Are we ever going to receive a brand new OS from Microsoft, or will each release merely be an upgrade from older versions?
Did Windows NT 3.1 count, or is it disqualified for inheriting code from VMS and OS/2?
Linux can trace its kernel lineage back to 1991, and many of its utilities are much much older than that. Are we ever going to receive a brand new OS from Torvalds?
What's the incentive for anyone to re-invent an operating system from scratch? A desire to create the next BeOS? There's too much collected knowledge in the decades' worth of "legacy" OS code that would be foolish to throw out.
I disagree with the court's finding nonetheless, as the defining characteristic of a motor vehicle is not the presence of wheels, but rather of a MOTOR.
If it was a motorized cow, it ought to have qualified as a motor vehicle.
I never understood why so many sites have their video on a dumbass proprietary format.
Okay, you tell me what video format sites should adopt that: 1. streams 2. has affordable, easy-to-use authoring tools available 3. has ubiquitous browser support 4. is not a dumbass proprietary format
I guess Oracle will feel relieved with their 'ISO SQL 92 minus datatypes and a few other essentials' product.
I'm sure Larry Ellison cries every evening as he swims through his five-story Money Bin.
Oracle has decided that it would be worse to break all the legacy applications already running on Oracle DBs than to force compliance with the ISO standard. Can't say I blame them.
Nintendo cartridges stored their code in ROM, which degrades very very very little with usage and time, and has been that way since it was invented 35 years ago.
It's not really comparable to Flash memory in any way.
But when they say 8 gigabits, do they mean 2^33 bits (8,589,934,592), or 8x10^9 bits (8,000,000,000)? At that magnitude, the difference between base 2 and base 10 is not trivial.
The first defintion SHOULD actually be referred to as gibibits, but that nomenclature is not yet universal. OS developers, I'm looking in your general direction here.
I think that [Bill & Melinda Gates being named People of the Year] constitutes some affection by the media.
Only if you believe that old imaginary phrase "As the editors of Time Magazine go, so goes the entire media industry." One story covering the Gateses (and the ensuing stories about the story) don't really carry the same weight of newsworthiness as an Associated Press NewsAlert.
[Michael Dell's] expertise is reliability and customer support.
You'd think some of that expertise would rub off on the desktop computer business he heads. Dell is so well known for its cheap components and poor support practices that it earned the nickname 'Dell Hell'.
Apple does not produce Unix Workstations. OS X is a BSD variant, and we all know that is not Unix.
BSD may not be a UNIX[TM] in the Bell Labs sense of the term, but I think you'd have a hard time finding anyone in the IT world who doesn't consider it to be a *nix.
You can go back 20, 25 years, and find Unix gurus comparing the relative merits of SYSV vs. BSD. That makes it Unixy enough in my eyes.
it is quite possible in the scheme of things Apple computers don't get classified as workstations, but as personal or desktop computers
Possible, yes. The line between "workstation" and "high-end desktop PC" has gotten so blurry in the past few years though that I'm not sure if it's a distinction even worth making anymore.
why not have the runtime engine built into all three products but only install if it isn't already present? Ya know, save memory and work on improving 1 engine instead of 3. Oh yeah, that's too smart and already exists as Mozilla
According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.
And eventually, they will always end up at Kevin Bacon's phone number!
(filler: it took me too long to realize that the middle word in the headline "NSA Wiretapping Whistleblower" was an adjective, not a verb. That's why many news style guides recommend that a headline should have complete sentence structure, even if the grammar is a little tortured.)
You're asking an entire generation of video game motorists to relearn everything they know about driving. Acceleration and braking are typically not controlled with a joystick's Y-axis, but rather by the A and B buttons.
What I want to know is, which button shoots the red turtle shell at the car in front of you?
It would be even better if I could step into my car with a latte, cell phone, and laptop, ask the car to take me to the airport, and read slashdot along the way. My guess is that it will happen within 20 years.
Oh come on, it doesn't take THAT long for a taxi to arrive.
Practically all of your comments about Google would be true of Open Source Software as well, with slight alterations. Would it be fair to say that OSS doesn't "get it"? To compare them to Microsoft?
FAT is such a technical piece of crap that I would have thought nobody would want to patent it, out of pure embarr~1.
To be fair, FAT was a rather elegant hack 25 years ago, when CPU clocks where measured in single-digit kHz and the OS had nothing to do but manage sectors on a pair of 360K floppy drives.
The problem is that Microsoft chose to keep it in use ever since, preferring to nail new features onto it clumsily rather than plan a smooth migration to a better FS, like HPFS or later NTFS. It's absurd that most Microsoft OS users didn't break of the 8.3 filename format until late 1995.
requiring people to pay a licence fee to use the only supported filesystem in the monopoly OS
Modern Windows OSes support multiple filesystems natively: FAT, NTFS, ISO-9660, etc. Userspace utilities are available that can read and write to other major filesystems like ext2, HFS+, etc.
FAT is not the ONLY choice for formatting removable media on Windows, it's simply the simplest and most obvious choice. I don't believe Microsoft is abusing a monopoly position here.
What exactly would prevent these low margin, high volume USB key manufacturers selling their memory sticks unformatted?
What would prevent them from simply raising the price of their products by 25 cents? Shoot, let's even say 50 cents, on account of the extra accounting work the manufacturer will have to do to send a check to Microsoft periodically.
Are there consumers out there that are willing to pay $99.00 for a flash memory card, but not $99.50?
Once litigation is concluded, the lawyers stop receiving money.
And yet, much like taxi drivers, the quicker a lawyer finishes with one client, the sooner they can move on to the next, so they can receive more money.
Unfortunately, I am serious.
Yes, it is unfortunate that you can't see any motive for lawyers to become lawmakers other than the opportunity to line their own pockets.
Slashdot Mirror
Are we ever going to receive a brand new OS from Microsoft, or will each release merely be an upgrade from older versions?
Did Windows NT 3.1 count, or is it disqualified for inheriting code from VMS and OS/2?
Linux can trace its kernel lineage back to 1991, and many of its utilities are much much older than that. Are we ever going to receive a brand new OS from Torvalds?
What's the incentive for anyone to re-invent an operating system from scratch? A desire to create the next BeOS? There's too much collected knowledge in the decades' worth of "legacy" OS code that would be foolish to throw out.
by BadAnalogyGuy (945258) ;-).
Did you pick your nick yourself, or is that what people call you? Because it's spot-on
By that criteria, shouldn't you be called "FailsToExplainWhyItsABadAnalogyGuy"?
So other cows "may" have wheels?
Sure, just nail rollerskates to their hooves.
I disagree with the court's finding nonetheless, as the defining characteristic of a motor vehicle is not the presence of wheels, but rather of a MOTOR.
If it was a motorized cow, it ought to have qualified as a motor vehicle.
Next the government will start copyrighting statistics they do not want to get out.
But the government isn't currently allowed to copyright what it produces... uh... hmm... I see your point.
I think Microsoft will go after Gibson's reputation.
Even then they would just be embracing/extending someone else's idea.
I never understood why so many sites have their video on a dumbass proprietary format.
Okay, you tell me what video format sites should adopt that:
1. streams
2. has affordable, easy-to-use authoring tools available
3. has ubiquitous browser support
4. is not a dumbass proprietary format
I'll wait.
I guess Oracle will feel relieved with their 'ISO SQL 92 minus datatypes and a few other essentials' product.
I'm sure Larry Ellison cries every evening as he swims through his five-story Money Bin.
Oracle has decided that it would be worse to break all the legacy applications already running on Oracle DBs than to force compliance with the ISO standard. Can't say I blame them.
"government customers will be able to purchase and deploy MySQL through Carahsoft Technology Corp."
Who is "Carahsoft Technology Corp.", and how much will they be charging the government (and therefore, US) for installing a Free product?
Nintendo cartridges stored their code in ROM, which degrades very very very little with usage and time, and has been that way since it was invented 35 years ago.
It's not really comparable to Flash memory in any way.
5 trillion writes is 10,000 writes/second for 13 years.
And good luck finding a Winchester drive that hasn't developed some bad sectors after 13 years of continuous service.
The limited-rewrite-cycle of Flash memory is pretty much a red herring. It's never going to affect 95+% of users.
Gartner estimates that 16GB Flash drives will cost from about $90...
Where's the conflict? Flash chip != flash drive. Flash drives can often comprise multiple chips.
It's a typo. Unless Gartner actually expects that 128-gigabit drives are going to sell at the same price 16-gigabit Flash drives currently do.
Maybe by the year 2010 they will.
one 8Gb chip is the equivalent of 1GB.
But when they say 8 gigabits, do they mean 2^33 bits (8,589,934,592), or 8x10^9 bits (8,000,000,000)? At that magnitude, the difference between base 2 and base 10 is not trivial.
The first defintion SHOULD actually be referred to as gibibits, but that nomenclature is not yet universal. OS developers, I'm looking in your general direction here.
I think that [Bill & Melinda Gates being named People of the Year] constitutes some affection by the media.
Only if you believe that old imaginary phrase "As the editors of Time Magazine go, so goes the entire media industry." One story covering the Gateses (and the ensuing stories about the story) don't really carry the same weight of newsworthiness as an Associated Press NewsAlert.
[Michael Dell's] expertise is reliability and customer support.
You'd think some of that expertise would rub off on the desktop computer business he heads. Dell is so well known for its cheap components and poor support practices that it earned the nickname 'Dell Hell'.
Apple does not produce Unix Workstations. OS X is a BSD variant, and we all know that is not Unix.
BSD may not be a UNIX[TM] in the Bell Labs sense of the term, but I think you'd have a hard time finding anyone in the IT world who doesn't consider it to be a *nix.
You can go back 20, 25 years, and find Unix gurus comparing the relative merits of SYSV vs. BSD. That makes it Unixy enough in my eyes.
it is quite possible in the scheme of things Apple computers don't get classified as workstations, but as personal or desktop computers
Possible, yes. The line between "workstation" and "high-end desktop PC" has gotten so blurry in the past few years though that I'm not sure if it's a distinction even worth making anymore.
why not have the runtime engine built into all three products but only install if it isn't already present? Ya know, save memory and work on improving 1 engine instead of 3. Oh yeah, that's too smart and already exists as Mozilla
I think you misspelled VBRUN300.DLL.
According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.
And eventually, they will always end up at Kevin Bacon's phone number!
(filler: it took me too long to realize that the middle word in the headline "NSA Wiretapping Whistleblower" was an adjective, not a verb. That's why many news style guides recommend that a headline should have complete sentence structure, even if the grammar is a little tortured.)
Okay, so a quiet alarm at 75 minutes before I have to be at work, and a loud alarm at 70 minutes before I have to be at work. Check.
You're asking an entire generation of video game motorists to relearn everything they know about driving. Acceleration and braking are typically not controlled with a joystick's Y-axis, but rather by the A and B buttons.
What I want to know is, which button shoots the red turtle shell at the car in front of you?
It would be even better if I could step into my car with a latte, cell phone, and laptop, ask the car to take me to the airport, and read slashdot along the way. My guess is that it will happen within 20 years.
Oh come on, it doesn't take THAT long for a taxi to arrive.
So is the scientific community anything like the Mafia? You didn't really say.
Practically all of your comments about Google would be true of Open Source Software as well, with slight alterations. Would it be fair to say that OSS doesn't "get it"? To compare them to Microsoft?
FAT is such a technical piece of crap that I would have thought nobody would want to patent it, out of pure embarr~1.
To be fair, FAT was a rather elegant hack 25 years ago, when CPU clocks where measured in single-digit kHz and the OS had nothing to do but manage sectors on a pair of 360K floppy drives.
The problem is that Microsoft chose to keep it in use ever since, preferring to nail new features onto it clumsily rather than plan a smooth migration to a better FS, like HPFS or later NTFS. It's absurd that most Microsoft OS users didn't break of the 8.3 filename format until late 1995.
requiring people to pay a licence fee to use the only supported filesystem in the monopoly OS
Modern Windows OSes support multiple filesystems natively: FAT, NTFS, ISO-9660, etc. Userspace utilities are available that can read and write to other major filesystems like ext2, HFS+, etc.
FAT is not the ONLY choice for formatting removable media on Windows, it's simply the simplest and most obvious choice. I don't believe Microsoft is abusing a monopoly position here.
What exactly would prevent these low margin, high volume USB key manufacturers selling their memory sticks unformatted?
What would prevent them from simply raising the price of their products by 25 cents? Shoot, let's even say 50 cents, on account of the extra accounting work the manufacturer will have to do to send a check to Microsoft periodically.
Are there consumers out there that are willing to pay $99.00 for a flash memory card, but not $99.50?
Once litigation is concluded, the lawyers stop receiving money.
And yet, much like taxi drivers, the quicker a lawyer finishes with one client, the sooner they can move on to the next, so they can receive more money.
Unfortunately, I am serious.
Yes, it is unfortunate that you can't see any motive for lawyers to become lawmakers other than the opportunity to line their own pockets.