If he was hiding incompetence with advocacy, then the real reason for firing him should merely be the incompetence, not the advocacy. My point was merely that the author never once mentioned any incompetence on the part of the employee, only that he was an "open source zealot" and that he said things that were less than flatering of the original design. This gave the author the *appearance* of being a zealot himself. Now, I find it ironic that someone labelled my post as a "troll" given that what I was trying to do was give the author the benefit of the doubt and say that it only appeared this way because of the lack of context presented. I was trying to give an explanation for the acid tones of the respondants, trying to point out to the author a way in which his words may have given a false impression.
("troll" shouldn't even be on the list of moderation categories, given that you have to measure a person's sincerity to truly know if he is trolling or just being brutally honest about his opinions. A judgement of "troll" requires that you either look at lots of what the alleged troll has written or that you can read his mind. You really can't tell if someone is trolling from just looking at one post. His opinions, no matter how inflamitory and silly, might be sincere.)
Your post gives very little context about your firing of the "open source zealot", and what little there is seems to indicate that you fired him for daring to dissent publicly, rather than for any actual problem he may have been causing. (What makes this seem espicially so was your comment about how mentioning how things could have been done different should be shunned because it is bad for "morale". That kind of attitude leads to stagnation.)
The problem isn't that this technology exists, but that it is going to be turned on be default on all the pages that have already been written. It should have been opt-out rather than opt-in. If I wanted to write a word or two about some 19th century explorer, or what his remote field office looked like, I am not necessarily talking about the same thing Microsoft thinks I'm talking about. If I mention the word Bill Gates I don't want this to turn into some pro-Bill link.
This is worse than ordinary plagerism. Instead of taking credit for what others have said, you are alterting what they said without mentioning to the reader what those alterations were.
Assuming they aren't lying about allowing a special HTML tag to disable this feature, The first thing I'm going to do is see if there's any such thing as boilerplate headers for Apache, and make that tag be a part of what goes in the boilerplate for all pages served on any site I'm running.
The DMCA doesn't support IP rights at all. It supports monopolization by giving the content creator 100% total control over all the means of deployment of his works. This is not the way other types of property work. If I sell widgets to person X, he is free to resell them to person Y, and I have no say in it at all. The DMCA also makes it so that alleged violators are assumed guilty until proven innocent.
Trivial: Not all music is copyrighted by the big boys. Why should my software tool deny me the ability to record unless I'm recording something from the big boys who have a digital signature? Just because the software tool is in EMI's pocket, that doesn't mean EMI owns *my* works (assuming I was a musician).
This implicit assumption that the only audio recording anyone wants to do is to record big-name pop music is arrogant, rude, and obviously designed to destroy the small-time up-and-coming labels. This reminds me of the way corps are portrayed in Cyberpunk-genre sci-fi. I used to think that stuff was fiction.
You're giving the recording and software industry more credit than they deserve, I think. Sure, if I was certain that this would *only* affect music piracy while still leaving open fair-use copying, then I'd have no problem with it. But I think the odds of the industry coming up with a fair scheme that would do that is round about zero. Fair use should include the notion that people are not required to purchase the same music multiple times just to change its media format if they have the means to change the media format themselves. It is perfectly legal for me to make a cassette tape copy of a CD I buy (for the sake of playing in my old car stereo that has no CD player). It only becomes illegal if I give that cassette to someone else who hasn't purchased the music in some form already. I should also be allowed to burn my own
CD's from music I've already purchased. I have several compilation CD's I've made for the sake of
having compact "best of" collections to take with
me on trips or in to work. This is perfectly legal since I already purchased those music selections in their original form, and I am merely organizing my favorites together.
I have zero confidence in the industry's ability (or more important, their willingness) to produce a solution that repsects this fair use type of copying. Those a**holes would love to make fair use a thing of the past. If they can't do it by changing the law, they'll do it by ruining all the available tools.
Normally, that wouldn't matter. I'd just say, "Screw them, I'll use my own burning software". The specs are public, there's a plethora of CD burner software. But the badly worded DMCA will make those tools become illegal because they "circumvent" a protection scheme, even if that protection scheme wasn't invented until after the fact, and even if that protection scheme is so badly implemented that ignoring it is acutally the default if your software wasn't written to notice it.
You must have missed the part where I said the burning of the white house wasn't even done by Canadians. (be they colonials or not) It was done by the British Navy, NOT by people born and raised in Canada. They sailed out FROM Canada to do it, but so what? If you say that means Canada did it, then by the same logic France bombed England in World War 2. Sure, it was german pilots in german planes, but many of them took off from airstrips in France to do it.
If you ignore the rest of the world and look at just the US and Canada, then it might look like the US started the war of 1812. But if you look at the world, the war of 1812 was merely an expansion of US/British hostilities that actually began at sea, over British trade blockades.
(And if you look at the whole Western Hemisphere, and not just the US/Canada border, the war of 1812 was a draw. No land changed hands, even though both sides tried taking over land. (The US tried invading into some British land (called Canada), and the British tried invading into the south of the US, near New Orleans. Both of these failed.
The US capitol buildings were burned (but the city was not held by the British. They just burned some buildings and left.), but at the same time the US Did get what it wanted in the end, which was open trade in the Western Hemisphere. (The war was started over the British Colonial practice of forbidding trade between British colonies and anyone other than Britain herself. It was illegal to sell US goods to British colonies (both Canadian and Carribiean) and visa versa, and THAT was the issue that sparked the war.)
If you seriously think that the skirmishes along the US/Canadian border were the ONLY part of the war of 1812, then I see how you might have gotten your skewed view.
You can't ignore the fact that Canada was British in 1812. That's the only reason why any fighting occurred at all across the US/Canada border.
You miss my point. The people that did the raid on Washington were British Navy, NOT colonial soldiers. They weren't even Canadian colonists. They just happened to be stationed in Canada at the time. Now, that said, SOME colonists did participate, but not in the burning of the white house. That was a navy operation, involving sailing down the coast and up the Patomic river.
Now, as to your second point, even if Canadian colonists were participating, it still wouldn't be the same sort of thing. They declared themselves to be fighting for the Brits, under their army, under their command. The official start of the US as a country was the signing of the declaration of independance, in 1776, which occurred a few years after the fighting began, but well before it was over. Before that declaration, the war was a *set* of splinter groups fighting, that hadn't even declared themselves to be a single entity yet, and the thirteen colonies had no connection to each other at all. New Jersey and New York were just as "foreign" to each other as Maine and Nova Scotia. The signing of that document is what declared the 13 colonies to be one federated nation, and that's why it's the start of the US as a country. The fact that the war wasn't over yet is not relevant. Britain *declared* that the US was still just a set of colonies, but Britain wasn't really in charge phyiscally. They just held a few cities. (And held them well, and won most battles, but in the end it didn't matter because at the time the US was largely agricultural and could function on the large amount of land the Brits were ignoring.)
Fact: Any programmers working on Linux kernel must release his work under Linux's current kernel license
That's not exactly true. Any programmers working on the Linux kernel WHO WISH TO RELEASE THEIR WORK must do so under the current kernel license. However, one is not required to release one's work. If a company hired some kernel guy to change some minor thing on their own server, in the linux kernel, and that was not part of a released product, but just something used internally by the company, that change would not need to be distributed.
Having faith in something and being right totally by accident is not how one seeks the truth. One seeks the truth by NOT engaging in faith. Columbus' trip was not based on faith. It had already been proven mathematically that the world was a sphere. In fact, if anything Columbus's faith was a faith that the world was small enough to make his trip short, a faith that was proven to be incorrect later. The fact that the world was a sphere was already known. In fact, the greeks had even made an experiment to measure how big the earth was, by extrapolating from the curve of the sea surface. (Put a stick of known hieght a great distance away (or use a ship's mast), than see how far away you get before the top of the stick is lost behind the horizon. Using this, it can be determined how tightly the surface is curved, and if you assume the world is spherical, you can figure out how big around it is from just that fragment. Using this primative technique, the Greeks got a figure that was only about 5% off from what we know today. Very smart people. Columbus's faith COUNTERED this fact, with his assumption that the world was much smaller. In fact, the notion that his exploration was opposed because people thought the world was flat is a myth. His expedition found opposition because learned scholars were telling him the world was MUCH bigger than he had guessed, and they (not he) were right. Columbus is damn lucky there was a continent out there in the way or he'd have died.
Fact: Canada had not yet declared independance during the war of 1812. It was still a British colonial holding.
Fact: The war of 1812 was fought between the US and the British.
Fact: The British made use of their vast colony known as "Canada" as a place to fight the US from (instead of trying to do it from across the sea).
Conclusion: The Canadians didn't burn the white house down. The British did. Despite Canadian patriotic claims to the contrary, the US has NEVER been to war with the nation known as Canada. In 1812, there was NO such thing as a nation called "Canada" yet. The name "Canada" referred to a vast array of British colonies in the north.
Do you know what not "sacrificing your ability to work with their teammates" entails? It means using Windows systems like Exchange. It's the same thing that made me quit a job I had 4 years ago at a Unix software shop that "standardized" on Exchange when they instituted ISO 9000. They never actually *said* we had to use windows, but they did say:
1 - We must use the ISO9000 documents, and if we see a problem with them, we must seek to change them rather than violate them. We must follow what they say even if we know it will cause a failure, we just need to mention the problem first so that when it fails it's not our fault. (We can point at the protest and say, "see - I told you so", and that will lend a lot of weight to getting the official policy in the ISO9000 document changed.)
2 - All ISO 9000 documents will be stored in Exchange as if they were discussion groups, so
comments can be attached to them.
So, adding 1 and 2 together gives us the result that we MUST have exchange up and running 100% of the day so we can get at the ISO 9000 docs, which means we must be running Windows. This was excessively stupid since we wrote 90% of our software in Unix. When I had to give up my linux box at work and isntead reformatt it for windows full-time, by productivity dropped because my only access to unix systems was through terminal programs, instead of having one natively on my box. (I'm not trying to dis Windows here, but understandably A unix system is better to develop unix programs on than a windows one.)
That made me quit the place, not just because I hate using Windows (I do), but because the management instituting a policy that screwed over 90% of the programmers, making their lives harder so that the managers' lives were easier, was an indicator to me that they didn't give a rat's ass about their programmers.
If you wait until it becomes law for the text to enter the public domain, you've waited too long. The public MUST have the right to know what is being proposed and debated on WHILE it is still being debated, so they may take political action on the issue BEFORE it's already a done deal. If you disagree, then you aren't in favor of the concept of democracy.
The solution is simple, It shouldn't be legal in the first place to enact a law that is not allowed to be publicly viewed in ANY and ALL media (It's not enough to make me have to come down and see the paper version.) So, in the case of the Stephan King text, it shouldn't be legal for the law to be created in the first place unless the text is opened up by the current copyright holder.
(Mr. King.)
It should be standard procedure that only open material be in the text of a law. Period. If previously copyrighted material is to become law, then the original copyright owner must bless the change in "license" before that can happen.
If the SBCCI wants to keep it's text closed, they have every right to, but doing so should prevent it from becoming a law. If they want it to be a law, then they have to open it first, as part of the public record (BEFORE it goes to a vote, as well, since the legistlature shouldn't be voting
on things in secret where the public doesn't know what's being voted on.)
At least, that would be the way the world worked if people were sane, and fair. Too bad we don't live in that world.
What the hell is the complaint the SBCCI has with this anyway, I wonder? If they wanted to be the ones to draft the building codes, then they should be happy that they are being dissemated. That's what they're FOR!
You are essentially arguing that it is right and good to require someone to PAY a PRIVATE company just to learn what the law is that he is being forced to live under.
What's next? Will you have to pay Rand McNally to
get a map to find out what all the speed limits
are on the roads for your next car trip, because they won't be posted but you'll be required to obey them anyway?
What you say would only make sense if the code was not a law. Once it becomes a law then the governing body is under obligation to make it as easy as possible for the public to read.
Sure, ignorance of the law isn't supposed to be an excuse, but in this case ignorance of the law is being required by law. That just can't possibly be legal. I'm no lawyer, but this sounds fishy. I suspect we aren't getting all the facts here.
It's called a checksum. Big freakin' deal. Like IBM's old XOR cursor patent, they've gone and patented a blatant, obvious, simple idea that others have had before but just never bothered patenting. This patent would have been thrown out if the patent office knew anything about programming. It's like trying to patent Newton's equation for gravity. It's an idea that everybody in the field already knew before the patent came out.
All CDDB does is generate an ID number based on the following data: length in time of the overall CD + starting time offset of each individual track. The idea is that although CDs don't come with ID numbers on them, the chances are almost nil that two different CDs would have the same exact length, down the the second, and the same exact starting time offsets for each track. So those numbers may be used to create a unique ID for that CD. Why do I know what the format is? Because despite
their lies to the contrary, the CDDB info database was DONATED to them by the work of thousands of people on the net who typed in the data when they bought CD's. CDDB doesn't do a lick of work to create their large database. It's a very sound, good idea UNTIL they start claiming exclusive ownership of that information that was vounteered to them. Now when an alternate free competitor does the SAME EXACT THING that CDDB did to get started, cddb gets all pissed off at them for it. Forking hypocrites.
Actually, yes, I think. I had heard that this new show was supposed to be set during the time when the Federation was young and still getting started. Vulcans and Humans know each other fairly well, since they made First Contact, but humans are still young and naive in the ways of the galaxy and there are lots of other unknown races out there.
I think this setting lends itself better to having meaningful adventures (meaningful in the sense that the TOS shows were meaningful). What the group of characters does actually has some important effect beyond just themselves. They were saving the galaxy, not just their own hides. That's what Voyager was missing, and that's why I haven't watched it in quite some time. (I think the last episode I saw was the one where Kes was possessed by that alien warlord guy. {The actress did a really good job of playing the "bad guy", and she sounded really hot doing it, but other than that it wasn't a very good episode.})
DS9 was really awful at first, but what made it better toward the end was the feeling that something big and epic was happenning as the series was coming to a close. (The big kilngon/federation/dominion war.)
That feeling is also what made B5 such a good show. I'm willing to give this new Trek a try, even if it is by the same dolts who made Voyager.
Wrong, the file manager-is-a-browser concept was in KDE since the beginning, long before there even was a packaged called "Konqueror". The original kfm was both a browser and a file manager. Granted, it wasn't a great browser yet, but the concept was already there in KDE, and predates konqueror.
Samba was not a copy of a concept. Unix already had that concept before Windows even knew what networking was. It was called NFS. Samba is just a way to work with Windows clients that refuse to play well with others and insist on only speaking Windows' drive sharing protocol (SMB).
Outlook is merely a copy of tools available on Unix beforehand.
Sure, a lot of KDE and Gnome are copying Windows apps, but the Windows apps they are copying were themselves copies of existing things in older Unixen. KDE and Gnome are merely making tools for people who are used to Windows because Windows is popular, NOT because these tools are anything new.
But how easy is it for someone *ELSE* besides Microsoft to write drop-in replacements for those layers? If the info needed to do so is not readily available, then its the same as having a monolithic system, for all practical purposes.
"Woah.. woah.. did I say the Internet would have gone nowhere? I didnt say that."
Uhm, actually, that pretty much *is* what you said. The pertinent point of your post that sparked my comment was this one I quote below:
"Like it not, that really marked the beginning of an explosive
growth in the popularity and availability of Internet access to the masses. With only the flavors of Unix, early Linux
distro's, and other non-friendly OS's, Internet access would have been rare."
I'm not typical, but I can remember that internet
access was the chief motivator behind my trying out FreeBSD and Linux after getting out of college in 1994. Windows didn't have what it takes without a lot of third-party add-ons, inlucuding a TSR just to make basic TCP/IP work. It was *that* threat that made MS put tcp/ip into windows. MS realized that they were starting to look bad by comparasin, and the only thing keeping people away from alternatives was the application availability, and that's a problem that fixes itself over time if people really want to switch badly enough. MS embraced tcp/ip in order to avoid the techies leaving their system, not because they actually wanted to do it. The college-educated programmers coming out all had exposure to the internet and knew how much better it was than AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and MSN. (I'm speaking here of the older dial-up proprietary versions of those services, before they became nothing more than internet portals.)
Every OS I can think of that wasn't Microsoft had a TCP/IP stack by default. The problem is I don't know what you would consider as a "mainstream OS". If you define "mainstream" narrowly enough, then only Windows would qaulify, and your statement would become a useless tautology. If, on the other hand, you define "mainstream" to include anything not from MS, like the Mac, or OS/2, or the wide array of Unixen, then your statement is false. So you've got two choices - your statement is false or if it is true it's only because it's a useless tautology.
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("troll" shouldn't even be on the list of moderation categories, given that you have to measure a person's sincerity to truly know if he is trolling or just being brutally honest about his opinions. A judgement of "troll" requires that you either look at lots of what the alleged troll has written or that you can read his mind. You really can't tell if someone is trolling from just looking at one post. His opinions, no matter how inflamitory and silly, might be sincere.)
Your post gives very little context about your firing of the "open source zealot", and what little there is seems to indicate that you fired him for daring to dissent publicly, rather than for any actual problem he may have been causing. (What makes this seem espicially so was your comment about how mentioning how things could have been done different should be shunned because it is bad for "morale". That kind of attitude leads to stagnation.)
This is worse than ordinary plagerism. Instead of taking credit for what others have said, you are alterting what they said without mentioning to the reader what those alterations were.
Assuming they aren't lying about allowing a special HTML tag to disable this feature, The first thing I'm going to do is see if there's any such thing as boilerplate headers for Apache, and make that tag be a part of what goes in the boilerplate for all pages served on any site I'm running.
The DMCA doesn't support IP rights at all. It supports monopolization by giving the content creator 100% total control over all the means of deployment of his works. This is not the way other types of property work. If I sell widgets to person X, he is free to resell them to person Y, and I have no say in it at all. The DMCA also makes it so that alleged violators are assumed guilty until proven innocent.
This implicit assumption that the only audio recording anyone wants to do is to record big-name pop music is arrogant, rude, and obviously designed to destroy the small-time up-and-coming labels. This reminds me of the way corps are portrayed in Cyberpunk-genre sci-fi. I used to think that stuff was fiction.
I have zero confidence in the industry's ability (or more important, their willingness) to produce a solution that repsects this fair use type of copying. Those a**holes would love to make fair use a thing of the past. If they can't do it by changing the law, they'll do it by ruining all the available tools.
Normally, that wouldn't matter. I'd just say, "Screw them, I'll use my own burning software". The specs are public, there's a plethora of CD burner software. But the badly worded DMCA will make those tools become illegal because they "circumvent" a protection scheme, even if that protection scheme wasn't invented until after the fact, and even if that protection scheme is so badly implemented that ignoring it is acutally the default if your software wasn't written to notice it.
If you ignore the rest of the world and look at just the US and Canada, then it might look like the US started the war of 1812. But if you look at the world, the war of 1812 was merely an expansion of US/British hostilities that actually began at sea, over British trade blockades.
(And if you look at the whole Western Hemisphere, and not just the US/Canada border, the war of 1812 was a draw. No land changed hands, even though both sides tried taking over land. (The US tried invading into some British land (called Canada), and the British tried invading into the south of the US, near New Orleans. Both of these failed. The US capitol buildings were burned (but the city was not held by the British. They just burned some buildings and left.), but at the same time the US Did get what it wanted in the end, which was open trade in the Western Hemisphere. (The war was started over the British Colonial practice of forbidding trade between British colonies and anyone other than Britain herself. It was illegal to sell US goods to British colonies (both Canadian and Carribiean) and visa versa, and THAT was the issue that sparked the war.)
If you seriously think that the skirmishes along the US/Canadian border were the ONLY part of the war of 1812, then I see how you might have gotten your skewed view.
You can't ignore the fact that Canada was British in 1812. That's the only reason why any fighting occurred at all across the US/Canada border.
Now, as to your second point, even if Canadian colonists were participating, it still wouldn't be the same sort of thing. They declared themselves to be fighting for the Brits, under their army, under their command. The official start of the US as a country was the signing of the declaration of independance, in 1776, which occurred a few years after the fighting began, but well before it was over. Before that declaration, the war was a *set* of splinter groups fighting, that hadn't even declared themselves to be a single entity yet, and the thirteen colonies had no connection to each other at all. New Jersey and New York were just as "foreign" to each other as Maine and Nova Scotia. The signing of that document is what declared the 13 colonies to be one federated nation, and that's why it's the start of the US as a country. The fact that the war wasn't over yet is not relevant. Britain *declared* that the US was still just a set of colonies, but Britain wasn't really in charge phyiscally. They just held a few cities. (And held them well, and won most battles, but in the end it didn't matter because at the time the US was largely agricultural and could function on the large amount of land the Brits were ignoring.)
Having faith in something and being right totally by accident is not how one seeks the truth. One seeks the truth by NOT engaging in faith. Columbus' trip was not based on faith. It had already been proven mathematically that the world was a sphere. In fact, if anything Columbus's faith was a faith that the world was small enough to make his trip short, a faith that was proven to be incorrect later. The fact that the world was a sphere was already known. In fact, the greeks had even made an experiment to measure how big the earth was, by extrapolating from the curve of the sea surface. (Put a stick of known hieght a great distance away (or use a ship's mast), than see how far away you get before the top of the stick is lost behind the horizon. Using this, it can be determined how tightly the surface is curved, and if you assume the world is spherical, you can figure out how big around it is from just that fragment. Using this primative technique, the Greeks got a figure that was only about 5% off from what we know today. Very smart people. Columbus's faith COUNTERED this fact, with his assumption that the world was much smaller. In fact, the notion that his exploration was opposed because people thought the world was flat is a myth. His expedition found opposition because learned scholars were telling him the world was MUCH bigger than he had guessed, and they (not he) were right. Columbus is damn lucky there was a continent out there in the way or he'd have died.
Fact: The war of 1812 was fought between the US and the British.
Fact: The British made use of their vast colony known as "Canada" as a place to fight the US from (instead of trying to do it from across the sea).
Conclusion: The Canadians didn't burn the white house down. The British did. Despite Canadian patriotic claims to the contrary, the US has NEVER been to war with the nation known as Canada. In 1812, there was NO such thing as a nation called "Canada" yet. The name "Canada" referred to a vast array of British colonies in the north.
"Be full of faith", and "seek truth" are incompatible goals.
1 - We must use the ISO9000 documents, and if we see a problem with them, we must seek to change them rather than violate them. We must follow what they say even if we know it will cause a failure, we just need to mention the problem first so that when it fails it's not our fault. (We can point at the protest and say, "see - I told you so", and that will lend a lot of weight to getting the official policy in the ISO9000 document changed.)
2 - All ISO 9000 documents will be stored in Exchange as if they were discussion groups, so comments can be attached to them.
So, adding 1 and 2 together gives us the result that we MUST have exchange up and running 100% of the day so we can get at the ISO 9000 docs, which means we must be running Windows. This was excessively stupid since we wrote 90% of our software in Unix. When I had to give up my linux box at work and isntead reformatt it for windows full-time, by productivity dropped because my only access to unix systems was through terminal programs, instead of having one natively on my box. (I'm not trying to dis Windows here, but understandably A unix system is better to develop unix programs on than a windows one.)
That made me quit the place, not just because I hate using Windows (I do), but because the management instituting a policy that screwed over 90% of the programmers, making their lives harder so that the managers' lives were easier, was an indicator to me that they didn't give a rat's ass about their programmers.
If you wait until it becomes law for the text to enter the public domain, you've waited too long. The public MUST have the right to know what is being proposed and debated on WHILE it is still being debated, so they may take political action on the issue BEFORE it's already a done deal. If you disagree, then you aren't in favor of the concept of democracy.
It should be standard procedure that only open material be in the text of a law. Period. If previously copyrighted material is to become law, then the original copyright owner must bless the change in "license" before that can happen.
If the SBCCI wants to keep it's text closed, they have every right to, but doing so should prevent it from becoming a law. If they want it to be a law, then they have to open it first, as part of the public record (BEFORE it goes to a vote, as well, since the legistlature shouldn't be voting on things in secret where the public doesn't know what's being voted on.)
At least, that would be the way the world worked if people were sane, and fair. Too bad we don't live in that world.
What the hell is the complaint the SBCCI has with this anyway, I wonder? If they wanted to be the ones to draft the building codes, then they should be happy that they are being dissemated. That's what they're FOR!
What's next? Will you have to pay Rand McNally to get a map to find out what all the speed limits are on the roads for your next car trip, because they won't be posted but you'll be required to obey them anyway?
Sure, ignorance of the law isn't supposed to be an excuse, but in this case ignorance of the law is being required by law. That just can't possibly be legal. I'm no lawyer, but this sounds fishy. I suspect we aren't getting all the facts here.
All CDDB does is generate an ID number based on the following data: length in time of the overall CD + starting time offset of each individual track. The idea is that although CDs don't come with ID numbers on them, the chances are almost nil that two different CDs would have the same exact length, down the the second, and the same exact starting time offsets for each track. So those numbers may be used to create a unique ID for that CD. Why do I know what the format is? Because despite their lies to the contrary, the CDDB info database was DONATED to them by the work of thousands of people on the net who typed in the data when they bought CD's. CDDB doesn't do a lick of work to create their large database. It's a very sound, good idea UNTIL they start claiming exclusive ownership of that information that was vounteered to them. Now when an alternate free competitor does the SAME EXACT THING that CDDB did to get started, cddb gets all pissed off at them for it. Forking hypocrites.
I think this setting lends itself better to having meaningful adventures (meaningful in the sense that the TOS shows were meaningful). What the group of characters does actually has some important effect beyond just themselves. They were saving the galaxy, not just their own hides. That's what Voyager was missing, and that's why I haven't watched it in quite some time. (I think the last episode I saw was the one where Kes was possessed by that alien warlord guy. {The actress did a really good job of playing the "bad guy", and she sounded really hot doing it, but other than that it wasn't a very good episode.})
DS9 was really awful at first, but what made it better toward the end was the feeling that something big and epic was happenning as the series was coming to a close. (The big kilngon/federation/dominion war.)
That feeling is also what made B5 such a good show. I'm willing to give this new Trek a try, even if it is by the same dolts who made Voyager.
Samba was not a copy of a concept. Unix already had that concept before Windows even knew what networking was. It was called NFS. Samba is just a way to work with Windows clients that refuse to play well with others and insist on only speaking Windows' drive sharing protocol (SMB).
Outlook is merely a copy of tools available on Unix beforehand.
Sure, a lot of KDE and Gnome are copying Windows apps, but the Windows apps they are copying were themselves copies of existing things in older Unixen. KDE and Gnome are merely making tools for people who are used to Windows because Windows is popular, NOT because these tools are anything new.
But how easy is it for someone *ELSE* besides Microsoft to write drop-in replacements for those layers? If the info needed to do so is not readily available, then its the same as having a monolithic system, for all practical purposes.
Uhm, actually, that pretty much *is* what you said. The pertinent point of your post that sparked my comment was this one I quote below:
I'm not typical, but I can remember that internet access was the chief motivator behind my trying out FreeBSD and Linux after getting out of college in 1994. Windows didn't have what it takes without a lot of third-party add-ons, inlucuding a TSR just to make basic TCP/IP work. It was *that* threat that made MS put tcp/ip into windows. MS realized that they were starting to look bad by comparasin, and the only thing keeping people away from alternatives was the application availability, and that's a problem that fixes itself over time if people really want to switch badly enough. MS embraced tcp/ip in order to avoid the techies leaving their system, not because they actually wanted to do it. The college-educated programmers coming out all had exposure to the internet and knew how much better it was than AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and MSN. (I'm speaking here of the older dial-up proprietary versions of those services, before they became nothing more than internet portals.)
Every OS I can think of that wasn't Microsoft had a TCP/IP stack by default. The problem is I don't know what you would consider as a "mainstream OS". If you define "mainstream" narrowly enough, then only Windows would qaulify, and your statement would become a useless tautology. If, on the other hand, you define "mainstream" to include anything not from MS, like the Mac, or OS/2, or the wide array of Unixen, then your statement is false. So you've got two choices - your statement is false or if it is true it's only because it's a useless tautology.