So apparently they want a special tax just for them, to pay for the cost of "piracy." At the same time they want it to be completely illegal to format shift any of your personal music, or rip in any way. How they think this is logical I'll never know.

How nice they think they can get the government to collect free money for them also. I'm not opposed to a blank media tax, but the money should stay in government coffers and never go to the pockets of a special interest group.

But if indeed a blank media tax is really going to offset the cost of piracy (and really that's the only justification that can be offered for such a tax., then logically, since the cost of copying is already paid for, there should be no prohibition on copying whatsoever. But no, they want to have it both ways, which benefits only them and offers consumers no benefits.

Am I the only one who finds the removal of the "read more" links on the front page to decrease the usability of the web site dramatically?

Phone keyboard caused me to mistype. Gtk# works with X11 *or* Wayland. So if you wanted to use C# to make X11 applications you certainly could! Like I say they are just bindings to Gtk+, so things work just fine using whatever backends Gtk+ uses. There are bindings for Mono and C# for just about any Linux library out there also. So if you wanted to use C#, it would certainly work in your remote situation. Though personally I would just use Python.

Umm, so why does Dice think we need a "share" button in place of a simple link to read the articles and comments? I realize I can click on the title of the article, and I found out while hovering the mouse cursor that I can click on the little comment bubble. But neither of those actions is obvious or discoverable. Please bring back the "read more" link! Come on guys. Thought you'd learned your lesson with the beta site fiasco. For a while I thought slashdot had leveled out, but now it's going downhill again.

Oh rest assured that everything "documented" in "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" was based on real events. This set of shows should be required watching for any political wonk, or anyone thinking of running for office. The show literally hurts while being the funniest show ever made. Even if you have never experienced a parliamentary system.

In one episode, the British government sends delegation to an ultra-conservative Arab state and during a reception, the British civil service sets up a communications room that, throughout the course of the evening, passed "messages" to various diplomatic, government, and civil service personnel, topping off their otherwise non-alcoholic drinks with booze. The Arabs look on with amusement as the British personnel get drunker and drunker as the night progresses. As the producer of the show said later, you can't make this stuff up. It was based on an event that really happened.

Bernard Woolley: Minister, there's an urgent call for you in the communications room. A Mr Haig.
James Hacker: General Haig?
Bernard Woolley: No, MR Haig. You know, with the dimples.
James Hacker: Yes, yes. Do excuse me. Most important.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

If you mean can you write graphical Linux programs the run on x11 out Wayland, the answer is yes absolutely. Gtk and Gnome bindings were some of the earliest tools for mono. In fact monodevelop is a gtk app, written in c#. Gtk turns out to be a pretty good fit for c#

That's really good. Just enough "you could be right" sentiment to make us believe you're expressing a real, valid, independant opinion, and not a paid post from the kremlin's trolling factories. Very well played indeed.

This is crazy. Why should the app have to know or care about the DPI of the screen. GUI toolkits should work based on pixel-independent units, and use layout managers to sanely lay out the widgets. I guess I've never understood the HiDPI hacks that everyone is doing, even in Gnome and KDE. If I have a dialog that uses 12 point font, it should be 12 point regardless of DPI and everything in the dialog box should be the same whether the screen is 72 dpi or 300 dpi.

I've always thought the Win32 pixel-based, fixed-position dialog boxes were a bad idea. OS X also fails badly in this area. I tried to get OS X to drive a TV, which sucked horribly because you just can't scale up the display at all. Windows may do this hap-hazardly, but at least you can make things bigger for the TV screen.

Sounds like you didn't actually read the article, or understand what it said. Of course the OS is not for you. You're either not a programmer, or else you're not a programmer who's been exposed to some of the really cool ideas of the past like Smalltalk and its IDE, or LISP machines. Perhaps you would not think of anything to learn from them either.

From a programmer's point of view a shell/file explorer that's integrated the way TempleOS's is is way cool, even if it's not useful for normal users. Sure C is awkward as a shell expression language. But it's still a super cool idea (even if impractical for most computer use today).

No, his hypertext format is definitely not a reinvention of docx. Reread the article. It's more like a more flexible version of the old MS .doc format actually, which was just a serialization of in-memory OLE structures, which was part of why doc files have always been so hard to read since the OLE objects themselves were always changing as MS worked on Office.

Actually, as it presently stands, his OS is very secure indeed. It's literally impervious to remote exploits, and you'll never run any insecure software on it because odds are if you ran it its only his software or your own. Sure if it ever became network-oriented it would be a huge problem. That's not the point, though.

You're absolutely right that TempleOS will ever find its way into any sort of mainstream use, obviously. But that's not the point of the article. The point is that this is a monumental work for one person, and that there are some really cool ideas that maybe we could learn from. Such as the blurring of a text-mode shell (a la bash) and something more graphical. The idea of embedding diagrams and documentation hyperlinks in source code is genius (and automatic ones at that), as are his annotations for struct members. Having a living coding environment is also very good. I would guess that if an environment like Visual Studio implemented this (kind of like Quick Basic 4.5 had back in the day; it compiled on the fly), programming in C or C++ would be almost as fast as Python since you could test and tweak individual functions as you wrote them. They would become live and callable as soon as you syntactically completed them.

So I think you missed out on a few things that we really can learn from TempleOS. If TempleOS had a few more features and dropped the VGA-only interface, it could be a very fun learning platform for programming and system concepts. In fact I think TempleOS could itself be made into a standalone, self-contained application for teaching programming. Would be similar to Squeak or Logo. Limited in scope but a good teaching tool.

Seems like congress likes to act all indignant (certain congresscritters) and demand that executive branch agencies answer their questions and defend civil liberties, but in the end nothing ever is done. Even Nancy Pelosi, after being temporarily upset that she was the target of some surveillance (if I recall correctly) fully supports the NSA and their illegal information gathering. I am left to conclude that congress just puts on a good show for the masses while the media is focused, and then when things move on they go back to doing what they were doing before. Both parties.

First I have to say I'm pretty disappointed in Slashdot commenters today. I was hoping to have a nice discussion of some very cool ideas, reminiscences of work with smalltalk or LISP, but sadly most people are just talking about the man and his illness. Too bad. Few of us, inspired by God or not, could have coded something as complete as this is. Temple OS's concepts really make me think. When I was a teenager I dreamed of an OS that would blur the line between code, programs, and data. In some ways I envisioned a system just like he designed. Where code is live as you write it. Instead of programs, you'd have just data, and code to operate on the date. Just like his idea of embedding pictures in anything I thought why not treat all forms of data that way. Instead of a word processor, you just have frameworks that operate on text objects already native to the system.

Some of these ideas are similar to, I believe it's called, squeak, which is a smalltalk environment that is completely live and modifiable.

In some ways TempleOS (if it could be adapted and modernized) could be the learning tool to really get young hackers excited about building things on their computers. Having a live compiler jit'ing code on the fly as I type it sounds very cool, especially since it accesses the whole system, and becomes a part of the system as you code. And his programming language looks very interesting.

As cool as it is, I think it would never fly in the real world because almost all people don't want computers to work that way. They don't want to create abstractly with them, but just use them as appliances to do some task. Which is sad but understandable.

While I feel the outrage over this move is probably overblown, it does vindicate the fairly extreme positions in regards to free software held by Richard Stallman. Basically the watered down idea of free software, called "open source", has taken off and really win the world over. Even Microsoft is embracing open source. Everyone sees the benefits. The problem is that they see that it can benefit their existing proprietary models quite well. So for example Microsoft, while being more open to open source and interoperability is as proprietary and closed as ever before.

Intel too has embraced open source and Linux, but the philosophy of free software is only embraced to the extent that it will help their business.

In the end then open source software has both won and lost. It hasn't changed the corporate attitudes like some of the earlier visionaries wanted. I fear we're all the losers here. This move by Intel confirms that to me. In this modern post stallman world, open source is mostly a way to placate the masses. And it works well. And is quite profitable.

Yes the idea that a mini physical keyboard on a phone device could be patented is ridiculous. But you can rest easy knowing that Blackberry is in its death throws anyway. Unfortunately that means its patents will be soon up for sale and will be bought up by other greedy companies who will continue to "leverage" them.

No it's not a clear violation of the GPL. Go read the GPL text itself. The GPL refers to the binary itself, not the installer. The binary itself, unmodified (or modified with source code), with a clear link to the source can be distributed easily, wrapped in whatever proprietary installer you want. The GPL is only transmitted through direct linkage. What SF did was certainly unethical, but it wasn't illegal.

Not sure where you're checking. ARM has been supported as a target for some time now, and as a host. Of course we aren't talking about the ARM target; we're talking about the x86 target on an ARM host. And it will definitely compile and run on an ARM system. Both full system emulation (a virtual machine) and user-mode emulation, though it's not really that fast yet. The latter mode is closer to the software described in the article. Years ago I used the QEMU x86 user mode system on my PowerPC to run a few x86 binary-only linux programs and even browser plugins (Adobe PDF reader, Adobe flash, and wine). User mode emulation often appears faster because only the program itself is running through the emulator. All calls to the kernel are thunked through to the real kernel. So you get native I/O speed, for example.

3.11 was Windows for workgroups, which actually was very good, probably better than 3.1. More stable anyway. Though 3.1 was way more stable than 3.0. No more UAEs. apps could actually crash without crashing the whole OS, if I recall correctly.