There is no way that the courts would make MS open the source code to Windows to the public, then not restrict its use. That would be like punishing the old AT&T by forcing them to give free phone service to everyone in the country. The point is to punish MS and promote competition, not put them out of business. Anyway, let's say that Judge Jackson says that they have to GPL Windows 2000. First off, the ruling is appealed until 2006 when the code is completely outdated. Second, how many people are going to be able to read the millions of lines of code and understand enough to constructively change anything. Bottom line: MS still has the user base and the money to do whatever they want.
I think automated highway driving will become a reality long before fully automated robotic cars can handle city driving. On car trips I often enjoy the scenery and the conversation, but I have no problem handing the driving over to a computer. Imagine taking a nap during the mindless drive between Chicago and St. Louis. Anyway, I would much rather have the computer drive than my girlfriend.
I don't know about the re-education camps, but I like the paintball idea. The DOJ doesn't even need to close the company down, just open it up to the paintballers. Let's see MS try to get W2K SP1 out while a couple hundred guys in camoflage pants are running around shooting at each other.
I was under the impression that gravity was a product of an object having mass. Is the theory that massive objects bend space the accepted one? It was explained to me as a bowling ball sitting on top of a matress, but in 3 dimensions. Anyway, the only two ways I can think of to create anti-gravity are to make the Earth have less mass (probably not the best idea), or to "unbend" the space around it. Does anyone have more technical details on what BAe is trying to do? Is there even a theoretical way to unbend space? Physics folks, help me out here.
Fight Club and Being John Malkovich got shafted. Those were the two of the most original films I've seen in years. There's a shot in Fight Club where the camera pans around Ed Norton's empty apartment and each item he owns starts appearing along with its catalog description. It was absolutely brilliant.
I believe that Iridium was a low orbit system that slowly fell back to Earth in about 10-12 years. You can put satelites in stable high orbits but the time lag starts getting really bad. I always doubted a system that had such insanely high recurring costs.
I don't think this situation deserves the same outrage as the etoy/etoys fiasco. Coke.* could easily be assumed by a "reasonable person" to be a web site for the Coca Cola company and the person who registered the domain had to know that. There are probably better domain names to put the addiction web site under.
Old people would still win. I didn't vote in November because I was at my desk from 7am to 9pm that day. The sad thing is that I could have voted at the school across the street from my house.
As others have mentioned, the Itanium and the Sledgehammer will probably not play well together at all. What I have read says that the Sledgehammer will be leaps and bounds better than the Itanium at running existing 32 bit apps. This is due to the fact that AMD is building on top of x86 and Intel is starting something entirely new. There was a great article on Toms Hardware about how Intel is very afraid because the 32 bit performace of the Itanium is just piss poor. The theory is that Itanium is a server CPU and should only be running a handfull of apps. But sooner or later those server CPUs trickle down to consumer CPUs. And consumers tend to frown on replacing every app they own.
I'm no material scientist, but I believe that you can make glass very strong, especially if you don't need it to be transparent. The article claims that the glass platters are quieter and are more stable at high speeds. If that's the case, then why is IBM only making 5400 and 7200 RPM drives with them? Seagate just showed off a 15k RPM drive that aparently used aluminum. Also, why are they bringing this new technology right to the desktop market? Wouldn't a higher capacity, more stable hard drive be ideal for a server? Even worse than that, I only saw an IDE version of these drives. The hard core home user that would want this kind of insane capacity would almost certainly have a SCSI setup. Anyway, it probably pisses off the MPAA to see "The number of DVDs you can store" as a de facto measure of hard drive capactiy...and that makes me happy.
Dropping the suit sounds like a great idea. Everyone on Slashdot would feel great that the boycot worked and O'Reilly would get a pat on the back. But how many people around here are going to chip in on lawyer's fees when a shareholder sues Amazon for not suing B&N. The lawsuit would be "By not continuing the suit against B&N, my portfolio dropped for 26 million dollars to 25.8 million dollars." And the shareholder would win. I'm not saying it's right, but I promise you it would happen.
That's not what I came away from the letter with at all. I think he comes off as a very bright, good guy who has more resposibilites than most of us could imagine. I would summarize his stance as "We're playing by the rules that were in place when we got here (which he is). If you want to change the rules, that's fine (and even offers good suggestions)." And then offers to play by the new rules should they be changed.
I had a DC that I picked up on 9/9/99 and never had a problem with it until Worms Armageddon. It was my only WinCE game, and the only one that wouldn't load properly. I went back to the store a few weeks ago, swapped DC units, and havn't had any problems since. I can't find a listing of any bugs specific to WinCE, but apparently I had one.
It was explained to me that the most of the problems with skipping audio/video and unrecognized disks is not due to bad engineering or poor QC, but due to the fact that nobody follows the actual DVD specs to the letter. Usually things work fine, but every once in a while a particular DVD will not play nice with a particular model DVD player and you're generally screwed. I believe that the players are getting much better, though. My 8 month old Samsung player absolutely will not play The Matrix. The Matrix DVD was rushed to market and there are about a dozen players that just won't recognize it as a valid DVD.
Overheating is nothing new to the PSX world. I have a solution to share with my Japanese friends. I came up with this during a snow storm last year that caused our Playstation to be on for about 18 hours straight.
1) Get one of those 14" X 14" Rubbermaid sink tubs 2) Fill it with ice cubes and cold water 3) Put a glass baking pan across the top so it sits inside the tub. The water should be just underneath the glass. 4) Put your Playstation inside the baking pan 5) Enjoy some icy cold Parrapa the Rapper
Note: It is possible that this will only work while you are very, very high. It was not tested under sober conditions.
From what I understand, IPv6 includes in its VAST address space the ID number hardwired into your NIC or modem. You could trace any packet back to its originating computer. It would be like bullet ballistics. You could prove that this computer was used in the crime and then you have to prove this person was using said computer at the time. I don't have strong views one way or the other on this scheme. I have been around long enough to say that someone with enough time on thier hands will succesfully spoof thier identity even under IPv6.
Computers don't correctly guess the future of the market because they're perfect. They're correct because people listen to the computers and everyone's computers are very similar. If every computer on Wall Street predicts that AT&T is going to drop, what does everyone do? Sells AT&T. What happens? AT&T's stock price goes down. They touch on this in the movie Pi (where I stole the example from), and obviously the global economy is a more complicated system then that. No matter how stupid or crazy people are, if we turn all the decision making over to the computers, it all becomes predictable.
Homer speaking to The Smashing Pumpkins in the Hulubalooza episode. Give me my points. I was actually thinking of that line when I wrote the post. But for my money, the best line of that episode is "Who ordered the London Symphony Orchestra?...Possibly while high?...I'm looking at Cypress Hill."
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way that the courts would make MS open the source code to Windows to the public, then not restrict its use. That would be like punishing the old AT&T by forcing them to give free phone service to everyone in the country. The point is to punish MS and promote competition, not put them out of business. Anyway, let's say that Judge Jackson says that they have to GPL Windows 2000. First off, the ruling is appealed until 2006 when the code is completely outdated. Second, how many people are going to be able to read the millions of lines of code and understand enough to constructively change anything. Bottom line: MS still has the user base and the money to do whatever they want.
-B
I think automated highway driving will become a reality long before fully automated robotic cars can handle city driving. On car trips I often enjoy the scenery and the conversation, but I have no problem handing the driving over to a computer. Imagine taking a nap during the mindless drive between Chicago and St. Louis. Anyway, I would much rather have the computer drive than my girlfriend.
-B
I was thinking that too. But actually, there aren't many ways to crash those things without using a shotgun.
-B
It's a good thing deep hyperlinking is legal. Rob would not do well in the joint.
-ODBjr
Maybe your grandma can handle a real ISP, mine can't.
-B
I don't know about the re-education camps, but I like the paintball idea. The DOJ doesn't even need to close the company down, just open it up to the paintballers. Let's see MS try to get W2K SP1 out while a couple hundred guys in camoflage pants are running around shooting at each other.
-B
I was under the impression that gravity was a product of an object having mass. Is the theory that massive objects bend space the accepted one? It was explained to me as a bowling ball sitting on top of a matress, but in 3 dimensions. Anyway, the only two ways I can think of to create anti-gravity are to make the Earth have less mass (probably not the best idea), or to "unbend" the space around it. Does anyone have more technical details on what BAe is trying to do? Is there even a theoretical way to unbend space? Physics folks, help me out here.
-B
I did enjoy American Beauty a lot..but...
Fight Club and Being John Malkovich got shafted. Those were the two of the most original films I've seen in years.
There's a shot in Fight Club where the camera pans around Ed Norton's empty apartment and each item he owns starts appearing along with its catalog description. It was absolutely brilliant.
-B
I believe that Iridium was a low orbit system that slowly fell back to Earth in about 10-12 years. You can put satelites in stable high orbits but the time lag starts getting really bad. I always doubted a system that had such insanely high recurring costs.
-B
This week the company I work for is cutting a 6 figure check to Citrix for the privledge of a capability that X has for free. Nice.
-B
I don't think this situation deserves the same outrage as the etoy/etoys fiasco. Coke.* could easily be assumed by a "reasonable person" to be a web site for the Coca Cola company and the person who registered the domain had to know that. There are probably better domain names to put the addiction web site under.
-B
Old people would still win. I didn't vote in November because I was at my desk from 7am to 9pm that day. The sad thing is that I could have voted at the school across the street from my house.
-B
As others have mentioned, the Itanium and the Sledgehammer will probably not play well together at all. What I have read says that the Sledgehammer will be leaps and bounds better than the Itanium at running existing 32 bit apps. This is due to the fact that AMD is building on top of x86 and Intel is starting something entirely new. There was a great article on Toms Hardware about how Intel is very afraid because the 32 bit performace of the Itanium is just piss poor. The theory is that Itanium is a server CPU and should only be running a handfull of apps. But sooner or later those server CPUs trickle down to consumer CPUs. And consumers tend to frown on replacing every app they own.
-B
Chris Dibona's job title is "Linux Community Evangelist".
-B
I'm no material scientist, but I believe that you can make glass very strong, especially if you don't need it to be transparent. The article claims that the glass platters are quieter and are more stable at high speeds. If that's the case, then why is IBM only making 5400 and 7200 RPM drives with them? Seagate just showed off a 15k RPM drive that aparently used aluminum. Also, why are they bringing this new technology right to the desktop market? Wouldn't a higher capacity, more stable hard drive be ideal for a server? Even worse than that, I only saw an IDE version of these drives. The hard core home user that would want this kind of insane capacity would almost certainly have a SCSI setup. Anyway, it probably pisses off the MPAA to see "The number of DVDs you can store" as a de facto measure of hard drive capactiy...and that makes me happy.
-B
Dropping the suit sounds like a great idea. Everyone on Slashdot would feel great that the boycot worked and O'Reilly would get a pat on the back. But how many people around here are going to chip in on lawyer's fees when a shareholder sues Amazon for not suing B&N. The lawsuit would be "By not continuing the suit against B&N, my portfolio dropped for 26 million dollars to 25.8 million dollars." And the shareholder would win. I'm not saying it's right, but I promise you it would happen.
-B
That's not what I came away from the letter with at all. I think he comes off as a very bright, good guy who has more resposibilites than most of us could imagine. I would summarize his stance as "We're playing by the rules that were in place when we got here (which he is). If you want to change the rules, that's fine (and even offers good suggestions)." And then offers to play by the new rules should they be changed.
-B
I had a DC that I picked up on 9/9/99 and never had a problem with it until Worms Armageddon. It was my only WinCE game, and the only one that wouldn't load properly. I went back to the store a few weeks ago, swapped DC units, and havn't had any problems since. I can't find a listing of any bugs specific to WinCE, but apparently I had one.
-B
It was explained to me that the most of the problems with skipping audio/video and unrecognized disks is not due to bad engineering or poor QC, but due to the fact that nobody follows the actual DVD specs to the letter. Usually things work fine, but every once in a while a particular DVD will not play nice with a particular model DVD player and you're generally screwed. I believe that the players are getting much better, though. My 8 month old Samsung player absolutely will not play The Matrix. The Matrix DVD was rushed to market and there are about a dozen players that just won't recognize it as a valid DVD.
-B
Overheating is nothing new to the PSX world. I have a solution to share with my Japanese friends. I came up with this during a snow storm last year that caused our Playstation to be on for about 18 hours straight.
1) Get one of those 14" X 14" Rubbermaid sink tubs
2) Fill it with ice cubes and cold water
3) Put a glass baking pan across the top so it sits inside the tub. The water should be just underneath the glass.
4) Put your Playstation inside the baking pan
5) Enjoy some icy cold Parrapa the Rapper
Note: It is possible that this will only work while you are very, very high. It was not tested under sober conditions.
-B
From what I understand, IPv6 includes in its VAST address space the ID number hardwired into your NIC or modem. You could trace any packet back to its originating computer. It would be like bullet ballistics. You could prove that this computer was used in the crime and then you have to prove this person was using said computer at the time. I don't have strong views one way or the other on this scheme. I have been around long enough to say that someone with enough time on thier hands will succesfully spoof thier identity even under IPv6.
-B
Computers don't correctly guess the future of the market because they're perfect. They're correct because people listen to the computers and everyone's computers are very similar. If every computer on Wall Street predicts that AT&T is going to drop, what does everyone do? Sells AT&T. What happens? AT&T's stock price goes down. They touch on this in the movie Pi (where I stole the example from), and obviously the global economy is a more complicated system then that. No matter how stupid or crazy people are, if we turn all the decision making over to the computers, it all becomes predictable.
-B
I need to step up and congratulate you on your use of the word "exo-cephalopodic". Very nicely done. Also, stop bogartin the weed.
-B
When crypto is outlawed, only outlaws will have crypto. Where's Charlton Heston when you need him?
-B
Homer speaking to The Smashing Pumpkins in the Hulubalooza episode. Give me my points. I was actually thinking of that line when I wrote the post. But for my money, the best line of that episode is "Who ordered the London Symphony Orchestra?...Possibly while high?...I'm looking at Cypress Hill."
-B