But my mom told me never to take operating system advice from strange tatooed people...:)
>...it is distributed as an entire operating > system, as opposed to GNU/Linux where you have > the Linux Kernel and then what ever > utils/programs $VENDOR has built around it.
I think that's the answer to something I was meaning to ask. I always got that impression whenever I read some *BSD discussions, but it's reassuring to hear someone come out and say it. It's also a compelling feature in its favour, since you don't have to tack "GNU/" on the front of it all the frickin time.
On a more serious note, what about all the GNU utilities (such as make) - does FreeBSD have its own alternatives, or do they get bundled into the distribution, or do you perhaps have to go download them yourself (surely not?)?
> you have a bunch of scripts, frontends, and > administration helpers.
So if I understand correctly, this is lots neater than Linux where there are dozens of competing bunches of scripts, frontends, and administration helpers which don't play ball together? Or is *BSD sufficiently diverse that this situation arises here, too?
> The BSD forums can (sometimes) be full of > snotty, holier-than-thou, ivory-tower-sitting > folks who won't deign to answer your questions.
Well that's OK, because I've been reading Slashdot for long enough to recognize them.
"Hey stupid Windows user, this is a Linux forum. We don't do it that way."
No, please don't take that the wrong way - I do actually mean it. You see, there could be (and probably are) hundreds of sites devoted to FreeBSD and I wouldn't know which one to start with. By way of analogy, I personally don't think that linux.org would be the best place to point someone who wanted to find out about Linux for the first time, because it's not exactly newbie-friendly (IMHO). In contrast, the information on the front page of freebsd.org has already answered lots of my questions. Hence, the sincere thanks.
I just had a sudden realisation that although I consider myself a free software enthusiast, I am ashamed to say that I know *nothing* about FreeBSD at all! Well, I remember reading about where the codebase came from, once upon a time, but that's about it. Perhaps someone could give me an executive summary to stem this clueless feeling...
Who uses it? How exactly is it licensed? How is it maintained and managed? Are there different distros as for Linux? Do any companies provide FreeBSD-based solutions, or is it just for hobbyists? What can it run on? Should *I* consider running it, and why?
I appreciate that I *could* go looking for all this information and piece the story together myself, but hell, it's easier this way.:) Zealots, do your worst!
Step 3 -- Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort.
Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction.
Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself.
...some analysis of the code generated by Visual C++ and gcc side by side, particularly for those trig calls. If there's that great a discrepancy between the runtimes, that's a good clue that either one of the compilers is under-optimising (i.e. missing a trick), or the other is over-optimising (i.e. applying some transformation that only approximates what the answer should be). I didn't see any mention of the numerical results obtained being checked against what they ought to be (or even against each other).
As any games/DSP programmer will tell you, there are a million ways to speed up trig providing that you don't *really* care after 6dps or so.
OK, maybe I'm just bitter because I was expecting gcc 3.1 to wipe the floor.:)
Didn't hear about the firing, but I did hear about the financial trouble. Sad, because I used to love Lego in all its forms. (sigh)
So I started thinking, "I wonder what happened to all that lego?", and it turns out that my mom still has all of it, in some big plastic boxes in the attic. A quick survey reveals that this is the fate of all lego - it's never thrown away! It just gets kept because everyone remembers how cool it was and wants to keep it for their kids. (Or in my case, my little sister got it as hand-me-downs.) I bet it's one of the few toys of which this can be said, although I don't plan to trawl through landfill sights comparing the frequencies of Barbie-parts and lego-bricks. Anyone?
So, that's my theory as to why it's not selling. Plus it all went downhill when they started cashing in on franchises. I had spaceships and castles and that was good enough for me, dammit!
You mean the fellow who turned down person the year from Time so that it could go to the "American Soldier"?
If it's any consolation, had they offered it to me I would've turned it down too... Since in addition I wasn't responsible for the deaths of 9,000 innocent civilians in Iraq, perhaps Donald Rumsfeld can start cleaning my jockstrap with his tongue. What a dumb way to judge someone's worth - "oo, this guy made a public gesture that made him look noble, therefore he must be a wonderful person".
In case you hadn't guessed I'm British, which means that when it comes to politics, the more authority a person has, the less I respect them. Hence, the monkey jokes. It's all quite straightforward.
<looks at watch> Blimey! Am I that off-topic already? Quick! To the troll-feeding-mobile!
> For anyone who's looked more than superficially > into the self-styled "Church" of Scientology
Like, ooh, say, someone who for years has been distributing leaflets warning people about the dangers of getting involved in this evil cult? Someone who keeps a close eye on the activity of scientology orgs and front groups in his area?
So, as someone like that, no I don't accuse SCO of being run by a drug-abusing, mentally unstable sci-fi writer turned paranoid control freak satanist, nor do I claim that they ruin people's lives, commit murder, espionage or child abuse. But as you rightly noticed, the preference for attack over defence is a common theme in many corrupt organisations (the USA not least).
(Also amused to be called a stranger by an AC on a site I've been active on for about five years. As for C expression syntax - how quaint! Not everyone has to pretend to be a programmer to be accepted as a geek, y'know.)
It's official! The Santa Cruz Organisation (SCO, $CO) have been taking
lessons from their close acronymical relatives the Church of Scientology
(CoS, Co$). Don't believe me? The evidence is quite compelling:
Extortion
CoS: Tell you that in order to be a happy and successful person, you must
pay them a lot of money, because they are the sole owners of the only
mental health "technology" that can save you from psychiatry;
SCO: Tell you that in order to be a happy and successful Linux user, you
must pay them a lot of money, because they are the sole owners of the
only operating system technology that can save you from Microsoft;
Spurious Copyright Lawsuits
CoS: Bring expensive lawsuits against organisations who publish details of
their courses, doctrines, rituals and modes of operation, in an attempt
to spread fear, uncertainly and doubt and to silence their critics;
SCO: Bring expensive lawsuits against organisations who publish what they
claim is "their" intellectual property, in an attempt to spread fear,
uncertainly and doubt and to inflate their share price;
Unwarranted Secrecy
CoS: Refuse to release details of what goes on inside their organisation
behind their razor-wire fences, even though they claim to be a peaceful
and benign religion with right on their side;
SCO: Refuse to release details of which parts of Linux souce code they
believe are infringing on their copyright, even though they claim to
be a good and responsible company with right on their side;
Playing to the media
CoS: Issue gushing press releases about how their cause is misunderstood
and misrepresented; claim that in the face of (alleged) intellectual
property misappropriation, their lawsuits are the only proper course
of action;
SCO: Issue gushing press releases about how their cause is misunderstood
and misrepresented; claim that in the face of (alleged) intellectual
property misappropriation, their lawsuits are the only proper course
of action;
Paranoia
CoS: Act as if the whole world is conspiring to destroy their organisation,
publish invented and overblown claims of harrasment and threats towards their
members in order to portray their opponents as criminals;
SCO: Act as if the whole world is conspiring to destroy their organisation;
publish invented and overblown claims of denial-of-service attacks on their
servers in order to portray their opponents as criminals;
Dead-agenting
CoS: Identify that most of the hostility towards them comes from particular
groups and individuals, then seek to discredit those people by publicly
accusing them of being violent, sexually immoral, drug addicts or
anything else they can dream up.
SCO: Identify that most of the hostility towards them comes from particular
groups and individuals, then seek to discredit those people by publicly
accusing them of being communists, hippies, deadbeat college students
or anything else they can dream up.
Yup, it's only a matter of time before SCO declares itself a religion, McBride
declares himself God, and the staff are made to buy e-meters, exorcise their
body thetans and start work on a remake of Battlefield: Earth... remember -
SCOentology, you heard it here first, people.:)
I read the headline and immediately thought, wouldn't it be great if we could map the interior of other planets, or the moon? The knowledge we have about what lies beneath the surface of Mercury, Venus and Mars seems to be mostly speculation, with no easy way of investigating. But on a body without active plate tectonics, I guess this technique wouldn't be usable at all. I suppose there are other sources of disturbance such as significant meteorite impacts, but they're much rarer than earthquakes (on Earth, anyway).
Also, does this method rely on the liquid nature of the mantle? Would these acoustic waves propagate as effectively through solid rock (I guess not)? So, even if we could create the effect of an earthquake on, say, the moon, would it even help?
I have no trouble understanding a switch from poly to metal for gate connections... but a metal dielectric? That seems to run counter to common sense. The dielectric is, by definition, required to be an insulator, whereas metals, also by definition, conduct electricity rather well. What is this magic substance?
I love this site sometimes - where else can you post completely clueless questions and be virtually guaranteed to get an intelligent response from at least two people with PhDs in semiconductor physics?:-)
So much misinformation in that I actually laughed... briefly...
Ethernet = CSMA/CD, that is, Carrier Sense Media Access with Collision Detection. Only one station transmitting at a time. Works OK for packetised data. 3G uses CDMA - Code Division Media Access - all users share a common frequency band and their signals are spread across all the available spectrum, and scrambled with a code unique to that user so that they can be recovered. No collisions occur.
Modulating a Carrier Frequency - all broadband communication systems do this. Duh.
Video link on a 50Hz carrier = snake oil.
Video on the cellphone isn't a goal, it's available now with 3G networks.
High speed mobile comms requires microwave frequencies. "Low" frequencies are typically already allocated to AM and FM radio broadcasts, and higher ones to VHF/UHF TV. No beaurocracy needed.
I'm going to stop now and return to my normal colour.:)
What's that you say? A world-wide cellphone standard?
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
<pause>
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Sorry, no. The US will insist on using CDMA-2000 as the physical layer of its 3G networks. Europe and Japan are using W-CDMA. Whatever frequency band you use, you'll have to wait for someone to develop a dual mode phone. For which they have no incentive, because damn, cellphones are so small nowadays that you could be carrying six of them in your jacket and not even notice the weight. And the sort of person for whom this is an issue tends (tends, mind you!) to be the sort of person who can afford a second phone.
Compulsory licensing, eh? What's that when it's at home?
Perhaps I haven't been following closely enough, but exactly who is to be compelled to license what, from whom? Is this a big license signed between big companies, or a little license signed by people who listen to music, or those who make it, or just those who download it, or is it a shrink-wrap license like you get with software? Is it free, or does someone pay for it? Who? How much? What does it all mean? Am I the only person who doesn't know? PLEASE MOM, I WANT TO KNOW? WHY? WHY?
Redmond, WA: In an unprecedented press briefing Friday, Microsoft Corporation announced its intention to establish itself as a sovereign nation. While only sketchy details have been released so far, it has emerged that Microsoft's Chief Software Architect and President Elect Bill Gates has purchased a small archipelago off the coast of Cuba. The company's Seattle headquarters are to be dismantled and transported there immediately by boat.
Microsoft CEO and Foreign Minister Steve Ballmer said, "This transformation marks the beginning of a new era for Microsoft. Becoming an independent nation will allow us to streamline our operations beyond what has previously been possible. Besides, our net yearly revenue already exceeds the GDP of 60% of the world's other countries, and we employ approximately as many people as live in Greenland. Plus, we didn't have to think very hard to come up with a flag."
Attorney General Brad Smith was quick to point out that, since so many of the laws passed into US statute have been heavily influenced by Microsoft, the transformation of the Legal department into the new Department of Justice would be relatively straightforward.
Environmental groups were dismayed by the sale of the North Atlantic islands, which they say contain some of the last remaining habitats of the Paralouatta Varonai monkey. Microsoft Environment Minister Ken DiPietro insisted that "every effort" would be made to safeguard the wellbeing of the primates, although he sought to play down rumours that some might be offered jobs in the country's Department of Trustworthy Computing.
Construction work has already begun on the smallest island of the complex, where a village of eleven mud huts has been erected. This will house the Departments of Software Testing, Quality Assurance and Customer Service. The remaining 95% of the landmass will house the Departments of Justice, the Treasury and the Department of Marketing and Tourism.
The move has caused widespread concern among industry analysts, many of whom are predicting severe economic repercussions. A spokesperson said, "Many people [at] Microsoft are of the opinion that we have been carrying the whole US economy for some time now. Well, as of today, that's no longer our problem."
It seems that the incorporation of an armed defence force does not figure in Microsoft's plan. Intelligence sources suspect that the country may be content with the strategic advantage they already have, by virtue of posessing a back door into the computer systems of almost every government in the world.
When asked about the potential perception of Microsoft's actions as anti-American, Ballmer said, "[that] is preposterous. All of our subjects will be offered dual nationality, and may retain their US passport in addition to their new Microsoft Passports and other documentation." Examination of the EULA for Windows XP Service Pack 2 reveals an extra clause allowing Microsoft to "upgrade" users in other countries to Microsoft citizenship automatically.
I don't quite see what is lost by releasing a device driver under GPL.
You get:
1) an army of geeks who will instantly worship your company and buy your products;
2) a slightly smaller army of geeks who can actually help you fix bugs in your own product FOR FREE.
You lose... erm, nothing?
The only drawback is that the interface to your hardware (register maps etc.) are no longer as secret as they were. Perhaps you're concerned about competitors stealing your ideas based on that knowledge? Well, think about it this way - if they badly want that information, they will already be reverse engineering your products and your binary-only drivers with a debugger and some elbow-grease.
IMO - you have nothing to lose. Embrace the future...:)
It would have been nice to see more said on the topic of anonymous posting though. The number of times you see AC posts on slashdot which are people with "real" accounts talking about their employers (for example)... this didn't even get a mention.
Slashdot Mirror
But my mom told me never to take operating system advice from strange tatooed people... :)
...it is distributed as an entire operating
>
> system, as opposed to GNU/Linux where you have
> the Linux Kernel and then what ever
> utils/programs $VENDOR has built around it.
I think that's the answer to something I was meaning to ask. I always got that impression whenever I read some *BSD discussions, but it's reassuring to hear someone come out and say it. It's also a compelling feature in its favour, since you don't have to tack "GNU/" on the front of it all the frickin time.
On a more serious note, what about all the GNU utilities (such as make) - does FreeBSD have its own alternatives, or do they get bundled into the distribution, or do you perhaps have to go download them yourself (surely not?)?
Interesting, thanks.
> you have a bunch of scripts, frontends, and
> administration helpers.
So if I understand correctly, this is lots neater than Linux where there are dozens of competing bunches of scripts, frontends, and administration helpers which don't play ball together? Or is *BSD sufficiently diverse that this situation arises here, too?
> The BSD forums can (sometimes) be full of
> snotty, holier-than-thou, ivory-tower-sitting
> folks who won't deign to answer your questions.
Well that's OK, because I've been reading Slashdot for long enough to recognize them.
"Hey stupid Windows user, this is a Linux forum. We don't do it that way."
Thank-you!
No, please don't take that the wrong way - I do actually mean it. You see, there could be (and probably are) hundreds of sites devoted to FreeBSD and I wouldn't know which one to start with. By way of analogy, I personally don't think that linux.org would be the best place to point someone who wanted to find out about Linux for the first time, because it's not exactly newbie-friendly (IMHO). In contrast, the information on the front page of freebsd.org has already answered lots of my questions. Hence, the sincere thanks.
I just had a sudden realisation that although I consider myself a free software enthusiast, I am ashamed to say that I know *nothing* about FreeBSD at all! Well, I remember reading about where the codebase came from, once upon a time, but that's about it. Perhaps someone could give me an executive summary to stem this clueless feeling...
:) Zealots, do your worst!
Who uses it? How exactly is it licensed? How is it maintained and managed? Are there different distros as for Linux? Do any companies provide FreeBSD-based solutions, or is it just for hobbyists? What can it run on? Should *I* consider running it, and why?
I appreciate that I *could* go looking for all this information and piece the story together myself, but hell, it's easier this way.
Say, remember when the Romano-British employed one lot of maurading Saxons to protect them from another lot of maurading Saxons?
I would say you're showing your age there. :P
Ah, those were the days. The sight of a circle of Norsemen huddled around a fire, reciting their ancient sagas... imagine a Beowulf clu... oh, wait.
What do you mean, Off Topic? C'mon, it's more fun than bitching about SCO!
Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed.
Step 2 -- Decide what the text says.
Step 3 -- Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort.
Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction.
Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself.
Step 6 -- ???
Step 7 -- Profit!
...some analysis of the code generated by Visual C++ and gcc side by side, particularly for those trig calls. If there's that great a discrepancy between the runtimes, that's a good clue that either one of the compilers is under-optimising (i.e. missing a trick), or the other is over-optimising (i.e. applying some transformation that only approximates what the answer should be). I didn't see any mention of the numerical results obtained being checked against what they ought to be (or even against each other).
:)
As any games/DSP programmer will tell you, there are a million ways to speed up trig providing that you don't *really* care after 6dps or so.
OK, maybe I'm just bitter because I was expecting gcc 3.1 to wipe the floor.
Didn't hear about the firing, but I did hear about the financial trouble. Sad, because I used to love Lego in all its forms. (sigh)
So I started thinking, "I wonder what happened to all that lego?", and it turns out that my mom still has all of it, in some big plastic boxes in the attic. A quick survey reveals that this is the fate of all lego - it's never thrown away! It just gets kept because everyone remembers how cool it was and wants to keep it for their kids. (Or in my case, my little sister got it as hand-me-downs.) I bet it's one of the few toys of which this can be said, although I don't plan to trawl through landfill sights comparing the frequencies of Barbie-parts and lego-bricks. Anyone?
So, that's my theory as to why it's not selling. Plus it all went downhill when they started cashing in on franchises. I had spaceships and castles and that was good enough for me, dammit!
You mean the fellow who turned down person the year from Time so that it could go to the "American Soldier"?
If it's any consolation, had they offered it to me I would've turned it down too... Since in addition I wasn't responsible for the deaths of 9,000 innocent civilians in Iraq, perhaps Donald Rumsfeld can start cleaning my jockstrap with his tongue. What a dumb way to judge someone's worth - "oo, this guy made a public gesture that made him look noble, therefore he must be a wonderful person".
In case you hadn't guessed I'm British, which means that when it comes to politics, the more authority a person has, the less I respect them. Hence, the monkey jokes. It's all quite straightforward.
<looks at watch> Blimey! Am I that off-topic already? Quick! To the troll-feeding-mobile!
Who is deploying giant robot ants? If no one is deployiong such a weapon, why are we creating something to eat them?
Because it's symbolic of American foreign policy (sticking an extra-long nose in where it's not wanted).
In related news, the French army is said to be working on a squadron of giant robot ostriches.
I wonder if they're looking into giant robot anteaters as an alternative to costly bunker-buster bombs?
Why not? After all, they've already got a giant robot chimpanzee as an alternative to a defense secretary.
<rimshot>LOL!
Prepare for Microsoft to retaliate by inserting Clippy into MS Paint...
"I see you're trying to defraud the federal government - would you like some help with that?"
> For anyone who's looked more than superficially
> into the self-styled "Church" of Scientology
Like, ooh, say, someone who for years has been distributing leaflets warning people about the dangers of getting involved in this evil cult? Someone who keeps a close eye on the activity of scientology orgs and front groups in his area?
So, as someone like that, no I don't accuse SCO of being run by a drug-abusing, mentally unstable sci-fi writer turned paranoid control freak satanist, nor do I claim that they ruin people's lives, commit murder, espionage or child abuse. But as you rightly noticed, the preference for attack over defence is a common theme in many corrupt organisations (the USA not least).
(Also amused to be called a stranger by an AC on a site I've been active on for about five years. As for C expression syntax - how quaint! Not everyone has to pretend to be a programmer to be accepted as a geek, y'know.)
It's official! The Santa Cruz Organisation (SCO, $CO) have been taking lessons from their close acronymical relatives the Church of Scientology (CoS, Co$). Don't believe me? The evidence is quite compelling:
Extortion
Spurious Copyright Lawsuits
Unwarranted Secrecy
Playing to the media
Paranoia
Dead-agenting
Yup, it's only a matter of time before SCO declares itself a religion, McBride declares himself God, and the staff are made to buy e-meters, exorcise their body thetans and start work on a remake of Battlefield: Earth... remember - SCOentology, you heard it here first, people. :)
> our natural body clock cycle is 25-26 hours,
:)
> making the adjustment to "Mars time" rather
> painless.
Painless - assuming, that is, that NASA have the technology to produce a localized variation in the hours of daylight...
And have you ever tried to order out for pizza at 9am (Earth time)? Not even Stephen Hawking has a fix for that one.
Dammit! I thought I'd got in with that one first. (Note to self - must stop browsing at +3) :)
I claim prior art! Surely, anyone seeing that must immediately think of the security system in Jurassic Park?
:)
"Hey, it's a UNIX system! I know this!"
[browses through file hierarchy in tron-like manner]
Oh, erm, just me then.
I read the headline and immediately thought, wouldn't it be great if we could map the interior of other planets, or the moon? The knowledge we have about what lies beneath the surface of Mercury, Venus and Mars seems to be mostly speculation, with no easy way of investigating. But on a body without active plate tectonics, I guess this technique wouldn't be usable at all. I suppose there are other sources of disturbance such as significant meteorite impacts, but they're much rarer than earthquakes (on Earth, anyway).
:)
Also, does this method rely on the liquid nature of the mantle? Would these acoustic waves propagate as effectively through solid rock (I guess not)? So, even if we could create the effect of an earthquake on, say, the moon, would it even help?
(should get back down to Earth, really!)
I have no trouble understanding a switch from poly to metal for gate connections... but a metal dielectric? That seems to run counter to common sense. The dielectric is, by definition, required to be an insulator, whereas metals, also by definition, conduct electricity rather well. What is this magic substance?
:-)
I love this site sometimes - where else can you post completely clueless questions and be virtually guaranteed to get an intelligent response from at least two people with PhDs in semiconductor physics?
Woooooo - flamebait!
:)
So much misinformation in that I actually laughed... briefly...
Ethernet = CSMA/CD, that is, Carrier Sense Media Access with Collision Detection. Only one station transmitting at a time. Works OK for packetised data. 3G uses CDMA - Code Division Media Access - all users share a common frequency band and their signals are spread across all the available spectrum, and scrambled with a code unique to that user so that they can be recovered. No collisions occur.
Modulating a Carrier Frequency - all broadband communication systems do this. Duh.
Video link on a 50Hz carrier = snake oil.
Video on the cellphone isn't a goal, it's available now with 3G networks.
High speed mobile comms requires microwave frequencies. "Low" frequencies are typically already allocated to AM and FM radio broadcasts, and higher ones to VHF/UHF TV. No beaurocracy needed.
I'm going to stop now and return to my normal colour.
What's that you say? A world-wide cellphone standard?
:)
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
<pause>
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Sorry, no. The US will insist on using CDMA-2000 as the physical layer of its 3G networks. Europe and Japan are using W-CDMA. Whatever frequency band you use, you'll have to wait for someone to develop a dual mode phone. For which they have no incentive, because damn, cellphones are so small nowadays that you could be carrying six of them in your jacket and not even notice the weight. And the sort of person for whom this is an issue tends (tends, mind you!) to be the sort of person who can afford a second phone.
Standards, eh? Doncha just love 'em...
Compulsory licensing, eh? What's that when it's at home?
Perhaps I haven't been following closely enough, but exactly who is to be compelled to license what, from whom? Is this a big license signed between big companies, or a little license signed by people who listen to music, or those who make it, or just those who download it, or is it a shrink-wrap license like you get with software? Is it free, or does someone pay for it? Who? How much? What does it all mean? Am I the only person who doesn't know? PLEASE MOM, I WANT TO KNOW? WHY? WHY?
Ahem.
Redmond, WA: In an unprecedented press briefing Friday, Microsoft Corporation announced its intention to establish itself as a sovereign nation. While only sketchy details have been released so far, it has emerged that Microsoft's Chief Software Architect and President Elect Bill Gates has purchased a small archipelago off the coast of Cuba. The company's Seattle headquarters are to be dismantled and transported there immediately by boat.
Microsoft CEO and Foreign Minister Steve Ballmer said, "This transformation marks the beginning of a new era for Microsoft. Becoming an independent nation will allow us to streamline our operations beyond what has previously been possible. Besides, our net yearly revenue already exceeds the GDP of 60% of the world's other countries, and we employ approximately as many people as live in Greenland. Plus, we didn't have to think very hard to come up with a flag."
Attorney General Brad Smith was quick to point out that, since so many of the laws passed into US statute have been heavily influenced by Microsoft, the transformation of the Legal department into the new Department of Justice would be relatively straightforward.
Environmental groups were dismayed by the sale of the North Atlantic islands, which they say contain some of the last remaining habitats of the Paralouatta Varonai monkey. Microsoft Environment Minister Ken DiPietro insisted that "every effort" would be made to safeguard the wellbeing of the primates, although he sought to play down rumours that some might be offered jobs in the country's Department of Trustworthy Computing.
Construction work has already begun on the smallest island of the complex, where a village of eleven mud huts has been erected. This will house the Departments of Software Testing, Quality Assurance and Customer Service. The remaining 95% of the landmass will house the Departments of Justice, the Treasury and the Department of Marketing and Tourism.
The move has caused widespread concern among industry analysts, many of whom are predicting severe economic repercussions. A spokesperson said, "Many people [at] Microsoft are of the opinion that we have been carrying the whole US economy for some time now. Well, as of today, that's no longer our problem."
It seems that the incorporation of an armed defence force does not figure in Microsoft's plan. Intelligence sources suspect that the country may be content with the strategic advantage they already have, by virtue of posessing a back door into the computer systems of almost every government in the world.
When asked about the potential perception of Microsoft's actions as anti-American, Ballmer said, "[that] is preposterous. All of our subjects will be offered dual nationality, and may retain their US passport in addition to their new Microsoft Passports and other documentation." Examination of the EULA for Windows XP Service Pack 2 reveals an extra clause allowing Microsoft to "upgrade" users in other countries to Microsoft citizenship automatically.
I don't quite see what is lost by releasing a device driver under GPL.
:)
You get:
1) an army of geeks who will instantly worship your company and buy your products;
2) a slightly smaller army of geeks who can actually help you fix bugs in your own product FOR FREE.
You lose... erm, nothing?
The only drawback is that the interface to your hardware (register maps etc.) are no longer as secret as they were. Perhaps you're concerned about competitors stealing your ideas based on that knowledge? Well, think about it this way - if they badly want that information, they will already be reverse engineering your products and your binary-only drivers with a debugger and some elbow-grease.
IMO - you have nothing to lose. Embrace the future...
Mostly obvious, but mostly good.
:)
It would have been nice to see more said on the topic of anonymous posting though. The number of times you see AC posts on slashdot which are people with "real" accounts talking about their employers (for example)... this didn't even get a mention.
But I liked:
> Discuss the Community Openly
If I say this is a good idea, do I get $rtbled?