So... Webkit renders html as far as I know. So the proposal seems to be to render the entire Gnome gui by feeding html at it. I hope I'm wrong, because if that is correct then it would be a really goofy way of going about things.
You're wrong, don't worry.
A window manager pretty much manages the window decorations (title bar, borders, et cetera) and window actions (close, maximize, resize, move, roll-up, sticky, always on top, always on bottom, et cetera).
Metacity is a window manager and nothing else. It doesn't handle what is in the windows themselves.
Oh, and their only proposing to use CSS. No HTML.
To an extent, this was what he was warning against (though he set no time constraints) -- that eventually people would complain about the existence of copyright regardless of length of time. He argued that making the law too broad and absurd (arguable - I'm not debating whether he was right on this issue) would cause people to view the entire thing as an unnecessary evil.
What we see in the past is copyright being extended and broadened continually over time, and people eventually arguing against it as a whole once they have a means to violate it easily.
Of course it is not perfectly what he predicted (and it is extremely late), but it does kind of fit some of the points.
Perhaps.
No, by the fact that there is a rising Pirate Party in a few countries. I don't dispute that it is currently very disorganized and ill-defined, but it exists.
It is by the fact that more and more people are obtaining copyrighted content from the internet illegally.
It is by the fact that more and more people think that this is okay.
Right now, many governments of the world and the recording industry are trying to fight it. Whether they are winning or not, only time will tell. In that respect, not everything he said has come true, but what hasn't come true still has the potential to.
The main point the GP was trying to make is that he predicted that in the future it would become extremely easy to copy something; so easy, in fact, that anybody could do it. That did come true, and that did take 160 years.
You could probably pretty easily write an extension for mediawiki that attaches to the 'ArticleAfterFetchContent' hook and augments the page with content fetched on the fly from Wikipedia. That would be easy enough to do. Just make sure that when the user is editing the page, the function you attach to the hook does not activate (otherwise you will end up saving the wikipedia content into your page, and it will be there twice when a user visits the page).
Were you on your rollerblades while you were playing with your legos?
Another simple way to reproduce:
1) Turn off immediately switching to new tab
2) Go to the slashdot index page
3) Middle click "Read More..." on any article
4) Try to scroll down the page
5) ???
6) Profit!
But in all seriousness, this can be a problem when browsing slashdot!
By blocking, BitZtream is talking about blocking for a significant amount of time. Technically, all calls are blocking, but there is a significant difference between blocking for a few milliseconds or blocking for a few tenths of a second. For example, reading from a pipe can block for a long time if nothing is writing to the other end; however, you can tell the read function to be non-blocking, and just return an error or nothing if there is nothing to read at the moment.
Obviously, these are system calls. And, being system calls, they are talking to another process, namely part of the kernel. However, this does not make your program multithreaded, because if it did, by that definition, there would be no such thing as a single threaded program on any OS that uses process switching.
> But the smaller, leaner, more approachable codebase goal?
Somewhat. It doesn't get blogged about much, and when it's blogged about the press doesn't pick it up because nitty-gritty arch work is boring. But there have in fact been significant simplifications to all sorts of stuff in the meantime...
So does this mean that it won't take several hours to compile it anymore?
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah