"Before you go spouting off about how much you Europeans value "openness" and how superior you are, you should understand that this would never fly in the US, unless it was specifically related to national security."
By turning the responsibility for collecting, storing, and disseminating information on government contract details over to a private company, the Bush administration has effectively sealed them away from public scrutiny. So this sort of thing does indeed "fly in the US".
"Hooray for the increased openness of socialism. It's so effective people actually believe it's the governments "right" to decide what to make public."
And hooray for Americans like you who don't let their ignorance of the fact that the EU isn't a government prevent them from showing their even greater ignorance of socialism.
NB: the fact that you're on Slashdot means you're also on the Internet, where you can access massive amounts of information about both the EU and socialism, so there's no excuse for repeating what you've read in Sarah Palin's Big Book Of Geography And Lefty Politics.
"Unless of course said government is trying to make a case against MS to make them pay out more money while at the same time being run by people too dim to use Linux and don't want to expose their hypocrisy."
What government would this be, perchance? It can't be the EU, because the EU isn't a government, so what government are you talking about?
"The problem is this is public money being spent, and they should be willing to divulge this information to clear up any ideas people might get concerning government collusion with a large corporation."
1) The EU does not directly receive any money from the public, so it has no obligation to tell the public about how it spends its money. It's the governments who supply the EU with public money that the EU is obliged to give information to, so Brown, Sarkozy, etc. can have a look at those contracts with MS if they want to, but you can be pretty sure that they won't tell us what they see.
2) The EU isn't a government, so it's pointless saying what governments should or should not do when discussing matters pertaining to the EU itself.
"They need to protect businesses equally, and if it appears they may be protecting a certain business over others"
They don't reveal the details of _any_ contracts with suppliers of goods or services to the public, so MS are being treated just like everyone else.
"it does make it look as if there might be a conflict of intrests with the public good"
The EU isn't elected by the public and doesn't pretend to represent the public, so its decisions aren't motivated by the opinions or needs of the public. It was originally a trade organisation, and although its role has been expanded over the years, much of what it does is still concerned with business and commerce, and its laws and practices reflect this.
"The slaves were not a valid nor just property even though the law and many people believed they were."
Everybody who argues that there is such a thing as natural law (which is inevitably completely different from anything that actually happens in nature) ends up using wooly terms like "valid" that boil down to "what I prefer things to be like". Slavery was an integral part of humanity as a whole that nobody really questioned in moral and ethical terms until the 18th century, so It takes either a special kind of arrogance, an ignorance of history, or a combination of the two to suggest that an opinion which has only existed for 200 years (and has been a majority opinion for less than 100 years) is more "valid" than the one that prevailed for at least 10,000 years just because you happen to agree with it.
"Many Native Americans had their rights violated even though the law at the time didn't recognize it"
And native Americans had been "violating the rights" of other native Americans for thousands of years before white people got there, just as animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria have been "violating the rights" of other organisms since life evolved on this planet.
"Rights and property are not created by law, they exist above it"
If this is the case, then you should be able to cite a whole bunch of situations in the natural world where such rights are observed by other life-forms in the way they behave towards members of both their own species and other species.
I think Sculptor would be classified as a 4GL, which is a category I mentioned in my post. It was reasonably popular a couple of decades ago (at least in the UK), but I've no idea whether it's still around.
"Well, on just about every Mac I've seen, from corporate computers, to those of artists to those used at home, just about all the used software is from Apple or Adobe, with the exception of Office. "
And just about every Windows computer I've seen in exactly the same settings is invariably dominated by software from MS and Abobe, i.e. MS Office and / or Adobe Photoshop, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio on dev. machines, SQL Server and Exchange Server on Windows servers, etc., etc. The only wide-scale exceptions to this are various anti-virus solutions and the bundled horrid-ware that OEMs are paid to plaster all over cheap Windows boxes that end-users don't want and would remove if they knew how.
Geek-owned Windows machines are non-typical in their software mixes, but then so are geek Macs.
"Apple legally licensed/bought the tech from PARC"
On a purely historical note, Apple licensed the mouse patent from SRI (where Doug Englebart, its inventor, worked), not PARC, although the fact that they bothered to do so reinforces your point about Apple actually having licensed many of the technologies they used in the Lisa and early Macs rather than simply plagiarising them.
Visual Basic is indeed the only language that supports textual if..then..else tokens and single "=" for equivalence. Except for FORTRAN and COBOL. But no other languages support them apart from ALGOL descendants such as Pascal, MESA, Modula-2, Oberon, Ada, etc. And of course some of those minority languages like Haskell, Eiffel, and CAML. But nobody uses them, so let's throw out those silly Algol descendants, FORTRAN, COBOL. and all the other stuff nobody uses, and claim that VB is definitely the only language with this type of syntax. Because RDBMS data definition languages haven't reached a consensus about precisely what syntax they should have, even though just about all of them use "=" for comparison together with textual if..then..else tokens. Only a fool would even consider including proprietary tripe in discussions of language syntax, and we're not fools, so we won't even consider them as languages, let alone _valid_ languages.
So, once we remove FORTRAN, COBOL, stuff nobody uses, and proprietary crap like DDLs, 4GLs, and various query languages, we're pretty much left with VB as the sole example of this weirdly un-C-like way of writing conditional expressions.
That would be a fair description of the PC-2, but not the 100, which had a CMOS 8085 clocked at 2.3MHz, a full-size QWERTY keyboard, serial and parallel ports, a bar-code reader, a built-in MODEM, and an add-on (which we'd now call a docking station) that gave it the ability to be used with a monitor and twin 5.25" floppy disk drives. It looks pretty feeble hardware-wise when put against even weak modern systems such as smart phones, but the spec. was comparable to that of many much larger computers being sold at that time.
NB: the model 200, which was launched a bit over a year later (early 1984) was a clam-shell design that looks very much like a modern laptop. It was otherwise very similar in hardware terms to the 100 and 102, but wouldn't be labelled as a PIM by most people who look at it solely because it has a larger fold-down screen that's more in line with what we now expect a portable computer to look like.
"I remember both the Osborne and the TRS80-100. Neither of which I would have wanted in my lap for more than, oh..., 10 minutes."
Your comments indicate that you don't remember the TRS-80 model 100 at all, because it was nothing like "luggables" such as the Osborne. Tandy's portable weighed 1.2 Kg and ran for 20 hours on 4 alkaline AA batteries, so it sat just as comfortably on a healthy set of knees as any modern netbook, let alone a laptop.
There's plenty of outcry for accountability, but Witchfynder Smith has an astonishing ability to completely ignore anything that doesn't support giving more power to the government and the police.
"It's about Opera having thought of a innovative way to get a browsing-experience into a phone where (apart from the screensize) the network is a bottleneck."
It's not in the least innovative (unless you're using the MS definition of the word), because a variety of services offered server-based compression of Internet data and pre-rendering of various data types to accelerate both dial-up modems and mobile phones years before Opera Mini was doing it.
"Actually, the term "Dark Ages" was coined by early historians IIRC simply because they could not find a lot of information about that period."
I already said this in my post, i.e.:
'Later historians (i.e. post-Renaissance) changed the usage of the term to one that referred to the fact that they knew little about what happened particularly in North Western Europe during that period because very little decipherable (to those historians, who had trouble with sources that weren't written in standard Latin using Roman characters) written material survived, so they were "dark" to those looking back rather than to the people living in them'
" Few written records survived, which makes sense in a time where whole libraries were burned to ashes because they were "heathen" or "heretic""
The Romans burned far more documents to fuel their hypocausts in a decade than were destroyed in the entirety of the early mediaeval period. Roman scholars may have valued ancient texts, but ordinary Romans didn't, and the scholars themselves often discounted anything they couldn't read (i.e. stuff that wasn't written in Latin or Greek) as worthless gibberish that wasn't worth preserving. It should also be noted that far more "heretical" and "pagan" texts were destroyed by order of Christian Roman emperors than during the early middle ages, when Catholicism was significantly less powerful and repressive than it had been under Rome or would become in the High Middle Ages.
"the average person was illiterate"
The average person had been illiterate in the Roman Empire too. What changed was the level of literacy in the wealthy and ruling classes, who were now living in or running small independent kingdoms that didn't have any need for the codified universal sets of laws and complex bureaucratic systems that were required to run a large empire or one of the multinational companies that existed under it. This is the reason why one of the first things a large empire tends to institute is a fast and reliable postal service, something even the Mongols did despite the fact that they weren't from a culture that had previously attached very much value to literacy.
"most of the scholars were also monks (which, in turn, meant that a lot of information was lost every time some "heathen" ransacked and burned the monasteries)"
Very few monks were scholars. They had a fairly high literacy rate, but that was due to their requirement for making often exquisitely beautiful copies of widely known (within the Catholic Church) religious texts. It wasn't customary for them to bother with any other sort of documents, and their penchant for living as far from external distractions as possible meant that they didn't tend to chronicle anything particularly interesting from a historical perspective either (although other parts of the Catholic Church did). It should also be noted that the frequency and viciousness of barbarian attacks on monasteries was significantly exaggerated by Catholic propagandists who wanted to discredit paganism of all types because it was one of several threats to an organisation whose influence was in steady decline in post-Roman Europe. It was a time of migrations and invasions of what had previously been Catholic Roman areas by pagans, Goths who were Arian Christians (which Catholics had declared to be a heresy), and Muslims, so Catholicism was faced with a fight for its very survival, and propaganda was one of the tools it used in that fight.
"Our view of the "barbaric medieval times" mostly stem from this."
The _popular_ view of the "dark ages" is a testament to how effective early mediaeval Catholic propagandists were at presenting a picture of the competition that was both denigrating and terrifying. That they did this isn't surprising, because "chroniclers" had been presenting the enemies of whoever was paying them in the same way for millennia. What's surprising is the fact that they've been so successful at it for so long that supposedly factual articles, books, and TV documentaries are still being produced which perpetuate it despite a century of archaeological and historical work that reveals its mostly mythical nature.
"Look at the Dark Ages, civilization both before and after was much more advanced."
This isn't actually correct. The term "dark ages" was originally coined and used by Italian scholars who had a very negative view of the period because (a) it marked a sudden and massive decline in the importance of Italy in the world, and (b) was also a time when Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity were rising forces in the world, both of which were regarded as rivals to be denigrated whenever the opportunity presented itself by Catholic Italians during the High Middle Ages. The fact that neither of these rivals used Latin for their literature was also widely regarded as an affront by Catholics in general, and Italian Catholics in particular, to whom it was proof that both of these rivals were barbarians with "pretend" civilisations.
Later historians (i.e. post-Renaissance) changed the usage of the term to one that referred to the fact that they knew little about what happened particularly in North Western Europe during that period because very little decipherable (to those historians, who had trouble with sources that weren't written in standard Latin using Roman characters) written material survived, so they were "dark" to those looking back rather than to the people living in them, the vast majority of whom were neither better nor worse off than they'd been under Roman rule (the very wealthy were definitely worse off, but they were a tiny proportion of Roman society). It was however still used in a pejorative sense because many historians regarded the paucity of written records and art to be evidence of general ignorance.
Our view of the "dark ages" changed markedly during the 20th century, when the rise of archaeology as a science (it had largely been concerned with treasure hunting in prior centuries) began to reveal a very different picture of what is now usually referred to as the Early Middle Ages to escape the prevailingly pejorative association that the term "dark ages" has with people who aren't historians or archaeologists. What they've found is that technology and culture moved in different directions rather than declining, so while some things were lost because people had less need for them in their less centralised societies, other new ones emerged, e.g. (by no means exhaustive) water wheels, the stirrup, horse collars, three crop rotation, corrective lenses, and crucible steel. These and many other "dark age" technologies already existed elsewhere, so they were probably introduced into Northern Europe both by the notable waves of migration that were happened during this time, and increased contact with both the Near and the Far East via the Eastern Roman Empire and Muslim trading ships.
What undoubtedly did suffer during the early middle ages in North Western Europe was education and study for its own sake. The old Roman Empire itself and the big companies that existed under it needed large numbers of bureaucrats to run things for the monied classes, so literacy and numeracy rates throughout the Empire much higher than in the dark ages, although they were still rather less than 15%, and probably below 10%. Wealthy Romans did however lead extremely comfortable lives, and had plenty of leisure time which, as was the case with Wealthy Englishmen at the height of the British Empire, they dedicated at least some of to studying and discussing philosophy, science, and mathematics.
By contrast with the above, the wealthy and powerful in North Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages were mostly practical warriors supported by agrarian societies that didn't require much in the way of bureaucracies, so literacy (and in particular Latin literacy) was only common in the Catholic Church, which was the last widespread centralised organisation left in the region during that period (apart from the Carolingian Empire, which was short-lived and restricted geographically compare with Rome, but still required more bureaucrats than were available, and established education systems to train them).
"Cutting down on outright duplicated effort and cutting out things that can be left to 3rd parties to develop for your product you could code from scratch an equivalent OS for MUCH less."
And cutting out all the stuff that was developed for multiple platforms including Linux, was ported to Linux from existing UNIX codebases, or was forked or is otherwise based on an existing codebase reduces that cost even further.
I'd also like to know whether the metric used to calculate LOC included header files or their equivalents in whatever languages are being used, because any reasonable programmer would be expected to write a lot more than 19 lines of header entries / day (I've read the article, and it doesn't say whether they count headers or not). However, it clearly does include (but is not restricted to -- the appendix in the article merely says these are in the top 10 packages in the Fedora distro) the following:
1. two distinct versions of GCC, both of which are multi-platform tools whose origins predate Linux.
2. OpenOffice, another multi-platform package.
3. Eclipse, again multi-platform rather than Linux-specific.
4. Mono. Multi-platform, and a copy of something from Microsoft for Windows whose developers have received significant amounts of help from MS (Icaza worships at the altar of Gates).
5. Firefox. Multi-platform again.
6. Bigloo, a multi-platform Scheme implementation.
7. ParaView, another multi-platform app.
So out of that top 10, we're left with two items that were actually developed for Linux, i.e. the kernel, and RedHat's own Enterprise Security Client. Add in the complete lack of clarity about whether they're counting headers as LOC, and it's difficult to reach any conclusion other than that the figures given in the white paper are utter BS.
"So cutting off all the fat, I think you could build something close to fedora 9 for under $1bn at full price"
You could do it for a lot less than that when you consider how much of what's in even the mini distros you cite is either multi-platform stuff that would have already been there if Linux didn't exist, or is a direct port, a fork, or is derived in some other way from a codebase that already existed elsewhere (i.e. outside Linux and software that's specifically been developed for it).
NB: another area where the BS creeps in is by assigning US development costs to large bodies of code that were not written exclusively in the US, and in some cases, have no input from US-based programmers at all.
That's because marine aircraft were smaller in those days. You wouldn't more than three of today's planes into the back of a 1950s station wagon, and even they'd be a tight fit.
We did it a lot later than the middle ages, because many European countries had criminal blasphemy laws well into the 20th century, and England and Wales didn't repeal theirs until this year.
"But there are societies out there who didn't experience the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition"
Such as for example most European countries, who weren't subject to Spanish rule and therefore didn't have the Spanish Inquisition.
NB: the Spanish Inquisition was mostly concerned with heresy rather than blasphemy, which was indeed a crime, but not one that attracted the attention of inquisitors in and of itself.
"The US state of Delaware had blasphemy laws until 1968"
Britain still had both blasphemy and blasphemous libel laws until May of 2008, when they were finally repealed. The last successful prosecution was in in 1977, and although it didn't result in a custodial sentence (the last one of those was in 1921), the fact that they counted as crimes meant that the person prosecuted ended up with a criminal record for reading a "blasphemous" poem in a public place.
"during WWII were the allied forces stepping on the rights of German citizens when the party they supported began singling out the Jews as a scapegoat before putting thousands of them to death?"
The allies didn't have any information about the Holocaust until 1942, and their leaders were sceptical about the veracity of the sources at that time, so it wasn't a motivating factor in any of their decisions. It should also be noted that very few Germans knew about it until after the Nazis had been defeated (which was also the time that the public in allied countries started to hear about it), because Nazi propaganda told them the Jews were being resettled in newly conquered lands, and they made films for domestic consumption showing how well they were being cared for and how happy they were about the chance to "lead productive lives helping to build the Reich". It's unlikely that they'd have bothered to manufacture and spread propaganda of this sort if they though that they had significant public support for their Final Solution.
NB: The initial scepticism about early reports of Nazi atrocities seems strange today, but is perhaps more understandable when seen in the context of WWI, which had only been over for a couple of decades, and was therefore still a major influence on the minds of both the leadership (military and government) and people of both the allies and Germany. A lot of false rumours about German atrocities were flying around during that war, including some that seem ludicrous to us nowadays, e.g. the Germans having factories near the Western front that made soap out of their own and allied dead, German and Austrian soldiers killing and eating large numbers of Belgian babies, mass crucifixions of allied POWs, and other things that were later found to be either complete rubbish, or massive exaggerations of single incidents by disturbed individuals or small groups who had subsequently been executed by their own side for their crimes. And although the allied leadership in WWI was happy to use such rumours for propaganda purposes, they did so in full knowledge of their false nature, so they can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the rumours which initially reached them about real Nazi atrocities might not be true.
This is a far more likely reason than any of the others that have been given, because:
1) Apple very likely pull in a fair bit of revenue from 3rd. party accessory manufacturers who license their proprietary iPod connection protocols and logos.
2) iPods are ubiquitous, so those connectors crop up in all sorts of unexpected places, and the fact that Apple won't license the protocols to other MP3 player (and phone) manufacturers means that people who want to use anything that has such a connector have to buy from Apple.
This sort of practice is very common in the consumer electronics world, where interoperability is often defined as being able to use a device by one manufacturer with other devices from the same manufacturer. It even happens with standard protocols and connectors such as HDMI, MIDI, etc., which are frequently used to carry manufacturer-specific data that's only understood by other devices from them, and isn't published or licensed to third parties.
1) Despite their well known arrogance, even Apple haven't had the temerity to unilaterally declare a Global Antipiracy Day solely for their own benefit.
2) They aren't trying to pretend that piracy is the reason for not being innovative.
3) Apple's pirates clearly want the latest versions of their products, so they don't have to wheel out a succession of reps who try to explain away the fact that people who aren't forced to use what what they're currently trying to sell don't bother with them even when they can get them without paying.
Slashdot Mirror
"Before you go spouting off about how much you Europeans value "openness" and how superior you are, you should understand that this would never fly in the US, unless it was specifically related to national security."
http://www.motherjones.org/news/update/2004/05/05_401.html
By turning the responsibility for collecting, storing, and disseminating information on government contract details over to a private company, the Bush administration has effectively sealed them away from public scrutiny. So this sort of thing does indeed "fly in the US".
"Hooray for the increased openness of socialism. It's so effective people actually believe it's the governments "right" to decide what to make public."
And hooray for Americans like you who don't let their ignorance of the fact that the EU isn't a government prevent them from showing their even greater ignorance of socialism.
NB: the fact that you're on Slashdot means you're also on the Internet, where you can access massive amounts of information about both the EU and socialism, so there's no excuse for repeating what you've read in Sarah Palin's Big Book Of Geography And Lefty Politics.
"Unless of course said government is trying to make a case against MS to make them pay out more money while at the same time being run by people too dim to use Linux and don't want to expose their hypocrisy."
What government would this be, perchance? It can't be the EU, because the EU isn't a government, so what government are you talking about?
"The problem is this is public money being spent, and they should be willing to divulge this information to clear up any ideas people might get concerning government collusion with a large corporation."
1) The EU does not directly receive any money from the public, so it has no obligation to tell the public about how it spends its money. It's the governments who supply the EU with public money that the EU is obliged to give information to, so Brown, Sarkozy, etc. can have a look at those contracts with MS if they want to, but you can be pretty sure that they won't tell us what they see.
2) The EU isn't a government, so it's pointless saying what governments should or should not do when discussing matters pertaining to the EU itself.
"They need to protect businesses equally, and if it appears they may be protecting a certain business over others"
They don't reveal the details of _any_ contracts with suppliers of goods or services to the public, so MS are being treated just like everyone else.
"it does make it look as if there might be a conflict of intrests with the public good"
The EU isn't elected by the public and doesn't pretend to represent the public, so its decisions aren't motivated by the opinions or needs of the public. It was originally a trade organisation, and although its role has been expanded over the years, much of what it does is still concerned with business and commerce, and its laws and practices reflect this.
"Uhh, your argument proves the point"
It proves his point, not yours.
"The slaves were not a valid nor just property even though the law and many people believed they were."
Everybody who argues that there is such a thing as natural law (which is inevitably completely different from anything that actually happens in nature) ends up using wooly terms like "valid" that boil down to "what I prefer things to be like". Slavery was an integral part of humanity as a whole that nobody really questioned in moral and ethical terms until the 18th century, so It takes either a special kind of arrogance, an ignorance of history, or a combination of the two to suggest that an opinion which has only existed for 200 years (and has been a majority opinion for less than 100 years) is more "valid" than the one that prevailed for at least 10,000 years just because you happen to agree with it.
"Many Native Americans had their rights violated even though the law at the time didn't recognize it"
And native Americans had been "violating the rights" of other native Americans for thousands of years before white people got there, just as animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria have been "violating the rights" of other organisms since life evolved on this planet.
"Rights and property are not created by law, they exist above it"
If this is the case, then you should be able to cite a whole bunch of situations in the natural world where such rights are observed by other life-forms in the way they behave towards members of both their own species and other species.
I think Sculptor would be classified as a 4GL, which is a category I mentioned in my post. It was reasonably popular a couple of decades ago (at least in the UK), but I've no idea whether it's still around.
"Unless there are some other devices Apple would have been making before that."
The Newton was launched in 1993.
"Well, on just about every Mac I've seen, from corporate computers, to those of artists to those used at home, just about all the used software is from Apple or Adobe, with the exception of Office. "
And just about every Windows computer I've seen in exactly the same settings is invariably dominated by software from MS and Abobe, i.e. MS Office and / or Adobe Photoshop, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio on dev. machines, SQL Server and Exchange Server on Windows servers, etc., etc. The only wide-scale exceptions to this are various anti-virus solutions and the bundled horrid-ware that OEMs are paid to plaster all over cheap Windows boxes that end-users don't want and would remove if they knew how.
Geek-owned Windows machines are non-typical in their software mixes, but then so are geek Macs.
"Apple legally licensed/bought the tech from PARC"
On a purely historical note, Apple licensed the mouse patent from SRI (where Doug Englebart, its inventor, worked), not PARC, although the fact that they bothered to do so reinforces your point about Apple actually having licensed many of the technologies they used in the Lisa and early Macs rather than simply plagiarising them.
Visual Basic is indeed the only language that supports textual if..then..else tokens and single "=" for equivalence. Except for FORTRAN and COBOL. But no other languages support them apart from ALGOL descendants such as Pascal, MESA, Modula-2, Oberon, Ada, etc. And of course some of those minority languages like Haskell, Eiffel, and CAML. But nobody uses them, so let's throw out those silly Algol descendants, FORTRAN, COBOL. and all the other stuff nobody uses, and claim that VB is definitely the only language with this type of syntax. Because RDBMS data definition languages haven't reached a consensus about precisely what syntax they should have, even though just about all of them use "=" for comparison together with textual if..then..else tokens. Only a fool would even consider including proprietary tripe in discussions of language syntax, and we're not fools, so we won't even consider them as languages, let alone _valid_ languages.
So, once we remove FORTRAN, COBOL, stuff nobody uses, and proprietary crap like DDLs, 4GLs, and various query languages, we're pretty much left with VB as the sole example of this weirdly un-C-like way of writing conditional expressions.
"hardly a laptop, and more of an oversized pim"
That would be a fair description of the PC-2, but not the 100, which had a CMOS 8085 clocked at 2.3MHz, a full-size QWERTY keyboard, serial and parallel ports, a bar-code reader, a built-in MODEM, and an add-on (which we'd now call a docking station) that gave it the ability to be used with a monitor and twin 5.25" floppy disk drives. It looks pretty feeble hardware-wise when put against even weak modern systems such as smart phones, but the spec. was comparable to that of many much larger computers being sold at that time.
NB: the model 200, which was launched a bit over a year later (early 1984) was a clam-shell design that looks very much like a modern laptop. It was otherwise very similar in hardware terms to the 100 and 102, but wouldn't be labelled as a PIM by most people who look at it solely because it has a larger fold-down screen that's more in line with what we now expect a portable computer to look like.
"I remember both the Osborne and the TRS80-100. Neither of which I would have wanted in my lap for more than, oh ..., 10 minutes."
Your comments indicate that you don't remember the TRS-80 model 100 at all, because it was nothing like "luggables" such as the Osborne. Tandy's portable weighed 1.2 Kg and ran for 20 hours on 4 alkaline AA batteries, so it sat just as comfortably on a healthy set of knees as any modern netbook, let alone a laptop.
There's plenty of outcry for accountability, but Witchfynder Smith has an astonishing ability to completely ignore anything that doesn't support giving more power to the government and the police.
"If you can get past the bile, hate, bias, bitterness and sensationalism, ask youself: does this publication actually have any credibility?"
Once you get past all that, there's no content left in the Daily Mail, so its credibility or otherwise is moot.
"It's about Opera having thought of a innovative way to get a browsing-experience into a phone where (apart from the screensize) the network is a bottleneck."
It's not in the least innovative (unless you're using the MS definition of the word), because a variety of services offered server-based compression of Internet data and pre-rendering of various data types to accelerate both dial-up modems and mobile phones years before Opera Mini was doing it.
"Actually, the term "Dark Ages" was coined by early historians IIRC simply because they could not find a lot of information about that period."
I already said this in my post, i.e.:
'Later historians (i.e. post-Renaissance) changed the usage of the term to one that referred to the fact that they knew little about what happened particularly in North Western Europe during that period because very little decipherable (to those historians, who had trouble with sources that weren't written in standard Latin using Roman characters) written material survived, so they were "dark" to those looking back rather than to the people living in them'
" Few written records survived, which makes sense in a time where whole libraries were burned to ashes because they were "heathen" or "heretic""
The Romans burned far more documents to fuel their hypocausts in a decade than were destroyed in the entirety of the early mediaeval period. Roman scholars may have valued ancient texts, but ordinary Romans didn't, and the scholars themselves often discounted anything they couldn't read (i.e. stuff that wasn't written in Latin or Greek) as worthless gibberish that wasn't worth preserving. It should also be noted that far more "heretical" and "pagan" texts were destroyed by order of Christian Roman emperors than during the early middle ages, when Catholicism was significantly less powerful and repressive than it had been under Rome or would become in the High Middle Ages.
"the average person was illiterate"
The average person had been illiterate in the Roman Empire too. What changed was the level of literacy in the wealthy and ruling classes, who were now living in or running small independent kingdoms that didn't have any need for the codified universal sets of laws and complex bureaucratic systems that were required to run a large empire or one of the multinational companies that existed under it. This is the reason why one of the first things a large empire tends to institute is a fast and reliable postal service, something even the Mongols did despite the fact that they weren't from a culture that had previously attached very much value to literacy.
"most of the scholars were also monks (which, in turn, meant that a lot of information was lost every time some "heathen" ransacked and burned the monasteries)"
Very few monks were scholars. They had a fairly high literacy rate, but that was due to their requirement for making often exquisitely beautiful copies of widely known (within the Catholic Church) religious texts. It wasn't customary for them to bother with any other sort of documents, and their penchant for living as far from external distractions as possible meant that they didn't tend to chronicle anything particularly interesting from a historical perspective either (although other parts of the Catholic Church did). It should also be noted that the frequency and viciousness of barbarian attacks on monasteries was significantly exaggerated by Catholic propagandists who wanted to discredit paganism of all types because it was one of several threats to an organisation whose influence was in steady decline in post-Roman Europe. It was a time of migrations and invasions of what had previously been Catholic Roman areas by pagans, Goths who were Arian Christians (which Catholics had declared to be a heresy), and Muslims, so Catholicism was faced with a fight for its very survival, and propaganda was one of the tools it used in that fight.
"Our view of the "barbaric medieval times" mostly stem from this."
The _popular_ view of the "dark ages" is a testament to how effective early mediaeval Catholic propagandists were at presenting a picture of the competition that was both denigrating and terrifying. That they did this isn't surprising, because "chroniclers" had been presenting the enemies of whoever was paying them in the same way for millennia. What's surprising is the fact that they've been so successful at it for so long that supposedly factual articles, books, and TV documentaries are still being produced which perpetuate it despite a century of archaeological and historical work that reveals its mostly mythical nature.
"Look at the Dark Ages, civilization both before and after was much more advanced."
This isn't actually correct. The term "dark ages" was originally coined and used by Italian scholars who had a very negative view of the period because (a) it marked a sudden and massive decline in the importance of Italy in the world, and (b) was also a time when Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity were rising forces in the world, both of which were regarded as rivals to be denigrated whenever the opportunity presented itself by Catholic Italians during the High Middle Ages. The fact that neither of these rivals used Latin for their literature was also widely regarded as an affront by Catholics in general, and Italian Catholics in particular, to whom it was proof that both of these rivals were barbarians with "pretend" civilisations.
Later historians (i.e. post-Renaissance) changed the usage of the term to one that referred to the fact that they knew little about what happened particularly in North Western Europe during that period because very little decipherable (to those historians, who had trouble with sources that weren't written in standard Latin using Roman characters) written material survived, so they were "dark" to those looking back rather than to the people living in them, the vast majority of whom were neither better nor worse off than they'd been under Roman rule (the very wealthy were definitely worse off, but they were a tiny proportion of Roman society). It was however still used in a pejorative sense because many historians regarded the paucity of written records and art to be evidence of general ignorance.
Our view of the "dark ages" changed markedly during the 20th century, when the rise of archaeology as a science (it had largely been concerned with treasure hunting in prior centuries) began to reveal a very different picture of what is now usually referred to as the Early Middle Ages to escape the prevailingly pejorative association that the term "dark ages" has with people who aren't historians or archaeologists. What they've found is that technology and culture moved in different directions rather than declining, so while some things were lost because people had less need for them in their less centralised societies, other new ones emerged, e.g. (by no means exhaustive) water wheels, the stirrup, horse collars, three crop rotation, corrective lenses, and crucible steel. These and many other "dark age" technologies already existed elsewhere, so they were probably introduced into Northern Europe both by the notable waves of migration that were happened during this time, and increased contact with both the Near and the Far East via the Eastern Roman Empire and Muslim trading ships.
What undoubtedly did suffer during the early middle ages in North Western Europe was education and study for its own sake. The old Roman Empire itself and the big companies that existed under it needed large numbers of bureaucrats to run things for the monied classes, so literacy and numeracy rates throughout the Empire much higher than in the dark ages, although they were still rather less than 15%, and probably below 10%. Wealthy Romans did however lead extremely comfortable lives, and had plenty of leisure time which, as was the case with Wealthy Englishmen at the height of the British Empire, they dedicated at least some of to studying and discussing philosophy, science, and mathematics.
By contrast with the above, the wealthy and powerful in North Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages were mostly practical warriors supported by agrarian societies that didn't require much in the way of bureaucracies, so literacy (and in particular Latin literacy) was only common in the Catholic Church, which was the last widespread centralised organisation left in the region during that period (apart from the Carolingian Empire, which was short-lived and restricted geographically compare with Rome, but still required more bureaucrats than were available, and established education systems to train them).
"Cutting down on outright duplicated effort and cutting out things that can be left to 3rd parties to develop for your product you could code from scratch an equivalent OS for MUCH less."
And cutting out all the stuff that was developed for multiple platforms including Linux, was ported to Linux from existing UNIX codebases, or was forked or is otherwise based on an existing codebase reduces that cost even further.
I'd also like to know whether the metric used to calculate LOC included header files or their equivalents in whatever languages are being used, because any reasonable programmer would be expected to write a lot more than 19 lines of header entries / day (I've read the article, and it doesn't say whether they count headers or not). However, it clearly does include (but is not restricted to -- the appendix in the article merely says these are in the top 10 packages in the Fedora distro) the following:
1. two distinct versions of GCC, both of which are multi-platform tools whose origins predate Linux.
2. OpenOffice, another multi-platform package.
3. Eclipse, again multi-platform rather than Linux-specific.
4. Mono. Multi-platform, and a copy of something from Microsoft for Windows whose developers have received significant amounts of help from MS (Icaza worships at the altar of Gates).
5. Firefox. Multi-platform again.
6. Bigloo, a multi-platform Scheme implementation.
7. ParaView, another multi-platform app.
So out of that top 10, we're left with two items that were actually developed for Linux, i.e. the kernel, and RedHat's own Enterprise Security Client. Add in the complete lack of clarity about whether they're counting headers as LOC, and it's difficult to reach any conclusion other than that the figures given in the white paper are utter BS.
"So cutting off all the fat, I think you could build something close to fedora 9 for under $1bn at full price"
You could do it for a lot less than that when you consider how much of what's in even the mini distros you cite is either multi-platform stuff that would have already been there if Linux didn't exist, or is a direct port, a fork, or is derived in some other way from a codebase that already existed elsewhere (i.e. outside Linux and software that's specifically been developed for it).
NB: another area where the BS creeps in is by assigning US development costs to large bodies of code that were not written exclusively in the US, and in some cases, have no input from US-based programmers at all.
"Einstein believed in a creator who set the universe in motion, and had no more to do with his creation (clockwork determinism)."
He probably got the idea from Aristotle.
That's because marine aircraft were smaller in those days. You wouldn't more than three of today's planes into the back of a 1950s station wagon, and even they'd be a tight fit.
"We used to do the same in medieval Europe"
We did it a lot later than the middle ages, because many European countries had criminal blasphemy laws well into the 20th century, and England and Wales didn't repeal theirs until this year.
"But there are societies out there who didn't experience the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition"
Such as for example most European countries, who weren't subject to Spanish rule and therefore didn't have the Spanish Inquisition.
NB: the Spanish Inquisition was mostly concerned with heresy rather than blasphemy, which was indeed a crime, but not one that attracted the attention of inquisitors in and of itself.
"The US state of Delaware had blasphemy laws until 1968"
Britain still had both blasphemy and blasphemous libel laws until May of 2008, when they were finally repealed. The last successful prosecution was in in 1977, and although it didn't result in a custodial sentence (the last one of those was in 1921), the fact that they counted as crimes meant that the person prosecuted ended up with a criminal record for reading a "blasphemous" poem in a public place.
"during WWII were the allied forces stepping on the rights of German citizens when the party they supported began singling out the Jews as a scapegoat before putting thousands of them to death?"
The allies didn't have any information about the Holocaust until 1942, and their leaders were sceptical about the veracity of the sources at that time, so it wasn't a motivating factor in any of their decisions. It should also be noted that very few Germans knew about it until after the Nazis had been defeated (which was also the time that the public in allied countries started to hear about it), because Nazi propaganda told them the Jews were being resettled in newly conquered lands, and they made films for domestic consumption showing how well they were being cared for and how happy they were about the chance to "lead productive lives helping to build the Reich". It's unlikely that they'd have bothered to manufacture and spread propaganda of this sort if they though that they had significant public support for their Final Solution.
NB: The initial scepticism about early reports of Nazi atrocities seems strange today, but is perhaps more understandable when seen in the context of WWI, which had only been over for a couple of decades, and was therefore still a major influence on the minds of both the leadership (military and government) and people of both the allies and Germany. A lot of false rumours about German atrocities were flying around during that war, including some that seem ludicrous to us nowadays, e.g. the Germans having factories near the Western front that made soap out of their own and allied dead, German and Austrian soldiers killing and eating large numbers of Belgian babies, mass crucifixions of allied POWs, and other things that were later found to be either complete rubbish, or massive exaggerations of single incidents by disturbed individuals or small groups who had subsequently been executed by their own side for their crimes. And although the allied leadership in WWI was happy to use such rumours for propaganda purposes, they did so in full knowledge of their false nature, so they can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the rumours which initially reached them about real Nazi atrocities might not be true.
This is a far more likely reason than any of the others that have been given, because:
1) Apple very likely pull in a fair bit of revenue from 3rd. party accessory manufacturers who license their proprietary iPod connection protocols and logos.
2) iPods are ubiquitous, so those connectors crop up in all sorts of unexpected places, and the fact that Apple won't license the protocols to other MP3 player (and phone) manufacturers means that people who want to use anything that has such a connector have to buy from Apple.
This sort of practice is very common in the consumer electronics world, where interoperability is often defined as being able to use a device by one manufacturer with other devices from the same manufacturer. It even happens with standard protocols and connectors such as HDMI, MIDI, etc., which are frequently used to carry manufacturer-specific data that's only understood by other devices from them, and isn't published or licensed to third parties.
I can see three differences:
1) Despite their well known arrogance, even Apple haven't had the temerity to unilaterally declare a Global Antipiracy Day solely for their own benefit.
2) They aren't trying to pretend that piracy is the reason for not being innovative.
3) Apple's pirates clearly want the latest versions of their products, so they don't have to wheel out a succession of reps who try to explain away the fact that people who aren't forced to use what what they're currently trying to sell don't bother with them even when they can get them without paying.