I don't think that these robots demonstrate the importance of the space station. Quite to the contrary: if NASA concentrated even more on robotics and eliminated most manned space exploration (for now), they could be doing a lot more in the areas of robotics, new propulsion systems, sample return missions, and exploration.
I think manned exploration should happen eventually. But manned exploration will be a lot more cost effective once we have further optimized many of the necessary technologies with more unmanned missions.
Legally, indeed, you are right. Ethically, if this attitude is prevalent at Unisys, this should be a warning flag to anybody wanting to do business with Unisys. Knowingly tolerating the use of patented technology for years and then starting to charge once users and developers have committed to what they thought was free technology is unethical. Your business partners should start wondering what other stealth clauses and IP rights may be hidden in your dealings with them.
In fact, when it comes to real property, the law already recognizes that if you tolerate trespassing, eventually people acquire an easement to your property. Cases like LZW suggest that this principle should be carried over into IP law.
Even if it's designed to use "safe levels" during normal operations, whoever may put it up will be subject to suspicions that the satellite can be reconfigured for military purposes. In fact, any large power source in space, whether nuclear or solar, will suffer from that perception.
Also, while a single power plant may not have a big impact, with global warming being a concern, collecting more solar energy and focussing it on earth is the wrong direction to go in.
The solution to energy problems on earth seems to me not to beam in more energy from space but to conserve more energy at home. The US in particular is so wasteful of energy that the kind of money spent on those projects would be better spent on some simple, down-to-earth conservation programs.
(I also wonder why this particular avenue is being pursued. Technically, it would seem that simple mylar reflectors in space for night time lighting of urban areas would be a much more logical first step. They could help conserve a lot of energy, would be technically much simpler, and couldn't be easily repurposed for military use. To me, that alternative makes the microwave-based approach suspiciously look like dual-use technology and a boondoggle for certain kinds of research.)
I find that Linux is acceptably close to the theoretical limits of the hardware I use when it comes to I/O and network bandwidth. So where is BeOS's supposed advantage supposed to come from?
There are some special purpose applications where an OS can make a real difference. Traditional operating systems, for example, have trouble keeping up when there are a lot of tiny chunks of data that need to be processed by user-level server processes (one of the reasons why routing, logging, and nfsd are in the kernel). There are some operating systems specifically designed for such applications, but they have to make other trade-offs. And I don't see this being an issue with Beowulf applications.
Marketeers like to make claims about one system being a lot faster than another (c.f. Windows NT vs. Linux), but in practice, I find those are pretty meaningless.
For Beowulf in particular, given that it's being developed with Linux and given that the people on the project know very well how to hack the Linux kernel and networking code, even if there were a bottleneck in some release of Linux, it's a good bet that it would get fixed really quickly. How much effort do you think Be Inc. is going to invest in addressing performance problems for distributed scientific computing, given that their target market is desktop multimedia?
Overtime pay won't help much: employees won't ask for it anyway, and employers will simply average it out in the salaries.
I think it's actually in the employer's interest to help their employees be reasonably happy, and that might include protecting them from overwork: if people change jobs, that's very expensive for employers.
Some Swiss companies seem to have found a good solution: after the cleaning crews have gone through, the lights go out and the doors get locked in the early evening.
Microsoft still doesn't get it...
on
Microsoft Janus
·
· Score: 3
If Microsoft is trying to compete with Linux by adding features, they are missing the point: I think Linux is popular because it is comparatively simple.
For feature rich, high-end systems, there are excellent commercial UNIX systems out there, priced at a fraction of the cost of the hardware needed to run them. Even if NT could compete feature-by-feature with those, it doesn't run on the high-end hardware (yet?).
The neat thing about Linux is that it is part of the UNIX/POSIX family of operating systems, a family that spans everything from small embedded systems to the largest scientific supercomputers and mainframes. While those systems aren't 100% compatible, it's pretty easy to port source code among them.
Microsoft seems to be trying to duplicate this with Windows APIs from WinCE to NT. But I think their range of platforms is much smaller than POSIX, and the interoperability of their own APIs among different platforms is much worse. If they want to play in this market, they have to document their APIs much more carefully and live with third party implementations.
The original Amiga was a great machine at a great price. But what about the new (planned) one? It's a different OS, it's a different set of programmers, it's different hardware, it's different owners, and it's probably a different user community by now, too.
That's not necessarily bad. But what all this amounts to is that a division of Gateway is thinking about building a multimedia computer that uses some of the Linux kernel. The fact that it's called "Amiga" seems pretty incidental to me.
If you read the article, they will be producing a $10k-$30k camera, and they don't seem to be interested in the consumer market ("we don't ever want to sell $100 cameras", Mead says).
For that kind of money, you can already get excellent digital cameras (including the Nikon D-100). Foveon may have resolution that's a little better and a slightly better dynamic range, but at those prices, that will be pretty academic for most camera users.
I get 24 hires pictures on a SmartMedia card on the C2000Z, and SmartMedia is a lot easier to change than film. And it looks like that in about six months, you can get quadruple that density.
And with CompactFlash, you get even more storage per card (but the cards themselves are bigger and they aren't as easy to change).
Why should a "movie site" necessarily contain video content? The target audience for that kind of content is likely home users, usually connected via dial-up. Low-bitrate video doesn't look all that impressive, and all video formats pester some people on some common platform about downloading a plug-in or Active-X component. (I don't think I have bothered downloading any movie trailer even over our T3 line.)
Good copywriting, background info, and some high quality stills are probably much better advertising.
And if you want to stand out, do something fun like a set of movie-related backgrounds, desktop themes, a game applet, or a screen saver.
The push for Quicktime and other proprietary content formats is symptomatic of attempts to corner various markets by dominating the content format. Quicktime is one of the few technologies Apple has left to push, and I expect they are going to squeeze out of it whatever they can.
Unfortunately, the situation for standard high quality video formats isn't all that great. But MPEG1 may be an OK choice. MPEG2 is more encumbered (but mainly added support for interlacing), and MPEG4 is both a technical mess and very much caught up in patent issues.
So, I'd use MPEG1. MPEG2 may be acceptable given that there are open source players, but it's patent situation is iffy. If I had to choose a proprietary format that's owned by an independent company that doesn't have a hardware or software axe to grind.
But, perhaps, even more importantly: are you sure you even want to put videos on your site?
Well, for the $6 that I paid, nothing has gotten delivered yet a couple of weeks later, except for probably nearly one X10-related piece of junk e-mail per day.
What makes the use of private information worrisome and harmful to me is that it is only available selectively. Often, I can't even view information that has been collected about me to check it for errors. Also, I have no idea how my behavior/record compares to that of other people.
This keeps everybody in a state of fear: am I "normal"? is my credit record worse than that of other people? was the bank justified in denying my loan? did I do something wrong? is everybody around me earning more money than I am?
Perhaps a better approach to the encroachment on our privacy is more transparency: with some exceptions, anybody can view most data about other people, from the Bills (Clinton and Gates) to your nextdoor neighbor. That way, I know where I stand relative to other people in society, I can review my records for accuracy, and people can detect discriminatory or harmful practices by businesses. Or on a smaller scale, if all salaries in a company are widely known, that will likely lead to more equity in pay since it gives employees more negotiating power.
Perhaps it would also mean that individuals behave more prudently because they would embarrassed about some of the things they do. Right now, detrimental behavior is covered by a blanket of privacy in a way it has never been before. The constitution may protect your right to bear arms, but it doesn't protect your right to amass a private weapons stash without your neighbors knowing about it.
The current state, where large corporations can get information on consumers, but everybody else is in the dark, seems to me like the worst possibility. Transparency, if it applies to everybody, individuals as well as corporations, could be a workable alternative.
Mostly what those numbers show is that Giga doesn't know how to take surveys. You cannot use self-selected reports of uptime in response to some unstated question to infer anything about operating system stability.
What we can tell is that those numbers are unlikely to reflect a representative sample of real NT sites, since most users would have experienced downtime at intervals of less than six months due to the service packs and security holes on NT that require attention with clockwork regularity.
I wouldn't take anything that those consulting firms publish very seriously, unless it comes with a lot of detail about how the experiment/survey was designed and unless that design actually survives scrutiny.
For me, the Palm Pilot has several advantages over a daytimer: it's smaller and lighter, it can be backed up, I didn't need to learn a "system" for what I enter where and when, and it's much easier to maintain long lists (telephone numbers, todo lists) when inserting and deleting items.
On the other hand, I don't think IT managers should "maintain" Palm Pilots. The company might pay for it, but that should be the extent of it. If you use your Palm Pilot for both business and personal work (as I do) I think it's a good idea to pay for it yourself no matter what.
Open source projects generally need a coherent, functional software framework in place before outside developers can contribute. Before that framework is in place, most contributions to the source simply require too much communication between the core development team and outside developers. And, in fact, most open source software projects start with a dedicated, small team in academia or industry developing the core of some major software project.
Mozilla's core development isn't quite finished yet. Even so, the open source machinery has already started working. Prerelease versions of Mozilla have been converted to widgets in GTK and Java, parts of the code are being used as parts of other projects, etc.
By keeping Mozilla open, AOL/Netscape continues to be the standards setter when it comes to what browsers are expected to do. Making Mozilla proprietary now would accomplish little (would they try to make licensing revenues from it?), and lose a lot of opportunities for influencing the future of the web.
Looking from the outside and experimenting with the occasional beta release, Mozilla looks like it's on-track to me. Once a beta release is out, more outside, open-source contributions will start happening. I hope AOL has the courage to stay the course.
You can find information about how PARC's epaper works and some of the applications envisioned for it on PARC's web site on this page. More traditional display applications are very much being considered, in addition to the ideas about novel, more paper-like uses.
Typical was one guy who observed that Oracle has a partial open-source strategy, then triumphantly announced that Microsoft's earnings per employee are several times Oracle's
Well, that's an interesting data point. Since Microsoft's products clearly aren't seven times better or their employees seven times more productive than Oracle's, all that goes to show that the market is either not efficient or not in equillibrium, and that means that customers are paying inflated prices for Microsoft products.
For customers of Microsoft, it makes no sense to keep paying those prices, and one way for them to equillibrate is for them to join together in a consortium and develop their own operating system software.
Open source and Linux provide one mechanism by which that can be achieved, and it seems to be working well. It's a convenient, simple, mechanism for sharing development effort.
Open source doesn't mean the end of commercial software or commercial software companies, it simply is one of several ways in which the market can equillibrate and become efficient and approach the true incremental cost of producing additional copies of software, which is near zero.
For Microsoft, it means that Microsoft can't use Windows as a cash cow forever, unless they distort the market by using monopolistic practices.
it's already happening
on
The Factoid
·
· Score: 2
Most digital recording devices (digital audio recorders, digital still cameras, digital camcorders, PDAs, and GPS devices) already timestamp, and you can correlate the timestamps to put things together into a coherent timeline.
When it comes to broadcasting and receiving information, that's also already happening. IR and local wireless protocols are being standardized. Sun, Motorola, and 3com were demonstrating lots of little devices that would communicate with one another, exchanging that kind of information, and doing so in a vendor neutral, platform independent manner.
Other systems that exist in this space are IBM's Personal Area Network (PAN), various pens that record information and can read barcode, broches and other jewelry that exchange information among wearers (and alert their wearers to compatible interests), etc.
The Motorola pagers (2000x) was particularly impressive: in addition to a pager, it contained a Java VM, fast IR links, and could exchange objects and applets with pilots and desktops.
An obsessive desire to record one's own life, however, will probably not be the motivating factor (and has somewhat worrisome legal implications). But there are possible business uses.
The big issues with this are:
really standardizing the protocols and content types
deploying the infrastructure
reducing the size of the devices and increasing battery lifetime
find commercial motivators for both producers and consumers of information.
The "Factoid" seems like a variation on these themes. But as the PalmPilot has shown, the right variation on an existing theme at the right point in time can win big.
It's hard to track down interference, so, yes, you can probably get away with it without someone knocking on your door.
I think the question shouldn't be whether you are likely to get caught, but whether you are causing someone else trouble. If you run your computer unshielded, there is a good chance that you are.
Running your computer without shielding is like turning your stereo all the way up. You are likely to disturb someone else's radio reception or amateur radio station. You might also be disrupting digital transmission (wireless printers, etc.).
Unlike acoustic noise, it's a lot of work for people affected by radio interference to figure out first of all that it is happening at all (rather than that their radio or digital wireless system is broken) and where it it is coming from.
Causing interference like that is also against FCC regulations, and people can track you down and have you fined.
Unless you live on a desert island, if you run your computer open, sooner or later you are going to cause other people a lot of unnecessary headaches. So, please shield your computer.
The term "open source" was fairly uncommon when Perens and Raymond started using it. It would have made sense as a certification mark for a particular class of software licenses then.
While many people may not like that kind of license (and I prefer "free software" in the GNU sense myself as well), it would still have served a useful function at that.
However, by now, the term may indeed have become too generic, since it has rarely been claimed to be a trademark when used. Maybe GNU at least should learn a lesson from that and think about claiming a trademark on "GNU", "GPL", and "LGPL", as well as their long forms.
Without trademark protection, anybody can release something under the "GNU Public License", and you may assume that you are getting the usual "GPL", but it may contain unexpected clauses. Getting trademark protection doesn't require registering, it merely requires using "TM" fairly consistently.
Companies like Microsoft subvert technologies by abusing terminology. Their "transactional" file system isn't really transactional, their "Java" implementation makes few of the safety and security guarantees that Java stands for, and they have already indicated that they think Windows NT is open source--you give them a lot of money and sign your rights away and you get the source. Changing the meaning of words is much simpler and cheaper than actually delivering. A lot of other companies with the moniker "open" in their name also really deliver highly proprietary products.
Trademarks ensure that people get what they think they get, and that's a very good thing in a market where companies benefit enormously from using the latest public-relations-friendly buzzwords.
Of course, there is always the risk that a trademark isn't administered well. But a well-administered trademark on the term "open source" could have ensured that people have a clear understanding of what they get and what they don't get when, say, Apple claims that their release is "open source". It could also have encouraged companies to go the extra mile to make their releases "open source" compliant, rather than having each company's lawyers make things up as they go along.
While a few years ago, the term "open source" was novel enough, I fear it may be too late to rescue the term "open source" as a trademark. And that's a big lost opportunity to anybody interested in open source.
eBay's problem has nothing to do with Sun or Oracle. Sun and Oracle have all the distribution, clustering, logging, failover, and mirroring facilities anybody needs to implement reliable e-commerce architectures of any kind.
If eBay uses a single Enterprise 10000 server for the back-end database, they should have had a standby server that they could have switched to in seconds. eBay could also have distributed database operations further.
One thing is clear: NT has no advantage in this area. Sun gives you the option of lots of little servers or one big server with a backup, and depending on the application, one sometimes has to make the latter choice. With NT, however, you are forced to go the lots-of-little-server approach.
On a side note, on the day on which Microsoft's poor security architecture in MS Office has been responsible for shutting down lots of corporate sites (including their own) and caused thousands of users to lose their data, their whining seems very ironic. eBay's problems are eBay's fault; the virus problems are Microsoft's fault.
Linux supports both SmartMedia and CompactFlash (with standard adapters, both look like disk drives), so that's not a difference.
I have been using a D-600L (and lately a C-2000Z) from Olympus with my Linux machine for a year and a half. I go directly from SmartMedia to the GIMP, no drivers or anything required, and the SmartMedia cards are easier to remove/insert than a floppy.
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I think manned exploration should happen eventually. But manned exploration will be a lot more cost effective once we have further optimized many of the necessary technologies with more unmanned missions.
In fact, when it comes to real property, the law already recognizes that if you tolerate trespassing, eventually people acquire an easement to your property. Cases like LZW suggest that this principle should be carried over into IP law.
Also, while a single power plant may not have a big impact, with global warming being a concern, collecting more solar energy and focussing it on earth is the wrong direction to go in.
The solution to energy problems on earth seems to me not to beam in more energy from space but to conserve more energy at home. The US in particular is so wasteful of energy that the kind of money spent on those projects would be better spent on some simple, down-to-earth conservation programs.
(I also wonder why this particular avenue is being pursued. Technically, it would seem that simple mylar reflectors in space for night time lighting of urban areas would be a much more logical first step. They could help conserve a lot of energy, would be technically much simpler, and couldn't be easily repurposed for military use. To me, that alternative makes the microwave-based approach suspiciously look like dual-use technology and a boondoggle for certain kinds of research.)
There are some special purpose applications where an OS can make a real difference. Traditional operating systems, for example, have trouble keeping up when there are a lot of tiny chunks of data that need to be processed by user-level server processes (one of the reasons why routing, logging, and nfsd are in the kernel). There are some operating systems specifically designed for such applications, but they have to make other trade-offs. And I don't see this being an issue with Beowulf applications.
Marketeers like to make claims about one system being a lot faster than another (c.f. Windows NT vs. Linux), but in practice, I find those are pretty meaningless.
For Beowulf in particular, given that it's being developed with Linux and given that the people on the project know very well how to hack the Linux kernel and networking code, even if there were a bottleneck in some release of Linux, it's a good bet that it would get fixed really quickly. How much effort do you think Be Inc. is going to invest in addressing performance problems for distributed scientific computing, given that their target market is desktop multimedia?
I think it's actually in the employer's interest to help their employees be reasonably happy, and that might include protecting them from overwork: if people change jobs, that's very expensive for employers.
Some Swiss companies seem to have found a good solution: after the cleaning crews have gone through, the lights go out and the doors get locked in the early evening.
For feature rich, high-end systems, there are excellent commercial UNIX systems out there, priced at a fraction of the cost of the hardware needed to run them. Even if NT could compete feature-by-feature with those, it doesn't run on the high-end hardware (yet?).
The neat thing about Linux is that it is part of the UNIX/POSIX family of operating systems, a family that spans everything from small embedded systems to the largest scientific supercomputers and mainframes. While those systems aren't 100% compatible, it's pretty easy to port source code among them.
Microsoft seems to be trying to duplicate this with Windows APIs from WinCE to NT. But I think their range of platforms is much smaller than POSIX, and the interoperability of their own APIs among different platforms is much worse. If they want to play in this market, they have to document their APIs much more carefully and live with third party implementations.
That's not necessarily bad. But what all this amounts to is that a division of Gateway is thinking about building a multimedia computer that uses some of the Linux kernel. The fact that it's called "Amiga" seems pretty incidental to me.
For that kind of money, you can already get excellent digital cameras (including the Nikon D-100). Foveon may have resolution that's a little better and a slightly better dynamic range, but at those prices, that will be pretty academic for most camera users.
And with CompactFlash, you get even more storage per card (but the cards themselves are bigger and they aren't as easy to change).
Good copywriting, background info, and some high quality stills are probably much better advertising.
And if you want to stand out, do something fun like a set of movie-related backgrounds, desktop themes, a game applet, or a screen saver.
Unfortunately, the situation for standard high quality video formats isn't all that great. But MPEG1 may be an OK choice. MPEG2 is more encumbered (but mainly added support for interlacing), and MPEG4 is both a technical mess and very much caught up in patent issues.
So, I'd use MPEG1. MPEG2 may be acceptable given that there are open source players, but it's patent situation is iffy. If I had to choose a proprietary format that's owned by an independent company that doesn't have a hardware or software axe to grind.
But, perhaps, even more importantly: are you sure you even want to put videos on your site?
Well, for the $6 that I paid, nothing has gotten delivered yet a couple of weeks later, except for probably nearly one X10-related piece of junk e-mail per day.
This keeps everybody in a state of fear: am I "normal"? is my credit record worse than that of other people? was the bank justified in denying my loan? did I do something wrong? is everybody around me earning more money than I am?
Perhaps a better approach to the encroachment on our privacy is more transparency: with some exceptions, anybody can view most data about other people, from the Bills (Clinton and Gates) to your nextdoor neighbor. That way, I know where I stand relative to other people in society, I can review my records for accuracy, and people can detect discriminatory or harmful practices by businesses. Or on a smaller scale, if all salaries in a company are widely known, that will likely lead to more equity in pay since it gives employees more negotiating power.
Perhaps it would also mean that individuals behave more prudently because they would embarrassed about some of the things they do. Right now, detrimental behavior is covered by a blanket of privacy in a way it has never been before. The constitution may protect your right to bear arms, but it doesn't protect your right to amass a private weapons stash without your neighbors knowing about it.
The current state, where large corporations can get information on consumers, but everybody else is in the dark, seems to me like the worst possibility. Transparency, if it applies to everybody, individuals as well as corporations, could be a workable alternative.
What we can tell is that those numbers are unlikely to reflect a representative sample of real NT sites, since most users would have experienced downtime at intervals of less than six months due to the service packs and security holes on NT that require attention with clockwork regularity.
I wouldn't take anything that those consulting firms publish very seriously, unless it comes with a lot of detail about how the experiment/survey was designed and unless that design actually survives scrutiny.
On the other hand, I don't think IT managers should "maintain" Palm Pilots. The company might pay for it, but that should be the extent of it. If you use your Palm Pilot for both business and personal work (as I do) I think it's a good idea to pay for it yourself no matter what.
Mozilla's core development isn't quite finished yet. Even so, the open source machinery has already started working. Prerelease versions of Mozilla have been converted to widgets in GTK and Java, parts of the code are being used as parts of other projects, etc.
By keeping Mozilla open, AOL/Netscape continues to be the standards setter when it comes to what browsers are expected to do. Making Mozilla proprietary now would accomplish little (would they try to make licensing revenues from it?), and lose a lot of opportunities for influencing the future of the web.
Looking from the outside and experimenting with the occasional beta release, Mozilla looks like it's on-track to me. Once a beta release is out, more outside, open-source contributions will start happening. I hope AOL has the courage to stay the course.
You can find information about how PARC's epaper works and some of the applications envisioned for it on PARC's web site on this page. More traditional display applications are very much being considered, in addition to the ideas about novel, more paper-like uses.
Well, that's an interesting data point. Since Microsoft's products clearly aren't seven times better or their employees seven times more productive than Oracle's, all that goes to show that the market is either not efficient or not in equillibrium, and that means that customers are paying inflated prices for Microsoft products.
For customers of Microsoft, it makes no sense to keep paying those prices, and one way for them to equillibrate is for them to join together in a consortium and develop their own operating system software.
Open source and Linux provide one mechanism by which that can be achieved, and it seems to be working well. It's a convenient, simple, mechanism for sharing development effort.
Open source doesn't mean the end of commercial software or commercial software companies, it simply is one of several ways in which the market can equillibrate and become efficient and approach the true incremental cost of producing additional copies of software, which is near zero.
For Microsoft, it means that Microsoft can't use Windows as a cash cow forever, unless they distort the market by using monopolistic practices.
When it comes to broadcasting and receiving information, that's also already happening. IR and local wireless protocols are being standardized. Sun, Motorola, and 3com were demonstrating lots of little devices that would communicate with one another, exchanging that kind of information, and doing so in a vendor neutral, platform independent manner.
Other systems that exist in this space are IBM's Personal Area Network (PAN), various pens that record information and can read barcode, broches and other jewelry that exchange information among wearers (and alert their wearers to compatible interests), etc.
The Motorola pagers (2000x) was particularly impressive: in addition to a pager, it contained a Java VM, fast IR links, and could exchange objects and applets with pilots and desktops.
An obsessive desire to record one's own life, however, will probably not be the motivating factor (and has somewhat worrisome legal implications). But there are possible business uses.
The big issues with this are:
The "Factoid" seems like a variation on these themes. But as the PalmPilot has shown, the right variation on an existing theme at the right point in time can win big.
I think the question shouldn't be whether you are likely to get caught, but whether you are causing someone else trouble. If you run your computer unshielded, there is a good chance that you are.
Unlike acoustic noise, it's a lot of work for people affected by radio interference to figure out first of all that it is happening at all (rather than that their radio or digital wireless system is broken) and where it it is coming from.
Causing interference like that is also against FCC regulations, and people can track you down and have you fined.
Unless you live on a desert island, if you run your computer open, sooner or later you are going to cause other people a lot of unnecessary headaches. So, please shield your computer.
While many people may not like that kind of license (and I prefer "free software" in the GNU sense myself as well), it would still have served a useful function at that.
However, by now, the term may indeed have become too generic, since it has rarely been claimed to be a trademark when used. Maybe GNU at least should learn a lesson from that and think about claiming a trademark on "GNU", "GPL", and "LGPL", as well as their long forms.
Without trademark protection, anybody can release something under the "GNU Public License", and you may assume that you are getting the usual "GPL", but it may contain unexpected clauses. Getting trademark protection doesn't require registering, it merely requires using "TM" fairly consistently.
Trademarks ensure that people get what they think they get, and that's a very good thing in a market where companies benefit enormously from using the latest public-relations-friendly buzzwords.
Of course, there is always the risk that a trademark isn't administered well. But a well-administered trademark on the term "open source" could have ensured that people have a clear understanding of what they get and what they don't get when, say, Apple claims that their release is "open source". It could also have encouraged companies to go the extra mile to make their releases "open source" compliant, rather than having each company's lawyers make things up as they go along.
While a few years ago, the term "open source" was novel enough, I fear it may be too late to rescue the term "open source" as a trademark. And that's a big lost opportunity to anybody interested in open source.
If eBay uses a single Enterprise 10000 server for the back-end database, they should have had a standby server that they could have switched to in seconds. eBay could also have distributed database operations further.
One thing is clear: NT has no advantage in this area. Sun gives you the option of lots of little servers or one big server with a backup, and depending on the application, one sometimes has to make the latter choice. With NT, however, you are forced to go the lots-of-little-server approach.
On a side note, on the day on which Microsoft's poor security architecture in MS Office has been responsible for shutting down lots of corporate sites (including their own) and caused thousands of users to lose their data, their whining seems very ironic. eBay's problems are eBay's fault; the virus problems are Microsoft's fault.
I have been using a D-600L (and lately a C-2000Z) from Olympus with my Linux machine for a year and a half. I go directly from SmartMedia to the GIMP, no drivers or anything required, and the SmartMedia cards are easier to remove/insert than a floppy.