This is a pretty funny article... but if one, as many of my sibling posts do, sees it only as a lampoon of ignorant and inflexible-minded people then one misses something. The reason the article is funny (to the extent that it is... it's an un-subtle Colbert-style satire which is not really my kind of thing anyway) is that it rings true: if you're a non-Windows, non-Mac user you've probably heard at least someone seriously say and believe many of the things written in that article. And some of those things have a degree of truth to them: there really are websites that don't render well outside of IE (usually this is the fault of the designer, but that doesn't change the truth of the fact). Many people are totally lost when it comes to installing software on non-Windows operating systems.
Many people do look for help and get flamed or told to RTFM (never mind that the first five pages of TFM consist of the history of how the program has been named throughout time *cough fvwm cough*... it may be the greatest window manager ever to manage windows, but its manpage spins my head sometimes). Just today I was looking for help because on my laptop running FreeBSD and some recent version of teTeX GNU/Lilypond refused to work. I came across a series of archived mailing list postings where a user got flamed for not realizing that *obviously* pdftex would not accept embedded postscript. And the part where the "reviewer" goes into IRC and the users are named "assrape" and such (while the reviewer character is a hyper-conservative) is a reminder that lots of users simply won't feel at home in the Free Software community for reasons that are basically just identity politics. I wouldn't ask the community to change it's identity, just to realize that there are plenty of other perspectives out there and that there are lots of people that don't identify with them. If someone wants to try to adapt Free Unix to a broader audience that really is a big issue to overcome.
For a while I've wondered why laptops have batteries in them but standard desktops don't have a little battery, just big enough to run for a few minutes to properly shut everything down in the event of a power failure. Then you look at UPSes and they're these beastly and pretty expensive things that require their own drivers and programs to monitor them. Sure, it would add some cost to a standard desktop system to have battery backup but I as a buyer would gladly offset the cost by taking a slower CPU or cheaper video card.
I assume you were taking a CS or Computer Engineering course at some kind of college. Remembering syntax details has nothing to do with understanding the important material of the class; and in most circumstances your code shouldn't rely on the difference between ++i and i++ anyway because it usually makes code harder to follow. I bet you think your TA was stupid or something, and he may well have been, but if that's your reason then you're missing the point.
W3C Validation, unfortunately, doesn't mean that your website is usable, that its markup has only one correct interpretation that looks good, or that it works well given a different set of user defaults than you expect.
I don't remember the exact details, but IE, Opera and Firefox differ in the way they handle rendering of UL elements, such that they look the same by default but some of them acheive this by setting the default to positive padding and zero margins and others by positive margins and zero padding. If you set one of the two quantities you might produce something that renders differently in different browsers despite that there's nothing wrong with your CSS (in that it will validate, and it's doing something pretty reasonable) and that all the browsers are acting according to the W3C standards. It's just that there are undefined areas in the standards. Sometimes I see this artifact while browsing the web (or at least it looks like it; I don't usually bother to check the source) and think, "Ah, some webmaster only tested in IE or Opera.
Who is responsible for covering such a gap? The W3C shouldn't go around specifying the CSS defaults for every type of HTML element, and the browser makers aren't about to get together and agree on this kind of stuff (although they usually try to set their defaults so that existing pages look good). Users, for the most part, don't want to care. So it is up to webmasters to test their code on the common browsers. (On the other hand, this is not as easy as it sounds sometimes. If you develop a web page on GNU/Linux it's not always easy to find a computer running IE to test against. I once had a small website up for my running club that I tested under FF, Opera and Konq and looked great; out on a run one of the guys mentioned that the site only had one page. Apparently IE quashed the entire navigation sidebar and I didn't even know).
Now I may be a lowly woodwind player (I play mostly out of the clarinet family) but you're not quite right. Most of today's brass instruments have some kind of variable length tubing; most obvious is the trombone, where a slide changes the length of the instrument, but the valves in trumpets, tubas and euphoniums open up extra sections of tubing, effectively lengthening the instrument. This is one way for brass players to change pitch. However, there are only three or four valves on most instruments, which would give at most eight distinct pitches.
But for each valve combination a brass player can actually produce many different notes; the player can play any pitch whose wavelength is a multiple of the instrument's length. The result is that for each fingering the player can produce a harmonic series: a fundamental note (usually very low), one octave above it, up a fifth, up a fourth, up a major third, up a minor third, and so on (these are approximate; or, one might more accurately say, modern even-tempered tuning systems produce approximations of the perfect harmonic intervals).
If you listen to bugle music you'll notice that only the notes of one harmonic series are used; in "Taps", for example, overtones 2, 3, 4 and 5 are used. If a trumpet player played "Taps" his or her fingers would not move; the trumpet player could, with some practice to adjust to the instrument, play exactly the same way on the bugle.
CS department? Since when is it the job of the CS department to administer the mail servers? Or any servers for that matter? The CS department studies computer science, not IT.
You might say that if the CS department had any clout in terms of IT decisions that they would use that clout to block the adoption of this service. That said, I'm not sure the faculty in technical fields have much say in anything. I'm an undergrad at a university with a well-respected Computer Engineering department and the department's IT staff mandates crappy and broken "web boards" instead of newsgroups, won't set up servers for things like CVS/SVN (supposedly they'd rather try to roll their own web-based stuff, so classes tend to use whatever places they have available to set up repositories) and refuses to set up a Linux lab when that's what a class desires (instead we had a lab of Windows machines running Linux under Virtual PC, which is mostly adequate but sometimes a bit of a pain). The web-based portal that all their services go through has a bunch of ads on it, which is probably the reason they want as many services as possible to rely on it. The students and the faculty don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Either way, we can still learn the same ideas even if we don't always do it in the most elegant way possible.
There's a problem with punishing corporations: it almost never amounts to punishing those that are truly guilty. As I understand it in the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandals tons of people were put out of work, people that did nothing wrong and who needed their jobs, but the guys at the top still had plenty of money to sit on when the whole thing was done. The way a corporation deals with punishment handed to it will be determined at the highest levels; they're not likely to make cuts at the highest levels. The little guys will always get screwed.
Corporations so often serve as means to evade responsibility that I think we have to look at the specific people involved in illegal activities. Any person that aided in a corporation's breaking the law should be punished individually. Punish the guilty and hopefully don't destroy the entire corporation.
Now I guess there are some cases where punishing the corporation is what best creates justice for the rest of the marketplace. Each case is going to be a bit different, and it would probably take a lot of thought (and, of course, lots of legal battles) to figure out just what to do in each case.
AMD procs these days have an on-die memory controller; they're connected directly to their RAM. HyperTransport is used for connecting processors in a multiprocessor system. This is useful because in an Opteron system each processor connects to a different slice of physical memory, so the processors need some reasonably fast way to access each other's memory.
Adding a layer like HyperTransport on top of the direct connections present in current AMD systems would just make things slower.
Properly calibrated display? Something tells me a properly calibrated display won't have much to say about the small print at the bottom of the page. I quote from the stylesheet, ".sosumi {font-size: 9px; line-height: 140%; color: #4e4e4e;}". Font size specified in pixels? 9px on my 1600x1200, 19" CRT is positively tiny. Why not use points as the size unit (really, all fonts for the web should use points for font sizes; even if creating boxes in CSS that text must fit into, these boxes' size can be defined in terms of points. Maybe for some crazy corner cases using points is a good idea, but certainly not for full paragraphs of text)? And #4e4e4e? That's a pretty dark grey. Something tells me they wanted that fine print to be *fine*.
Now it looks like the color for main text is #a1a5a9, which is not quite so bad on paper. Maybe I do need to adjust my gamma. Yeah. But going back to their global stylesheet, where it looks like the main font is set, its size is "12px". Again with the pixel sizes.
So it doesn't look like Apple is going out of its way to create a good-looking web page. In fact, if the majority of PC users, as one of my uncle posts mentions, have their gamma set too low, Apple should probably use a color scheme that adapts to this, and looks fine both on correct and incorrect displays. After all, most computer users aren't going to blame their display when one website in a million is hard to read.
Oh, sure, if you want to watch professionals play. But if you have a neighborhood park and 17 friends you can play baseball pretty much for free once you have all the equipment (until someone that has the field reserved kicks you out). It's the 17 friends part that's the barrier, and the reason that there's not enough demand for field times for a market to develop.
You wouldn't have to have 17 friends for soccer, various disc sports, basketball, tennis, racquetball or running. These things won't cost you $120-a-pop either.
There is a Windows development community. There are all kinds of sites, for example, where people discuss development for Windows and Microsoft-specific platforms. Furthermore, you can bet that Microsoft tries to have its finger on the pulse of its development community when it plans new products. It's not the exact same thing as the F/OSS community, but it is a community. It's a large community that gets a lot of use out of its software.
I understand that Microsoft does many things that you might object to. But a backlash against Microsoft doesn't have to mean a backlash against all users of their products. If your open-source project purports itself to be cross-platform it should strive for good functionality on all the platforms it supports. It's frustrating to me that nobody will talk to me on Jabber, too. It's frustrating that I receive Word files, or even worse, MS Publisher files in email (I think even some Office users can't open those). But if you actively alienate Windows users the F/OSS community becomes as little a community to them as the Microsoft community is to you.
Maybe he means he'll be seriously trying to make Windows feel like home for the first time. I'm sure he's used Windows before and probably knows quite a bit about it, but just doesn't know the ways that some users make it their own.
Now for some on-topic stuff, he sounds like he's coming from the Mac world, but I'll suggest Cygwin anyway; Cygwin gives you a Unix-like environment within Windows, including an X server and package management (for Cygwin packages) that's pretty painless. It also can give you your favorite Unix shell to do all your commandline stuff; I used to find that handy when doing lots of ssh/scp sessions (I'm sure those utilities exist on the command line for Windows natively, but I already had them there under Cygwin and then were in xterms with focus following mouse, so I just used 'em there:) ). Of course, after I realized that I was getting most of my classwork done within the Cygwin environment I figured I might as well just run GNU/Linux instead.
If you have a remote for your computer, I'd recommend Girder to harness its power. Back when I used Windows primarily Girder was free (as in beer); now you have to pay for it *shrug*.
So the SysV experience, rather than convincing vendors to drop silly restrictions, convinced them to make the same restrictions in a more robust way (somehow I doubt that breaking Windows 2000's two-user limit is as simple as dropping a new binary into $WINDOWS/system)
Bender647 produced from a sack strapped onto his back a large book. "The book of teh intarweb", it read in gold lettering on its black leather binding. "Now, my children," intoned the wise old man, stroking his long grey beard, "I shall read you the story of when I got fsir7 ps0t."
Do you think he wanted the job? If his horn-tooting was accurate he probably didn't need it. So why would he work for a jackass? He probably thinks of it in terms of whether the job got him.
What does it mean for Linspire to "consider" DRM? Operating systems don't decrypt DRMed media files, programs do. There's only one company that can authorize development of software to play iTMS songs on Linux, and that's Apple.
If they mean crippling the user with "features" like "secure video path", I think they'll soon find that implementing controls like that in a Free operating system is very hard. It might be possible with trusted computing, which if I understand correctly gives user programs a way to identify the kernel without making a call into the kernel.
In some situations it would be easier than porting a Windows app to Linux; interacting with devices, dealing with threading and terminal settings will be easier if the app is already on OS X. And in the case of a game, if it runs on OS X it already will be using OpenGL.
For a lot of applications where calls to the UI are more prevalent it could be more of an issue, but usually games don't worry much about Quartz vs. GTK vs. Win32 in terms of interfaces; they just need a minimal wrapper that abstracts input events and the OpenGL interface can do the rest.
Your school district must have an unusual amount of money left over if you as an employee are "getting excited" about convincing people a set of new computers plus an extra operating system and set of software for each. Of course, the whole expensive setup would be worth all the money, because everyone would benefit from having to watch Windows load every time they wanted to run this program that your department requires. Oh wait, they won't, because after they run this program they'll just leave it up running Windows.
The only person I can think of that actually would benefit at all from such a crazy scheme is a crazy Apple fanboy. If you want Intel Macs and you want to run some random Windows program and you actually the computer booted into OS/X most of the time you probably should be looking at a virtualization solution, not dual booting.
There's a difference between the name GNU/Linux and, say, OSX/Mach. The difference is that in the case of OSX the project to create an operating system was Apple's. They used the Mach kernel in that pursuit, as they used many other pieces of F/OSS. The operating system was Apple's and they called it OS/X.
The GNU/Linux story is much more complicated. The project to create an OS was definitely GNU's. However, the marriage between GNU and Linux was the doing of the Linux developers (at least as I understand it). So would it then come under the naming of Linux or GNU? There is ambiguity. Then the distributors came in, and there's this silly question of semantics: were they trying to create their own operating systems, or to distribute existing software? What's the difference?
GNU's project to create a Free operating system was and is important. I believe that a continuation of GNU's goals of freedom has resulted in the system that I use, know and love. But it's also a continuation of Linux's goals, those of creating the best operating system possible. So I call my operating system GNU/Linux, because it gives credit to both of these ideas. The two sets of ideas, complementary and often at odds with eachother. I'd only mention the distributor (or "meta-distributor", as I'm a Gentoo user) if someone was asking me about things relavent to package distribution or system configuration. Some people would be well, frankly, to list their operating system as KDE/GNU/Linux or Gnome/Linux (as Gnome/GNU would be redundant) because those projects bring a third set of goals to the table that strongly influences the experience of their users (by this I mean users of the full desktop environments and not so much those that merely benefit from the many quality apps made possible by those projects).
So I guess if an OSX user thinks that the goals and ideas of the Mach project aren't getting their due for doing the dirty work for Apple's operating system, that user would be fine by me to call the whole thing OSX/Mach. I don't think that what Mac users are presented with on a daily basis is the same kind of synthesis that GNU/Linux folk are.
What I mean by an "office" format is probably more correctly termed an "intermediate" format: one that's designed to be edited again. Intermediate formats usually aren't guaranteed to look and print exactly the same on all systems. For example, one system might have a different version of fonts installed that would be slightly different in size and mess up the formatting. Or a different program (in ODF's case, say, koffice vs. openoffice) might render a table differently. If the file was well-constructed the semantic value wouldn't change, but many users of such programs use lots of ugly hacks for their fomatting that would mess things up. If the storage format was pdf or postscript, a "final" format, that wouldn't matter since it should always render the same way.
Of course, you can extract text and images from a pdf; just because Adobe doesn't include the functionality in its reader (a totally artificial restriction that eases the minds of people creating PDFs that they don't want text copied from) doesn't mean it can't be done. Google "pdf extract text" if you don't believe me. Many pdfs even have structural information embedded in them (so you can view a document index and select a section of the document to read, which is really useful for technical specs). Of course, only quality-made pdfs have this, just as quality-made ODFs would.
Although ODF is an XML format, the documents may not be created in a way that takes advantage of that to provide any more-structured information than a flat page of text.
Now if I'm going to have to deal with files in an intermediate format, I'd hope it would be an open and well thought-out standard like ODF. But for final documents that will not have to be re-edited, a "final" or "print" format is the best choice in my opinion (I am not an archival expert).
Re your sig: super as a prefix doesn't mean "very", it means something along the lines of "above" or "beyond", as in "superscript".
For a more on-topic note, I'm not sure why an office format would be the best thing to use for archives of final documents; why not use something like pdf? Readers are widely available, it will always produce the same results when printed, and it's been around for a while. Plus it's very straightforward to produce a pdf from absolutely any document that can be printed on at least Windows and Unix-like machines (in fact I bet even wierd computers like Macs, Be-Boxes and NeXT cubes can produce pdfs from any print output with a bit of prodding).
I think that's interesting, though I'm not sure how many people regularly browse the Star Force website and even more, how many actually want to take a trip to Moscow and the headquarters of the company. It doesn't seem all that appealing to me. Of course, the results of their experiment are not "proof" like they claim, but what would you expect from a company trying to sell its product?
That said, anyone that would install system-altering DRM to play a damn game is insane. Totally nuts. I am not much of a gamer, but I know that many electronics stores carry many video game titles. Surely at least some of them don't feature system-altering DRM. I've never given listeners of mainstream music much credit for selectivity, but when Sony tried this kind of stuff a few months ago they were forced out of the market. Why haven't gamers done the same? Are they idiots or cowards, brainwashed to accept any corporate doublespeak? Do they just not care (seems strange for a group of people that will try anything to improve their computers' performance...)?
It's been enough for your media so far. But what happens a few computers and iPods down the road? If you reinstall your OS is that another "machine" down the drain? If you have a different OS installed on another partition of your hard drive and want to play the files from there, does that count as "another machine"? If you wanted to play the files under, say, BeOS and found that there was no player available, would it be possible for you or anyone else to write one? For that matter, I've never even heard of a player for GNU/Linux capable of playing iTMS files, and it's a pretty common operating system these days.
I think you've been had. "Enough for your needs" now can easily become a headache when you are faced with the artificial restrictions of DRM.
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This is a pretty funny article... but if one, as many of my sibling posts do, sees it only as a lampoon of ignorant and inflexible-minded people then one misses something. The reason the article is funny (to the extent that it is... it's an un-subtle Colbert-style satire which is not really my kind of thing anyway) is that it rings true: if you're a non-Windows, non-Mac user you've probably heard at least someone seriously say and believe many of the things written in that article. And some of those things have a degree of truth to them: there really are websites that don't render well outside of IE (usually this is the fault of the designer, but that doesn't change the truth of the fact). Many people are totally lost when it comes to installing software on non-Windows operating systems.
Many people do look for help and get flamed or told to RTFM (never mind that the first five pages of TFM consist of the history of how the program has been named throughout time *cough fvwm cough*... it may be the greatest window manager ever to manage windows, but its manpage spins my head sometimes). Just today I was looking for help because on my laptop running FreeBSD and some recent version of teTeX GNU/Lilypond refused to work. I came across a series of archived mailing list postings where a user got flamed for not realizing that *obviously* pdftex would not accept embedded postscript. And the part where the "reviewer" goes into IRC and the users are named "assrape" and such (while the reviewer character is a hyper-conservative) is a reminder that lots of users simply won't feel at home in the Free Software community for reasons that are basically just identity politics. I wouldn't ask the community to change it's identity, just to realize that there are plenty of other perspectives out there and that there are lots of people that don't identify with them. If someone wants to try to adapt Free Unix to a broader audience that really is a big issue to overcome.
For a while I've wondered why laptops have batteries in them but standard desktops don't have a little battery, just big enough to run for a few minutes to properly shut everything down in the event of a power failure. Then you look at UPSes and they're these beastly and pretty expensive things that require their own drivers and programs to monitor them. Sure, it would add some cost to a standard desktop system to have battery backup but I as a buyer would gladly offset the cost by taking a slower CPU or cheaper video card.
I assume you were taking a CS or Computer Engineering course at some kind of college. Remembering syntax details has nothing to do with understanding the important material of the class; and in most circumstances your code shouldn't rely on the difference between ++i and i++ anyway because it usually makes code harder to follow. I bet you think your TA was stupid or something, and he may well have been, but if that's your reason then you're missing the point.
What the hell kind of desktop environment requires the installation of a package just to make a simple change to the right-click menu?
W3C Validation, unfortunately, doesn't mean that your website is usable, that its markup has only one correct interpretation that looks good, or that it works well given a different set of user defaults than you expect.
I don't remember the exact details, but IE, Opera and Firefox differ in the way they handle rendering of UL elements, such that they look the same by default but some of them acheive this by setting the default to positive padding and zero margins and others by positive margins and zero padding. If you set one of the two quantities you might produce something that renders differently in different browsers despite that there's nothing wrong with your CSS (in that it will validate, and it's doing something pretty reasonable) and that all the browsers are acting according to the W3C standards. It's just that there are undefined areas in the standards. Sometimes I see this artifact while browsing the web (or at least it looks like it; I don't usually bother to check the source) and think, "Ah, some webmaster only tested in IE or Opera.
Who is responsible for covering such a gap? The W3C shouldn't go around specifying the CSS defaults for every type of HTML element, and the browser makers aren't about to get together and agree on this kind of stuff (although they usually try to set their defaults so that existing pages look good). Users, for the most part, don't want to care. So it is up to webmasters to test their code on the common browsers. (On the other hand, this is not as easy as it sounds sometimes. If you develop a web page on GNU/Linux it's not always easy to find a computer running IE to test against. I once had a small website up for my running club that I tested under FF, Opera and Konq and looked great; out on a run one of the guys mentioned that the site only had one page. Apparently IE quashed the entire navigation sidebar and I didn't even know).
Now I may be a lowly woodwind player (I play mostly out of the clarinet family) but you're not quite right. Most of today's brass instruments have some kind of variable length tubing; most obvious is the trombone, where a slide changes the length of the instrument, but the valves in trumpets, tubas and euphoniums open up extra sections of tubing, effectively lengthening the instrument. This is one way for brass players to change pitch. However, there are only three or four valves on most instruments, which would give at most eight distinct pitches.
But for each valve combination a brass player can actually produce many different notes; the player can play any pitch whose wavelength is a multiple of the instrument's length. The result is that for each fingering the player can produce a harmonic series: a fundamental note (usually very low), one octave above it, up a fifth, up a fourth, up a major third, up a minor third, and so on (these are approximate; or, one might more accurately say, modern even-tempered tuning systems produce approximations of the perfect harmonic intervals).
If you listen to bugle music you'll notice that only the notes of one harmonic series are used; in "Taps", for example, overtones 2, 3, 4 and 5 are used. If a trumpet player played "Taps" his or her fingers would not move; the trumpet player could, with some practice to adjust to the instrument, play exactly the same way on the bugle.
CS department? Since when is it the job of the CS department to administer the mail servers? Or any servers for that matter? The CS department studies computer science, not IT.
You might say that if the CS department had any clout in terms of IT decisions that they would use that clout to block the adoption of this service. That said, I'm not sure the faculty in technical fields have much say in anything. I'm an undergrad at a university with a well-respected Computer Engineering department and the department's IT staff mandates crappy and broken "web boards" instead of newsgroups, won't set up servers for things like CVS/SVN (supposedly they'd rather try to roll their own web-based stuff, so classes tend to use whatever places they have available to set up repositories) and refuses to set up a Linux lab when that's what a class desires (instead we had a lab of Windows machines running Linux under Virtual PC, which is mostly adequate but sometimes a bit of a pain). The web-based portal that all their services go through has a bunch of ads on it, which is probably the reason they want as many services as possible to rely on it. The students and the faculty don't have a lot of choice in the matter. Either way, we can still learn the same ideas even if we don't always do it in the most elegant way possible.
There's a problem with punishing corporations: it almost never amounts to punishing those that are truly guilty. As I understand it in the Enron/Arthur Andersen scandals tons of people were put out of work, people that did nothing wrong and who needed their jobs, but the guys at the top still had plenty of money to sit on when the whole thing was done. The way a corporation deals with punishment handed to it will be determined at the highest levels; they're not likely to make cuts at the highest levels. The little guys will always get screwed.
Corporations so often serve as means to evade responsibility that I think we have to look at the specific people involved in illegal activities. Any person that aided in a corporation's breaking the law should be punished individually. Punish the guilty and hopefully don't destroy the entire corporation.
Now I guess there are some cases where punishing the corporation is what best creates justice for the rest of the marketplace. Each case is going to be a bit different, and it would probably take a lot of thought (and, of course, lots of legal battles) to figure out just what to do in each case.
AMD procs these days have an on-die memory controller; they're connected directly to their RAM. HyperTransport is used for connecting processors in a multiprocessor system. This is useful because in an Opteron system each processor connects to a different slice of physical memory, so the processors need some reasonably fast way to access each other's memory.
Adding a layer like HyperTransport on top of the direct connections present in current AMD systems would just make things slower.
Properly calibrated display? Something tells me a properly calibrated display won't have much to say about the small print at the bottom of the page. I quote from the stylesheet, ".sosumi {font-size: 9px; line-height: 140%; color: #4e4e4e;}". Font size specified in pixels? 9px on my 1600x1200, 19" CRT is positively tiny. Why not use points as the size unit (really, all fonts for the web should use points for font sizes; even if creating boxes in CSS that text must fit into, these boxes' size can be defined in terms of points. Maybe for some crazy corner cases using points is a good idea, but certainly not for full paragraphs of text)? And #4e4e4e? That's a pretty dark grey. Something tells me they wanted that fine print to be *fine*.
Now it looks like the color for main text is #a1a5a9, which is not quite so bad on paper. Maybe I do need to adjust my gamma. Yeah. But going back to their global stylesheet, where it looks like the main font is set, its size is "12px". Again with the pixel sizes.
So it doesn't look like Apple is going out of its way to create a good-looking web page. In fact, if the majority of PC users, as one of my uncle posts mentions, have their gamma set too low, Apple should probably use a color scheme that adapts to this, and looks fine both on correct and incorrect displays. After all, most computer users aren't going to blame their display when one website in a million is hard to read.
Oh, sure, if you want to watch professionals play. But if you have a neighborhood park and 17 friends you can play baseball pretty much for free once you have all the equipment (until someone that has the field reserved kicks you out). It's the 17 friends part that's the barrier, and the reason that there's not enough demand for field times for a market to develop.
You wouldn't have to have 17 friends for soccer, various disc sports, basketball, tennis, racquetball or running. These things won't cost you $120-a-pop either.
There is a Windows development community. There are all kinds of sites, for example, where people discuss development for Windows and Microsoft-specific platforms. Furthermore, you can bet that Microsoft tries to have its finger on the pulse of its development community when it plans new products. It's not the exact same thing as the F/OSS community, but it is a community. It's a large community that gets a lot of use out of its software.
I understand that Microsoft does many things that you might object to. But a backlash against Microsoft doesn't have to mean a backlash against all users of their products. If your open-source project purports itself to be cross-platform it should strive for good functionality on all the platforms it supports. It's frustrating to me that nobody will talk to me on Jabber, too. It's frustrating that I receive Word files, or even worse, MS Publisher files in email (I think even some Office users can't open those). But if you actively alienate Windows users the F/OSS community becomes as little a community to them as the Microsoft community is to you.
Maybe he means he'll be seriously trying to make Windows feel like home for the first time. I'm sure he's used Windows before and probably knows quite a bit about it, but just doesn't know the ways that some users make it their own.
:) ). Of course, after I realized that I was getting most of my classwork done within the Cygwin environment I figured I might as well just run GNU/Linux instead.
Now for some on-topic stuff, he sounds like he's coming from the Mac world, but I'll suggest Cygwin anyway; Cygwin gives you a Unix-like environment within Windows, including an X server and package management (for Cygwin packages) that's pretty painless. It also can give you your favorite Unix shell to do all your commandline stuff; I used to find that handy when doing lots of ssh/scp sessions (I'm sure those utilities exist on the command line for Windows natively, but I already had them there under Cygwin and then were in xterms with focus following mouse, so I just used 'em there
If you have a remote for your computer, I'd recommend Girder to harness its power. Back when I used Windows primarily Girder was free (as in beer); now you have to pay for it *shrug*.
So the SysV experience, rather than convincing vendors to drop silly restrictions, convinced them to make the same restrictions in a more robust way (somehow I doubt that breaking Windows 2000's two-user limit is as simple as dropping a new binary into $WINDOWS/system)
Bender647 produced from a sack strapped onto his back a large book. "The book of teh intarweb", it read in gold lettering on its black leather binding. "Now, my children," intoned the wise old man, stroking his long grey beard, "I shall read you the story of when I got fsir7 ps0t."
Do you think he wanted the job? If his horn-tooting was accurate he probably didn't need it. So why would he work for a jackass? He probably thinks of it in terms of whether the job got him.
What does it mean for Linspire to "consider" DRM? Operating systems don't decrypt DRMed media files, programs do. There's only one company that can authorize development of software to play iTMS songs on Linux, and that's Apple.
If they mean crippling the user with "features" like "secure video path", I think they'll soon find that implementing controls like that in a Free operating system is very hard. It might be possible with trusted computing, which if I understand correctly gives user programs a way to identify the kernel without making a call into the kernel.
In some situations it would be easier than porting a Windows app to Linux; interacting with devices, dealing with threading and terminal settings will be easier if the app is already on OS X. And in the case of a game, if it runs on OS X it already will be using OpenGL.
For a lot of applications where calls to the UI are more prevalent it could be more of an issue, but usually games don't worry much about Quartz vs. GTK vs. Win32 in terms of interfaces; they just need a minimal wrapper that abstracts input events and the OpenGL interface can do the rest.
Your school district must have an unusual amount of money left over if you as an employee are "getting excited" about convincing people a set of new computers plus an extra operating system and set of software for each. Of course, the whole expensive setup would be worth all the money, because everyone would benefit from having to watch Windows load every time they wanted to run this program that your department requires. Oh wait, they won't, because after they run this program they'll just leave it up running Windows.
The only person I can think of that actually would benefit at all from such a crazy scheme is a crazy Apple fanboy. If you want Intel Macs and you want to run some random Windows program and you actually the computer booted into OS/X most of the time you probably should be looking at a virtualization solution, not dual booting.
Thank you, good sir... that trailer was truly amazing.
There's a difference between the name GNU/Linux and, say, OSX/Mach. The difference is that in the case of OSX the project to create an operating system was Apple's. They used the Mach kernel in that pursuit, as they used many other pieces of F/OSS. The operating system was Apple's and they called it OS/X.
The GNU/Linux story is much more complicated. The project to create an OS was definitely GNU's. However, the marriage between GNU and Linux was the doing of the Linux developers (at least as I understand it). So would it then come under the naming of Linux or GNU? There is ambiguity. Then the distributors came in, and there's this silly question of semantics: were they trying to create their own operating systems, or to distribute existing software? What's the difference?
GNU's project to create a Free operating system was and is important. I believe that a continuation of GNU's goals of freedom has resulted in the system that I use, know and love. But it's also a continuation of Linux's goals, those of creating the best operating system possible. So I call my operating system GNU/Linux, because it gives credit to both of these ideas. The two sets of ideas, complementary and often at odds with eachother. I'd only mention the distributor (or "meta-distributor", as I'm a Gentoo user) if someone was asking me about things relavent to package distribution or system configuration. Some people would be well, frankly, to list their operating system as KDE/GNU/Linux or Gnome/Linux (as Gnome/GNU would be redundant) because those projects bring a third set of goals to the table that strongly influences the experience of their users (by this I mean users of the full desktop environments and not so much those that merely benefit from the many quality apps made possible by those projects).
So I guess if an OSX user thinks that the goals and ideas of the Mach project aren't getting their due for doing the dirty work for Apple's operating system, that user would be fine by me to call the whole thing OSX/Mach. I don't think that what Mac users are presented with on a daily basis is the same kind of synthesis that GNU/Linux folk are.
What I mean by an "office" format is probably more correctly termed an "intermediate" format: one that's designed to be edited again. Intermediate formats usually aren't guaranteed to look and print exactly the same on all systems. For example, one system might have a different version of fonts installed that would be slightly different in size and mess up the formatting. Or a different program (in ODF's case, say, koffice vs. openoffice) might render a table differently. If the file was well-constructed the semantic value wouldn't change, but many users of such programs use lots of ugly hacks for their fomatting that would mess things up. If the storage format was pdf or postscript, a "final" format, that wouldn't matter since it should always render the same way.
Of course, you can extract text and images from a pdf; just because Adobe doesn't include the functionality in its reader (a totally artificial restriction that eases the minds of people creating PDFs that they don't want text copied from) doesn't mean it can't be done. Google "pdf extract text" if you don't believe me. Many pdfs even have structural information embedded in them (so you can view a document index and select a section of the document to read, which is really useful for technical specs). Of course, only quality-made pdfs have this, just as quality-made ODFs would.
Although ODF is an XML format, the documents may not be created in a way that takes advantage of that to provide any more-structured information than a flat page of text.
Now if I'm going to have to deal with files in an intermediate format, I'd hope it would be an open and well thought-out standard like ODF. But for final documents that will not have to be re-edited, a "final" or "print" format is the best choice in my opinion (I am not an archival expert).
Re your sig: super as a prefix doesn't mean "very", it means something along the lines of "above" or "beyond", as in "superscript".
For a more on-topic note, I'm not sure why an office format would be the best thing to use for archives of final documents; why not use something like pdf? Readers are widely available, it will always produce the same results when printed, and it's been around for a while. Plus it's very straightforward to produce a pdf from absolutely any document that can be printed on at least Windows and Unix-like machines (in fact I bet even wierd computers like Macs, Be-Boxes and NeXT cubes can produce pdfs from any print output with a bit of prodding).
I think that's interesting, though I'm not sure how many people regularly browse the Star Force website and even more, how many actually want to take a trip to Moscow and the headquarters of the company. It doesn't seem all that appealing to me. Of course, the results of their experiment are not "proof" like they claim, but what would you expect from a company trying to sell its product?
That said, anyone that would install system-altering DRM to play a damn game is insane. Totally nuts. I am not much of a gamer, but I know that many electronics stores carry many video game titles. Surely at least some of them don't feature system-altering DRM. I've never given listeners of mainstream music much credit for selectivity, but when Sony tried this kind of stuff a few months ago they were forced out of the market. Why haven't gamers done the same? Are they idiots or cowards, brainwashed to accept any corporate doublespeak? Do they just not care (seems strange for a group of people that will try anything to improve their computers' performance...)?
It's been enough for your media so far. But what happens a few computers and iPods down the road? If you reinstall your OS is that another "machine" down the drain? If you have a different OS installed on another partition of your hard drive and want to play the files from there, does that count as "another machine"? If you wanted to play the files under, say, BeOS and found that there was no player available, would it be possible for you or anyone else to write one? For that matter, I've never even heard of a player for GNU/Linux capable of playing iTMS files, and it's a pretty common operating system these days.
I think you've been had. "Enough for your needs" now can easily become a headache when you are faced with the artificial restrictions of DRM.