I call nationalized health care, a fear of the internal combustion engine, tax and
spend economics, abortion on demand, and excessive gun control pretty damn
liberal and leftist in my book.
Nationalized health-care is neither liberal nor non-liberal. It is leftist, granted (and still adopted by most west-european countries, even those without strong socialistish governments).
Fear of polluting the globe to death is not limited to liberal or socialists.. I hope.
"Excessive" gun control is a term not commonly understood outside US of A; and certainly controls suggested by Woody & Klingon would be pretty much mainstream anywhere else (and laissez-faire fire arms tactics would be a fringe movement).
However, restrictions are seldom related to liberalism... so it's just that people for (sane) gun controls are labeled liberals or communists or whatever; instead of there being ideological connection.
Tax and spend economics are leftist, but not liberal (liberals probably would tend to be somewhere between vulture capitalism and centralized communism).
"Abortion-on-demand" is, once again, phrase only understood in religion-ridden countries, plus USA. Having abortion available is the standard in western countries, and except for some of more catholic-oriented countries (Ireland, Italy?) it seldom is considered to be any sort of a problem. Neither socialism nor liberalism has much to say about this subject, although communist countries used to have reasonably loose rules regarding abortion (possibly related to official loathing of religions communist regimes had).
FWIW, I think that mr. Gore was too much of a corporate and religious-right asskisser (during campaing... probably nothing genuine, I hope), and his wife hysteric "somebody please think of our children" idiot, supporting censorship. And mrs. Clinton had weird ideas about who actually was voted as the acting president. So my biggest worry would be tarnishing reputation of liberals or socialists, not that these terms were used "against" the aforementioned couple.
It is so left wing that it make communists
look like Rush Limbaugh
Um, try to decide; are they liberals (ie. central, neither left nor right-wing), or leftists? From the rant it seems latter, but referring to Gore & Hillary make me wonder, neither of them being particularly leftist nor liberal.
... yeah yeah, I should know better. For some peculiar reason, mainstream US political lingo is equating liberal to communist. Sigh. Just like in Russia (ex-)communists are called "conservatives", as they long for olden times of centralized communist regime.
Ideas certainly can be and have been
patented. It is only "abstract ideas" that can't be patented.
...
From the USPTO site [uspto.gov]:
A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion.
Doesn't that explicitly state "ideas can not be patented"?
I know we are discussing semantics here, but to me that (USPTO) says what I'm trying to say; methods can be patented, ideas not. Idea is "selling sausage over Internet" or "Encrypting data using [brand new algorithm]"; neither of which is patentable. When describing specific method, idea has been "patentified", refined to a specific enough invention. I don't think detailed description is "mere idea" any more.
And for what it's worth I, too, somewhat against patenting as whole, and strongly against patenting of algorithms and business methods. For algorithms it comes down to ideals, but also to the fact that copyright should be strong enough protection for actual implementations, so more abstract methods need no such protection.
Point taken; one doesn't need to have a physical implementation (I was thinking more general implementation / application of the idea). However, main point ("ideas can not be patented") still stands. Idea needs to be developed to patentable things (which includes processes, arts and methods).
The modern
stack-based chips are very fast indeed -- consider the X25, shBOOM, or P21.
Interesting. I probably should read something about those... I'm not a h/w specialist, but it's good to have basic knowledge and try to keep that up-to-date.
And yes, I thought that caches generally were (always) implemented using main memory, so I did confuse the issues.
By the way, where are the chips you mention usually used? For signal-processing? (I'm sure Google can answer that one)
The question is, at
what point does 'drawing on experience' cross the line
and invade others IP
In general all IP protection mechanisms (copyright, patents, trademarks) are supposed to cover implementations, not ideas. In case of software algorithms things become messy; separating idea from implementation seems to be a hard thing to do (esp. for US pat. office...), but in theory the basic idea should not be patentable; copyright protects specific implementation and trademarks shouldn't be applicable?
Unfortunately, since the decision to allow business methods to be patented (and even when allowing algorithms) the line has become blurrier than ever.:-/
Finally keep in mind that using experiences in itself never infringes IP; at most it could violate his previous job contract (and even that is unlikely to hold in court). I know this sounds obvious but it needs to be emphasised. Thus that person can explain the idea -- patents are not trade secrets after all -- and then you may consider whether the method in question might be protected or not, and proceed appropriately. The exception would be if you were planning to do complete clean room implementation of a system, but that doesn't seem to be the case?
One of the things that has surprised me about virtual machines ever since Java
became a buzzword was that no one had ever thought to eliminate the relative
performance penalty by implementing the VM as hardware
...
Is there a reason why these virtual
machines aren't taken as a blueprint for real hardware and implemented as such?
Ok here are some potential problems with the idea that I can think of:
[Specifically for Java:] VM is stack-based, and
stack-based designs were tried couple of decades ago, and eventually were obsoleted by register-based CPUs. Memory-to-memory just isn't efficient way to do it, even with caches.
Do-it-on-software philosophy. "Native" CPUs are seen as CISC, in "too specific" sense, not
necessarily size or complexity of instruction set itself.
[Java] General design of bytecode. Java bytecode probably wasn't really designed to be implemented in hardware (I think making it stack-based makes this obvious by itself but...), and as such there may be implementation problems regarding performance.
Too specific; market for these CPUs would be more limited than the market for generic CPUs. I'm not aware of a complete fully Java-based desk top system, so desk top systems would need to be hybrid ones, which leads to:
Complexity (and specificity) of h/w design,
to support multiple non-symmetric CPUs. Which, in turn leads to:
Complexity of the OS that would make use of the add-on special CPU.
However, there are niches where h/w implementation might well make sense; tiny mobile devices where performance is not so much the key but simplicity, and where ease of development is another strong selling point (for companies that develop s/w for such products).
Being able to omit advanced JVMs is a plus, and performance may still be decent, if not stellar.
Then again, if they thought it's "Windows", they probably can't see connection between "Lindows" to "Linux" either? And if they could, they wouldn't have mistakenly bought it as Windows in the first place.
No, and they don't want to run Windows apps either. They want to "use Internet", "send email", possibly use "messenger", "use word" (as in generic word processor, not MS Word), "use excel" (ditto).
In short, they don't care what OS they have. And that's just fine, as long as your Friendly Linux Apps work well enough. Install StarOffice and Mozilla and you are halfway there already.
parking a car or hoisting some other heavy object onto the tracks
Even with SUVs it would be quite a feat to drive the car to a park on those maglev tracks high above... (rails could perhaps in theory be made to run on ground-level, digging magnets in, but there are no good reasons for doing that?).
Even without malicious intents accidents on crossovers would be a problem with fast trains, so it's very unlikely there would be any level intersections with other traffic. So, while getting obstacles on the track would be easier than with airplanes, it probably wouldn't be trivial. It's also likely trains are will be equipped with some radar equipment, to try to prevent crashes with obstacles (and once again even without terrorism threats this is a somewhat real problem).
...incredible boost to the
economies of both Europe and Africa. Industry in Europe could gain by getting
cheap labor in Africa, while nations in Africa will receive heavy investments -
Improving their infrastructure.
Well, there are already hundreds of thousands of immigrant moroccan workers in Spain. They travel by ferries, visit their families over weekends and so on (actually situation is similar to mexican immigration situation in southern US states).
But the biggest is hardly the transportation; bridge would do nothing for real barriers for free flow of labour (legal barriers as labor unions
in Europe are afraid of cheap labour, governments worried about social problems etc etc)
And as to investments to Africa, money need not be transported via bridges... lack of investments is not really caused by missing road infrastructure between Europe and Africa but by total lack of interest. Africa is about the worst place to invest, and has been for past couple of decades. Sad but true.:-/
In short, even though bridge would have its uses it's unlikely it would have huge impacts on any nearby economies.
I don't think so. All the graphics editing software I've played with have had roughly
similar interfaces. This probably owes more to functional similarities than to
wholesale copying of interface designs.
Well, I'm not too condemning about wholesale copying -- I think part of software evolution is recycling good practices, especially in UIs -- but I do think there's too much copying just because that's how things have "always" (for past 5 years or whatever the time span is) been done.
Of course there is the other extreme too, redesigning everything so as not to anything like it was done before, just because it was thought original design had nothing good. The results (voice-controlled UI, 3D UI) often "leave Colonel unimpressed", but usually have respectable whizz-bang factor if nothing else.
Finally I'm not a gfx artist so I could be wrong -- perhaps Photoshop UI is a pinnacle of graphics app UI design. I just think that if another company / group started designing UI (possibly reusing internal rendering etc. engines) from scratch, and really spending time on designing good functional - and perhaps if possible, intuitive - UI... the results would surpass what, say, Photoshop has to offer. Such a redesign wouldn't have to be revolution (ie. it can be based on traditional WIMP basics), but there's plenty of room for evolution.
It's GUI is everey bit as intuitive (not that either are particulary so) as PS,
...
Where's the usability studies to prove that the Gimp is intuitive at all?
Wasn't he saying that Gimp UI is every bit as unintuitive as Photoshop's? Photoshop UI is not a particularly good one, but it is de facto standard. People like it because they have used it for years, and don't know of anything better. And, the usual bottomline is that it gets things done reasonably efficiently.
Bit like Quark XPress UI is weird, but still pretty much standard for desktop publishing apps, and as a result Adobe's InDesign all but copied it. And in this case my understanding is that Gimp has copied (too?) much of Photoshop UI, bit like people claim KDE/Gnome have copied Windows UI.
So what he was saying that Gimp UI is about as good as Photoshop's because it is very similar, n'est pas?
Well, it's just one of those problems of not having "correct" letter to represent the sound (and having to combine 2 existing letters).
"sh" in "shit" should use one of letters other languages use (usually s with some symbol on top of it to note it differs from 'plain' blunt s)...
Course it doesn't matter to me... I can pronunce it any way I like, it goes wrong anyways.:-)
Well I may be biased by what happened 2 blocks from where I used to live; a pickup driver shot a biker after some (petty) argument.:-/
(the case was closely followed by local papers in Colorado a year ago or so)
That is not to say that's an every day thing, but it's not unheard of either.
"Sun goes through executives faster than
french pastries at a Weighwatcher's convention."
Um, most (all) of the big bosses leaving have spent more than a DECADE working for Sun (which is quite an achievement as Sun is only now celebrating its 20th year). The reporting guy was a moron. That they are leaving as a herd is one thing but so far there's no revolving-doors-employment situation?
The problem I see there is just like the problem with smokers. That is, even though I don't smoke I'm still affected by smokers' actions. If guns were only dangerous to their owners I wouldn't have any problem, same as with smoking -- my main concern is my own health (although with cigarettes there is also indirect problem with health care costs... but let's leave that aside for now).
As a side note, I'm -- unlike many (most?) people -- more worried about "law-abiding citizens" ability to own (and carry) guns. The specific problem is that it takes just a fraction of a second to "convert" a law-abiding citizen to a murderer.:-/
When road rage hits, when a person finds his/her
spouses cheating, when in the middle of the night one mistakenly assumes a burglar entered (instead of their own kid...)... there are dozens of cases where having a firearm is what makes situation deadly instead of just ugly.
Of course the biggest difference is that whereas many (most?) americans view guns-for-self-defence as the biggest legitimate use, I don't. It's not that I don't believe in self-defence; but with guns consequences are too likely to be deadly. I think there's a good reason society has a monopoly in both enforcing and creating laws; and could also have monopoly in extreme means of protecting
these duties.
I do think there are other legitimate uses for guns; from hunting to authorities' needs (police, army), and perhaps even for hobby shooting. But... kinds of fire arms suitable for those needs are pretty limited (rifles for hunting, small fire arms are usually adequate for police), and it should be easy to also require actual tests and licenses to minimize risks.
Did you guys get on some kind of AOL spam list or something?
I have no idea... I think it's because of the apartment, as none of those came with my name. Or perhaps my neighbours will just dump their copies in my mailbox?:-)
I bet their cash flow displays about 2 billion $ annually for producing those (sn|cr)appy little "AOL 8" CDs that they send. I've so far received 12 of those (I kid you not); of which highest daily batch was 3x. They sure are desperate to try to lure me into Happy AOL family...
The irony is that I could actually use my free corporate AOL account if I wanted to, to begin with, but have absolutely no intention to change from the cool and reliable local smallish ISP I'm using.
They spin off most of these branches that
were "not part of the core competency".
See, in couple of years the whole strategy of behemoth company may (will) change. That's the way things work; one fraction sails the boat for a while, then another.
GPL license states that you can't just copy the software without agreeing
to the license agreement
Depends on what copying you are referring to. If you mean "get myself a copy of a GPL'ed software" then you are wrong. No licensing is needed; GPL doesn't really enter the picture here.
If you mean handing out a copy to another person, then you do need to agree to the license; that's considered distribution, which is what GPL is built on (that is, restrictions on distribution, not in use). [I know I know, this is just GPL FAQ... sorry if I'm preaching to choir here].
An interesting question is how would Gnutella and other networks be handled as there people can distribute GPL'ed software automatically and almost without realizing they are distributors? It's more of an academic question, probably, since if you just take a "valid" GPL'ed thing and hand it over, it does still contain GPL license stuff and will still be in accordance with GPL... but still, an interesting point; "implicit agreement" with GPL?
Like someone else mentioned, Sparc-chips definitely are not manufactured by IBM.
IBM is actually playing with both Sun and Microsoft, pitting them against each other. With Sun the name of the game is Java, with Microsoft XML-Soap-Web services.
It's the good old "Divide et Impera" game. Works ok as Sun and Microsoft do not play nice together, no matter what the issue.:-)
Finally, the feasibility of buyout is hard to measure. Sun's market cap is around 30 billions, but that would skyrocket if IBM was to try takeover. Plus, Sun has couple of billions in cash reserves, so it could (probably would) choose to fight against hostile takeover too. IBM might be able to get financing... or maybe not. It's a huge company, but we are talking about huge amounts too.
And last but not least; believe it or not, Sun and IBM are almost as bitterly engaged in battle as are Sun and Microsoft. Combining the companies, thus, would not be an easy task after buyout... see how easy it is with neutral comps like Compaq and HP.:-)
I know, I shouldn't be too generalizing, and should have rephrased that. The fact that someone
is able to learn new things fast and without
too much external pressure is a plus, not a minus.
I should have said something like "'programmers' who 'learnt' javascript by stealing scripts from web pages their friends showed them" or "people who think that even thought only programming language they know is VB, learnt in two-week mail correspondence class" to descibe applicants that
were overvalued. And this, btw, doesn't mean I frown upon scripting languages... just that anyone who learns C without any previous programming experience, in a week, is likely to be something special.:-)
I myself learnt Javascript in a week reading JavaScript bible. And after a month I wrote my first spreadsheet app in javascript (I kid you not)... and although I don't consider myself guru in JS, at least I can create my own stuff, not just cut'n paste existing scripts.
What I am saying is that genuine skills (no matter how they are obtained) should be valued. Usually people who learn new things fast have strong foundation, wide set of skills that allow them
to learn new things easily. I wouldn't be surprised if that was true in your case.
Well, that's the standard stereotypical H1B image.
Perhaps there are companies abusing it that way,
I have no idea. All I know is there are enough H1B people earning 6-figure salaries to pay neat
welfare for lots of unfortunate 8-bucks-or-less working poors, and that many of those H1B workers are actually cream of the crop from their home country.
H1B program is bigger loss for originating countries than for USA...
Um, I take it you replied to wrong post? Or if not, you didn't explain in any way or form whether Apache's hybrid perhaps might improve scalability.
Where did you get the idea I have something against Zeus, or touting Apache as the ultimate
killer production server?
If you want to rant in "Apache is a toy" way, go troll with someone else. I wasn't making statements about Apache's usability, but merely questioning the assumption of "Apache is inherently limited by...". And your post was pretty devoid of any counter arguments as well.
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Nationalized health-care is neither liberal nor non-liberal. It is leftist, granted (and still adopted by most west-european countries, even those without strong socialistish governments).
Fear of polluting the globe to death is not limited to liberal or socialists.. I hope.
"Excessive" gun control is a term not commonly understood outside US of A; and certainly controls suggested by Woody & Klingon would be pretty much mainstream anywhere else (and laissez-faire fire arms tactics would be a fringe movement). However, restrictions are seldom related to liberalism... so it's just that people for (sane) gun controls are labeled liberals or communists or whatever; instead of there being ideological connection.
Tax and spend economics are leftist, but not liberal (liberals probably would tend to be somewhere between vulture capitalism and centralized communism).
"Abortion-on-demand" is, once again, phrase only understood in religion-ridden countries, plus USA. Having abortion available is the standard in western countries, and except for some of more catholic-oriented countries (Ireland, Italy?) it seldom is considered to be any sort of a problem. Neither socialism nor liberalism has much to say about this subject, although communist countries used to have reasonably loose rules regarding abortion (possibly related to official loathing of religions communist regimes had).
FWIW, I think that mr. Gore was too much of a corporate and religious-right asskisser (during campaing... probably nothing genuine, I hope), and his wife hysteric "somebody please think of our children" idiot, supporting censorship.
And mrs. Clinton had weird ideas about who actually was voted as the acting president. So my biggest worry would be tarnishing reputation of liberals or socialists, not that these terms were used "against" the aforementioned couple.
It is so left wing that it make communists look like Rush Limbaugh
Um, try to decide; are they liberals (ie. central, neither left nor right-wing), or leftists? From the rant it seems latter, but referring to Gore & Hillary make me wonder, neither of them being particularly leftist nor liberal.
Ideas certainly can be and have been patented. It is only "abstract ideas" that can't be patented.
From the USPTO site [uspto.gov]: A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion.
Doesn't that explicitly state "ideas can not be patented"?
I know we are discussing semantics here, but to me that (USPTO) says what I'm trying to say; methods can be patented, ideas not. Idea is "selling sausage over Internet" or "Encrypting data using [brand new algorithm]"; neither of which is patentable. When describing specific method, idea has been "patentified", refined to a specific enough invention. I don't think detailed description is "mere idea" any more.
And for what it's worth I, too, somewhat against patenting as whole, and strongly against patenting of algorithms and business methods. For algorithms it comes down to ideals, but also to the fact that copyright should be strong enough protection for actual implementations, so more abstract methods need no such protection.
Point taken; one doesn't need to have a physical implementation (I was thinking more general implementation / application of the idea). However, main point ("ideas can not be patented") still stands. Idea needs to be developed to patentable things (which includes processes, arts and methods).
Interesting. I probably should read something about those... I'm not a h/w specialist, but it's good to have basic knowledge and try to keep that up-to-date.
And yes, I thought that caches generally were (always) implemented using main memory, so I did confuse the issues.
By the way, where are the chips you mention usually used? For signal-processing? (I'm sure Google can answer that one)
In general all IP protection mechanisms (copyright, patents, trademarks) are supposed to cover implementations, not ideas. In case of software algorithms things become messy; separating idea from implementation seems to be a hard thing to do (esp. for US pat. office...), but in theory the basic idea should not be patentable; copyright protects specific implementation and trademarks shouldn't be applicable?
Unfortunately, since the decision to allow business methods to be patented (and even when allowing algorithms) the line has become blurrier than ever. :-/
Finally keep in mind that using experiences in itself never infringes IP; at most it could violate his previous job contract (and even that is unlikely to hold in court). I know this sounds obvious but it needs to be emphasised. Thus that person can explain the idea -- patents are not trade secrets after all -- and then you may consider whether the method in question might be protected or not, and proceed appropriately. The exception would be if you were planning to do complete clean room implementation of a system, but that doesn't seem to be the case?
...
Is there a reason why these virtual machines aren't taken as a blueprint for real hardware and implemented as such?
Ok here are some potential problems with the idea that I can think of:
However, there are niches where h/w implementation might well make sense; tiny mobile devices where performance is not so much the key but simplicity, and where ease of development is another strong selling point (for companies that develop s/w for such products). Being able to omit advanced JVMs is a plus, and performance may still be decent, if not stellar.
Then again, if they thought it's "Windows", they probably can't see connection between "Lindows" to "Linux" either? And if they could, they wouldn't have mistakenly bought it as Windows in the first place.
No, and they don't want to run Windows apps either. They want to "use Internet", "send email", possibly use "messenger", "use word" (as in generic word processor, not MS Word), "use excel" (ditto).
In short, they don't care what OS they have. And that's just fine, as long as your Friendly Linux Apps work well enough. Install StarOffice and Mozilla and you are halfway there already.
Even with SUVs it would be quite a feat to drive the car to a park on those maglev tracks high above... (rails could perhaps in theory be made to run on ground-level, digging magnets in, but there are no good reasons for doing that?).
Even without malicious intents accidents on crossovers would be a problem with fast trains, so it's very unlikely there would be any level intersections with other traffic. So, while getting obstacles on the track would be easier than with airplanes, it probably wouldn't be trivial. It's also likely trains are will be equipped with some radar equipment, to try to prevent crashes with obstacles (and once again even without terrorism threats this is a somewhat real problem).
Well, there are already hundreds of thousands of immigrant moroccan workers in Spain. They travel by ferries, visit their families over weekends and so on (actually situation is similar to mexican immigration situation in southern US states). But the biggest is hardly the transportation; bridge would do nothing for real barriers for free flow of labour (legal barriers as labor unions in Europe are afraid of cheap labour, governments worried about social problems etc etc)
And as to investments to Africa, money need not be transported via bridges... lack of investments is not really caused by missing road infrastructure between Europe and Africa but by total lack of interest. Africa is about the worst place to invest, and has been for past couple of decades. Sad but true. :-/
In short, even though bridge would have its uses it's unlikely it would have huge impacts on any nearby economies.
Well, I'm not too condemning about wholesale copying -- I think part of software evolution is recycling good practices, especially in UIs -- but I do think there's too much copying just because that's how things have "always" (for past 5 years or whatever the time span is) been done.
Of course there is the other extreme too, redesigning everything so as not to anything like it was done before, just because it was thought original design had nothing good. The results (voice-controlled UI, 3D UI) often "leave Colonel unimpressed", but usually have respectable whizz-bang factor if nothing else.
Finally I'm not a gfx artist so I could be wrong -- perhaps Photoshop UI is a pinnacle of graphics app UI design. I just think that if another company / group started designing UI (possibly reusing internal rendering etc. engines) from scratch, and really spending time on designing good functional - and perhaps if possible, intuitive - UI... the results would surpass what, say, Photoshop has to offer. Such a redesign wouldn't have to be revolution (ie. it can be based on traditional WIMP basics), but there's plenty of room for evolution.
Where's the usability studies to prove that the Gimp is intuitive at all?
Wasn't he saying that Gimp UI is every bit as unintuitive as Photoshop's? Photoshop UI is not a particularly good one, but it is de facto standard. People like it because they have used it for years, and don't know of anything better. And, the usual bottomline is that it gets things done reasonably efficiently. Bit like Quark XPress UI is weird, but still pretty much standard for desktop publishing apps, and as a result Adobe's InDesign all but copied it. And in this case my understanding is that Gimp has copied (too?) much of Photoshop UI, bit like people claim KDE/Gnome have copied Windows UI.
So what he was saying that Gimp UI is about as good as Photoshop's because it is very similar, n'est pas?
Well, it's just one of those problems of not having "correct" letter to represent the sound (and having to combine 2 existing letters). "sh" in "shit" should use one of letters other languages use (usually s with some symbol on top of it to note it differs from 'plain' blunt s)... Course it doesn't matter to me... I can pronunce it any way I like, it goes wrong anyways. :-)
(the case was closely followed by local papers in Colorado a year ago or so)
That is not to say that's an every day thing, but it's not unheard of either.
Um, most (all) of the big bosses leaving have spent more than a DECADE working for Sun (which is quite an achievement as Sun is only now celebrating its 20th year). The reporting guy was a moron. That they are leaving as a herd is one thing but so far there's no revolving-doors-employment situation?
As a side note, I'm -- unlike many (most?) people -- more worried about "law-abiding citizens" ability to own (and carry) guns. The specific problem is that it takes just a fraction of a second to "convert" a law-abiding citizen to a murderer. :-/
When road rage hits, when a person finds his/her spouses cheating, when in the middle of the night one mistakenly assumes a burglar entered (instead of their own kid...)... there are dozens of cases where having a firearm is what makes situation deadly instead of just ugly.
Of course the biggest difference is that whereas many (most?) americans view guns-for-self-defence as the biggest legitimate use, I don't. It's not that I don't believe in self-defence; but with guns consequences are too likely to be deadly. I think there's a good reason society has a monopoly in both enforcing and creating laws; and could also have monopoly in extreme means of protecting these duties. I do think there are other legitimate uses for guns; from hunting to authorities' needs (police, army), and perhaps even for hobby shooting. But... kinds of fire arms suitable for those needs are pretty limited (rifles for hunting, small fire arms are usually adequate for police), and it should be easy to also require actual tests and licenses to minimize risks.
I have no idea... I think it's because of the apartment, as none of those came with my name. Or perhaps my neighbours will just dump their copies in my mailbox? :-)
The irony is that I could actually use my free corporate AOL account if I wanted to, to begin with, but have absolutely no intention to change from the cool and reliable local smallish ISP I'm using.
Then, when you start to see the synergies,
but the way it continues should be:
They spin off most of these branches that were "not part of the core competency".
See, in couple of years the whole strategy of behemoth company may (will) change. That's the way things work; one fraction sails the boat for a while, then another.
Depends on what copying you are referring to. If you mean "get myself a copy of a GPL'ed software" then you are wrong. No licensing is needed; GPL doesn't really enter the picture here.
If you mean handing out a copy to another person, then you do need to agree to the license; that's considered distribution, which is what GPL is built on (that is, restrictions on distribution, not in use). [I know I know, this is just GPL FAQ... sorry if I'm preaching to choir here].
An interesting question is how would Gnutella and other networks be handled as there people can distribute GPL'ed software automatically and almost without realizing they are distributors? It's more of an academic question, probably, since if you just take a "valid" GPL'ed thing and hand it over, it does still contain GPL license stuff and will still be in accordance with GPL... but still, an interesting point; "implicit agreement" with GPL?
It's the good old "Divide et Impera" game. Works ok as Sun and Microsoft do not play nice together, no matter what the issue. :-)
Finally, the feasibility of buyout is hard to measure. Sun's market cap is around 30 billions, but that would skyrocket if IBM was to try takeover. Plus, Sun has couple of billions in cash reserves, so it could (probably would) choose to fight against hostile takeover too. IBM might be able to get financing... or maybe not. It's a huge company, but we are talking about huge amounts too.
And last but not least; believe it or not, Sun and IBM are almost as bitterly engaged in battle as are Sun and Microsoft. Combining the companies, thus, would not be an easy task after buyout... see how easy it is with neutral comps like Compaq and HP. :-)
I myself learnt Javascript in a week reading JavaScript bible. And after a month I wrote my first spreadsheet app in javascript (I kid you not)... and although I don't consider myself guru in JS, at least I can create my own stuff, not just cut'n paste existing scripts.
What I am saying is that genuine skills (no matter how they are obtained) should be valued. Usually people who learn new things fast have strong foundation, wide set of skills that allow them to learn new things easily. I wouldn't be surprised if that was true in your case.
H1B program is bigger loss for originating countries than for USA...
If you want to rant in "Apache is a toy" way, go troll with someone else. I wasn't making statements about Apache's usability, but merely questioning the assumption of "Apache is inherently limited by ...". And your post was pretty devoid of any counter arguments as well.