Bullshit! This is EXPLICITLY allowed and encouraged by the GPL! There is NOTHING wrong with selling free software. If the users have the knowledge to get it elsewhere, more power to them -- they can redirect thier apt-sources. Linspire also spends money on things like servers and development.
I'm not a fan of thier product -- doesn't do exactly what I need. However, thier business strategy is totally legit. What do you say about other distributors that charge? Red Hat charges for Up2Date (or whatever it's called), Mandrake, RedHat, Novell, and others all charge for boxed sets of software, most of which you can get elsewhere for free.
I've written some obscure Linux software years ago that's been taken over by someone else and is now bundled in Linux-based PDA's. I think that's great!
Regardless with whether it is true and does get appealed and then gets re-ammended, it's crap. A federal income tax is so far against the spirit of the constitution; the federal governement shouldn't have the power to tax the property (including labor) of citizens directly. That is a matter purely for the state.
If the government was kept in check, it could *easilly* survive on excise taxes and tarriffs -- which are explicitly allowed in the constitution.
The federal government claims Kentucky was the second state to ratify the 16th Amendment, on Feb. 8, 1910. However, the records of the State of Kentucky show that after the Kentucky House proposed a resolution to adopt the amendment and sent it to the Senate, on Feb. 8, 1910 the Kentucky Senate voted upon that resolution, but rejected it by a vote of 9 in favor and 22 opposed. [...]
In Oklahoma, the proposed amendment was passed by the Oklahoma House and the language of the resolution perfectly matched the one passed by Congress. However, the Oklahoma Senate obviously disliked what Congress had proposed, so it amended the language of the 16th Amendment in such a fashion as to have a precisely opposite meaning.
The California legislative assembly never recorded any vote upon any proposal to adopt the 16th Amendment. [...]
Minnesota sent nothing to the Secretary of State in Washington, but this did not deter Philander Knox from claiming that Minnesota ratified the amendment, regardless of the absence of any documentation from the State of Minnesota.
Article V of the U.S. Constitution controls the amending process, which requires that three-fourths of the states ratify any amendment proposed by Congress. In 1913, there were 48 States in the American union, so to adopt any amendment required the affirmative act of 36 states. In February 1913, Knox issued a proclamation claiming that 38 states had ratified the amendment -- including Kentucky, California and Oklahoma. But since Kentucky had rejected the amendment, California had not voted on it, and Oklahoma wanted something entirely different, the amendment was not legally adopted, the number of ratifying States being only 35. Then again, a total of 11 states failed to vote on the amendment, 33 changed the language of the amendment and Minnesota sent in nothing. In the final analysis, if the process of the adoption of the 16th Amendment is subjected to strict legal scrutiny, the amendment was never adopted.
Yes, but the US government had to add the 16th ammendment to collect income tax. Before that, the wording you quote only specifies duties, imposts, and excise. The ambiguous word "taxes" doesn't allow for the form of tax collection we have today.
There is much evidence that the 16th ammendment was NEVER RATIFIED by congress. It should be repealed, and the federal government should have NO power to tax individuals directly. Excise and tariffs can support a libertarian form of government.
I want a Linux-based PDA-phone (GSM) with a keyboard (something like the Zaurus, only a little sleeker and more compact) with a 20GB+ hard drive, a real USB 2 port (and have it behave like a USB hard drive when plugged in), and 802.11b or better interface on it.
This is a HUGE step in the right direction. I want to carry only one damn device that does everything I need (play my Ogg's, surf the web, check emails, SSH to my web server, manage my calendar and contacts) rather than three devices that only do a partial job.
But the fact of the matter is, at least in AMD's case, the high-end Opteron preceded the Athlon64. There's a 1-pin difference between the newer A64's and Opterons! I honestly don't believe that they have to cut enough transistors out of the silicon to justify 2X the price.
The fact of the matter is, SMP=server/workstation market, so they can charge more. Most users won't gain much (if any) real world from an SMP system.
Windows has had production 64-bit OSes since Windows 2000, only they called it the DataCenter version, and you had to get it with your hardware from an OEM. So yes, you can have 64 bit Windows, though you'll pay dearly for it.
Not for AMD64/x86-64/EMT64 -- generally available for only Itanium and MIPS (I think -- not too sure)
It actually is possible... if he uses the storyline from Zahn's Thrawn trilogy... fantastic books part of the official Star Wars expanded universe. That is until Lucas invalidated a few things in Episode II. Still, they could be adapted for screenplay.
Not really. Modern mid-range 7200 rpm HDs have a peak sustained read of more than 30 MB/s - up to twice that speed actually, but that'd be the best case scenario. At that speed, it'd take all of 3 seconds to load the textures into memory. Loading times of 5 seconds would be more than acceptable to me...
Key words: peak sustained. That's assuming everything is nice and close together, and usually one large file rather than lots of little ones. In addition to texture data, there's also the geometry for the level, AI, physics code, character models, etc. Quake III takes more than 5 seconds to load a level on my machine (Athlon XP 2400+, 512MB, GeForceFX 5200, 7200rpm hard drive, Linux 2.6).
a) only in Quake II was 3D accelleration actually required b) a lot of the changes have to do with features rather than clock speed, memory, and fillrate.
For instance, up until Doom3, no vertex or fragment shaders were required for the card. We don't know what tomorrow will bring in terms of on-chip components and language change. This would be like trying to plot OpenGL version requirements...
Do I really need all that for a gaming machine, though? I mean, are save-games so important that I really need RAID? I'm assuming the parent is refering to RAID-0 striping, which would buy you performance rather than redundancy. And seeing as iD recommends defragging before installing Doom 3 (because it has 2 GB of content, and hard disk speeds have not improved at the same rate as CPU and RAM speeds), a 4-way RAID-0 virtual disk using 10K RPM SATA drives would be damn useful. Think about it: 2 GB of game data. A single scene uses 80+ MB of textures. That's a LOT of reading.
Man, 80MB of textures, about 15 MB for a 1600x1200 frame buffer (upwards of 4-16 times that if FSAA is used...), insane amounts of geometry data, complex shader code... it actually justifies graphics cards with 256MB VRAM on board.
I'm hoping the Debian guys make an exception this time... I have no problem resorting to the testing or even unstable tree for a desktop machine (in fact, I'm using testing right now... it's VERY stable). For a server, however, I much prefer to use stable, if for no other reason, it doesn't change much. I know I could put "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" in my cron.daily and not have anything break, and still have the latest security patches.
That's why I wouldn't recommend this sort of thing when a new tech first comes out -- but the G5's have been out for a year, already!
And yes, Apple make money from high-paying customers, but think of what higher volumes could do to thier bottom line?
And what about businesses? In my company, all the artist-types want Macs, but they get Dells because they're half the cost. One guy who did make a case for a Mac was given a Dell LCD monitor because the Apple ones are too expensive. A sensible model like the one I described would be fantastic if aimed towards businesses, and paired with $400 17" LCD monitors.
Apple could VERY WELL make a G5 for under a grand without skimping on quality. Here's how:
Make a new motherboard design that does not have all the traces/silkscreen/extra board space for a second CPU. Zap one or two of the PCI-X slots.
Have only 2 DIMM slots. Ditch the modem.
Now that the mobo is physically smaller, make the case significantly smaller. Only have space for 1 hard drive. That cast aluminum has to be expensive.
Using the new PPC970FX chips clocked down to like 1.5-1.6 Ghz, it shouldn't run as hot as the older models. Now, you don't need an elaborite cooling solution.
Ship with a combo-drive standard instead of a superdrive.
Now, are you telling me that the above wouldn't shave $1000 off the price of the Dual 1.8ghz model? And it wouldn't do so without sacrificing quality?
I did not add software, because I don't care about all that crap, and I assume neither does the parent I replied to.
I use free software exclusively, with the exception of a couple of games and my video driver. I don't care about the stuff you listed -- I want Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, GNU Emacs, and GCC. For what I do, all other desktop stuff is fluff.
I was NOT slamming Apple -- I was trying to show that it's not that much more than DIY dual Opterons. Given to the average Joe, the G5 is a better product.
The myth that Apple is more expensive is just not true, as anyone who has done a serious comparison of features will tell you.
Sorry, but it used to be true. The G5's are the first systems Apple offered that are a reasonable deal compared to PC's. Honestly, I'd like to see a $1000 machine based on a 1.6ghz G5. Then Apple would really turn some heads.
And Apple monitors, while excellent, are still too pricey. They need a $400 17" DVI-D only model or something.
Look at the iMacs... a 1ghz G4 with a 15" LCD for $1300? I could get a MUCH faster Athlon64 system for that with more RAM and disk space, plus it would be upgradable.
Yeah, you're paying for the software and the "experience", but frankly, most people don't care enough to plunk down the extra cash, and they still have to pay another $200 (or more) for MS Office when cheaper PC's come with it for free.
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Bullshit! This is EXPLICITLY allowed and encouraged by the GPL! There is NOTHING wrong with selling free software. If the users have the knowledge to get it elsewhere, more power to them -- they can redirect thier apt-sources. Linspire also spends money on things like servers and development.
I'm not a fan of thier product -- doesn't do exactly what I need. However, thier business strategy is totally legit. What do you say about other distributors that charge? Red Hat charges for Up2Date (or whatever it's called), Mandrake, RedHat, Novell, and others all charge for boxed sets of software, most of which you can get elsewhere for free.
I've written some obscure Linux software years ago that's been taken over by someone else and is now bundled in Linux-based PDA's. I think that's great!
Regardless with whether it is true and does get appealed and then gets re-ammended, it's crap. A federal income tax is so far against the spirit of the constitution; the federal governement shouldn't have the power to tax the property (including labor) of citizens directly. That is a matter purely for the state.
If the government was kept in check, it could *easilly* survive on excise taxes and tarriffs -- which are explicitly allowed in the constitution.
My argument isn't based on the Ohio thing. I made another comment here, and don't want to be modded down as redundant.
Here's one of the MANY cases agains the ratification of the ammendment. It has NOTHING to do with the stupid Ohio-isn't-a-state claims.
http://christianparty.net/16thamendment.htm
An excerpt:
The federal government claims Kentucky was the second state to ratify the 16th Amendment, on Feb. 8, 1910. However, the records of the State of Kentucky show that after the Kentucky House proposed a resolution to adopt the amendment and sent it to the Senate, on Feb. 8, 1910 the Kentucky Senate voted upon that resolution, but rejected it by a vote of 9 in favor and 22 opposed. [...]
In Oklahoma, the proposed amendment was passed by the Oklahoma House and the language of the resolution perfectly matched the one passed by Congress. However, the Oklahoma Senate obviously disliked what Congress had proposed, so it amended the language of the 16th Amendment in such a fashion as to have a precisely opposite meaning.
The California legislative assembly never recorded any vote upon any proposal to adopt
the 16th Amendment. [...]
Minnesota sent nothing to the Secretary of State in Washington, but this did not deter
Philander Knox from claiming that Minnesota ratified the amendment, regardless of the
absence of any documentation from the State of Minnesota.
Article V of the U.S. Constitution controls the amending process, which requires that
three-fourths of the states ratify any amendment proposed by Congress. In 1913, there were
48 States in the American union, so to adopt any amendment required the affirmative act of
36 states. In February 1913, Knox issued a proclamation claiming that 38 states had
ratified the amendment -- including Kentucky, California and Oklahoma. But since Kentucky
had rejected the amendment, California had not voted on it, and Oklahoma wanted something
entirely different, the amendment was not legally adopted, the number of ratifying States
being only 35. Then again, a total of 11 states failed to vote on the amendment, 33
changed the language of the amendment and Minnesota sent in nothing. In the final
analysis, if the process of the adoption of the 16th Amendment is subjected to strict
legal scrutiny, the amendment was never adopted.
Yes, but the US government had to add the 16th ammendment to collect income tax. Before that, the wording you quote only specifies duties, imposts, and excise. The ambiguous word "taxes" doesn't allow for the form of tax collection we have today.
There is much evidence that the 16th ammendment was NEVER RATIFIED by congress. It should be repealed, and the federal government should have NO power to tax individuals directly. Excise and tariffs can support a libertarian form of government.
This is one step closer to what I want...
I want a Linux-based PDA-phone (GSM) with a keyboard (something like the Zaurus, only a little sleeker and more compact) with a 20GB+ hard drive, a real USB 2 port (and have it behave like a USB hard drive when plugged in), and 802.11b or better interface on it.
This is a HUGE step in the right direction. I want to carry only one damn device that does everything I need (play my Ogg's, surf the web, check emails, SSH to my web server, manage my calendar and contacts) rather than three devices that only do a partial job.
But the fact of the matter is, at least in AMD's case, the high-end Opteron preceded the Athlon64. There's a 1-pin difference between the newer A64's and Opterons! I honestly don't believe that they have to cut enough transistors out of the silicon to justify 2X the price.
The fact of the matter is, SMP=server/workstation market, so they can charge more. Most users won't gain much (if any) real world from an SMP system.
- Windows has had production 64-bit OSes since Windows 2000, only they called it the DataCenter version, and you had to get it with your hardware from an OEM. So yes, you can have 64 bit Windows, though you'll pay dearly for it.
Not for AMD64/x86-64/EMT64 -- generally available for only Itanium and MIPS (I think -- not too sure)It actually is possible... if he uses the storyline from Zahn's Thrawn trilogy... fantastic books part of the official Star Wars expanded universe. That is until Lucas invalidated a few things in Episode II. Still, they could be adapted for screenplay.
I was stating VRAM to mean a generic term for video RAM, as opposed to main memory.
Not really. Modern mid-range 7200 rpm HDs have a peak sustained read of more than 30 MB/s - up to twice that speed actually, but that'd be the best case scenario. At that speed, it'd take all of 3 seconds to load the textures into memory. Loading times of 5 seconds would be more than acceptable to me...
Key words: peak sustained. That's assuming everything is nice and close together, and usually one large file rather than lots of little ones. In addition to texture data, there's also the geometry for the level, AI, physics code, character models, etc. Quake III takes more than 5 seconds to load a level on my machine (Athlon XP 2400+, 512MB, GeForceFX 5200, 7200rpm hard drive, Linux 2.6).
My bad, but that further illustrates my point. Only QIII, RTCW, and Doom3 required anything special from the graphics card.
Not something that could be plotted easily, as:
a) only in Quake II was 3D accelleration actually required
b) a lot of the changes have to do with features rather than clock speed, memory, and fillrate.
For instance, up until Doom3, no vertex or fragment shaders were required for the card. We don't know what tomorrow will bring in terms of on-chip components and language change. This would be like trying to plot OpenGL version requirements...
Do I really need all that for a gaming machine, though? I mean, are save-games so important that I really need RAID?
I'm assuming the parent is refering to RAID-0 striping, which would buy you performance rather than redundancy. And seeing as iD recommends defragging before installing Doom 3 (because it has 2 GB of content, and hard disk speeds have not improved at the same rate as CPU and RAM speeds), a 4-way RAID-0 virtual disk using 10K RPM SATA drives would be damn useful. Think about it: 2 GB of game data. A single scene uses 80+ MB of textures. That's a LOT of reading.
Man, 80MB of textures, about 15 MB for a 1600x1200 frame buffer (upwards of 4-16 times that if FSAA is used...), insane amounts of geometry data, complex shader code... it actually justifies graphics cards with 256MB VRAM on board.
I don't care about security too much on my desktop machine; it's behind a firewall (running stable) and not visible to the outside world.
I'm hoping the Debian guys make an exception this time... I have no problem resorting to the testing or even unstable tree for a desktop machine (in fact, I'm using testing right now... it's VERY stable). For a server, however, I much prefer to use stable, if for no other reason, it doesn't change much. I know I could put "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" in my cron.daily and not have anything break, and still have the latest security patches.
That's why I wouldn't recommend this sort of thing when a new tech first comes out -- but the G5's have been out for a year, already!
And yes, Apple make money from high-paying customers, but think of what higher volumes could do to thier bottom line?
And what about businesses? In my company, all the artist-types want Macs, but they get Dells because they're half the cost. One guy who did make a case for a Mac was given a Dell LCD monitor because the Apple ones are too expensive. A sensible model like the one I described would be fantastic if aimed towards businesses, and paired with $400 17" LCD monitors.
Yes, Mac laptops have been on par with quality PC counterparts, but we were talking about desktops, weren't we?
Make a new motherboard design that does not have all the traces/silkscreen/extra board space for a second CPU. Zap one or two of the PCI-X slots.
Have only 2 DIMM slots. Ditch the modem.
Now that the mobo is physically smaller, make the case significantly smaller. Only have space for 1 hard drive. That cast aluminum has to be expensive.
Using the new PPC970FX chips clocked down to like 1.5-1.6 Ghz, it shouldn't run as hot as the older models. Now, you don't need an elaborite cooling solution.
Ship with a combo-drive standard instead of a superdrive.
Now, are you telling me that the above wouldn't shave $1000 off the price of the Dual 1.8ghz model? And it wouldn't do so without sacrificing quality?
If they follow my .sig's suggestion, they would also throw out OSX. I'm assuming someone buying a Mac wants to use proprietary software.
I did not add software, because I don't care about all that crap, and I assume neither does the parent I replied to.
I use free software exclusively, with the exception of a couple of games and my video driver. I don't care about the stuff you listed -- I want Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, GNU Emacs, and GCC. For what I do, all other desktop stuff is fluff.
I was NOT slamming Apple -- I was trying to show that it's not that much more than DIY dual Opterons. Given to the average Joe, the G5 is a better product.
Opteron has a dual-channel memory controller, so to get optimum memory bandwidth, you need two.
Cheapest PC2700 registered DIMMs I could find. Yeah, I could go cheaper if I was going PC2100, but that would be silly.
The retail CPU's actually have warantees, and come with heat sink/fan units, which you'd have to spend at least $10 each for a good one.
The case I priced out was comparable to the G5 case. Look it up.
I used a $200 case because it's a case that's relatively comparable to the G5 case.
I did use pricewatch for some things. Yes, you could get OEM CPU's cheaper, but I like the warrantee and I'd need to buy a seperate fan elsewhere.
I chose the power supply because I want a nice, clean, beefy one to supply the power to the Opterons.
Most of the parts, you can't get for a whole lot cheaper, other than the CPU's, and that's only if you go OEM
The myth that Apple is more expensive is just not true, as anyone who has done a serious comparison of features will tell you.
Sorry, but it used to be true. The G5's are the first systems Apple offered that are a reasonable deal compared to PC's. Honestly, I'd like to see a $1000 machine based on a 1.6ghz G5. Then Apple would really turn some heads.
And Apple monitors, while excellent, are still too pricey. They need a $400 17" DVI-D only model or something.
Look at the iMacs... a 1ghz G4 with a 15" LCD for $1300? I could get a MUCH faster Athlon64 system for that with more RAM and disk space, plus it would be upgradable.
Yeah, you're paying for the software and the "experience", but frankly, most people don't care enough to plunk down the extra cash, and they still have to pay another $200 (or more) for MS Office when cheaper PC's come with it for free.