Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Les Mikesell]

Les wrote:
> 
>> 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? 

Yes, and there are other incompatible versions just as damaging.

> 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?

Yes, but I don't see the relevance to open source vs. proprietary 
systems.  Hardly anything still uses the wordstar command structure.

> 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.

Programmers haven't seen the need for control-key commands since 
keyboards started including an alt key and a bunch of function keys and 
everything has a mouse.

> 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.

Yes, and you can insert pictures too...

  > 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.

Not sure I see a point here.  What we need are interfaces that let you 
run old/new technology concurrently and while that isn't perfect it is 
better than ever before.  Look at all the stuff you can put on the other 
side of firewire/usb/scsi connection or use remotely over networks.

> 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?

Bad marketing?

> Digital Equipment Corporation?

DEC?  The company best known for it's CEO wondering why anyone would 
want a computer in their home?

> 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.

If they were designed with stable interfaces you'd still be able to use 
them.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com