I think you've overlooked some details yourself. Software and car parts are completely different, technologically, socially, and economically. Anybody with the right facilities and access to the specs can make an alternator that's compatible with a GM alternator. It's a lot harder to engineer a word processor that's totally compatible with Microsoft Word. So GM doesn't own the market on GM-compatible alternators, whereas Microsoft totally owns the market Word compatible word processors.
Since most big companies won't even consider buying a computer that doesn't run Office, Microsoft greatly extends the potential customer base for Macs. Of course they lose a few sales for Windows XP in the process. But given the relative market share of Windows and Mac, they probably don't lose much sleep over this.
If it were just a matter of getting Office on as many desktops as possible, there would have been a Linux port long ago. But unlike MacOS, Linux is a threat to Windows' dominance.
We don't have a permanent presence on the mooon because the Apollo program wasn't designed to create one. A fundamental flaw in the whole concept. They didn't build a system that could be used as a foundation for further space exploration -- they just built this big expensive kludge, the main design goal of which was to get there before the Soviets.
I thought, this missions should be about advancing science not bragging rights.
Depends on who you talk to. But that's a moot point -- you can't have one without the other. Taxpayers aren't going to get all emotional about a mission that mainly result in a few scientific papers. They need something more.
Congress gladly spent $25 billion (almost $120 billion in today's dollars) to put a man on the moon, because it was a matter of national pride. But as soon as it was obvious that the Soviets had dropped out of the race, funding for anything past the initial landing began to dry up.
I'm not saying plans for a moon base would have saved the manned space program. But we obviously needed to do more than go a fetch a few moon rocks to maintain popular support.
Except that a manned mission will (or should, if it's properly conceived) build up to a permanent presence. This builds national pride in the program, and holds out the hope of long term benefits. No robot probe can hope to do these things -- even on the rare occasions they work!
It's true that emulating a serious CPU takes a lot of crunching. Which is why we've traditionally relied on campatibility layers (like Wine) and hardware support. But like many other problems, this one is being nibbled at by increasing CPU specs.
When I want to play an old DOS game on my XP system, I don't mess with a compatibility layer (complicated and unreliable) or reboot to DOS (damned inconvenient). I run DOSBox, which emulates not just the CPU, but the sound card and video adapter as well! The overhead is horrendous (Sword of the Samurai takes more than half the cycles on my 1 Ghz Pentium III), but well within the capacity of my system. And that's a real-time application! I imagine the DOSBox would barely notice the overhead for something less CPU-intensive, like a word processor. One of these days, I'm going to have to try Windows 3.0...
I think most Windows desktop applications (database clients, productivity software) would have even less overhead than my old DOS games. But even if they had a lot more, consider the specs of a low-end Macintosh. Its CPU cycles as fast as my Dell's, and the raw crunching power of a G4 is possibly twice that of my PIII. Never mind a dual-processor G5!
Which isn't all that expensive. If performance and usability were the only criteria for buying a computer, I'd be a Mac fanatic. As it is, I hardly ever touch one. Oh well.
My point being that if you push the engine harder than you need to, you waste a lot more than 5% of its power. But I guess that only matters if you look at cars merely as a form of transportation....
Most manuals do suck, don't they? I'll try to do better in the future!
There's a big mistake here that needs correction: Chaucer's spelling and grammar are not "rough". He was, and is, considered one of the greatest writers ever to use the English language. The problem is that English has changed a bit in 600 years. And a writer couldn't look up "correct" spelling: dictionaries hadn't been invented yet.
In a strict sense, Chaucer's language is not Modern English but a different language called Middle English. They're as different as Classical Latin and Church Latin. (Huh?) OK, they're as different as Cantonese and Mandarin. (WTF are those?) Sigh. It's even more different thatn C++ and Java!
Nevertheless, I'm building a startup right now, Findory.com.
Pretty cool app. Dare I ask how it's supposed to generate revenue, or is that a secret part of your business plan?
Findory reminds me of MovieCentral.com, a really well-designed web application that helped users find movies simliar to ones they already liked, and also to hook up with people with similar tastes. I like it mainly because of a clever feature that threw randomly chosen movie titles at you and asked you to rate them. I fed a lot of data into their system just for the fun of it. If ever a DotCom deserved to succeed, it was that one.
But like all the other DotCom's they failed to find a revenue stream. There's no infrastructure for micropayments, nobody wants to pay a subscription, and there just isn't enough ad revenue to go around. Has something changed since then?
If you have lots more updates than accesses, you need your redo logs etc on RAW devices, no filesystem required, these will be your biggest bottleneck.
Despite all the wisecracks about the name, our sentimental favorite should be GPFS because of a certain well known geek who works for the filesystem group at IBM Almaden.
Gawd, if my Escort had caught fire I would have been pleased. I was sorely tempted to set it on fire for the insurance. The way the engine would malfunction was discouraging (I think I got bit by the famous timing belt bug), but not as discouraging as the difficulty I had finding mechanics who were willing to work on the beast.
Jeez, how much power do you need? My old Subaru redlined at about 3500, but I had to have a wide open freeway (and no cops, of course) to get even close.
Never did figure out why Suburu put a tach in an automatic-shift compact. But it was fun to watch it, even though it sort of encouraged me to go too fast.
That's probably exactly what they have in mind. You can use IP law to sequester something (the source code for Windows) or you can use it to control the way other people use it (the source code for Linux). Sequestration gets all the headlines, but there wouldn't be any free/open source software without intelligent use of the IP laws.
I can't believe IBM intends to be sticky about licensing this patent. It would alienate the very people they want to work with. And even if you think Software Patents are Evil, Unconstitutional, and Contrary to Natural Law, the fact remains that the courts accept them. As long as that state of affairs persists, you can't fault people for filing patents, only misusing the patents once they're obtained.
Related topic: I think I'm beginning to understand IBM's open-source strategy. They have the obvious reasons for wanting to break away from Microsoft. But they also have one other incentive: Microsoft products tend to be Pentium specific. Open source software tends to be processor agnostic. And guess who makes the biggest competitor to the Pentium? Right!
Just wait until we have Interplanetary, Interstellar, Intergalactic Remote Desktop. I'm only half-joking.
No you're not. All these Mars glitches are exactly why real space exploration entails sending an actual carbon-based unit, not a glorified laptop.
Consider that an interstellar probe will take years to receive updated instructions. By which time, any fix will probably be irrelevent. Plus if they're more than 30 light-years away (practically next door by galactic standards) they guy who sent out the instructions probably won't live long enough to find out if they worked!
Yeah, in hindsight this was an obvious step. I remember sitting in the Office 2003 "Launch Event" and saying to myself, "They're opening up all their app file formats? What are they thinking of?" I guess they were thinking that they could use IP law to prevent unauthorized third-party tools.
But can they? It's one thing to file a patent, and even get the courts to uphold it. But with technology as simple as this, there's always a way around it. That's what Thomas Edison discovered when he tried to use IP law to give himself a monopoly on motion picture film. He couldn't get a patent, but he did manage to get an enforceable copyright that prevented his competitors from making film with the right kind of sprocket holes. Solution: competitors designed cameras that punched the sprocket holes as the film was being shot.
The obvious workaround here is to write and distribute the necessary plugin in a country that doesn't recognize the patent. Or simply distribute it with the same kind of guerrilla tactics that work so well for DeCSS. Lawyers can shut down one big conspicuous server, they can even put individuals in jail, but you can't stomp out simple bits of technology with a C&D letter. There are just too many informal distribution channels.
Of course, many big companies will avoid this software for fear of DMCA prosecution. But they have an alternative -- one which I personally rather prefer to simple Microsoft format transparency. The problem with WordProcessMLis that it's fundamentally as unstructured as RTF and the.DOC formats. If I wanted my OpenOffice users to be able to interoperate with my Word users, I'd prefer a format that's a little better structured. So rather than a OO plugin for Microsoft's XML, I'd want a Word plugin for OO XML. Or better yet, a truely structed document type specially designed for whatever documents are being shared.
I read somewhere that felt markers with water-based inks were safer than those that used other solvents. Question is, how to tell what kind of ink is in your market?
I doubt if Friendster is all that popular, in the sense of having lots of enthusiastic members. Given the quality of their software, popularity would destroy them! But they are good at generating buzz. Which makes them popular where they want to be popular -- in the media and on Wall Street.
Slashdot Mirror
Since most big companies won't even consider buying a computer that doesn't run Office, Microsoft greatly extends the potential customer base for Macs. Of course they lose a few sales for Windows XP in the process. But given the relative market share of Windows and Mac, they probably don't lose much sleep over this.
If it were just a matter of getting Office on as many desktops as possible, there would have been a Linux port long ago. But unlike MacOS, Linux is a threat to Windows' dominance.
Yes, and how many of them are still alive???!!!
Or just instruction set hungry ;)
Congress gladly spent $25 billion (almost $120 billion in today's dollars) to put a man on the moon, because it was a matter of national pride. But as soon as it was obvious that the Soviets had dropped out of the race, funding for anything past the initial landing began to dry up.
I'm not saying plans for a moon base would have saved the manned space program. But we obviously needed to do more than go a fetch a few moon rocks to maintain popular support.
Except that a manned mission will (or should, if it's properly conceived) build up to a permanent presence. This builds national pride in the program, and holds out the hope of long term benefits. No robot probe can hope to do these things -- even on the rare occasions they work!
When I want to play an old DOS game on my XP system, I don't mess with a compatibility layer (complicated and unreliable) or reboot to DOS (damned inconvenient). I run DOSBox, which emulates not just the CPU, but the sound card and video adapter as well! The overhead is horrendous (Sword of the Samurai takes more than half the cycles on my 1 Ghz Pentium III), but well within the capacity of my system. And that's a real-time application! I imagine the DOSBox would barely notice the overhead for something less CPU-intensive, like a word processor. One of these days, I'm going to have to try Windows 3.0...
I think most Windows desktop applications (database clients, productivity software) would have even less overhead than my old DOS games. But even if they had a lot more, consider the specs of a low-end Macintosh. Its CPU cycles as fast as my Dell's, and the raw crunching power of a G4 is possibly twice that of my PIII. Never mind a dual-processor G5!
Which isn't all that expensive. If performance and usability were the only criteria for buying a computer, I'd be a Mac fanatic. As it is, I hardly ever touch one. Oh well.
Allegedly, DVI is faster. But I suppose analog is fast enough for most people.
My point being that if you push the engine harder than you need to, you waste a lot more than 5% of its power. But I guess that only matters if you look at cars merely as a form of transportation....
There's a big mistake here that needs correction: Chaucer's spelling and grammar are not "rough". He was, and is, considered one of the greatest writers ever to use the English language. The problem is that English has changed a bit in 600 years. And a writer couldn't look up "correct" spelling: dictionaries hadn't been invented yet.
In a strict sense, Chaucer's language is not Modern English but a different language called Middle English. They're as different as Classical Latin and Church Latin. (Huh?) OK, they're as different as Cantonese and Mandarin. (WTF are those?) Sigh. It's even more different thatn C++ and Java!
Need a tech writer? Will work for equity!
If driving stick puts a bigger strain on your engine, what's the point? Besides wasting gas and working out your repressed homoerotic urges.
Findory reminds me of MovieCentral.com, a really well-designed web application that helped users find movies simliar to ones they already liked, and also to hook up with people with similar tastes. I like it mainly because of a clever feature that threw randomly chosen movie titles at you and asked you to rate them. I fed a lot of data into their system just for the fun of it. If ever a DotCom deserved to succeed, it was that one.
But like all the other DotCom's they failed to find a revenue stream. There's no infrastructure for micropayments, nobody wants to pay a subscription, and there just isn't enough ad revenue to go around. Has something changed since then?
Despite all the wisecracks about the name, our sentimental favorite should be GPFS because of a certain well known geek who works for the filesystem group at IBM Almaden.
Gawd, if my Escort had caught fire I would have been pleased. I was sorely tempted to set it on fire for the insurance. The way the engine would malfunction was discouraging (I think I got bit by the famous timing belt bug), but not as discouraging as the difficulty I had finding mechanics who were willing to work on the beast.
Never did figure out why Suburu put a tach in an automatic-shift compact. But it was fun to watch it, even though it sort of encouraged me to go too fast.
I can't believe IBM intends to be sticky about licensing this patent. It would alienate the very people they want to work with. And even if you think Software Patents are Evil, Unconstitutional, and Contrary to Natural Law, the fact remains that the courts accept them. As long as that state of affairs persists, you can't fault people for filing patents, only misusing the patents once they're obtained.
Related topic: I think I'm beginning to understand IBM's open-source strategy. They have the obvious reasons for wanting to break away from Microsoft. But they also have one other incentive: Microsoft products tend to be Pentium specific. Open source software tends to be processor agnostic. And guess who makes the biggest competitor to the Pentium? Right!
You got your wish! Moderators have no sense of irony.
Consider that an interstellar probe will take years to receive updated instructions. By which time, any fix will probably be irrelevent. Plus if they're more than 30 light-years away (practically next door by galactic standards) they guy who sent out the instructions probably won't live long enough to find out if they worked!
I say "watter ... other solvents".
But can they? It's one thing to file a patent, and even get the courts to uphold it. But with technology as simple as this, there's always a way around it. That's what Thomas Edison discovered when he tried to use IP law to give himself a monopoly on motion picture film. He couldn't get a patent, but he did manage to get an enforceable copyright that prevented his competitors from making film with the right kind of sprocket holes. Solution: competitors designed cameras that punched the sprocket holes as the film was being shot.
The obvious workaround here is to write and distribute the necessary plugin in a country that doesn't recognize the patent. Or simply distribute it with the same kind of guerrilla tactics that work so well for DeCSS. Lawyers can shut down one big conspicuous server, they can even put individuals in jail, but you can't stomp out simple bits of technology with a C&D letter. There are just too many informal distribution channels.
Of course, many big companies will avoid this software for fear of DMCA prosecution. But they have an alternative -- one which I personally rather prefer to simple Microsoft format transparency. The problem with WordProcessMLis that it's fundamentally as unstructured as RTF and the .DOC formats. If I wanted my OpenOffice users to be able to interoperate with my Word users, I'd prefer a format that's a little better structured. So rather than a OO plugin for Microsoft's XML, I'd want a Word plugin for OO XML. Or better yet, a truely structed document type specially designed for whatever documents are being shared.
I read somewhere that felt markers with water-based inks were safer than those that used other solvents. Question is, how to tell what kind of ink is in your market?
Read the thread.
I doubt if Friendster is all that popular, in the sense of having lots of enthusiastic members. Given the quality of their software, popularity would destroy them! But they are good at generating buzz. Which makes them popular where they want to be popular -- in the media and on Wall Street.
The lamest post on a very lame thread. Where did I say, "images of text don't need to be compressed"??
Well duh.