I don't think that embedded Linux stands to do much in terms of affecting the perception of Linux. I for one, don't care what OS my car uses, my Microwave uses, or my VCR uses. If i need to know or care, then obviously it wasn't implented correctly.
So far as the kernel forking. Who cares? If the kernel forks in order to make concessions to the embedded market, it's still GPL'ed, so other developers won't be left out in the cold. It'd actually be better if it forked in this way, rather than following mMicrosofts footsteps with Win32, where we've now got WinCE, Win9x, and WinNT, which are largely incompatible with each other, serve completely different markets, yet have the same interface and API's tying them together...
With all that, it'd definetly be a boon for developers of embedded devices, supposing the could cut away enough fat from the kernely to make it competitive with other embedded OS'es. Though the cost savings probably won't be enough to make it back to the customer, i'm sure they'ed appreciate having an open platform to develope on, rather than needing to learn the semanics of a new OS when they switch projects...
Re:Why Linux Supporters Should Be Excited About X-
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More on the MS "X-Box"
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I profess to know none of the details of Microsofts rumored gaming system, but here goes...
We've seen great progress in the gaming market due to the battle of equals in Nintendo and Sega... Sony hopped into the fray as well, and though they dwarf the other two in size, they play by the rules (my idea, anyways) of releasing better hardware rather than simply lowering prices.
If Microsoft indeed enters the market, I wouldn't be suprised if they delivered an inferior solution which they sold at cost or at a loss in order to gain market share. They'ed somehow make their systems require WinCE disks... It'd be trully embarrasing for them if Linux somehow runs on it. Plus, their revenue stream from such a device would be solely from WinCE royalties from game developers. So, don't expect Linux disks for this machine.
So far as hoping for a Microsoft machine to support both DVD and DVD RAM, dream on. Their entire revenue base is from OEM deals. If they let their machine read DVD RAM devices, then that can shoot themselves in the foot so far as capturing revenue from developers.
Though the system will be built from "commodity" parts, I highly doubt one will ever be able to call it "open". It's just not in Microsoft's interest to have a trully open platform.
Think of it like this: you leave your front door unlocked everyday while you're away at work, and one day, a thief breaks in and steals everything. Will your neighbours feel sorry for you? Should they?
So... why not tell me where you live then? It wouldn't be my fault for breaking in if, say, you were stupid enough to have windows in your house, would it? I mean, everyone knows that glass shatters incredibly easily, and therefore anyone with glass windows is just asking for it, right?
The industry followed what they thought was their best option. They used 40-bit crypto so as to not have to have a US edition and international edition. What would the point be to using 128 bit crypto when you can still pump the DVD's output into a video capture card? You don't get all the neato things (multiple aspect ratios, etc...) but the point is the movie has been copied.
And no matter what, no one is going to be able to market a DVD recorder with a key cracker in it, so the 40-bit crypto pretty much stop 95% of the copies that could be made otherwise.
Well, it's useless until someone funds a national or global PKI. Until that point, it seems incredibly easy to corrupt it. Say i make 20 false signatures, then make 20 more and sign them all with the first 20, then make one genuine one, get it signed by someone widely regarded as "trusted" and then use my signed key to sign the first 20... I now have 20 signatures that are "signed" by a trusted party and are at the same time two steps away from me... Add a few more people to the scheme to get more signatures from other "trusted" people and you've got slews of false signing keys out there...
Both the good and the bad thing about realworld signatures is that you can't revoke them. It also takes a HUGE amount of skill to replicate them infront of someone else. It's one thing to sit at home and try over and over until you get a reasonable facsimile, it's entirely another to be able to do it on the fly.
I can't really see how we could as a country or world create a sufficiently secure system of key management. It's got to be a lot better than the current notary system, but that would tend to leave the handling of it in the hands of the government, which would probably be the NSA, FBI, or Secret Service...
I just stopped by their site, but without having a Wintel machine handy I can't quite tell what they're providing?
Is it basically SoftPC for x86?
If so, though it sounds slow, I'd LOVE it... I could do whatever i wanted to do with the system, then backup the hard disk file and have nothing to worry about... Anyone know? Or am i being off-topic here?
I seriously can't tell by your post if you're humorous, stupid or sarcastic?:)
"Maybe it says something about how competitive the OS market is?"
Drop it. There has been no real competition out there for years and years. Only now has Linux come forward as a completely free alternative. Says something about the market that the only reasonable competition Microsoft has is free. Go figure on that one.
And no matter how expensive the OS is, consumers will likely not notice. Maybe they'll think that Dell and Gateway have dropped their lowest-end configurations. Maybe the companies will use the system requirements of W2K to boost the complement of RAM, add faster CPU's etc, in order to get their average selling prices back up. Consumers will get more for their money, but they'll have to spend more of their money as well. And not one will think it's because of the brand new OS on their computer that caused the chain of events.
Regardless, this is Microsofts attempt to gauge the market. They have so much clout that OEM's wont really have a choice. They can slide Dell W2K licenses for the same cost as they paid for Win9x. Then the other OEM's will want W2K to have feature parity with Dell's systems, and Microsoft offer slight discounts if the OEM's stop installing Win9x on machines. After a while, Microsoft can raise it's price back above it's introductory price at the same moment it discontinues Win9x for once and for all. Conspiracy? Paranoid? We'll see.
Me, I'd do my best to stay off Microsoft's radar screen until I had something that was really ready to compete, for fear of being FUD'ed out of a job.
No matter how great an OS is, it's going nowhere without applications. And Be, maybe unwittingly, has such a strong position on itself being a media OS, that it could actually be discouraging non multimedia programs from being developed for it.
Face it, in order to grow in this market, you really need to be blatant about it, otherwise you'll just be pushed aside.
2. Unlike MS/AOL/etc who will stick a freebie copy of anything anywhere, this actually targets potential Linux users.
What difference does it make for AOL to put a disk in a magazine or send them to a list of people who've bought modems in the past 12 months? They're just as much "a potential user" as are buyers of motherboards are to linux.
It is cool though, that they're doing this. A big deterent probably is the hassle of downloading a distro, followed by actually spending money (no matter how little) on an OS you have no idea if you'll even use. If even 10% of the buyers decide to try out the free OS that came with their Motherboard, it'll make a huge difference
OS/2's all but dead, so far as i can tell. Does IBM even have OS/2 installed anywhere within their organization? Seems to me they're all AIX, Linux and Win2000.
BeOS is much to specialized an OS to consider giving away with motherboards. And it's Be's fault. Back when they were on the Mac platform and had hopes of being bought by apple, they really did try to provide a compelling alternative to the MacOS. Now that they're on Microsofts platform, they tiptoe around in hopes of not in anyway offending Microsoft. Gasse (sp?) doesn't even try to spread the hope that BeOS will ever be a viable substitue for windows, unless you happen to be a multimedia professional, in which case maybe you'll be able to make do.
Linux still has that hope of growing into a platform for all, with the bonus that no one owns it (aside from Linus...) and even he can't change the licensing terms.
If Microsofts stock went to 0 tomorrow, that'd have a lot more ramification than 75 points off the DOW. It would quite literally crush the entire tech industry. Monopoly or not, they're the biggest player in the markets today. If they sink, so do we...
"The nature of buybacks is somewhat questionable; it most certainly amounts to a manipulation of securities pricing."
While I'm not a CFO or economics major, I think that buy backs make complete sense.
If a company is sitting on a huge pile of it's own cash and at the same time feels that it itself is under valued, then why not use the money to in essense invest in themselves? If their stock goes up, and they need to generate cash for facilities, then they could reissue those shares. I think it shows a lot about a company that will go and buy it's own shares, rather than simply investing in other companies.
In reading their explanation, it seems that they're not going to actively police this. They say that if you've bought the tools which create GIF's, they're covered under license and you're fine. Their $5,000 / site fee is if you're unsure of what was used to make the GIF files and you want to be sure you comply.
I guess users of Photoshop are fine, it's just GIMP users that are effected by this. Oh, wait...
But as the Burn all GIF's page states, LZW is a patented algorythm that's inferior to superior and unpatented algorythms which is used to create obsolete GIF files.
My question is, why does anyone even care then? Use JPEG or PNG. Other formats exist. If you want to use GIF files for any reason, then there's a price to pay. That's either $5,000 for the "license" from unisys, or $49 for some cheapo program that you never need to install, just have handy to say that yes, you have a license... If you don't like their terms, there's plenty of other formats to use.
If you value compatiblity, then, it is their algorythm afterall. No matter how innane current patent laws seem, they are the law, afterall.
They didn't HAVE to go smaller to get more speed. They (Mot) did so they could reduce costs. The more chips you squeeze onto a wafer, the more money you generate from said wafer. That's all there is to that argument.
Intel drags it's heels in order to maximize it's profit from each successive generation of tech, only switching when they absolutely cannot do anymore with what they've got (witness the 7th generation x86).
Don't think that all the other semi-conductor co.'s follow their footsteps in that regard.
I'd really like to see Athlon's scalability in the real world.
What?
You can't?
There's numerous advantages you can tout with the Athlon: Speed (in MHz - up until today), Price, sheer Performance, but let's please hold off on scalability until AMD can point us to a supplier of 2-4 slot motherboards.
I also doubt that anyone cares how old a CPU's core is, except for the people that actually care. Kids are going to buy a CPU based on how fast they percieve it to be, regardless of architectural constraits. In that reasoning, the first company to tout 1 GHz will have something to rub in the other's face for at least a little while.
It'll be good news for AMD's stockholders when they can sell a chip that performs identically to the comparable Intel product and it costs more or at least comparable. Right now, you have to wonder how much longer their bankers will let them float with all their debt. (I'm only assuming they've acquired debt due to 6 or 7 quarters of losses.)
It's just a computer, looking for words. If it triggers an alert, it sends it to a new program for more analyis. If it still is ringing bells, an actual human takes a look to see if it's something to worry about. At that point, you've obviously sent something that people should be worried about, or it's a huge mistake. If it's a mistake, then they go "oops" and hit delete. There's no way on earth that they could amass enough storage to keep logs on every communication that everyone makes.
So far as objecting to the NSA sitting around cracking your keys... If they can, then you need new keys. Don't get angry at them if you're using keys that aren't long enough anymore. That's your problem, and only yours.
You also have to remember that the US Gov't/Military are responsible for building what we call the internet. It is a public resource, but only because they let us use it. If you don't like that, send mail the old fashion way: in envelopes. Much safer than email. And there's due process involved in intercepting your mail. If you're going to use the convience of the internet, then you have to realize that for the convience, you sacrafice some privacy
Personally, I am kind of intimidated by the idea that everything i do or say could be monitored, but honestly, I don't think anyone would wantto waste any spare cycles on me. I'm just not that interesting.:)
In general I stand in favor of patents, though some are completely abused. I don't think that a company should be allowed to patent something, not enforce violations for years, and then start making a big stink after the technology is well entrenched (LZW, MP3, etc... RSA, so far as I know, has been protected by RSA, which made companies create the DH alternative).
But this, I think, is absurd. They're basically saying they've patented the idea of knowing their customers and of adding conviences to the shopping experience. So far as I remember, the feature was in place more than a year ago. I didn't look, but i also don't remember seeing anything like "patent-pending technology" or anything.
Besides that, if it's been out for over a year, I thought they had to do something to start the filing process to protect themselves. They didn't, they just released the technology and later patented it. I think every website in the world should step forward and say "hey, we track our customers, too. We store information about them that they choose to give us."
Who cares if that info is a credit card number or a username/login? The underlying technique of storing relevant info in a cookie on the client machine and looking up the appropriate data on in a database somewhere is not new, and though it was probably a breakthrough at the time, it was a logical extension of where the internet was going.
B&N better not even think of settling. I'll switch completely to them if they duke it out with Amazon.
If there's one centrally run authority, as would need to be the case in a scenario where digital signatures are accepted as valid signatures, then you have to count for the corruption factor.
A court would probably not rule my signature was valid if the keypair used to sign/verify it was yours. It would need to be in a trusted repository. Otherwise, I could make 5,000 keys with different people's email addresses/ID's and create a script that cross signed them all. They'ed all very in the web of trust i created. If i had a few of those keys signed by people outside my web, who were genearlly trested, or at least not known to have done bad before, I'd be golden...
What i'm thinking is that a central board will generate the keypairs and divy them out to people who request them... That's bad. But using current PKI would also be incredibly cumbersome. How many different keyservers exist?
But from several earlier discussions, so please don't moderate it as such...
No matter how much progess we make on the digital signature front, we still need to ask if we can trust who is in charge of managing the keys.
It's trivial to swap the keys on the server, and in doing that you've blown the whole signature idea. You can send an email to me, but Bob's made sure i have his public key with your name attatched to it, so then he can send a completely different signed email and i'd never know the difference without a phone call...
Or how about i go through whatever paperwork is involved and get a keypair from the issuing authority, but given them all of your information instead. I now have a means of generating untraceable signatures.
At least with current signatures, there's handwriting analysis available, which can generally tell if the signer of the document is trully the signer... It doesn't stop copying and pasting, but until i encounter my own forged signature, I feel much more comfortable with real sigs rather than digital ones.
Lastly, RSA is completely theoretical security. It's security rests in the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. If next year a researcher at IBM discovers the way factor them and announces it to the world, okay, all of our digitally signed documents are invalid, but that's not so bad...
What if the NSA/CIA/FBI/IRS, or anyone else figures that out, but neglects to tell anyone else? That's my main gripe.
I think I'm pretty much for patents in most cases. The goal of most companies is to make money and keep a competitive edge. That means spending lots of money on R&D, and you don't want to make a discovery, get a product to market and then find that your largest competitor copying your work. That, i think, would cause the death of innovation in so many industries.
I think that there should be different classifications on patents, if that would be at all feasible. For instance, computer-related patents should only be allowed to be enforceable for 5-7 years (the 3 year life of any given computer, plus a couple years just to be generous)... That'd be enough, I think that a company could come up with something trully ingenious and make their money from it, but they'ed also have to work their buts off on their next product rather than going "Okay, now we've got 20 years of revenues from licensees"...
Patents on drugs are more difficult. We need drugs to live comfortably (and i'm not even talking about the recreational ones)... Should a company be allowed to patent it's discoveries? Yes. Should they be allowed to recoup their investments? Yes. If they couldn't, then they'ed all make the next diet drug, because those are a lot surer to bring back profits for the shareholders...
Perhaps the gov't should contract with the Pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs they feel they need developed. They could say, we need a new AIDS drug, start your bidding. Then the gov't would pay all associated costs for 5 or 7 years to develop the drug, and give the company 15% of the income derived from the drug.
That way, companies would still get their due, and consumers wouldn't get nearly as screwed as can be the case these days (ahem... UNISYS)
Seriousyl, thought, you are looking way way way too far into this... People may actually have good tings to say about microsoft. They're not 100% evil, you know. Oops. Now i said something that's not pro microsoft, and therefore should be moderated down, right?
Just because this is slashdot, that doesn't mean it has to been this festering pool of anti-microsoft sentiment... I really enjoy the discussions around here where people intellegently debate the pro's and con's of each angle of everything.
I think you need to get over this paranoia of Microsoft trying to invade and influence your life. Next thing you know, you're going to start thinking that all the computers you buy funnell money back to microsoft due to components that you don't need, or that maybe that pro microsoft letter to the local newspaper originated in their PR department, and that they're buying opinions of major corporate consulting firms... Oh wait. Drat!
I think though, honestly, that slashdot is useful for MSFT to research what people dislike about them, but i doubt they would expend the energy to try to change the opinions found here, because most seem to be way out in right fiend and not even remotely changeable.
I'm not even attempting to imply anything about NT, just that it takes an article like this for Linux users to admit that, yes, there are some things that need to be worked on...
I always read rambles about how Linux is uncrashable compared to NT, etc..., but then reading this one and seeing everyone voice up and say "Well, MY system doesn't work that way" or "When X crashes I'm completely frozen from my system, except i can still telnet into it"
I think a system is only as capable as the person whose responsible to run it... Too often, that tidbit is left out of discussions around here.
So after all those posts saying that how Linux is so much more stable then NT, it is now that we can surmise that well, yeah, the box is more stable, but only if you have a second console to be able to telnet into with in the case that X locks up the display...
Really! Just a little while ago (in the Gartner thread) there were all these posts saying things like: "Linux kicks NT's as in terms of stability", "Linux can dominate the desktop"... Face it, if X crashes, the system may as well be crashed if you're an end user.
Lets' just continue the list a little more, shall we?
X doesn't use all the available memory on some video cards.
X is a lot more pickey about what monitor it runs on.
X crashes leave Linux in an unuseable state
Kernel prevents X from accessing memory it needs in order to run...
And you wonder why Gartner says that Linux isn't ready for the desktop? Joe user (and me) doesn't want to worry about a kernel not wanting to give my video card the memory it needs to run. I just want to plug it in, maybe load some drivers and have it work...
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Go ahead, moderate me down... I've got karma to burn!
1 - OS X will ship when it's ready. Do you want them to pull a Microsoft and ship it sooner and then augment it with service packs to get it to a useable state?
2 - Apples just not large enough to offer a wide variety of video cards... They commit to buying all their chips from ATI and presumably get a huge discount because of that...
3 - I have to agree with that... Those keyboards suck
4 - Is a non-issue... Only someone that has no idea as to how the innards work and that is resistant to having it explained would really request this. If Apple can achieve equivilant performance with 1/2 the MHz, what do i care?
5 - I haven't seen Sherlock 2 yet (OS 9 apparently kills ATM, and i can't have that!) but let apple do whatever they want with their bundled apps... It's not terribly difficult to develope a quicktime player using Apple's API's and overlaying an interface of your choice on top of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that embedded Linux stands to do much in terms of affecting the perception of Linux. I for one, don't care what OS my car uses, my Microwave uses, or my VCR uses. If i need to know or care, then obviously it wasn't implented correctly.
So far as the kernel forking. Who cares? If the kernel forks in order to make concessions to the embedded market, it's still GPL'ed, so other developers won't be left out in the cold. It'd actually be better if it forked in this way, rather than following mMicrosofts footsteps with Win32, where we've now got WinCE, Win9x, and WinNT, which are largely incompatible with each other, serve completely different markets, yet have the same interface and API's tying them together...
With all that, it'd definetly be a boon for developers of embedded devices, supposing the could cut away enough fat from the kernely to make it competitive with other embedded OS'es. Though the cost savings probably won't be enough to make it back to the customer, i'm sure they'ed appreciate having an open platform to develope on, rather than needing to learn the semanics of a new OS when they switch projects...
I profess to know none of the details of Microsofts rumored gaming system, but here goes...
We've seen great progress in the gaming market due to the battle of equals in Nintendo and Sega... Sony hopped into the fray as well, and though they dwarf the other two in size, they play by the rules (my idea, anyways) of releasing better hardware rather than simply lowering prices.
If Microsoft indeed enters the market, I wouldn't be suprised if they delivered an inferior solution which they sold at cost or at a loss in order to gain market share. They'ed somehow make their systems require WinCE disks... It'd be trully embarrasing for them if Linux somehow runs on it. Plus, their revenue stream from such a device would be solely from WinCE royalties from game developers. So, don't expect Linux disks for this machine.
So far as hoping for a Microsoft machine to support both DVD and DVD RAM, dream on. Their entire revenue base is from OEM deals. If they let their machine read DVD RAM devices, then that can shoot themselves in the foot so far as capturing revenue from developers.
Though the system will be built from "commodity" parts, I highly doubt one will ever be able to call it "open". It's just not in Microsoft's interest to have a trully open platform.
Think of it like this: you leave your front door unlocked everyday while you're away at work, and one day, a thief breaks in and steals everything. Will your neighbours feel sorry for you? Should they?
So... why not tell me where you live then? It wouldn't be my fault for breaking in if, say, you were stupid enough to have windows in your house, would it? I mean, everyone knows that glass shatters incredibly easily, and therefore anyone with glass windows is just asking for it, right?
The industry followed what they thought was their best option. They used 40-bit crypto so as to not have to have a US edition and international edition. What would the point be to using 128 bit crypto when you can still pump the DVD's output into a video capture card? You don't get all the neato things (multiple aspect ratios, etc...) but the point is the movie has been copied.
And no matter what, no one is going to be able to market a DVD recorder with a key cracker in it, so the 40-bit crypto pretty much stop 95% of the copies that could be made otherwise.
Well, it's useless until someone funds a national or global PKI. Until that point, it seems incredibly easy to corrupt it. Say i make 20 false signatures, then make 20 more and sign them all with the first 20, then make one genuine one, get it signed by someone widely regarded as "trusted" and then use my signed key to sign the first 20... I now have 20 signatures that are "signed" by a trusted party and are at the same time two steps away from me... Add a few more people to the scheme to get more signatures from other "trusted" people and you've got slews of false signing keys out there...
Both the good and the bad thing about realworld signatures is that you can't revoke them. It also takes a HUGE amount of skill to replicate them infront of someone else. It's one thing to sit at home and try over and over until you get a reasonable facsimile, it's entirely another to be able to do it on the fly.
I can't really see how we could as a country or world create a sufficiently secure system of key management. It's got to be a lot better than the current notary system, but that would tend to leave the handling of it in the hands of the government, which would probably be the NSA, FBI, or Secret Service...
I just stopped by their site, but without having a Wintel machine handy I can't quite tell what they're providing?
Is it basically SoftPC for x86?
If so, though it sounds slow, I'd LOVE it... I could do whatever i wanted to do with the system, then backup the hard disk file and have nothing to worry about... Anyone know? Or am i being off-topic here?
I seriously can't tell by your post if you're humorous, stupid or sarcastic? :)
"Maybe it says something about how competitive the OS market is?"
Drop it. There has been no real competition out there for years and years. Only now has Linux come forward as a completely free alternative. Says something about the market that the only reasonable competition Microsoft has is free. Go figure on that one.
And no matter how expensive the OS is, consumers will likely not notice. Maybe they'll think that Dell and Gateway have dropped their lowest-end configurations. Maybe the companies will use the system requirements of W2K to boost the complement of RAM, add faster CPU's etc, in order to get their average selling prices back up. Consumers will get more for their money, but they'll have to spend more of their money as well. And not one will think it's because of the brand new OS on their computer that caused the chain of events.
Regardless, this is Microsofts attempt to gauge the market. They have so much clout that OEM's wont really have a choice. They can slide Dell W2K licenses for the same cost as they paid for Win9x. Then the other OEM's will want W2K to have feature parity with Dell's systems, and Microsoft offer slight discounts if the OEM's stop installing Win9x on machines. After a while, Microsoft can raise it's price back above it's introductory price at the same moment it discontinues Win9x for once and for all.
Conspiracy? Paranoid? We'll see.
Me, I'd do my best to stay off Microsoft's radar screen until I had something that was really ready to compete, for fear of being FUD'ed out of a job.
No matter how great an OS is, it's going nowhere without applications. And Be, maybe unwittingly, has such a strong position on itself being a media OS, that it could actually be discouraging non multimedia programs from being developed for it.
Face it, in order to grow in this market, you really need to be blatant about it, otherwise you'll just be pushed aside.
Not you as in you, but a company, okay?
2. Unlike MS/AOL/etc who will stick a freebie copy of anything anywhere, this actually targets potential Linux users.
What difference does it make for AOL to put a disk in a magazine or send them to a list of people who've bought modems in the past 12 months? They're just as much "a potential user" as are buyers of motherboards are to linux.
It is cool though, that they're doing this. A big deterent probably is the hassle of downloading a distro, followed by actually spending money (no matter how little) on an OS you have no idea if you'll even use. If even 10% of the buyers decide to try out the free OS that came with their Motherboard, it'll make a huge difference
If you don't want Linux with your Motherboard, take your business somewhere else. Unlike with top-tier PC's, you do have a choice in these matters.
OS/2's all but dead, so far as i can tell. Does IBM even have OS/2 installed anywhere within their organization? Seems to me they're all AIX, Linux and Win2000.
BeOS is much to specialized an OS to consider giving away with motherboards. And it's Be's fault. Back when they were on the Mac platform and had hopes of being bought by apple, they really did try to provide a compelling alternative to the MacOS. Now that they're on Microsofts platform, they tiptoe around in hopes of not in anyway offending Microsoft. Gasse (sp?) doesn't even try to spread the hope that BeOS will ever be a viable substitue for windows, unless you happen to be a multimedia professional, in which case maybe you'll be able to make do.
Linux still has that hope of growing into a platform for all, with the bonus that no one owns it (aside from Linus...) and even he can't change the licensing terms.
If Microsofts stock went to 0 tomorrow, that'd have a lot more ramification than 75 points off the DOW. It would quite literally crush the entire tech industry. Monopoly or not, they're the biggest player in the markets today. If they sink, so do we...
"The nature of buybacks is somewhat questionable; it most certainly amounts to a manipulation of securities pricing."
While I'm not a CFO or economics major, I think that buy backs make complete sense.
If a company is sitting on a huge pile of it's own cash and at the same time feels that it itself is under valued, then why not use the money to in essense invest in themselves? If their stock goes up, and they need to generate cash for facilities, then they could reissue those shares. I think it shows a lot about a company that will go and buy it's own shares, rather than simply investing in other companies.
My two cents.
In reading their explanation, it seems that they're not going to actively police this. They say that if you've bought the tools which create GIF's, they're covered under license and you're fine. Their $5,000 / site fee is if you're unsure of what was used to make the GIF files and you want to be sure you comply.
I guess users of Photoshop are fine, it's just GIMP users that are effected by this. Oh, wait...
But as the Burn all GIF's page states, LZW is a patented algorythm that's inferior to superior and unpatented algorythms which is used to create obsolete GIF files.
My question is, why does anyone even care then? Use JPEG or PNG. Other formats exist. If you want to use GIF files for any reason, then there's a price to pay. That's either $5,000 for the "license" from unisys, or $49 for some cheapo program that you never need to install, just have handy to say that yes, you have a license... If you don't like their terms, there's plenty of other formats to use.
If you value compatiblity, then, it is their algorythm afterall. No matter how innane current patent laws seem, they are the law, afterall.
They didn't HAVE to go smaller to get more speed. They (Mot) did so they could reduce costs. The more chips you squeeze onto a wafer, the more money you generate from said wafer. That's all there is to that argument.
Intel drags it's heels in order to maximize it's profit from each successive generation of tech, only switching when they absolutely cannot do anymore with what they've got (witness the 7th generation x86).
Don't think that all the other semi-conductor co.'s follow their footsteps in that regard.
I'd really like to see Athlon's scalability in the real world.
What?
You can't?
There's numerous advantages you can tout with the Athlon: Speed (in MHz - up until today), Price, sheer Performance, but let's please hold off on scalability until AMD can point us to a supplier of 2-4 slot motherboards.
I also doubt that anyone cares how old a CPU's core is, except for the people that actually care. Kids are going to buy a CPU based on how fast they percieve it to be, regardless of architectural constraits. In that reasoning, the first company to tout 1 GHz will have something to rub in the other's face for at least a little while.
It'll be good news for AMD's stockholders when they can sell a chip that performs identically to the comparable Intel product and it costs more or at least comparable. Right now, you have to wonder how much longer their bankers will let them float with all their debt. (I'm only assuming they've acquired debt due to 6 or 7 quarters of losses.)
No one's reading your email.
:)
It's just a computer, looking for words. If it triggers an alert, it sends it to a new program for more analyis. If it still is ringing bells, an actual human takes a look to see if it's something to worry about. At that point, you've obviously sent something that people should be worried about, or it's a huge mistake. If it's a mistake, then they go "oops" and hit delete. There's no way on earth that they could amass enough storage to keep logs on every communication that everyone makes.
So far as objecting to the NSA sitting around cracking your keys... If they can, then you need new keys. Don't get angry at them if you're using keys that aren't long enough anymore. That's your problem, and only yours.
You also have to remember that the US Gov't/Military are responsible for building what we call the internet. It is a public resource, but only because they let us use it. If you don't like that, send mail the old fashion way: in envelopes. Much safer than email. And there's due process involved in intercepting your mail. If you're going to use the convience of the internet, then you have to realize that for the convience, you sacrafice some privacy
Personally, I am kind of intimidated by the idea that everything i do or say could be monitored, but honestly, I don't think anyone would wantto waste any spare cycles on me. I'm just not that interesting.
In general I stand in favor of patents, though some are completely abused. I don't think that a company should be allowed to patent something, not enforce violations for years, and then start making a big stink after the technology is well entrenched (LZW, MP3, etc... RSA, so far as I know, has been protected by RSA, which made companies create the DH alternative).
But this, I think, is absurd. They're basically saying they've patented the idea of knowing their customers and of adding conviences to the shopping experience. So far as I remember, the feature was in place more than a year ago. I didn't look, but i also don't remember seeing anything like "patent-pending technology" or anything.
Besides that, if it's been out for over a year, I thought they had to do something to start the filing process to protect themselves. They didn't, they just released the technology and later patented it. I think every website in the world should step forward and say "hey, we track our customers, too. We store information about them that they choose to give us."
Who cares if that info is a credit card number or a username/login? The underlying technique of storing relevant info in a cookie on the client machine and looking up the appropriate data on in a database somewhere is not new, and though it was probably a breakthrough at the time, it was a logical extension of where the internet was going.
B&N better not even think of settling. I'll switch completely to them if they duke it out with Amazon.
If there's one centrally run authority, as would need to be the case in a scenario where digital signatures are accepted as valid signatures, then you have to count for the corruption factor.
A court would probably not rule my signature was valid if the keypair used to sign/verify it was yours. It would need to be in a trusted repository. Otherwise, I could make 5,000 keys with different people's email addresses/ID's and create a script that cross signed them all. They'ed all very in the web of trust i created. If i had a few of those keys signed by people outside my web, who were genearlly trested, or at least not known to have done bad before, I'd be golden...
What i'm thinking is that a central board will generate the keypairs and divy them out to people who request them... That's bad. But using current PKI would also be incredibly cumbersome. How many different keyservers exist?
But from several earlier discussions, so please don't moderate it as such...
No matter how much progess we make on the digital signature front, we still need to ask if we can trust who is in charge of managing the keys.
It's trivial to swap the keys on the server, and in doing that you've blown the whole signature idea. You can send an email to me, but Bob's made sure i have his public key with your name attatched to it, so then he can send a completely different signed email and i'd never know the difference without a phone call...
Or how about i go through whatever paperwork is involved and get a keypair from the issuing authority, but given them all of your information instead. I now have a means of generating untraceable signatures.
At least with current signatures, there's handwriting analysis available, which can generally tell if the signer of the document is trully the signer... It doesn't stop copying and pasting, but until i encounter my own forged signature, I feel much more comfortable with real sigs rather than digital ones.
Lastly, RSA is completely theoretical security. It's security rests in the difficulty of factoring large prime numbers. If next year a researcher at IBM discovers the way factor them and announces it to the world, okay, all of our digitally signed documents are invalid, but that's not so bad...
What if the NSA/CIA/FBI/IRS, or anyone else figures that out, but neglects to tell anyone else? That's my main gripe.
I think I'm pretty much for patents in most cases. The goal of most companies is to make money and keep a competitive edge. That means spending lots of money on R&D, and you don't want to make a discovery, get a product to market and then find that your largest competitor copying your work. That, i think, would cause the death of innovation in so many industries.
I think that there should be different classifications on patents, if that would be at all feasible. For instance, computer-related patents should only be allowed to be enforceable for 5-7 years (the 3 year life of any given computer, plus a couple years just to be generous)... That'd be enough, I think that a company could come up with something trully ingenious and make their money from it, but they'ed also have to work their buts off on their next product rather than going "Okay, now we've got 20 years of revenues from licensees"...
Patents on drugs are more difficult. We need drugs to live comfortably (and i'm not even talking about the recreational ones)... Should a company be allowed to patent it's discoveries? Yes. Should they be allowed to recoup their investments? Yes. If they couldn't, then they'ed all make the next diet drug, because those are a lot surer to bring back profits for the shareholders...
Perhaps the gov't should contract with the Pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs they feel they need developed. They could say, we need a new AIDS drug, start your bidding. Then the gov't would pay all associated costs for 5 or 7 years to develop the drug, and give the company 15% of the income derived from the drug.
That way, companies would still get their due, and consumers wouldn't get nearly as screwed as can be the case these days (ahem... UNISYS)
Is it my browser or Slashdot that's broken? Whenever I come to this page it's completely empty, saying 0 comments no matter what the threshold.
:)
Someone please forward that to CDC...
Seriousyl, thought, you are looking way way way too far into this... People may actually have good tings to say about microsoft. They're not 100% evil, you know. Oops. Now i said something that's not pro microsoft, and therefore should be moderated down, right?
Just because this is slashdot, that doesn't mean it has to been this festering pool of anti-microsoft sentiment... I really enjoy the discussions around here where people intellegently debate the pro's and con's of each angle of everything.
I think you need to get over this paranoia of Microsoft trying to invade and influence your life. Next thing you know, you're going to start thinking that all the computers you buy funnell money back to microsoft due to components that you don't need, or that maybe that pro microsoft letter to the local newspaper originated in their PR department, and that they're buying opinions of major corporate consulting firms... Oh wait. Drat!
I think though, honestly, that slashdot is useful for MSFT to research what people dislike about them, but i doubt they would expend the energy to try to change the opinions found here, because most seem to be way out in right fiend and not even remotely changeable.
my two cents
I'm not even attempting to imply anything about NT, just that it takes an article like this for Linux users to admit that, yes, there are some things that need to be worked on...
I always read rambles about how Linux is uncrashable compared to NT, etc..., but then reading this one and seeing everyone voice up and say "Well, MY system doesn't work that way" or "When X crashes I'm completely frozen from my system, except i can still telnet into it"
I think a system is only as capable as the person whose responsible to run it... Too often, that tidbit is left out of discussions around here.
So after all those posts saying that how Linux is so much more stable then NT, it is now that we can surmise that well, yeah, the box is more stable, but only if you have a second console to be able to telnet into with in the case that X locks up the display...
Really! Just a little while ago (in the Gartner thread) there were all these posts saying things like: "Linux kicks NT's as in terms of stability", "Linux can dominate the desktop"... Face it, if X crashes, the system may as well be crashed if you're an end user.
Lets' just continue the list a little more, shall we?
X doesn't use all the available memory on some video cards.
X is a lot more pickey about what monitor it runs on.
X crashes leave Linux in an unuseable state
Kernel prevents X from accessing memory it needs in order to run...
And you wonder why Gartner says that Linux isn't ready for the desktop? Joe user (and me) doesn't want to worry about a kernel not wanting to give my video card the memory it needs to run. I just want to plug it in, maybe load some drivers and have it work...
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Go ahead, moderate me down... I've got karma to burn!
1 - OS X will ship when it's ready. Do you want them to pull a Microsoft and ship it sooner and then augment it with service packs to get it to a useable state?
2 - Apples just not large enough to offer a wide variety of video cards... They commit to buying all their chips from ATI and presumably get a huge discount because of that...
3 - I have to agree with that... Those keyboards suck
4 - Is a non-issue... Only someone that has no idea as to how the innards work and that is resistant to having it explained would really request this. If Apple can achieve equivilant performance with 1/2 the MHz, what do i care?
5 - I haven't seen Sherlock 2 yet (OS 9 apparently kills ATM, and i can't have that!) but let apple do whatever they want with their bundled apps... It's not terribly difficult to develope a quicktime player using Apple's API's and overlaying an interface of your choice on top of it.