That was my thought, too. PA Semi's CPU is certainly a desktop competitor. 2GHz, dual core, large cache, PCIe, DDR2,... Nothing that matches the embedded market. Sure, a semiconductor company could be good for a whole host of things, but given that Apple already has experience with the PowerPC, it should be an easier switch than previous ones. Given that Apple has switched CPU's more than once without apparent financial harm, this move shouldn't be too much of an issue. I imagine that moving to a wholly owned CPU would be attractive to Apple, and that incompatibility with x86 might actually be seen as a benefit.
I agree. Surely 22/7 is a much better approximation than 14.3, which is not even close to the value of Pi. I mean, even if they mean 14/3, that's still way off.
There aren't any wireless cards that don't support Windows.
I've had quite a bit of problem with this under Vista. Which actually is a good example of why it's important to have drivers. One of the reasons I didn't want to move to Vista, and still use XP, even though I got a free Vista license, was that it didn't just run out of the box with all I had. The same thing, applied to Linux, is even more of a problem, since moving to Linux will mean having to do a lot more work to get comfortable.
I run a Live CD occasionally (usually Knoppix), and IMO things are better than they used to be. But last time I used one I still needed to call a Linux-using friend to get some things working.
On the original subject, I think there's something to that. Getting something for free which costs money feels more valuable (for example, the Vista I got vs. Linux). On the other hand, I also have a Microsoft Office license, but I still have Open Office installed instead, and frankly (especially when I wrote a lot) I preferred Wordpad over both. So I'd say that it's more a matter of supplying the needs of the user than the matter of cost.
Well said. It's interesting to see how Linux fanatics on Slashdot completely ignore that the reviewer is recommending the Eee PC in the same breath as Vista, and that Eee PC, as well as the XO, both Linux based, got good reviews on PC Mag (4 out of 5). Kind of amazing the way you can just slap the word Linux on any piece of crap and suddenly people will jump to its defense.
BTW, one of the greatest benefits of e-books for me is that you don't have to keep the book open. Holding a book is inconvenient. It often requires two hands, and usually at least one. I use a subnotebook, which I can just put on a surface with the screen in front of me, and read while doing something else with my hands. All I need to flick the page is press a key. If you've ever tried to read a print book while doing something else, you'd know how cumbersome that is.
You're wrong about "I cannot borrow an eBook from a library. Thousands of books for free." First of all, there are thousands upon thousands of e-books for free (Gutenberg projects and others). In print these books cost money, and even a library usually costs money.
Secondly, Fictionwise has a library and provides that support to others who want to open their own e-book library (see http://www.libwise.com/fll/).
I also disagree about e-books being more expensive. Some are, and often when they are cheaper they aren't significantly cheaper than print books, but as a regular buyer at Fictionwise, I get a lot of books more cheaply than I could in print. I bought the entire His Dark Materials trilogy for about $5 (after seeing The Golden Compass -- not a very good movie, but made me want to read the books). BTW, price is after a discount and includes the micropay rebate that's available for me to buy other books with. Normal would have been about the same as on Amazon. Still, for most books I can get them at Fictionwise slightly more cheaply than I can at Amazon. Say what you will, a little cheaper is still cheaper.
It's true that e-books are not there yet, but you haven't really convinced me that there's any fundamental problem with them. They are much like MP3 players, IMO. When these players still have little space on them, and you were limited in the number of songs and their quality, you were better off with CDs. Now that you can buy one that can store thousands of songs at high quality, there's not that much point in using large round things to store your music (except for backup). IMO, e-books are not too far behind music players.
The convenience of instant gratification (being able to read a few minutes after you think you want the book) and being able to carry your book collection with you are there. So if the down sides are solved (and a lot of them aren't technical), e-books could be perfectly valid replacements to print books.
First, as people said here, patents aren't always directly related to innovation as a lot of people see it. However, they do provide new ways of doing things.
Classic MS patents are the extended filenames for FAT/FAT32. Say what you will, MS invented a way to encode long filenames. Not anything major, but worth a few patents (in an industry that has software patents as they are now; not getting into *that* argument). I'm sure that Windows Media encoding of audio and video has a few patents, and these are true patents. Sure, there are other ways to achieve the same goal, but that's what patents are about.
A lot of other research goes into things like.NET, DirectX, all kinds of platform products that end users care little about. I'm sure Vista's kernel includes a lot of patents, and few users know or care, because users just see the UI and interaction, not what's underneath.
Some research goes into products like Microsoft's image editing (defunct product that is now partly integrated with Vista). Probably others are integrated into other products that few people use, relatively speaking. Of the many products that Microsoft publishes, most people only think of Office and Windows and what's included with them. Even then, they refer only to a subset of functionality. Few people will think of Office's collaboration tools or OneNote, and probably nobody has heard of Forefront Client Security (I just downloaded the Microsoft product list, and there are lots of products there I've never heard about).
A lot of patents of course don't yet have products incorporating them on the market, which is just the nature of patents. The time from patent creation to product is a few years, even when a company immediately starts creating a product around it. A lot of times the company doesn't have a good product to incorporate the patent into. Though Microsoft has a lot of patents in graphics, image processing, etc., it doesn't really have mainstream products there, so what doesn't get into the OS via the likes of DirectX might remain in the patent portfolio without implementation.
The specific file, inflate.c, was taken from a non GPL project and had GPL slapped on it. Therefore (and I mentioned it before) it won't be under GPL. There's another file, however, that the game uses, and originates in libarc, and that would be under GPL.
Is there any evidence that Sony didn't pay Izumo. If they did pay for a license then it won't be a GPL violation. There's noting to say, far as I know, that a software that's been GPL'ed can't be sold with another license by its author.
BTW, inflate.c itself seems to be not under GPL anyway. (Though mblock.c would be.)
I'm all for forcing PC vendors to optionally sell their PCs without Windows installed. I wouldn't mind if they also provided the option to have Linux preinstalled (though I don't think that should be forced). What sounds stupid to me is the idea, apparently what's being taken here as "unbundling", of not having an OS installed on any PC shipped.
Sure, go ahead, force me to install Windows for all my family and friends. Yeah, sure, I have the time. I just love being the support person for everyone, and it's so considerate of you to provide me with yet another option to serve all those around me. Yes, I'd have the opportunity to install Linux instead -- which would still take my time.
I'd use the option to buy a PC without Windows for myself (hey, I do it all the time by not buying the brands), but for people who just want a PC to use, I'd much rather have them get a PC with an OS preinstalled.
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That was my thought, too. PA Semi's CPU is certainly a desktop competitor. 2GHz, dual core, large cache, PCIe, DDR2, ... Nothing that matches the embedded market. Sure, a semiconductor company could be good for a whole host of things, but given that Apple already has experience with the PowerPC, it should be an easier switch than previous ones. Given that Apple has switched CPU's more than once without apparent financial harm, this move shouldn't be too much of an issue. I imagine that moving to a wholly owned CPU would be attractive to Apple, and that incompatibility with x86 might actually be seen as a benefit.
I agree. Surely 22/7 is a much better approximation than 14.3, which is not even close to the value of Pi. I mean, even if they mean 14/3, that's still way off.
I've had quite a bit of problem with this under Vista. Which actually is a good example of why it's important to have drivers. One of the reasons I didn't want to move to Vista, and still use XP, even though I got a free Vista license, was that it didn't just run out of the box with all I had. The same thing, applied to Linux, is even more of a problem, since moving to Linux will mean having to do a lot more work to get comfortable.
I run a Live CD occasionally (usually Knoppix), and IMO things are better than they used to be. But last time I used one I still needed to call a Linux-using friend to get some things working.
On the original subject, I think there's something to that. Getting something for free which costs money feels more valuable (for example, the Vista I got vs. Linux). On the other hand, I also have a Microsoft Office license, but I still have Open Office installed instead, and frankly (especially when I wrote a lot) I preferred Wordpad over both. So I'd say that it's more a matter of supplying the needs of the user than the matter of cost.
Well said. It's interesting to see how Linux fanatics on Slashdot completely ignore that the reviewer is recommending the Eee PC in the same breath as Vista, and that Eee PC, as well as the XO, both Linux based, got good reviews on PC Mag (4 out of 5). Kind of amazing the way you can just slap the word Linux on any piece of crap and suddenly people will jump to its defense.
BTW, one of the greatest benefits of e-books for me is that you don't have to keep the book open. Holding a book is inconvenient. It often requires two hands, and usually at least one. I use a subnotebook, which I can just put on a surface with the screen in front of me, and read while doing something else with my hands. All I need to flick the page is press a key. If you've ever tried to read a print book while doing something else, you'd know how cumbersome that is.
You're wrong about "I cannot borrow an eBook from a library. Thousands of books for free." First of all, there are thousands upon thousands of e-books for free (Gutenberg projects and others). In print these books cost money, and even a library usually costs money.
Secondly, Fictionwise has a library and provides that support to others who want to open their own e-book library (see http://www.libwise.com/fll/).
I also disagree about e-books being more expensive. Some are, and often when they are cheaper they aren't significantly cheaper than print books, but as a regular buyer at Fictionwise, I get a lot of books more cheaply than I could in print. I bought the entire His Dark Materials trilogy for about $5 (after seeing The Golden Compass -- not a very good movie, but made me want to read the books). BTW, price is after a discount and includes the micropay rebate that's available for me to buy other books with. Normal would have been about the same as on Amazon. Still, for most books I can get them at Fictionwise slightly more cheaply than I can at Amazon. Say what you will, a little cheaper is still cheaper.
It's true that e-books are not there yet, but you haven't really convinced me that there's any fundamental problem with them. They are much like MP3 players, IMO. When these players still have little space on them, and you were limited in the number of songs and their quality, you were better off with CDs. Now that you can buy one that can store thousands of songs at high quality, there's not that much point in using large round things to store your music (except for backup). IMO, e-books are not too far behind music players.
The convenience of instant gratification (being able to read a few minutes after you think you want the book) and being able to carry your book collection with you are there. So if the down sides are solved (and a lot of them aren't technical), e-books could be perfectly valid replacements to print books.
First, as people said here, patents aren't always directly related to innovation as a lot of people see it. However, they do provide new ways of doing things.
.NET, DirectX, all kinds of platform products that end users care little about. I'm sure Vista's kernel includes a lot of patents, and few users know or care, because users just see the UI and interaction, not what's underneath.
Classic MS patents are the extended filenames for FAT/FAT32. Say what you will, MS invented a way to encode long filenames. Not anything major, but worth a few patents (in an industry that has software patents as they are now; not getting into *that* argument). I'm sure that Windows Media encoding of audio and video has a few patents, and these are true patents. Sure, there are other ways to achieve the same goal, but that's what patents are about.
A lot of other research goes into things like
Some research goes into products like Microsoft's image editing (defunct product that is now partly integrated with Vista). Probably others are integrated into other products that few people use, relatively speaking. Of the many products that Microsoft publishes, most people only think of Office and Windows and what's included with them. Even then, they refer only to a subset of functionality. Few people will think of Office's collaboration tools or OneNote, and probably nobody has heard of Forefront Client Security (I just downloaded the Microsoft product list, and there are lots of products there I've never heard about).
A lot of patents of course don't yet have products incorporating them on the market, which is just the nature of patents. The time from patent creation to product is a few years, even when a company immediately starts creating a product around it. A lot of times the company doesn't have a good product to incorporate the patent into. Though Microsoft has a lot of patents in graphics, image processing, etc., it doesn't really have mainstream products there, so what doesn't get into the OS via the likes of DirectX might remain in the patent portfolio without implementation.
The specific file, inflate.c, was taken from a non GPL project and had GPL slapped on it. Therefore (and I mentioned it before) it won't be under GPL. There's another file, however, that the game uses, and originates in libarc, and that would be under GPL.
Is there any evidence that Sony didn't pay Izumo. If they did pay for a license then it won't be a GPL violation. There's noting to say, far as I know, that a software that's been GPL'ed can't be sold with another license by its author.
BTW, inflate.c itself seems to be not under GPL anyway. (Though mblock.c would be.)
I'm all for forcing PC vendors to optionally sell their PCs without Windows installed. I wouldn't mind if they also provided the option to have Linux preinstalled (though I don't think that should be forced). What sounds stupid to me is the idea, apparently what's being taken here as "unbundling", of not having an OS installed on any PC shipped.
Sure, go ahead, force me to install Windows for all my family and friends. Yeah, sure, I have the time. I just love being the support person for everyone, and it's so considerate of you to provide me with yet another option to serve all those around me. Yes, I'd have the opportunity to install Linux instead -- which would still take my time.
I'd use the option to buy a PC without Windows for myself (hey, I do it all the time by not buying the brands), but for people who just want a PC to use, I'd much rather have them get a PC with an OS preinstalled.