> Also UTF-8 string can't be cut at arbitrary position.
Neither can be any other kind of Unicode string because of Combining Characters. That's why the Unicode standard (or an Annex) recommends algorithms for text segmentation.
(And if you really need to cut at a certain length then you can easily backtrack and find the beginning of the sequence by looking for the first byte with the MSB = 0)
The problem with start ups is that engineering is fun but business and administration is no fun. Nobody is enthusiastic about filling out tax forms and yelling at people because they are missing deadlines. People with experience in administration are rarely looking for a chaotic start up that can't pay a good salary.
No. I'd rather like to see Linus talk about Linux (or git) and Bjarne talk about C++. That would be far more interesting than having them fight a flame war over such a silly issue as C vs. C++.
Microsoft is threatened. Selling Office (and Windows) licenses is the backbone of Microsoft and that's what's financing all the other adventures. Large companies have to buy Office licenses for every workstation. Even with large customer discount they still pay millions on license fees. With LibreOffice now being independent of a large company it becomes a viable alternative for those large corporations. It's much cheaper to hire a LibreOffice developer or get a company like SuSE for contract work on it to do all the required customizations than buying MSOffice licenses.
People complain a lot about the GUI of LibreOffice. But in fact it can be an advantage because it is much closer to Office 2003 than the new Office versions. And it seems that Office 2003 is still the de-facto standard in a lot of corporations. So moving to LibreOffice might in fact require less training than new versions of Microsoft Office.
There are other alternatives like Google Docs etc.
Therefore it is a threat to Microsoft. Will LibreOffice/Google Docs etc. kill MSOffice in the next Years/Month/Hours? Of course not. But it will have an impact on Office sales and MS would be stupid not to consider it a threat.
And of course there are still some technical issues. E.g. a missing alternative to MS Exchange. I know that there are some commercial open source alternatives. But there is not the one true alternative on the horizon. Another problem of course is backward compatibility, SharePoint, etc. But all of that can be fixed in the long run and will be with more support from companies like Intel.
> In order to "fully open source" it, they would have to include an open source H264/mp4 decoder. Which would probably not be allowed by everyone who owns H264. Alas.
There are existing open source implementations of H264. Even the best encoder (x264) is open source. But I guess there are license issues with third party code/libraries used in Flash.
That lsb_release is "an optional package in many distributions" is only a minor complain:
> There's already the lsb_release tool for this, why don't you just use that? Well, it's a very strange interface: a shell script you have to invoke (and hence spawn asynchronously from your C code), and it's not written to be extensible. It's an optional package in many distributions, and nothing we'd be happy to invoke as part of early boot in order to show a welcome message. (In times with sub-second userspace boot times we really don't want to invoke a huge shell script for a triviality like showing the welcome message). The lsb_release tool to us appears to be an attempt of abstracting distribution checks, where standardization of distribution checks is needed. It's simply a badly designed interface. In our opinion, it has its use as an interface to determine the LSB version itself, but not for checking the distribution or version.
And I guess distributions are far more reluctant to install a shell script than adding a file to /etc
https://launchpad.net/~cassou/+archive/emacs
http://emacs.naquadah.org/ (Debian)