Markets stop working correctly in the presence of a monopoly.
I agree with that.
Microsoft has monopoly power over sales of Microsoft Windows (that's what copyright does).
I don't agree with that. Microsoft has their monopoly over operating systems and software in general due to unfair business practices and locking their customers into their products by intentional ignorance of de facto standards, using proprietary data formats, and deliberately refusing to interoperate with current products on the market.
Copyright is not a bad thing. Companies that leverage their money and power to bend the copyright system to their advantage are a bad thing. (FWIW, copyright is what makes the GPL effective, which in turn keeps Linux and all of the other GPL'ed programs truly free as in speech/beer.)
Microsoft is not the Good Guy in the software industry by any stretch of the imagination, but let's at least get our reasons right on why.
I thought pretty much the same thing when I saw the screen shots. "Okay, looks like a QT version of menuconfig. But what does it DO differently than the current config utilities?" And the answer, near as I can tell: nothing at all.
I mean, maybe I'm missing the entire point of this new wonderful utility, but from what I've read, I could have done the same thing by hacking with Tcl/Tk for a half an hour.
I'm right in line with you: what the Linux kernel needs desparately more than GUI menuconfig is the complete removal of any configuration process altogether. Many operating systems have proven in the past that a fast stable kernel that you never have to touch is indeed possible, and presumably, not overly difficult either.
Er, the term "monolithic," when used in references to kernels, has nothing to do with loadable modules. Linux *is* a monolithic kernel, period, because all of its code runs at the kernel level.
Contrast with microkernels which only consist of the bare minimum of code needed to manage the OS. Most of the drivers (network, disk, maybe even some memory stuff) live outside of the main kernel and execute in user space, similar to any other process only with slighly elevated priority and access to hardware.
The type of loadable modules implemented in the Linux kernel gives it one of the primary advantages of a microkernel--the ability to load and remove *certain* drivers at run-time--but it doesn't change the fact that it's still monolithic.
(Corrections, clarification appreciated. I'm not a kernel guru.)
I think the main problem is that MDI is useful for some things and horrible for others, and people on both sides of the argument seem to forget that. (As is common in most slashdot debates.)
In instances where a single computer system is planned to be running only one application most of the time (such as a point-of-sale or other single-use system) MDI is good because it hides all of the stuff that's not applicable to the task at hand. (Such as the operating system's visual elements.) I won't elaborate much on the advantages of this, but it's clear to see
But in a setting where the user is going to be using multiple third-party applications as well as parts of the operating system itself, MDI extremely hampers usability. Constrast a web developer trying to use Photoshop and the various MDI-laden Microsoft web development tools with a web developer on unix, who can have GIMP images, web browser windows, and xterms all separately accessable on the screen at the same time.
Tabbed browsing in Mozilla?
Yes, that's MDI but tabbed browser windows are not mandatory the way MDI is in most MDI-styled applications is. If I'm developing a web page and want to have multiple Mozilla windows open, I can. I can even have multiple Mozilla windows each with an arbitrary number of tabs. Also of note is that browser tabs don't have most of the annoyances commonly associated with MDI-style document management: The tabs are completely optional, and Mozilla never opens a window with no tabs and no document to display. (A blank page is still considered a document.)
I've seen lots of crappy DeLoreans that I wouldn't pay any amount of money for, so I would imagine ones that are still in decent condition are in pretty high demand. I also understand that there weren't a whole lot made.
One thing I just thought of this morning, I also remember seeing a video clip in that same class of some NBC reporter interviewing "the inventor of television," Sarnoff, where Sarnoff was explaining how the cathode ray tube worked and generally giving the same sort of spiel that was in the article I originally mentioned.
In my high school, (don't remember the exact class) the teacher had us read this long long article about how the brilliant David Sarnoff, created from scratch, the first cathode ray tube at the technology wonderland company RCA. I don't remember much detail, but it greatly glorified Sarnoff as "the father of television" and RCA as the company that brought moving pictures to every living room in America.
It sounded fishy to me, but I didn't bother looking further into it. As luck would have it, I ran across an article in an old Scientific American a week later that told the truth: Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube (as well as the tube that the first cameras used, can't remember the name) and RCA tried to steal the invention and patents from him.
I took a copy of the factual article to the aforementioned teacher who said he'd announce a correction to the class. Funny, though, he never did. I guess teachers don't like to be told they're wrong (even though it wasn't exactly his fault.)
The next big wars will be fought over *water*, one of the most common substances on the planet.
I'd be curious to hear you elaborate. My first thought was that you meant ocean water. But fighting wars over the water itself (rather than the space that the water occupies) seems foolish at best since ocean water is both toxic and corrosive and generally useless for most pusposes.
If you mean fresh water, yeah I can see a war over that, but it's not a common substance by any stretch in many parts of the world. Therefore, any war over fresh water would effectively be a war over land.
Well, while this post sounds just a bit past slightly luddist, at least two things intrigue me. Bear in mind that I spend at least 6 hours a day in front of a CRT for the last, er, maybe 10 years.
1. The studies of EM radiation claiming that it decreases short-term memory. In the past few years, I've noticed that my memory sucks ass to the point where I constantly forget upcoming appointments and things that I have to do later within the next few days. I'm considering implementing a home-made post-it note system next to my computer. (I already make extensive use of post-it notes, but a cleaner system would be nice since I sometimes find myself drowning in them depending on my workload.)
2. Loss of sleep with repetitive exposure to EM radiation. I've always had an incredibly difficult time falling asleep. The norm for me is to lay awake at least one to three hours before managing to doze off regardless of how long I've been awake or how much sleep I've gotten recently.
But I'm not about to blame all this on EM just yet. I know full well that there are countless other factors to consider, many that are far beyond the reach of current research methods. It's more likely that I am merely a defective human, anyway.:P
Muahaha, excellent post. I agree completly. Although I don't plan on buying another full-tower case in the near future, my current one kicks ass and there are only a few mid-towers where you can hook up dual 10K rpm SCSI disks *and* still be able to cool them properly.
And yeah, I've used my computer as a seat, keyboard stand, etc, but it does kinda suck to lug it, along with a 19" monitor, to a lanparty.
Small PCs have their place, though. I'm looking at getting one of those cute little Shuttle cube jobs for use as a set-top box (NOT a PVR) that I'm designing. Then again, a whirring full-tower with loads of blinking lights next to the entertainment center might make quite a conversation piece for the living room...
I happen to know of two fairly popular distributions of LotR on the P2P networks. (But posses neither, if that satifies the "piracy!" crowd here. This is just information.)
One seems to have been filmed from a video camera off the movie screen itself. It is about 1.8GB in size and the sound is pretty decent. I believe it is in MPEG-2 format. The main catch is that while the picture is relatively sharp, the colors are washed out and you can tell it was recorded from a screen.
The other is a 3-disc divx rip of the screener disc with really good video and Dolby AC3 (or somesuch) sound. The catch to this one, however, is that every 15 minutes or so, some text scrolls along the bottom of the screen that says something to the effect of, This is a screener disc, don't copy or you'll go to hell.
Not that hackneyed old BS again. The Money that you would have paid for the services that were performed in creating the media has a very real aspect to it. when you take the media without paying for it, it's theft of services, and no different than an employer that refuses to hand out a paycheck to a programmer after a month of coding because it's just ones and zeros on a hard drive.
Sometimes I really wish there were a -1, Dumb Analogy moderation. I could use up a lifetime's worth of mod points in a single thread with that one.
Here's the deal. Try to follow along as best you can, please. I personally own quite a few legally purchased movies and music albums. I also openly admit that I own quite a few "illegaly" obtained [1] movies and MP3s.
Lets start with the "legal" copies. These are movies and music that I purchased (albiet at a fairly high price) because I believe that everyone involved in the production process of this content--from writers to editors--put a lot of hard work and dedication into the creation of the content and deserve to see the results of their work in terms of sales and royalties.
Now on to the "illegal" copies. These are copies of music and movies and whatnot that, 99% of the time, I have not watched or listened yet to but am at least curious enough to try it out. How many people in this slashdot discussion are seriously wealthy enough to go to a movie or CD store and pay $20-$30 for a single title that only might be worth it? Please. That's ridiculous. I choose to download "illegal" content not because I'm some sort of cheapass, but because I want to be able to sample what's out there without completely breaking the bank.
How about this factual scenario:
A friend on mine on IRC offered to send me a mix tape of Tori Amos music, an artist who I previously had no knowledge of. Under current US copyright law, this is a completely illegal act. I listened to the tape, decided that she was a brilliant artist, and now have well over $100 worth of her albums in my "legal" music collection. That one "illegal" copied tape earned the record compay a decent chunk of change and ended up getting me the kind of music that I wanted... the very cornerstone of a capitalist economy.
This is not an isolated incident. It happens all the time, and continues to happen for me. So before you all you moral holier-than-thous start screaming "piracy!", you might well consider the nearly direct correlation the past few years between the increase of online file trading and the increase of the record and movie studio profits.
(And, btw, I do have a bone to pick about the relationship between content distributors and artists, but that's a different thread altogether.)
My RMS MODE pseudo-future-quote was, of course, merely poking fun at RMS as that seems to be his standard disclaimer whenever someone has a legitimate gripe about his opinions, projects, or writings.
I don't think the GPL is bad in and of itself, but I hardly think it to be the One True License for Everything either. For instance, if I'm sitting at home writing up a neat little bit of code in my free time and I want it to be used as well as improved then the GPL is perfect. Just about any other scenario will cause you some amount of problem, however.
No, I didn't read the article but for good reason: hanging around the OSS community one gets a pretty good familiarization of the ins and outs of the GPL. Familiarization, dead-horse style, that is. I just wanted to do a little good-humoured RMS bashing, that's all.
Any part of Mr. Asay's article where he implies the GPL is bad or could use some work is merely due to his failing to comprehend or understand the meaning and scope of what the GPL in its entirety.
<RMS MODE OFF>
Isn't that pretty much what we're going to hear in a few days? I'll thank the moderators for at least attempting to have something resembling a sense of humor.
P.S. No offense meant to RMS or his devout apostles.
1. Add "startx" to the user's.profile, or go the xinit route. For more info on the latter, go a-googlin'.
2. According to the outdated command-line doc on mozilla.org, height and width are determined by "-height" and "-width". Or just use a window manager that can remember the settings and start that before Mozilla.
Er, I just downloaded 1.1 and I didn't notice this because it's a great deal easier to just middle-click the link. I think you have to have an opion enabled in the prefs dialog, though.
Heh, Mozilla and other OSS software are the only error reports I bother to send in on XP. I figure that as long as proprietary software developers are getting paid for their work, they shouldn't have to rely on volunteers to do their bughunting for them.
P.S: It would be a good idea to install/enabled Talkbalk on your Mozilla build so that the developers know about this. If I ever find a really horrible bug that shouldn't have made it through the development cycle, sometimes I'll make it crash on purpose 5 or 6 times just so the Mozilla guys watching the talkback data get the hint.;) (Duplicate Talkback reports are not probably not exactly encouraged if the user can help it, but wouldn't be nearly as frowned upon as duplicate bug reports.)
Try backing up and then deleting your profile and starting anew. Mozilla releases in the 1.0.x series are fairly well guaranteed not to cause any huge problems when upgrading, but any other upgrade path can or will cause problems.
FWIW, I haven't had a profile-related problem since 0.9.2 or so.
Also, maybe use POP. I was using IMAP for awhile, but it's just way too slow for my taste, even over broadband.
The interface for a tabbed setting is slightly erratic and doesn't follow other window managers, Linux or Windows.
It's not supposed to. If you want to have a different entry in your window list / taskbar, all you need to do is simply turn off tabs. If you *must* have tabbed but discreet windows, there are a few good tabbed window managers for X available.
If I'm using Alt+Tab in WIndows I will have between 5-10 windows open, and I can quickly tell what I have available.
Again, just turn off tabs. This is the same thing as complaining that your favorite Linux distro boots KDE instead of GNOME. The choice is there, all you have to do is pick it and run with it. FWIW, I believe Mozilla tabs are disabled by default.
I just don't understand Everyone's attraction to tabbed browsing.
Tabs are useful for people like me who like to have have a lot of web pages open at once but hate a cluttered desktop. Moz tabs have been a godsend and with 1.1, the introduction of a New Tab button has increased their usefulness at least 2-fold for me.
How can software patents be applied in the EU when at the moment there are no such things as software patents in the EU.
Easy: they won't be. You have nothing to worry about, please resume your normal business.
We Americans, however, have about a million miles of hot stinking shit to wade through every day thanks to our corrupt patent office, corrupt government, and severely corrupt businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
Markets stop working correctly in the presence of a monopoly.
I agree with that.
Microsoft has monopoly power over sales of Microsoft Windows (that's what copyright does).
I don't agree with that. Microsoft has their monopoly over operating systems and software in general due to unfair business practices and locking their customers into their products by intentional ignorance of de facto standards, using proprietary data formats, and deliberately refusing to interoperate with current products on the market.
Copyright is not a bad thing. Companies that leverage their money and power to bend the copyright system to their advantage are a bad thing. (FWIW, copyright is what makes the GPL effective, which in turn keeps Linux and all of the other GPL'ed programs truly free as in speech/beer.)
Microsoft is not the Good Guy in the software industry by any stretch of the imagination, but let's at least get our reasons right on why.
I thought pretty much the same thing when I saw the screen shots. "Okay, looks like a QT version of menuconfig. But what does it DO differently than the current config utilities?" And the answer, near as I can tell: nothing at all.
I mean, maybe I'm missing the entire point of this new wonderful utility, but from what I've read, I could have done the same thing by hacking with Tcl/Tk for a half an hour.
I'm right in line with you: what the Linux kernel needs desparately more than GUI menuconfig is the complete removal of any configuration process altogether. Many operating systems have proven in the past that a fast stable kernel that you never have to touch is indeed possible, and presumably, not overly difficult either.
Er, the term "monolithic," when used in references to kernels, has nothing to do with loadable modules. Linux *is* a monolithic kernel, period, because all of its code runs at the kernel level.
Contrast with microkernels which only consist of the bare minimum of code needed to manage the OS. Most of the drivers (network, disk, maybe even some memory stuff) live outside of the main kernel and execute in user space, similar to any other process only with slighly elevated priority and access to hardware.
The type of loadable modules implemented in the Linux kernel gives it one of the primary advantages of a microkernel--the ability to load and remove *certain* drivers at run-time--but it doesn't change the fact that it's still monolithic.
(Corrections, clarification appreciated. I'm not a kernel guru.)
I think the main problem is that MDI is useful for some things and horrible for others, and people on both sides of the argument seem to forget that. (As is common in most slashdot debates.)
In instances where a single computer system is planned to be running only one application most of the time (such as a point-of-sale or other single-use system) MDI is good because it hides all of the stuff that's not applicable to the task at hand. (Such as the operating system's visual elements.) I won't elaborate much on the advantages of this, but it's clear to see
But in a setting where the user is going to be using multiple third-party applications as well as parts of the operating system itself, MDI extremely hampers usability. Constrast a web developer trying to use Photoshop and the various MDI-laden Microsoft web development tools with a web developer on unix, who can have GIMP images, web browser windows, and xterms all separately accessable on the screen at the same time.
Tabbed browsing in Mozilla?
Yes, that's MDI but tabbed browser windows are not mandatory the way MDI is in most MDI-styled applications is. If I'm developing a web page and want to have multiple Mozilla windows open, I can. I can even have multiple Mozilla windows each with an arbitrary number of tabs. Also of note is that browser tabs don't have most of the annoyances commonly associated with MDI-style document management: The tabs are completely optional, and Mozilla never opens a window with no tabs and no document to display. (A blank page is still considered a document.)
I've seen lots of crappy DeLoreans that I wouldn't pay any amount of money for, so I would imagine ones that are still in decent condition are in pretty high demand. I also understand that there weren't a whole lot made.
Perhaps.
One thing I just thought of this morning, I also remember seeing a video clip in that same class of some NBC reporter interviewing "the inventor of television," Sarnoff, where Sarnoff was explaining how the cathode ray tube worked and generally giving the same sort of spiel that was in the article I originally mentioned.
You know, I've always suspected that but had no idea if it was true or not.
Thanks!
Rough timeline:
Live TV -> Filmed TV -> Videotaped TV
Anyone care to fill in some dates?
In my high school, (don't remember the exact class) the teacher had us read this long long article about how the brilliant David Sarnoff, created from scratch, the first cathode ray tube at the technology wonderland company RCA. I don't remember much detail, but it greatly glorified Sarnoff as "the father of television" and RCA as the company that brought moving pictures to every living room in America.
It sounded fishy to me, but I didn't bother looking further into it. As luck would have it, I ran across an article in an old Scientific American a week later that told the truth: Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube (as well as the tube that the first cameras used, can't remember the name) and RCA tried to steal the invention and patents from him.
I took a copy of the factual article to the aforementioned teacher who said he'd announce a correction to the class. Funny, though, he never did. I guess teachers don't like to be told they're wrong (even though it wasn't exactly his fault.)
The next big wars will be fought over *water*, one of the most common substances on the planet.
I'd be curious to hear you elaborate. My first thought was that you meant ocean water. But fighting wars over the water itself (rather than the space that the water occupies) seems foolish at best since ocean water is both toxic and corrosive and generally useless for most pusposes.
If you mean fresh water, yeah I can see a war over that, but it's not a common substance by any stretch in many parts of the world. Therefore, any war over fresh water would effectively be a war over land.
Well, while this post sounds just a bit past slightly luddist, at least two things intrigue me. Bear in mind that I spend at least 6 hours a day in front of a CRT for the last, er, maybe 10 years.
1. The studies of EM radiation claiming that it decreases short-term memory. In the past few years, I've noticed that my memory sucks ass to the point where I constantly forget upcoming appointments and things that I have to do later within the next few days. I'm considering implementing a home-made post-it note system next to my computer. (I already make extensive use of post-it notes, but a cleaner system would be nice since I sometimes find myself drowning in them depending on my workload.)
2. Loss of sleep with repetitive exposure to EM radiation. I've always had an incredibly difficult time falling asleep. The norm for me is to lay awake at least one to three hours before managing to doze off regardless of how long I've been awake or how much sleep I've gotten recently.
But I'm not about to blame all this on EM just yet. I know full well that there are countless other factors to consider, many that are far beyond the reach of current research methods. It's more likely that I am merely a defective human, anyway.
Muahaha, excellent post. I agree completly. Although I don't plan on buying another full-tower case in the near future, my current one kicks ass and there are only a few mid-towers where you can hook up dual 10K rpm SCSI disks *and* still be able to cool them properly.
And yeah, I've used my computer as a seat, keyboard stand, etc, but it does kinda suck to lug it, along with a 19" monitor, to a lanparty.
Small PCs have their place, though. I'm looking at getting one of those cute little Shuttle cube jobs for use as a set-top box (NOT a PVR) that I'm designing. Then again, a whirring full-tower with loads of blinking lights next to the entertainment center might make quite a conversation piece for the living room...
I happen to know of two fairly popular distributions of LotR on the P2P networks. (But posses neither, if that satifies the "piracy!" crowd here. This is just information.)
One seems to have been filmed from a video camera off the movie screen itself. It is about 1.8GB in size and the sound is pretty decent. I believe it is in MPEG-2 format. The main catch is that while the picture is relatively sharp, the colors are washed out and you can tell it was recorded from a screen.
The other is a 3-disc divx rip of the screener disc with really good video and Dolby AC3 (or somesuch) sound. The catch to this one, however, is that every 15 minutes or so, some text scrolls along the bottom of the screen that says something to the effect of, This is a screener disc, don't copy or you'll go to hell.
Not that hackneyed old BS again. The Money that you would have paid for the services that were performed in creating the media has a very real aspect to it. when you take the media without paying for it, it's theft of services, and no different than an employer that refuses to hand out a paycheck to a programmer after a month of coding because it's just ones and zeros on a hard drive.
Sometimes I really wish there were a -1, Dumb Analogy moderation. I could use up a lifetime's worth of mod points in a single thread with that one.
Here's the deal. Try to follow along as best you can, please. I personally own quite a few legally purchased movies and music albums. I also openly admit that I own quite a few "illegaly" obtained [1] movies and MP3s.
Lets start with the "legal" copies. These are movies and music that I purchased (albiet at a fairly high price) because I believe that everyone involved in the production process of this content--from writers to editors--put a lot of hard work and dedication into the creation of the content and deserve to see the results of their work in terms of sales and royalties.
Now on to the "illegal" copies. These are copies of music and movies and whatnot that, 99% of the time, I have not watched or listened yet to but am at least curious enough to try it out. How many people in this slashdot discussion are seriously wealthy enough to go to a movie or CD store and pay $20-$30 for a single title that only might be worth it? Please. That's ridiculous. I choose to download "illegal" content not because I'm some sort of cheapass, but because I want to be able to sample what's out there without completely breaking the bank.
How about this factual scenario:
A friend on mine on IRC offered to send me a mix tape of Tori Amos music, an artist who I previously had no knowledge of. Under current US copyright law, this is a completely illegal act. I listened to the tape, decided that she was a brilliant artist, and now have well over $100 worth of her albums in my "legal" music collection. That one "illegal" copied tape earned the record compay a decent chunk of change and ended up getting me the kind of music that I wanted... the very cornerstone of a capitalist economy.
This is not an isolated incident. It happens all the time, and continues to happen for me. So before you all you moral holier-than-thous start screaming "piracy!", you might well consider the nearly direct correlation the past few years between the increase of online file trading and the increase of the record and movie studio profits.
(And, btw, I do have a bone to pick about the relationship between content distributors and artists, but that's a different thread altogether.)
----
1. Yep, obtained from The Devil Himself!
My RMS MODE pseudo-future-quote was, of course, merely poking fun at RMS as that seems to be his standard disclaimer whenever someone has a legitimate gripe about his opinions, projects, or writings.
I don't think the GPL is bad in and of itself, but I hardly think it to be the One True License for Everything either. For instance, if I'm sitting at home writing up a neat little bit of code in my free time and I want it to be used as well as improved then the GPL is perfect. Just about any other scenario will cause you some amount of problem, however.
No, I didn't read the article but for good reason: hanging around the OSS community one gets a pretty good familiarization of the ins and outs of the GPL. Familiarization, dead-horse style, that is. I just wanted to do a little good-humoured RMS bashing, that's all.
<RMS MODE ON>
Any part of Mr. Asay's article where he implies the GPL is bad or could use some work is merely due to his failing to comprehend or understand the meaning and scope of what the GPL in its entirety.
<RMS MODE OFF>
Isn't that pretty much what we're going to hear in a few days? I'll thank the moderators for at least attempting to have something resembling a sense of humor.
P.S. No offense meant to RMS or his devout apostles.
Heh, for the record, thanks to slashdot I have never received this notification once and I've been using Moz exclusively since around 0.9.0.
Then again, the notification might only work (as most would expect) for stable releases, which are defined as those being in the 1.0.x series.
1. Add "startx" to the user's
2. According to the outdated command-line doc on mozilla.org, height and width are determined by "-height" and "-width". Or just use a window manager that can remember the settings and start that before Mozilla.
Er, I just downloaded 1.1 and I didn't notice this because it's a great deal easier to just middle-click the link. I think you have to have an opion enabled in the prefs dialog, though.
It works fine if you have a bugzilla account and a corresponding cookie in your current browser.
Heh, Mozilla and other OSS software are the only error reports I bother to send in on XP. I figure that as long as proprietary software developers are getting paid for their work, they shouldn't have to rely on volunteers to do their bughunting for them.
P.S: It would be a good idea to install/enabled Talkbalk on your Mozilla build so that the developers know about this. If I ever find a really horrible bug that shouldn't have made it through the development cycle, sometimes I'll make it crash on purpose 5 or 6 times just so the Mozilla guys watching the talkback data get the hint.
Try backing up and then deleting your profile and starting anew. Mozilla releases in the 1.0.x series are fairly well guaranteed not to cause any huge problems when upgrading, but any other upgrade path can or will cause problems.
FWIW, I haven't had a profile-related problem since 0.9.2 or so.
Also, maybe use POP. I was using IMAP for awhile, but it's just way too slow for my taste, even over broadband.
The interface for a tabbed setting is slightly erratic and doesn't follow other window managers, Linux or Windows.
It's not supposed to. If you want to have a different entry in your window list / taskbar, all you need to do is simply turn off tabs. If you *must* have tabbed but discreet windows, there are a few good tabbed window managers for X available.
If I'm using Alt+Tab in WIndows I will have between 5-10 windows open, and I can quickly tell what I have available.
Again, just turn off tabs. This is the same thing as complaining that your favorite Linux distro boots KDE instead of GNOME. The choice is there, all you have to do is pick it and run with it. FWIW, I believe Mozilla tabs are disabled by default.
I just don't understand Everyone's attraction to tabbed browsing.
Tabs are useful for people like me who like to have have a lot of web pages open at once but hate a cluttered desktop. Moz tabs have been a godsend and with 1.1, the introduction of a New Tab button has increased their usefulness at least 2-fold for me.
Err, I thought M$ bought only the patents relating to OpenGL, not kernel implementations?
How can software patents be applied in the EU when at the moment there are no such things as software patents in the EU.
Easy: they won't be. You have nothing to worry about, please resume your normal business.
We Americans, however, have about a million miles of hot stinking shit to wade through every day thanks to our corrupt patent office, corrupt government, and severely corrupt businesses.