Having at least two radicals (Auerbach and Mueller-Maguhn) on the board is a Very Good Thing. It means that they'll be able to second each others' motions and get discussions going of things that other board members might not otherwise be happy to talk about. They may not get things passed, but at least it'll be discussed.
It makes it that much harder for the corporate members to keep things under the table and off the radar. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
She's probably pissed about being spied on, but she found a way to process the problem vie an anti-industrial espionage act in Germany. It's a normal legal manouver of getting what you want through some legal loophole. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Pacific Place Center in Vancouver, BC has fiber to the basement and ethernet to the living room... They were a prototype, (about 3-4 years old) so I'm pretty sure that there are a number of other recent developments with similar setups. (I remember about PPC because a few of my friends live there. I'm happy enough with 1.5Mb ADSL for $75/mo. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
3 gigabit or gigabyte? 3 gigabit isn't much -- barely 300MB (i.e. not enough to install red-hat. 3gigabyte, on the other hand, is pretty snazzy). I'm also presuming that it's 3G in either direction... otherwise, 3Bbit of response packets isn't very bad (if you're mostly doing downloading).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Many years ago (mid~late 80's) I remember being at a meeting of CIPS (Canadian Info Processing Society) where the luncheon speaker mentioned that most business analysts do minimal sanity checking on their growth predictions. To support his contention he mentioned that, if you followed the curve out, North American computer sales would exceed population by about 2001.
My guess is that the supersaturation point has shifted but the curves remain roughly the same. The presumption of infinite geometric growth is central to most financial planning.
As one friend of mine most sucinctly put it: "Capitalism is the world's largest pyramid scheme" `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
When I read the note (I'm not going to the site because they demand
cookies without any valid reason),
the question came to my mind:
Does "Fully Functional" include working weaponry.
This in turn, reminded me of the filk song
(Science fiction folk -- don't ask me where the 'i' comes from)
called "My murderous little toy"
The Murderous Little Toy Words: Mike Roberts
Music: The Marvelous Little Toy: Tom Paxton
When I was just a wee little lad, my Daddy brought to me
A toy he made down at the lab; it filled me full of glee!
A wonder to behold it was, with many buttons bright.
From the moment that I turned it on, it filled us all with fright.
Chorus:
It went ZAP! when it fired; it cursed when it missed,
And whirred as it took aim.
It didn't know if we were friend or foe:
It attacked us just the same.
Curiosity killed the cat, and the dog was next to go.
The parakeet beat a fast retreat, as the wall began to glow.
A turret turned, some bullets fired, and the TV was no more.
My friends, you should have seen it as the napalm hit the floor.
Chorus
It broke each window down the hall, and then I heard it laugh.
I must admit, I chuckled when it cut my brother in half.
My sister made it to the stairs, when it caught her in the pants.
My daddy had the shotgun out but he never stood a chance.
Chorus
It fired two mortars at the wall, and when the smoke had cleared,
I looked all around for my murderous toy, but it had disappeared!
Then I saw it leave through watered eyes; the tear-gas smelled so sweet.
Things weren't too good for the neighborhood, as it ambled down the street.
Chorus
Well that's the last I ever saw of my murderous little toy.
It might be dead but I hope it's not, `cause it filled me full of joy.
They say it reached the Bearing Strait, and crossed the icy flows.
The Russian Army ain't killed it yet, but it keeps them on their toes.
Chorus
Well, the years have gone too quickly now, and I've my own little boy,
And just last night I told him `bout my murderous little toy.
I recognized his crafty look, I could almost read his mind.
My son has grown up like his dad, `cause he wants one just like mine.
Chorus
oh yeah: stolen and reformatted from: another fan site `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
In a (pseudo) monopoly situation, if there isn't the market pressure, there's no need for the company to invest in producing a new product sub family when the current product family can be shoe-horned to fit the market.
It's an expense without much payback -- even if they have the basic technology available.
Now that Tranmeta has produced a chip that threatens this sub-market, Intel actually has a reason to produce chips that aren't so power hungry. The expense of production with hitherto dormant technology is offset by not loosing (as much) market share to this upstart company.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Corel must release.NET compliant versions, and may release non-.NET versions (as long as they assign enough resources to the.NET version}.
Section 4 does not give Corel a license.
The foregoing covenant does not constitute a patent license to Corel, and except as explicitly set forth
above, Microsoft does not, directly or by implication, estoppel or otherwise, grant any other patent covenants or patent
rights under this Agreement.
Microsoft is simply promising not to sue Corel over those patents until Corel is sold, tries to transfer rights or sues MS -- Including for anti-trust violations. If you add in section 5 (unconditional surrender of any legal rights WRT past MS actions), it's kinda like:
You give me your gun and put on these handcuffs. I'll put my uzi on safety (for a while).
There was a course at a youth detention center some time ago. The 'kids' were asked how they ended up in jail. The first two kids to speak commented (roughly) as follows:
Kid 1: I'm here because my parents were too lax. They never paid any attention to me. They let me do whatever I wanted. When people complained about me, they'd say "that's too bad". It didn't matter what I'd done. . . . .
Kid 2: I'm here because my parents were too strict. They wouldn't let me do anything. Whenever I went out, they wanted to know exactly what I was doing and where I was going. I felt smothered. I had no freedom whatsoever . . . .
____________________
Yeah. Go ahead. Blame the parents. Blame the internet. Blame the kids. The main purpose in blaming is to avoid looking for where you can take responsibility for your part in the problem. As long as you're unwilling to look at your part in the situation, there's no power to really affect the end result. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Doesn't matter if you can 'bring down' the vote. It's still important to get out and vote The statistics will catch the attention of the government and the candidates (They can't track how you vote, but they can track if you vote.
Overall this is an excelently researched and written article. I think that it is wasted if it is 'only' posted on slashdot (preaching to the converted). It should be submited to more 'mainstream' media. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
I didn't find the comments to be attacks on the internet, but
rather attacks on current values of society.
If he was attacking the current values of society, then he should have mentioned them, instead of implicating the internet for darkening the hearts of our children. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Orwell is nonsense when taken out of context -- that's almost whole point of his work. If you're not immersed in the social context, much propaganda seems blatently stupid to an outsider. It often only makes sense to an insider because of implicit understandings which are silently violated. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
A friend of mine (I'll call him Dave) worked as Windoze support for an reasonably large company -- large enough that he was assigned a specific MS support person. At one point a rather serious problem around Excel was noticed (recurring corruption of files). Data was being corrupted, Entire files were lost. People were losing a whole Day's worth of work (thankfully there were nightly backups, but daily restores were getting to be a pain too).
The Microsoft response was "Very strange. We've never seen this problem anywhere else. It must be something strange that your company is doing.
This went on for weeks (if not months) until my friend talked to his counterpart at another large company that was having the same problems with recurrent file corruption.
The next time 'Dave' talked to his MS contact he mentioned that he'd been talking to this other support person.
Dave: "I was talking to X at Y company, yesterday."
MS: "Ah yes, Him. I talk to him all the time"
Dave: "Oh, so you know about his problem?"
MS: {long guilty silence}.
Pretty much. It's actually a legal requirement. There was a legal precedent, many years ago, that a login message that said "welcome" authorized the illegal entry by a stranger. (I kid you not!).
Putting a lock on your door won't stop most good burglars. It does, however, change the charge from illegal entry to break and enter. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
To put a different spin:
What's the big deal here? We take an 750mz P3 with 512MB of ram and a
graphics card that would have singlehandedly doubled NASA's computing
capability back in the Apollo era, and we use that as a glorified
gameboy! (I'm going to go play Half Life when I'm done writing this).
Face it -- The Game boy is a computer. Just because it's
normally used to play cute games doesn't mean that it's not able
to do anything else. Where's your hacker ethic? The 4Mz
Z80-lookalike that runs it was one of the mainstays of hobby
computing until the IBM PC overran the competition (remember CPM
or the TRS-80? And with up to 2MB of ROM, it's got the program
storage of a small hard disk of the era. (4K of RAM is a bit small,
but quite livable -- equivalent to a VIC-20.).
With an external floppy (ooh! 1M of storage, I'd be in HEAVEN!) or some
flash RAM, and a 1200 baud modem (no K there!), it'd make a quite respectable early-80s
BBS. Your average home hobbyist would have been scandalized about using
that MUCH processing power (mostly because of the hundreds of K
of available storage) 'just' to run a sewing machine.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The presumption is that MS had many of their ducks lined up before they even filed their appeal. Remember that they've actually (hopefully) been preparing their application since the original decision went down. This schedule simply gives them a deadline for filing what they've put together.
Until MS files their arguments, the DOJ can only guess at what MS is going to argue. Some arguments are probably easy to guess. For the ones they didn't think about, they'll have to wait for MS's filing before they can start their research. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
These batteries won't have much effect on your first complaint, but they could have much more effect on the latter. One problem with them is going to be getting the optimal charge current into them. To chargea 2000maH battery you'd have a few choices:
20min@9A, 2min@90A 15sec@900A.
The battery might actually be able to take the 900A, if you could design it so that the wiring wouldn't melt in the process. The most probable approach for most consumer items would be between the first 2 options. (charging a 12V battery at 90A is actually doable with household current. It would translate to ~10A at 120V, but a power supply that could do that would be rather bulky -- you're talking a 1100W power supply. It might be doable as a base station. The lower range is more likely for a portable. The 900A range might be used for industrial/military applications.)
If the connectors for the battery were standardized, you might actually see units in the airport where you'd pay $2 to charge your battery in 2 minutes or less. (Images from half-life keep flashing in front of my eyes (HEV charging units)).
If they go commercial, these units might actually be made with cheap Titanium cases because a puncture could result in a catastrophic energy release. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The conspiracy theory explanation is:
They saw that this was going to be a wildly successful IPO, and wanted to eat as much of the profit as possible, so they came up with a reasonably plausable explanation and a questionaire to go with it. They used the answers
on the questionaire as an excuse to exclude a large number of invited IPO participants and keep the shares for themselves.
When Red-Hat mushroomed, the sold the the shares themselves and kept the profits.
The nasty thing is: Had the IPO plummeted, they would have probably told Red-Hat that they hadn't been able to distribute all of the shares, and found a way to quietly return them to RedHat.
I dunno about you, but this thing has "Class action" written all over it in my eyes. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Re:Patents are exchanges of power for publication
on
One Click Patent News
·
· Score: 2
Women's sufferage, Black rights, Labour rights, Democracy (as we know it), the independence of India, The Magna Carta.
All of these developments and more are the result of communal work. Yes, they had (a) person(s) who headed the movement, who gathered the people together and gave them a productive focus, but it was the community that got behind them and gave the power to the movement.
Without a focusing leader the movement may have expended it's energy fruitlessly. Without the support of the people, the leader would have been powerless. All of those changes were the result of a communal effort.
I challenge you to show me some majour developments in the history of man which only required a single person to effect.
As for suggestiong that you were sitting on your ass, I said that if you weren't to share that. I found your pessimistic flame too close to a self-fullfilling and self-limiting prophesy.
I'd rather hear what is going on than what's not worth doing (in your mind). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
It's going to be different to program, but not horribly difficult. I know that, in the 1980's Myrias Corp. was intending to build 4000 processor machines. They did a lot of work on the concept of parallelization of various processes.
Note that this is NOT necessarily a general-purpose system. It seems currently intended more for high-volume data manipulation. On the other hand, I think that it would do a peachy job on many image rendering problems (for ray tracing, you could assign one processor to a group of rays).
It would also be great for multi-threaded applications (Each process gets a handfull of processors). For Seti@Home, I think that it would kick butt.
On the other hand, it would suck on a single task that was indivisibly serial (only a handfull of the 128+ processors doing anything).
Note that some processes that seem inherently serial (summing data from a single stream) are actually quite parallelizable (N processors each gets 1/Nth of the stream and pass their intermediate results, on demand, to a supervisor processor that totals the intermediate values.) `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
One of the questions I have is: Is energy density per volume or per weight? If it's per volume, then it's pretty reasonable. I don't think that it's quite as good as Lithium ion at the start of it's life cycle but it indicates a lot of interesting possibilities.
One of the most interesting aspects is extremely fast (5 minutes!) recharge times. i.e. the battery might not last as long, but you'd be able to fully recharge it while waiting in line to board the plane (much less while waiting for the plane to arrive). 10K cycles means that you could fully discharge and recharge it 3 times a day and it would still have a 10 year life cycle (In my world, I think this would mean ~5 years ( at 3 discharges/day) before you started to notice serious capacity dropoff.
For example, you could fast-charge it (full charge) while in transit between customers and not have to worry about battery death. 30 seconds plugged into a wall circuit might give you an extra 2 hours of stand-by power
THE DOWNSIDE -- SAFETY
Fuse early, fuse often.   I've seen a small (VHS casette sized) battery vaporize a 30A fuse without breathing hard.
Something that can give you 10 times the discharge of a lead acid battery could couple as an emergency ark welding power supply. As long as you didn't drain it, A furby-sized battery could jump start a car (but you'd still need 2-gauge jumper cables to connect it!). If you shorted it out with 12Gauge (extension cord) wire, you could probably burn off the insulation in under 10 seconds. Now think what would happen to your thigh if you stuck one of these batteries in your pocket and shorted it out on your keys -- We're talking instant branding here (not to mention the hole burnt in your pants).
ON THE BRIGHT SIDE - QUAKE LIVES
I think that, with a fuel-cell generator pack, you could probably use one of these things in a man-portable rail gun. The scarey thing is that it would probably work much like the quake-3 unit (fire off a round (or three), and then wait for the power pack to reload). `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Mention that preinstalling the operating system on the new PC saves considerable time, expense and trouble. After all, your expertise is valuable. You install system software day in, day out, so there is little question you're best equipped to do it well.
We've been saying it for years. Now Micro$oft is admitting (nay, proclaiming) that installing their product is troublesome, time consuming and even expensive. -- That it's only sane to try it if you've already got lots of training and practice.
Now I've got a Microsoft site that backs that up. Thank you Redmond! `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
IANAL, but: No it's NOT how the law reads. You've been eating too much microsoft FUDge. The law says: You buy a copy, you get to use it. As long as you're only using one copy at a time, you're clearly not violating copyright law.
When it comes to violating the MS shrink-wrap 'agreement', however, that's a different question. Whether or not the shrink-wrap 'agreements' are legal is also another question. If the way that they describe those agreements is interpreted literally, then when the OEM dealer installs and uses the OS to test the computer, he can't legally transfer it to you. He has to destroy the old disk, de-install, buy a new copy and sell you the freshly-installed, VIRGIN copy of MS windows. (this is unless, of course, he has 'previous written permission from Microsoft'.)
(For those of you about to flame me for being anal about the license agreement, my point is that this what you get when you get anal about these agreements.)
Until the new consumer 'protection' act comes into action that declares shrink-wrap agreements binding, I believe that the legality of shrink-wrap agreements is state by state. There are also 'reasonableness' limits to even written 'standard' contracts. In any event the old (win 3.1) agreement seem to allow you to "physically" transfer the OS from one machine to another. I think that a clean wipe on one machine and an install on another would classify as a physical transfer. `ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Slashdot Mirror
It makes it that much harder for the corporate members to keep things under the table and off the radar.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
She's probably pissed about being spied on, but she found a way to process the problem vie an anti-industrial espionage act in Germany. It's a normal legal manouver of getting what you want through some legal loophole.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
So 6hrs over 2 weeks would be ~ 1/2 hour per day (Alkaline batteries get slightly more juice out of them if you use them intermittently).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Pacific Place Center in Vancouver, BC has fiber to the basement and ethernet to the living room... They were a prototype, (about 3-4 years old) so I'm pretty sure that there are a number of other recent developments with similar setups. (I remember about PPC because a few of my friends live there. I'm happy enough with 1.5Mb ADSL for $75/mo.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
3 gigabit or gigabyte? 3 gigabit isn't much -- barely 300MB (i.e. not enough to install red-hat. 3gigabyte, on the other hand, is pretty snazzy). I'm also presuming that it's 3G in either direction... otherwise, 3Bbit of response packets isn't very bad (if you're mostly doing downloading).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
My guess is that the supersaturation point has shifted but the curves remain roughly the same. The presumption of infinite geometric growth is central to most financial planning.
As one friend of mine most sucinctly put it:
"Capitalism is the world's largest pyramid scheme"
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Does "Fully Functional" include working weaponry.
This in turn, reminded me of the filk song (Science fiction folk -- don't ask me where the 'i' comes from) called "My murderous little toy"
When I was just a wee little lad, my Daddy brought to me
A toy he made down at the lab; it filled me full of glee!
A wonder to behold it was, with many buttons bright.
From the moment that I turned it on, it filled us all with fright.
Chorus:
It went ZAP! when it fired; it cursed when it missed,
And whirred as it took aim.
It didn't know if we were friend or foe:
It attacked us just the same.
Curiosity killed the cat, and the dog was next to go.
The parakeet beat a fast retreat, as the wall began to glow.
A turret turned, some bullets fired, and the TV was no more.
My friends, you should have seen it as the napalm hit the floor.
Chorus
It broke each window down the hall, and then I heard it laugh.
I must admit, I chuckled when it cut my brother in half.
My sister made it to the stairs, when it caught her in the pants.
My daddy had the shotgun out but he never stood a chance.
Chorus
It fired two mortars at the wall, and when the smoke had cleared,
I looked all around for my murderous toy, but it had disappeared!
Then I saw it leave through watered eyes; the tear-gas smelled so sweet.
Things weren't too good for the neighborhood, as it ambled down the street.
Chorus
Well that's the last I ever saw of my murderous little toy.
It might be dead but I hope it's not, `cause it filled me full of joy.
They say it reached the Bearing Strait, and crossed the icy flows.
The Russian Army ain't killed it yet, but it keeps them on their toes.
Chorus
Well, the years have gone too quickly now, and I've my own little boy,
And just last night I told him `bout my murderous little toy.
I recognized his crafty look, I could almost read his mind.
My son has grown up like his dad, `cause he wants one just like mine.
Chorus
oh yeah: stolen and reformatted from: another fan site
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Now that Tranmeta has produced a chip that threatens this sub-market, Intel actually has a reason to produce chips that aren't so power hungry. The expense of production with hitherto dormant technology is offset by not loosing (as much) market share to this upstart company.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Section 4 does not give Corel a license.
Microsoft is simply promising not to sue Corel over those patents until Corel is sold, tries to transfer rights or sues MS -- Including for anti-trust violations. If you add in section 5 (unconditional surrender of any legal rights WRT past MS actions), it's kinda like:`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Kid 1: I'm here because my parents were too lax. They never paid any attention to me. They let me do whatever I wanted. When people complained about me, they'd say "that's too bad". It didn't matter what I'd done. . . . .
Kid 2: I'm here because my parents were too strict. They wouldn't let me do anything. Whenever I went out, they wanted to know exactly what I was doing and where I was going. I felt smothered. I had no freedom whatsoever . . . .
____________________
Yeah. Go ahead. Blame the parents. Blame the internet. Blame the kids. The main purpose in blaming is to avoid looking for where you can take responsibility for your part in the problem. As long as you're unwilling to look at your part in the situation, there's no power to really affect the end result.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Overall this is an excelently researched and written article. I think that it is wasted if it is 'only' posted on slashdot (preaching to the converted). It should be submited to more 'mainstream' media.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Orwell is nonsense when taken out of context -- that's almost whole point of his work. If you're not immersed in the social context, much propaganda seems blatently stupid to an outsider. It often only makes sense to an insider because of implicit understandings which are silently violated.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
The Microsoft response was "Very strange. We've never seen this problem anywhere else. It must be something strange that your company is doing. This went on for weeks (if not months) until my friend talked to his counterpart at another large company that was having the same problems with recurrent file corruption.
The next time 'Dave' talked to his MS contact he mentioned that he'd been talking to this other support person.
Dave: "I was talking to X at Y company, yesterday." MS: "Ah yes, Him. I talk to him all the time"
Dave: "Oh, so you know about his problem?"
MS: {long guilty silence}.
(names withheld to protect the NDAed)
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
That's slashBot.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Putting a lock on your door won't stop most good burglars. It does, however, change the charge from illegal entry to break and enter.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
What's the big deal here? We take an 750mz P3 with 512MB of ram and a graphics card that would have singlehandedly doubled NASA's computing capability back in the Apollo era, and we use that as a glorified gameboy! (I'm going to go play Half Life when I'm done writing this).
Face it -- The Game boy is a computer. Just because it's normally used to play cute games doesn't mean that it's not able to do anything else. Where's your hacker ethic? The 4Mz Z80-lookalike that runs it was one of the mainstays of hobby computing until the IBM PC overran the competition (remember CPM or the TRS-80? And with up to 2MB of ROM, it's got the program storage of a small hard disk of the era. (4K of RAM is a bit small, but quite livable -- equivalent to a VIC-20.).
With an external floppy (ooh! 1M of storage, I'd be in HEAVEN!) or some flash RAM, and a 1200 baud modem (no K there!), it'd make a quite respectable early-80s BBS. Your average home hobbyist would have been scandalized about using that MUCH processing power (mostly because of the hundreds of K of available storage) 'just' to run a sewing machine.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Until MS files their arguments, the DOJ can only guess at what MS is going to argue. Some arguments are probably easy to guess. For the ones they didn't think about, they'll have to wait for MS's filing before they can start their research.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
20min@9A, 2min@90A 15sec@900A.
The battery might actually be able to take the 900A, if you could design it so that the wiring wouldn't melt in the process. The most probable approach for most consumer items would be between the first 2 options. (charging a 12V battery at 90A is actually doable with household current. It would translate to ~10A at 120V, but a power supply that could do that would be rather bulky -- you're talking a 1100W power supply. It might be doable as a base station. The lower range is more likely for a portable. The 900A range might be used for industrial/military applications.)
If the connectors for the battery were standardized, you might actually see units in the airport where you'd pay $2 to charge your battery in 2 minutes or less. (Images from half-life keep flashing in front of my eyes (HEV charging units)).
If they go commercial, these units might actually be made with cheap Titanium cases because a puncture could result in a catastrophic energy release.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
They saw that this was going to be a wildly successful IPO, and wanted to eat as much of the profit as possible, so they came up with a reasonably plausable explanation and a questionaire to go with it. They used the answers on the questionaire as an excuse to exclude a large number of invited IPO participants and keep the shares for themselves. When Red-Hat mushroomed, the sold the the shares themselves and kept the profits.
The nasty thing is: Had the IPO plummeted, they would have probably told Red-Hat that they hadn't been able to distribute all of the shares, and found a way to quietly return them to RedHat.
I dunno about you, but this thing has "Class action" written all over it in my eyes.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
All of these developments and more are the result of communal work. Yes, they had (a) person(s) who headed the movement, who gathered the people together and gave them a productive focus, but it was the community that got behind them and gave the power to the movement.
Without a focusing leader the movement may have expended it's energy fruitlessly. Without the support of the people, the leader would have been powerless. All of those changes were the result of a communal effort.
I challenge you to show me some majour developments in the history of man which only required a single person to effect.
As for suggestiong that you were sitting on your ass, I said that if you weren't to share that. I found your pessimistic flame too close to a self-fullfilling and self-limiting prophesy. I'd rather hear what is going on than what's not worth doing (in your mind).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Note that this is NOT necessarily a general-purpose system. It seems currently intended more for high-volume data manipulation. On the other hand, I think that it would do a peachy job on many image rendering problems (for ray tracing, you could assign one processor to a group of rays). It would also be great for multi-threaded applications (Each process gets a handfull of processors). For Seti@Home, I think that it would kick butt. On the other hand, it would suck on a single task that was indivisibly serial (only a handfull of the 128+ processors doing anything).
Note that some processes that seem inherently serial (summing data from a single stream) are actually quite parallelizable (N processors each gets 1/Nth of the stream and pass their intermediate results, on demand, to a supervisor processor that totals the intermediate values.)
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
One of the most interesting aspects is extremely fast (5 minutes!) recharge times. i.e. the battery might not last as long, but you'd be able to fully recharge it while waiting in line to board the plane (much less while waiting for the plane to arrive). 10K cycles means that you could fully discharge and recharge it 3 times a day and it would still have a 10 year life cycle (In my world, I think this would mean ~5 years ( at 3 discharges/day) before you started to notice serious capacity dropoff.
For example, you could fast-charge it (full charge) while in transit between customers and not have to worry about battery death. 30 seconds plugged into a wall circuit might give you an extra 2 hours of stand-by power
THE DOWNSIDE -- SAFETY
Fuse early, fuse often.   I've seen a small (VHS casette sized) battery vaporize a 30A fuse without breathing hard. Something that can give you 10 times the discharge of a lead acid battery could couple as an emergency ark welding power supply. As long as you didn't drain it, A furby-sized battery could jump start a car (but you'd still need 2-gauge jumper cables to connect it!). If you shorted it out with 12Gauge (extension cord) wire, you could probably burn off the insulation in under 10 seconds. Now think what would happen to your thigh if you stuck one of these batteries in your pocket and shorted it out on your keys -- We're talking instant branding here (not to mention the hole burnt in your pants).
ON THE BRIGHT SIDE - QUAKE LIVES
I think that, with a fuel-cell generator pack, you could probably use one of these things in a man-portable rail gun. The scarey thing is that it would probably work much like the quake-3 unit (fire off a round (or three), and then wait for the power pack to reload).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Now I've got a Microsoft site that backs that up. Thank you Redmond!
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
When it comes to violating the MS shrink-wrap 'agreement', however, that's a different question. Whether or not the shrink-wrap 'agreements' are legal is also another question. If the way that they describe those agreements is interpreted literally, then when the OEM dealer installs and uses the OS to test the computer, he can't legally transfer it to you. He has to destroy the old disk, de-install, buy a new copy and sell you the freshly-installed, VIRGIN copy of MS windows. (this is unless, of course, he has 'previous written permission from Microsoft'.)
(For those of you about to flame me for being anal about the license agreement, my point is that this what you get when you get anal about these agreements.)
Until the new consumer 'protection' act comes into action that declares shrink-wrap agreements binding, I believe that the legality of shrink-wrap agreements is state by state. There are also 'reasonableness' limits to even written 'standard' contracts. In any event the old (win 3.1) agreement seem to allow you to "physically" transfer the OS from one machine to another. I think that a clean wipe on one machine and an install on another would classify as a physical transfer.
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