The ironic thing is, that the "Turbo" speed was actually the native speed of the CPU. When you disabled turbo, you were actually underclocking it so that applications (games really), would run slower.
Yeah, what's crazier is that there was no particular "compatibility" speed, they were just slower by some random factor. The only time I ever functionally used turbo was on a 286 that would operate at 8088 speed - the CPU in the original IBM PC - when the turbo was off, everything since that just assumed it could be run on different CPUs of different speeds. It made no sense to make a 33 MHz 386 into a 25 MHz 386 or whatever it was for anything.
An ordinary work week is 37,5 hrs a week[1] (by law, yay Norway) (...) [1] I think.. Someone correct me if wrong.
By law a normal work week can not be more than 40 hours, 37.5 hours is just extremely common. There's many that fall under some form of exemption though.
As for this case, NRK actually have three classes, employees, temps with fixed assignments and "on call" temps. She was the latter, basically they're the people being shuffled around to fill gaps in the staff with a very unpredictable workload. They're not freelancers, they're still hired but internally they almost are. Extremely unpredictable work load, nobody can really tell you what your future with them will be etc. and just got fed up I guess.
Ten businesses screaming: Our Internet's down!!! Reseller: OMG OMG ISP: Um, I see a single basic support plan to your building. It'll go in the low-priority queue with the others. Reseller: Uh oh...
If it's one thing most businesses can't function well without anymore, it's Internet. Hell, with so many companies on laptops and servers on UPS/generators it's possible even a power failure will cause less productivity loss. I'd care much less about the 1 Gbps speed and far more about the SLA...
True, but both require training. If all you did was trying to memorize trivia, you wouldn't be that good at reasoning. If you google everything, then you won't be that good at memorizing things. The essential skill you're looking for is critical thinking, but critical thinking requires you both to actually know enough to reason from and the ability to reason.
If you ask me what the cause of WWII is, I'm not going to pull it out of some logical nowhere. I have to pull it a lot of facts about WWI, the great depression, political ideas of the time, the threat of communism and so on. The more facts I have, the more likely I have some relevant facts to use as basis. Of course you can say you can google it, but you can only google facts that you know are missing. If you don't even know the relevance, you lose them.
And on that topic, there's also a lot of useful metaknowledge that goes between pure facts and pure logic, like organizational theory, group theory, motivational theory, psychology, game theory and so on. People who know it will understand the actors, those that don't know it also won't understand why people do what they do. And you rarely manaqe to google your way into a decent understanding of it, it's more long term lerning for those able to memorize.
I wouldn't take a popular poll on anything from how my house should be wired to what that rash is, I'd find an electrician and a doctor. But every four years they ask the guy barely qualified to make fries down at McDonald's how he thinks the country should be run. Or rather which lying sack of shit has been the best at slinging it while not having it stick to themselves. Even if you had "perfect" voters and "perfect" politicians representing the majority we'd still have situations like two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
Don't get me wrong, in total democracy is better than any of the alternatives. But totalitarian regimes sometimes have a completely different level of execution power, like for example when China was holding the Olympics or the super high speed railways they've been building. You don't have to go through nine circles of committee hell and political games to do it, you just execute. You don't have to be the most popular boy in class all the time, unlike politicians that do their damnedest to avoid being the bearer of bad news.
You see a marked difference there between Europe and the US, not just because the US is bigger than most European countries. It's mostly one party (red or blue) and one man (the President) in power while in Europe you have flimsy coalitions with leaders sitting only on the grace of their coalition partners. Sometimes you get very strong and good leaders out of that, sometimes very crappy yet strong. I doubt we could have pulled off anything like the Apollo program in Europe, we wouldn't have the political stamina to execute it. Other times I praise that we don't have the US system.
I really understand people that want to have their cake and eat it too and actually have a government run by an elite of the smartest and wisest while still working for the good of all. It's not without reason many tribes had "the Elders" as their leaders, not by popular vote even when it was easily doable in a group that size. I certainly don't feel that way about most politicians, even though there's some I think are less bad than others...
In fact, while this doesn't happen in my line of work (thankfully), what you'll see in states with these legal protections is that, when your company decides they want to fire you for any reason at all, they just start the very long paper trail of documenting your 'poor performance and attitude' and xyz other legal requirements to fire you, so that when you do finally lose your job, you're a) completely unprepared and b) now have a paper trail of BS performance reviews and poor references. You might say 'well that's a dishonest company,' and indeed you'd be correct, but that's what happens when the government doesn't let two private parties resolve their differences through a more natural means: resentment builds up and the work environment tanks. I'd sooner work in an at-will state than one where I'm 'protected.'
I work in pretty much the exact opposite of an at-will state, around here typical termination notice is one month in first six months of employment, then three months. They have to give a reason for termination, either their situation (e.g. downsizing,restructuring, relocation, lack of work etc.) or your situation (performance, attitude, breach of rules etc.).
Around here a significant part of the process is that the employee is informed that the job performance is so poor it may result in termination, and be given time to correct it. That's plenty warning if you're really doing good work. The paper trail might be bullshit but it's not like they list it on your reference, you were normally simply laid off (unless you took the clue and got a new job first).
They can use downsizing as a legitimate reason, but if they put up job listings for your job or hire people with similar skills then that can be found untrue by the courts and it gets very expensive as people have been awarded full pay from their termination to the end of the trial with interest and their job back or a compensation for that too.
That said, we have termination for cause (avskjed) as opposed to regular termination (oppsigelse), which can be almost on the spot. However, that is never used for poor work performance, but rather e.g. if you discover they've been embezzling money from the company or something like that. Or if you don't show up at all or refuse to work, and I don't mean oversleeping once or twice.
Sure the process is long but those that end in termination aren't so bad, the real downside are the people that are poor workers but not poor enough to fire. I know a lot of these people were let go during the financial crisis, I've heard some various rumors about companies that weren't that bad off but were "preparing" for bad times through layoffs. It probably had some personal vendettas and good people caught in a bad department, but a lot of dead weight was shed...
Wouldn't that be a telltale sign of someone caught with their hand in the cookie jar? To the company, that could be seen as even clearer proof that you have been in control of this domain all along and trying to avoid a lawsuit on your ass. I would not touch that domain with a ten foot pole, if you're suspended with pay I'd say wait it out. If you're suspended without pay, dispute it and demand full compensation with interest from day one. Go see a lawyer to hear how long they can keep you suspended, I doubt it's long before being construed as a dismissal. On that note, you probably might want to brush up your resume just in case...
You don't receive any income after you're dead, which is all that's been extended since 1976.
I agree the life+forever extensions are too much, but most people want to leave something for their heirs and whether that's cash or stocks or property or royalties it's still money. And you can always sell the rights before your death if you don't want to wait. Is money you get later somehow not real?
Hey, I remember those and I got them. Unfortunately they were not licensed under any form of CC or public domain, they were simply limited free-as-in-beer downloads so once they shut down the source, no one could legally distribute them. The promise here is that these works will be released into the public domain, assuming the paperwork is done correctly that can't be undone.
That's what I was thinking too, in the comments it was asked but the answers are fuzzy:
1. What orchestra(s) are you planning on using 2. Who is conducting? 3. Who is mixing the recording?
1. orchestra depends on total raised. I'm hoping for a mixture of conservatories + professional orchestra to lower cost and increase total music, but it depends on what we can negotiate and the total raised. Some orchestras we are considering include London Symphony, Czech Philharmonic and several others that regularly record movie soundtracks. 2. I have several contacts who would conduct for free, I'd also like to try contacting some well known conductors to see if they would be interested. My backup would be a for hire's conductor that orchestras use to record with 3. Several orchestras we've spoken to include those kinds of services as they regularly record for movie soundtracks
I read that as "might possibly be considering it for one of them if we exceed our budget, I doubt you'll get the London Symphony to record it for $500/symphony...
Well at the top of the list is cost. That LED on your computers isn't putting out much, it's just a little blip. Enough to actually illuminate a room is very costly. Here's a quote from and article about LED bulbs from GE in April this year:
The bad news the bulbs are expected to retail for between US$40-50, but that initial cost is more than offset by their long life. (source)
As much as that might be true, it's a hard sell to pay $50 now to save money in 10-20 years. Most people do the exact opposite, they have credit cards and will pay a damn lot later to avoid paying now.
First Sale -- both as a judicial doctrine and as a statute -- merely says that copyright holders cannot impose restrictions on the redistribution of lawfully made and initially-distributed copies of their works, based upon their rights as a copyright holder. It has always been open to the possibility of copyright holders using contract law to accomplish the same ends, however.
Originally the first sale doctrine came when some book manufacturer put a minimum sales price notice of $1.00 in a book. I strongly doubt the manufacturer could have placed a sticker keeping the book shut saying "By breaking this sticker, you are licensed to use this book and can transfer that license at a price of no less than $1.00. If you don't agree with these terms return the book to the store for a full refund" and have it hold by contract law instead. Normally I very much respect your legal knowledge but really, seriously? Because I could swear that's what they would have done.
As long as it was just copyright extensions, even if it was the Mickey Mouse protection act, that didn't bug me so badly. It's all the absurd crap they're trying to pull to preserve copyright as a system that does and that's really just in the last decade or two.
If they are going to disallow sale of licensed software, then unlicensed software (read: pirated) can easily have more value to a user than the licensed work.
I'm not saying that the increase piracy is justified, but it's an inevitable result.
Let me put it this way, if copyright is supposed to be a deal between copyright holders and society it has turned into a slave contract. I'll just treat it as such.
It's pretty clear that you don't quite understand the concept of a license. Do you know what the L in GPL stands for?
So if you don't own it, and you don't license it, your right to use it comes from...? Hint: If it's not owned by you, it's owned by somebody else. Can you in general use other people's property without permission?
If we are just a licensee, then that means they can't sue for intelectual property theft
I'm fairly sure "intelectual (sic) property theft" is not a term of law. And to use a car analogy, even if I only lease my car it can still get stolen...
And those with a cult following. Wikipedia's notability requirements are a bit "in or out". I've noticed many no-so-notable people, events and activities that probably qualifies for a page but that get a ton of information, many links from other pages and whatnot as if they were really big and important. I'm quite sure Wikipedia will give a skewed image of the past compared to what people actually thought.
"Akamai routinely delivers between fifteen and thirty percent of all Web traffic,"
Watch the doublespeak, it's not between 15 and 30% of all Internet traffic. Very much content *could* be cached, if you'd allow the mother of all copyright-infringing servers to sit on the border. Until then, there'll be tons of P2P traffic dragging content from edge to edge of the network.
If you mean it should compete with Intel CPUs for PC processors, on the other hand, one impediment may be that ARM is (at least at present) a 32-bit architecture.
I don't see that as a huge drawback for at least taking on the netbook market, or possibly extending the netbook market to an even lower price point. There's not been any significant push for more memory in recent years, in fact the 4x4GB DDR2 is mostly replaced by 6x2GB DDR3 as the "top of the line" at mortal prices.
By far the greatest challenge is software, with no Windows or Mac support you'd be pushing Linux. A linux with no option to run Windows software through WINE or virtualbox for those occasional needs. Or you're trying to rebuild the entire desktop around a new ARM-oriented system, which seems like a massive job even if ARM is already in use many places.
1. Is usually not that easy, if it's licensed for use in the driver there might be bits of it many places. It'll take developer time and lawyer time to do, or you could risk a huge lawsuit.
2. Being the honest loser of an OEM contract doesn't put food on the table.
3. Common end users? No. But certainly some developers in the community will start asking hard questions and expect answers. If the driver isn't working well enough, the negative PR will hit the company, possibly worse than if they had no driver at all.
4. It doesn't matter if we "know" it's bullshit, as long as PHBs believe it
5. Invisible and unmeasurable sales. Nobody will know and can put in a business case that this is why you bought that router.
I see a lot of these answers, that just say "well it's not a technical problem, so it's not real". Legal liability, losing contracts, bad PR, security concerns and no proven business case are problems even if they're just perceived to be problems. Unless you'd like to buy out some of these companies and bet your fortune on these problems not being real. Yes, I'm being overly pessimistic when I answered here, but it's too easy to think all they needed was a grocery list from slashdot. That's what everyone is looking for in a business case, what's the weaknesses you didn't include and is your downsides soberly assessed? Business cases that only deal with the sunshine scenarios don't usually get through.
Just do a quick search for rt2x00 bugs, they've been open sourced a long time, and still has plenty of bugs and failures. It's not magic, it wont' make all problems go away. Yet, that's what the claim is.
Well yes if the released source is crap and the documentation is equally crap so you can't figure out how to fix it then GIGO it is. But Linux doesn't have the luxury of being prioritized as highly as Windows or Mac except for server components, I would say in 99% of the cases open source is better than closed source. Then at least you can fix obvious logic errors or overflows that you don't need chip documentation to understand. This is one big step closer to installing Linux and having it all Just Work(tm). That's actually the biggest advantage of in-kernel open source drivers, nothing as annoying as having to drag out a cable to get online for updates and troubleshooting. Almost anything else can be fixed as long as you get online...
I know in the case ATI, when it was taken over by AMD, they wanted to release Open Source drivers as quickly as possible but couldn't straight away because third party companies had contributed parts of the driver software and it was under NDAs. I think it took them a little while to work around some of those issues, secure agreements, etc.
Actually, far more than that. They gave up on "washing" the internal code base and the open source drivers are essentially written from scratch with only slight one-way code sharing. In some cases yes they look at it to figure out how to program specific bits of hardware, but that's about it. And even that almost-from-scratch rewrite has to pass through a fairly serious legal review to make sure they're not revealing too much IP. Most of the shit in the graphics drivers is caused by DRM though, they can't release any low-level stuff or you would be able to see the DRM'd bits being moved around and decrypted, even if you don't know the DRM bits.
Yes, that chap was an asshole, and a religious extremist.
If you say "religious extremist" I think of Taliban that'll accept no other religion than their own and slaughter all unbelievers. From everything I've read and seen about him he was very tolerant of Muslims, Christians and other religions not just Hindus. He was very much an extremist in other ways yes, just not religiously.
I'd strongly disagree with the asshole part too, but that's more opinion. He very strongly believed that to be rid of the British, they had to be rid of the dependence on them. Western medicine was holding back their own medical development. to use the fish analogy he wanted to stop buying fish from the British so they'd learn to fish and fend for themselves. I'm not exactly sure about the reference to his use of western medicine, but regarding his wife she was 74 and had suffered a double heart attack. Penicillin may have prolonged her life, but even the doctors agreed she was beyond curing. And contrary to what you claim, Gandhi's did not forbid it.
Devdas took Mohandas and the doctors aside. In what he would later describe as "the sweetest of all wrangles I ever had with my father," he pleaded fiercely that Ba be given the life saving medicine, even though the doctors told him her condition was beyond help. It was Mohandas, after learning that the penicillin had to be administered by injection every four to six hours, who finally persuaded his youngest son to give up the idea. "Why do you want to prolong your mother's agonies after all the suffering she has been through?" Gandhi asked. Then he said, "You can't cure her now, no matter what miracle drug you may muster. But if you insist, I will not stand in your way."
And how is the situation you describe any different than every console? If you live in a signed sandbox, you live on the good graces of the signee. Doesn't seem like that's a dealbreaker to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
The ironic thing is, that the "Turbo" speed was actually the native speed of the CPU. When you disabled turbo, you were actually underclocking it so that applications (games really), would run slower.
Yeah, what's crazier is that there was no particular "compatibility" speed, they were just slower by some random factor. The only time I ever functionally used turbo was on a 286 that would operate at 8088 speed - the CPU in the original IBM PC - when the turbo was off, everything since that just assumed it could be run on different CPUs of different speeds. It made no sense to make a 33 MHz 386 into a 25 MHz 386 or whatever it was for anything.
An ordinary work week is 37,5 hrs a week[1] (by law, yay Norway) (...) [1] I think.. Someone correct me if wrong.
By law a normal work week can not be more than 40 hours, 37.5 hours is just extremely common. There's many that fall under some form of exemption though.
As for this case, NRK actually have three classes, employees, temps with fixed assignments and "on call" temps. She was the latter, basically they're the people being shuffled around to fill gaps in the staff with a very unpredictable workload. They're not freelancers, they're still hired but internally they almost are. Extremely unpredictable work load, nobody can really tell you what your future with them will be etc. and just got fed up I guess.
Ten businesses screaming: Our Internet's down!!!
Reseller: OMG OMG
ISP: Um, I see a single basic support plan to your building. It'll go in the low-priority queue with the others.
Reseller: Uh oh...
If it's one thing most businesses can't function well without anymore, it's Internet. Hell, with so many companies on laptops and servers on UPS/generators it's possible even a power failure will cause less productivity loss. I'd care much less about the 1 Gbps speed and far more about the SLA...
True, but both require training. If all you did was trying to memorize trivia, you wouldn't be that good at reasoning. If you google everything, then you won't be that good at memorizing things. The essential skill you're looking for is critical thinking, but critical thinking requires you both to actually know enough to reason from and the ability to reason.
If you ask me what the cause of WWII is, I'm not going to pull it out of some logical nowhere. I have to pull it a lot of facts about WWI, the great depression, political ideas of the time, the threat of communism and so on. The more facts I have, the more likely I have some relevant facts to use as basis. Of course you can say you can google it, but you can only google facts that you know are missing. If you don't even know the relevance, you lose them.
And on that topic, there's also a lot of useful metaknowledge that goes between pure facts and pure logic, like organizational theory, group theory, motivational theory, psychology, game theory and so on. People who know it will understand the actors, those that don't know it also won't understand why people do what they do. And you rarely manaqe to google your way into a decent understanding of it, it's more long term lerning for those able to memorize.
I wouldn't take a popular poll on anything from how my house should be wired to what that rash is, I'd find an electrician and a doctor. But every four years they ask the guy barely qualified to make fries down at McDonald's how he thinks the country should be run. Or rather which lying sack of shit has been the best at slinging it while not having it stick to themselves. Even if you had "perfect" voters and "perfect" politicians representing the majority we'd still have situations like two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
Don't get me wrong, in total democracy is better than any of the alternatives. But totalitarian regimes sometimes have a completely different level of execution power, like for example when China was holding the Olympics or the super high speed railways they've been building. You don't have to go through nine circles of committee hell and political games to do it, you just execute. You don't have to be the most popular boy in class all the time, unlike politicians that do their damnedest to avoid being the bearer of bad news.
You see a marked difference there between Europe and the US, not just because the US is bigger than most European countries. It's mostly one party (red or blue) and one man (the President) in power while in Europe you have flimsy coalitions with leaders sitting only on the grace of their coalition partners. Sometimes you get very strong and good leaders out of that, sometimes very crappy yet strong. I doubt we could have pulled off anything like the Apollo program in Europe, we wouldn't have the political stamina to execute it. Other times I praise that we don't have the US system.
I really understand people that want to have their cake and eat it too and actually have a government run by an elite of the smartest and wisest while still working for the good of all. It's not without reason many tribes had "the Elders" as their leaders, not by popular vote even when it was easily doable in a group that size. I certainly don't feel that way about most politicians, even though there's some I think are less bad than others...
Well, I have a bit more belief in the theory of parallel basements than of parallel universes.
In fact, while this doesn't happen in my line of work (thankfully), what you'll see in states with these legal protections is that, when your company decides they want to fire you for any reason at all, they just start the very long paper trail of documenting your 'poor performance and attitude' and xyz other legal requirements to fire you, so that when you do finally lose your job, you're a) completely unprepared and b) now have a paper trail of BS performance reviews and poor references. You might say 'well that's a dishonest company,' and indeed you'd be correct, but that's what happens when the government doesn't let two private parties resolve their differences through a more natural means: resentment builds up and the work environment tanks. I'd sooner work in an at-will state than one where I'm 'protected.'
I work in pretty much the exact opposite of an at-will state, around here typical termination notice is one month in first six months of employment, then three months. They have to give a reason for termination, either their situation (e.g. downsizing ,restructuring, relocation, lack of work etc.) or your situation (performance, attitude, breach of rules etc.).
Around here a significant part of the process is that the employee is informed that the job performance is so poor it may result in termination, and be given time to correct it. That's plenty warning if you're really doing good work. The paper trail might be bullshit but it's not like they list it on your reference, you were normally simply laid off (unless you took the clue and got a new job first).
They can use downsizing as a legitimate reason, but if they put up job listings for your job or hire people with similar skills then that can be found untrue by the courts and it gets very expensive as people have been awarded full pay from their termination to the end of the trial with interest and their job back or a compensation for that too.
That said, we have termination for cause (avskjed) as opposed to regular termination (oppsigelse), which can be almost on the spot. However, that is never used for poor work performance, but rather e.g. if you discover they've been embezzling money from the company or something like that. Or if you don't show up at all or refuse to work, and I don't mean oversleeping once or twice.
Sure the process is long but those that end in termination aren't so bad, the real downside are the people that are poor workers but not poor enough to fire. I know a lot of these people were let go during the financial crisis, I've heard some various rumors about companies that weren't that bad off but were "preparing" for bad times through layoffs. It probably had some personal vendettas and good people caught in a bad department, but a lot of dead weight was shed...
Wouldn't that be a telltale sign of someone caught with their hand in the cookie jar? To the company, that could be seen as even clearer proof that you have been in control of this domain all along and trying to avoid a lawsuit on your ass. I would not touch that domain with a ten foot pole, if you're suspended with pay I'd say wait it out. If you're suspended without pay, dispute it and demand full compensation with interest from day one. Go see a lawyer to hear how long they can keep you suspended, I doubt it's long before being construed as a dismissal. On that note, you probably might want to brush up your resume just in case...
You don't receive any income after you're dead, which is all that's been extended since 1976.
I agree the life+forever extensions are too much, but most people want to leave something for their heirs and whether that's cash or stocks or property or royalties it's still money. And you can always sell the rights before your death if you don't want to wait. Is money you get later somehow not real?
Hey, I remember those and I got them. Unfortunately they were not licensed under any form of CC or public domain, they were simply limited free-as-in-beer downloads so once they shut down the source, no one could legally distribute them. The promise here is that these works will be released into the public domain, assuming the paperwork is done correctly that can't be undone.
That's what I was thinking too, in the comments it was asked but the answers are fuzzy:
1. What orchestra(s) are you planning on using
2. Who is conducting?
3. Who is mixing the recording?
1. orchestra depends on total raised. I'm hoping for a mixture of conservatories + professional orchestra to lower cost and increase total music, but it depends on what we can negotiate and the total raised. Some orchestras we are considering include London Symphony, Czech Philharmonic and several others that regularly record movie soundtracks.
2. I have several contacts who would conduct for free, I'd also like to try contacting some well known conductors to see if they would be interested. My backup would be a for hire's conductor that orchestras use to record with
3. Several orchestras we've spoken to include those kinds of services as they regularly record for movie soundtracks
I read that as "might possibly be considering it for one of them if we exceed our budget, I doubt you'll get the London Symphony to record it for $500/symphony...
Well at the top of the list is cost. That LED on your computers isn't putting out much, it's just a little blip. Enough to actually illuminate a room is very costly. Here's a quote from and article about LED bulbs from GE in April this year:
The bad news the bulbs are expected to retail for between US$40-50, but that initial cost is more than offset by their long life. (source)
As much as that might be true, it's a hard sell to pay $50 now to save money in 10-20 years. Most people do the exact opposite, they have credit cards and will pay a damn lot later to avoid paying now.
First Sale -- both as a judicial doctrine and as a statute -- merely says that copyright holders cannot impose restrictions on the redistribution of lawfully made and initially-distributed copies of their works, based upon their rights as a copyright holder. It has always been open to the possibility of copyright holders using contract law to accomplish the same ends, however.
Originally the first sale doctrine came when some book manufacturer put a minimum sales price notice of $1.00 in a book. I strongly doubt the manufacturer could have placed a sticker keeping the book shut saying "By breaking this sticker, you are licensed to use this book and can transfer that license at a price of no less than $1.00. If you don't agree with these terms return the book to the store for a full refund" and have it hold by contract law instead. Normally I very much respect your legal knowledge but really, seriously? Because I could swear that's what they would have done.
As long as it was just copyright extensions, even if it was the Mickey Mouse protection act, that didn't bug me so badly. It's all the absurd crap they're trying to pull to preserve copyright as a system that does and that's really just in the last decade or two.
If they are going to disallow sale of licensed software, then unlicensed software (read: pirated) can easily have more value to a user than the licensed work.
I'm not saying that the increase piracy is justified, but it's an inevitable result.
Let me put it this way, if copyright is supposed to be a deal between copyright holders and society it has turned into a slave contract. I'll just treat it as such.
It's pretty clear that you don't quite understand the concept of a license. Do you know what the L in GPL stands for?
So if you don't own it, and you don't license it, your right to use it comes from...? Hint: If it's not owned by you, it's owned by somebody else. Can you in general use other people's property without permission?
If we are just a licensee, then that means they can't sue for intelectual property theft
I'm fairly sure "intelectual (sic) property theft" is not a term of law. And to use a car analogy, even if I only lease my car it can still get stolen...
And those with a cult following. Wikipedia's notability requirements are a bit "in or out". I've noticed many no-so-notable people, events and activities that probably qualifies for a page but that get a ton of information, many links from other pages and whatnot as if they were really big and important. I'm quite sure Wikipedia will give a skewed image of the past compared to what people actually thought.
"Akamai routinely delivers between fifteen and thirty percent of all Web traffic,"
Watch the doublespeak, it's not between 15 and 30% of all Internet traffic. Very much content *could* be cached, if you'd allow the mother of all copyright-infringing servers to sit on the border. Until then, there'll be tons of P2P traffic dragging content from edge to edge of the network.
If you mean it should compete with Intel CPUs for PC processors, on the other hand, one impediment may be that ARM is (at least at present) a 32-bit architecture.
I don't see that as a huge drawback for at least taking on the netbook market, or possibly extending the netbook market to an even lower price point. There's not been any significant push for more memory in recent years, in fact the 4x4GB DDR2 is mostly replaced by 6x2GB DDR3 as the "top of the line" at mortal prices.
By far the greatest challenge is software, with no Windows or Mac support you'd be pushing Linux. A linux with no option to run Windows software through WINE or virtualbox for those occasional needs. Or you're trying to rebuild the entire desktop around a new ARM-oriented system, which seems like a massive job even if ARM is already in use many places.
1. Is usually not that easy, if it's licensed for use in the driver there might be bits of it many places. It'll take developer time and lawyer time to do, or you could risk a huge lawsuit.
2. Being the honest loser of an OEM contract doesn't put food on the table.
3. Common end users? No. But certainly some developers in the community will start asking hard questions and expect answers. If the driver isn't working well enough, the negative PR will hit the company, possibly worse than if they had no driver at all.
4. It doesn't matter if we "know" it's bullshit, as long as PHBs believe it
5. Invisible and unmeasurable sales. Nobody will know and can put in a business case that this is why you bought that router.
I see a lot of these answers, that just say "well it's not a technical problem, so it's not real". Legal liability, losing contracts, bad PR, security concerns and no proven business case are problems even if they're just perceived to be problems. Unless you'd like to buy out some of these companies and bet your fortune on these problems not being real. Yes, I'm being overly pessimistic when I answered here, but it's too easy to think all they needed was a grocery list from slashdot. That's what everyone is looking for in a business case, what's the weaknesses you didn't include and is your downsides soberly assessed? Business cases that only deal with the sunshine scenarios don't usually get through.
Just do a quick search for rt2x00 bugs, they've been open sourced a long time, and still has plenty of bugs and failures. It's not magic, it wont' make all problems go away. Yet, that's what the claim is.
Well yes if the released source is crap and the documentation is equally crap so you can't figure out how to fix it then GIGO it is. But Linux doesn't have the luxury of being prioritized as highly as Windows or Mac except for server components, I would say in 99% of the cases open source is better than closed source. Then at least you can fix obvious logic errors or overflows that you don't need chip documentation to understand. This is one big step closer to installing Linux and having it all Just Work(tm). That's actually the biggest advantage of in-kernel open source drivers, nothing as annoying as having to drag out a cable to get online for updates and troubleshooting. Almost anything else can be fixed as long as you get online...
I know in the case ATI, when it was taken over by AMD, they wanted to release Open Source drivers as quickly as possible but couldn't straight away because third party companies had contributed parts of the driver software and it was under NDAs. I think it took them a little while to work around some of those issues, secure agreements, etc.
Actually, far more than that. They gave up on "washing" the internal code base and the open source drivers are essentially written from scratch with only slight one-way code sharing. In some cases yes they look at it to figure out how to program specific bits of hardware, but that's about it. And even that almost-from-scratch rewrite has to pass through a fairly serious legal review to make sure they're not revealing too much IP. Most of the shit in the graphics drivers is caused by DRM though, they can't release any low-level stuff or you would be able to see the DRM'd bits being moved around and decrypted, even if you don't know the DRM bits.
Yes, that chap was an asshole, and a religious extremist.
If you say "religious extremist" I think of Taliban that'll accept no other religion than their own and slaughter all unbelievers. From everything I've read and seen about him he was very tolerant of Muslims, Christians and other religions not just Hindus. He was very much an extremist in other ways yes, just not religiously.
I'd strongly disagree with the asshole part too, but that's more opinion. He very strongly believed that to be rid of the British, they had to be rid of the dependence on them. Western medicine was holding back their own medical development. to use the fish analogy he wanted to stop buying fish from the British so they'd learn to fish and fend for themselves. I'm not exactly sure about the reference to his use of western medicine, but regarding his wife she was 74 and had suffered a double heart attack. Penicillin may have prolonged her life, but even the doctors agreed she was beyond curing. And contrary to what you claim, Gandhi's did not forbid it.
Devdas took Mohandas and the doctors aside. In what he would later describe as "the sweetest of all wrangles I ever had with my father," he pleaded fiercely that Ba be given the life saving medicine, even though the doctors told him her condition was beyond help. It was Mohandas, after learning that the penicillin had to be administered by injection every four to six hours, who finally persuaded his youngest son to give up the idea. "Why do you want to prolong your mother's agonies after all the suffering she has been through?" Gandhi asked. Then he said, "You can't cure her now, no matter what miracle drug you may muster. But if you insist, I will not stand in your way."
Yeah, a real asshole that man.
And how is the situation you describe any different than every console? If you live in a signed sandbox, you live on the good graces of the signee. Doesn't seem like that's a dealbreaker to anyone.