with siteadvisor nobody went to disreputable* sites, so only major commercial sites and personal blogs exist now!!!
(*sites that did not pay for a good rating)
This is a valid concern, however SiteAdvisor does not remove bad listings, it only provides additional information. Care must be taken on how that information is used, but doesnt warrant the same level of concern as solutions that utilise filtering.
For example, I will be using this information to avoid sites that are known to infect users computers or engage in bad email practices, unless I really need to visit that page. I wont be avoiding untested sites, because I use Adblock & NoScript, so I have very little to fear. However, I will be advising novices that Untested means they should avoid those sites unless they have good reason to follow the link. i.e. think twice before entering the site. Hopefully with novices exercising a little more caution, I will spend less time rebuilding computers for friends.
Oh wait! this is NOT going to fix the problems with malware.
There is no magic bullet for any problem that involves to humans. Site Advisor is an elegant tool that may be used to reduce the problem.
Seriously, this just sends every URL you go to to the siteadvisor servers, and checks to see if they are "okay" as dictated by a specific corporation with no accountability.
How is this different from typing in a search term into Google?
it wouldn't surprise me if this WAS the next generation of malware. Hidden right in plain sight.
It might surprise you to learn that their Firefox extension source code IShidden right in plain sight.
Download their XPI file, unzip it, unzip chrome/safe.jar, and scan the code. The first thing you should notice is that there are no DLL files -- it is implemented in standard Mozilla technology: XUL + JS. As such, the source code will be vetted by hundreds of people, and any attempt to do the wrong thing WILL be noticed.
I think this tool is a great idea for Firefox users as well.
Even if you practise very safe web practises, avoiding sites that use IE exploits or send spam is a good idea. By not visiting these sites, you deny them advertising money that your visit brings, unless you also use adblock, and it also reduces the site's presence on the web, further eliminating their ability to secure funding.
I expect this extension will also improve my research efforts, as I wont spend as much time vetting through useless sites.
Having previously worked as an Australian lecturer at six or seven institutions, teaching electronics, programming and system administration to overseas students, I am quite used to poor, non-standard English.
Overseas students are really big money here, and our education market has made a lot of changes to increase our education sector accordingly; not always in ways that benefit the students. For example, unit examination in C.S. has been moving away from methods that require comprehension of English. I have been shocked to find that students have progressed to my third year classes without being able to write paragraph responses without gross grammatical problems, often making comprehension difficult. I found that I was often in a conflicted position marking essays where a students otherwise proven to me that they are in charge of the topics but lack the English skills -- often the essay was obviously the result of a lot of effort, could be correct, but I had no idea. Often the only way I could honestly pass the student was to ask them to come in and discuss it with them in person, and for various reasons, this wasn't always possible to organise.
Sadly, a number of institutions here now offer expedited passages through C.S., often with little regard for the students eventual knowledge. One college, where I worked briefly, placed a lot of pressure on me to alter grades in order to keep overseas students moving through the college, both to ensure the room utilisation stays very high, and also so simplify planning units offered each semester.
Regarding OS outsourced phone support, I don't find a big difference between local and OS in how happy I feel after calls. I do prefer to hear an Australian answer the call as it reassures me that cultural and language barriers wont be a problem, but talking to a well spoken OS support person is usually more interesting & rewarding. In general, I have found that OS vs local doesn't make any difference when I am faced with a support person who doesn't know what they are talking about; the easiest solution is to hang up asap and try to figure it out myself, and maybe call back with more information.
The likelihood of a resourceful/knowledgeable support operator is a function of the ethics of the company I have a contract with; a good company that engages OS support operators usually means the OS support operators will also be good.
You are spot on; Skype doesnt have a monopoly, but what others are implying is that Intel does have a monopoly. Should an anti-trust suit proceed against Intel (presumably by AMD), Skype will be heavily involved as they colluded with Intel in a very open manner, and were the ones that introduced the artificial limit.
The statements about 2k and xp are entirely true.... [Microsoft] lived up to their goals for xp and 2k.
Excuse me!?:
While it may be true that their goals for Windows 2000 did include "to improve security and safety for all our customers", it was definately not their primary goal, and they failed to deliver real improvements in this area. Anyone with real security credentials would have told them ActiveX needed to go, but that meant they would loose their stranglehold on the Intranets. Internet Explorer exploits were still rampant until XP SP2, and ActiveX still has not been removed from the product, nor does it look like IE 7 will finally kill it.
"Windows XP is the most secure and dependable operating system we have ever produced." (source)
A lot of folk consider Windows 2000 to be more dependable than Windows XP, and DOS was more secure; back when Novell built the TCP/IP stack for their operating system.
What a pity they neglected to compare XP with operating systems produced outside of Redmond -- maybe with the bar set a bit higher in the first place, they may have been able to avoid taking a year out to produce a secure version of XP: SP2.
Maybe with Longhorn, Microsoft will finally achieve the goals they set for themselves in the late 90's.
Re:"Shared bookmarks creates unholy lust in my hea
on
Google Toolbar v.4
·
· Score: 1
Another way to satisfy the unholy lust is to try Flock. It runs on OSX, and has native bookmark sharing with support for the popular bookmark sharing sites.
It sounds like this topic was certainly before your time!
As far back as I can remember, Netscape profiles could be shared across Unix machines using NFS, and I presume the windows counterpart also worked the same. File locking was in place to prevent the profile being trashed. And then in version 4.5 (October 1998), Netscape allowed the profile, including calanders, to be stored on a central server using Internet protocols. It was not until many years later that Exchange offered the same level of functionality for Windows workstations, and Internet Explorer still does not natively allow Favourites to be retrieved over the Internet.
SciFi writers have been very good at predicting human advancement.
I suspect this is because they research rather than speculate, and they believe in their predictions enough that they flesh them out by writing detailed descriptions of what life would be like after their predictions come true.
... and if the bug search reveals a significant number of problems in MySQL, it will encourage a lot of LAMP developers that have been considering migrating to PostgreSQL to finally put other work on hold and strengthen their backend.
I wonder how Oracle would respond to security problems being found in their newest product. If a large number of problems were found, and the humorous "unbreakable" slogan only recently put to rest, we may finally see how Oracle intends to play it's cards.
Quartz is very similar to DPS (cicra 1987), and NeWS was used by Sun Microsystems and SGI, and was part of the success of FrameMaker, arguably the best desktop publishing package ever written for large documents.
And it's not true that Unix had the components before Windows
Motif 1.x predates Microsoft Windows 1.0. By 1990, Motif, Open Look and the Project Athena widgets all existed, predating Windows 3.0. Before Windows 3.1, there was a Motif API to make it appear like Open Look, and reference material of how to use X widget libraries were already in the third edition.
When they were designing Motif/CDE, they went to Microsoft for advice on how to do it.
In my opinion, the Windows 95 desktop was also skin deep.
The unix world, including linux, had all the underlying components, and had them before Windows was conceived.
Postscript printing and lineprinters have worked perfectly on Linux since/bin/cat and/dev/lp. Real font management on windows 95 consisted of the Adobe Type Manager and a collection of Postscript fonts that were native on Linux. High level Drawing APIs? take you pick: Motif, Athena, etc; higher? Tcl/Tk; lower? X.
I dont mean to imply that Linux/BSD was better than Microsoft's offering at the time; just that I feel we missed the boat by allowing Microsoft to dominate so easily when the raw potential to build a competitive operating system was freely available. Once Microsoft gained control, they orchestrated the hardware compatibility problems we face today, and billions of dollars have been spent creating the mess we know as the Windows API.
I was referring to the time when Windows 95 was released. I was also using slackware.
Pretty? There were heaps of pretty screensavers and desktop candy. If you looked beyond the different widget sets, it was a good environment. Not as pretty as IRIX, but a lot cheaper!
Flexible? Redhat wasnt flexible at the time, but linux was as flexible then as it is now. Anybody can make their own distribution. Building software from scratch was not easy, and sometimes it was difficult to get X working on strange hardware combinations, but most of the time it worked well, and it definately worked more often than Windows 95. Everyone I know learnt how to install software from scratch without too much help.
Regarding hardware support, I preferred Linux because what drivers were available were always on hand. With Windows 95, and even today, I tread trying to find drivers for obscure hardware, or motherboards without a CD. With Linux, they all came on the same CD (or 14 floppies if you prefer), so I always readily knew what hardware was supported. The hardware support for linux went really bad for a few years, with all of the PC hardware manufacturers completely locked into Microsoft.
As a result of the success of Windows 9x at the time, I am quite confident that historians will reflect on the Windows era as a 10 year failure in the history of computing. The failure mostly belongs to the other operating systems that were unable to provide a viable alternative, but also to the wider I.T. community that gorged itself on the crumbs that fell from Microsoft's tables.
At the time, even linux was prettier, more flexible and had more applications and better hardware support than Windows at the time; yet Windows was selected in spite of its track record. And it seems we have not learnt. XBOX and XBOX 360 will be more of the same. Instead of building platforms that can last a decade (think PSOne), Microsoft will start churning out new versions more rapidly and product quality will slide quickly.
Is depriving users of binary drivers such a bad thing?
There are only two reasons why anybody would say yes:
A user wants to use their new [insert cool device here] with Linux, but does not understand why they want to use Linux.
A lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon right now, but few take the time to realise why the bandwagon exists. It isn't by chance that Linux is now a melting pot of wonderful functionality and opportunity, its because of the decisions that have been made in the past, and how they have been implemented.
A company wants to sell [insert cool device here] to the Linux users mentioned above.
Hardware vendors that understand open source realise they can make a superior product by working with open source. Open source drivers raise the "quality" bar; a good hardware company wants to clear that bar.
These two reasons are a co-dependent relationship, and the kernel hackers are doing everybody a favour by discouraging it, and making it difficult.
As Linux and open source grows, the market will bless vendors and hardware manufacturers that adopt open source, and eventually new users will find that all of their devices work out of the box.
There is nothing preventing these three companies from building a kernel module that provides said stable layer. That module would probably need to be GPL, but that depends on what kernel calls it needs to make.
Maintaining this stable layer would be the responsibility of those that need it. Due to the rather fluid changes that go on in the kernel source code, the maintainer would need to actively involved, and it may even take some engineering genius every once in a while. Im sure that if someone wrote such a beast, maintained it for a while, and kernel modules started to be written for it, Linus would see that is serves a useful purpose.
Until then, crys for stability from software engineers are sounding very much like "wait for me".
If they want stability, they should consider using one of the stable branches, like 2.2, 2.4, or one of the 2.6.x.y stable branches.
I realise you are not critising OSS, and you raise a lot of interesting points about Nokia, but I would like to point out that when large companies announce they are jumping on the open source bandwagon, they are not hoping the OSS community helps them add zero's to the balance sheet.
They are buying kudos with two very important groups: CTOs and engineers in the industry. Of course they may also encourage external participation, and accept patches, but that is rarely the primary focus. A sub-domain listing open source sends a number of very clear statements about the company. here are a few..
Microsoft does not have them on a leash,
Interoperability is not just a buzzword on their marketing material,
An appreciation that open source software underpins everything in I.T. these days. 5 years ago, most CTOs didn't realise this. Now, sensible CTOs wants to know that every staff member at the vendor is aware of this fact, otherwise they will be working with fools who have "not invented here" syndrome and other related ailments.
The board of the company has embraced the economic advantages of open source.
They allow and encourage engineers to work on open source tools in order to perform their jobs. With a website like this, Nokia's HR department would be flooded with quality resumes.
The brain-power of the engineering department is worth showcasing.
Opening up the hardware does help hardware design and marketing.
Providing specifications and allowing mod's (even silly UI mods) shows a willingness to put their design under the spotlight, and let the chips fall where they may. Obviously the component is built by a confident engineering team that have not been re-assigned to build the next big thing.
And this is why it is brilliant marketing IMO. Instead of a large marketing campaign which could never unseat iPod, they are giving customers more bang for their buck. happy customers mean blog entries, and the meme is born.
In addition to these direct benefits, in a year or so they will find that they have more money to spend on the hardware because useful software enhancements and UI designs will be falling into their laps. These contributions may not be polished, but it is free R&D.
If Gates really wanted to preserve computing history, he should donate money to the dying *BSDs! Im sure that PR stunt would raise some eyebrows on/. and close a few wounds.
No problems! I'll do that right after he refunds everyone for software that was broken, or pays the damage for any ill effect of software his company has released. This is the standard expectation for consumers purchasing any product.
Back in reality for a moment, I realise that damages are not warrented, but in my part of the software industry, refunds do happen. Big clients expect that software is actually able to do what is described in the documentation, does not crash, and that it interoperates.
one must honestly be impressed with [Microsoft]... making computing ubiquitous, and easy to understand...
Without Microsoft, the world would not have stood still. Moore's `law' is what drove the recent information age; I doubt any company could have stopped it. The Internet is the only component of the puzzle that was critical for our lifestyle, and the formation of Internet as it know it was a coup of the people over the mega-corps if ever there was one. Without Microsoft, the Internet would be a much safer place to do business.
It is my opinion that without Microsoft, companies like IBM, SGI, HP, Sun, Apple, etc would be very viable companies now with quality goods in constant competition. They were starting to introduce low end workstations in the timeframe that MS-DOS was becoming popular. And while MS-DOS was still learning about pixels, SGI Iris had multimedia.
Instead of the hardware engineering industry being matched with quality in software engineering, quantity has always been the "name of the game" for the bulk of the software industry.
My gut feeling says that RMS will be remembered long after all of Gates monuments and plaques have deteriorated away.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a valid concern, however SiteAdvisor does not remove bad listings, it only provides additional information. Care must be taken on how that information is used, but doesnt warrant the same level of concern as solutions that utilise filtering.
For example, I will be using this information to avoid sites that are known to infect users computers or engage in bad email practices, unless I really need to visit that page. I wont be avoiding untested sites, because I use Adblock & NoScript, so I have very little to fear. However, I will be advising novices that Untested means they should avoid those sites unless they have good reason to follow the link. i.e. think twice before entering the site.
Hopefully with novices exercising a little more caution, I will spend less time rebuilding computers for friends.
There is no magic bullet for any problem that involves to humans. Site Advisor is an elegant tool that may be used to reduce the problem.
How is this different from typing in a search term into Google?
It might surprise you to learn that their Firefox extension source code IS hidden right in plain sight.
Download their XPI file, unzip it, unzip chrome/safe.jar, and scan the code. The first thing you should notice is that there are no DLL files -- it is implemented in standard Mozilla technology: XUL + JS. As such, the source code will be vetted by hundreds of people, and any attempt to do the wrong thing WILL be noticed.
I think this tool is a great idea for Firefox users as well.
Even if you practise very safe web practises, avoiding sites that use IE exploits or send spam is a good idea. By not visiting these sites, you deny them advertising money that your visit brings, unless you also use adblock, and it also reduces the site's presence on the web, further eliminating their ability to secure funding.
I expect this extension will also improve my research efforts, as I wont spend as much time vetting through useless sites.
Having previously worked as an Australian lecturer at six or seven institutions, teaching electronics, programming and system administration to overseas students, I am quite used to poor, non-standard English.
Overseas students are really big money here, and our education market has made a lot of changes to increase our education sector accordingly; not always in ways that benefit the students. For example, unit examination in C.S. has been moving away from methods that require comprehension of English. I have been shocked to find that students have progressed to my third year classes without being able to write paragraph responses without gross grammatical problems, often making comprehension difficult. I found that I was often in a conflicted position marking essays where a students otherwise proven to me that they are in charge of the topics but lack the English skills -- often the essay was obviously the result of a lot of effort, could be correct, but I had no idea. Often the only way I could honestly pass the student was to ask them to come in and discuss it with them in person, and for various reasons, this wasn't always possible to organise.
Sadly, a number of institutions here now offer expedited passages through C.S., often with little regard for the students eventual knowledge. One college, where I worked briefly, placed a lot of pressure on me to alter grades in order to keep overseas students moving through the college, both to ensure the room utilisation stays very high, and also so simplify planning units offered each semester.
Regarding OS outsourced phone support, I don't find a big difference between local and OS in how happy I feel after calls. I do prefer to hear an Australian answer the call as it reassures me that cultural and language barriers wont be a problem, but talking to a well spoken OS support person is usually more interesting & rewarding. In general, I have found that OS vs local doesn't make any difference when I am faced with a support person who doesn't know what they are talking about; the easiest solution is to hang up asap and try to figure it out myself, and maybe call back with more information.
The likelihood of a resourceful/knowledgeable support operator is a function of the ethics of the company I have a contract with; a good company that engages OS support operators usually means the OS support operators will also be good.
You are spot on; Skype doesnt have a monopoly, but what others are implying is that Intel does have a monopoly. Should an anti-trust suit proceed against Intel (presumably by AMD), Skype will be heavily involved as they colluded with Intel in a very open manner, and were the ones that introduced the artificial limit.
Excuse me!? :
While it may be true that their goals for Windows 2000 did include "to improve security and safety for all our customers", it was definately not their primary goal, and they failed to deliver real improvements in this area. Anyone with real security credentials would have told them ActiveX needed to go, but that meant they would loose their stranglehold on the Intranets. Internet Explorer exploits were still rampant until XP SP2, and ActiveX still has not been removed from the product, nor does it look like IE 7 will finally kill it.
A lot of folk consider Windows 2000 to be more dependable than Windows XP, and DOS was more secure; back when Novell built the TCP/IP stack for their operating system.
What a pity they neglected to compare XP with operating systems produced outside of Redmond -- maybe with the bar set a bit higher in the first place, they may have been able to avoid taking a year out to produce a secure version of XP: SP2.
Maybe with Longhorn, Microsoft will finally achieve the goals they set for themselves in the late 90's.
Another way to satisfy the unholy lust is to try Flock. It runs on OSX, and has native bookmark sharing with support for the popular bookmark sharing sites.
It sounds like this topic was certainly before your time!
As far back as I can remember, Netscape profiles could be shared across Unix machines using NFS, and I presume the windows counterpart also worked the same. File locking was in place to prevent the profile being trashed. And then in version 4.5 (October 1998), Netscape allowed the profile, including calanders, to be stored on a central server using Internet protocols. It was not until many years later that Exchange offered the same level of functionality for Windows workstations, and Internet Explorer still does not natively allow Favourites to be retrieved over the Internet.
SciFi writers have been very good at predicting human advancement.
I suspect this is because they research rather than speculate, and they believe in their predictions enough that they flesh them out by writing detailed descriptions of what life would be like after their predictions come true.
I heard recently that Linus keeps a few offshore backups in case the feds raid the Oregon servers.
... and if the bug search reveals a significant number of problems in MySQL, it will encourage a lot of LAMP developers that have been considering migrating to PostgreSQL to finally put other work on hold and strengthen their backend.
I wonder how Oracle would respond to security problems being found in their newest product. If a large number of problems were found, and the humorous "unbreakable" slogan only recently put to rest, we may finally see how Oracle intends to play it's cards.
In my opinion, the Windows 95 desktop was also skin deep.
/bin/cat and /dev/lp.
The unix world, including linux, had all the underlying components, and had them before Windows was conceived.
Postscript printing and lineprinters have worked perfectly on Linux since
Real font management on windows 95 consisted of the Adobe Type Manager and a collection of Postscript fonts that were native on Linux.
High level Drawing APIs? take you pick: Motif, Athena, etc; higher? Tcl/Tk; lower? X.
I dont mean to imply that Linux/BSD was better than Microsoft's offering at the time; just that I feel we missed the boat by allowing Microsoft to dominate so easily when the raw potential to build a competitive operating system was freely available. Once Microsoft gained control, they orchestrated the hardware compatibility problems we face today, and billions of dollars have been spent creating the mess we know as the Windows API.
I was referring to the time when Windows 95 was released. I was also using slackware.
Pretty? There were heaps of pretty screensavers and desktop candy. If you looked beyond the different widget sets, it was a good environment. Not as pretty as IRIX, but a lot cheaper!
Flexible? Redhat wasnt flexible at the time, but linux was as flexible then as it is now. Anybody can make their own distribution. Building software from scratch was not easy, and sometimes it was difficult to get X working on strange hardware combinations, but most of the time it worked well, and it definately worked more often than Windows 95. Everyone I know learnt how to install software from scratch without too much help.
Regarding hardware support, I preferred Linux because what drivers were available were always on hand. With Windows 95, and even today, I tread trying to find drivers for obscure hardware, or motherboards without a CD. With Linux, they all came on the same CD (or 14 floppies if you prefer), so I always readily knew what hardware was supported. The hardware support for linux went really bad for a few years, with all of the PC hardware manufacturers completely locked into Microsoft.
As a result of the success of Windows 9x at the time, I am quite confident that historians will reflect on the Windows era as a 10 year failure in the history of computing. The failure mostly belongs to the other operating systems that were unable to provide a viable alternative, but also to the wider I.T. community that gorged itself on the crumbs that fell from Microsoft's tables.
At the time, even linux was prettier, more flexible and had more applications and better hardware support than Windows at the time; yet Windows was selected in spite of its track record. And it seems we have not learnt. XBOX and XBOX 360 will be more of the same. Instead of building platforms that can last a decade (think PSOne), Microsoft will start churning out new versions more rapidly and product quality will slide quickly.
And not a moment too soon.
I have to spend all my spare cycles worrying about a flu pandemic instead.
There are only two reasons why anybody would say yes:
A lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon right now, but few take the time to realise why the bandwagon exists. It isn't by chance that Linux is now a melting pot of wonderful functionality and opportunity, its because of the decisions that have been made in the past, and how they have been implemented.
Hardware vendors that understand open source realise they can make a superior product by working with open source. Open source drivers raise the "quality" bar; a good hardware company wants to clear that bar.
These two reasons are a co-dependent relationship, and the kernel hackers are doing everybody a favour by discouraging it, and making it difficult.
As Linux and open source grows, the market will bless vendors and hardware manufacturers that adopt open source, and eventually new users will find that all of their devices work out of the box.
There is nothing preventing these three companies from building a kernel module that provides said stable layer. That module would probably need to be GPL, but that depends on what kernel calls it needs to make.
Maintaining this stable layer would be the responsibility of those that need it. Due to the rather fluid changes that go on in the kernel source code, the maintainer would need to actively involved, and it may even take some engineering genius every once in a while. Im sure that if someone wrote such a beast, maintained it for a while, and kernel modules started to be written for it, Linus would see that is serves a useful purpose.
Until then, crys for stability from software engineers are sounding very much like "wait for me".
If they want stability, they should consider using one of the stable branches, like 2.2, 2.4, or one of the 2.6.x.y stable branches.
and then when the faeces strike the ventilator you can honestly claim ignorance...
It doesnt matter how the shit ended up on your face; it doesnt look good.
They are buying kudos with two very important groups: CTOs and engineers in the industry. Of course they may also encourage external participation, and accept patches, but that is rarely the primary focus. A sub-domain listing open source sends a number of very clear statements about the company. here are a few..
Opening up the hardware does help hardware design and marketing.
Providing specifications and allowing mod's (even silly UI mods) shows a willingness to put their design under the spotlight, and let the chips fall where they may. Obviously the component is built by a confident engineering team that have not been re-assigned to build the next big thing.
And this is why it is brilliant marketing IMO. Instead of a large marketing campaign which could never unseat iPod, they are giving customers more bang for their buck. happy customers mean blog entries, and the meme is born.
In addition to these direct benefits, in a year or so they will find that they have more money to spend on the hardware because useful software enhancements and UI designs will be falling into their laps. These contributions may not be polished, but it is free R&D.
Not often. Momentous reverse engineering would be appropriate for WINE 1.0 or ReactOS 1.0.
I doubt that Oboe will that big!
If Gates really wanted to preserve computing history, he should donate money to the dying *BSDs! Im sure that PR stunt would raise some eyebrows on /. and close a few wounds.
No problems! I'll do that right after he refunds everyone for software that was broken, or pays the damage for any ill effect of software his company has released. This is the standard expectation for consumers purchasing any product.
Back in reality for a moment, I realise that damages are not warrented, but in my part of the software industry, refunds do happen. Big clients expect that software is actually able to do what is described in the documentation, does not crash, and that it interoperates.
one must honestly be impressed with [Microsoft] ... making computing ubiquitous, and easy to understand...
Without Microsoft, the world would not have stood still. Moore's `law' is what drove the recent information age; I doubt any company could have stopped it. The Internet is the only component of the puzzle that was critical for our lifestyle, and the formation of Internet as it know it was a coup of the people over the mega-corps if ever there was one. Without Microsoft, the Internet would be a much safer place to do business.
It is my opinion that without Microsoft, companies like IBM, SGI, HP, Sun, Apple, etc would be very viable companies now with quality goods in constant competition. They were starting to introduce low end workstations in the timeframe that MS-DOS was becoming popular. And while MS-DOS was still learning about pixels, SGI Iris had multimedia.
Instead of the hardware engineering industry being matched with quality in software engineering, quantity has always been the "name of the game" for the bulk of the software industry.
My gut feeling says that RMS will be remembered long after all of Gates monuments and plaques have deteriorated away.