Yes, but software for internal use isn't really the same thing. For one thing, most of that's already purchased. And Microsoft screwing around with the price of IBM's internal software because IBM's promoting Linux...well, I can't really describe the Justice Department's reaction to that.
And I really suspect IBM is not using MS Office, but their own damn office suite, anyway. Although you never know with IBM.
I didn't mean it now wouldn't buy anything from MS, I meant it could do without buying anything from MS. And the important thing wasn't Server 2003, it was XP.
What happens currently is that MS likes to reduce bulk prices for Windows XP. If a company pisses them off, they raise them back up. They also tack on all sorts of rules, like inability to dual boot.
With servers, IBM isn't hurting if the price goes up 100 dollars a license, as servers cost a lot more anyway, and MS doesn't offer anywhere near the discount on Server 2003 to OEMs as it does for XP. (No, they can't raise the price above the store version, as IBM would just go to the store and buy copies. And that'd be an astonishingly obvious anti-trust violation.)
And now that IBM doesn't have any computers it is required to have MS software on (and thus must get a 60% discount from MS to compete with), it can do whatever it wants with no regard to MS at all.
Microsoft does not have a monopoly in server operating systems, whereas it does have an (effective) monopoly in consumer operating systems. It knows if it starts dicking around with prices on its server OSes, IBM can, and will, just stop selling them.
I'm glad someone else is paying attention to something that almost everyone seems to miss. (And slashdot missing a connection with MS is unprecedented.)
IBM is doing this so it can do whatever the hell it wants WRT to Microsoft. (Possiblity: Going after them for the SCO lawsuit.) It doesn't have to buy anything from MS anymore.
Let me repeat: IBM NO LONGER DEPENDS ON A MICROSOFT PRODUCT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWENTY YEARS.
Someone openly on the side of OSS severing all ties to MS? Nah, that can't possibly be worth mentioning. Fucking stupid editors.
Not only can you own Windows boxs, you often can 0wn other boxes, like Sun.
I know a local college anyone can drive up to and get on the wireless and hack Suns. Of course, they don't really need to hack them, the Sun room uses one root password for the machines and everyone knows it.
I.e., I wouldn't blame poor university security on Microsoft.;)
They already solved the damn problem on 9x, and everyone was happy for years and years, until some crazy person decided to try the attack against XP SP2 and died of shock when it worked.
If IE is not available, it can't render using IE. That's a pretty silly thing to expect it to be able to do. All it does is embed IE, like dozens of other programs do.
If you're using 98, sure. 98 loads IE automatically, remember. The OS is 12 megs, IE is 16 megs, roughly. In fact, IE is almost entirely responsibly for the difference in memory size required between 95 and 98.
Try Firefox on 95, without IE, with 32 megs of memory. It'll be sluggish, but work okay.
Not that I'm saying, if you have a 233Mhz 32 meg box, you should switch back to 95, or that I have any other solution that would allow Firefox to run. I don't. (Besides pointing out that you can find old memory for free if you look hard for discarded computers.) I'm just saying, be aware the reason Firefox is not working is that Microsoft wanted to make their browser faster by preloading it. And that's not only stopping you from running IE, it probably is stopping you from running any modern program, be it Microsoft Word 2000 or Dreamweaver or even non-IE Java.
To keep people from having to read that, FLAC is not significantly smaller (1), but a hell of a lot faster if you use it right.
The important stats:
FLAC at 8 took 55:02 to encode, 7:07 to decode, at a ratio of 1:0.5437.
ALAC took 19:53 to encode, and 10:01 to decode, at a ratio of 1:0.5496.
So, yes, FLAC at the tightest takes much longer than ALAC. (Alghought it's only 3/4th the CPU to play!)
However FLAC at 5 took 12:54 to encode and 7:08 to decode, at a ration of 1:0.5459. Much faster than ALAC, barely smaller, and decodes much easier than ALAC.
So, yes, if you ramp FLAC all the way up it takes much longer to encode, and slightly longer to decode, and you don't gain anything. So obviously doing that is a bit silly unless you're talking about long term storage.
If you leave it at the default, though, it beats ALAC in every single way, unless there's some differences in CPU architechure that changes the relative decoding difficulties between an iPod and a PC. Which isn't that impossible. But I have to point out that a lot of people use iTunes sans iPod, on a PC.
1) No lossless compression is significantly smaller than anything else. All the serious contenders are between 1:0.56 and 1:0.48 or so.
You mean, we'll sue our own citizens who purchase stuff from them, right? We'll invent 'intellectual property', India will use it at will, and sell it to us. So large corporations can just sue us to make money.
A lawsuit based economy. That should be interesting.
To clarify, in the real world, companies come up with a patented process that's better than other things. Other companies in the same line of work look at it, and make a cost/benefit analyst of the technology.
Sometimes they decide it's worth it, and license the technology, sometimes they decide it's not worth it, and do not.
This does not, under any circumstances, happen with software. Look at the GIF patent. Compuserve wanted to compress images. Someone there had seen LZW published in the IEEE's magazine a few years earlier. It was well described and easy to use.
There were several other, although poorer, compression methods at that time, that were not patented. Run length encoding, for example. (Which, oddly enough, was patented later, although that patent is clearly invalid.)
Why did they chose a patented method? Because they didn't know it was patented.
Would they have chosen another method of compression? Yup. Or even no compression at all. Because it wouldn't have mattered to them.
Sure, it was nice that they could transfer images 25% faster, but we're not talking about the days of the web, we're not even talking about the days of Windows. We're talking about the days where you'd connect to Compuserve and tell it to download some images. And they worked on PCs and Macs! No longer did you have to choose between PICs and BMPs, or whatever the formats were.
That's half of software patents, the kind that get used accidently. The story's the same with MP3s.
The other half is patents over a process you can't do anything to get around, like the absurd Amazon patent on one-click shopping.
More realistically, failure-wise, one of the rovers might have crashed, and thus they'd never have realized the other was calibrated with the wrong data, because the only way they noticed was they were getting different readings for things that should be the same.
They'd want them to be in the lab at the same time, along with the baseline measurer, to make sure they were measuring the same rock under the same conditions. They'd build a rig, put baseline sensor in rig, measure, put Spirit sensor in rig, measure, etc.
What got me is that surely you'd calibrate it after putting it in the rover. You don't calibrate something, install it, and then test it, you install it, test it, and then calibrate it. (Then test the calibration.)
So maybe they're confused, and the problem isn't that they swapped the instruments, it's that they saved the data under the wrong filenames or whatever. Someone tested the two, and then sat down and filed Spirit's test results under Opportunity, and vis versa.
What's really interesting is the number of patented technologies that helped create the internet. It was plenty of them. And not one of them by the patent holder, but by someone else, who was infringing unknowingly.
I can't think of a single software patent whose invention was popularized by the patent holder and it helped the industry, which knew it was patented. Not one.
See, the thing about software patents: Either you a) know about them, and you do something a different way (aka XOR cursors), b) you know about them, but can't do it a different way (aka MP3 players and one click shopping), or c) you don't know about them, and you use them unwittingly (aka Eolas), or d) you have a cross licensing agreement with the patent holder.
Many times b) starts as c).
There's no software patent that people go 'Well, I don't need to use that patented method, but I think I will and pay a royalty anyway', because it's incredibly easy to create alternate methods. And thus software patents are pretty stupid to start with.
No one in their right mind would ever chose to use a patented method if there was another way of doing something that was just as easy. So all money-making software patents are over something there is not another way to do it, which shouldn't be patentable in the first place!
They don't want to sell software to Indians, they want to sell software to Americans and Europeans. It doesn't matter if the software is patented in India.
Of course, the real danger is that they're sitting there teaching Indians how to program, making sure the technological base of the country is updated, and one day India is going to wake up and say 'What the hell am I doing?' and start producing its own software that violates US and EU patents, and selling it online to people in the EU and US, and the whole damn house of cards is going to come tumbling down. (No, they can't cut India off the net when that happens, because that's where all their software development is coming from.)
I'm a little baffled as to why Europe and America are exporting all our services to India and all our plastic trinkets to China. One day, they're going to realize they're doing all the work and we're making all the money, leaving us completely and utterly fucked.
India is a democracy, they could at any minute get a demogauge who decided to take the ownership of India's business away from outsiders and keep it functioning, which is a lot more dangerous than just dismantling it. You think outsourcing sucks, just wait till outsourced companies start competing with Indian-owned businesses. If you think Indian workers are cheap, imagine how much Indian CEOs will save the company!
As for China, the government there has managed to stir up some sort of awe-inspiring simmering resentment towards Americans in the population, and, frankly, could cause us enough problems without the support of its population. (Which is why we have to keep making consessions towards it.) China could just take their ball and go home.
Luckily, India and China have been engaged in a pointless border dispute for like 50 years now, along with Pakistan, and they don't much like each other anyway, so it seems unlikely they'd ever team up in any way.
It's insanely frustrating when you realize we gave them this power over us.
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And I really suspect IBM is not using MS Office, but their own damn office suite, anyway. Although you never know with IBM.
What happens currently is that MS likes to reduce bulk prices for Windows XP. If a company pisses them off, they raise them back up. They also tack on all sorts of rules, like inability to dual boot.
With servers, IBM isn't hurting if the price goes up 100 dollars a license, as servers cost a lot more anyway, and MS doesn't offer anywhere near the discount on Server 2003 to OEMs as it does for XP. (No, they can't raise the price above the store version, as IBM would just go to the store and buy copies. And that'd be an astonishingly obvious anti-trust violation.)
And now that IBM doesn't have any computers it is required to have MS software on (and thus must get a 60% discount from MS to compete with), it can do whatever it wants with no regard to MS at all.
Microsoft does not have a monopoly in server operating systems, whereas it does have an (effective) monopoly in consumer operating systems. It knows if it starts dicking around with prices on its server OSes, IBM can, and will, just stop selling them.
IBM is doing this so it can do whatever the hell it wants WRT to Microsoft. (Possiblity: Going after them for the SCO lawsuit.) It doesn't have to buy anything from MS anymore.
Let me repeat: IBM NO LONGER DEPENDS ON A MICROSOFT PRODUCT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWENTY YEARS.
Someone openly on the side of OSS severing all ties to MS? Nah, that can't possibly be worth mentioning. Fucking stupid editors.
Or call you and your bank at the same time, passing messages back and forth. Aka, a man-in-the-middle attack.
Embiggen's not a word.
Wait a minute...every single mail and web server does that! That's the defination of an internet server!
So the question is, I guess, what kind of idiotic setup has a server that runs Windows?
And they're cheaper that way, too.
I know a local college anyone can drive up to and get on the wireless and hack Suns. Of course, they don't really need to hack them, the Sun room uses one root password for the machines and everyone knows it.
I.e., I wouldn't blame poor university security on Microsoft. ;)
Which, of course, means that any malware that gets in your network could take down the whole damn thing via a LAND attack. ;)
You just can't password protect said writes, or even put passwords on the reads, as far as I can tell.
They're vulnerable to it again.
They already solved the damn problem on 9x, and everyone was happy for years and years, until some crazy person decided to try the attack against XP SP2 and died of shock when it worked.
Seriously, personal firewalls are idiotic for incoming ports. You should just turn every service off that's not in use.
What do you mean, there's no easy way to do that in Windows?
Lukcily that would probably be some licensing violation.
I guess it can in the same way it can do CSS. As in, brokenly.
If IE is not available, it can't render using IE. That's a pretty silly thing to expect it to be able to do. All it does is embed IE, like dozens of other programs do.
Try Firefox on 95, without IE, with 32 megs of memory. It'll be sluggish, but work okay.
Not that I'm saying, if you have a 233Mhz 32 meg box, you should switch back to 95, or that I have any other solution that would allow Firefox to run. I don't. (Besides pointing out that you can find old memory for free if you look hard for discarded computers.) I'm just saying, be aware the reason Firefox is not working is that Microsoft wanted to make their browser faster by preloading it. And that's not only stopping you from running IE, it probably is stopping you from running any modern program, be it Microsoft Word 2000 or Dreamweaver or even non-IE Java.
Ah, but they said more than 3,000. Maybe it's about 5,500 thousand.
The important stats:
FLAC at 8 took 55:02 to encode, 7:07 to decode, at a ratio of 1:0.5437.
ALAC took 19:53 to encode, and 10:01 to decode, at a ratio of 1:0.5496.
So, yes, FLAC at the tightest takes much longer than ALAC. (Alghought it's only 3/4th the CPU to play!)
However FLAC at 5 took 12:54 to encode and 7:08 to decode, at a ration of 1:0.5459. Much faster than ALAC, barely smaller, and decodes much easier than ALAC.
So, yes, if you ramp FLAC all the way up it takes much longer to encode, and slightly longer to decode, and you don't gain anything. So obviously doing that is a bit silly unless you're talking about long term storage.
If you leave it at the default, though, it beats ALAC in every single way, unless there's some differences in CPU architechure that changes the relative decoding difficulties between an iPod and a PC. Which isn't that impossible. But I have to point out that a lot of people use iTunes sans iPod, on a PC.
1) No lossless compression is significantly smaller than anything else. All the serious contenders are between 1:0.56 and 1:0.48 or so.
The correct order of steps: Build, test, install, test, calibrate, test.
A lawsuit based economy. That should be interesting.
Sometimes they decide it's worth it, and license the technology, sometimes they decide it's not worth it, and do not.
This does not, under any circumstances, happen with software. Look at the GIF patent. Compuserve wanted to compress images. Someone there had seen LZW published in the IEEE's magazine a few years earlier. It was well described and easy to use.
There were several other, although poorer, compression methods at that time, that were not patented. Run length encoding, for example. (Which, oddly enough, was patented later, although that patent is clearly invalid.)
Why did they chose a patented method? Because they didn't know it was patented.
Would they have chosen another method of compression? Yup. Or even no compression at all. Because it wouldn't have mattered to them.
Sure, it was nice that they could transfer images 25% faster, but we're not talking about the days of the web, we're not even talking about the days of Windows. We're talking about the days where you'd connect to Compuserve and tell it to download some images. And they worked on PCs and Macs! No longer did you have to choose between PICs and BMPs, or whatever the formats were.
That's half of software patents, the kind that get used accidently. The story's the same with MP3s.
The other half is patents over a process you can't do anything to get around, like the absurd Amazon patent on one-click shopping.
More realistically, failure-wise, one of the rovers might have crashed, and thus they'd never have realized the other was calibrated with the wrong data, because the only way they noticed was they were getting different readings for things that should be the same.
What got me is that surely you'd calibrate it after putting it in the rover. You don't calibrate something, install it, and then test it, you install it, test it, and then calibrate it. (Then test the calibration.)
So maybe they're confused, and the problem isn't that they swapped the instruments, it's that they saved the data under the wrong filenames or whatever. Someone tested the two, and then sat down and filed Spirit's test results under Opportunity, and vis versa.
I can't think of a single software patent whose invention was popularized by the patent holder and it helped the industry, which knew it was patented. Not one.
See, the thing about software patents: Either you a) know about them, and you do something a different way (aka XOR cursors), b) you know about them, but can't do it a different way (aka MP3 players and one click shopping), or c) you don't know about them, and you use them unwittingly (aka Eolas), or d) you have a cross licensing agreement with the patent holder.
Many times b) starts as c).
There's no software patent that people go 'Well, I don't need to use that patented method, but I think I will and pay a royalty anyway', because it's incredibly easy to create alternate methods. And thus software patents are pretty stupid to start with.
No one in their right mind would ever chose to use a patented method if there was another way of doing something that was just as easy. So all money-making software patents are over something there is not another way to do it, which shouldn't be patentable in the first place!
Of course, the real danger is that they're sitting there teaching Indians how to program, making sure the technological base of the country is updated, and one day India is going to wake up and say 'What the hell am I doing?' and start producing its own software that violates US and EU patents, and selling it online to people in the EU and US, and the whole damn house of cards is going to come tumbling down. (No, they can't cut India off the net when that happens, because that's where all their software development is coming from.)
I'm a little baffled as to why Europe and America are exporting all our services to India and all our plastic trinkets to China. One day, they're going to realize they're doing all the work and we're making all the money, leaving us completely and utterly fucked.
India is a democracy, they could at any minute get a demogauge who decided to take the ownership of India's business away from outsiders and keep it functioning, which is a lot more dangerous than just dismantling it. You think outsourcing sucks, just wait till outsourced companies start competing with Indian-owned businesses. If you think Indian workers are cheap, imagine how much Indian CEOs will save the company!
As for China, the government there has managed to stir up some sort of awe-inspiring simmering resentment towards Americans in the population, and, frankly, could cause us enough problems without the support of its population. (Which is why we have to keep making consessions towards it.) China could just take their ball and go home.
Luckily, India and China have been engaged in a pointless border dispute for like 50 years now, along with Pakistan, and they don't much like each other anyway, so it seems unlikely they'd ever team up in any way.
It's insanely frustrating when you realize we gave them this power over us.