Hussein trucked them to Syria. The gov't just isn't talking too much about it. Wait until things stabilize a bit, and if the weapons don't come under U.S. control quietly, Syria will be the next one "liberated"...
Bush didn't lie. Everyone in the middle east knows that Hussein had and used those weapons.
Nah. Forget plasmonics, fiber optics, quantum computing, and all this other junk... Let's make computers that are 100% mechanical, but built out of MEMS. Tiny gears, levers, pistons, pendulums, and other mechanisms will perform computations not previously possible with electronic computers. Better yet, let's return to the days of relay logic, but using nanotechnology to built microscopic relays. Good idea.
Today the internet could provide a developmental database far beyond any testbed that we imagined, yet there has been no significant progress in over 30 years.
The danger is that this thing will learn the wrong things by reading the Internet.
It will know every sexual technique known to man. It will learn to commit all kinds of hate crimes. Other stuff like that. Or, hundreds of people might provide good vs. evil inputs to this thing as it learns.
oh you just wait. regulation will eventually make it so that we can't do anything without filing a form XB-230U-JJKG-23473842389-KLOW374938748275-234-2352 -6536-234 with a government agency like the Department of Freedom of Food Selection and Consumption Freedom Department, to ask permission to eat a piece of bread, and wait about six years for approval. Papers will have to be filed each day, beginning six years or so before a baby is conceived, so that there won't be a lapse where someone is not allowed to eat. And you'd better remember to file this form each day, or you will eventually have a lapse, and you'll go hungry. And this form will take approximately 100 times the amount of time to fill out as all the IRS crap for your taxes. (By the way, if you haven't done that yet, better get crackin', cuz they're due in less than two weeks.)
Congratulations, you summed up the Libertarian platform on campagin finance quite well.
Funny... I am a Republican. But I agree with several Libertarian ideas.
the only campaign finance reform that makes sense is to ban all forms of campaign finance except that allocated by an independant Electoral Commission based on a per vote basis
And how are you doing to define what is campaign finance? Money that changes hands? Money someone gives to someone who is running for office? What if that person has an organization that does all his campaign stuff? Do you have to ban giving money to any organizations owned by someone running for office? What if that person owns a nonprofit that feeds hungry children? Is it illegal to give money to that organization? What if the organization that does the campaign stuff isn't owned at all by the person who is running for office? What if the party with which he is affiliated owns that organization? Then is it illegal to give money to organizations owned by the party with which a candidate is affiliated? Then what if those organizations are nonprofit charities that help abused children and have nothing to do with marketing an election? How do you define having "nothing to do" with an election? What if some other organization wants to state something positive or negative about a candidate? What if that organization is a business that makes inkjet printers and the candidate wants to outlaw printers, and they want to tell the public about it? How do you define, legally, who is involved with an election, with a candidate, with marketing a candidate, with funding election marketing, etc., etc., etc., etc...?
Any kind of law you make up about campaigning is going to get so complicated that it will wipe freedom of speech right off the books. The simpler thing is to get rid of all this crap. Ok, so you want to make sure North Korea won't advertise in favor of Bush because your family lives in North Korea and you're afraid they'll get liberated because then your in-laws will want to come over? The way I see it, people are generally smart enough to see past bullshit like that. Observe the previous election. Bush-bashers galore, and yet Bush won. It's because the other candidate (who was it again?) was a blooming idiot.
The only campaign finance reform that needs to take place is to completely get rid of all campaign finance laws put into place from day one of this country's existance. Allow people to finance campaigns in any way they see fit.
However, only one law will be put into place that does make sense: Every candidate must create a report, written in plain English, that explains what that candidate intends to do during his term in office, if he gets elected. A panel of ten people or so, appointed by the government, will review these documents in advance and have the candidate correct anything that doesn't make sense. That way, there's no legalese and it won't be written in a way that nobody can understand; also, it will be short enough that people will actually make time to read it.
These documents, once finalized, will be published, by the government, into a book format, and distributed to bookstores all over the country, in much the same way that books like the September 11 report were distributed and sold to the general public. Free copies will be available at all libraries, on the Internet, to first-time voter registrants, poor people, and to whatever other groups the government deems necessary.
The availability of this information will do two very important things:
First, it will allow people to see past the bullshit of traditional campaign advertising, which generally doesn't tell anybody anything, much less serve any purpose other than making people remember someone's name, and that this person's opponent is a piece of lying, cheating rubbish. The advertising and the garbage can go on in the background, but reasonable people will buy the books, read them, and make an educated decision.
Secondly, people will be able to keep these books, and two, four, six, or however many years later, they'll be able to look at them and say, "Did this candidate for whom I voted actually do any of the things he promised, past his first day in office?" This will be great for making re-election decisions, when unsure.
Yes, there will be abuses, but in politics, everything is bullshit. Besides, it'll be great for the economy, with all the advertising moneys running all over the place by various organizations that want to screw over various other organizations.
Certainly, this means that people with less money will probably get less advertising, but did the lack of money stop things like open source software from making Microsoft scared shitless?
I say, the less laws, the better off we'll all be in every respect. And to that end, I think there should be some sort of fund set up with a nonprofit organization of lawyers, kind of like Groklaw, but for pointless, unnecessary laws. This group would dig up all kinds of laws that don't make sense anymore, or shouldn't be on the books, and it will lobby Congress to rethink these laws, remove them, modify them, etc., providing suggestions for something better. Such an organization, if well funded, would help the entire country get over a lot of crap that's on the books and probably will be forever, as we accumulate more and more and more and more and more laws.
You are quite knowledgeable. I appreciate that. Suppose the law should be changed to allow for other competition in this fashion: If you are telephone company Foobell, and telephone company Barbell has a government-granted monopoly over City X, then you, Foobell, would have the following choice:
Run your business under the existing rules using Barbell's copper.
Run your own wires all over the city and make up your own rules.
Granted, this would mean a lot of wire running all over the place, but you could lease space on the existing company's telephone poles and whatnot to put your wires there. The wire-running would be regulated in such a way that the city would not turn into a huge cobweb of telephone company wires. In some areas, if there are a lot of different companies that want to run wire, the city itself might install enough fiber optics to cover any voice, video, and data that the city might need in the next hundred years, and the telco's could lease time on those wires. Just a bunch of ideas. Yes, they would all be expensive. Yes, they would all require a lot of time and effort. But hey, it might be good for the economy... More wire needs to be produced, more contractors used, lots of fun...
I stand corrected. You have enlightened me of the errors of my ways. I will immediately delete the CLI and only use applications that require a Pentium 5, 128-bit processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, and at least 1280x1024 in 64-bit color, with hardware accelerated 3D graphics. Because you can't see a directory until you see a directory.
Whoever said Windows has a lower TCO than Linux was muttering utter bullsh*t.
I think the Open Source community, including individuals, who can donate a few dollars, small businesses, who can donate a few hundred dollars, and large businesses, who can donate thousands of dollars, should get together and produce ads very similar to the Microsoft TCO ads found in magazines that show examples of companies that saved money by switching from Linux to Windows, with very specific settings picked out so that the Linux solution will come out more expensive.
The Open Source ads will feature individual companies that saved money by using not just Linux, but Open Source in general. The idea is to showcase individual cases where a company did the math and decided to use Open Source for some or all of its needs.
These ads will point the reader to a website where very real numbers are shown, and the entire process of computing the cost of various alternatives is shown, along with enough information so the reader can see it's not bullsh*t. I actually clicked on one of those links Microsoft put on some website to read the rest of the story, and let me tell you, it was just a discussion of how they did the math, figured Windows has a lower TCO, and decided to switch away from Linux. There was no math, no details, nothing that showed just how they came to that conclusion. Sounds like a bunch of hogwash to me.
Look how many people hate Bush and claim he lied. He didn't. But enough people say that he did, so enough people believe that he did. Who said the "truth" can't be spread about Microsoft with their TCO claims?
In other news, Microsoft has just bought out id Software, and is developing a new game, codenamed Battlestar Linux. The game is said to be a combination 1st- and 3rd-person shooter based on ideas from Doom, Quake, Grand Theft Auto, and the classic Kings Quest series.
"We've developed some innovative new ideas for this game," stated Mark Davidson, project manager for the Battlestar Linux effort. "Our game will be set in an environment of post-World War 3 New York, with the city engulfed in violence from scattered rebel groups, gangs, warlords, and other nice characters. What sets this game apart from other games is a new USB we are producing that will make the gameplay feel more real. Attachments that go to a skullcap, waistband, wrist- and ankle-straps, will provide an electric shock whenever the player is 'shot' by an electrical weapon such as the raygun or cellblaster. Gas burners installed in these straps will engulf the player in real flames if the player is shot with a flamethrower. Explosives placed in a pack, worn on the player's back, will blow the player up if the player is hit with a grenade or rocket. Finally, a system of shotguns, strategically placed around the room in a surround-sound fashion, will shoot real bullets at the player when the player is hit by bullets in the game. Our effort is intended to give new meaning to the term 'virtual reality.'"
People familiar with the matter suggest the game will only be available for Linux, a first for operating system vendor Microsoft, which usually makes applications available only for the Wintel platform and for the Mac.
I have an idea: Congress should step in and create new legislation that returns the time-restricted copyright and patent protections to their original length, retroactively.
Keep the part of the law that states that any work is immediately copyrighted by its creator, even if a notice is not present, but you only get so many years, and then, that's it. It goes into the public domain.
And here's something cool: Offer an additional "extra bonus" copyright protection term, say, ten years extra, for full release of "source"... If it's music, all notation, lyrics, recordings, and other matter used in production. If it's a movie, all the original film, etc. If it's software, the source code and building scripts. Whatever it is, it must be submitted to a government agency created for the purpose a year or so before the copyright expires, and that agency will make sure that all the required materials are there. If they are, the additional "extra bonus" time will be awarded, with the materials released to the public domain when that additional term expires.
You'll find a lot of software companies running up against the copyright limit for versions they released so many years ago, and they'll be desperate for the additional time. Say it's version 9 right now, but version 1 is nearing the copyright limit... Ten years from now, when it's version 12, the complete source code for version 1 will come out. May seem like a huge lag of so many years, but UNIX was created how many years ago? Ten years ago they were saying that BSD is dying. And what the heck am I using to type this up? A Mac. Running BSD. Some of the code running in this thing, I'd bet you, is at least 20 years old. Probably crap they wrote, perfected, and never touched again. How often do you look at the code for tail?
So, yes, you could get additional time in exchange for all the source, or simply let the release go into the public domain and keep the source secret.
I could set it up so when I yell at the TV, it will increase the volume. That way, when I'm watching my right-wing extremist news, and some idiot leftist opens his mouth, I can yell at the TV, the volume will increase, so I will yell louder, so the volume will increase even more, and we can have a volume duel with me, the right-wing extremist, against some idiot leftist.
what stops a carrier from denying broadband service to an end-user who has cut the cord
What stops 7-Eleven from denying you a coffee unless you also pay for the cup? What stops a liquor store from denying you 750ml of Vodka unless you also buy the bottle that it's in? What stops a computer company from denying you a computer unless you also buy an operating system? What stops an operating system company from denying you an operating system unless you also buy the web browser, media player, and solitaire game? What stops a magazine company from denying you a magazine unless you also buy the ads it contains? What stops a printer company from denying you the use of your printer unless you buy ink cartridges?
Why should any business be forced to sell something separately that essentially needs to come in the same package, or at least be used together? The DSL needs to go over the same physical wire that the landline requires. If you don't have a landline, and don't pay for landline service, why the heck should any telephone company be forced to provide DSL over that line?
Business should be free to offer whatever the heck it wants. Consumers should be free to buy whatever the heck they want. Telephone companies have a monopoly over a particular area? In a particular area, if the cable company delivers something better, faster, and cheaper than the telephone company, then the telephone company will ultimately lose revenue, which will stimulate an improvement in the telephone company. Or get broadband through your cellphone carrier. It's not quite as fast as DSL, and not quite as cheap, but it's an alternative choice, if that's what you want.
I was really angry when Apple didn't want to use BeOS as the foundation for OSX. But BeOS by itself wasn't enough... They made mostly the right choice, except that they should have bought out Be for the code and used it in the process of making OSX, because though BeOS wasn't enough, neither was BSD. By doing that, the first version of OSX could have been where Tiger will be when it comes out, or maybe even further ahead. (Except that the user interface for much of the stuff in Tiger would still have taken a long time to create.)
Now I must say, for the record, that I am using OSX for most of my purposes now. Only the engineering stuff from work, like Autocad, Pro/E, and Mastercam, doesn't run on this thing. My boss told me that when versions of those programs become available for the Mac, the entire Windows-based network is going in the trash. This is cool, because seven years ago, when I told him to dump NT and use FreeBSD as his server system, he didn't believe that some alternative to Windows that he never heard of could get the job done at all, let alone do it better. Boy, did I prove him wrong after a while, but I had to make him a bet that if FreeBSD didn't do the job, I'd take him and his family out to dinner at his favorite restaurant, which is a very, very expensive restaurant!
Back to OSX and BeOS, though... There were a number of things about BeOS that I loved, including:
Live filesystem. In other words, the operating system knows when it puts a file somewhere, right? So why poll for that information? BeOS has hooks that allow your software to install a "monitor" on a file or directory. When something happens to that object in the filesystem, your application receives an asynchronous message, and then you can act on it. Why is this useful? Someone else in this discussion mentioned that you could load a device driver just by dropping it in the appropriate directory, without rebooting. There are other reasons. Samba, for example, has an option that monitors the contents of a directory for changes, and acts on them. You have to set up how often to monitor. Samba has to maintain an internal list. This takes up a bunch of computer time. In BeOS, a simple line of code an a handler for the event would do the trick, and waste less computer time. This was cool. And it worked on any filesystem supported by BeOS.
Attributes. This existed in BeOS long before any other OS had something like it. These things are showing up in OSX and Linux only recently. Attributes are programmable metadata that you can attach to a file. This turned the filesystem into a sort of database. The operating system had certain information that it would associate with files, such as their MIME type. This information was used to open the proper application for a file, instead of going by the file's extension. This could allow you to completely do away with extensions. Most of the time, I kept extensions on files anyway, because it was convenient for transferring them to and from other computers. But it was not necessary. You could also run queries on information, and save the query. The query could be accessed just like a directory, and it was "live" due to the previous feature I mentioned, which means that as things moved around the disk, or were created or deleted, that change would show up immediately in the query window.
The OS was just so damn fast.
It was built the way the Hurd should have been built, if it were ever built. In other words, there was the kernel, and then there were a bunch of "servers", like the input server, the network server, the window server, etc. Then, there were the "kits", or the APIs, that each server had. This meant the OS was so modular that you could conceivably remove any component and replace it with a better one, if the OS had ever gained widespread adoption.
Unfortunately, BeOS didn't fulfill all needs quite so well. Let's see a few things BSD has that BeOS doesn't:
Multiuser. The BeOS filesystem and other OS components were written to mak
In other news, a man named Gates was last seen dressed like Rambo and shooting into a crowd of spammers with a Gatling 134 minigun. "Electronic damages caused by spammers cost business billions of dollars each year in lost revenue. I was simply trying to help," stated Gates in a later interview.
Reports show that Gates began his all-out assault after receiving 10,000 emails advertising enlargement of certain organs found in male humans. This reportedly outraged Gates, who believes that his organs are already the maximum size allowed under Washington law.
135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOP/s) on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world
Microsoft just announced that NNSA is the fastest because it uses the upcoming version of Microsoft Office XP 2005, which offers faster startup times and a talking paperclip optimized for modern processors.
The Japanese language makes a lot of things like this possible, or at least a lot easier than in other languages. In Japanese, it doesn't take as many characters to describe a sentence as it does, for example, in English. (This is one of the reasons all kinds of IM 1337 5p33k has developed, like "c u l8er" or "brb".) This means that the small screens on cell phones are large enough to facilitate many innovative uses.
Here in the United States, people seem more content to haul around laptops, like this Powerbook I'm using right now, and read novels or access enterprise data from Internet cafes with wireless access. By the way, I ain't Japanese, but I have several friends who are.
This is the greatest thing to come to the Apple platform since sliced cheese. I also heard a rumor that Apple is collaborating with Tiger to create a golf came, to be included in the next version of OSX, codenamed Woods.
This is most likely an April Fools joke, but if it's true:
I bet you Bill Gates' fortune that Microsoft will deliberately insert all kinds of intermittent bugs into the Linux version of the software so that it will crash ever so often, lose records, and do all kinds of other fun things that will make business managers quite happy. Then, when those happy business managers call Microsoft to find out why the data is getting lost, Microsoft will tell them that the Linux platform contains bugs that cause the database server to malfunction.
Then, they will sell that company a bunch of Windows licenses.
And then, you'll see an ad in the magazine that says, "How did one company lower its TCO? It switched from Linux to Windows." And then describe how this company used to have problems with the database records getting screwed up and losing millions over it, and as soon as they switched to Windows and started rebooting their servers every four seconds, the problems went totally away, and using Microsoft Reboot Accelerator Server 2005, the reboots only take eight seconds each time, so their uptime is also 900% better (and the fine print will read that it's 900% better as compared to the same package without Microsoft Reboot Accelerator Server 2005).
And companies will switch from Linux to Windows in droves, and open source will be outlawed at pain of death.
heh... try running Apple hardware and software. Then you'll understand. It's so damn good, especially compared with that Losedows crap, but even compared to perfectly good software like Linux and FreeBSD when used in a desktop or laptop situation, that when some new feature comes out that makes things even better than before... well, these products really spoil you, I'll tell you that.
What Novell really needs to do is merge unique features from Netware into Linux, and license much of Apple's proprietary code at any price. This will allow applications made for the Mac to compile and run pretty cleanly on Novell Linux, thereby differentiating Novell from the other distros.
Dammit... The auction said it was the newest version, new in box, and all that good stuff. I bought it on ebay. As soon as I get home I'm gonna post here the ebay id of the jerk who sold it to me as "new in box"... The asshole didn't say it was two years old.
The only problem with using an Apple box as an embedded platform is this: By the time you release your product, based on the Mini, Apple will discontinue it and start developing something else.
The iMac got replaced. The Mac Cube is long gone. The lampshade is on its way out. Apple constantly innovates and comes out with something new. In embedded systems, you need something that probably isn't as exciting as an Apple system, but that will remain stable and available for years to come, with no or minimal changes. Otherwise, you are asking for trouble.
As NASA said, test what you fly and fly what you test. You can't design something, change the computer at the last minute, and expect it to be fine, even if all the software still works. There are electrical noises, temperature considerations, EMI, RFI, and all kinds of other fun things that will keep you chasing shadows for months. Embedded projects fail over this kind of thing.
I would LOVE to use some Apple box in an embedded system... but Apple would have to release such a box as one that is INTENDED for embedded applications, and they would need to promise continued production for a number of years.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush didn't lie. Everyone in the middle east knows that Hussein had and used those weapons.
Nah. Forget plasmonics, fiber optics, quantum computing, and all this other junk... Let's make computers that are 100% mechanical, but built out of MEMS. Tiny gears, levers, pistons, pendulums, and other mechanisms will perform computations not previously possible with electronic computers. Better yet, let's return to the days of relay logic, but using nanotechnology to built microscopic relays. Good idea.
The danger is that this thing will learn the wrong things by reading the Internet.
It will know every sexual technique known to man. It will learn to commit all kinds of hate crimes. Other stuff like that. Or, hundreds of people might provide good vs. evil inputs to this thing as it learns.
oh you just wait. regulation will eventually make it so that we can't do anything without filing a form XB-230U-JJKG-23473842389-KLOW374938748275-234-2352 -6536-234 with a government agency like the Department of Freedom of Food Selection and Consumption Freedom Department, to ask permission to eat a piece of bread, and wait about six years for approval. Papers will have to be filed each day, beginning six years or so before a baby is conceived, so that there won't be a lapse where someone is not allowed to eat. And you'd better remember to file this form each day, or you will eventually have a lapse, and you'll go hungry. And this form will take approximately 100 times the amount of time to fill out as all the IRS crap for your taxes. (By the way, if you haven't done that yet, better get crackin', cuz they're due in less than two weeks.)
Congratulations, you summed up the Libertarian platform on campagin finance quite well. Funny... I am a Republican. But I agree with several Libertarian ideas.
And how are you doing to define what is campaign finance? Money that changes hands? Money someone gives to someone who is running for office? What if that person has an organization that does all his campaign stuff? Do you have to ban giving money to any organizations owned by someone running for office? What if that person owns a nonprofit that feeds hungry children? Is it illegal to give money to that organization? What if the organization that does the campaign stuff isn't owned at all by the person who is running for office? What if the party with which he is affiliated owns that organization? Then is it illegal to give money to organizations owned by the party with which a candidate is affiliated? Then what if those organizations are nonprofit charities that help abused children and have nothing to do with marketing an election? How do you define having "nothing to do" with an election? What if some other organization wants to state something positive or negative about a candidate? What if that organization is a business that makes inkjet printers and the candidate wants to outlaw printers, and they want to tell the public about it? How do you define, legally, who is involved with an election, with a candidate, with marketing a candidate, with funding election marketing, etc., etc., etc., etc...?
Any kind of law you make up about campaigning is going to get so complicated that it will wipe freedom of speech right off the books. The simpler thing is to get rid of all this crap. Ok, so you want to make sure North Korea won't advertise in favor of Bush because your family lives in North Korea and you're afraid they'll get liberated because then your in-laws will want to come over? The way I see it, people are generally smart enough to see past bullshit like that. Observe the previous election. Bush-bashers galore, and yet Bush won. It's because the other candidate (who was it again?) was a blooming idiot.
However, only one law will be put into place that does make sense: Every candidate must create a report, written in plain English, that explains what that candidate intends to do during his term in office, if he gets elected. A panel of ten people or so, appointed by the government, will review these documents in advance and have the candidate correct anything that doesn't make sense. That way, there's no legalese and it won't be written in a way that nobody can understand; also, it will be short enough that people will actually make time to read it.
These documents, once finalized, will be published, by the government, into a book format, and distributed to bookstores all over the country, in much the same way that books like the September 11 report were distributed and sold to the general public. Free copies will be available at all libraries, on the Internet, to first-time voter registrants, poor people, and to whatever other groups the government deems necessary.
The availability of this information will do two very important things:
First, it will allow people to see past the bullshit of traditional campaign advertising, which generally doesn't tell anybody anything, much less serve any purpose other than making people remember someone's name, and that this person's opponent is a piece of lying, cheating rubbish. The advertising and the garbage can go on in the background, but reasonable people will buy the books, read them, and make an educated decision.
Secondly, people will be able to keep these books, and two, four, six, or however many years later, they'll be able to look at them and say, "Did this candidate for whom I voted actually do any of the things he promised, past his first day in office?" This will be great for making re-election decisions, when unsure.
Yes, there will be abuses, but in politics, everything is bullshit. Besides, it'll be great for the economy, with all the advertising moneys running all over the place by various organizations that want to screw over various other organizations.
Certainly, this means that people with less money will probably get less advertising, but did the lack of money stop things like open source software from making Microsoft scared shitless?
I say, the less laws, the better off we'll all be in every respect. And to that end, I think there should be some sort of fund set up with a nonprofit organization of lawyers, kind of like Groklaw, but for pointless, unnecessary laws. This group would dig up all kinds of laws that don't make sense anymore, or shouldn't be on the books, and it will lobby Congress to rethink these laws, remove them, modify them, etc., providing suggestions for something better. Such an organization, if well funded, would help the entire country get over a lot of crap that's on the books and probably will be forever, as we accumulate more and more and more and more and more laws.
- Run your business under the existing rules using Barbell's copper.
- Run your own wires all over the city and make up your own rules.
Granted, this would mean a lot of wire running all over the place, but you could lease space on the existing company's telephone poles and whatnot to put your wires there. The wire-running would be regulated in such a way that the city would not turn into a huge cobweb of telephone company wires. In some areas, if there are a lot of different companies that want to run wire, the city itself might install enough fiber optics to cover any voice, video, and data that the city might need in the next hundred years, and the telco's could lease time on those wires. Just a bunch of ideas. Yes, they would all be expensive. Yes, they would all require a lot of time and effort. But hey, it might be good for the economy... More wire needs to be produced, more contractors used, lots of fun...I stand corrected. You have enlightened me of the errors of my ways. I will immediately delete the CLI and only use applications that require a Pentium 5, 128-bit processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, and at least 1280x1024 in 64-bit color, with hardware accelerated 3D graphics. Because you can't see a directory until you see a directory.
I think the Open Source community, including individuals, who can donate a few dollars, small businesses, who can donate a few hundred dollars, and large businesses, who can donate thousands of dollars, should get together and produce ads very similar to the Microsoft TCO ads found in magazines that show examples of companies that saved money by switching from Linux to Windows, with very specific settings picked out so that the Linux solution will come out more expensive.
The Open Source ads will feature individual companies that saved money by using not just Linux, but Open Source in general. The idea is to showcase individual cases where a company did the math and decided to use Open Source for some or all of its needs.
These ads will point the reader to a website where very real numbers are shown, and the entire process of computing the cost of various alternatives is shown, along with enough information so the reader can see it's not bullsh*t. I actually clicked on one of those links Microsoft put on some website to read the rest of the story, and let me tell you, it was just a discussion of how they did the math, figured Windows has a lower TCO, and decided to switch away from Linux. There was no math, no details, nothing that showed just how they came to that conclusion. Sounds like a bunch of hogwash to me.
Look how many people hate Bush and claim he lied. He didn't. But enough people say that he did, so enough people believe that he did. Who said the "truth" can't be spread about Microsoft with their TCO claims?
"We've developed some innovative new ideas for this game," stated Mark Davidson, project manager for the Battlestar Linux effort. "Our game will be set in an environment of post-World War 3 New York, with the city engulfed in violence from scattered rebel groups, gangs, warlords, and other nice characters. What sets this game apart from other games is a new USB we are producing that will make the gameplay feel more real. Attachments that go to a skullcap, waistband, wrist- and ankle-straps, will provide an electric shock whenever the player is 'shot' by an electrical weapon such as the raygun or cellblaster. Gas burners installed in these straps will engulf the player in real flames if the player is shot with a flamethrower. Explosives placed in a pack, worn on the player's back, will blow the player up if the player is hit with a grenade or rocket. Finally, a system of shotguns, strategically placed around the room in a surround-sound fashion, will shoot real bullets at the player when the player is hit by bullets in the game. Our effort is intended to give new meaning to the term 'virtual reality.'"
People familiar with the matter suggest the game will only be available for Linux, a first for operating system vendor Microsoft, which usually makes applications available only for the Wintel platform and for the Mac.
Keep the part of the law that states that any work is immediately copyrighted by its creator, even if a notice is not present, but you only get so many years, and then, that's it. It goes into the public domain.
And here's something cool: Offer an additional "extra bonus" copyright protection term, say, ten years extra, for full release of "source"... If it's music, all notation, lyrics, recordings, and other matter used in production. If it's a movie, all the original film, etc. If it's software, the source code and building scripts. Whatever it is, it must be submitted to a government agency created for the purpose a year or so before the copyright expires, and that agency will make sure that all the required materials are there. If they are, the additional "extra bonus" time will be awarded, with the materials released to the public domain when that additional term expires.
You'll find a lot of software companies running up against the copyright limit for versions they released so many years ago, and they'll be desperate for the additional time. Say it's version 9 right now, but version 1 is nearing the copyright limit... Ten years from now, when it's version 12, the complete source code for version 1 will come out. May seem like a huge lag of so many years, but UNIX was created how many years ago? Ten years ago they were saying that BSD is dying. And what the heck am I using to type this up? A Mac. Running BSD. Some of the code running in this thing, I'd bet you, is at least 20 years old. Probably crap they wrote, perfected, and never touched again. How often do you look at the code for tail?
So, yes, you could get additional time in exchange for all the source, or simply let the release go into the public domain and keep the source secret.
By the way, Bush told the truth.
What stops 7-Eleven from denying you a coffee unless you also pay for the cup? What stops a liquor store from denying you 750ml of Vodka unless you also buy the bottle that it's in? What stops a computer company from denying you a computer unless you also buy an operating system? What stops an operating system company from denying you an operating system unless you also buy the web browser, media player, and solitaire game? What stops a magazine company from denying you a magazine unless you also buy the ads it contains? What stops a printer company from denying you the use of your printer unless you buy ink cartridges?
Why should any business be forced to sell something separately that essentially needs to come in the same package, or at least be used together? The DSL needs to go over the same physical wire that the landline requires. If you don't have a landline, and don't pay for landline service, why the heck should any telephone company be forced to provide DSL over that line?
Business should be free to offer whatever the heck it wants. Consumers should be free to buy whatever the heck they want. Telephone companies have a monopoly over a particular area? In a particular area, if the cable company delivers something better, faster, and cheaper than the telephone company, then the telephone company will ultimately lose revenue, which will stimulate an improvement in the telephone company. Or get broadband through your cellphone carrier. It's not quite as fast as DSL, and not quite as cheap, but it's an alternative choice, if that's what you want.
Now I must say, for the record, that I am using OSX for most of my purposes now. Only the engineering stuff from work, like Autocad, Pro/E, and Mastercam, doesn't run on this thing. My boss told me that when versions of those programs become available for the Mac, the entire Windows-based network is going in the trash. This is cool, because seven years ago, when I told him to dump NT and use FreeBSD as his server system, he didn't believe that some alternative to Windows that he never heard of could get the job done at all, let alone do it better. Boy, did I prove him wrong after a while, but I had to make him a bet that if FreeBSD didn't do the job, I'd take him and his family out to dinner at his favorite restaurant, which is a very, very expensive restaurant!
Back to OSX and BeOS, though... There were a number of things about BeOS that I loved, including:
Unfortunately, BeOS didn't fulfill all needs quite so well. Let's see a few things BSD has that BeOS doesn't:
Reports show that Gates began his all-out assault after receiving 10,000 emails advertising enlargement of certain organs found in male humans. This reportedly outraged Gates, who believes that his organs are already the maximum size allowed under Washington law.
Microsoft just announced that NNSA is the fastest because it uses the upcoming version of Microsoft Office XP 2005, which offers faster startup times and a talking paperclip optimized for modern processors.
Here in the United States, people seem more content to haul around laptops, like this Powerbook I'm using right now, and read novels or access enterprise data from Internet cafes with wireless access. By the way, I ain't Japanese, but I have several friends who are.
This is the greatest thing to come to the Apple platform since sliced cheese. I also heard a rumor that Apple is collaborating with Tiger to create a golf came, to be included in the next version of OSX, codenamed Woods.
I bet you Bill Gates' fortune that Microsoft will deliberately insert all kinds of intermittent bugs into the Linux version of the software so that it will crash ever so often, lose records, and do all kinds of other fun things that will make business managers quite happy. Then, when those happy business managers call Microsoft to find out why the data is getting lost, Microsoft will tell them that the Linux platform contains bugs that cause the database server to malfunction.
Then, they will sell that company a bunch of Windows licenses.
And then, you'll see an ad in the magazine that says, "How did one company lower its TCO? It switched from Linux to Windows." And then describe how this company used to have problems with the database records getting screwed up and losing millions over it, and as soon as they switched to Windows and started rebooting their servers every four seconds, the problems went totally away, and using Microsoft Reboot Accelerator Server 2005, the reboots only take eight seconds each time, so their uptime is also 900% better (and the fine print will read that it's 900% better as compared to the same package without Microsoft Reboot Accelerator Server 2005).
And companies will switch from Linux to Windows in droves, and open source will be outlawed at pain of death.
So it shall be written. So it shall be done.
Heh... I like how the list of different Windows flavors just keeps getting longer...
RidiculousAnd, yes, I definitely shed a tear. :-)
What Novell really needs to do is merge unique features from Netware into Linux, and license much of Apple's proprietary code at any price. This will allow applications made for the Mac to compile and run pretty cleanly on Novell Linux, thereby differentiating Novell from the other distros.
Dammit... The auction said it was the newest version, new in box, and all that good stuff. I bought it on ebay. As soon as I get home I'm gonna post here the ebay id of the jerk who sold it to me as "new in box"... The asshole didn't say it was two years old.
The iMac got replaced. The Mac Cube is long gone. The lampshade is on its way out. Apple constantly innovates and comes out with something new. In embedded systems, you need something that probably isn't as exciting as an Apple system, but that will remain stable and available for years to come, with no or minimal changes. Otherwise, you are asking for trouble.
As NASA said, test what you fly and fly what you test. You can't design something, change the computer at the last minute, and expect it to be fine, even if all the software still works. There are electrical noises, temperature considerations, EMI, RFI, and all kinds of other fun things that will keep you chasing shadows for months. Embedded projects fail over this kind of thing.
I would LOVE to use some Apple box in an embedded system... but Apple would have to release such a box as one that is INTENDED for embedded applications, and they would need to promise continued production for a number of years.