I've been checking it out to see if there are any interesting developments about the team that apparently claimed the discovery of 2003UB313 without mentioning the fact that they at least visited the logs of the telescope Brown's team was using, if not outright deducing its existence from those logs.
"The fact"? Where has that "fact" been established? So far, all we have in an accusation and a claim from one party.
And, assuming Brown's claims are true, why should they mention that fact? It is Brown's assertion that academic principles require this, but just because Brown claims that's so doesn't make it true.
Not at all. Right now, there is no complete agreement on what a "planet" is, but it's not necessarily just a question of size. It's conceivable that between two objects, the smaller one is a planet while the bigger one is not.
Airbus and Boeing both have a lot of motivation not to produce a plane that falls out of the sky. And before I get to fly on it, the FAA will test it and it will probably have a few thousand commercial flights under its belt already. If it makes it through all that, it's safe enough for me.
Overall, I stopped worrying about whether people who design safety critical systems know what they were doing--it became clear to me long ago that they don't and that if I was going to worry about that, I'd have to become a hermit. But as long as the stuff they produce works well enough on average, it doesn't matter whether it works for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons.
As for this case, my impression of these allegations is that TTTech may have cut some corners they shouldn't have cut, and that Manangan may have reacted to that more strongly than he should have. But, again, if the end product doesn't fall out of the sky too frequently, who cares?
If the folks in charge of writing autopilot software are idiots, then I invite you step right in and do it for them, since you seem to know what's what.
Written by someone with no clue about how contracts are awarded in this modern economy. In real life, technical competency and contracts are at best weakly related.
the biggest reason IBM had substandard stuff was the same reason MS has substandard stuff now. They were playing catch up.
No, they weren't. IBM had lots of technology ready to go; it would have been trivial for them to ship a multitasking OS on a decent hardware platform. Shipping PC hardware with a lousy operating system was a choice they made. (The PC OS that missed its chance was CP/M 86, but it was only slightly better than MS-DOS.)
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Windows isn't user friendly either, and that hasn't stopped it from acquiring 90% market share. DOS before it was even worse, yet it won out over Macintosh. Obviously, market share and user friendliness aren't related.
Take installation.
Yes, Windows system installation sucks badly; it's so bad that most PC users never upgrade Windows but buy a new PC with the next version of Windows preinstalled instead.
Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Actually, Linux zealots say that you click on the "Install Software" icon and then browse for the software you want. Once you find it, you double click on it, and that's it. It's really a lot simpler than on Windows, and you don't even have to take out your credit card.
If the playing field were leveled, and all PCs shipped without OS or preinstalled software, Windows would be history quickly, because, in the end, Windows is a bloody mess to install and maintain.
IBM was fully aware of minicomputers and personal computers and the threat they represented, and they did everything they could to stop them taking away market share from them. IBM was paranoid and well-informed.
In part, that's why IBM picked both a rather substandard hardware design and a rather substandard vendor to supply the operating system (IBM didn't have a choice but to go outside for their software--they were under antitrust scrutiny). This was no secret at the time--how badly the PC architecture and Microsoft's operating system sucked, and what IBM's motivations were, was obvious the day the PC was released.
And it worked as IBM intended: it took 15 years for PC software to catch up with the state of the art of the mid-80's. That translated into a lot of extra sales for IBM's mainframes, servers, and workstations. Of course, the PC business ended up being bigger and more important, but even if IBM had know that at the time, they couldn't have acted on it.
And Microsoft is about to repeat this. Microsoft would have to cannibalize their operating system and MS Office businesses in order to move ahead, and there is no way they are going to be able to do that.
Abolishing embedded media isn't the same as abolishing the media. Flash, video, PDF, ActiveX, etc. are much less of a problem when they're not embedded. Security, compatibility, and UI problems arise when they are embedded inside the hypermedia document, as covered by the patent.
As for Flash in particular, I use FlashBlock, so I need to click on it explicitly to see it. I rarely need to click on Flash at all, and when I do, it's usually something that could have been done just as well in either JavaScript or MPEG.
I don't see any grounds to support your interpretation. But I suggest you read the patent and analyze the claims, and then let us all know about the results.
Anarchism may point you away from rules in general, but Libertarianism is about a minimum set of rules.
We have close to the minimum set of rules that works in the real world; the Libertarian mistake is that they don't see that.
Most specifically, harming other people and/or their property is still very much against the rules, and very much still punishable.
That is, unfortunately, not sufficient to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The problem with "imposing lots of rules on everybody, but at least the majority agreed to them" is that it goes counter to the very principles of our nation -- namely, that laws exist to protect minorities.
There is no problem. The rules that we impose in our nation through democratic means, and the minority protections that they respect, are subject to the principles set forth in the Constitution, no more and no less.
Libertarians may believe in [...]
Yes, and that's what the problem is. Libertarian beliefs and promises don't distinguish Libertarianism from liberal politics--we all want minimal government interference in our lives--only a few religious or right-wing nuts attempt to impose additional rules on everybody.
Liberals, Libertarians, and moderate Republicans roughly have the same set of goals: prosperity, freedom, minority protection, and no unnecessary government interference in people's lives. Where they differ is on the policies of achieving that, and Libertarian policies just look like the least likely to actually achive those goals.
That is why libertarians think people can be left alone and will still help each other without needing a central authority that operates by force. In fact, as human beings go, the people who make up the government (politicians and bureaucrats) tend to be the worst.
Perhaps. But let's say that you Libertarians get to set up the nation the way you want and abolish most rules and regulations. What do you think will happen to those people? Will they disappear in a puff of smoke? Will they undergo a conversion and magically start helping their fellow men? I don't think so. Instead, they'll grab power, and since you just abolished all those pesky little rules that force people to behave in minimally decent ways towards one another, they will be unhampered in that grab for power.
We've had libertarian government on-and-off for millennia, but it usually doesn't last very long. Some kinds of autocracy and feudalism are libertarian, namely when the power is acquired legitimately according to libertarian principles. Libertarianism is like Communism: it makes unrealistic assumptions about human behavior and its consequences.
Democratic government is the best compromise we have found so far; it does indeed impose a lot of rules on everybody, but at least it's rules that the majority of people have agreed to, and it works better than the alternatives.
First-to-file doesn't affect prior art. What it means is that if there are two competing patent claims, the first to file wins. That's much saner than the current system.
If you come up with an idea independently, there is a simple way of protecting yourself from patent claims against you: publish your idea. Making your project open source probably helps, but it is probably also a good idea to write up an explanation and submit it to an archive server or even get it published in a journal.
Patent law is pretty clear: if you don't publish your idea and you don't patent it either, you shouldn't have any rights to claim ownership of it.
Don't let us gloat over the damage to Microsoft. The Eolas patent is a threat to large parts of the Internet as we know it.
No, the Eolas patent is a threat specifically to embedded, external appliations, because that's what it covers. That means for "the Internet as we know it", ActiveX, embedded media players, embedded PDF viewers, and embedded Flash players. If all of those go, as well as the ability of companies like Microsoft to fragment the web by creating Windows-specific plug-ins, I think that's good news. It will probably also help the usability of many sites because embedding applications is, ultimately, not a good idea.
I looked it up again. The patent is entitled "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document", and that's the way the claims seem to read, too.
So, invoking external applications that don't embed, or invoking built-in functionality, would seem to be OK. I believe this means invoking a built-in MPEG4 player would be fine, as would be Javascript/SVG animation. Furthermore, both of those do have clear prior art and probably weren't addressed in this lawsuit.
I may recall the patent completely wrong, but I think it specifically talks about extending browser functionality by embedding external applications or plug-ins. If the functionality is fixed and built-in, then the patent may not apply. I suspect that it is hair splitting like that that let the patent survive reexamination, but that also means that it needs to be interpreted narrowly.
I can see why such a feature might be desirable for some kinds of software. For example, you might want to ensure interoperability among different web services based on free software. And, after all, commercial software vendors apply even more onerous restrictions to web-based software, such as "per user" licensing costs.
However, I think it would be a good idea to have two versions of the license, one with this provision and one without, and give them different names, say WGPL (Web GPL) and GPL. If the FSF only releases a revision of the GPL that includes this provision, I suspect many software authors will stick with the GPL2, and they'll be missing other clarifications and improvements in the GPL license.
If the patent only covers applets, Flash, plug-ins, and ActiveX, then it probably doesn't matter anymore: they are not being used for much that is important anymore, and anything that eliminates these from the web is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
That doesn't change the fact, of course, that the patent is stupid and has prior art., it's just that in this case, the incorrect decision may not have a lot of serious consequences.
If you have followed him, you'll see that to Declan McCullagh, anything the government does is wrong; that's just his view of the world.
So far, there is not even the slightest indication that the FCC either has the authority or the ability of regulating what you do on your PC. So, while the FCC may really intend something stupid with this rule, it probably doesn't matter; they might as well try to make and enforce FCC regulations against radio emissions from the sun.
Or do you suggest that any new program to be developed in the new language/toolkit/whatever, with bindings to integrate it with the older stuff? If you mean the latter, is this really switching, or is it just changing your policy about how new stuff is made? Please clarify further on this interesting point.
Yes, that's what I mean. It's like Carbon/Cocoa on Macintosh: Cocoa is the preferred new API and it's arguably a lot easier to code for, but lots of applications are still written in Carbon.
Please explain how C++ and Qt in particular prevent the KDE team from achieving their goals.
I didn't say "prevent"; you can write a high quality application in assembly language if you invest enough time in it and are persistent enough (and people did, on Macintosh). But it's just not a wise thing to do.
Are you saying that C++ is too low-level to be used for desktop development, and as Qt is a C++ toolkit, it too is affected by this? Would you suggest a Java-based desktop, or maybe a C#-based one? It's an interesting idea, and I could talk for quite a while about it, but I wouldn't want to waste my time if it's not what you mean.
I think the entire approach of developing applications by writing code in a general purpose language and a toolkit is flawed. If usability is a goal, and given that resources are limited, it's important to make it easy for people with expertise in that area to design not just the GUI, but the entire interaction. But C++/Qt is aimed at experienced programmers, and exploring different GUI and interaction ideas is laborious even for them.
The solution? A VHLL GUI language with occasional native code components. Kind of like VB/ActiveX (only it shouldn't suck) or Tcl/Tk or xulrunner; each of those got something wrong, but it's clearly the way things are going, and for good reason.
Commercial software developers should be able to easily underwrite this cost
As a commercial product, Qt is not attractive except in niche markets. It is a really expensive software product (for less money, Microsoft gives you not just a toolkit, but a complete enterprise development environment). Also, its future is determined by a small company in Norway; it is prudent to avoid such dependencies. That's probably also why companies like Sun and IBM didn't pick KDE when it came to picking a Linux desktop, even though KDE (at the time) looked more mature.
But it's also wrong to divide the world into commercial and open source developers; most open source developers are both, so they all end up paying Troll Tech anyway. Furthermore, even fully open source projects may have the need to distribute closed source binaries during some stages of development; the Qt license prohibits that.
You say that a more restrictive license discourages use of that software in favour of less restrictive alternatives, but then by your logic, we would all be using *BSD because the license there is less restrictive that Linux's
I was merely making a point about the GPL versus the LGPL. (FWIW, we are all using BSD-licensed code: it's in Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. You can get an LGPL-free OS, but you can't get a BSD-free OS. I don't want to argue, though, that that is necessarily good. I think the LGPL is the right license for a GUI toolkit. GPL is good for most apps and tools. And BSD and X11 licenses useful in some other areas.)
The iPod Nano is a nice looking, but pretty standard flash-based MP3 player. There are no signficant new technologies in it, nor does it have to use any materials differnt from previous iPods. So, it's not "early adoption". If Apple chose a bad screen this time, they simply screwed up.
It's simple: looks is a major factor in the value of Apple products, and people are paying extra for that. And there is nothing frivolous about that either. People buy nice looking furniture and clothes as well. In some professions, you won't be taken seriously if you don't. A scratched or chipped laptop case simply won't do sometimes.
One display design being considered is a flat, flexible printed display developed at MIT's Media Lab.
If they are still considering research prototypes for the display design, this is pretty much still pie in the sky stuff.
The problem with a $100 laptop isn't technology, it's making it for $100, and to demonstrate that, you need to be a little more specific about the components and build than that.
Yes, NeWS was Sun's version of Display Postscript. And Java was actually Sun's second attempt at NeWS, done basically by the same people.
Sun did turn it into a language for thin clients: most thin clients come with Java installed, in addition to a web browser. In practice, people just happen to prefer HTML/JS, RDP, and VNC on their thin clients.
Capitalization doesn't (generally) make a difference for trademarking. And we can call junkmail "spam" not because of capitalization differences but because doing so doesn't identify a product.
The origin of the name "Ajax" is greek mythology, and that's where the trademark derives from. Of course, the trademark is still legal, but that doesn't change the history or derivation.
Furthermore, the term "AJAX" does denote something distinct from "dynamic web application" and refers to sites like Google Maps, Google Mail, and Yahoo! Mail. Given that it is new APIs and new software, you can bet that it's going to cost the client more, given that there are fewer toolkits and less experience with implementing these kinds of apps.
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I've been checking it out to see if there are any interesting developments about the team that apparently claimed the discovery of 2003UB313 without mentioning the fact that they at least visited the logs of the telescope Brown's team was using, if not outright deducing its existence from those logs.
"The fact"? Where has that "fact" been established? So far, all we have in an accusation and a claim from one party.
And, assuming Brown's claims are true, why should they mention that fact? It is Brown's assertion that academic principles require this, but just because Brown claims that's so doesn't make it true.
There may well be planets far out enough. There could even be a companion brown dwarf that we haven't detected so far.
Either "Xena" is a planet, or Pluto isn't
Not at all. Right now, there is no complete agreement on what a "planet" is, but it's not necessarily just a question of size. It's conceivable that between two objects, the smaller one is a planet while the bigger one is not.
Airbus and Boeing both have a lot of motivation not to produce a plane that falls out of the sky. And before I get to fly on it, the FAA will test it and it will probably have a few thousand commercial flights under its belt already. If it makes it through all that, it's safe enough for me.
Overall, I stopped worrying about whether people who design safety critical systems know what they were doing--it became clear to me long ago that they don't and that if I was going to worry about that, I'd have to become a hermit. But as long as the stuff they produce works well enough on average, it doesn't matter whether it works for the right reasons or for the wrong reasons.
As for this case, my impression of these allegations is that TTTech may have cut some corners they shouldn't have cut, and that Manangan may have reacted to that more strongly than he should have. But, again, if the end product doesn't fall out of the sky too frequently, who cares?
If the folks in charge of writing autopilot software are idiots, then I invite you step right in and do it for them, since you seem to know what's what.
Written by someone with no clue about how contracts are awarded in this modern economy. In real life, technical competency and contracts are at best weakly related.
the biggest reason IBM had substandard stuff was the same reason MS has substandard stuff now. They were playing catch up.
No, they weren't. IBM had lots of technology ready to go; it would have been trivial for them to ship a multitasking OS on a decent hardware platform. Shipping PC hardware with a lousy operating system was a choice they made. (The PC OS that missed its chance was CP/M 86, but it was only slightly better than MS-DOS.)
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
Windows isn't user friendly either, and that hasn't stopped it from acquiring 90% market share. DOS before it was even worse, yet it won out over Macintosh. Obviously, market share and user friendliness aren't related.
Take installation.
Yes, Windows system installation sucks badly; it's so bad that most PC users never upgrade Windows but buy a new PC with the next version of Windows preinstalled instead.
Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".
Actually, Linux zealots say that you click on the "Install Software" icon and then browse for the software you want. Once you find it, you double click on it, and that's it. It's really a lot simpler than on Windows, and you don't even have to take out your credit card.
If the playing field were leveled, and all PCs shipped without OS or preinstalled software, Windows would be history quickly, because, in the end, Windows is a bloody mess to install and maintain.
IBM was fully aware of minicomputers and personal computers and the threat they represented, and they did everything they could to stop them taking away market share from them. IBM was paranoid and well-informed.
In part, that's why IBM picked both a rather substandard hardware design and a rather substandard vendor to supply the operating system (IBM didn't have a choice but to go outside for their software--they were under antitrust scrutiny). This was no secret at the time--how badly the PC architecture and Microsoft's operating system sucked, and what IBM's motivations were, was obvious the day the PC was released.
And it worked as IBM intended: it took 15 years for PC software to catch up with the state of the art of the mid-80's. That translated into a lot of extra sales for IBM's mainframes, servers, and workstations. Of course, the PC business ended up being bigger and more important, but even if IBM had know that at the time, they couldn't have acted on it.
And Microsoft is about to repeat this. Microsoft would have to cannibalize their operating system and MS Office businesses in order to move ahead, and there is no way they are going to be able to do that.
Abolishing embedded media isn't the same as abolishing the media. Flash, video, PDF, ActiveX, etc. are much less of a problem when they're not embedded. Security, compatibility, and UI problems arise when they are embedded inside the hypermedia document, as covered by the patent.
As for Flash in particular, I use FlashBlock, so I need to click on it explicitly to see it. I rarely need to click on Flash at all, and when I do, it's usually something that could have been done just as well in either JavaScript or MPEG.
I don't see any grounds to support your interpretation. But I suggest you read the patent and analyze the claims, and then let us all know about the results.
Anarchism may point you away from rules in general, but Libertarianism is about a minimum set of rules.
We have close to the minimum set of rules that works in the real world; the Libertarian mistake is that they don't see that.
Most specifically, harming other people and/or their property is still very much against the rules, and very much still punishable.
That is, unfortunately, not sufficient to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The problem with "imposing lots of rules on everybody, but at least the majority agreed to them" is that it goes counter to the very principles of our nation -- namely, that laws exist to protect minorities.
There is no problem. The rules that we impose in our nation through democratic means, and the minority protections that they respect, are subject to the principles set forth in the Constitution, no more and no less.
Libertarians may believe in [...]
Yes, and that's what the problem is. Libertarian beliefs and promises don't distinguish Libertarianism from liberal politics--we all want minimal government interference in our lives--only a few religious or right-wing nuts attempt to impose additional rules on everybody.
Liberals, Libertarians, and moderate Republicans roughly have the same set of goals: prosperity, freedom, minority protection, and no unnecessary government interference in people's lives. Where they differ is on the policies of achieving that, and Libertarian policies just look like the least likely to actually achive those goals.
That is why libertarians think people can be left alone and will still help each other without needing a central authority that operates by force. In fact, as human beings go, the people who make up the government (politicians and bureaucrats) tend to be the worst.
Perhaps. But let's say that you Libertarians get to set up the nation the way you want and abolish most rules and regulations. What do you think will happen to those people? Will they disappear in a puff of smoke? Will they undergo a conversion and magically start helping their fellow men? I don't think so. Instead, they'll grab power, and since you just abolished all those pesky little rules that force people to behave in minimally decent ways towards one another, they will be unhampered in that grab for power.
We've had libertarian government on-and-off for millennia, but it usually doesn't last very long. Some kinds of autocracy and feudalism are libertarian, namely when the power is acquired legitimately according to libertarian principles. Libertarianism is like Communism: it makes unrealistic assumptions about human behavior and its consequences.
Democratic government is the best compromise we have found so far; it does indeed impose a lot of rules on everybody, but at least it's rules that the majority of people have agreed to, and it works better than the alternatives.
First-to-file doesn't affect prior art. What it means is that if there are two competing patent claims, the first to file wins. That's much saner than the current system.
If you come up with an idea independently, there is a simple way of protecting yourself from patent claims against you: publish your idea. Making your project open source probably helps, but it is probably also a good idea to write up an explanation and submit it to an archive server or even get it published in a journal.
Patent law is pretty clear: if you don't publish your idea and you don't patent it either, you shouldn't have any rights to claim ownership of it.
Don't let us gloat over the damage to Microsoft. The Eolas patent is a threat to large parts of the Internet as we know it.
No, the Eolas patent is a threat specifically to embedded, external appliations, because that's what it covers. That means for "the Internet as we know it", ActiveX, embedded media players, embedded PDF viewers, and embedded Flash players. If all of those go, as well as the ability of companies like Microsoft to fragment the web by creating Windows-specific plug-ins, I think that's good news. It will probably also help the usability of many sites because embedding applications is, ultimately, not a good idea.
I looked it up again. The patent is entitled "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document", and that's the way the claims seem to read, too.
So, invoking external applications that don't embed, or invoking built-in functionality, would seem to be OK. I believe this means invoking a built-in MPEG4 player would be fine, as would be Javascript/SVG animation. Furthermore, both of those do have clear prior art and probably weren't addressed in this lawsuit.
You can read the patent yourself.
I may recall the patent completely wrong, but I think it specifically talks about extending browser functionality by embedding external applications or plug-ins. If the functionality is fixed and built-in, then the patent may not apply. I suspect that it is hair splitting like that that let the patent survive reexamination, but that also means that it needs to be interpreted narrowly.
I can see why such a feature might be desirable for some kinds of software. For example, you might want to ensure interoperability among different web services based on free software. And, after all, commercial software vendors apply even more onerous restrictions to web-based software, such as "per user" licensing costs.
However, I think it would be a good idea to have two versions of the license, one with this provision and one without, and give them different names, say WGPL (Web GPL) and GPL. If the FSF only releases a revision of the GPL that includes this provision, I suspect many software authors will stick with the GPL2, and they'll be missing other clarifications and improvements in the GPL license.
If the patent only covers applets, Flash, plug-ins, and ActiveX, then it probably doesn't matter anymore: they are not being used for much that is important anymore, and anything that eliminates these from the web is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
That doesn't change the fact, of course, that the patent is stupid and has prior art., it's just that in this case, the incorrect decision may not have a lot of serious consequences.
If you have followed him, you'll see that to Declan McCullagh, anything the government does is wrong; that's just his view of the world.
So far, there is not even the slightest indication that the FCC either has the authority or the ability of regulating what you do on your PC. So, while the FCC may really intend something stupid with this rule, it probably doesn't matter; they might as well try to make and enforce FCC regulations against radio emissions from the sun.
Or do you suggest that any new program to be developed in the new language/toolkit/whatever, with bindings to integrate it with the older stuff? If you mean the latter, is this really switching, or is it just changing your policy about how new stuff is made? Please clarify further on this interesting point.
Yes, that's what I mean. It's like Carbon/Cocoa on Macintosh: Cocoa is the preferred new API and it's arguably a lot easier to code for, but lots of applications are still written in Carbon.
Please explain how C++ and Qt in particular prevent the KDE team from achieving their goals.
I didn't say "prevent"; you can write a high quality application in assembly language if you invest enough time in it and are persistent enough (and people did, on Macintosh). But it's just not a wise thing to do.
Are you saying that C++ is too low-level to be used for desktop development, and as Qt is a C++ toolkit, it too is affected by this? Would you suggest a Java-based desktop, or maybe a C#-based one? It's an interesting idea, and I could talk for quite a while about it, but I wouldn't want to waste my time if it's not what you mean.
I think the entire approach of developing applications by writing code in a general purpose language and a toolkit is flawed. If usability is a goal, and given that resources are limited, it's important to make it easy for people with expertise in that area to design not just the GUI, but the entire interaction. But C++/Qt is aimed at experienced programmers, and exploring different GUI and interaction ideas is laborious even for them.
The solution? A VHLL GUI language with occasional native code components. Kind of like VB/ActiveX (only it shouldn't suck) or Tcl/Tk or xulrunner; each of those got something wrong, but it's clearly the way things are going, and for good reason.
Commercial software developers should be able to easily underwrite this cost
As a commercial product, Qt is not attractive except in niche markets. It is a really expensive software product (for less money, Microsoft gives you not just a toolkit, but a complete enterprise development environment). Also, its future is determined by a small company in Norway; it is prudent to avoid such dependencies. That's probably also why companies like Sun and IBM didn't pick KDE when it came to picking a Linux desktop, even though KDE (at the time) looked more mature.
But it's also wrong to divide the world into commercial and open source developers; most open source developers are both, so they all end up paying Troll Tech anyway. Furthermore, even fully open source projects may have the need to distribute closed source binaries during some stages of development; the Qt license prohibits that.
You say that a more restrictive license discourages use of that software in favour of less restrictive alternatives, but then by your logic, we would all be using *BSD because the license there is less restrictive that Linux's
I was merely making a point about the GPL versus the LGPL. (FWIW, we are all using BSD-licensed code: it's in Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. You can get an LGPL-free OS, but you can't get a BSD-free OS. I don't want to argue, though, that that is necessarily good. I think the LGPL is the right license for a GUI toolkit. GPL is good for most apps and tools. And BSD and X11 licenses useful in some other areas.)
The iPod Nano is a nice looking, but pretty standard flash-based MP3 player. There are no signficant new technologies in it, nor does it have to use any materials differnt from previous iPods. So, it's not "early adoption". If Apple chose a bad screen this time, they simply screwed up.
It's simple: looks is a major factor in the value of Apple products, and people are paying extra for that. And there is nothing frivolous about that either. People buy nice looking furniture and clothes as well. In some professions, you won't be taken seriously if you don't. A scratched or chipped laptop case simply won't do sometimes.
One display design being considered is a flat, flexible printed display developed at MIT's Media Lab.
If they are still considering research prototypes for the display design, this is pretty much still pie in the sky stuff.
The problem with a $100 laptop isn't technology, it's making it for $100, and to demonstrate that, you need to be a little more specific about the components and build than that.
Yes, NeWS was Sun's version of Display Postscript. And Java was actually Sun's second attempt at NeWS, done basically by the same people.
Sun did turn it into a language for thin clients: most thin clients come with Java installed, in addition to a web browser. In practice, people just happen to prefer HTML/JS, RDP, and VNC on their thin clients.
Capitalization doesn't (generally) make a difference for trademarking. And we can call junkmail "spam" not because of capitalization differences but because doing so doesn't identify a product.
The origin of the name "Ajax" is greek mythology, and that's where the trademark derives from. Of course, the trademark is still legal, but that doesn't change the history or derivation.
Furthermore, the term "AJAX" does denote something distinct from "dynamic web application" and refers to sites like Google Maps, Google Mail, and Yahoo! Mail. Given that it is new APIs and new software, you can bet that it's going to cost the client more, given that there are fewer toolkits and less experience with implementing these kinds of apps.