Yes, but since there's no way of knowing how much was actually illegal material in the first place, we have no way of knowing how to weight that remaining 1%. Since there are non-zero legal downloads (no matter how few), the real figure must be strictly less than this by an unquantifiable amount.
So they added up all the bittorent users, multiplied the figure by 25, and assumed that was the total cost to the economy.
I'm sure the Blender team would LOVE to receive 25 pounds ($40) for every download of each and every one of their movies. Ms. Boyle would doubtless be substantially richer if she were given the same for every person who had ever downloaded (or watched on YouTube) a clip of her singing. More members of Ubuntu might be able to play space tourist if each and every file (whether it be a CD, DVD or just a patch) resulted in a $40 donation. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails would be over the moon if each individual song they've released for free got them that in checks received via fan mail.
I'm not saying that all the legit material added together make a substantial chunk of the corrected figure, but rather that the researchers never bothered to consider the fact that the material is not of equal value and that some items have a value of zero. They assumed everything was illegal and everything had identical worth.
That goes beyond Bad Science. How many of you, in elementary/primary school, got taught algebra by being given shopping lists? Pretty much everyone? Good. It would be a pointless exercise if apples and oranges had the same price ($40 each), so we can assume your class used different prices for different object, right? Right. So. Hands up who can tell me what you could do then that these researchers didn't do now?
Possibly. Intel has given up making its ARM processor (for now, though they could always return to it), and although Linux has several hard real-time variants for the embedded marker, and although there are other embedded OS' out there, VxWorks is by far the best-known and the most prestigious.
It is also one of the very few that is ratified for military and aerospace work. As much as I like Linux, and as much as I'm impressed by the fact that Lynx (a cut-down Linux) is FAA-approved for non-critical systems, and that there are even carrier-grade 5N-rated Linux distros, Linux simply isn't rated high enough (yet) to compete in the mission-critical arenas.
I'm not sure on that. Microsoft entering the antivirus market by buying up an antivirus vendor, rebranding it as its own product, then leveraging its monopoly to make said product the de-facto antivirus product SHOULD have run afoul of many anti-trust laws. It's a new market for Microsoft that they are working to eliminate competitors in in much the same way as they did in the browser wars against Netscape.
On the other hand, Microsoft is already in the embedded market, via Windows CE. It's not a new market and unless they planned on making VxWorks a plug-in interface to CE, their monopoly elsewhere would not be useful. If Microsoft wasn't busted wide open on the first, I can't see them being given any grief on the second.
Exactly. On the other hand, if Microsoft is buying up companies that are involved in the Embedded market, then Microsoft would have to pay Intel whatever Intel asked in order to get Windows to interoperate better with such system (or replace the OS entirely).
This would give Intel some small degree of leverage that it simply wouldn't have otherwise, and would prevent Microsoft from buying those embedded OS makers themselves (which would give Microsoft even more power over Intel - something I doubt Intel desires).
This is why I can see a defensive reason for Intel wanting Wind River, but no offensive reason. I can see nothing Wind River can give Intel that Intel couldn't have obtained for less, as you note, OTHER than protection from the consequences of Microsoft owning Wind River.
Microsoft has started buying up biotech software companies (most recently Rosetta Biosoftware). There almost has to be some link, but all of Rosetta's software runs on Linux, with only a handful of clients on Windows, and no direct usage of VxWorks - although I'd be surprised if the actual hardware doing the data collection was running a server OS rather than an embedded OS.
VxWorks is not a bad embedded OS. In fact, I'd call it quite good. Not great, but definitely good. There's very very little support out there for such architectures as VME, and VME is definitely an important architecture. There's next-to-no support in any of the F/L/OSS BSDs or Linux for this important bus, for example.
Wind River has also contributed a fair bit to Linux and the *BSDs over time, a fact we shouldn't forget. Will Intel keep up that investment? Intel already invests a fair bit into Linux, but I just don't see them increasing that to cover the loss of investment from Wind River.
Could Intel be aiming at the OS market? They no longer get the kind of support from Microsoft that they once enjoyed. I don't think so - embedded OS' just don't sell in the kind of numbers you'd need.
Then what is it that Wind River has that Intel wants? Hmmm. I don't know, but I'm going to guess that it's more of a defensive move than an offensive one. Microsoft has been buying up biotech software companies, recently. Biotech companies use embedded OS'.
The parent post needs to get modded up. It is probably one of the most informative posts I've seen on Slashdot in a long time and is extremely well-written. Worthy of an article in itself.
They would need to examine the reaction of different populations from the countryside to see if the reaction is simply one of disputes between avian clans. As it stands, their data could mean too many different things. The adage, often repeated here, is that correlation is not causation.
Norton Guides was a TSR program for DOS that allowed you to get context-sensitive programming information. I found the assembler guide to be an essential tool. The Guides may have used material from the book, but unless you know something about TSRs that I don't, the book wasn't what was running on my computer.:)
True enough. I'd also put Norton Guides or the ORIGINAL Norton Utilities ahead of Norton Anti-Virus. Basil's CopyAll and Ripoff 9 changed things in the anti-piracy scene, rendering most copy protection obsolete and forcing vendors to make software people were willing to pay for. For a while.
Zork I, Wizardry and (gasp!) Microsoft Flight Simulator changed the expectations of the gaming market, and ultimately the gaming market dictated the hardware produced.
Superior Software Speech! was the first serious attempt at an all-software speech synthesizer. That, in turn, started opening the computing world to whole new markets. (There would be no car navigation systems today without these kinds of pioneering efforts.)
Although RiscOS isn't technically an application, it did shatter the mythology that home computers could not multi-task or be user-friendly.
It's interesting that Occam (I presume they used the KROC implementation, owing to the lack of handy transputers) outperforms C in some situations. Occam is designed to be highly parallel, etc, etc, ad nausium, but it hasn't had nearly the same level of development work and optimization work as C.
...you have explicit allocation/deallocation, you get holes in memory. There's no way to avoid it, for the same reason that fragmentation occurs on disks. Unless the chunk you allocate is exactly the same size as the chunk last deallocated, there will be a region of memory that cannot be used.
This means that your heap will end up looking like swiss-cheese, unless you have some means of shuffling things around. Unless the programmer can absolutely guarantee that mallocs and frees only occur in such a way that no space unusable to the program's next malloc is ever left, the program will always have the potential of exhausting resources even without leaking memory.
This is why there are all kinds of malloc() substitutes for C, including several with garbage collection. If the program runs for long enough, the vanilla malloc() in most C libraries is simply not good enough.
I'm thinking there's going to be a greater push towards getting another language into browsers. If you had Ruby for both server-side scripting and client-side, it would be easier to maintain the code-base. You could also dispense with having to maintain two nearly-identical languages (Java and Javascript), which would cut down on the memory footprint.
Or perhaps Erlang might be the poison of choice. It's ideally suited to taking advantage of the multiple cores on client and server machines, whereas Java threading is a bastard and Ruby is hardly the parallel programmer's dream.
There was a Tcl plugin for Netscape, once, but Tcl/Tk isn't a great web language. It's ok, but definitely not great. Besides, nobody bothered maintaining the plugin, as far as I know.
Define "willingly", given that cults are exceptionally good at applying brainwashing techniques. Is it possible to voluntarily do something when you are no longer medically competent to make such decisions?
Coca-Cola can cause muscle relaxation and even paralysis, at large enough doses. This is only a crime if the lawyer pumping you with sodas then rifles your pockets for credit cards and cash, otherwise it's a breakthrough medical discovery.
It measures resistivity, which makes it very similar to your basic lie-detector - really a "feeling of guilt detector". I suspect that the similarity is not accidental - if you were in charge of a cult, being able to detect wavering followers or unbelievers who were trying to infiltrate would have definite advantages. Ask the right questions, subtly, during testing, and you can also find out who can "donate" more.
Then we're down to altering the N/O ratio. That's a bugger, because whatever method you use is going to consume energy and it'll be tough to think of a method of gaining more than you use. As I said, there are good reasons for thinking the problem has solutions but no obvious reason for thinking it has practical solutions.
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The burning question that remains: Was the fairy dust from freshly-picked Cornish pixies?
Take Microsoft, for example.
Yes, but since there's no way of knowing how much was actually illegal material in the first place, we have no way of knowing how to weight that remaining 1%. Since there are non-zero legal downloads (no matter how few), the real figure must be strictly less than this by an unquantifiable amount.
So they added up all the bittorent users, multiplied the figure by 25, and assumed that was the total cost to the economy.
I'm sure the Blender team would LOVE to receive 25 pounds ($40) for every download of each and every one of their movies. Ms. Boyle would doubtless be substantially richer if she were given the same for every person who had ever downloaded (or watched on YouTube) a clip of her singing. More members of Ubuntu might be able to play space tourist if each and every file (whether it be a CD, DVD or just a patch) resulted in a $40 donation. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails would be over the moon if each individual song they've released for free got them that in checks received via fan mail.
I'm not saying that all the legit material added together make a substantial chunk of the corrected figure, but rather that the researchers never bothered to consider the fact that the material is not of equal value and that some items have a value of zero. They assumed everything was illegal and everything had identical worth.
That goes beyond Bad Science. How many of you, in elementary/primary school, got taught algebra by being given shopping lists? Pretty much everyone? Good. It would be a pointless exercise if apples and oranges had the same price ($40 each), so we can assume your class used different prices for different object, right? Right. So. Hands up who can tell me what you could do then that these researchers didn't do now?
Possibly. Intel has given up making its ARM processor (for now, though they could always return to it), and although Linux has several hard real-time variants for the embedded marker, and although there are other embedded OS' out there, VxWorks is by far the best-known and the most prestigious.
It is also one of the very few that is ratified for military and aerospace work. As much as I like Linux, and as much as I'm impressed by the fact that Lynx (a cut-down Linux) is FAA-approved for non-critical systems, and that there are even carrier-grade 5N-rated Linux distros, Linux simply isn't rated high enough (yet) to compete in the mission-critical arenas.
I'm not sure on that. Microsoft entering the antivirus market by buying up an antivirus vendor, rebranding it as its own product, then leveraging its monopoly to make said product the de-facto antivirus product SHOULD have run afoul of many anti-trust laws. It's a new market for Microsoft that they are working to eliminate competitors in in much the same way as they did in the browser wars against Netscape.
On the other hand, Microsoft is already in the embedded market, via Windows CE. It's not a new market and unless they planned on making VxWorks a plug-in interface to CE, their monopoly elsewhere would not be useful. If Microsoft wasn't busted wide open on the first, I can't see them being given any grief on the second.
Exactly. On the other hand, if Microsoft is buying up companies that are involved in the Embedded market, then Microsoft would have to pay Intel whatever Intel asked in order to get Windows to interoperate better with such system (or replace the OS entirely).
This would give Intel some small degree of leverage that it simply wouldn't have otherwise, and would prevent Microsoft from buying those embedded OS makers themselves (which would give Microsoft even more power over Intel - something I doubt Intel desires).
This is why I can see a defensive reason for Intel wanting Wind River, but no offensive reason. I can see nothing Wind River can give Intel that Intel couldn't have obtained for less, as you note, OTHER than protection from the consequences of Microsoft owning Wind River.
Microsoft has started buying up biotech software companies (most recently Rosetta Biosoftware). There almost has to be some link, but all of Rosetta's software runs on Linux, with only a handful of clients on Windows, and no direct usage of VxWorks - although I'd be surprised if the actual hardware doing the data collection was running a server OS rather than an embedded OS.
Speculation on a possible connection?
It's also used heavily by CERN and other nuclear research groups, and is also used heavily by the US military.
VxWorks is not a bad embedded OS. In fact, I'd call it quite good. Not great, but definitely good. There's very very little support out there for such architectures as VME, and VME is definitely an important architecture. There's next-to-no support in any of the F/L/OSS BSDs or Linux for this important bus, for example.
Wind River has also contributed a fair bit to Linux and the *BSDs over time, a fact we shouldn't forget. Will Intel keep up that investment? Intel already invests a fair bit into Linux, but I just don't see them increasing that to cover the loss of investment from Wind River.
Could Intel be aiming at the OS market? They no longer get the kind of support from Microsoft that they once enjoyed. I don't think so - embedded OS' just don't sell in the kind of numbers you'd need.
Then what is it that Wind River has that Intel wants? Hmmm. I don't know, but I'm going to guess that it's more of a defensive move than an offensive one. Microsoft has been buying up biotech software companies, recently. Biotech companies use embedded OS'.
The parent post needs to get modded up. It is probably one of the most informative posts I've seen on Slashdot in a long time and is extremely well-written. Worthy of an article in itself.
They would need to examine the reaction of different populations from the countryside to see if the reaction is simply one of disputes between avian clans. As it stands, their data could mean too many different things. The adage, often repeated here, is that correlation is not causation.
Norton Guides was a TSR program for DOS that allowed you to get context-sensitive programming information. I found the assembler guide to be an essential tool. The Guides may have used material from the book, but unless you know something about TSRs that I don't, the book wasn't what was running on my computer. :)
Oh, and MUD I. Without which, there would be no MUDs, MUSHes, MMORGs, or much of any other gaming online.
They were too busy dealing with the Cascade and Headbanger virus to care.
True enough. I'd also put Norton Guides or the ORIGINAL Norton Utilities ahead of Norton Anti-Virus. Basil's CopyAll and Ripoff 9 changed things in the anti-piracy scene, rendering most copy protection obsolete and forcing vendors to make software people were willing to pay for. For a while.
Zork I, Wizardry and (gasp!) Microsoft Flight Simulator changed the expectations of the gaming market, and ultimately the gaming market dictated the hardware produced.
Superior Software Speech! was the first serious attempt at an all-software speech synthesizer. That, in turn, started opening the computing world to whole new markets. (There would be no car navigation systems today without these kinds of pioneering efforts.)
Although RiscOS isn't technically an application, it did shatter the mythology that home computers could not multi-task or be user-friendly.
It's interesting that Occam (I presume they used the KROC implementation, owing to the lack of handy transputers) outperforms C in some situations. Occam is designed to be highly parallel, etc, etc, ad nausium, but it hasn't had nearly the same level of development work and optimization work as C.
They wrapped round. You have to turn the PNG over and look at the back.
...you have explicit allocation/deallocation, you get holes in memory. There's no way to avoid it, for the same reason that fragmentation occurs on disks. Unless the chunk you allocate is exactly the same size as the chunk last deallocated, there will be a region of memory that cannot be used.
This means that your heap will end up looking like swiss-cheese, unless you have some means of shuffling things around. Unless the programmer can absolutely guarantee that mallocs and frees only occur in such a way that no space unusable to the program's next malloc is ever left, the program will always have the potential of exhausting resources even without leaking memory.
This is why there are all kinds of malloc() substitutes for C, including several with garbage collection. If the program runs for long enough, the vanilla malloc() in most C libraries is simply not good enough.
That was back when it was called Oak, right?
I'm thinking there's going to be a greater push towards getting another language into browsers. If you had Ruby for both server-side scripting and client-side, it would be easier to maintain the code-base. You could also dispense with having to maintain two nearly-identical languages (Java and Javascript), which would cut down on the memory footprint.
Or perhaps Erlang might be the poison of choice. It's ideally suited to taking advantage of the multiple cores on client and server machines, whereas Java threading is a bastard and Ruby is hardly the parallel programmer's dream.
There was a Tcl plugin for Netscape, once, but Tcl/Tk isn't a great web language. It's ok, but definitely not great. Besides, nobody bothered maintaining the plugin, as far as I know.
Define "willingly", given that cults are exceptionally good at applying brainwashing techniques. Is it possible to voluntarily do something when you are no longer medically competent to make such decisions?
Coca-Cola can cause muscle relaxation and even paralysis, at large enough doses. This is only a crime if the lawyer pumping you with sodas then rifles your pockets for credit cards and cash, otherwise it's a breakthrough medical discovery.
It measures resistivity, which makes it very similar to your basic lie-detector - really a "feeling of guilt detector". I suspect that the similarity is not accidental - if you were in charge of a cult, being able to detect wavering followers or unbelievers who were trying to infiltrate would have definite advantages. Ask the right questions, subtly, during testing, and you can also find out who can "donate" more.
Then we're down to altering the N/O ratio. That's a bugger, because whatever method you use is going to consume energy and it'll be tough to think of a method of gaining more than you use. As I said, there are good reasons for thinking the problem has solutions but no obvious reason for thinking it has practical solutions.