And those three different ways would involve them putting their own time (=money) into supporting someone else's hardware.
Actually at least one of the solutions would have required that Apple not spend a dime. Apple actually went out of their way and spent good money to make sure that Palm's solution for connecting their iTunes compatible device was suddenly not compatible.
What actually, in fact, happened is the exact opposite of what you argue, and yet you argue for Apple. Your argument should be for Palm instead, as it actually applies to them (they spent the time and money to be sure the Pre was compatible with iTunes by making it behave exactly like an older iPod).
There was no trademark infringement originally, when Palm simply used the product ID to tell iTunes how it should be treated - that's exactly what the product ID was created for. Apple chose to look at both the product ID and the vendor ID after the Pre was released, so now Palm has basically flipped them the bird and spoofed the vendor ID. That was NOT intended by the USB-IF, and Palm is basically daring the USB-IF to kick them out, and daring Apple to sue them. Frankly, in my non-lawyer opinion I think Palm has a good shot at winning a counter-suit on anti-competitive practices grounds. If that happens, Apple is screwed.
The thing Gmail has that I have never seen in any other service or application (granted, never used fastmail) is the idea of conversations. The fact that all replies to an email are kept under the original email instead of thrown all over the place made the whole email experience vastly superior to anything else I have ever used. Just one little feature did it for me. I frankly despise my corporate email for that reason, though Outlook is finally getting the feature (after having it for years in Gmail), so there is hope. The storage is also awesome, though I've used it for years, never deleted anything, and still I don't think I have hit the 300mb mark so I'm not the target for email storage. It's still better than my corporate email 150mb 15mb per message (up from 5mb recently) limits.
I never bothered with Gmail's IMAP service because I preferred their webmail client to any other email client, so I can't really speak to that. I can certainly see a need for good IMAP service in many situations though.
Actually the point of an SLA is that it is an Agreement to provide a certain Level of Service. Both parties agree to the service level and build in metrics (the obvious metric for an E-mail service is uptime) and consequences for failing to meet the level of service agreed to.
The result is that, as you said, there is a real, monetary cost for downtime to the provider, which certainly gives them an incentive to make sure they can actually meet their SLA's. The payment to customers is critical to create this incentive.
These are legally enforceable contracts, they are very, very common - far from unique to email, and if a company jerks you around you sue the bastards for breach of contract and switch providers.
You're supposed to get a lawyer and sue for compensitory and punitive damages when that happens, it's called a breach of contract, and if the outage was large enough and the breach flagrant enough, you just might be able to get a portion of your losses back.
The neat side effect of that is, they probably wouldn't pull that bullshit again, either because you sued them into the grave or they learned their lesson.
A temporary monopoly was granted by the government to allow that inventor who created that unique and original device to recoup the R&D costs associated with creating that device in the first place, noting that R&D for something genuinely original often has dead end roads when trying to get something to work and is generally quite expensive to perform.
It's actually much simpler than that, though what you said certainly applies. The temporary monopoly is a reward for being clever. We want clever people making clever things, and we also want them to share how to make that clever thing with everybody else, so how do we encourage that? We tell them that for X number of years they are the only ones allowed to make the item they invented. They can produce and sell the item themselves, license their right to produce and sell to someone else, or both.
Personally, I think software patents are a good thing, they simply haven't been done correctly. You don't grant patents on some gadget based on some vague description based on what it would do, you grant patents based on the actual design that can be used to re-create the gadget. That's where software patents go wrong, I think, they don't actually give you the design (the source code) for the product, they just give a description of what it does. The actual important piece to share is the source code for the patentable software, not just the description of all the cool things it does. It is also the source code that matters when a software patent is infringed upon, because you can compare the source to see if the infringer is doing whatever it is he's doing in essentially the same way as the patent holder.
That would both encourage new, innovative software AND spread these ideas around quickly, which is the whole point of the patent system. As it stands now we are stuck in the "trade secrets" mode for expensive software and we shouldn't be.
but it wasn't the patent itself that was proving to be useful in this case... it was merely a roadblock that needed to be overcome and ignored. It has become ignored for the most part as well.
Despite what you may think, the LZW patent was an example of poor business management, not the patent system failing. The patent portion of that issue worked flawlessly, and was exactly the kind of innovation the patent system was designed to encourage. LZW was vast improvement over LZ78, and certainly qualifies (it is not pure math, though people argue the point) and the Sperry Corp. (who Welch worked for) had a right to the patent. They merged with the Burroughs Corp. and formed Unisys. That's how Unisys got it, Unisys was the company that developed it.
What you pointed out were the consequences of being an asshole with your licensing terms - a competing format was developed and hardly anybody uses GIF today (which uses LZW, as you pointed out). You can be fairly certain that the developers of PNG looked long and hard at LZW before they were able to come up with something better. You look at similar technologies, like mpeg3 and mpeg4, both of which have patents on them, both of which have the exact same potential problems as LZW, and yet together they include the two most popular and ubiquitous digital audio formats out there - mp3 and AAC. They are simply compression algorithms, just like LZW, they are also licensed just like LZW, yet the patent owners handled it much better than the LZW owners did.
It's very possible that without patents like LZW having been established as legal, mpeg3 and 4 would have been kept private, trade secrets with stiff licensing terms and a single software vendor, and then where would we be?
It's the same concept as trying to boil a live frog. If you just throw it in boiling water it will immediately jump out, foiling your attempt to boil it. If, however, you throw it in cool water and slowly heat it, the frog won't jump out. It will stay comfortable while it cooks, up until the point at which it is cooked enough that it dies.
Had legislatures simply dumped all the laws, restrictions, etc. that we have now on the founding generation, there would have been a major revolt. It would never work. But if you change just a few things a year, over the course of decades and centuries the population will tolerate quite a lot, because no one issue is big enough to fight for. Space them out a bit and the tolerance threshold is never reached.
You know what? If you are lucky to come from certain "non aryan" place and do couple of things very wrong, that "pain in the ass" could become literal.
You're actually more likely to have an easy time than us "aryan" types, at least in the airports, as racial profiling is pretty much illegal in the US, and the ACLU is even fighting to allow burkas for photo ID's.
Since you can't be racist to a white man in the US, grandma gets strip-searched while the nervous looking arab with full beard and head wrap coasts on through.
All of which ignores the REAL security breakdown that day, which was that 19 people managed to sneak box cutters onto airplanes. And you know what? You can -still- sneak box cutters onto airplanes, I know because a former co-worker of mine who traveled frequently left one in his bag for several trips and was never tagged. He did a major "oh shit!" when he realized it was in there.
Harassing foreigners happens because for some reason Immigration hates immigrants, and anybody who could potentially become an immigrant, regardless of your intentions or value to society. I don't know why, 90% (at least) of the people in this country are descended from immigrants, you'd think we'd love them. Apparently we only love the illegal immigrants, legal visitors can go screw themselves.
If you've ever opened up a hard drive, you may have noticed there are very weak barriers over open holes - which often say things like "removal voids the warranty yadda yadda". These exist to let air in and keep dust out. Dust = bad, vacuum = worse.
You'd be hard pressed to come up with something better, the drive arms and platters would have to be extremely rigid to prevent the platters from contacting disk while still being able to make minute changes in direction extremely quickly (they are delicate and agile currently), all while maintaining a separation of well below a millimeter. There is also zero heat dissipation through the vaccum, so you would need some sort of heat conductor to make up for the difference there. All in all it may be feasible, but the drives would be a lot heavier, more expensive, and probably slower - which completely defeats the purpose of removing the air to speed the drive up.
Actually the US Copyright code spells out the criteria, very much narrowing what is considered "fair".
You've got to realize that "fair use" is the original right, and copyright is a restriction placed upon it to incentivise the creation of new art. Without copyright, fair use would obviously not be a question, because it would be the purchasers of the creative work who would have complete control over their individual copy (including the ability to make more copies and distribute them). Copyright grants a limited monopoly, restricting the public usage rights. They still exist underneath the copyrights, and frankly large copyright holders hate it.
Fair use is ambiguous and subjective because the ultimate right to use the creative works belongs to the public, not the artist/author/big media corporation, and copyright is simply a restriction on that right to ultimately (hopefully) enhance the benefit to the public. "Clarifying" the law would make it more restrictive, not less restrictive. It is better this way.
I believe it is $75 million from the time they illegaly distributed the source code, not from the day of the deal. When exactly that would be I have no idea, but the British version of this lawsuit goes back to March of this year.
Using a March start date, you're still looking at $13.5 billion, but that is based on the maximum statutory damages (which these litigious copyright owners do not set, btw). More than likely if eBay loses it will be substantially less than that, but still very significant.
If eBay loses I wouldn't be surprised to hear a $1-5 billion figure, assuming they are correct in their assertions of when statutory damages trigger.
Changing the code was perfectly legal, so long as they only used it internally or developed a compiled product with it. That's why they licensed the source code in the first place.
However, distributing the code is not legal. It sounds to me like someone at Ebay was dumbass enough to think that minor changes would be enough to alter the copyright, making it theirs and therefore distributable. In fact, depending on the license they agreed to, it may have legal to distribute the altered portions only, or not at all. Either way, to make re-distributing the code legal would have required a substantial re-write, basically just using the Skype code as a guide and not much more than that.
The Skype founders may be overly-litigeous bastards, but on the surface it sounds like they are in the right on this one.
Wow, the site itself claims it is nothing more than a rumor. Which means that, so far, there is zero evidence to back it up. Why should he bother? Seriously, this is tabloid material at best.
The only people who would believe such a ridiculous claim with zero evidence of any kind are either extremely naive (and he couldn't hope to pursuade them) or already have it in for him, in which case they'll just use his response to fan the controversy. Instead of "Why hasn't he responded?" it will become "Why is he covering up suchandsuch?".
A serious allegation is not evidence by itself, and an unsubstantiated rumor is worth far less than a serious allegation.
The point of the whole exercise, though, is that we should be taking what I just said and applying it to what Beck himself says, because he uses a lot of these linguistic techniques to cajole people all the time. Frankly, I agree with him half the time, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize that some of his most popular techniques are a bit underhanded. But that's the art of argument, and Beck is definitely good at it.
I recently had to fire up an old Win98 box on a Compaq with a PIII inside, and man, it was rough. It was not unresponsive, but it was not exactly quick, and I had almost forgotten what hard drive thrashing sounded like. Plus the UI was just terrible, I used to love 98, but since I've been using XP for so long I can't figure out what I liked about it. Networking didn't make much sense, -every- little change required a reboot, and it just wasn't capable of fully integrating into a domain. Oh and it could not get DNS via DHCP, I was like, what?
Anyway, 98 would certainly run quicker on modern hardware, up until you hit multi-cores anyway. I don't recall since they were rare in consumer products back then, but I don't think 98 ever had very good multi-processor support. Poor handling of application processes was also an issue, that was actually one of the big selling poitns of XP, was that an application crash would rarely cause an OS crash. That was common for 98 and below.
As far as XP vs Vista's performance, the last I heard on the subject (it was a while ago) was Vista begins to outperform XP in raw speed once your system has more than 8 processors; XP does not scale as well as Vista (and Win7). That seems ridiculous now, but in a couple years it will probably be commonplace. You can get systems like that already.
First off, as far as I can tell UL does not certify computer cases. There may be other certification issues, but that one is certainly BS.
Second, do you know anything about corrugated cardboard? When placed end to-end, as in this case design, it is very, very sturdy. I would expect a person could stand on this case without issue, whereas the sheet metal equivalent (except in a few obnoxiously heavy cases) would certainly collapse, at least in the case of a fatass like me.
Third, with the corrugation verticle, this case will have extremely nice cooling charactaristics. As designed it will probably be the coolest case on the market, I would be surprised if there were heat buildup issues.
mainly heat will make it brittle over time since it's still paper/w a coating...
I'm not sure I understand, it's standard brown cardboard, there is no coating. What it actually is, in case you don't understand what corrugation is, is a piece of wavy thick brown paper sandwitched between two flat pieces of thick brown paper. There's no coating. Stack 30 or so of those on top of each other and you have a very sturdy box from pretty much all sides.
Water could be an issue for the cardboard, but water is already an issue for computers so that's not exactly a big negative there. There is certainly a greater risk of fire due to shorts than a metal case, that would need to be looked into. A light applciation of something like FlameStop should solve some of those problems, but would also increase the cost a little. Flamestop 2 especially, it's a waterproofer as well, and will fireproof 200 square feet of material for about $40 retail, you could probably get it cheaper for larger applications.
The biggest "need" for a cardboard case comes from big name manufacturers that insist on making proprietary boards and cases instead of sticking with industry standards.
I've got a newsflash for you, but the big name manufacturers are the ones who created the inudstry standards, and they certainly stick to them. That you (and most hobby computer builders) prefer an old, outdated standard like ATX is not something to hold against the industry, which has been trying to move on for years.
One of the best case formats out there is BTX, the layout greatly improves airflow while at the same time reducing case size in most applciations significantly, all without sacrificing power like other designs. Yet the only people who make boards for it are the big name manufacturers, because hobbyists aren't interested, for some reason.
The same with ITX, its applications are not those that most hobbyists are into, yet big manufactuers are to a small degree, and they have some useful applications.
These are all industry standards and allow for new applciations that ATX just doesn't work at all for. For example, there will never be an ATX case small enough to clip to your belt, but there are other form factors that will.
Grounding has always been via the power supply primarily, the power supply always has a ground plug for that reason. The case was just a handy secondary ground when working on the computers. I imagine that lame grounding strap will be more important for this case, but really grounding isn't a big risk unless you are in a very dry area and producing a large static buildup in your body.
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And those three different ways would involve them putting their own time (=money) into supporting someone else's hardware.
Actually at least one of the solutions would have required that Apple not spend a dime. Apple actually went out of their way and spent good money to make sure that Palm's solution for connecting their iTunes compatible device was suddenly not compatible.
What actually, in fact, happened is the exact opposite of what you argue, and yet you argue for Apple. Your argument should be for Palm instead, as it actually applies to them (they spent the time and money to be sure the Pre was compatible with iTunes by making it behave exactly like an older iPod).
There was no trademark infringement originally, when Palm simply used the product ID to tell iTunes how it should be treated - that's exactly what the product ID was created for. Apple chose to look at both the product ID and the vendor ID after the Pre was released, so now Palm has basically flipped them the bird and spoofed the vendor ID. That was NOT intended by the USB-IF, and Palm is basically daring the USB-IF to kick them out, and daring Apple to sue them. Frankly, in my non-lawyer opinion I think Palm has a good shot at winning a counter-suit on anti-competitive practices grounds. If that happens, Apple is screwed.
The thing Gmail has that I have never seen in any other service or application (granted, never used fastmail) is the idea of conversations. The fact that all replies to an email are kept under the original email instead of thrown all over the place made the whole email experience vastly superior to anything else I have ever used. Just one little feature did it for me. I frankly despise my corporate email for that reason, though Outlook is finally getting the feature (after having it for years in Gmail), so there is hope. The storage is also awesome, though I've used it for years, never deleted anything, and still I don't think I have hit the 300mb mark so I'm not the target for email storage. It's still better than my corporate email 150mb 15mb per message (up from 5mb recently) limits.
I never bothered with Gmail's IMAP service because I preferred their webmail client to any other email client, so I can't really speak to that. I can certainly see a need for good IMAP service in many situations though.
Actually the point of an SLA is that it is an Agreement to provide a certain Level of Service. Both parties agree to the service level and build in metrics (the obvious metric for an E-mail service is uptime) and consequences for failing to meet the level of service agreed to.
The result is that, as you said, there is a real, monetary cost for downtime to the provider, which certainly gives them an incentive to make sure they can actually meet their SLA's. The payment to customers is critical to create this incentive.
These are legally enforceable contracts, they are very, very common - far from unique to email, and if a company jerks you around you sue the bastards for breach of contract and switch providers.
You're supposed to get a lawyer and sue for compensitory and punitive damages when that happens, it's called a breach of contract, and if the outage was large enough and the breach flagrant enough, you just might be able to get a portion of your losses back.
The neat side effect of that is, they probably wouldn't pull that bullshit again, either because you sued them into the grave or they learned their lesson.
Well sure, he's newer than YOU, all high and mighty with your sub-6 digit slashdot ID.
Go back to your ivory tower, man! ;)
A temporary monopoly was granted by the government to allow that inventor who created that unique and original device to recoup the R&D costs associated with creating that device in the first place, noting that R&D for something genuinely original often has dead end roads when trying to get something to work and is generally quite expensive to perform.
It's actually much simpler than that, though what you said certainly applies. The temporary monopoly is a reward for being clever. We want clever people making clever things, and we also want them to share how to make that clever thing with everybody else, so how do we encourage that? We tell them that for X number of years they are the only ones allowed to make the item they invented. They can produce and sell the item themselves, license their right to produce and sell to someone else, or both.
Personally, I think software patents are a good thing, they simply haven't been done correctly. You don't grant patents on some gadget based on some vague description based on what it would do, you grant patents based on the actual design that can be used to re-create the gadget. That's where software patents go wrong, I think, they don't actually give you the design (the source code) for the product, they just give a description of what it does. The actual important piece to share is the source code for the patentable software, not just the description of all the cool things it does. It is also the source code that matters when a software patent is infringed upon, because you can compare the source to see if the infringer is doing whatever it is he's doing in essentially the same way as the patent holder.
That would both encourage new, innovative software AND spread these ideas around quickly, which is the whole point of the patent system. As it stands now we are stuck in the "trade secrets" mode for expensive software and we shouldn't be.
but it wasn't the patent itself that was proving to be useful in this case... it was merely a roadblock that needed to be overcome and ignored. It has become ignored for the most part as well.
Despite what you may think, the LZW patent was an example of poor business management, not the patent system failing. The patent portion of that issue worked flawlessly, and was exactly the kind of innovation the patent system was designed to encourage. LZW was vast improvement over LZ78, and certainly qualifies (it is not pure math, though people argue the point) and the Sperry Corp. (who Welch worked for) had a right to the patent. They merged with the Burroughs Corp. and formed Unisys. That's how Unisys got it, Unisys was the company that developed it.
What you pointed out were the consequences of being an asshole with your licensing terms - a competing format was developed and hardly anybody uses GIF today (which uses LZW, as you pointed out). You can be fairly certain that the developers of PNG looked long and hard at LZW before they were able to come up with something better. You look at similar technologies, like mpeg3 and mpeg4, both of which have patents on them, both of which have the exact same potential problems as LZW, and yet together they include the two most popular and ubiquitous digital audio formats out there - mp3 and AAC. They are simply compression algorithms, just like LZW, they are also licensed just like LZW, yet the patent owners handled it much better than the LZW owners did.
It's very possible that without patents like LZW having been established as legal, mpeg3 and 4 would have been kept private, trade secrets with stiff licensing terms and a single software vendor, and then where would we be?
It's the same concept as trying to boil a live frog. If you just throw it in boiling water it will immediately jump out, foiling your attempt to boil it. If, however, you throw it in cool water and slowly heat it, the frog won't jump out. It will stay comfortable while it cooks, up until the point at which it is cooked enough that it dies.
Had legislatures simply dumped all the laws, restrictions, etc. that we have now on the founding generation, there would have been a major revolt. It would never work. But if you change just a few things a year, over the course of decades and centuries the population will tolerate quite a lot, because no one issue is big enough to fight for. Space them out a bit and the tolerance threshold is never reached.
One day we'll just wake up dead. ;)
You know what? If you are lucky to come from certain "non aryan" place and do couple of things very wrong, that "pain in the ass" could become literal.
You're actually more likely to have an easy time than us "aryan" types, at least in the airports, as racial profiling is pretty much illegal in the US, and the ACLU is even fighting to allow burkas for photo ID's.
Since you can't be racist to a white man in the US, grandma gets strip-searched while the nervous looking arab with full beard and head wrap coasts on through.
All of which ignores the REAL security breakdown that day, which was that 19 people managed to sneak box cutters onto airplanes. And you know what? You can -still- sneak box cutters onto airplanes, I know because a former co-worker of mine who traveled frequently left one in his bag for several trips and was never tagged. He did a major "oh shit!" when he realized it was in there.
Harassing foreigners happens because for some reason Immigration hates immigrants, and anybody who could potentially become an immigrant, regardless of your intentions or value to society. I don't know why, 90% (at least) of the people in this country are descended from immigrants, you'd think we'd love them. Apparently we only love the illegal immigrants, legal visitors can go screw themselves.
I mean--wooden screws and boards!
They are wood screws, not wooden screws. Wooden screws are made of wood, wood screws are made to screw into wood, and are made of steel.
The boards themselves look legit - except for the odd screws and lack of an actual DVI connection to the board.
The truth? OMGZ Linux is teh best!!!1! Leenux Trovalds is the smartest man ever to live!
Typical American arrogance.
I thought Linus Torvolds was Finnish?
Anyway, he moved to the US and at least one of his children is a natural born "Arrogant American", so maybe he's on to something?
Just saying...
If you've ever opened up a hard drive, you may have noticed there are very weak barriers over open holes - which often say things like "removal voids the warranty yadda yadda". These exist to let air in and keep dust out. Dust = bad, vacuum = worse.
You'd be hard pressed to come up with something better, the drive arms and platters would have to be extremely rigid to prevent the platters from contacting disk while still being able to make minute changes in direction extremely quickly (they are delicate and agile currently), all while maintaining a separation of well below a millimeter. There is also zero heat dissipation through the vaccum, so you would need some sort of heat conductor to make up for the difference there. All in all it may be feasible, but the drives would be a lot heavier, more expensive, and probably slower - which completely defeats the purpose of removing the air to speed the drive up.
Anything that isn't unfair.
Actually the US Copyright code spells out the criteria, very much narrowing what is considered "fair".
You've got to realize that "fair use" is the original right, and copyright is a restriction placed upon it to incentivise the creation of new art. Without copyright, fair use would obviously not be a question, because it would be the purchasers of the creative work who would have complete control over their individual copy (including the ability to make more copies and distribute them). Copyright grants a limited monopoly, restricting the public usage rights. They still exist underneath the copyrights, and frankly large copyright holders hate it.
Fair use is ambiguous and subjective because the ultimate right to use the creative works belongs to the public, not the artist/author/big media corporation, and copyright is simply a restriction on that right to ultimately (hopefully) enhance the benefit to the public. "Clarifying" the law would make it more restrictive, not less restrictive. It is better this way.
Weird Al normally doesn't need permission, but he always tries to get it anyway. Defending lawsuits, even if you win, is expensive.
I believe it is $75 million from the time they illegaly distributed the source code, not from the day of the deal. When exactly that would be I have no idea, but the British version of this lawsuit goes back to March of this year.
Using a March start date, you're still looking at $13.5 billion, but that is based on the maximum statutory damages (which these litigious copyright owners do not set, btw). More than likely if eBay loses it will be substantially less than that, but still very significant.
If eBay loses I wouldn't be surprised to hear a $1-5 billion figure, assuming they are correct in their assertions of when statutory damages trigger.
Changing the code was perfectly legal, so long as they only used it internally or developed a compiled product with it. That's why they licensed the source code in the first place.
However, distributing the code is not legal. It sounds to me like someone at Ebay was dumbass enough to think that minor changes would be enough to alter the copyright, making it theirs and therefore distributable. In fact, depending on the license they agreed to, it may have legal to distribute the altered portions only, or not at all. Either way, to make re-distributing the code legal would have required a substantial re-write, basically just using the Skype code as a guide and not much more than that.
The Skype founders may be overly-litigeous bastards, but on the surface it sounds like they are in the right on this one.
Wow, the site itself claims it is nothing more than a rumor. Which means that, so far, there is zero evidence to back it up. Why should he bother? Seriously, this is tabloid material at best.
The only people who would believe such a ridiculous claim with zero evidence of any kind are either extremely naive (and he couldn't hope to pursuade them) or already have it in for him, in which case they'll just use his response to fan the controversy. Instead of "Why hasn't he responded?" it will become "Why is he covering up suchandsuch?".
A serious allegation is not evidence by itself, and an unsubstantiated rumor is worth far less than a serious allegation.
The point of the whole exercise, though, is that we should be taking what I just said and applying it to what Beck himself says, because he uses a lot of these linguistic techniques to cajole people all the time. Frankly, I agree with him half the time, but that doesn't mean I can't recognize that some of his most popular techniques are a bit underhanded. But that's the art of argument, and Beck is definitely good at it.
I recently had to fire up an old Win98 box on a Compaq with a PIII inside, and man, it was rough. It was not unresponsive, but it was not exactly quick, and I had almost forgotten what hard drive thrashing sounded like. Plus the UI was just terrible, I used to love 98, but since I've been using XP for so long I can't figure out what I liked about it. Networking didn't make much sense, -every- little change required a reboot, and it just wasn't capable of fully integrating into a domain. Oh and it could not get DNS via DHCP, I was like, what?
Anyway, 98 would certainly run quicker on modern hardware, up until you hit multi-cores anyway. I don't recall since they were rare in consumer products back then, but I don't think 98 ever had very good multi-processor support. Poor handling of application processes was also an issue, that was actually one of the big selling poitns of XP, was that an application crash would rarely cause an OS crash. That was common for 98 and below.
As far as XP vs Vista's performance, the last I heard on the subject (it was a while ago) was Vista begins to outperform XP in raw speed once your system has more than 8 processors; XP does not scale as well as Vista (and Win7). That seems ridiculous now, but in a couple years it will probably be commonplace. You can get systems like that already.
Actually we're talking about a feature of of OS/2 that does NOT exist in Linux, and the P was giving reasons why it would be a bad idea.
What you say is true of Linux now, but what you say would not be true of Linux if it had OS/2 like hard disk management.
In other words, you've simply re-stated exactly why an OS/2 like agressive disk management scheme would be a bad idea, making the parent's point.
Cheers.
OSX 10.2 was released in 2002, it seems fair to compare XP to OSX.
Someone already did that.
Ouch, I suppose I deserved that.
First off, as far as I can tell UL does not certify computer cases. There may be other certification issues, but that one is certainly BS.
Second, do you know anything about corrugated cardboard? When placed end to-end, as in this case design, it is very, very sturdy. I would expect a person could stand on this case without issue, whereas the sheet metal equivalent (except in a few obnoxiously heavy cases) would certainly collapse, at least in the case of a fatass like me.
Third, with the corrugation verticle, this case will have extremely nice cooling charactaristics. As designed it will probably be the coolest case on the market, I would be surprised if there were heat buildup issues.
mainly heat will make it brittle over time since it's still paper /w a coating...
I'm not sure I understand, it's standard brown cardboard, there is no coating. What it actually is, in case you don't understand what corrugation is, is a piece of wavy thick brown paper sandwitched between two flat pieces of thick brown paper. There's no coating. Stack 30 or so of those on top of each other and you have a very sturdy box from pretty much all sides.
Water could be an issue for the cardboard, but water is already an issue for computers so that's not exactly a big negative there. There is certainly a greater risk of fire due to shorts than a metal case, that would need to be looked into. A light applciation of something like FlameStop should solve some of those problems, but would also increase the cost a little. Flamestop 2 especially, it's a waterproofer as well, and will fireproof 200 square feet of material for about $40 retail, you could probably get it cheaper for larger applications.
The biggest "need" for a cardboard case comes from big name manufacturers that insist on making proprietary boards and cases instead of sticking with industry standards.
I've got a newsflash for you, but the big name manufacturers are the ones who created the inudstry standards, and they certainly stick to them. That you (and most hobby computer builders) prefer an old, outdated standard like ATX is not something to hold against the industry, which has been trying to move on for years.
One of the best case formats out there is BTX, the layout greatly improves airflow while at the same time reducing case size in most applciations significantly, all without sacrificing power like other designs. Yet the only people who make boards for it are the big name manufacturers, because hobbyists aren't interested, for some reason.
The same with ITX, its applications are not those that most hobbyists are into, yet big manufactuers are to a small degree, and they have some useful applications.
These are all industry standards and allow for new applciations that ATX just doesn't work at all for. For example, there will never be an ATX case small enough to clip to your belt, but there are other form factors that will.
Call me when they invent cardboard solder.
Call me when anybody gives a rat's ass enought to call you.
Seriously, I hate that meme, it's such a dick of a thing to say that it makes me grumpy and causes me to jeer an otherwise good post.
Grounding has always been via the power supply primarily, the power supply always has a ground plug for that reason. The case was just a handy secondary ground when working on the computers. I imagine that lame grounding strap will be more important for this case, but really grounding isn't a big risk unless you are in a very dry area and producing a large static buildup in your body.