DOS (or what's left of it) will be removed in Whistler
Ya know, I've got this bridge in New York, and I'm having a hard time keeping up the maintenence. So I'll tell ya what, I'll sell it to ya for, oh, five hundred bucks. It's the one connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. Steven E. Ehrbar
Actually, the Mars Direct people argue that a direct flight to Mars followed by colonization is a plan that would work better than going to the Moon first.
While the lunar gravity is lower, it's far easier to extract propellant from the Martian atmosphere than the lunar regolith. Just send an unmanned probe with a nuclear reactor and some hydrogen. Combine atmosphereic CO2 and hydrogen to produce methane (the fuel for the propellant) and water, use electricity to convert the water into oxygen (the oxidizer for the propellant). Send extra hydrogen to make water and oxygen to help support the human mission that will arrive two years later.
Yep, there was a supply of plutonium that could have solved the RTG problem. When the Russians dismantled missiles to comply with START, they saved the plutonium as a national resource.
And we just paid the Russians to dispose of it.
Oh, well. Who needs space exploration when there are proven-ineffecive programs like Head Start and DARE on which we can piss away money...
(Head Start has been shown to have no effect on the student's future high-school grades, graduation rates, college admissions, standardized test scores, dropout rates, or any other measure of academic achievement. DARE has been shown to have no effect on drug use.)
And, of course, Quebec will recognize the right of self-determination in those areas in the north and along its borders where peoples of the First Nations and Anglo-Canadians are the majority?
Or will the PQ continue to insist that distinct communities within the nation-state of Canada have the right to self-determination but distinct communities within the future nation-state of Quebec do not?
Well, the response you'll usually hear is "the legacy of colonialism".
Which fails to explain why some colonies (Taiwan, South Korea) succeded after gaining independence; why some (Argentina) initially succeeded and now have falllen behind; why some still prospered as essentially colonial states (South Africa); and why most failed.
Another explanation you will hear talks about natural resources, which doesn't explain Taiwan's advantage over Nigeria or Russia; it only explains a handful of Arab oil states.
The real reason become simple to divine when you look at economic systems. Countries where capitalism was discouraged, where the government was active in redistributing wealth (whether to the people or to cronies), or where the reliable rule of law was not established, failed to develop.
Whether they were European states or non-European, independent for long periods or long were colonies, resource-rich or resource-poor, democratic or stable dictatorships, recieved much foriegn aid or little, it's never mattered. Material wealth flows from free markets coupled with stable governments. Always has, always will.
Which feeds right into a second question; if they made the inconvenient choice, how much longer would it take before we had Mozilla?
What the current choice means is that you'll get a working browser faster (at least on Mac and *nix), and then people can dick around making localized chrome later Steven E. Ehrbar
Anyway, suppose a new law was put in place that put software into the public domain some time after it was copyrighted, I suggest 10 years.
Are you volunteering to be the U.S. representative to the treaty negotiations?
Under the Universal Copyright Convention (Berne), no party may have a copyright term of less than life+50/75 years, and no party may reduce their term of copyright. There are roughly 180 nations other than the U.S. who are parties to the UCC; IIRC you need 2/3 to go along with changes before they take effect for the change-ratifying parties.
So, before such a law could take effect (unless you wanted to make U.S. copyrights invalid across the world), you need to get 120 nations to sign off on it.
Yes, it's a good idea. No, there's not a chance in hell it will ever be acted upon.
UNIX is not playing catch-up on journalling file systems. Linux is, but UNIX had them years ago. For example, AIX's JFS.
Compare to Win2000, which has an anemic semi-journaled hack of HPFS which is called NTFS; Mac OS 9 or Windows 98/Me, which doesn't have one yet; and OS/2, which didn't get one until AIX's JFS was ported to it by IBM.
"Chrome/skins" are merely a side effect from deciding to use the rendering engine to render the UI.
The choices the Mozilla project faced were: 1) Write three front ends 2) Make Mozilla dependent on a non-free toolkit, creating a financial barrier to contributing 3) Base Mozilla on the 1.x-4.x codebase 4) Write a new XP toolkit with three local implementations. 5) Render the UI with Gecko.
Well, given that they have started to sell premium services to buisnesses....
Also, they make money on interest. When you've been paid via PayPal, but have yet to transfer the money to you own bank account, it sits in PayPal's accounts, and they get the interest on it. Add a bank-like normal rate of "abandoned" accounts with some cash in them, the fact that the bonuses can be written as customer acquisition/marketing expenses, and a plan to eventually abandon the bonuses when the customer base grows sufficiently....
It doesn't seem they'll turn a profit soon, but it does look like a plausible buisness model. Steven E. Ehrbar
Except, of course, that the defense has stated its intention to show that CSS is anticompetitive in nature as opposed to antipiracy. Kaplan saying that that defense's strategy is irrelevant to the facts at hand is defensible, but it can also be interpreted as self-fulfilling justification. For example:
"I am biased toward the plaintiff, and I've got to stay on the case to ensure their victory. Hmm, if the anticompetitive argument is irrelevant, then there is no cause to recuse me. Therefore, if I say it is irrelevant, I don't have to recuse myself, and therefore can stay on the case and assure the victory of the MPAA."
Coca-Cola was foolish enough several years ago to change a Good Thing
One word you have to add to that -- radically. Coke has changed the "secret formula" more than half-a-dozen times in the last 50 years, but always with some effort to keep the taste pretty similar. But the Coke you drink today is not the same formula as the Coke you drank in 1980, and neither is the same as the Coke you drank in 1960.
So what if Corel has sold off its library of graphics? It didn't sell off its software (like CorelDraw), and it kept royalty-free redistribution rights. So Corel spun off an non-core buisness. Big deal.
We here in the DirtBike community are so close to the issue of dirt bikes and bike modification that it is taking over our lives. If you take a step back from the monitor (remember in "Fight Club": you are not your job)you will see that non-biker people saw the K-Rad 7, and other 2000-model bikes, as a nice thing to ride on you half-day off work and nothing more.
SO was an OS/2 application first. Then Star Division wrote a Windows-OS/2 multiplatform library and moved the codebase to that. Then they ported that library to X.
So, you can't just "tear out that annoying Win98-clone WM". SO essentially is a Windows application running on top of its own incompatible flavor of Wine; porting it to gtk or Qt would be as much work as moving an MFC app to gtk or Qt.
No, it started out life as a pure OS/2 application. There was (and maybe is) an attempt to write a Java version, but SO has always been C/C++. Steven E. Ehrbar
If the basic UI of SO gets fixed, and Gnomified, this could be a cross-platform bonanza, at least on the free side. Perhaps somene will use one of the free crossplatform toolkits (like wxWindows) to do the platform dependent work. That would keep things stable.
1) StarOffice is already based on a cross-platform tollkit for OS/2, Windows, and X developed by the original Star Division company.
2) Gnomifying would be ridiculously hard. StarOffice started on OS/2; the original cross-platforming was done to Windows, and only then to X. Moving to Gnome would be like moving MS Office to Gnome; the assumptions of the code itself are tooled for OS/2 and Windows style abstractions, not X-style abstractions.
Predictions: - Bush will (unfortunately) get the presidency - Due to pressure from Bush (direct or indirect through appointments to various positions) M$ will get off easy, with little more than a little wrist slapping
Bullshit. There's already been a court ruling on the case.
The only way Bush can interfere is to first fire the current prosecutor before he finishes the case (something only Bill Clinton has done on a change on administration in the last 50 years), appoint a replacement prosecutor who will deliberately throw the appeals, and hope the court reaction to those actions isn't to go ahead and punish MS anyway based on the already-submitted information.
Do you realize exactly how much political capital those actions would take, and how uncertain the outcome would be? Even National Review, which advocates a housecleaning by Bush at Justice and has denounced the MS trial, doesn't think Bush will try to affect the MS case or that it would be a good idea for him to try.
Eh, I've had a few, mostly when using an old Cyrix 6x86 that was apparently overheating. The rest were when using either Netscape Navigator or Lotus SmartSuite... Steven E. Ehrbar
Aw, it doesn't deserve a 5 -- and I forgot to preview first, so it's got HTML and spelling errors. I'm perfectly happy with a 3; I've got a lot of Karma anyway. Steven E. Ehrbar
That's like the pot calling the dinner plate black. Ziff-Davis has a long history of getting lots of actual money from MS for advertising, and a long history of generating glowing reveiws of every new MS product... Steven E. Ehrbar
it did mandate that the Judicial Branch have the power to interpret the Constitution and judge whether or not a law is in violation of the Constitution
Section of the Constitution, please? The language in Art. III section 2 is ambiguous as to whether the meaning of the Constitution is subject to judicial interpretation; the courts have certainly ruled it is, but that's still a circular argument.
And it is apparently legal for a President to unilaterally interpret the Constitution even when the Court rules otherwise; at least nobody has tried to give northwestern Georgia back to the Cherokees recently. It can be argued that Supreme Court interpretation is customarily accepted by the other branches, but not Consstitutionally priviledged over Congressional, state, or Presidential interpretation.
I am not a lawyer, but if you have a legal copy of SCO that you aren't using (for example, because you've moved to Linux or bought a second license), you should legally be able to copy the libraries over and use them under Linux/iBCS.
Slashdot Mirror
DOS (or what's left of it) will be removed in Whistler
Ya know, I've got this bridge in New York, and I'm having a hard time keeping up the maintenence. So I'll tell ya what, I'll sell it to ya for, oh, five hundred bucks. It's the one connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Actually, the Mars Direct people argue that a direct flight to Mars followed by colonization is a plan that would work better than going to the Moon first.
While the lunar gravity is lower, it's far easier to extract propellant from the Martian atmosphere than the lunar regolith. Just send an unmanned probe with a nuclear reactor and some hydrogen. Combine atmosphereic CO2 and hydrogen to produce methane (the fuel for the propellant) and water, use electricity to convert the water into oxygen (the oxidizer for the propellant). Send extra hydrogen to make water and oxygen to help support the human mission that will arrive two years later.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yep, there was a supply of plutonium that could have solved the RTG problem. When the Russians dismantled missiles to comply with START, they saved the plutonium as a national resource.
And we just paid the Russians to dispose of it.
Oh, well. Who needs space exploration when there are proven-ineffecive programs like Head Start and DARE on which we can piss away money...
(Head Start has been shown to have no effect on the student's future high-school grades, graduation rates, college admissions, standardized test scores, dropout rates, or any other measure of academic achievement. DARE has been shown to have no effect on drug use.)
Steven E. Ehrbar
And, of course, Quebec will recognize the right of self-determination in those areas in the north and along its borders where peoples of the First Nations and Anglo-Canadians are the majority?
Or will the PQ continue to insist that distinct communities within the nation-state of Canada have the right to self-determination but distinct communities within the future nation-state of Quebec do not?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, the response you'll usually hear is "the legacy of colonialism".
Which fails to explain why some colonies (Taiwan, South Korea) succeded after gaining independence; why some (Argentina) initially succeeded and now have falllen behind; why some still prospered as essentially colonial states (South Africa); and why most failed.
Another explanation you will hear talks about natural resources, which doesn't explain Taiwan's advantage over Nigeria or Russia; it only explains a handful of Arab oil states.
The real reason become simple to divine when you look at economic systems. Countries where capitalism was discouraged, where the government was active in redistributing wealth (whether to the people or to cronies), or where the reliable rule of law was not established, failed to develop.
Whether they were European states or non-European, independent for long periods or long were colonies, resource-rich or resource-poor, democratic or stable dictatorships, recieved much foriegn aid or little, it's never mattered. Material wealth flows from free markets coupled with stable governments. Always has, always will.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Which feeds right into a second question; if they made the inconvenient choice, how much longer would it take before we had Mozilla?
What the current choice means is that you'll get a working browser faster (at least on Mac and *nix), and then people can dick around making localized chrome later
Steven E. Ehrbar
Anyway, suppose a new law was put in place that put software into the public domain some time after it was copyrighted, I suggest 10 years.
Are you volunteering to be the U.S. representative to the treaty negotiations?
Under the Universal Copyright Convention (Berne), no party may have a copyright term of less than life+50/75 years, and no party may reduce their term of copyright. There are roughly 180 nations other than the U.S. who are parties to the UCC; IIRC you need 2/3 to go along with changes before they take effect for the change-ratifying parties.
So, before such a law could take effect (unless you wanted to make U.S. copyrights invalid across the world), you need to get 120 nations to sign off on it.
Yes, it's a good idea. No, there's not a chance in hell it will ever be acted upon.
Steven E. Ehrbar
UNIX is not playing catch-up on journalling file systems. Linux is, but UNIX had them years ago. For example, AIX's JFS.
Compare to Win2000, which has an anemic semi-journaled hack of HPFS which is called NTFS; Mac OS 9 or Windows 98/Me, which doesn't have one yet; and OS/2, which didn't get one until AIX's JFS was ported to it by IBM.
Steven E. Ehrbar
And MSIE still isn't compliant...
Steven E. Ehrbar
"Chrome/skins" are merely a side effect from deciding to use the rendering engine to render the UI.
The choices the Mozilla project faced were:
1) Write three front ends
2) Make Mozilla dependent on a non-free toolkit, creating a financial barrier to contributing
3) Base Mozilla on the 1.x-4.x codebase
4) Write a new XP toolkit with three local implementations.
5) Render the UI with Gecko.
What choice would you have made?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, given that they have started to sell premium services to buisnesses....
Also, they make money on interest. When you've been paid via PayPal, but have yet to transfer the money to you own bank account, it sits in PayPal's accounts, and they get the interest on it. Add a bank-like normal rate of "abandoned" accounts with some cash in them, the fact that the bonuses can be written as customer acquisition/marketing expenses, and a plan to eventually abandon the bonuses when the customer base grows sufficiently....
It doesn't seem they'll turn a profit soon, but it does look like a plausible buisness model.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Except, of course, that the defense has stated its intention to show that CSS is anticompetitive in nature as opposed to antipiracy. Kaplan saying that that defense's strategy is irrelevant to the facts at hand is defensible, but it can also be interpreted as self-fulfilling justification. For example:
"I am biased toward the plaintiff, and I've got to stay on the case to ensure their victory. Hmm, if the anticompetitive argument is irrelevant, then there is no cause to recuse me. Therefore, if I say it is irrelevant, I don't have to recuse myself, and therefore can stay on the case and assure the victory of the MPAA."
Eh, my cynicism is showing, isn't it?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Coca-Cola was foolish enough several years ago to change a Good Thing
One word you have to add to that -- radically. Coke has changed the "secret formula" more than half-a-dozen times in the last 50 years, but always with some effort to keep the taste pretty similar. But the Coke you drink today is not the same formula as the Coke you drank in 1980, and neither is the same as the Coke you drank in 1960.
Steven E. Ehrbar
So what if Corel has sold off its library of graphics? It didn't sell off its software (like CorelDraw), and it kept royalty-free redistribution rights. So Corel spun off an non-core buisness. Big deal.
Steven E. Ehrbar
We here in the DirtBike community are so close to the issue of dirt bikes and bike modification that it is taking over our lives. If you take a step back from the monitor (remember in "Fight Club": you are not your job)you will see that non-biker people saw the K-Rad 7, and other 2000-model bikes, as a nice thing to ride on you half-day off work and nothing more.
Steven E. Ehrbar
SO was an OS/2 application first. Then Star Division wrote a Windows-OS/2 multiplatform library and moved the codebase to that. Then they ported that library to X.
So, you can't just "tear out that annoying Win98-clone WM". SO essentially is a Windows application running on top of its own incompatible flavor of Wine; porting it to gtk or Qt would be as much work as moving an MFC app to gtk or Qt.
Steven E. Ehrbar
No, it started out life as a pure OS/2 application. There was (and maybe is) an attempt to write a Java version, but SO has always been C/C++.
Steven E. Ehrbar
If the basic UI of SO gets fixed, and Gnomified, this could be a cross-platform bonanza, at least on the free side. Perhaps somene will use one of the free crossplatform toolkits (like wxWindows) to do the platform dependent work. That would keep things stable.
1) StarOffice is already based on a cross-platform tollkit for OS/2, Windows, and X developed by the original Star Division company.
2) Gnomifying would be ridiculously hard. StarOffice started on OS/2; the original cross-platforming was done to Windows, and only then to X. Moving to Gnome would be like moving MS Office to Gnome; the assumptions of the code itself are tooled for OS/2 and Windows style abstractions, not X-style abstractions.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Predictions:
- Bush will (unfortunately) get the presidency
- Due to pressure from Bush (direct or indirect through appointments to various positions) M$ will get off easy, with little more than a little wrist slapping
Bullshit. There's already been a court ruling on the case.
The only way Bush can interfere is to first fire the current prosecutor before he finishes the case (something only Bill Clinton has done on a change on administration in the last 50 years), appoint a replacement prosecutor who will deliberately throw the appeals, and hope the court reaction to those actions isn't to go ahead and punish MS anyway based on the already-submitted information.
Do you realize exactly how much political capital those actions would take, and how uncertain the outcome would be? Even National Review, which advocates a housecleaning by Bush at Justice and has denounced the MS trial, doesn't think Bush will try to affect the MS case or that it would be a good idea for him to try.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Eh, I've had a few, mostly when using an old Cyrix 6x86 that was apparently overheating. The rest were when using either Netscape Navigator or Lotus SmartSuite...
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, okay. Go to ftp.redhat.com to get the free copy of Linux I've prepared for you and...
WAIT! I don't need to give you anything! It's already been moderated up to a 5!
[goes back and reads own post]
Oh, okay. I implicitly defend Linux and attack MS, while explicitly attacking ZD. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect I was a Karma Whore.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Aw, it doesn't deserve a 5 -- and I forgot to preview first, so it's got HTML and spelling errors. I'm perfectly happy with a 3; I've got a lot of Karma anyway.
Steven E. Ehrbar
That's like the pot calling the dinner plate black. Ziff-Davis has a long history of getting lots of actual money from MS for advertising, and a long history of generating glowing reveiws of every new MS product...
Steven E. Ehrbar
it did mandate that the Judicial Branch have the power to interpret the Constitution and judge whether or not a law is in violation of the Constitution
Section of the Constitution, please? The language in Art. III section 2 is ambiguous as to whether the meaning of the Constitution is subject to judicial interpretation; the courts have certainly ruled it is, but that's still a circular argument.
And it is apparently legal for a President to unilaterally interpret the Constitution even when the Court rules otherwise; at least nobody has tried to give northwestern Georgia back to the Cherokees recently. It can be argued that Supreme Court interpretation is customarily accepted by the other branches, but not Consstitutionally priviledged over Congressional, state, or Presidential interpretation.
Steven E. Ehrbar
I am not a lawyer, but if you have a legal copy of SCO that you aren't using (for example, because you've moved to Linux or bought a second license), you should legally be able to copy the libraries over and use them under Linux/iBCS.
Steven E. Ehrbar