MIT's professor Madnick stumbles

Post #37,213 by marlowe 5/2/02 12:55:13 PM Reply	MIT's professor Madnick stumbles [link\|http://money.cnn.com/2002/05/02/technology/microsoft/index.htm\|Isn't it his job to know better?] Excerpt: "I'm not trying to be evasive," Stuart E. Madnick, a computer and software expert and professor at MIT, said at one point during Wednesday's testimony. "I'm just trying to be precise." Madnick was sometimes anything but precise, however. When government attorney Kevin Hodges asked him to name an operating system besides those made by Microsoft in which the Web browsing software could not be removed, Madnick immediately offered up KDE as an example. But KDE is a computer program designed to run on top of the Linux operating system, as Hodges pointed out. Madnick conceded that was true, and instead suggested GNOME as an example. But GNOME performs the same function as KDE on a computer equipped with the Linux operating system. Hodges was never able to get an answer to his question. I say: Maybe he cracked under stress. I guess you could say he failed to meet the intended design paramaters. Too bad they can't melt him down and make rings out of him. That's more comforting than thinking he actually didn't know what the hell he was talking about. In which case, it's really time to fear for hte state of higher education in this country. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Truth is that which is the case. Accept no substitutes. If competence is considered "hubris" then may I and my country always be as "arrogant" as we can possibly manage.
Post #37,216 by drewk 5/2/02 1:33:03 PM Reply	Not really Did you notice what he's a professor of ? J N Maguire Prof Of Info Tech, M.I.T. Sloan School of Management IOW he's not a techie. He's a PHB. For more on bad witnesses MS has called, check out the [link\|http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Test/PatheticWitnesses\|Wiki page] I did on it. === I can't be a Democrat because I like to spend the money I make. I can't be a Republican because I like to spend the money I make on drugs and whores.
Post #37,226 by a6l6e6x 5/2/02 2:33:40 PM Reply	Not to mention... [link\|http://web.mit.edu/smadnick/www/home.html\|His home page.] Co-Director, PRoductivity From Information Technology (PROFIT) and Co-Principal Inbestigator, COntext INtercharge (COIN) PROFIT and COIN? Hmmmm. Alex "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." -- Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Post #37,312 by CRConrad 5/3/02 4:52:07 AM Reply	S'posed t'be an MIT prof, and can't even reverse-engineer... ...an acronym?!? PRoductivity From Information Technology (PROFIT)[] No, that's actually "PRFIT". It should of course be, "PROductivity From Information Technology (PROFIT)". I'll let "Inbestigator" slide -- I do that typo myself, all too often, what with 'v' and 'b' being next to each other on the keyboard (See? VB even causes typos! ;^) -- but he's still a fuckwit just for getting his silly retrofitted acronym wrong, if nothing else (which, though, there is). []: Since zIWT/Zope won't allow changing the font colour, I can't reproduce the effect he so painstakingly -- and incorrectly -- applied to the words on his own page; his clumsiness sure stands out even more when the capitals are coloured bright red. Christian R. Conrad Of course, who am I to point fingers? I'm in the "Information Technology" business, prima facia evidence that there's bats in the bell tower. -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=27764\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #37,236 by admin 5/2/02 3:57:35 PM Reply	Not to mention... It's trivial to remove the browsers from KDE and GNOME anyway. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #37,260 by ben_tilly 5/2/02 6:52:21 PM Reply	The lawyer screwed up as well KDE and GNOME are not GUIs. They are desktop environments. Take a Linux system. Delete them both. Your underlying GUI, namely X, is still there. Depending on the distro you still have a good variety of graphical programs and available window managers. And, as Scott says, you can easily remove the existing HTML widgets. Plus, if you really wanted, you could replace the existing one with another. In other words they are both middleware and toolkits to help others write more middleware. They are neither operating systems nor GUIs. The lawyer clearly didn't understand that, else the witness would have been made to look like an even bigger idiot. Cheers, Ben "... I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything." --Richard Feynman
Post #37,311 by CRConrad 5/3/02 4:33:57 AM Reply	Sorry, but that's pretty much bullshit. Or at least... ...highly debatable. Ben says: KDE and GNOME are not GUIs. They are desktop environments. Take a Linux system. Delete them both. Your underlying GUI, namely X, is still there. Depending on the distro you still have a good variety of graphical programs and available window managers. That's bullshit, or very debatable to say the very least, because what you call "desktop environments" and "window managers" _I_S_ what, in ordinary modern English usage, is called -- correctly, for once, IMnshO -- a Graphical User Interface. X is more like just an underlying protocol to build a GUI on top of. But look at the last two thirds of the acronym, "User Interface". For all practical intents and purposes, what the _User Inter_-acts with is the "desktop environment" / "window manager", not the X Window Protocol. (Sure, you can persist in adhering to some silly kind of Original Terminological Purity... But if I grant you that, will you grant me your adherence to every linguistic foible I think our modern world is mangling? Naah... Didn't think so. So no deal, then. ;^) Apart from that, of course, you are all in the right -- you, Scott, Alex, and the lawyer (except for his missing to point out the last bit): Neither KDE nor GNOME are OSes; they're GUIs running on top of an OS; and it was of course only to be expected that they do indeed allow you to remove their browser components. But anyway, GUIs is exactly what they are. Christian R. Conrad Of course, who am I to point fingers? I'm in the "Information Technology" business, prima facia evidence that there's bats in the bell tower. -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=27764\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #37,313 by ben_tilly 5/3/02 6:56:13 AM Reply	Answer me this I am typing this message into a graphical application running on Linux with neither KDE or GNOME in sight. To be precise I am typing into Netscape with fvwm2 as my window manager running on top of XFree86. Either I am lying, or else Linux minus KDE and GNOME still has a working GUI. We can argue about which remaining component(s) actually deserve the name GUI. (Each one does different things.) But definitely it is incorrect to say that you cannot remove KDE and GNOME and still have a working GUI on Linux. Cheers, Ben "... I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything." --Richard Feynman
Post #37,315 by CRConrad 5/3/02 7:25:41 AM Reply	Yup, that's correct. Ben: I am typing this message into a graphical application running on Linux with neither KDE or GNOME in sight. To be precise I am typing into Netscape with fvwm2 as my window manager running on top of XFree86. Either I am lying, or else Linux minus KDE and GNOME still has a working GUI. Why, certainly. We can argue about which remaining component(s) actually deserve the name GUI. (Each one does different things.) But definitely it is incorrect to say that you cannot remove KDE and GNOME and still have a working GUI on Linux. And in your case, the working GUI is apparently called "fvwm2". Christian R. Conrad Of course, who am I to point fingers? I'm in the "Information Technology" business, prima facia evidence that there's bats in the bell tower. -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=27764\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #37,317 by ben_tilly 5/3/02 7:50:26 AM Reply	But that is a window manager And a window manager does the same thing even if you run KDE or GNOME. For instance if you run GNOME using sawfish as your WM, then kill sawfish, your GUI is seriously hampered. However start up enlightenment instead and you are back in business. (Things may look a little different...) Conversely you can work perfectly well with programs that require either desktop environment from within a window manager that knows about neither. The truth is that the final user interface has a lot of components behind it. I will grant that a desktop environment is part of the user interface that a given user may take for granted. But removal of that desktop does not mean that there is no graphical user interface left, it merely means that it behaves somewhat differently and you can't run some applications. Cheers, Ben "... I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything." --Richard Feynman
Post #37,322 by imric 5/3/02 8:23:52 AM Reply	For that matter... You don't need a window manager - try running xwc, say, from .xinitrc (or start it from xterm)... Or Mozilla... grin Imric's Tips for Living Paranoia Is a Survival Trait Pessimists are never disappointed - but sometimes, if they are very lucky, they can be pleasantly surprised... Even though everyone is out to get you, it doesn't matter unless you let them win.
Post #37,325 by CRConrad 5/3/02 8:36:08 AM Reply	But if you can't start an application by clicking an icon... ...can you really claim you have a "Graphical User Interface"?!? No, that'd be like running, I dunno... Harvard Graphics, perhaps? -- on DOS. i.e, a single graphical application, on a NON-Graphical User Interface. Christian R. Conrad Of course, who am I to point fingers? I'm in the "Information Technology" business, prima facia evidence that there's bats in the bell tower. -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=27764\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #37,334 by imric 5/3/02 10:55:47 AM Reply	grin xterm is capable of launching multiple simultaneous gui programs - but before you claim that xterm is then the gui chuckle, it's X that provides the 'pointy-clicky' copy&paste functions, no? The argument that no other OS builds it's Internet browser in so that it cannot be safely removed / replaced still stands, I think! smile Imric's Tips for Living Paranoia Is a Survival Trait Pessimists are never disappointed - but sometimes, if they are very lucky, they can be pleasantly surprised... Even though everyone is out to get you, it doesn't matter unless you let them win.
Post #37,336 by drewk 5/3/02 11:36:23 AM Reply	I wonder why we're arguing with each other here? The basic question is: Does any other OS integrate the web browser into the OS? Microsoft have taken the position that the web browser is somply one aspect of the GUI, which is itslef fully integrated into the OS. But here we are arguing over which particular part of a Linux distribution deserves to be called the GUI. "The GUI" is so modular and distinct from the OS that we can't even agree on what gets to be called the GUI! On top of the kernel there is (at least) the desktop manager, the window manager, the font renderer (probably) and the ... well I can't think what to call X, because there are desktops that don't even require X. So there is a module that handles the pointy-clicky-mousish stuff; a module that handles the window widgets; a module that handles font rendering; a module that handles drawing things to the screen; and desktop managers like Gnome, KDE, fvwm and others which may or may not include any combinatin of the above modules, or may provide them itself -- at the user's option. So instead of agruing about "what is The GUI" on a Linux box, can we just agree that it's pretty clear "The Gui" is not part of "the OS"? === I can't be a Democrat because I like to spend the money I make. I can't be a Republican because I like to spend the money I make on drugs and whores.
Post #37,345 by CRConrad 5/3/02 12:22:43 PM Reply	For the fun of it, of course, you spoilsport!!! :-) But the worst part is, this: So there is a module that handles the pointy-clicky-mousish stuff; a module that handles the window widgets; a module that handles font rendering; a module that handles drawing things to the screen; and desktop managers like Gnome, KDE, fvwm and others which may or may not include any combinatin of the above modules, or may provide them itself -- at the user's option. ...bit could probably do with being a little more integrated, be it "commingling-a-l-a-Microsoft" or some technically slightly different way. The stuff you read about on /. and here and all over the 'Net, all the time: "I can't get font manager Q to work with application Z under window manager R and desktop environment Y"; "How do I set up X to allow cut-and-paste between application G and application J under window manager H?", etc... And my own timid experience, of setting up the mouse to be this kind of hardware, button emulation so-and-so, cursor speed and acceleration this-and-that -- first in some X configuration thingy, and then again in (because the previous had absolutely ZERO effect under) some desktop environment... That all just sucks so unbelievably, I can only say Bill's minions do really do a much better job of it. And that's probably precisely because this, "the GUI", is such a mess of loosely-related but non-integrated bits that you can't even say precisely where it begins and where it ends. Christian R. Conrad Of course, who am I to point fingers? I'm in the "Information Technology" business, prima facia evidence that there's bats in the bell tower. -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=27764\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #37,344 by marlowe 5/3/02 12:15:31 PM 5/3/02 12:41:38 PM Reply	I recall the first time I saw X running. Without any window manager at all. I was distinctly unimpressed. I would never call that a proper GUI. It couldn't even compare with Windows 3.0. Adding twm to the mix helped a lot. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Truth is that which is the case. Accept no substitutes. If competence is considered "hubris" then may I and my country always be as "arrogant" as we can possibly manage. Edited by marlowe May 3, 2002, 12:41:38 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #37,329 by Silverlock 5/3/02 9:42:37 AM Reply	The Register's John Lettice weighs in [link\|http://theregus.com/content/4/24845.html\|URL] Don't blame me. I voted with the majority.
Post #37,809 by n3jja 5/7/02 2:59:22 PM Reply	I would love to be there.... ... but I'm afraid my laughter would get me thrown out of the courtroom. Microsoft should be punished (if for no other reason) just for their sheer stupidity in witness selection. Welp, off to clean up the soda I sprayed from laughing so hard....

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