I am in a similar position, but for me there is a compromise that I like. Buy PC from a small independent vendor that can customize the system, ie use exactly the components you want. There are some limitations on components, but you can pretty much always choose from at least a couple of decent alternatives.
What this means is that first of all I save time on not having to assemble the thing and test individual components, plus if something breaks, I can get it replaced more easily. But I still get to choose the exact configuration, and don't have to pay the Microsoft tax if I choose not to (if I choose to, however, I can still get OEM pricing for Windows).
I may end up paying that 100 - 200 bucks for their work; but usually it's not even that much, since they still get volume discount for components. That is, if I bought components from them, the price would be about equal to what they charge for the whole system.
all the hew and cry in the press about the shortage of tech workers
Some of that (esp. regarding not-so-highly-educated "high tech" workers) was certainly just lemming-see-lemming-write hype mongering... but it's different in that there wasn't really anyone selling their product (except perhaps some of techies wanting even more inflated salaries... but they have less influence on press than companies)
And shortage for actually qualified and competent
tech people is still true, and will be true in near future. Big headlines for tech slump hide the fact that even now it is often difficult to find good enough people, esp. programmers (and related, system architects etc). There are lots of people who claim they have the skills, but who shouldn't have been hired in the first place... and their crying is now obfuscating the scenery.
I'm not saying it's easy to find a job, even if you are qualified right now, but it's often more of a problem of supply and demand meeting, not least because of floood of "fake" candidates, 20 year old dotcom CEOs, "programmers" who self-taught javascript in 2 days etc. etc..
That's what MS would want you believe, but more fundamentally, most (all?) other email programs do not automatically execute included code. And/or code that can be embedded runs with proper security restrictions (JavaScript simply has no way to access local file system, for example).
I might buy the argument for OS vulnerabilities, but for email client, biggest reason is technical. Most of the stuff would be impossible with all other email clients.
But, of course, Apache's is inherently limited to the number of connections it can handle, due to using a separate thread/process for each connection
Hmmh. I may be wrong but:
A few of the new features are:...
* multiple operational models: threaded, hybrid multi-processes and multi-threaded
Does this not indicate that this is not necessarily true any more? Plus, on some
platforms limitation is pretty high, esp. for threads ('full' processes usually have lower limits).
Re:How to Google Whack...
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
Actually, the count I've heard is 300k, so I think you have one too many zeroes in there (and the page you included uses the same number). That to second is still a big number of course.
Of course that's just another approximation, but the order of magnitude is probably ok (what is considered a word etc; for english it's fortunately easier than for languages that use synthesis to add endings to words instead of post-/prefixes)
you can't have standards when everything is always changing. Stability of
anything here... not good.
No. "Real" standards are not results of patents -- sometimes it seems it's exactly opposite. De facto standards ("Windows") may be a result of patents or copyrights, but the actual de jure standards are almost always result of a leading period of chaotic development. And usually this seems to be
a good way to go. Premature creation of patents often leads to unusable bloated paper standards (ISO OSI model anyone? full X509?).
As well, it ends up making things extra cmplicated as the only
way to make money is to do it from services
I don't think this is true either. Many big pharmaceutical companies make money manufacturing aspirin (or, rather, generic versions... name itself is trademarked? or was it?). So, patents
are not a requirement for being able to sell a physical product -- you just need either a strong brand or best version of the product (cheapest, best, in some way better than competitors).
It may make it more difficult to make money with a completely new product, but right now it seems that there are 2 main lifecycles for innovative new products:
Try to protect the idea and/or implementation
as closely as possible. End up being proprietary thing no one wants (rambus, various wavelet packing algorithms, most new closed audio/video formats)
Share and enjoy; product itself becomes a hit, but not necessarily version you produce (mp3 is a good example... there's no real "leader" that creates most mp3 appliances).
I do think there are some reasons to tax IP. Since we're moving to a service and
knowledge base economy, then the tax laws ought to move to tax the activity. Tying
tax law to physical assets rather than IP makes this quite difficult.
Well it seems to me that taxing services should
need nothing new or special; sales or value addition tax should probably apply similarly to services than physical products. At least that's
how it works in most european countries... and I thought sales tax was applied to service charges in many/most US states too? (or is it only for
certain services like phone service?)
As to taxing IP as property (like real estate); value of IP usually diminishes over time, unlike the value of real estate ("they ain't making it anymore"), and the very value of IP is not only difficult to measure (except when a real monetary transaction takes place, in which case taxing is easy with sales tax etc) but also very volatile.
Re:I know this is going to hurt...
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This should be obvious to anyone, but the difference is whether it's obvious search results
are added product "placements".
Search engines are pretty much implying they
try search a match based on relevantness, not
based on money they make. Google clearly indicates
the ads... And it's much easier to do it succesfully when their search engine is known to work well, and they have never done it other way. That is, for other search engines it might be tricky to go from 'invisible' placements to explicit ones. Their ad customers would probably just leave, or demand significant price reductions.
As to Google, I like it not only because of clearly marked ads, but also because of the
damn well working matching.
An interesting sidenote is that matching also
seems to be dynamically adjusted based on hits
(ie. times user clicks on particular search result). I noticed
that for one of my "own" pages, which went from
number 8 to number 1 in a week (took a month
for Google to find the page, but only a week
to upgrade it... the page gets 90% of hits via
Google actually). It's not a huge amount of hits
(5-10 a day), but I think search matching works well (page contains a piece of open source code in a popular programming language, so it's reasonably easy to "guess" correct keywords; but it seems that there aren't all that many real alternatives, even though result set has ~7000 pages)...
and that's not because it's my page and I want tons of hits but because it seems like a perfect match, compared to most other results returned (like I was objective observer here...:-) ).
Although that is an interesting tidbit, it's comparing apples to oranges. What you are saying is that since the founder was a french, French parliament (whatever it was called) should have ultimate control over Olympics?
Instead, my recollection is that there exists international olympic committee?
I thought the quote was something along the lines of "If your only tool is hammer, all the problems seem like nails", which implies that there is the concept of "right tool for the job". You don't usually try digging holes with a hammer do you?
Whether the problems domains for high-quality (ogg) and high-compression (ktech codec) are overlapping enough or not to make one codec potentially work for both I don't know (I'm sure there are./ readers who can give decent answer), but I wouldn't count on that being the case.
Much like JPEGs and PNGs can peacefully co-exists -- even though both are for image compression -- I can easily see the need for at least 2 separate codecs, if their goals are different. Larger the audience, more compromises one has to make.
And exactly why should US congress be the ultimate governing body of the Internet? (or US government...). Internet is well past its earlier "US only" phase... Being international, and there not being many international organizations with any formal powers (UN being one of the few... and its powers are severely limited), it's hard to see any (existing) organizational body having "ultimate" control over Internet.
Minor nitpicking; AFAIK Sun does NOT sell Windows-based solutions. The only
thing related to Windows Sun sells are certain
software packages (Forte, StarOffice) that have Windows-version
available along with Solaris and Linux-versions.
Sun's products can certainly be integrated with Windows systems etc, but Sun doesn't sell such systems.
Ok, I do know that Netscape did officially charge 'commercial users', and private users could buy it too (and/or buy the 'premium' version). But that's just prerequisite for making money; my understanding is that they never really made any actual profit from selling browsers. I may be wrong; if anyone has actual numbers they would be interesting to see (I'd guess Netscape lawyers have shown those in court to show actual damage).
I thought, though, that they really were after
the web server market; even before competition
from Microsoft demolished the browser market.
And for what it's worth, Microsoft never directly charged for the product; they do charge for Windows... thus comparison is still slightly different (price dumping vs. trying to prevent competitors from entering the market).
And I completely missed Opera... they hopefully have made (and do make) money, either by selling the browser or by selling ad space.
And like someone else commented, Microsoft has done same stunt to n+1 companies; it's not JUST BeOS that has a case. But I still maintain it has one of the best ones to make.
Hmmh. I'm not quite sure that is the case. I would think one has to sign contract that says this is the case. And that would be similar to US practice (US job contracts are pretty scary with all rights waivers one has to sign etc. etc). I do not think that the default is to lose your rights, but that may depend on the type of work you are doing (contract, full-time)... but I'm no legal expert in finnish labour laws either.:-)
I do know for a fact that universities did (do?) not automatically get ownership of software students (or professors for that matter) wrote... and some bureaucrats/economists thought that was bad. I don't think that has changed since then (in 1998 or so), fortunately.
Alternative is often to heavily regulate buying and/or owning of dangerous or generally harmful items... You may need to obtain a license, need to be a certified professional in a field (for buying explosives for example or for ordering various biohazardous materials) or such. But that's most often based on existing problems; that is, laws/regulations are tightened when a specific need comes apparent.
... and no, I don't think there's need for such regulation here. Just something to consider; it's not always a choice between complete laissez-faire and illegality.
Well, it's hardly a secret that, yes, Microsoft has had (perhaps still has?) the problematic deals with hardware manufacturers. Problematic in the sense that the practices were closer to mafia than normal businesses ("we'll make you an offer you can't refuse"). It's not that big dealers got discounts; it was that the choice was pretty much down to "pay for windows install for every single machine you sell or we won't sell you any copies, ever, you pirate scum". Guess if it's easy for any other OS vendor to get their OS pre-installed as Microsoft-tax has already been paid?
Be is one of the few companies that genuinely do have a case, me thinks. With browsers the situation is bit convoluted (no one ever made money selling browsers). With BeOS, Be had snowball's chance in hell getting h/w manufacturer's to pre-install the OS because of Microsoft's strong arm tactics. Consumers didn't get to choose... perhaps they wouldn't have wanted BeOS in any case, but MS didn't want to take a chance. Of course MS didn't just fight BeOS but
all potential competitors... Be just happens to
be the one that had closest match on intel hardware (for 'normal' consumers).
Oh and yes, these tactics were hardly "tiny little thing" that Microsoft "didn't even know it was doing"... the whole industry has known about this for years now... but big names (Dell, Gateway et al) have been too scared of Don Bill to publicly complain (and/or greedy and content with status quo... they just sell hardware, OS is just a tax they have to pay)
Hard to argue with the author of the series about how things should be done eh? I kind of thought this was due to networks push for conforming nice family-valued entertainment... but if that's not the case I'm actually happy, even if I don't like the product as much as I would if it was produced differently. His show, them's the rules.
Of course this probably explains a bit about Futurama having somewhat different direction... I find it more consistent (plus funny) because of its missing "realistic characters" department.:-)
What Simpsons has going for it (more than Futurama) are the long-running character development sideline plots, and these are actually based on character traits... and often funny (gay theme for mr. Byrns 'n Smithers, relationship between the principal etc. etc), because they aren't pushed to the foreground too heavily. Just like all 'secondary jokes' in ZAZ movies (Naked Gun etc); things that shown alone wouldn't be all that funny, but combined add to the 'main course' nicely.
For me what is wrong is that it doesn't work (btw, "wrong" as in "doesn't work", not as in morally wrong or such). Result is not funny; stuff that would either be funny (to me), or touching/realistic/whatever (for someone else... the "moral of the story" part) cancels out the other part. Like mixing oil and
water (can be done like in mayo... but isn't easy).
I find some satiric humour in Simpsons to be funny, but I find "we are good normal people after all" part to be cheesy. Just like happy endings ruin some movies; for movies were they fit nicely in they are ok; for movies that require different kind of ending they just spoil the whole thing.
I just want my satiric humour pure; not necessarily/always sardonically sharp, but certainly not as watered-down "hey-we-didnt-really-mean-to-mock-em" version either.
Yeah, Simpsons is a weird mixture of still some funny stuff, and then lots of very lame-o Disneysque "moral of the story" kid stuff. It's weird combination; if you want to do "moral" things, do your Mary Poppins; if rough and funny, do South Park. But do NOT try to mix the two. Simpsons is doing that, at least with new episodes (yeah yeah, not rough and funny just mildly amusing and just teeny-weeny bit naughty occasionally but still).:-/
Of course it could be just matter of taste; those few X-files episodes I ever saw convinced me it's half-assed low-quality sci-fi-wannabe stuff more often found from paperback books (and "philosophic" semi-intellectual conversations comical)... but lots of people just love(d) the series.
But anyways, Futurama is my favourite from Fox and a real pity if/when it goes away. They should rather axe Simpsons... before it gets even worse.:-)
You are falling into the trap of assuming that everything that looks familiar is familiar. That's a very poor approach when making laws in a changing world.
Hmmh. I must honestly admit I don't quite understand what you are saying here..
What you are saying is that there are "special" URLs, ie ones that point to images, which are inherently pointing to things which are not published to the public and "normal" URLs, pointing to HTML, which constitute the intended published context of an item. This is arbitrary and false (at the same time!).
No. I'm not saying anything like that. I'm saying I (assuming I was a judge) don't care even about the fact that we are talking about URL-linked items. I'd be more interested in what is the end result; what browser display and how that looks like; what is the impression and intention of the page in question.
You are still thinking in technical terms, how things are done instead of what is done. I certainly understand how similar (identical) different methods are from HTML viewpoint; hyper-linking as usual. About the only difference is that it might be logical to consider html-pages to be 'first class' web content, and anything else secondary linked-to material; whether that makes sense or not can be argued to no end.
No, I don't think so. Judges in general are not interested in technical implementations, but about actual usage and context. It looks like search engine cut'n pasted image, even though underlying system 'only' links the image, and fetches it from another server.
Now, from user's point of view (which approximates judge's POV most likely), if you do see the whole image on a page, it IS ON THAT PAGE. Technical implementation is that due to linkage browser automatically fetches the image, and comes from another server. That is inconsequential for the user. Who cares? Programmers do, obviously, but for the user that image IS part of the page.
Thus, having a thumb-nailed image that links to the original page with the embedded image seems more fair use than 'embedding' the image.
And yes, I fully understand that from underlying tech's (and infrastructure's) perspective, difference isn't all that clear, far from it. But what matters is the context in which the image is used.
However, what I would consider more interesting is actually the _intention_ for linking to full-sized images. Thing is; if a casual user (or another artist etc) did the linking to mislead people, it would be easy to condemn the practice. But when a general purpose search engine does it, it's easier to defend the practice; especially since it's easier for anyone to understand that the search engine "didn't produce" the image, but found it from another site.
Well, you can reverse your statement and it would still be about as true. See, for me it IS the reverse. I do have a windows-partition, but I simply have no need for it, and everything I use my computer for can be done without problems under Linux.
Same can of course be said about Windows or
even MacOS. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages (for example, Windows does shine in games, linux on wide variety of free server software etc. etc), but usually things can be done on any of the mainstream platforms; and I do include Linux in that category at this point.
As to "not ready for every day user", that is just simply an urban legend. The only major obstacle is that it's not usually pre-installed; and installing any OS is an alien thing to do for many people, no matter how simple and painless it is (which it usually is for all mainstream OSes). If it was, your every day user could just start up Linux, log in and start clicking away. Email, web browsing, office (StarOffice et al)... that's easy as anywhere else.
Just out of curiosity... do you have some specific examples on why "Linux is just not ready for..."? Or are you just repeating the common conception of the state of Linux?
Yes, you are absolutely right there. There's whole software ecosystem based on Oracle as the foundation, lots and lots of 3rd party products (as well as products from Oracle itself). And like I said reliability is what sells Oracle, and diagnostics tools add to reliability ("even if it breaks, we at least know what happened").
Well, I think the point was that when you go from expensive proprietary hardware to commodity hardware, you might start thinking of going from expensive proprietary software to commodity software?
It may be that PostgreSQL isn't yet quite up to Oracle, but it's not all that far away, depending on your needs. Thing is, unlike most people think, Oracle doesn't shine as much in performance side as in image, brand, reliability and status. It's not for nothing that they try to prevent benchmark results being published. So why isn't Oracle the fastest beast? Because their biggest selling point is reliability, conservative warm (fuzzy?) feeling about always being there, doing operations in predicatble way. Thus optimizations are not done if they result in uneven results; no bleeding edge things are added as that would be a risk etc. etc. etc.
The reason Oracle actually is a pretty good fit for big corporations is that big corps just love predictability and security; superb performance or latest features really are secondary issues.
It's not that their product was bad; it's mostly "good enough", mediocre but reliable. Much like proprietary unix hardware. And both scale well; they are designed for each other. Big boxes for Big Databases.
Maybe Sun can put even more effort into Java to make it faster - maybe even revisiting the hardware implementation angle. What about a drop-in Java Virtual Machine in hardware implemented on a PCI card or something?
Personally I think that with one exception (see below), the idea of hardware tailored for specific languages doesn't make much sense (although processors and languages have always had symbiotic relationships... C is a good example with its pre- and post increment operators that were there because the hardware of the day had support for that). In case of Java, chips for running java bytecode natively would have to be a stack machines, and those were tried decades ago (60s?), and were eventually decimated by register-based machines. And even though cache certainly helps with stacks, the idea of doing all operations in memory instead of registers... well, just doesn't sound like a good idea.
I don't know why even many Sun people were hinting at java chips being a solution; they _might_ make sense for low-end embedded systems, but not so much for performance but for price and simplicity. Perhaps those were mostly marketing people, and the basic idea of hardware solution being faster than software was tempting (not to mention the fact Sun is really a hardware company).
Now, there IS one hardware architecture development that could well help Java... and it is something both Sun (project "MAJC" or such?) and IBM are researching / developing; processor-level multi-threading. Basically, having multiple processor cores that could do "thread multiplexing", ie. schedule in instructions from different threads to same execution unit. This is possible for threads but since they share the same address space (and thus memory mapping and caches)... and might give nice boost. However, it appears to be still more a research project than actual production thing.
Slashdot Mirror
What this means is that first of all I save time on not having to assemble the thing and test individual components, plus if something breaks, I can get it replaced more easily. But I still get to choose the exact configuration, and don't have to pay the Microsoft tax if I choose not to (if I choose to, however, I can still get OEM pricing for Windows).
I may end up paying that 100 - 200 bucks for their work; but usually it's not even that much, since they still get volume discount for components. That is, if I bought components from them, the price would be about equal to what they charge for the whole system.
Some of that (esp. regarding not-so-highly-educated "high tech" workers) was certainly just lemming-see-lemming-write hype mongering... but it's different in that there wasn't really anyone selling their product (except perhaps some of techies wanting even more inflated salaries... but they have less influence on press than companies)
And shortage for actually qualified and competent tech people is still true, and will be true in near future. Big headlines for tech slump hide the fact that even now it is often difficult to find good enough people, esp. programmers (and related, system architects etc). There are lots of people who claim they have the skills, but who shouldn't have been hired in the first place... and their crying is now obfuscating the scenery.
I'm not saying it's easy to find a job, even if you are qualified right now, but it's often more of a problem of supply and demand meeting, not least because of floood of "fake" candidates, 20 year old dotcom CEOs, "programmers" who self-taught javascript in 2 days etc. etc..
I might buy the argument for OS vulnerabilities, but for email client, biggest reason is technical. Most of the stuff would be impossible with all other email clients.
Hmmh. I may be wrong but:
Does this not indicate that this is not necessarily true any more? Plus, on some platforms limitation is pretty high, esp. for threads ('full' processes usually have lower limits).
Of course that's just another approximation, but the order of magnitude is probably ok (what is considered a word etc; for english it's fortunately easier than for languages that use synthesis to add endings to words instead of post-/prefixes)
No. "Real" standards are not results of patents -- sometimes it seems it's exactly opposite. De facto standards ("Windows") may be a result of patents or copyrights, but the actual de jure standards are almost always result of a leading period of chaotic development. And usually this seems to be a good way to go. Premature creation of patents often leads to unusable bloated paper standards (ISO OSI model anyone? full X509?).
As well, it ends up making things extra cmplicated as the only way to make money is to do it from services
I don't think this is true either. Many big pharmaceutical companies make money manufacturing aspirin (or, rather, generic versions... name itself is trademarked? or was it?). So, patents are not a requirement for being able to sell a physical product -- you just need either a strong brand or best version of the product (cheapest, best, in some way better than competitors).
It may make it more difficult to make money with a completely new product, but right now it seems that there are 2 main lifecycles for innovative new products:
Well it seems to me that taxing services should need nothing new or special; sales or value addition tax should probably apply similarly to services than physical products. At least that's how it works in most european countries... and I thought sales tax was applied to service charges in many/most US states too? (or is it only for certain services like phone service?)
As to taxing IP as property (like real estate); value of IP usually diminishes over time, unlike the value of real estate ("they ain't making it anymore"), and the very value of IP is not only difficult to measure (except when a real monetary transaction takes place, in which case taxing is easy with sales tax etc) but also very volatile.
As to Google, I like it not only because of clearly marked ads, but also because of the damn well working matching.
An interesting sidenote is that matching also seems to be dynamically adjusted based on hits (ie. times user clicks on particular search result). I noticed that for one of my "own" pages, which went from number 8 to number 1 in a week (took a month for Google to find the page, but only a week to upgrade it... the page gets 90% of hits via Google actually). It's not a huge amount of hits (5-10 a day), but I think search matching works well (page contains a piece of open source code in a popular programming language, so it's reasonably easy to "guess" correct keywords; but it seems that there aren't all that many real alternatives, even though result set has ~7000 pages)... and that's not because it's my page and I want tons of hits but because it seems like a perfect match, compared to most other results returned (like I was objective observer here... :-) ).
Instead, my recollection is that there exists international olympic committee?
I thought the quote was something along the lines of "If your only tool is hammer, all the problems seem like nails", which implies that there is the concept of "right tool for the job". You don't usually try digging holes with a hammer do you?
Whether the problems domains for high-quality (ogg) and high-compression (ktech codec) are overlapping enough or not to make one codec potentially work for both I don't know (I'm sure there are ./ readers who can give decent answer), but I wouldn't count on that being the case.
Much like JPEGs and PNGs can peacefully co-exists -- even though both are for image compression -- I can easily see the need for at least 2 separate codecs, if their goals are different. Larger the audience, more compromises one has to make.
And exactly why should US congress be the ultimate governing body of the Internet? (or US government...). Internet is well past its earlier "US only" phase... Being international, and there not being many international organizations with any formal powers (UN being one of the few... and its powers are severely limited), it's hard to see any (existing) organizational body having "ultimate" control over Internet.
Minor nitpicking; AFAIK Sun does NOT sell Windows-based solutions. The only thing related to Windows Sun sells are certain software packages (Forte, StarOffice) that have Windows-version available along with Solaris and Linux-versions. Sun's products can certainly be integrated with Windows systems etc, but Sun doesn't sell such systems.
And I completely missed Opera... they hopefully have made (and do make) money, either by selling the browser or by selling ad space.
And like someone else commented, Microsoft has done same stunt to n+1 companies; it's not JUST BeOS that has a case. But I still maintain it has one of the best ones to make.
I do know for a fact that universities did (do?) not automatically get ownership of software students (or professors for that matter) wrote... and some bureaucrats/economists thought that was bad. I don't think that has changed since then (in 1998 or so), fortunately.
Be is one of the few companies that genuinely do have a case, me thinks. With browsers the situation is bit convoluted (no one ever made money selling browsers). With BeOS, Be had snowball's chance in hell getting h/w manufacturer's to pre-install the OS because of Microsoft's strong arm tactics. Consumers didn't get to choose... perhaps they wouldn't have wanted BeOS in any case, but MS didn't want to take a chance. Of course MS didn't just fight BeOS but all potential competitors... Be just happens to be the one that had closest match on intel hardware (for 'normal' consumers).
Oh and yes, these tactics were hardly "tiny little thing" that Microsoft "didn't even know it was doing"... the whole industry has known about this for years now... but big names (Dell, Gateway et al) have been too scared of Don Bill to publicly complain (and/or greedy and content with status quo... they just sell hardware, OS is just a tax they have to pay)
Of course this probably explains a bit about Futurama having somewhat different direction... I find it more consistent (plus funny) because of its missing "realistic characters" department. :-)
What Simpsons has going for it (more than Futurama) are the long-running character development sideline plots, and these are actually based on character traits... and often funny (gay theme for mr. Byrns 'n Smithers, relationship between the principal etc. etc), because they aren't pushed to the foreground too heavily. Just like all 'secondary jokes' in ZAZ movies (Naked Gun etc); things that shown alone wouldn't be all that funny, but combined add to the 'main course' nicely.
I find some satiric humour in Simpsons to be funny, but I find "we are good normal people after all" part to be cheesy. Just like happy endings ruin some movies; for movies were they fit nicely in they are ok; for movies that require different kind of ending they just spoil the whole thing.
I just want my satiric humour pure; not necessarily/always sardonically sharp, but certainly not as watered-down "hey-we-didnt-really-mean-to-mock-em" version either.
Of course it could be just matter of taste; those few X-files episodes I ever saw convinced me it's half-assed low-quality sci-fi-wannabe stuff more often found from paperback books (and "philosophic" semi-intellectual conversations comical)... but lots of people just love(d) the series.
But anyways, Futurama is my favourite from Fox and a real pity if/when it goes away. They should rather axe Simpsons... before it gets even worse. :-)
Hmmh. I must honestly admit I don't quite understand what you are saying here..
What you are saying is that there are "special" URLs, ie ones that point to images, which are inherently pointing to things which are not published to the public and "normal" URLs, pointing to HTML, which constitute the intended published context of an item. This is arbitrary and false (at the same time!).
No. I'm not saying anything like that. I'm saying I (assuming I was a judge) don't care even about the fact that we are talking about URL-linked items. I'd be more interested in what is the end result; what browser display and how that looks like; what is the impression and intention of the page in question.
You are still thinking in technical terms, how things are done instead of what is done. I certainly understand how similar (identical) different methods are from HTML viewpoint; hyper-linking as usual. About the only difference is that it might be logical to consider html-pages to be 'first class' web content, and anything else secondary linked-to material; whether that makes sense or not can be argued to no end.
Now, from user's point of view (which approximates judge's POV most likely), if you do see the whole image on a page, it IS ON THAT PAGE. Technical implementation is that due to linkage browser automatically fetches the image, and comes from another server. That is inconsequential for the user. Who cares? Programmers do, obviously, but for the user that image IS part of the page.
Thus, having a thumb-nailed image that links to the original page with the embedded image seems more fair use than 'embedding' the image.
And yes, I fully understand that from underlying tech's (and infrastructure's) perspective, difference isn't all that clear, far from it. But what matters is the context in which the image is used.
However, what I would consider more interesting is actually the _intention_ for linking to full-sized images. Thing is; if a casual user (or another artist etc) did the linking to mislead people, it would be easy to condemn the practice. But when a general purpose search engine does it, it's easier to defend the practice; especially since it's easier for anyone to understand that the search engine "didn't produce" the image, but found it from another site.
Same can of course be said about Windows or even MacOS. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages (for example, Windows does shine in games, linux on wide variety of free server software etc. etc), but usually things can be done on any of the mainstream platforms; and I do include Linux in that category at this point.
As to "not ready for every day user", that is just simply an urban legend. The only major obstacle is that it's not usually pre-installed; and installing any OS is an alien thing to do for many people, no matter how simple and painless it is (which it usually is for all mainstream OSes). If it was, your every day user could just start up Linux, log in and start clicking away. Email, web browsing, office (StarOffice et al)... that's easy as anywhere else.
Just out of curiosity... do you have some specific examples on why "Linux is just not ready for..."? Or are you just repeating the common conception of the state of Linux?
Yes, you are absolutely right there. There's whole software ecosystem based on Oracle as the foundation, lots and lots of 3rd party products (as well as products from Oracle itself). And like I said reliability is what sells Oracle, and diagnostics tools add to reliability ("even if it breaks, we at least know what happened").
It may be that PostgreSQL isn't yet quite up to Oracle, but it's not all that far away, depending on your needs. Thing is, unlike most people think, Oracle doesn't shine as much in performance side as in image, brand, reliability and status. It's not for nothing that they try to prevent benchmark results being published. So why isn't Oracle the fastest beast? Because their biggest selling point is reliability, conservative warm (fuzzy?) feeling about always being there, doing operations in predicatble way. Thus optimizations are not done if they result in uneven results; no bleeding edge things are added as that would be a risk etc. etc. etc.
The reason Oracle actually is a pretty good fit for big corporations is that big corps just love predictability and security; superb performance or latest features really are secondary issues. It's not that their product was bad; it's mostly "good enough", mediocre but reliable. Much like proprietary unix hardware. And both scale well; they are designed for each other. Big boxes for Big Databases.
Personally I think that with one exception (see below), the idea of hardware tailored for specific languages doesn't make much sense (although processors and languages have always had symbiotic relationships... C is a good example with its pre- and post increment operators that were there because the hardware of the day had support for that). In case of Java, chips for running java bytecode natively would have to be a stack machines, and those were tried decades ago (60s?), and were eventually decimated by register-based machines. And even though cache certainly helps with stacks, the idea of doing all operations in memory instead of registers... well, just doesn't sound like a good idea.
I don't know why even many Sun people were hinting at java chips being a solution; they _might_ make sense for low-end embedded systems, but not so much for performance but for price and simplicity. Perhaps those were mostly marketing people, and the basic idea of hardware solution being faster than software was tempting (not to mention the fact Sun is really a hardware company).
Now, there IS one hardware architecture development that could well help Java... and it is something both Sun (project "MAJC" or such?) and IBM are researching / developing; processor-level multi-threading. Basically, having multiple processor cores that could do "thread multiplexing", ie. schedule in instructions from different threads to same execution unit. This is possible for threads but since they share the same address space (and thus memory mapping and caches)... and might give nice boost. However, it appears to be still more a research project than actual production thing.