The I doubt we really have to worry about it. Cable providers are generally *very cheap* and not terribly competent. (though they do have some competent people working for them)
But this looks easy enough to take care of by adding and properly configuring Squid. Besides, at that point *only one machine* will be accessing the Internet through their service, precisely meeting the letter of the TOS.
Because the overall structure is geosynchronous, and the part at geosynchronous is itself stable. None of the parts anywhere but geosynchronous and Earth are stable, though.
Specifically, the stuff between the Earth's surface and geosynchronous is travelling too slowly to be orbiting at their altitude. Therefore, one way or another, they fall. If for no other factor than drag, the part at the equator will keep going East and the rest will fall behind.
Re:I hope somebody will publish a picture...
on
Columbia Coverage
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I suppose so. A little tasteless, though. Oh, well.
0- The emergency stairs: Build the elevator compartments as re-entry capsules. If you have an elevator problem, pop the exploding bolts and the compartment returns to Earth. Heat shield, parachute, and emergency floatation and radio mandatory. Works parachute altitude and above. For a really high failure, a small RCS may be recommended to either stabilize an orbit, or speed reentry.
1: Normal elevators don't destroy the building or even their housings when they fail. 100% reliability isn't necessary for a space elevator, just understand and minimize catastrophic failures, and make sure that there's a way to repair the thing.
2: Send the firemen to the Land of Books. (F.451 ref) After all, the elevator will be made of carbon nanotubes, and we all know that carbon burns. Always seemed rather odd to me that the highest temperature shielding on the shuttle was carbon-carbon composite. I wouldn't expect it to actually burn, but I would expect some rate of oxidation during re-entry.
3: I hope you're kidding. I'd be much more worried about the elevator wrapping itself partway around the Earth after it snapped. Not much mass, except in toto, but it would be like a sharp, fast, long knife blade. This would be time to hope that most of it would burn.
I hope somebody will publish a picture...
on
Columbia Coverage
·
· Score: 1
...of the relevant area of the shuttle, with notes on sensor reading, times of bad readings, and significant paths coupling those readings. I've kind of figured what the parent post was saying, but it would be good to see that, "These two sensors are both wired in this bundle or to this multiplexer, and both failed at this time. That other sensor failed at that time, and its wire was so-many cm away from the first bundle/multiplexer."
Thinking about WHY they should publish such information, the answer is simple. It's partly MY space program. My taxes help fund it, and I'm a pro-space voter. Currently NASA carries the torch for my wish to go into space, myself. (and others like me)
...now NASA is developing pretty decent theories about what happened, but they anticipate that it may be impossible to get to the root cause. The pieces of debris they need most may be either burned up or hopelessly lost between Eastern California and Texas. So the shuttles are grounded awaiting a much more difficult root cause determination.
OTOH, had Space Station construction gone more according to plan...
* There were plans for a Hab module, so that they could accomodate more than the three people necessary for bare maintenance. They might've even been able to do some decent science work. * There were plans for a crew rescue vehicle, to overcome Soyuz lifetime problems and get the larger crew down. * There were plans for an 'orbital tug' that was meant to do short intra-orbital missions based from the space stations.
All were cut. The combination of all three just might have made a difference, in the current situation. To temper that, I don't know what schedule those three pieces were on. They might not have been in place by now, even with funding.
As-is, the space station is essentially useless. The only good we get out of it is that we are learning something about space construction and maintenance, and maybe someday we can send the goodies up and make the thing really useful. That future hasn't been ruled out, which it would be if we shut it down
I'll only argue with the people lining up to take the IA-64 path. People have pretty much gotten into the mold of assuming that Microsoft will WIN any battle, at least in its core competence (?) arena. It seems that Intel is getting that same priviledged status.
What's worse is that people seem to allow Microsoft, and presumably now Intel, to WIN permanently, game over. Anyone else who Wins a market battle only survives until the next battle with Microsoft or Intel. Pain in the neck attitude, if you ask me. But then, Linux has shown chinks in Microsoft's armor, at least in the server space, and AMD won the last round. I only hope competition can be kept alive.
Actually, I don't mind the idea of breaking X86 compatibility - I just object to breaking it for IA-64. IA-64 was conceived in a time when it was felt that Out Of Order (OOO) execution was going to be too tough a nut to crack.
In less time than Intel and HP took to go off and crack the VLIW/EPIC problems, other design teams learned to handle OOO, and do a very good job of it. They appear to have succeeded, and have a leading-edge part - but at what cost. AFAIK, the IA-64 is the most expensive CPU ever made.
The latest-out CPU usually does seem to hold the performance crown. But IA-64 doesn't seem to hold it that solidly, and there's question about whether the latest Alpha iterations have been allowed to fully appear - for fear of embarassment.
IA-64 looks almost like a government project gone wild. It has produced results, but IMHO horribly inefficiently. Pushing a more reasonable (not necessarily more conventional) architecture might well have yielded better results.
There's another little-considered thing about IA-64: It's the most proprietary major CPU on the market. AFAIK, every one of the major CPUs has some form of cross-licensing or functional cloning in place, except IA-64. (Actually, I don't know about HPPA, but I'm sure there's some cross-licensing of technology through HP's IP agreements.)
It's not because of market positioning, either. It's not something that will come on as soon as IA-64 succeeds.
It's because Intel and HP set up a company specifically to hold the IP of IA-64. Intel and HP don't hold any IA-64 IP themselves, they get it from this company. That way, the IA-64 IP is not covered by any agreements of Intel or HP, either.
This is no guarantee that 100% private IP is evil. Nor is it a guarantee that it won't be licensed in the future. Nor is it a guarantee that Intel and HP won't come at each others' throats with a price war. But it's a degree of lock-in that should be a factor in any decision.
These are really small pieces. I remember seeing pictures of some of the recovered Challenger debris, and pieces were much bigger. That would lead me to thing that breakup during re-entry is considerably more violent than the whole stack exploding.
Thousands die on the road every year, and we haven't closed down automobile travel, yet.
Thousands die from tobacco-related causes...
Thousands die essentially from poor eating habits...
We have a poor sense of risks in our society.
Re:The job category that'll never get outsourced..
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps that's the goal, but there can be varied ways to go about it, and not necessarily at odds with the rest of what you say.
Case in point - the Internet
I was on a corporate network back in 1980, in a primitive way. By 1982 I was using a corporate network in a way that seems "modern", except that it was all text mode. During the years I saw several attempts at PC networking come and go. I've been on CompuServe, AOL, several BBSs, and a brief trial of Prodigy. NONE of them survived in their original incarnations.
The issue is quite simple: Do you want to own a small pie, or have a share of a giant one. Most sane people would look at the size of the small pie, look at the size of their piece of the giant one, and choose the latter. One could argue that nobody knew ahead of time how big a pie the Internet would turn out to be, and there is some merit to that. But it doesn't forgive the way business now wish to "own" the Internet, imagining that they can skim a fraction of a cent out of every packet. They miss the fact that non-ownership is a fundamental part of the success, past and future, of the Internet. They're choosing to make a giant pie smaller so they can own it.
Short-term thinking.
Personally, I have a similar cash-view as you. I like food to eat, a roof over my head, and a few perks. Beyond that, our family has made choices to bypass more money in favor of what we feel is a higher quality of life.
I suspect a lot of others out-of-work don't think the system works just fine the way it is.
Re:The job category that'll never get outsourced..
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 1
You completely missed my point.
Everything you say is true - in the short run.
I simply assert that to earn really big bux, a CEO ought to understand the long run, the tragedy of the commons, participation in society, enlightened self-interest, and all of that stuff.
Raping society for short-term profit is easy, getting away with it a bit harder. But neither require the talent that a true long-term perspective requires.
Did it take an idiot to realize that dot-com was an insand bubble? Alan Greenspan knew it, said so, and tried to do something about it. But the dot-com'ers thumbed their noses at him. THEY'RE the fools, and WE'RE left holding the bag.
The job category that'll never get outsourced...
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
How about CxO's - CEO, CFO, CTO, etc?
They cut costs by outsourcing real workers' jobs, and that's how they earn the big bux.
IMHO, the real problem with CxOs isn't that the pay scale is too high. It's just that in general, today the jobs are being held by a bunch of bozos who are overpaid for their performance. A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to be able to see the relationship between laid-off workers and the economy that's prompting furthre layoffs. A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to see that health care is a difficult problem, and that at some point we need to just plain face it and begin taclking it. Maybe Clinton's attempt back in 1992 was a mess, but since all we've done is try to ignore the problem, raise premiums and co-pays, and apply too many managers to the problem, sucking up money that should be paying for health care. (Last I heard, 25%-33% of health care money is going toward "management" costs.) A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to understand more about the macroeconomic nature of the US, and bear partial responsibility for it.
My requirements for a CEO at 50X worker's pay are much lower than those for a CEO at 200X+ workers' pay. IMHO some of today's crop isn't even that good.
If these bozos were at pay-for-performance, the US economy wouldn't be in the toilet. Their primary talent appears to be obtaining money.
I know they're not supposed to matter, and IRQs should be sharable on the PCI bus with modern drivers.
But it doesn't seem that way. I still hear bad stories about shared IRQs, and common advice is to try and avoid it, especially on high-bandwidth devices. Maybe it's possible that they're all related to Creative soundcards, but I more suspect that it's possible that Creative doesn't have a monopoly on buggy PCI design.
Watch out with this combination. Works like a charm in Windows, and even works decently well in Linux, so far. But under Linux it's not fully capable, due to nVidia's usual documentation/binary driver issues.
1: No GART driver for Linux. The GART driver is integrated with nVidia video drivers, so forget about 3D on an ATI on an nForce under Linux. The nForce is effectively tied to nVidia video for Linux 3D.
2: No APIC. At the moment, I have stuff like SATA, firewire, USB2, AC97 modem, and USB2.0 turned off. Even so, I have an IRQ conflict between the ATI video and USB1.1 that so far hasn't bit me. But I suspect future pain, here.
3: Sound works - in stereo, not Dolby 5.1. I've heard of a $30 driver that will give full capability, though I've heard mixed reports of getting the SPDIF working even with these.
4: Binary-only network driver. There's also a 3com, but something about it requires patching the standard driver to get it recognized. So var nvnet works, so I haven't fussed with the 3com.
Demi off-topic, except that there is a tie between nForce and nVidia video, so I guess that's relevant to the subject. This is also a concern because it's a really high-performance board, where you'd really like to run an R300 or NV30.
Fortunately my mission for this board was largely Win-based with Linux as a dual-boot, or I would have RMA-ed the thing. But I kept the ATI video, and refused to "reward" nVidia's actions with more money.
This idea was proposed in Vermont years ago, and my subject line made the headlines in our papers. The idea faded, or at least the publicity about it did, and we went back to worrying about overstressing local creeks.
About a decade ago, when I was involved in the design of a 4Mb DRAM shrink, I went to the company store to buy some chip-earrings for my mom for Christmas. At that time, they took chips that failed test and made jewelry.
I paid more for duds glued to an earring post than I would have for fully tested and packaged DRAMs.
It's worth noting that 'things in nature' are essentially worthless. Air is worth nothing. Water is worth nothing. For that matter, oil is worth nothing. For the start, the human labor required to make these things usable (both form and location) is valuable. Beyond someone manages to own the source of something, it becomes 'scarce', and then we assign it intrinsic value.
At this point and for the near future, I suspect that getting the copyright situation corrected will be pretty much impossible. But maybe there is something we can hope for, a form of copyright reform that doesn't cross Disney too badly.
Proposed: The owner of a copyright must be actively engaged in "use" (publication, distribution, derivation, etc) of the work, or it goes into the public domain after a period of 14 years. (The original copyright term)
Unfortunately it "allows" Disney to keep their works effectivly eternal. But at least it minimizes collateral damage. Disney's IP isn't that big a chunk, it's all of the other stuff that gets taken out of the public domain in Disney's quest to keep Steamboat Willie that's the real crying shame.
Really, my suggestion to be an official sanction for the "abandonware" concept and applies it more generally. In Disney's interest, it keeps works going into the public domain for them to harvest. To Disney's dismay, it forces them to do something about, "Song of the South." OTOH, it also gives them an out, because it lets them release it and pass the blame onto new copyright law.
From what I understand, copyright law allows libraries to copy during the last 20 years of the copyright. IMHO, there are two problems with this. First off, we don't really know when the last 20 years are, because none of us doubt that there will be another extension when Steamboat Willie's copyright next threatens to expire. Second, nobody is served by allowing a work to languish for the extra 50-70 years under allowed under current law, compared to my proposal. The public isn't served, and since the work has been abandoned, the copyright holder isn't being served, either. Perhaps we can question exactly *how* "promotion of the arts and sciences" are being served by eternity-minus-one-day copyrights on active works, but on inactive works it clearly isn't.
I would like to say that in the long run protectionism, which this really is, has never worked. Unfortunately I'm not enough of an historian to really say that. OTOH, maybe someone will back up this opinion, or tell me I'm full of it.
I wouldn't count this too far. Unless it gets tested in the marketplace, new tech tends to get rather...inbred. Too many generations of "new tech held internally" and you'll find it simply can't be put to market, because it turns out to be irrelevant, or not well adapted to the current situation, or...
AFAIK, it is *the most proprietary* processor on the market.
When they began the IA64, Intel and HP set up a company to hold the IP related to the new architecture. That company owns the IP, Intel and HP get rights to use it. None of Intel's or HP's cross-licensing agreements apply to any of the IA64 IP.
AFAIK, every other major CPU ends up have some amount of cross-licensing, except the IA-64. They own it lock, stock, and barrel. The only chink in the armor seems to be Intergraph.
Windows is used on the space shuttle, too. Linux was part of a mission payload, Windows runs on laptops for office functions. Neither were part of the support infrastructure. I suspect that's what the grandposter really wants to know.
Slashdot Mirror
The I doubt we really have to worry about it. Cable providers are generally *very cheap* and not terribly competent. (though they do have some competent people working for them)
But this looks easy enough to take care of by adding and properly configuring Squid. Besides, at that point *only one machine* will be accessing the Internet through their service, precisely meeting the letter of the TOS.
Because the overall structure is geosynchronous, and the part at geosynchronous is itself stable. None of the parts anywhere but geosynchronous and Earth are stable, though.
Specifically, the stuff between the Earth's surface and geosynchronous is travelling too slowly to be orbiting at their altitude. Therefore, one way or another, they fall. If for no other factor than drag, the part at the equator will keep going East and the rest will fall behind.
Yeah, I suppose so. A little tasteless, though. Oh, well.
0- The emergency stairs: Build the elevator compartments as re-entry capsules. If you have an elevator problem, pop the exploding bolts and the compartment returns to Earth. Heat shield, parachute, and emergency floatation and radio mandatory. Works parachute altitude and above. For a really high failure, a small RCS may be recommended to either stabilize an orbit, or speed reentry.
1: Normal elevators don't destroy the building or even their housings when they fail. 100% reliability isn't necessary for a space elevator, just understand and minimize catastrophic failures, and make sure that there's a way to repair the thing.
2: Send the firemen to the Land of Books. (F.451 ref) After all, the elevator will be made of carbon nanotubes, and we all know that carbon burns. Always seemed rather odd to me that the highest temperature shielding on the shuttle was carbon-carbon composite. I wouldn't expect it to actually burn, but I would expect some rate of oxidation during re-entry.
3: I hope you're kidding. I'd be much more worried about the elevator wrapping itself partway around the Earth after it snapped. Not much mass, except in toto, but it would be like a sharp, fast, long knife blade. This would be time to hope that most of it would burn.
...of the relevant area of the shuttle, with notes on sensor reading, times of bad readings, and significant paths coupling those readings. I've kind of figured what the parent post was saying, but it would be good to see that, "These two sensors are both wired in this bundle or to this multiplexer, and both failed at this time. That other sensor failed at that time, and its wire was so-many cm away from the first bundle/multiplexer."
Thinking about WHY they should publish such information, the answer is simple. It's partly MY space program. My taxes help fund it, and I'm a pro-space voter. Currently NASA carries the torch for my wish to go into space, myself. (and others like me)
...now NASA is developing pretty decent theories about what happened, but they anticipate that it may be impossible to get to the root cause. The pieces of debris they need most may be either burned up or hopelessly lost between Eastern California and Texas. So the shuttles are grounded awaiting a much more difficult root cause determination.
OTOH, had Space Station construction gone more according to plan...
* There were plans for a Hab module, so that they could accomodate more than the three people necessary for bare maintenance. They might've even been able to do some decent science work.
* There were plans for a crew rescue vehicle, to overcome Soyuz lifetime problems and get the larger crew down.
* There were plans for an 'orbital tug' that was meant to do short intra-orbital missions based from the space stations.
All were cut. The combination of all three just might have made a difference, in the current situation. To temper that, I don't know what schedule those three pieces were on. They might not have been in place by now, even with funding.
As-is, the space station is essentially useless. The only good we get out of it is that we are learning something about space construction and maintenance, and maybe someday we can send the goodies up and make the thing really useful. That future hasn't been ruled out, which it would be if we shut it down
I won't argue with a thing you say.
I'll only argue with the people lining up to take the IA-64 path. People have pretty much gotten into the mold of assuming that Microsoft will WIN any battle, at least in its core competence (?) arena. It seems that Intel is getting that same priviledged status.
What's worse is that people seem to allow Microsoft, and presumably now Intel, to WIN permanently, game over. Anyone else who Wins a market battle only survives until the next battle with Microsoft or Intel. Pain in the neck attitude, if you ask me. But then, Linux has shown chinks in Microsoft's armor, at least in the server space, and AMD won the last round. I only hope competition can be kept alive.
Actually, I don't mind the idea of breaking X86 compatibility - I just object to breaking it for IA-64. IA-64 was conceived in a time when it was felt that Out Of Order (OOO) execution was going to be too tough a nut to crack.
In less time than Intel and HP took to go off and crack the VLIW/EPIC problems, other design teams learned to handle OOO, and do a very good job of it. They appear to have succeeded, and have a leading-edge part - but at what cost. AFAIK, the IA-64 is the most expensive CPU ever made.
The latest-out CPU usually does seem to hold the performance crown. But IA-64 doesn't seem to hold it that solidly, and there's question about whether the latest Alpha iterations have been allowed to fully appear - for fear of embarassment.
IA-64 looks almost like a government project gone wild. It has produced results, but IMHO horribly inefficiently. Pushing a more reasonable (not necessarily more conventional) architecture might well have yielded better results.
There's another little-considered thing about IA-64: It's the most proprietary major CPU on the market. AFAIK, every one of the major CPUs has some form of cross-licensing or functional cloning in place, except IA-64. (Actually, I don't know about HPPA, but I'm sure there's some cross-licensing of technology through HP's IP agreements.)
It's not because of market positioning, either. It's not something that will come on as soon as IA-64 succeeds.
It's because Intel and HP set up a company specifically to hold the IP of IA-64. Intel and HP don't hold any IA-64 IP themselves, they get it from this company. That way, the IA-64 IP is not covered by any agreements of Intel or HP, either.
This is no guarantee that 100% private IP is evil. Nor is it a guarantee that it won't be licensed in the future. Nor is it a guarantee that Intel and HP won't come at each others' throats with a price war. But it's a degree of lock-in that should be a factor in any decision.
This issue isn't mentioned in either article.
These are really small pieces. I remember seeing pictures of some of the recovered Challenger debris, and pieces were much bigger. That would lead me to thing that breakup during re-entry is considerably more violent than the whole stack exploding.
Thousands die on the road every year, and we haven't closed down automobile travel, yet.
Thousands die from tobacco-related causes...
Thousands die essentially from poor eating habits...
We have a poor sense of risks in our society.
Perhaps that's the goal, but there can be varied ways to go about it, and not necessarily at odds with the rest of what you say.
Case in point - the Internet
I was on a corporate network back in 1980, in a primitive way. By 1982 I was using a corporate network in a way that seems "modern", except that it was all text mode. During the years I saw several attempts at PC networking come and go. I've been on CompuServe, AOL, several BBSs, and a brief trial of Prodigy. NONE of them survived in their original incarnations.
The issue is quite simple: Do you want to own a small pie, or have a share of a giant one. Most sane people would look at the size of the small pie, look at the size of their piece of the giant one, and choose the latter. One could argue that nobody knew ahead of time how big a pie the Internet would turn out to be, and there is some merit to that. But it doesn't forgive the way business now wish to "own" the Internet, imagining that they can skim a fraction of a cent out of every packet. They miss the fact that non-ownership is a fundamental part of the success, past and future, of the Internet. They're choosing to make a giant pie smaller so they can own it.
Short-term thinking.
Personally, I have a similar cash-view as you. I like food to eat, a roof over my head, and a few perks. Beyond that, our family has made choices to bypass more money in favor of what we feel is a higher quality of life.
I suspect a lot of others out-of-work don't think the system works just fine the way it is.
You completely missed my point.
Everything you say is true - in the short run.
I simply assert that to earn really big bux, a CEO ought to understand the long run, the tragedy of the commons, participation in society, enlightened self-interest, and all of that stuff.
Raping society for short-term profit is easy, getting away with it a bit harder. But neither require the talent that a true long-term perspective requires.
Did it take an idiot to realize that dot-com was an insand bubble? Alan Greenspan knew it, said so, and tried to do something about it. But the dot-com'ers thumbed their noses at him. THEY'RE the fools, and WE'RE left holding the bag.
How about CxO's - CEO, CFO, CTO, etc?
They cut costs by outsourcing real workers' jobs, and that's how they earn the big bux.
IMHO, the real problem with CxOs isn't that the pay scale is too high. It's just that in general, today the jobs are being held by a bunch of bozos who are overpaid for their performance.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to be able to see the relationship between laid-off workers and the economy that's prompting furthre layoffs.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to see that health care is a difficult problem, and that at some point we need to just plain face it and begin taclking it. Maybe Clinton's attempt back in 1992 was a mess, but since all we've done is try to ignore the problem, raise premiums and co-pays, and apply too many managers to the problem, sucking up money that should be paying for health care. (Last I heard, 25%-33% of health care money is going toward "management" costs.)
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to understand more about the macroeconomic nature of the US, and bear partial responsibility for it.
My requirements for a CEO at 50X worker's pay are much lower than those for a CEO at 200X+ workers' pay. IMHO some of today's crop isn't even that good.
If these bozos were at pay-for-performance, the US economy wouldn't be in the toilet. Their primary talent appears to be obtaining money.
I know they're not supposed to matter, and IRQs should be sharable on the PCI bus with modern drivers.
But it doesn't seem that way. I still hear bad stories about shared IRQs, and common advice is to try and avoid it, especially on high-bandwidth devices. Maybe it's possible that they're all related to Creative soundcards, but I more suspect that it's possible that Creative doesn't have a monopoly on buggy PCI design.
Did you buy the book after the first few pages, or did you have your four hour sit-in at the bookstore?
Watch out with this combination. Works like a charm in Windows, and even works decently well in Linux, so far. But under Linux it's not fully capable, due to nVidia's usual documentation/binary driver issues.
1: No GART driver for Linux. The GART driver is integrated with nVidia video drivers, so forget about 3D on an ATI on an nForce under Linux. The nForce is effectively tied to nVidia video for Linux 3D.
2: No APIC. At the moment, I have stuff like SATA, firewire, USB2, AC97 modem, and USB2.0 turned off. Even so, I have an IRQ conflict between the ATI video and USB1.1 that so far hasn't bit me. But I suspect future pain, here.
3: Sound works - in stereo, not Dolby 5.1. I've heard of a $30 driver that will give full capability, though I've heard mixed reports of getting the SPDIF working even with these.
4: Binary-only network driver. There's also a 3com, but something about it requires patching the standard driver to get it recognized. So var nvnet works, so I haven't fussed with the 3com.
Demi off-topic, except that there is a tie between nForce and nVidia video, so I guess that's relevant to the subject. This is also a concern because it's a really high-performance board, where you'd really like to run an R300 or NV30.
Fortunately my mission for this board was largely Win-based with Linux as a dual-boot, or I would have RMA-ed the thing. But I kept the ATI video, and refused to "reward" nVidia's actions with more money.
So does the presence of the R200 path mean that my Radeon 8500LE will do a nearly decent job on Doom3, at least until ARB2 cards reach affordable?
This idea was proposed in Vermont years ago, and my subject line made the headlines in our papers. The idea faded, or at least the publicity about it did, and we went back to worrying about overstressing local creeks.
About a decade ago, when I was involved in the design of a 4Mb DRAM shrink, I went to the company store to buy some chip-earrings for my mom for Christmas. At that time, they took chips that failed test and made jewelry.
I paid more for duds glued to an earring post than I would have for fully tested and packaged DRAMs.
It's worth noting that 'things in nature' are essentially worthless. Air is worth nothing. Water is worth nothing. For that matter, oil is worth nothing. For the start, the human labor required to make these things usable (both form and location) is valuable. Beyond someone manages to own the source of something, it becomes 'scarce', and then we assign it intrinsic value.
At this point and for the near future, I suspect that getting the copyright situation corrected will be pretty much impossible. But maybe there is something we can hope for, a form of copyright reform that doesn't cross Disney too badly.
Proposed: The owner of a copyright must be actively engaged in "use" (publication, distribution, derivation, etc) of the work, or it goes into the public domain after a period of 14 years. (The original copyright term)
Unfortunately it "allows" Disney to keep their works effectivly eternal. But at least it minimizes collateral damage. Disney's IP isn't that big a chunk, it's all of the other stuff that gets taken out of the public domain in Disney's quest to keep Steamboat Willie that's the real crying shame.
Really, my suggestion to be an official sanction for the "abandonware" concept and applies it more generally. In Disney's interest, it keeps works going into the public domain for them to harvest. To Disney's dismay, it forces them to do something about, "Song of the South." OTOH, it also gives them an out, because it lets them release it and pass the blame onto new copyright law.
From what I understand, copyright law allows libraries to copy during the last 20 years of the copyright. IMHO, there are two problems with this. First off, we don't really know when the last 20 years are, because none of us doubt that there will be another extension when Steamboat Willie's copyright next threatens to expire. Second, nobody is served by allowing a work to languish for the extra 50-70 years under allowed under current law, compared to my proposal. The public isn't served, and since the work has been abandoned, the copyright holder isn't being served, either. Perhaps we can question exactly *how* "promotion of the arts and sciences" are being served by eternity-minus-one-day copyrights on active works, but on inactive works it clearly isn't.
I tried to hit on this with this response, a few days ago when the decision was announced:
0 88 365
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=50808&cid=5
I would like to say that in the long run protectionism, which this really is, has never worked. Unfortunately I'm not enough of an historian to really say that. OTOH, maybe someone will back up this opinion, or tell me I'm full of it.
I wouldn't count this too far. Unless it gets tested in the marketplace, new tech tends to get rather...inbred. Too many generations of "new tech held internally" and you'll find it simply can't be put to market, because it turns out to be irrelevant, or not well adapted to the current situation, or...
Been there, done that.
AFAIK, it is *the most proprietary* processor on the market.
When they began the IA64, Intel and HP set up a company to hold the IP related to the new architecture. That company owns the IP, Intel and HP get rights to use it. None of Intel's or HP's cross-licensing agreements apply to any of the IA64 IP.
AFAIK, every other major CPU ends up have some amount of cross-licensing, except the IA-64. They own it lock, stock, and barrel. The only chink in the armor seems to be Intergraph.
Windows is used on the space shuttle, too. Linux was part of a mission payload, Windows runs on laptops for office functions. Neither were part of the support infrastructure. I suspect that's what the grandposter really wants to know.