside is that I know where I can find beta-testers.
This was exactly the same issue that turned my parents off from using Priceline to book a hotel stay. They had no way of knowing that they weren't going to get a run down dive in the worst part of town. And the policy locks them in. Would it be so hard to offer a different tier of service, where they guarantee that you will be getting the service from one of a list of name-brand suppliers? I suspect that the lock-in is how they attract the suppliers to provide lower rates. However, those same suppliers might be thrilled to make an average of a dollar or two more on thousands of transactions that guarantee the same level of service they already provide. Insect infested dives by the tracks in the combat zone need not apply.