I will use this phrase out today I swear. Are you retarded or something? Or maybe you're just 13 and don't know any better. I can't just fucking move because my telco won't provide me with DSL access and neither can 99.999% of people in this country. Telcos do not give a shit about anyone except their shareholders and thus will not lay a bunch of new lines because a million copies of a video game are sold, a large percentage of which were not sold in their service area. They make more money per month from a single medium sized business than they make from a residence in six months. Do the math real quick (if you can) and tell me for an average sized city where most of their revenues come from.
Are you mentally retarded or something? A majority of people on the internet are connecting to it with modems and a majority of THOSE people aren't even getting 56k connections. Because you are in a potential DSL or Cable service area doesn't mean shit. If there is no one there to provide access you don't get access. If you can't get stable 56k access which a good deal of people don't get you'll not get DSL service either.
The drawback the USB has which SCSI and FireWire (which is based off SCSI) is that USB is a centalized design. All data from a USB device passes through the USB controller on your main system bus effectively limiting your aggregate bandwidth to the bandwidth available on your main system bus. This communication scheme also limits the connectivity of USB devices, they have to pass through a central controller in order to talk to one another. SCSI and FireWire devices all have their own minicontrollers which enables them to act independantly. Since every SCSI device has its own controller data never has to pass through a central hub allowing devices you potentially have higher bandwidth than your main system bus. If anything around right now replaces Fibre channel connection it will most likely be an overclocked version of FireWire. FireWire is for the most part serialized SCSI.
Are you all fucking daft? If you don't want to subscribe to Office XP DON'T BUY IT. If you don't want subscrib-o-ware at all DON'T BUY IT. If you don't buy it the producers of said software will not produce it in the form they are not selling it in. Besides which, the question is about OEMs. OEMs stand to make a killing with subscrib-o-ware. As it stands Dell and Gateway and everyone else have to pay for software licenses in bulk. Not only that but OEM software's support is the responsibility of the OEM and not, say, Microsoft. This also costs the OEM money that could be better spent elsewhere. With a subscrib-o-ware model the OEM simply bundles a subscrib-o-ware capable OS and lets the user decide which software packages they want. Support for this subscrib-o-ware is now the responsibility of the developer rather than the OEM. Your next Dell or Gateway may just come with Whistler preinstalled and let you pick and choose from a list of options what software you want. Not only do the customers save but OEMs get to put a little extra money in pocket from not having to pay for a bunch of software people may or may not use or even want. Case in point; my grandparents bought a new Gateway last year that came with a mound of software. Most of this software has to this day gone unused which means both they and Gateway paid for a bunch of stuff that is essencially useless.
What exactly was so bad about DIVX's distribution plan? You supposedly could go to your local Blockbuster and pick up a DIVX disc for a few bucks and watch it for a couple days then if it turned out you liked the movie you could pay a couple more bucks to have the disc unlocked so you could watch it all the time. I rent a movie and decide I like enough to own it, rather than make a separate trip out to find that disc I pay to have it unlocked and can watch it forever. Fuck your "over-commercialization of closed source software", do you have any idea what the fuck you're talking about? They make tools and you buy them, this model has worked for a very long fucking time. If you think software companies are nickel and diming you to death turn your eye upon your local banking institution. They are fucking you with their rates and charges. So is the phone company and your municipal utilities. Wah wah.
If a company was found to snoop through your personal files without your consent they will get fucked up the ass by class action lawsuits and criminal charges. If they put a line in their EULA that they can access all of your Microsoft-made documents and you agree to it then you ought to have read more carefully that to which you agreed to. It has always been caveat emptor with retail software what exactly is changing?
Son of a bitch. If you don't want your "inventions" owned by a company don't fucking sign them over. Do corporations have rights to your ideas if you sign them over? You're fucking right they do, you're developing your project on their time and with their resources, intellectual and physical. If you want to work on your own stuff or open source software do it at home. If you're using my computer time to go off on your own projects you're suddenly going to find user access restrictions on cc. If you work on something for the company you are an agent of the company and they DO have IP rights to your work; they pay your fucking bills so you ought to be happy with the arrangment. If you want to make your project free work on it on your own time and license it as such that it demands to be kept free (GPL, BSD). If you use an idea you developed whilst working on a similar project you better make sure the free version is a clean room implimentation of it and don't think your boss shouldn't be pissed you incorporated something you worked out on their time into a potentially competing application.
Please stop being retarded, please stop being retarded. Passive RF tags are cool, I could find the TV remote anywhere in my house by pressing a button on a remote control. I could also walk out of a store without passing by a register (like the IBM commercial) with a couple goods in my pockets. To insist that we will be tracked in the future is a misleading concept. We ARE fucking tracked wherever we go. If I want to know where you went on vacation I pull up a TRW on you and find out when and where your transactions took place. Same if I want to know what you eat or how healthy your children are. Face it: you're a fucking number. So anyways RF ID tags have a very very very short range, I would be really hard pressed to track a tag from orbit even if I was a government body with trillions of dollars at my disposal. I don't see the point of people complaining, the jolt cola you're drinking whilst being a l33t haX0r has a UPC code on it which is scarely different from an RFID tag.
You've already for an ID tag that is unique to your body, your finger print. Police ask for your ID when they pull you over to make sure you have a license to operate a vehicle. If you do have a license and were swerving all over the road they slap you with reckless endangerment/driving as they can infer that if you got a license from the state you passed exams and are aware you're not allowed to swerve all over the road.
I hear the "do things as others say you should" bit alot yet I've never seen anyone provide an example of how Microsoft told them to do business. Microsoft doesn't tell you how to run your business, neither does IBM or Sun. If I don't like the software a company provides I will look elsewhere, thousands of companies have had to do this in the past so there is a whole subindustry in the computer biz that merely provides ways of intercommunicating between different software suites and architectures.
No one sells Apache, Perl, or HTML do they? Apache survives because it is an exceptionally good piece of software. Few other open source projects can be compared quality wise to Apache.
Firstly c|net has a real problem with their writing, they tend to take stuff off alt.* and post it as if it were the word of God. Secondly, you're whining again. One thousand one hundred and forty three posts and even the highest scores are people whining or telling Bill Gates to kiss their ass. Fucking weenies. I really wish I could get Linux people to understand the concept behind selling a product for profit. You need to sell a product at a high profit margin in order to make your investors happy because those profits go into their pockets. Retail == commercialism. Giving product away for free is not retail, it's giving your product away for free. I don't think open source software is a threat to my way of life but I don't think that for any reason it ought to be the primary example of software distribution. RMS and the GPL work fine in academic environments where it's nice to see how the next guy solved a problem or gives you the change to fix bugs by exposing the software to many eyes. In business this is bullshit. You can't open up confidential projects to competitors; they'll buy new BMWs while you pass out pink slips and auction your assets. If I want a hobby I'll write GPL software if I want to start a business I'm going to write up a decent EULA and copyright my work.
Fuck national coverage, I merely want coverage. My area has limited to no coverage for Ricochet which I've been excited about since I first heard about it. I'd pay 80$ for a 128k connection that traveled with my Powerbook. Metricom's major problem is and was availability. Of course a new service like this takes time to percolate to new areas but they spent a wad of cash on advertising and getting product recognition before they could feasibly deliver their product to anyone who might want to use it. I really doubt they would be in such troubles now if they would have spent more money on deployment rather than advertising; if they had wider deployment and penetration right now they could offer up licenses for other companies to use their networks/patents. Their advertising dollar would have been better spent if they really pushed the corporate buttons rather than a dumb campaign geared towards crow-like home consumers. IBM advertises to businesses correctly. PHBs see IBM commercials and get a sense of awe and the next day ask their IT manager if they can handle a bajillion hits every second and some other mumbo jumbo. Metricom ought to have learned from them. Point out to PHB types that connectiveity is a good thing and wireless connectivity for traveling types is even better. Once they grabbed a bunch of corporate accounts they should have gone after the college student and oddly enough college faculty. Get schools to host relay stations and the student body will cream themselves because they can for a nominal fee (tacked onto their housing bill) use napster from the park by the school or from non-connected buildings. Both of these customer bases are going to be purchasing year or multiple year contracts for a fair number of people and in the case of college campuses support their network and increase availbility. Poor Metricom.
What you want is a really smart server. If User-Agent: == a certain set, say Mozilla or IE format the content a certain way and include stylesheets and JavaScript and the like. If the user agent is a Palm VII or Nokia phone format the content differently. This of course requires way more work on the part of the server and web admin. Separation of content and presentation is a good thing for high availability web sites. HTTP has lots of possibilities that haven't been explored in nearly enough detail yet.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. What does Sun make that is cheaper than its Intel based counterpart? Solaris gives you as much freedom as Windows 2000 does and don't give me some bright eyed speech, I use both regularly. Sun "forces" you to use Solaris with their hardware; oh shit wait it is merely pre-loading like Windows 2000 what besides you're short sightedness prevents you from nuking the hard drive and installing whatever OS you'd like? If your Windows installation keeps crashing you can with a bit of effort fix it. Or call up your hardware vendor and give them shit for an inferior box. I say fuck Solaris and Windows and Linux. They only reason I almost give a fuck about operating systems is the OS manufacturers are part of my portfolio. It isn't about what you run with it matters what you're running on top. Fuck Linux or Solaris or Windows if I can't access my mission critical application(s) on it. Given the proper tools I can be productive on any system what is it that's causing you so much trouble?
If you're really interested in developing with Microsoft go to their fucking website or call them. They are a software company and do actually provide developers some assistance. If you want to throw hypocritical software licencing issues at them don't bother.
Well describe to me the REAL difference between word processing and writing email. Both involve the input of text into the computer. Rather than print said text you may want to send it to someone in the form of an email. If you separate everything into the most basic of components you end up with a fairly large number of combonations of "applications". The same GrabKeyboardInputAndBufferIt object could be used to put text into an email, insert text into a picture you're editing or send a command to the lower levels of the OS.
Did you JUST register your slashdot account or something? You're like a glowing radioactive inflamed piece of hyperbole. For starters Solaris is not open source in the Richard Stallman Linux zealot sort of way (oddly enough Sun's business plan involves you PURCHASING things from them to generate income). Unicies that comply with POSIX are for the most part interoperable. They do however have different API sets which either aid or hinder developers. If these APIs were standard among different unicies they would not be different unicies. FreeBSD and Solaris both have Linux compatibility layers anyways, most binaries compiled for Linux will run on both Solaris (providing they are compiled for the right processor) and FreeBSD. If this isn't compatibility I don't think you know what is.
If you think that your opinion of Microsoft having too much money is legal grounds for them to be put out of business I doubt you're over 14 years old, in mentality at least. You cannot put a company out of business for being successful. You can however sue them for improper use of market position and persuade the court to issue an injunction against them. Microsoft has not abused personal freedom or technology or innovation. They have done what many other corporations have done, use whatever tactics necessary to make money. If you want to talk about personal freedom being infringed point fingers at older industrial giants (think mining and production) and look at how said companies turned their workers into little more than indentured servants. Microsoft has yet to destroy a small town's economy a la Flint, MI. We must remain strong and not give into your bullshit.
Uh..I hate to break this to you but you do NOT have to reverse engineer.doc in order to write an application that reads it. Microsoft Press publishes a pair of books, one concerning Word documents and the other concerning Excel documents. They describe in detail the formats of the document structures. I guess people haven't learned about these books because the documentation costs money. Oh well.
Fuck. I really hate reading this thread over and over. Firstly OS X != Darwin (which has been ported to x86). Intel is not a panacea for Apple's supply difficulties with Motorola. And for some odd reason people think that if Apple did switch processor architectures that somehow they would become all open and cool. Apple is 85% about style, polycarbonate cases and candy colourings ought to tell you that much. They're not going to open BIOS specifications on any of their boxes, Intel chips or otherwise. It'd be a dumb fucking idea to switch architectures anytime soon in any case. Does anyone remember Microsoft had MIPS and PPC version of Windows NT? Notice how there are no MIPS or PPC versions of Windows 2000. They couldn't even get people to port to a different architecture despite they could write to the same API. Microsoft didn't even port its products to those platforms. Third part developers would get awfly pissed at them, they would be shipping their PPC software out (a costly venture) and then Apple says they are switching to x86 so you best not buy any software until new boxes come out. Yeah great idea you fucking dipshits. Let this fucking thread die and buy a fucking Mac if you want OS X.
Sooo...according to the article and some of the posts here. Linux (GNU/Linux) consists entirely of the kernel and nothing else besides the kernel. Lets open up a terminal and see what happens. Holy fucking shit it's a c shell! Wait is that part of the kernel? If this guy really wanted to make a statement he would have complained that the tools included with Linux are all GNU tools that repilicate programs on closed source Unix systems. These tools are developed at the whim of a handful of coders which authorize a stable release as Linus does with the Linux kernel. I've read all these arguments before and they've been just as backwards. First of all Linus owns the Linux kernel, you can't just demand he give it over to some group of developers. Secondly there would be little point in doing so. If you're going to use someone else's emulation of Unix you're going to have to put up with their flights of fancy. IBM, Compaq, and HP all have their own versions of Unix floating around. If they really wanted to they could port said Unix systems to any architecture they wanted and blast Linux out of the water on the hardware they stuck it on. If big wig software ever DID want to oust Linus and his kernel all they would really have to do is port the main Linux libraries and write into their own kernels a Linux compatibility layer in their kernel (a la FreeBSD and Solaris).
Yay, finally some news on more people making PPC boxes! I can now rest. Lots of people have been pointing out that a couple years ago you could shell out 9k bucks for a non-UltraSPARC box that could fit inside a PC or that Cubes and G4 towers are cheaper. Who the fuck cares. The cool thing here is more people than just Apple are selling PPC boxes. All the stories of this catagory that get posted always end up bashed because everyone points out Apple and then when Apple actually does something they get bashed. Oh well.
If x number of PPC CPUs generate y amount of heat then y is directly proportional to x as such having more PPC CPUs would generate more heat. Fitting these processors into a smaller space (less potential surface area and less air volume) means you're going to end up with heat flow problems. 10 G4 Macs are going to radiate generated heat better than 10 of these little boxes stacked on top of one another due to the fact the G4 towers have the physical capacity to circulate more air.
Something I don't think you've considered is population density. For some places you could get away with 1000 people per base station with those stations fairly far apart (transmiting with a decent power output). In somewhere like New York or Tokyo you're talking about a thousand people in a couple blocks. Thats alot of base stations close together. To keep them patitioned you would need to reduce the transmission wattage to the point where some people would have to settle for slower speeds due to signal loss. Wireless communications are way too limited to enable 5 million New Yorkers to get 2Mbps connections all at once. If you don't agree you've never gotten a "Network Busy" message whilst trying to make a cell phone call in a metropolitan area.
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I will use this phrase out today I swear. Are you retarded or something? Or maybe you're just 13 and don't know any better. I can't just fucking move because my telco won't provide me with DSL access and neither can 99.999% of people in this country. Telcos do not give a shit about anyone except their shareholders and thus will not lay a bunch of new lines because a million copies of a video game are sold, a large percentage of which were not sold in their service area. They make more money per month from a single medium sized business than they make from a residence in six months. Do the math real quick (if you can) and tell me for an average sized city where most of their revenues come from.
Are you mentally retarded or something? A majority of people on the internet are connecting to it with modems and a majority of THOSE people aren't even getting 56k connections. Because you are in a potential DSL or Cable service area doesn't mean shit. If there is no one there to provide access you don't get access. If you can't get stable 56k access which a good deal of people don't get you'll not get DSL service either.
The drawback the USB has which SCSI and FireWire (which is based off SCSI) is that USB is a centalized design. All data from a USB device passes through the USB controller on your main system bus effectively limiting your aggregate bandwidth to the bandwidth available on your main system bus. This communication scheme also limits the connectivity of USB devices, they have to pass through a central controller in order to talk to one another. SCSI and FireWire devices all have their own minicontrollers which enables them to act independantly. Since every SCSI device has its own controller data never has to pass through a central hub allowing devices you potentially have higher bandwidth than your main system bus. If anything around right now replaces Fibre channel connection it will most likely be an overclocked version of FireWire. FireWire is for the most part serialized SCSI.
Are you all fucking daft? If you don't want to subscribe to Office XP DON'T BUY IT. If you don't want subscrib-o-ware at all DON'T BUY IT. If you don't buy it the producers of said software will not produce it in the form they are not selling it in. Besides which, the question is about OEMs. OEMs stand to make a killing with subscrib-o-ware. As it stands Dell and Gateway and everyone else have to pay for software licenses in bulk. Not only that but OEM software's support is the responsibility of the OEM and not, say, Microsoft. This also costs the OEM money that could be better spent elsewhere. With a subscrib-o-ware model the OEM simply bundles a subscrib-o-ware capable OS and lets the user decide which software packages they want. Support for this subscrib-o-ware is now the responsibility of the developer rather than the OEM. Your next Dell or Gateway may just come with Whistler preinstalled and let you pick and choose from a list of options what software you want. Not only do the customers save but OEMs get to put a little extra money in pocket from not having to pay for a bunch of software people may or may not use or even want. Case in point; my grandparents bought a new Gateway last year that came with a mound of software. Most of this software has to this day gone unused which means both they and Gateway paid for a bunch of stuff that is essencially useless.
If your music PC only does music why the fuck are you worried about Office XP or any other subscrib-o-ware? You're using it only for music right?
What exactly was so bad about DIVX's distribution plan? You supposedly could go to your local Blockbuster and pick up a DIVX disc for a few bucks and watch it for a couple days then if it turned out you liked the movie you could pay a couple more bucks to have the disc unlocked so you could watch it all the time. I rent a movie and decide I like enough to own it, rather than make a separate trip out to find that disc I pay to have it unlocked and can watch it forever. Fuck your "over-commercialization of closed source software", do you have any idea what the fuck you're talking about? They make tools and you buy them, this model has worked for a very long fucking time. If you think software companies are nickel and diming you to death turn your eye upon your local banking institution. They are fucking you with their rates and charges. So is the phone company and your municipal utilities. Wah wah.
If a company was found to snoop through your personal files without your consent they will get fucked up the ass by class action lawsuits and criminal charges. If they put a line in their EULA that they can access all of your Microsoft-made documents and you agree to it then you ought to have read more carefully that to which you agreed to. It has always been caveat emptor with retail software what exactly is changing?
Son of a bitch. If you don't want your "inventions" owned by a company don't fucking sign them over. Do corporations have rights to your ideas if you sign them over? You're fucking right they do, you're developing your project on their time and with their resources, intellectual and physical. If you want to work on your own stuff or open source software do it at home. If you're using my computer time to go off on your own projects you're suddenly going to find user access restrictions on cc. If you work on something for the company you are an agent of the company and they DO have IP rights to your work; they pay your fucking bills so you ought to be happy with the arrangment. If you want to make your project free work on it on your own time and license it as such that it demands to be kept free (GPL, BSD). If you use an idea you developed whilst working on a similar project you better make sure the free version is a clean room implimentation of it and don't think your boss shouldn't be pissed you incorporated something you worked out on their time into a potentially competing application.
Please stop being retarded, please stop being retarded. Passive RF tags are cool, I could find the TV remote anywhere in my house by pressing a button on a remote control. I could also walk out of a store without passing by a register (like the IBM commercial) with a couple goods in my pockets. To insist that we will be tracked in the future is a misleading concept. We ARE fucking tracked wherever we go. If I want to know where you went on vacation I pull up a TRW on you and find out when and where your transactions took place. Same if I want to know what you eat or how healthy your children are. Face it: you're a fucking number. So anyways RF ID tags have a very very very short range, I would be really hard pressed to track a tag from orbit even if I was a government body with trillions of dollars at my disposal. I don't see the point of people complaining, the jolt cola you're drinking whilst being a l33t haX0r has a UPC code on it which is scarely different from an RFID tag.
You've already for an ID tag that is unique to your body, your finger print. Police ask for your ID when they pull you over to make sure you have a license to operate a vehicle. If you do have a license and were swerving all over the road they slap you with reckless endangerment/driving as they can infer that if you got a license from the state you passed exams and are aware you're not allowed to swerve all over the road.
I hear the "do things as others say you should" bit alot yet I've never seen anyone provide an example of how Microsoft told them to do business. Microsoft doesn't tell you how to run your business, neither does IBM or Sun. If I don't like the software a company provides I will look elsewhere, thousands of companies have had to do this in the past so there is a whole subindustry in the computer biz that merely provides ways of intercommunicating between different software suites and architectures.
No one sells Apache, Perl, or HTML do they? Apache survives because it is an exceptionally good piece of software. Few other open source projects can be compared quality wise to Apache.
Firstly c|net has a real problem with their writing, they tend to take stuff off alt.* and post it as if it were the word of God. Secondly, you're whining again. One thousand one hundred and forty three posts and even the highest scores are people whining or telling Bill Gates to kiss their ass. Fucking weenies. I really wish I could get Linux people to understand the concept behind selling a product for profit. You need to sell a product at a high profit margin in order to make your investors happy because those profits go into their pockets. Retail == commercialism. Giving product away for free is not retail, it's giving your product away for free. I don't think open source software is a threat to my way of life but I don't think that for any reason it ought to be the primary example of software distribution. RMS and the GPL work fine in academic environments where it's nice to see how the next guy solved a problem or gives you the change to fix bugs by exposing the software to many eyes. In business this is bullshit. You can't open up confidential projects to competitors; they'll buy new BMWs while you pass out pink slips and auction your assets. If I want a hobby I'll write GPL software if I want to start a business I'm going to write up a decent EULA and copyright my work.
Fuck national coverage, I merely want coverage. My area has limited to no coverage for Ricochet which I've been excited about since I first heard about it. I'd pay 80$ for a 128k connection that traveled with my Powerbook. Metricom's major problem is and was availability. Of course a new service like this takes time to percolate to new areas but they spent a wad of cash on advertising and getting product recognition before they could feasibly deliver their product to anyone who might want to use it. I really doubt they would be in such troubles now if they would have spent more money on deployment rather than advertising; if they had wider deployment and penetration right now they could offer up licenses for other companies to use their networks/patents. Their advertising dollar would have been better spent if they really pushed the corporate buttons rather than a dumb campaign geared towards crow-like home consumers. IBM advertises to businesses correctly. PHBs see IBM commercials and get a sense of awe and the next day ask their IT manager if they can handle a bajillion hits every second and some other mumbo jumbo. Metricom ought to have learned from them. Point out to PHB types that connectiveity is a good thing and wireless connectivity for traveling types is even better. Once they grabbed a bunch of corporate accounts they should have gone after the college student and oddly enough college faculty. Get schools to host relay stations and the student body will cream themselves because they can for a nominal fee (tacked onto their housing bill) use napster from the park by the school or from non-connected buildings. Both of these customer bases are going to be purchasing year or multiple year contracts for a fair number of people and in the case of college campuses support their network and increase availbility. Poor Metricom.
What you want is a really smart server. If User-Agent: == a certain set, say Mozilla or IE format the content a certain way and include stylesheets and JavaScript and the like. If the user agent is a Palm VII or Nokia phone format the content differently. This of course requires way more work on the part of the server and web admin. Separation of content and presentation is a good thing for high availability web sites. HTTP has lots of possibilities that haven't been explored in nearly enough detail yet.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. What does Sun make that is cheaper than its Intel based counterpart? Solaris gives you as much freedom as Windows 2000 does and don't give me some bright eyed speech, I use both regularly. Sun "forces" you to use Solaris with their hardware; oh shit wait it is merely pre-loading like Windows 2000 what besides you're short sightedness prevents you from nuking the hard drive and installing whatever OS you'd like? If your Windows installation keeps crashing you can with a bit of effort fix it. Or call up your hardware vendor and give them shit for an inferior box. I say fuck Solaris and Windows and Linux. They only reason I almost give a fuck about operating systems is the OS manufacturers are part of my portfolio. It isn't about what you run with it matters what you're running on top. Fuck Linux or Solaris or Windows if I can't access my mission critical application(s) on it. Given the proper tools I can be productive on any system what is it that's causing you so much trouble?
If you're really interested in developing with Microsoft go to their fucking website or call them. They are a software company and do actually provide developers some assistance. If you want to throw hypocritical software licencing issues at them don't bother.
Well describe to me the REAL difference between word processing and writing email. Both involve the input of text into the computer. Rather than print said text you may want to send it to someone in the form of an email. If you separate everything into the most basic of components you end up with a fairly large number of combonations of "applications". The same GrabKeyboardInputAndBufferIt object could be used to put text into an email, insert text into a picture you're editing or send a command to the lower levels of the OS.
Did you JUST register your slashdot account or something? You're like a glowing radioactive inflamed piece of hyperbole. For starters Solaris is not open source in the Richard Stallman Linux zealot sort of way (oddly enough Sun's business plan involves you PURCHASING things from them to generate income). Unicies that comply with POSIX are for the most part interoperable. They do however have different API sets which either aid or hinder developers. If these APIs were standard among different unicies they would not be different unicies. FreeBSD and Solaris both have Linux compatibility layers anyways, most binaries compiled for Linux will run on both Solaris (providing they are compiled for the right processor) and FreeBSD. If this isn't compatibility I don't think you know what is.
If you think that your opinion of Microsoft having too much money is legal grounds for them to be put out of business I doubt you're over 14 years old, in mentality at least. You cannot put a company out of business for being successful. You can however sue them for improper use of market position and persuade the court to issue an injunction against them. Microsoft has not abused personal freedom or technology or innovation. They have done what many other corporations have done, use whatever tactics necessary to make money. If you want to talk about personal freedom being infringed point fingers at older industrial giants (think mining and production) and look at how said companies turned their workers into little more than indentured servants. Microsoft has yet to destroy a small town's economy a la Flint, MI. We must remain strong and not give into your bullshit.
Uh..I hate to break this to you but you do NOT have to reverse engineer .doc in order to write an application that reads it. Microsoft Press publishes a pair of books, one concerning Word documents and the other concerning Excel documents. They describe in detail the formats of the document structures. I guess people haven't learned about these books because the documentation costs money. Oh well.
Fuck. I really hate reading this thread over and over. Firstly OS X != Darwin (which has been ported to x86). Intel is not a panacea for Apple's supply difficulties with Motorola. And for some odd reason people think that if Apple did switch processor architectures that somehow they would become all open and cool. Apple is 85% about style, polycarbonate cases and candy colourings ought to tell you that much. They're not going to open BIOS specifications on any of their boxes, Intel chips or otherwise. It'd be a dumb fucking idea to switch architectures anytime soon in any case. Does anyone remember Microsoft had MIPS and PPC version of Windows NT? Notice how there are no MIPS or PPC versions of Windows 2000. They couldn't even get people to port to a different architecture despite they could write to the same API. Microsoft didn't even port its products to those platforms. Third part developers would get awfly pissed at them, they would be shipping their PPC software out (a costly venture) and then Apple says they are switching to x86 so you best not buy any software until new boxes come out. Yeah great idea you fucking dipshits. Let this fucking thread die and buy a fucking Mac if you want OS X.
Sooo...according to the article and some of the posts here. Linux (GNU/Linux) consists entirely of the kernel and nothing else besides the kernel. Lets open up a terminal and see what happens. Holy fucking shit it's a c shell! Wait is that part of the kernel? If this guy really wanted to make a statement he would have complained that the tools included with Linux are all GNU tools that repilicate programs on closed source Unix systems. These tools are developed at the whim of a handful of coders which authorize a stable release as Linus does with the Linux kernel. I've read all these arguments before and they've been just as backwards. First of all Linus owns the Linux kernel, you can't just demand he give it over to some group of developers. Secondly there would be little point in doing so. If you're going to use someone else's emulation of Unix you're going to have to put up with their flights of fancy. IBM, Compaq, and HP all have their own versions of Unix floating around. If they really wanted to they could port said Unix systems to any architecture they wanted and blast Linux out of the water on the hardware they stuck it on. If big wig software ever DID want to oust Linus and his kernel all they would really have to do is port the main Linux libraries and write into their own kernels a Linux compatibility layer in their kernel (a la FreeBSD and Solaris).
Yay, finally some news on more people making PPC boxes! I can now rest. Lots of people have been pointing out that a couple years ago you could shell out 9k bucks for a non-UltraSPARC box that could fit inside a PC or that Cubes and G4 towers are cheaper. Who the fuck cares. The cool thing here is more people than just Apple are selling PPC boxes. All the stories of this catagory that get posted always end up bashed because everyone points out Apple and then when Apple actually does something they get bashed. Oh well.
If x number of PPC CPUs generate y amount of heat then y is directly proportional to x as such having more PPC CPUs would generate more heat. Fitting these processors into a smaller space (less potential surface area and less air volume) means you're going to end up with heat flow problems. 10 G4 Macs are going to radiate generated heat better than 10 of these little boxes stacked on top of one another due to the fact the G4 towers have the physical capacity to circulate more air.
Something I don't think you've considered is population density. For some places you could get away with 1000 people per base station with those stations fairly far apart (transmiting with a decent power output). In somewhere like New York or Tokyo you're talking about a thousand people in a couple blocks. Thats alot of base stations close together. To keep them patitioned you would need to reduce the transmission wattage to the point where some people would have to settle for slower speeds due to signal loss. Wireless communications are way too limited to enable 5 million New Yorkers to get 2Mbps connections all at once. If you don't agree you've never gotten a "Network Busy" message whilst trying to make a cell phone call in a metropolitan area.