On Sat, 2008-04-26 at 15:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > Francis Earl wrote: > > > > There is nothing you can really do about nvidia and ati, nothing but > > reverse engineer things, or force them to open up the specs. > > Of course there is: provide a stable interface for drivers and cooperate > with instead of subverting the vendors that try to improve your product. > > > To answer your question, yes it does feel good being part of a minority > > that asks "how are they able to get away with that?", and makes an > > effort to ensure the industry can't rape users anymore. > > Industry can only rape users if there is no competition. Users choose > what they buy. The way to help them is to increase the available choices. > > > It speaks more > > loudly for the ignorance of society at large that these things are even > > an issue. > > No, it means that you aren't addressing the real issue at all. The real > problem is that Microsoft has no competition, and by working to ensure > that Linux distributions cannot contain everything they need to be a > competitor, you are helping them maintain their monopoly status and > their ability to rape users. > But remember when Microsoft attempted to usurp SUN's Java, and how SUN had to go after them to prevent that? Or do you remember Wordstar which was a word processing program which had a working model where you never had to take your fingers off the home row (it was used by at least 199 professional Authors, as well as many hundreds of educators), but Microsoft captured the control J character to disable its menues? These are the sorts of things that can happen through the openings of standards. Control J is in fact the standard for a line feed. Yet no microsoft system has ever included control J ascii 0x0a to achieve a linefeed (unless they have started within the last 5 years). Instead Microsoft ends lines with c/r which is ascii 0x0d. Now we have lots of menues with Word, driven by a mouse (with some associated helper keys if you can remember them), but all require that you remove your hands from the home row due to the means by which they are called. There were others, like Super Calc, and Dbase2 and Dbase3 which did quite well for most small business needs. And then there are the interminable iterations of Basic... Don't get me started... And now C# or whatever they are calling it, along with the SCO debacle. These things all brought about the necessity to be so vigilant about open software. When Word Perfect went out of business, there was a period of time when WordPefect documents could not be edited by Word. Thank goodness some kind folks took it upon themselves to write a converter to a few other word processing programs and typesetting programs. Proprietary stuff has a way of creeping in where it can do damage via the legal system, and while I want programmers to get paid for their work, I do not want one system or even one set of standards to wipe everything else out. If that happened you would not have the high capacity disks you have today thanks to the shift from RLE to PRML to whatever standards are now being used for the magneto-strictive heads. And there is still better technology available out there somewhere. I do want technology to move forward, but I do not want to lose data like some old tapes I have that were on the 40GB stnadard that can no longer be read (I think SUN has a drive that will read them should I ever decide to plunk down the bucks or decide that the software and documentation there would be worth it.) What happened to Digital Research? Digital Equipment Corporation? Televideo and hundreds of others? What happened to the software that they ran? Anyone remember sprites? Sprite hardware collision detection? What a wonderful concept, low bandwidth at the time, but can you imagine a sprite system built on a 1.3Ghz processor platform? or a 3d sprite hardware system? Sure some technologies are replaced, and some die due to technical lapses, and occasionally one is too early in the hardware capability region, but how do we hang onto those intriguing concepts? The Open Software movement has archives both formal and informal all over the world with bits and pieces just waiting for discovery and implementation in a new context or new hardware, along with some capability to recover things from long ago systems. Like rosetta stones just waiting for their 30th century discovery to decode our past. Regards, Les H -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
