I used to have an iConnectHere account, and they indeed had connection problems from time to time. But the killer problem was not that, it was bad audio, and that can't be easily fixed.
I doubt that the poor audio quality is caused by iConnectHere, it's more likely to be the network from my PBX to them. Packet switching networks are not configured for guaranteed latency; if some are, good luck ripping your ISP roots out and migrating to a possibly better ISP. That would be easily the most difficult option, and with least guarantee of any improvement.
If you are a manual laborer then that's true and you will win in court. But if you are a decision-maker then different rules may apply. Nobody can afford a project leader who publicly says, for example, that his project is doomed to fail. The higher your position is, the easier it is to lose it.
btw, those people who would want to die themselves of old age... count amongst them the Catholics (a billion) and assorted Christians, the Hindi, the Jews, and the Muslims. This is a significant percentage of the human population.
Right - but that doesn't change the hard, cold facts. If one group of people gets immortality and other group of people refuses it, then guess who will outlive who?
It can be, of course, said that the mortals will rejuvenate themselves as a collective, and immortals will be mired in their own squabbles, like the Greek gods. Maybe. But that's a side issue. The real issue here is that people who deny progress can not expect to lead those who embrace progress. The orthodox group would have neither respect nor ability to control the progressive group.
My personal expectation is that if, for example, a way is found to repair telomeres (and thus to become younger) through some sort of stem cells manipulation combined with some gene engineering, very few of the orthodox people will be brave enough to refuse, especially when the treatment is for their children. It's easy to be orthodox (or mainstream) when you have no other options and the cost of compliance is low (Pascal's Wager.) But when you do have the options, when you must choose... many believers will find their beliefs shattered, and they will be cursing themselves while taking their precious children for the treatments.
Also, much of the impetus for social development is the prospect of death. Our mortality is he reason we do what we do.
I don't know about that. Myself, I do what I like. And what I like is partly embedded in genes, partly acquired, and partly just a delusion, just the regular mix. For example, I got a new car a couple of days ago - not because I was afraid of death but because I was tired of worrying about the old car (whether it will pass the smog check, whether a wheel falls off, etc.)
And another note. We live, as of now, too short a life to advance the science far more then we already do. It takes a lot of time to learn science of your predecessors, and by the time you are ready to do your own research you are dead. We either have to prolong life of our current biological bodies, or we have to move our minds into a faster machine, so that one can learn most of modern physics in an hour or so. Otherwise we hit a gnostic barrier just as solid as the light speed.
What purpose will an artificially intelligent being have to do anything? Why?
The question of purpose of being (and doing things) is one of major questions of many schools of philosophy. It's not unreasonable to assume that a successful AI would have the same reasons to exist that you do, so that we can share the world with them. If you build an AI that is hell-bent on vaporizing every living creature it can find, then probably something went very wrong in the design process...
Not to mention everyone has instant access to free porn now, I mean really, what else do we need as human race?
In a decade or two you can have instant Web access to a succubus AI who will easily pass your Turing test (mostly by distracting you, though:-)
Seriously, though, I would call a truly working AI to be the next goal of humanity. Upload of human's mind into the machine is the next priority. After that we can take all the time in the world (literally!) to think about the task #3:-)
We have acheived a level of comfort that people are happy with, and more convienience is now seen as extravagance.
I, for one, am still waiting for handheld teleporters. Not everyone likes to be stuck in traffic, assuming even that you can afford the gasoline.
Stem Cells, Cloning, Space Exploration, Quantam Computing, all these courses of study have the ability to alter views on creation itself. And most people are not willing to pay that price.
I am anxiously awaiting all of the above. Who cares about someone's "views on creation" if I can, for example, become immortal through one technological feat or another? I dare you to find those "most people" who would rather die themselves of old age and tell their children to do the same, instead of becoming, say, cyborgs, or wearers of cloned bodies, or simply disembodied souls in computer memory.
Besides, those who choose to refuse the technology will die, and the rest (who took the leap) become immortals, inherit the Earth, and the stars too, for a good measure.
I'm asking if the belief in faster-than-light travel is a kind of faith, like the desire for immortal life? [...] Why is this such a passionate belief for some people?
Why do you think it is a belief, let alone the compassionate part? To me it is a completely unfounded scientific conjecture, something curious to ponder about, and I only have a moderate hope that one day someone will make it work. There is no belief involved.
Why is faster-than-light travel so important?
Because it would be awfully lonely here otherwise - we live in boondocks of the Milky Way. Right now we are landlocked, doomed to stay dirtside unless of course you wish to launch multi-generation ship-worlds to other stars. This is not very practical. FTL is the only reasonable way to get to other stars, regardless of whether it is possible or not.
Accelerating to the speed of light is demonstrably possible, you only need to open your eyes because photons, by definition, move at the speed of light (whatever that might be in the current medium.) And not just that, you may want to check out what causes the Cherenkov radiation - and it does exist.
Besides, other posters mentioned many other options (unattainable at the moment, though) which may offer a way out of the FTL problems. Many of modern scientific and technological problems are impossible to solve if you just try the most straightforward approach; the word "workaround" means exactly that:-)
Einstein rules, and FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing.
Yes, and Isaac Newton would just laugh if someone told him about weird quantum effects which we accept as obvious today.
In fact, we know that we know almost nothing about the fundamental nature of this Universe, and it's just pointless to discuss what one can and can not do with it.
How many of you reading this, when sending an email in Thunderbird actually changed the "from" field?
I am glad it's there. I use it all the time, and it is extremely useful. I have currently four different identities there (work, Yahoo, Gmail and one relay address.) As result, I have no spam.
you don't need to worry about keeping track of licenses when you are deploying it
At home your license sticker is already on the computer, and most people are not even aware of the fact. In business setting admins have to track far more licenses than just the OS itself. Besides, to track the OS one can just open the AD window and count the registered computers. That's the easy part. Tracking of rare 3rd party software may be more difficult, unless you employ advanced technology (such as a spreadsheet, for one:-)
Normal simply means "majority of the user base", such as casual home users and most of the business users. In this context it is clear that none of them care about "freedom of software" or about the choice between seventeen text editors, all similar to Notepad but different in hundreds of minor details.
The question here is, will significant numbers of Linux users migrate to the Mac?
I don't think so. Motivations differ, but people who want free (in both senses) OS won't switch - OS X is neither cheap nor open-source. People who run Linux because of greater security may switch. People who run Linux because they need a UNIX desktop may switch.
More interestingly, will significant numbers of Linux users contributing useful work migrate?
Maybe. If a developer is interested in the application itself, and not in the OS that runs it, then I see no reason why [s]he can't get a computer that better suits the needs.
To some extent, given how much software is open source, the latter is far more important than the former.
Not really, unless the apps are tied to the OS - which they should not be. Use Qt, for example, if you can.
For Apple and Microsoft, users are everything because without a critical mass of users commercial/proprietary ISV companies won't develop or port software. For Linux - while the support of commercial ISVs is certainly nice to have - it's not so intertwined with its survival.
In both home and business sectors Linux's greatest flaw is its inability to run common apps. In business, for example, this is the first and most convincing reason to revert to Windows. Besides, Windows improved greatly in last years. A business will not be too concerned to pay $100 or so for the XP license; it's pretty much the internal cost of two or three hours of sysadmin's work.
Apple have solved this problem so far partly by writing tons of software itself (I think they have over a thousand people in their software division alone!)
That's where heavily centralized structure of a business is better than a bazaar of F/OSS developers. Nobody can order those developers to do this and that. But a company CEO can; and he also can demand very specific results. That's how 1000 developers can produce applications that all work with each other and are consistent. MS did it before with Office, and succeeded as well.
Attacking the corporate desktop is where Novell and Red Hat are currently focussed
I wish them good luck, but they need to fix WINE first, make it perfect. Only then the migration becomes possible. You can forget about business desktop (and many home desktops) until MS Office 2003 runs on the thing as well as it does on XP.
It was intended to service low Earth orbit. We have a vastly greater need to access orbiting devices than to go to the Moon
It is then unfortunate that most of our orbiting devices are launched to much higher orbits that the Shuttle can reach. Shuttle: 400 km. Geostationary: 35,786 km. Some satellites are on orbits that are highly elliptical and are not easily accessible by Shuttle.
In other words, the only "access" to a satellite the Shuttle can provide is to launch it in first place. Considering that this can be done with any rocket, less cost and zero risk, I don't see much value in such launch method at all.
It is hardly a surprise then that in last decades NASA had much more success with remotely controlled robots than with Shuttles. IMO, Shuttles provided zero science for all their life to date, and they gave us only some technological advances which may or may not be of any use elsewhere.
There is another, concurring, view at the problem of the Moon base and all these launches from the Moon.
You have to invest, for example, 10 trillion dollars to build a capable Moon base. The actual number will be likely higher, but whatever. This is one HUGE investment that must be fully made BEFORE you start using the results. Since it's not possible to consume all that money instantly, you have to borrow some of that capital early and can return it only much later. The interest on that immense loan will kill you.
Note that reference to the interest doesn't always mean real banks and real bankers. You can borrow from the society equally well, as governments do, but you still have to pay interest as everyone else does. Nobody is going to loan you money or resources or personal effort without some sort of interest.
This scheme results in need of much higher initial investment than the job itself would require, and the end result is that your costs go even higher.
This is totally counter-indicated. Today people prefer to pay as they go (see insurance or mortgage markets, for example.) Rarely a new home buyer can pay $500K in cash, but in this Moonbase thing you have to pay $10T in cash and then live in a trailer for 10 years while your house is being built. I don't think you can find many buyers on these conditions:-)
Currently we already have Earth-based launch system which is adequate for the needs. If it were cheaper then more space tourists could go up. But really it doesn't matter; to summarize, there is no problem with launches in first place. If you can afford to build a satellite you can afford to launch it. And as technology advances, the launches will be cheaper and cheaper. When they become cheap enough the Moon base will become financially possible.
due to a number of Putin's policy changes that are effectively destroying the russian democracy
Most russians support Putin and don't support the "democracy" that was being built by his predecessors. They are conservative and support the model of the government that was tried, tested and true for hundreds of years - a strong centralized government. There will be no concessions to Bush, in part because Putin's position is far more solid than Bush's own.
If you want to know what's wrong with the "democracy" (as opposed to real democracy, which does not exist anywhere on Earth,) look at Georgia and Ukraine, they have it. Their example is scary; rule by the committee often quickly morphs into infinite corruption.
Purchase of software (drivers etc.) hardly depends on what kind of company it is. You buy not because you like the company but because you need their products.
If I build a Linux server, and if it requires a binary-only driver, then sure I will consider the purchase. But then the game is played on a different field, a field of commercial OSes, and there a choice is different.
Besides, from my experience with even very good binary-only packages (NVidia, for example) they break whenever you update the kernel, and that can happen even automatically. Next time you reboot - and no graphics!
So again, all said and done, I would be very cautious if the whole system does not come from a single place (Suse, Redhat, Debian, Microsoft etc.)
You can expect normally about zero support in this.
This free driver may cause bad publicity to the company (if it spectacularly fails, for example, or just poorly performs on average.)
It may create a perception of support of the device on some OS where, in fact, the company does not support it.
Several hundred units, $100 each is what, ten thousand dollars? Forget it; this is petty cash for any successful business - and we are not talking about mom & pop stores here. When you get to half a million of guaranteed orders, then you may have a business case.
As many people noted already, the documentation may contain closets full of skeletons. Such as "if you set this bit the whole thing crashes and we don't know why." This would not be helpful to the image of the company as NYSE analysts read it and scream "SELL!!!" - or as some bored journalist, or a lawyer, smells blood in the water.
Uncountable other reasons, such as lack of any documentation that is safe to publish.
So by all indications it's safer to sit on the documentation rather than do something and get busted, one way or another. Rules of the business world are quite different from the rules of F/OSS world.
I was perfectly fine with having separate programs for raster and vector editing, and absolutely no need to mix them.
There is no good usability reason to NOT mix them in one package. Both create and modify pictures, both have their uses, and it is silly to have two different pieces of software to do one design.
Convergence like this occurs as soon as it is technically possible and financially viable.
Fifty years ago you were lucky to have a car that runs when you want it to. Today you insist on having radio, CD player and cupholders and air conditioner and power seats, and whatnot - even though the car is not a concert hall and not a coffee house.
Ten years ago you were lucky to have a digital photo camera. Today you get it in your phone, as part of the hardware, free pretty much, and it works better than those early models.
So don't look backward, don't recall how you used to have it done. Instead think of how it should be done, and see if you can have it this way.
The Deep Paint software is freeware now, and it has many functions for 3D painting. A ton of brushes is preset, for example, and you can start doing things right away. It's pretty powerful.
IMO, Acrylic will be a replacement for MS Paint, given that Paint is totally ridiculous today.
Just hire people who've been using it for years and you don't have this big scary learning curve.
Unfortunately such people will cost you $20K/yr more than Windows people. Compared to this continuous expense, a price of Windows license is invisible.
FPGA may even be faster, because it will execute a command in one clock (or two at most) - and you can include the hardware into the FPGA that does what this particular CPU needs. But the VLIW firmware has to spend more clocks on decoding the operation and then running it step by step, according to VLIW machine commands. All in all, it's difficult to guess, and pointless too, as you mention. At least the FPGA design is safer from many points of view, and is more open, and easier to modify.
Java or CLR would benefit from CPUs that are designed to run them. There is no point of taking a "Jack of all trades" CPU, it will be master of none.
And with regard to emulation companies, this market is too small for a chip manufacturer to exist. Transmeta would need to send many hundreds of thousands of CPUs to have positive balance.
I have wondered if the Transmeta would be good for emulating things like the PDP-11, Vax, and other older Minis
My answer to that would be NO. If the task is to run a legacy s/w on some sort of a replica box, I would rather synthesize the desired CPU in an FPGA. It would give me direct, hardware execution of commands as opposed to reinterpreting them. As another important benefit, I would synthesize right there all the I/O hardware that is part of that Mini. This is not possible with Transmeta since it's just a CPU, and it has no idea about PDP-11 bus, for example. You'd have to build the bus controller anyway, unless you want to do it in VLIW software - which is not practical.
Coding wouldn't have been expensive unless you were selling the software
Coding would be infinitely expensive if you pour money in and gain nothing, one way or another. Selling of the s/w is just one gain option; using it in-house, as you suggest, is another.
However you can't buy a Transmeta beige box and give it to a code monkey to play with:-) There are no such boxes, except a few notebooks that don't even exist (for all practical purposes.) You would have to build your own computer, from chips, caps and resistors. That is not easy (read it as "awfully expensive".)
You also mention number-crunching in this post and below. But if you want that you don't go with a teeny-weeny low power CPU. You take a big and hot chip, and not one either. Big CPUs can run SMP if that's your thing; for example, G4 is not even a "big" CPU in my book, but with its existing SMP capabilities and its AltiVec core (which is probably what you need for your multimedia and other uses) it trumps Transmeta's product, just stomps it into the ground. And you can get G4 beige boxen from many places, off the shelf (including Apple's shelf, for the moment.)
Transmeta's CPUs are good for one purpose only - for emulating other CPUs. If you want a cold chip, there are many other, and better too (ask anyone between Atmel and Freescale.) If you want a fast CPU, there are many of those (ask AMD and Intel and IBM.) You'd have to work hard to find the exact niche where Transmeta's products fit - and the problem is that the niche is too narrow for the company to live in.
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I doubt that the poor audio quality is caused by iConnectHere, it's more likely to be the network from my PBX to them. Packet switching networks are not configured for guaranteed latency; if some are, good luck ripping your ISP roots out and migrating to a possibly better ISP. That would be easily the most difficult option, and with least guarantee of any improvement.
If you are a manual laborer then that's true and you will win in court. But if you are a decision-maker then different rules may apply. Nobody can afford a project leader who publicly says, for example, that his project is doomed to fail. The higher your position is, the easier it is to lose it.
Right - but that doesn't change the hard, cold facts. If one group of people gets immortality and other group of people refuses it, then guess who will outlive who?
It can be, of course, said that the mortals will rejuvenate themselves as a collective, and immortals will be mired in their own squabbles, like the Greek gods. Maybe. But that's a side issue. The real issue here is that people who deny progress can not expect to lead those who embrace progress. The orthodox group would have neither respect nor ability to control the progressive group.
My personal expectation is that if, for example, a way is found to repair telomeres (and thus to become younger) through some sort of stem cells manipulation combined with some gene engineering, very few of the orthodox people will be brave enough to refuse, especially when the treatment is for their children. It's easy to be orthodox (or mainstream) when you have no other options and the cost of compliance is low (Pascal's Wager.) But when you do have the options, when you must choose... many believers will find their beliefs shattered, and they will be cursing themselves while taking their precious children for the treatments.
Also, much of the impetus for social development is the prospect of death. Our mortality is he reason we do what we do.
I don't know about that. Myself, I do what I like. And what I like is partly embedded in genes, partly acquired, and partly just a delusion, just the regular mix. For example, I got a new car a couple of days ago - not because I was afraid of death but because I was tired of worrying about the old car (whether it will pass the smog check, whether a wheel falls off, etc.)
And another note. We live, as of now, too short a life to advance the science far more then we already do. It takes a lot of time to learn science of your predecessors, and by the time you are ready to do your own research you are dead. We either have to prolong life of our current biological bodies, or we have to move our minds into a faster machine, so that one can learn most of modern physics in an hour or so. Otherwise we hit a gnostic barrier just as solid as the light speed.
What purpose will an artificially intelligent being have to do anything? Why?
The question of purpose of being (and doing things) is one of major questions of many schools of philosophy. It's not unreasonable to assume that a successful AI would have the same reasons to exist that you do, so that we can share the world with them. If you build an AI that is hell-bent on vaporizing every living creature it can find, then probably something went very wrong in the design process...
In a decade or two you can have instant Web access to a succubus AI who will easily pass your Turing test (mostly by distracting you, though :-)
Seriously, though, I would call a truly working AI to be the next goal of humanity. Upload of human's mind into the machine is the next priority. After that we can take all the time in the world (literally!) to think about the task #3 :-)
I, for one, am still waiting for handheld teleporters. Not everyone likes to be stuck in traffic, assuming even that you can afford the gasoline.
Stem Cells, Cloning, Space Exploration, Quantam Computing, all these courses of study have the ability to alter views on creation itself. And most people are not willing to pay that price.
I am anxiously awaiting all of the above. Who cares about someone's "views on creation" if I can, for example, become immortal through one technological feat or another? I dare you to find those "most people" who would rather die themselves of old age and tell their children to do the same, instead of becoming, say, cyborgs, or wearers of cloned bodies, or simply disembodied souls in computer memory.
Besides, those who choose to refuse the technology will die, and the rest (who took the leap) become immortals, inherit the Earth, and the stars too, for a good measure.
Why do you think it is a belief, let alone the compassionate part? To me it is a completely unfounded scientific conjecture, something curious to ponder about, and I only have a moderate hope that one day someone will make it work. There is no belief involved.
Why is faster-than-light travel so important?
Because it would be awfully lonely here otherwise - we live in boondocks of the Milky Way. Right now we are landlocked, doomed to stay dirtside unless of course you wish to launch multi-generation ship-worlds to other stars. This is not very practical. FTL is the only reasonable way to get to other stars, regardless of whether it is possible or not.
I hope this answers your questions.
Besides, other posters mentioned many other options (unattainable at the moment, though) which may offer a way out of the FTL problems. Many of modern scientific and technological problems are impossible to solve if you just try the most straightforward approach; the word "workaround" means exactly that :-)
That's what Einstein's opponents used to say?
Yes, and Isaac Newton would just laugh if someone told him about weird quantum effects which we accept as obvious today.
In fact, we know that we know almost nothing about the fundamental nature of this Universe, and it's just pointless to discuss what one can and can not do with it.
Well, you can already buy Mac Mini for $499, that's close enough.
I am glad it's there. I use it all the time, and it is extremely useful. I have currently four different identities there (work, Yahoo, Gmail and one relay address.) As result, I have no spam.
At home your license sticker is already on the computer, and most people are not even aware of the fact. In business setting admins have to track far more licenses than just the OS itself. Besides, to track the OS one can just open the AD window and count the registered computers. That's the easy part. Tracking of rare 3rd party software may be more difficult, unless you employ advanced technology (such as a spreadsheet, for one :-)
Normal simply means "majority of the user base", such as casual home users and most of the business users. In this context it is clear that none of them care about "freedom of software" or about the choice between seventeen text editors, all similar to Notepad but different in hundreds of minor details.
The question here is, will significant numbers of Linux users migrate to the Mac?
I don't think so. Motivations differ, but people who want free (in both senses) OS won't switch - OS X is neither cheap nor open-source. People who run Linux because of greater security may switch. People who run Linux because they need a UNIX desktop may switch.
More interestingly, will significant numbers of Linux users contributing useful work migrate?
Maybe. If a developer is interested in the application itself, and not in the OS that runs it, then I see no reason why [s]he can't get a computer that better suits the needs.
To some extent, given how much software is open source, the latter is far more important than the former.
Not really, unless the apps are tied to the OS - which they should not be. Use Qt, for example, if you can.
For Apple and Microsoft, users are everything because without a critical mass of users commercial/proprietary ISV companies won't develop or port software. For Linux - while the support of commercial ISVs is certainly nice to have - it's not so intertwined with its survival.
In both home and business sectors Linux's greatest flaw is its inability to run common apps. In business, for example, this is the first and most convincing reason to revert to Windows. Besides, Windows improved greatly in last years. A business will not be too concerned to pay $100 or so for the XP license; it's pretty much the internal cost of two or three hours of sysadmin's work.
Apple have solved this problem so far partly by writing tons of software itself (I think they have over a thousand people in their software division alone!)
That's where heavily centralized structure of a business is better than a bazaar of F/OSS developers. Nobody can order those developers to do this and that. But a company CEO can; and he also can demand very specific results. That's how 1000 developers can produce applications that all work with each other and are consistent. MS did it before with Office, and succeeded as well.
Attacking the corporate desktop is where Novell and Red Hat are currently focussed
I wish them good luck, but they need to fix WINE first, make it perfect. Only then the migration becomes possible. You can forget about business desktop (and many home desktops) until MS Office 2003 runs on the thing as well as it does on XP.
It is then unfortunate that most of our orbiting devices are launched to much higher orbits that the Shuttle can reach. Shuttle: 400 km. Geostationary: 35,786 km. Some satellites are on orbits that are highly elliptical and are not easily accessible by Shuttle.
In other words, the only "access" to a satellite the Shuttle can provide is to launch it in first place. Considering that this can be done with any rocket, less cost and zero risk, I don't see much value in such launch method at all.
It is hardly a surprise then that in last decades NASA had much more success with remotely controlled robots than with Shuttles. IMO, Shuttles provided zero science for all their life to date, and they gave us only some technological advances which may or may not be of any use elsewhere.
You have to invest, for example, 10 trillion dollars to build a capable Moon base. The actual number will be likely higher, but whatever. This is one HUGE investment that must be fully made BEFORE you start using the results. Since it's not possible to consume all that money instantly, you have to borrow some of that capital early and can return it only much later. The interest on that immense loan will kill you.
Note that reference to the interest doesn't always mean real banks and real bankers. You can borrow from the society equally well, as governments do, but you still have to pay interest as everyone else does. Nobody is going to loan you money or resources or personal effort without some sort of interest.
This scheme results in need of much higher initial investment than the job itself would require, and the end result is that your costs go even higher.
This is totally counter-indicated. Today people prefer to pay as they go (see insurance or mortgage markets, for example.) Rarely a new home buyer can pay $500K in cash, but in this Moonbase thing you have to pay $10T in cash and then live in a trailer for 10 years while your house is being built. I don't think you can find many buyers on these conditions :-)
Currently we already have Earth-based launch system which is adequate for the needs. If it were cheaper then more space tourists could go up. But really it doesn't matter; to summarize, there is no problem with launches in first place. If you can afford to build a satellite you can afford to launch it. And as technology advances, the launches will be cheaper and cheaper. When they become cheap enough the Moon base will become financially possible.
Most russians support Putin and don't support the "democracy" that was being built by his predecessors. They are conservative and support the model of the government that was tried, tested and true for hundreds of years - a strong centralized government. There will be no concessions to Bush, in part because Putin's position is far more solid than Bush's own.
If you want to know what's wrong with the "democracy" (as opposed to real democracy, which does not exist anywhere on Earth,) look at Georgia and Ukraine, they have it. Their example is scary; rule by the committee often quickly morphs into infinite corruption.
Maybe because there is no actual pioneering in it any more?
If I build a Linux server, and if it requires a binary-only driver, then sure I will consider the purchase. But then the game is played on a different field, a field of commercial OSes, and there a choice is different.
Besides, from my experience with even very good binary-only packages (NVidia, for example) they break whenever you update the kernel, and that can happen even automatically. Next time you reboot - and no graphics!
So again, all said and done, I would be very cautious if the whole system does not come from a single place (Suse, Redhat, Debian, Microsoft etc.)
So by all indications it's safer to sit on the documentation rather than do something and get busted, one way or another. Rules of the business world are quite different from the rules of F/OSS world.
There is no good usability reason to NOT mix them in one package. Both create and modify pictures, both have their uses, and it is silly to have two different pieces of software to do one design.
Convergence like this occurs as soon as it is technically possible and financially viable.
Fifty years ago you were lucky to have a car that runs when you want it to. Today you insist on having radio, CD player and cupholders and air conditioner and power seats, and whatnot - even though the car is not a concert hall and not a coffee house.
Ten years ago you were lucky to have a digital photo camera. Today you get it in your phone, as part of the hardware, free pretty much, and it works better than those early models.
So don't look backward, don't recall how you used to have it done. Instead think of how it should be done, and see if you can have it this way.
IMO, Acrylic will be a replacement for MS Paint, given that Paint is totally ridiculous today.
Unfortunately such people will cost you $20K/yr more than Windows people. Compared to this continuous expense, a price of Windows license is invisible.
Java or CLR would benefit from CPUs that are designed to run them. There is no point of taking a "Jack of all trades" CPU, it will be master of none.
And with regard to emulation companies, this market is too small for a chip manufacturer to exist. Transmeta would need to send many hundreds of thousands of CPUs to have positive balance.
My answer to that would be NO. If the task is to run a legacy s/w on some sort of a replica box, I would rather synthesize the desired CPU in an FPGA. It would give me direct, hardware execution of commands as opposed to reinterpreting them. As another important benefit, I would synthesize right there all the I/O hardware that is part of that Mini. This is not possible with Transmeta since it's just a CPU, and it has no idea about PDP-11 bus, for example. You'd have to build the bus controller anyway, unless you want to do it in VLIW software - which is not practical.
Coding would be infinitely expensive if you pour money in and gain nothing, one way or another. Selling of the s/w is just one gain option; using it in-house, as you suggest, is another.
However you can't buy a Transmeta beige box and give it to a code monkey to play with :-) There are no such boxes, except a few notebooks that don't even exist (for all practical purposes.) You would have to build your own computer, from chips, caps and resistors. That is not easy (read it as "awfully expensive".)
You also mention number-crunching in this post and below. But if you want that you don't go with a teeny-weeny low power CPU. You take a big and hot chip, and not one either. Big CPUs can run SMP if that's your thing; for example, G4 is not even a "big" CPU in my book, but with its existing SMP capabilities and its AltiVec core (which is probably what you need for your multimedia and other uses) it trumps Transmeta's product, just stomps it into the ground. And you can get G4 beige boxen from many places, off the shelf (including Apple's shelf, for the moment.)
Transmeta's CPUs are good for one purpose only - for emulating other CPUs. If you want a cold chip, there are many other, and better too (ask anyone between Atmel and Freescale.) If you want a fast CPU, there are many of those (ask AMD and Intel and IBM.) You'd have to work hard to find the exact niche where Transmeta's products fit - and the problem is that the niche is too narrow for the company to live in.