Say you watched it on YouTube or a similar site. YouTube keeps track of what videos are watched; the person that posted it keeps track of videos that are watched. The more people watch their videos the more money they make. So at the very least you've created demand for videos of monkeys attacking people. At some point if enough people love to watch hilarious monkey attacks people will stage them.
OK, that's a bit of a stretch. But that's a video made of an accident. Child porn is not an accident. If you download child porn, even if you don't pay the creator, the person you downloaded it from knows that it's popular and that he should try to get more. This will at some point probably lead to creators of child porn being paid.
Iunno, the Kindle makes a lot of sacrifices to publishers. Including incredibly stupid sacrifices like allowing them to disable text-to-speech for whatever books they want (I don't have a Kindle but I know some people that work for Amazon, one of whom does marketing for Kindle).
Amazon's model seems to be centered around itself foremost, and clearly it must balance customer and publisher demands. If this other company wants to cater more to publisher demands I guess they can try it that way. But don't tell the public that!
TBH little we have today is that close to Craig's view of a "town". When looking for apartments in Chicago there's a big difference between Hyde Park and Uptown unless all your major commitments are downtown. If you work in Lakeview one is a couple stops down on the L, the other requires at least an hour and at least a transfer.
When a couple of my co-workers were looking for an apartment they wrote a Python script to go over Craigslist RSS feeds for apartments, plug the given street names into Google Maps, get walking distances to various important landmarks (the office, their favorite little Italian deli, Red Line stops), and weigh them against each of their personal criteria. They wound up finding a great place. Even if Craigslist were sorted by neighborhood, Chicago neighborhood boundaries are fluid enough that it wouldn't help that much.
Dude, I thought this was the 21st century! If I can't use a cell phone in a bathroom stall why'd I bother getting the damn thing? Oh, right, I didn't get a cell phone. But if I did I'd probably use it in bathroom stalls, this being the 21st century and all.
Craigslist leverages the Internet to provide a hell of a lot of service to a hell of a lot of people without doing much work at all. They skim a little money from some of those people and say that's enough.
Microsoft creates a lot of work for themselves by making lots of new features and then convincing people that they need them. It's how they leverage their advantage as the world's largest software company, and the rest of the industry (and lots of people doing OSS) fall for it.
Google is probably pretty much the same these days. The point is that these companies are worried about shareholder value first, they're worried about winning. That's why they make all this work for themselves. Craigslist just provides the service. Take it or leave it.
The first thing that came to mind when I thought of C, network-facing services, and security was buffer overruns. They aren't hard to avoid, but they aren't hard to write either. Encouraging programmers to write ad-hoc scripts to process input in C sounds like a remarkably bad idea to me.
CRT monitors beat the crap out of LCDs in similar price ranges in just about every aspect of picture and video quality, it's true. But LCDs are light and small; that's a lot more important to me. I used to have a 19" CRT. It was a beast. Took up way too much desk space, and space in the car every time I had to move it. I finally decided to get rid of it when moving away from California and none of my friends would take it for free. My current (rather old, obtained for free) 19" LCD has a tiny footprint.
The one thing I can't stand is widescreen monitors. Less visible area for bigger desk footprint. Stupid dimensions for doing anything but watching movies (but why would you watch movies on a crappy LCD computer monitor?).
Well, and that if they're working all day they can't get an education. Meanwhile there are lots of unemployed adults in many of these places (source: this guy on Colbert a bit ago) -- if they can't work, and the employers would rather hire kids (apparently this is the case in many places), well, that's just going to create a cycle of poor education and child labor, generation after generation.
I know it's basically impossible to get an accurate idea of the conditions of labor in these places without going there. They're probably not that good, though most are probably better than the horror-story sweatshops that are often portrayed.
1. Voice commands will work really poorly in crowded places. I'm trying to picture how I'd use voice commands reliably in Denver airport.
2. Any sort of holographic projection thing is going to require something to project on. For privacy reasons you'll often want something you can hold up to your face, and there are many surfaces that would be impolite to use for a holographic keyboard. If you have something you're holding up to your face, now you have to hold the watch steady relative to it... you'd be better off with a detachable LCD screen. At which point you might as well put the phone hardware in the LCD screen instead.
3. Again, ergonomic factors dictate that a watch is not more convenient than a phone for making calls. My watch has one button on the front and four out of the way on the sides. More buttons on the front would make it harder to use (it is typically pressed blind, sometimes while wearing gloves, usually while very tired and out of breath, and for my purposes I need fairly precise timing). A phone needs... a numeric keypad! A device with an effective keypad and be easy to talk into, something good enough that I'd prefer it to my landline, would have to be big. You could have a Bluetooth thing that looks like a phone or a headset or something... but, again, you might as well just make that the phone instead. If you get a call on your watch-phone and don't have a headset with you, what can you do about it? You just get a ring, and maybe you can listen to the message.
I think the biggest issues here are human factors.
There is no way a device small enough that I will want to wear it out running will be comfortable to use for phone conversations. And no way a device comfortable to use for phone conversations will have a large enough screen to read, browse the web fully, and write code.
It is at least plausible that cell phones will one day have good enough sound quality and ergonomics that I'll want to replace my land-line. Cameras are another like this -- I have no doubt the best phone-cameras are good enough today that my weak photography skills need nothing better.
Phones may replace some of these functions for some people, but they won't replace all of them for everyone.
I'm OK with grey widgets and stuff. They're easy to read from and don't distract from the content of what you're doing. The Oxygen widgets, overall, are among my favorites on any platform (most platforms' default widgets are pretty good these days, although I don't like the gradients in some Clearlooks elements and Windows stuff).
I think the Oxygen window decs are inane, though. It's important (especially with multi-monitor systems or mouse focus) to be able to distinguish the window with focus from others, and the Oxygen decs follow Microsoft and Apple in the direction of making it hard to distinguish. FVWM has great defaults in this regard... Windows 95-2000 were pretty good too.
I've discussed this at length with friends. Highly active people would not be tasty, their meat would be too tough. You basically want people that have lived like veal calves but are built such that they have plenty of muscle mass despite being slow and weak.
- A not-self-interested-at-all long distance runner
There are a lot of ways that a good device could be built. I can think of two plausible ways, and I don't even own a cell phone.
1. There are a number of keyboards designed for efficient one-handed use. With a bluetooth-capable one-handed keyboard you could set the keyboard on your lap and hold the screen up near your face with your other hand.
2. Some people prefer the tiny thumb keyboards most smartphones have to the iPhone's on-sceen 'board. A device for someone like that would basically be a bluetooth-enabled thumb keyboard, that holds the iPhone. It could then be folded down for compact storage somehow.
There are a lot of possibilities here, and I doubt that Apple screwed up Bluetooth support on purpose just to keep people from trying them. I always thought Apple wanted to cultivate an ecosystem of stupid shit people could buy for their iPhones.
Whether they make money doing it is unimportant to me (unless they give me some). If what they're doing is legal, they can go ahead and do it, and we can dislike it, withhold information, create fake accounts, etc. I really resent the lock-in, but WTF can I do? Most of my friends don't keep track of eachother's email addresses anymore.
For my part, I don't do quizzes or install apps for the most part... I mostly use it to broadcast messages about how creepy Facebook and its apps are. That seems like a fair tradeoff for the money it makes off me.
Have you heard of TeX, the document formatting system? When you print onto 8.5x11 paper it leaves enormous margins by default. Do you know why? Because it's easier to read blocks of single-spaced text at around 60 characters per line than it is to read longer lines. The same applies to code.
Meanwhile the culture around many languages encourages programmers never to split lines. At a former workplace where we used VB, one of my co-workers worked with the IDE maximized across two screens! I always kept my lines at least under 100 characters, but when people checked in code near stuff I'd written they sometimes would go through and join my lines together.
At the same time, some of those really long lines are function calls where you don't always need to see all the arguments. Folding editors can collapse those into one line if you write them on multiple lines; it would be cool if there were anti-folding editors that could automatically break up long lines. It's similar for long formulas.
PHP? Where they dump all their million built-in functions into one namespace? Lame. In Perl you have a lot more control over what libraries you pull in and how you use them -- you have to search CPAN for packages sometimes, but then you have a choice on what packages to use. And every Perl module I've pulled from CPAN has been well documented.
I can see wanting lots of libraries around in a default install back before the Internet was big. These days that stuff should be separate and the language's core should be its core.
So you disengage from the truck so you can make your exit. This dismantles the entire train; you and everyone behind you must space out to normal separation. I have a feeling this could be pretty tricky with more than a couple cars involved, or if there's significant traffic or difficult merges. I'm trying to picture a maneuver like this taking place safely, for example, near the Mannheim exit on the inbound Eisenhower west of Chicago (formerly known as the Hillside Strangler... a few years ago more lanes were added for a couple miles, so now there's an Oak Park Strangler). Or even going outbound, a few miles further out, at the merge with the North-South Tollway... if the train is coming from the tollway and you need to get off at Thorndale Ave.
You would probably want to know in advance where the train was going to break apart, so you could avoid joining trains that are about to break up anyway. Maybe you wouldn't be allowed to join trains that are going to exit before you.
It would be a lot less complicated in rural areas... I live in Wyoming now, and when I drive from, say, Cody to Powell, most of the other cars on the road are headed at least as far as Powell. Even back in Illinois, I could see it working on stretches of I-57 between major towns, and especially on the east-west freeways that gets lots of truck traffic.
If it turns out that Microsoft copied code from this GPL project (it's possible that both used a common reference source -- comments on the blog post mention that there are lots of.NET code samples out there, many from Microsoft itself... I don't know a lot about this, but I could see something like ReadBytes being one of these) it's a copyright infringement issue. The developer of the original project would probably try to come to an agreement with Microsoft. One possible agreement would be that they would comply retroactively with the GPL, and thus offer its terms to all users (applying to everything statically linked to the infringing code, if I understand it correctly). If they couldn't come to an agreement the original developer could sue Microsoft.
Forcing the guy to sue would probably be an effective strategy for Microsoft, although it could be a bad PR move if it got public enough. It *might* be able to get out of offering the GPL to anyone, instead only paying a small sum of money to the developer (the court probably can force Microsoft to offer the GPL, but I'm not sure it would -- and since the program is offered for free it's hard for the developer to claim much in the way of monetary damage). The court probably wouldn't force Microsoft to stop distributing the software with any urgency, because that would disrupt too many people. They'd have some reasonable amount of time, after the verdict, to comply, but they'd have been working on a solution throughout the trial while only racking up more fees to the developer, who would himself be racking up legal bills and wasting his own time.
That is the case regardless of whether it was a "rogue developer" or an order straight from Steve Ballmer. Either way, this whole post is irrelevant if Microsoft didn't actually infringe, which is quite possible.
It's completely insane that the cop wouldn't ticket him for a stunt like that, and for much more money than the speeding ticket would have been. But that's pretty typical of American road enforcement, all about speed, never about behavior.
This is mostly library dependencies as I understand it. The fact that most software we get through distros links almost everything dynamically is a big part of why package management is so important.
Meanwhile, people making third-party releases are often better off linking statically as much as they can. If you rely on dynamic libraries, Linux binary compatibility across distros and over time is nearly impossible. If you build statically you'll usually only depend on the kernel and X11 (and maybe things like sound APIs, but they usually try to keep old apps working) -- which makes binary compatibility about the same as on Mac and Windows. This is not to get down on dynamically-linked stuff. For the parts of your system that the distro provides (most of it) it has its advantages. For third-party stuff, why not a static build?
There are a number of reasons you might want to make binary third-party releases on Linux (even though very few people do). You could be developing something closed-source and not redistributable by distros. Your package might not have a high enough profile to make it into major distros. And even high-profile projects might want to release cutting-edge versions to users that (a) aren't comfortable building from source and (b) don't want to waste disk space on development headers for every library on their system. Furthermore, distros often screw things up (see Debian SSL Fiasco and all the complaints about Ubuntu and PulseAudio).
I don't know about general distraction studies, but a study done on distracted driving showed that cell phone conversations, even hands-free ones were more distracting than conversations with people in the car. And there are good reasons to expect this result. Anyway.
1. I don't care if it's a luxury, or about people flaunting things. I care that people pay attention, a lot, as a runner and a cyclist.
2. Radios don't demand your attention the way that phone callers do. You can completely tune them out -- often while driving with a CD playing my favorite song on the album will go by and I won't notice until halfway through the next one. They don't demand much of your reasoning abilities, don't demand that you try to remember anything, and are very unlikely to frustrate or annoy you, as callers often do. If radios were anywhere near the distraction problem of phones people would be studying them.
3. Passengers in the car know that you're driving. They don't just know it as a fact, they're in the same boat. They can see traffic conditions and respond to your body language. They know when you don't respond immediately that you're still there (pauses become awkward *fast* on the phone -- someone talking to you face-to-face would never "ping" you by saying, "Hello?" or, "You still there?" like people do on the phone all the time). Passengers, in fact, often help drivers operate the radio/heater/windows, find change for tolls, navigate, and notice dangerous situations on the road. That's not true of everyone, but it's true of just about all my passengers.
I was once almost hit by a woman holding a dog in her lap (I was on my bike, caught up to her at the next stoplight, and knocked on her window to notify her that she was driving unsafely -- she said she didn't see me, which was really scary). I know that pets and children can be a problem... so store them properly! Cats and small dogs have carriers, children have child seats. Believe me, I don't ignore this problem. There's another factor to this -- often when traveling with passengers the whole point of the trip is to get the passengers somewhere. Banning them would defeat the whole purpose.
4. This is a caricature. I am quite aware that there is no one cause for anything. When on the road there's a certain amount of risk that we have to accept. When people willfully do things that introduce risk beyond that we should single those things out. Speeding, bad lane behavior, driving drunk/high, fiddling excessively with stereo/heater/iPod, holding a dog in your lap... I will single those things out. Using a phone to text or make a call is one of those things also; based on actual studies, it increases the risk of an accident more than drinking to the legal limit in the average person.
5. More caricatures.
6. More caricatures. I should note that when you drive distracted you externalize that additional risk you create onto other road users. So you're imposing your will on others as well. When externalities are involved, the argument, "I should just do WTF I want" doesn't hold much weight. True, some people like to tell people what to do when their behavior doesn't really affect anyone else. Anti-cell phone people are not among them.
Your Firewire camera isn't part of the hardware-software interaction that Microsoft can do anything about. It's an external device, and not something that either Apple or Microsoft are going to bend over backwards for. As for a device having two different drivers, it happens sometimes, because sometimes a driver is general enough to cover devices the author didn't even know about. It's not Microsoft's fault, it's your fault for installing two incompatible drivers on your system. You could do it just as easily on MacOS or Linux, and you'd have the same results.
The problems you mention in your post really have very little to do with the hardware-software interactions that Apple does so well. A digital microscope camera probably connects through some external interface. If you're using one of those, you certainly don't want Microsoft cracking down on esoteric external devices. The computer slowing down over time and "forgetting how to launch powerpoint" probably has to do with software and configuration changes that have happened over time. Same with the viruses -- being the target of hackers is the price of being the largest open software ecosystem. You certainly don't want Microsoft closing off their software ecosystem -- nobody using computers for non-trivial things wants that.
I will concede that Microsoft's focus on backwards compatibility has often kept misbehaving software in circulation longer than it should have been. Of course, their users demand it to some degree, so it's a hard road to walk. If Microsoft made continuity too hard their customers would bleed away; many corporate ones would leave for Linux, and you'd probably hate that even more -- those crazy Linux bastards won't rest until you're running a web server on your Palm Pilot!
Meanwhile, on the Mac, if you have problems with your vision and want to change the size of the menu bar font you have to change the screen resolution (really? In 2009?) or run some other OS. If you want a netbook to complement your desktop Mac, you'll have to read up on how to sync with Windows or Linux. If you want a mid-range computer without a widescreen display, Apple says, "Go fuck yourself." Well, to be fair, the whole computer industry is doing that. Fuck widescreens.
And, unless your employer is very small, or you are very rich, you probably aren't willing to cover the cost of overhauling your IT with Macs.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends.
Say you watched it on YouTube or a similar site. YouTube keeps track of what videos are watched; the person that posted it keeps track of videos that are watched. The more people watch their videos the more money they make. So at the very least you've created demand for videos of monkeys attacking people. At some point if enough people love to watch hilarious monkey attacks people will stage them.
OK, that's a bit of a stretch. But that's a video made of an accident. Child porn is not an accident. If you download child porn, even if you don't pay the creator, the person you downloaded it from knows that it's popular and that he should try to get more. This will at some point probably lead to creators of child porn being paid.
Iunno, the Kindle makes a lot of sacrifices to publishers. Including incredibly stupid sacrifices like allowing them to disable text-to-speech for whatever books they want (I don't have a Kindle but I know some people that work for Amazon, one of whom does marketing for Kindle).
Amazon's model seems to be centered around itself foremost, and clearly it must balance customer and publisher demands. If this other company wants to cater more to publisher demands I guess they can try it that way. But don't tell the public that!
TBH little we have today is that close to Craig's view of a "town". When looking for apartments in Chicago there's a big difference between Hyde Park and Uptown unless all your major commitments are downtown. If you work in Lakeview one is a couple stops down on the L, the other requires at least an hour and at least a transfer.
When a couple of my co-workers were looking for an apartment they wrote a Python script to go over Craigslist RSS feeds for apartments, plug the given street names into Google Maps, get walking distances to various important landmarks (the office, their favorite little Italian deli, Red Line stops), and weigh them against each of their personal criteria. They wound up finding a great place. Even if Craigslist were sorted by neighborhood, Chicago neighborhood boundaries are fluid enough that it wouldn't help that much.
Dude, I thought this was the 21st century! If I can't use a cell phone in a bathroom stall why'd I bother getting the damn thing? Oh, right, I didn't get a cell phone. But if I did I'd probably use it in bathroom stalls, this being the 21st century and all.
Craigslist leverages the Internet to provide a hell of a lot of service to a hell of a lot of people without doing much work at all. They skim a little money from some of those people and say that's enough.
Microsoft creates a lot of work for themselves by making lots of new features and then convincing people that they need them. It's how they leverage their advantage as the world's largest software company, and the rest of the industry (and lots of people doing OSS) fall for it.
Google is probably pretty much the same these days. The point is that these companies are worried about shareholder value first, they're worried about winning. That's why they make all this work for themselves. Craigslist just provides the service. Take it or leave it.
The first thing that came to mind when I thought of C, network-facing services, and security was buffer overruns. They aren't hard to avoid, but they aren't hard to write either. Encouraging programmers to write ad-hoc scripts to process input in C sounds like a remarkably bad idea to me.
CRT monitors beat the crap out of LCDs in similar price ranges in just about every aspect of picture and video quality, it's true. But LCDs are light and small; that's a lot more important to me. I used to have a 19" CRT. It was a beast. Took up way too much desk space, and space in the car every time I had to move it. I finally decided to get rid of it when moving away from California and none of my friends would take it for free. My current (rather old, obtained for free) 19" LCD has a tiny footprint.
The one thing I can't stand is widescreen monitors. Less visible area for bigger desk footprint. Stupid dimensions for doing anything but watching movies (but why would you watch movies on a crappy LCD computer monitor?).
Well, and that if they're working all day they can't get an education. Meanwhile there are lots of unemployed adults in many of these places (source: this guy on Colbert a bit ago) -- if they can't work, and the employers would rather hire kids (apparently this is the case in many places), well, that's just going to create a cycle of poor education and child labor, generation after generation.
I know it's basically impossible to get an accurate idea of the conditions of labor in these places without going there. They're probably not that good, though most are probably better than the horror-story sweatshops that are often portrayed.
1. Voice commands will work really poorly in crowded places. I'm trying to picture how I'd use voice commands reliably in Denver airport.
2. Any sort of holographic projection thing is going to require something to project on. For privacy reasons you'll often want something you can hold up to your face, and there are many surfaces that would be impolite to use for a holographic keyboard. If you have something you're holding up to your face, now you have to hold the watch steady relative to it... you'd be better off with a detachable LCD screen. At which point you might as well put the phone hardware in the LCD screen instead.
3. Again, ergonomic factors dictate that a watch is not more convenient than a phone for making calls. My watch has one button on the front and four out of the way on the sides. More buttons on the front would make it harder to use (it is typically pressed blind, sometimes while wearing gloves, usually while very tired and out of breath, and for my purposes I need fairly precise timing). A phone needs... a numeric keypad! A device with an effective keypad and be easy to talk into, something good enough that I'd prefer it to my landline, would have to be big. You could have a Bluetooth thing that looks like a phone or a headset or something... but, again, you might as well just make that the phone instead. If you get a call on your watch-phone and don't have a headset with you, what can you do about it? You just get a ring, and maybe you can listen to the message.
I think the biggest issues here are human factors.
There is no way a device small enough that I will want to wear it out running will be comfortable to use for phone conversations. And no way a device comfortable to use for phone conversations will have a large enough screen to read, browse the web fully, and write code.
It is at least plausible that cell phones will one day have good enough sound quality and ergonomics that I'll want to replace my land-line. Cameras are another like this -- I have no doubt the best phone-cameras are good enough today that my weak photography skills need nothing better.
Phones may replace some of these functions for some people, but they won't replace all of them for everyone.
I'm OK with grey widgets and stuff. They're easy to read from and don't distract from the content of what you're doing. The Oxygen widgets, overall, are among my favorites on any platform (most platforms' default widgets are pretty good these days, although I don't like the gradients in some Clearlooks elements and Windows stuff).
I think the Oxygen window decs are inane, though. It's important (especially with multi-monitor systems or mouse focus) to be able to distinguish the window with focus from others, and the Oxygen decs follow Microsoft and Apple in the direction of making it hard to distinguish. FVWM has great defaults in this regard... Windows 95-2000 were pretty good too.
I've discussed this at length with friends. Highly active people would not be tasty, their meat would be too tough. You basically want people that have lived like veal calves but are built such that they have plenty of muscle mass despite being slow and weak.
- A not-self-interested-at-all long distance runner
There are a lot of ways that a good device could be built. I can think of two plausible ways, and I don't even own a cell phone.
1. There are a number of keyboards designed for efficient one-handed use. With a bluetooth-capable one-handed keyboard you could set the keyboard on your lap and hold the screen up near your face with your other hand.
2. Some people prefer the tiny thumb keyboards most smartphones have to the iPhone's on-sceen 'board. A device for someone like that would basically be a bluetooth-enabled thumb keyboard, that holds the iPhone. It could then be folded down for compact storage somehow.
There are a lot of possibilities here, and I doubt that Apple screwed up Bluetooth support on purpose just to keep people from trying them. I always thought Apple wanted to cultivate an ecosystem of stupid shit people could buy for their iPhones.
Whether they make money doing it is unimportant to me (unless they give me some). If what they're doing is legal, they can go ahead and do it, and we can dislike it, withhold information, create fake accounts, etc. I really resent the lock-in, but WTF can I do? Most of my friends don't keep track of eachother's email addresses anymore.
For my part, I don't do quizzes or install apps for the most part... I mostly use it to broadcast messages about how creepy Facebook and its apps are. That seems like a fair tradeoff for the money it makes off me.
Have you heard of TeX, the document formatting system? When you print onto 8.5x11 paper it leaves enormous margins by default. Do you know why? Because it's easier to read blocks of single-spaced text at around 60 characters per line than it is to read longer lines. The same applies to code.
Meanwhile the culture around many languages encourages programmers never to split lines. At a former workplace where we used VB, one of my co-workers worked with the IDE maximized across two screens! I always kept my lines at least under 100 characters, but when people checked in code near stuff I'd written they sometimes would go through and join my lines together.
At the same time, some of those really long lines are function calls where you don't always need to see all the arguments. Folding editors can collapse those into one line if you write them on multiple lines; it would be cool if there were anti-folding editors that could automatically break up long lines. It's similar for long formulas.
PHP? Where they dump all their million built-in functions into one namespace? Lame. In Perl you have a lot more control over what libraries you pull in and how you use them -- you have to search CPAN for packages sometimes, but then you have a choice on what packages to use. And every Perl module I've pulled from CPAN has been well documented.
I can see wanting lots of libraries around in a default install back before the Internet was big. These days that stuff should be separate and the language's core should be its core.
So you disengage from the truck so you can make your exit. This dismantles the entire train; you and everyone behind you must space out to normal separation. I have a feeling this could be pretty tricky with more than a couple cars involved, or if there's significant traffic or difficult merges. I'm trying to picture a maneuver like this taking place safely, for example, near the Mannheim exit on the inbound Eisenhower west of Chicago (formerly known as the Hillside Strangler... a few years ago more lanes were added for a couple miles, so now there's an Oak Park Strangler). Or even going outbound, a few miles further out, at the merge with the North-South Tollway... if the train is coming from the tollway and you need to get off at Thorndale Ave.
You would probably want to know in advance where the train was going to break apart, so you could avoid joining trains that are about to break up anyway. Maybe you wouldn't be allowed to join trains that are going to exit before you.
It would be a lot less complicated in rural areas... I live in Wyoming now, and when I drive from, say, Cody to Powell, most of the other cars on the road are headed at least as far as Powell. Even back in Illinois, I could see it working on stretches of I-57 between major towns, and especially on the east-west freeways that gets lots of truck traffic.
This. I also think the GPL essentially disallows usage licenses, which Microsoft applied.
If it turns out that Microsoft copied code from this GPL project (it's possible that both used a common reference source -- comments on the blog post mention that there are lots of .NET code samples out there, many from Microsoft itself... I don't know a lot about this, but I could see something like ReadBytes being one of these) it's a copyright infringement issue. The developer of the original project would probably try to come to an agreement with Microsoft. One possible agreement would be that they would comply retroactively with the GPL, and thus offer its terms to all users (applying to everything statically linked to the infringing code, if I understand it correctly). If they couldn't come to an agreement the original developer could sue Microsoft.
Forcing the guy to sue would probably be an effective strategy for Microsoft, although it could be a bad PR move if it got public enough. It *might* be able to get out of offering the GPL to anyone, instead only paying a small sum of money to the developer (the court probably can force Microsoft to offer the GPL, but I'm not sure it would -- and since the program is offered for free it's hard for the developer to claim much in the way of monetary damage). The court probably wouldn't force Microsoft to stop distributing the software with any urgency, because that would disrupt too many people. They'd have some reasonable amount of time, after the verdict, to comply, but they'd have been working on a solution throughout the trial while only racking up more fees to the developer, who would himself be racking up legal bills and wasting his own time.
That is the case regardless of whether it was a "rogue developer" or an order straight from Steve Ballmer. Either way, this whole post is irrelevant if Microsoft didn't actually infringe, which is quite possible.
It's completely insane that the cop wouldn't ticket him for a stunt like that, and for much more money than the speeding ticket would have been. But that's pretty typical of American road enforcement, all about speed, never about behavior.
This is mostly library dependencies as I understand it. The fact that most software we get through distros links almost everything dynamically is a big part of why package management is so important.
Meanwhile, people making third-party releases are often better off linking statically as much as they can. If you rely on dynamic libraries, Linux binary compatibility across distros and over time is nearly impossible. If you build statically you'll usually only depend on the kernel and X11 (and maybe things like sound APIs, but they usually try to keep old apps working) -- which makes binary compatibility about the same as on Mac and Windows. This is not to get down on dynamically-linked stuff. For the parts of your system that the distro provides (most of it) it has its advantages. For third-party stuff, why not a static build?
There are a number of reasons you might want to make binary third-party releases on Linux (even though very few people do). You could be developing something closed-source and not redistributable by distros. Your package might not have a high enough profile to make it into major distros. And even high-profile projects might want to release cutting-edge versions to users that (a) aren't comfortable building from source and (b) don't want to waste disk space on development headers for every library on their system. Furthermore, distros often screw things up (see Debian SSL Fiasco and all the complaints about Ubuntu and PulseAudio).
I don't know about general distraction studies, but a study done on distracted driving showed that cell phone conversations, even hands-free ones were more distracting than conversations with people in the car. And there are good reasons to expect this result. Anyway.
1. I don't care if it's a luxury, or about people flaunting things. I care that people pay attention, a lot, as a runner and a cyclist.
2. Radios don't demand your attention the way that phone callers do. You can completely tune them out -- often while driving with a CD playing my favorite song on the album will go by and I won't notice until halfway through the next one. They don't demand much of your reasoning abilities, don't demand that you try to remember anything, and are very unlikely to frustrate or annoy you, as callers often do. If radios were anywhere near the distraction problem of phones people would be studying them.
3. Passengers in the car know that you're driving. They don't just know it as a fact, they're in the same boat. They can see traffic conditions and respond to your body language. They know when you don't respond immediately that you're still there (pauses become awkward *fast* on the phone -- someone talking to you face-to-face would never "ping" you by saying, "Hello?" or, "You still there?" like people do on the phone all the time). Passengers, in fact, often help drivers operate the radio/heater/windows, find change for tolls, navigate, and notice dangerous situations on the road. That's not true of everyone, but it's true of just about all my passengers.
I was once almost hit by a woman holding a dog in her lap (I was on my bike, caught up to her at the next stoplight, and knocked on her window to notify her that she was driving unsafely -- she said she didn't see me, which was really scary). I know that pets and children can be a problem... so store them properly! Cats and small dogs have carriers, children have child seats. Believe me, I don't ignore this problem. There's another factor to this -- often when traveling with passengers the whole point of the trip is to get the passengers somewhere. Banning them would defeat the whole purpose.
4. This is a caricature. I am quite aware that there is no one cause for anything. When on the road there's a certain amount of risk that we have to accept. When people willfully do things that introduce risk beyond that we should single those things out. Speeding, bad lane behavior, driving drunk/high, fiddling excessively with stereo/heater/iPod, holding a dog in your lap... I will single those things out. Using a phone to text or make a call is one of those things also; based on actual studies, it increases the risk of an accident more than drinking to the legal limit in the average person.
5. More caricatures.
6. More caricatures. I should note that when you drive distracted you externalize that additional risk you create onto other road users. So you're imposing your will on others as well. When externalities are involved, the argument, "I should just do WTF I want" doesn't hold much weight. True, some people like to tell people what to do when their behavior doesn't really affect anyone else. Anti-cell phone people are not among them.
cat /etc/sysctl.d/30-wine.conf
Your Firewire camera isn't part of the hardware-software interaction that Microsoft can do anything about. It's an external device, and not something that either Apple or Microsoft are going to bend over backwards for. As for a device having two different drivers, it happens sometimes, because sometimes a driver is general enough to cover devices the author didn't even know about. It's not Microsoft's fault, it's your fault for installing two incompatible drivers on your system. You could do it just as easily on MacOS or Linux, and you'd have the same results.
The problems you mention in your post really have very little to do with the hardware-software interactions that Apple does so well. A digital microscope camera probably connects through some external interface. If you're using one of those, you certainly don't want Microsoft cracking down on esoteric external devices. The computer slowing down over time and "forgetting how to launch powerpoint" probably has to do with software and configuration changes that have happened over time. Same with the viruses -- being the target of hackers is the price of being the largest open software ecosystem. You certainly don't want Microsoft closing off their software ecosystem -- nobody using computers for non-trivial things wants that.
I will concede that Microsoft's focus on backwards compatibility has often kept misbehaving software in circulation longer than it should have been. Of course, their users demand it to some degree, so it's a hard road to walk. If Microsoft made continuity too hard their customers would bleed away; many corporate ones would leave for Linux, and you'd probably hate that even more -- those crazy Linux bastards won't rest until you're running a web server on your Palm Pilot!
Meanwhile, on the Mac, if you have problems with your vision and want to change the size of the menu bar font you have to change the screen resolution (really? In 2009?) or run some other OS. If you want a netbook to complement your desktop Mac, you'll have to read up on how to sync with Windows or Linux. If you want a mid-range computer without a widescreen display, Apple says, "Go fuck yourself." Well, to be fair, the whole computer industry is doing that. Fuck widescreens.
And, unless your employer is very small, or you are very rich, you probably aren't willing to cover the cost of overhauling your IT with Macs.