Check the credentials of the people questioned and you realize that this article is heavily pro Linux.
1. Phil Roberts, systems manager for a network installer, ( anti )
2. Clive Longbottom, strategy analyst at Strategy Partners ( anti )
3. Bernie Dodwell, business development manager for System Security specialist Integralis Group ( anti )
4. Unix expert Malcolm Beattie, systems programmer for Oxford University Computer Service ( pro )
This is like coming out with some claim about the thrust required to launch a 15 tun object into space and having bunch of automechanics and a graphic artist give one view then getting another from the chief launch engineer at NASA.
Simply put the fact that the only Linux supporter comes down strongly against the other 3 and also has the best standing to make such claims speaks wonders. For those who don't know You can't name a top ten list of Universities without Oxford on it. Some of us would call it the #1 university on this planet.
This article has an old feel to it. Especially where it talks about OSs for ia64. That was the state of affairs in december of 1999. Things have shifted somewhat with Turbo Linux releasing a full distribution for Ia64.
Sure it's only Alpha quality but the fact that it exists and includes all the major parts of a Linux system. The web server runs fast enough and the file server flies. The compiler exists and works but has not been optimized nearly enough. GCC's strength has never been speed anyway, just cross platform consistency.
Apart from that this was a decent and well researched article. Frankly I think it was either just published late or Slashdot waited a few months to pick it up.
That's what I mean by breaking mathematical laws. They wold be selling Win2K to themselvs for a negetive figure in order to install the extra hardware and stay competitive.
Also removing some of the functionality of Win2K will actualy INCREAS the cost to them since it means more development work.
Microsoft can only compete with this by defying such fundamental laws as "Thou shalt try to make a profit on everything you sell."
In this case MS is coming into the game at a minimum $300 handicap since that's the cost in Win2K licenses it will have to eat before lousing money on that 32 meg RAM gap and the 200 Meg storage gap. ( that's how much extra you need to make it useful ).
Set top box, Computing appliance, Game console, MP3 jukebox. The names vary but in the end the functionality will not. MS will have to "pull an Amazon" and defy a few fundamental laws of mathematics in order to make the X box fly. However according to Cringly they probably have no intention of ever selling them in volume. His contention that it exists only to "confuse the market makes sense.
As for the "i600" Ingram is a volume business. They don't know how to sell small numbers of high priced crap. As such they will probably be able to make a profit selling these boxes at $200 to $300 in volumes of 50k to 100k per week. At that rate you can tune your manufacturing processes to make the thing profitable.
Note that it just says "600MHz Processor". This might be another Linus machine ( I.e. One with Linux as software and Cruso for Hardware ).
Actually this won't do squat to help us. It only protects us in those instances where we created and patented the specific invention in question before anybody else.
Unfortunately these overly broad and near meaningless Internet patents, Business module patents and software patents that are stirring up trouble would still be a problem. How many OSS diehards would have thought of patenting "One click shopping" 2 years ago? I am willing to bet that even the geeks at Amazon who implemented this code didn't think of patenting it until the patent lawyers Bezos higherd went looking through the lab for anything add.
However in the event that we did have a cheap Patent on "One click shopping" we could still be sued for abusing the "Affiliates patent". In that event we would have no defense but to search for prior art to the Affiliate program. Just as if we had no patents at all.
However if we had a full patent on something ridicules like "threaded discussion on a web page" and someone decided to sue us for violating some unrelated patent ( Like "One click" ) we would only have to find evidence of them using Zope's "SquishDot" and the case is over. Out of court settlement with a written agreement to never file patent suite against any free software developer.
This is where Amazon can show weather it's a jungle or just a big river. Put the ridicules patents it owns into a pool managed by the FSF and LI. Ask every member of LI to contribute some patents to the pool. Then we can come back and talk about being attacked. Simply put it's not that difficult to assemble a set of 50 to 100 ridicules patents that every new or dynamic business on the planet violates one of. ( Those that have done nothing new for 30 years are protected since everything they do is prior art:).
There is a reason the GPL speaks in the overly broad language of "Linking" rather than the debatable "Patch".
Basically a Linked program can be anything from a few bytes up to several megs. The rule of thumb is that If you require the source code to produce your patch then the patch must be GPLed too. If you can produce it simply by bending the binary then you haven't used the GPLed source code at all.
However if challenged you will be called upon to prove that. If there are any wealthy suckers on this board I have a bet for you.
The best part of the whole thing is what they said when asked about being "compatible" with all the different Linux distributions. The answer amounted to the following ( not an exact quote but pretty much the meaning is intact ).
[metaquote] "We will test on a couple of popular distribs and tell customers to use that and it WILL work. It's no different from testing a Win32 application because technically there are several different Win32 OS out there that are not compatible."
"One nice advantage of Linux is that we can negotiate to have our Runtimes distributed with the OS so that a developer on Linux will be able to send just the 50K file with his software on it to customers. we tried to make arrangements like this with MS and it didn't work." [/metaquote].
I think our Free Development tools are entrenched enough that new closed and commercial tools like this will serve to widen the overall number of people developing for Linux rather than reduce the number of users on the GPLed tools. There is very little by way of core apps that hasn't already tied itself to Open Source tools anyway so who cares what the latest toys or custom business apps use? Running on Linux is good enough.
This is nothing new. Remember it was many YEARS after the release of the 386 MS came out with a version of Windows that used any 32bit features. For those who don't remember it was Windows 3.1 and the features were performance tweaks for virtual memory. It would still run on a 286 if you knew how to detune the setup.
All the apps for the platform were 16 bit however. It wasn't until yet more years that they actually released a 32 bit OS. It was Windows NT and though it had some 16 Bit stuff in there it qualified as a 32 bit OS even in early release.
MS will sell a 32 bit OS or even that hybrid 16/32 bit Win98 or WinME on Itanium and the market will lap it up. Perhaps not as quickly or in the volumes that Linux will enjoy but enough to be noticed.
As for Monterey. I have herd a lot of posturing from the people producing it and some talk from people who promise to ship it on boxes but I have yet to here customers who say "We want to use Monterey on Itanium to run our business". Why would they ? It's a compliantly unknown quantity. In the Jargon file it qualifies as Vaporware. I.e. Nobody has seen even an Alpha build.
This just indicates where Linux is in the IA64 marketplace. Way out ahead for those who just returned from Vega.
Adaptec has high bandwidth Hard drive controllers to sell on the x86 market. They believe iNTEL's claim that this will be Itanium in just a few short months. Therefore they must make this available for Itanium and support it as much as possible.
Since there is only one complete OS that's correctly capable of doing real work on Itanium today; they really have no choice. See this story for details about Turbo Linux on Itanium. This isn't just a kernel or a compiler but a full, functional Linux distribution. The closest thing anyone has to a Linux distribution ( in terms of included Apps ) is Microsoft's "Back Office suite".
As for this IBM chip. What took you all so long ? SMP on a single chip is an obvious advance. When you vastly increase the amount of circuits on a chip as happens between a Celeron and a P3 without a matching increase in performance something has to give. Why not make that the number of cores on the chip? I hope this isn't patented because it really is obvious.
This brings up something I have been thinking about with the Cruise. If you can convert 32 bit instructions to 128 bit meta instructions and have the finished product run as fast as on the genuine 32 bit CPU.
What if the same technique is applied to an SMP setup in such a way that the software sees the processors as a single CPU. Right now this kind of abstraction is handled by the Operating system and except on the Mainframe that is very inefficient. To the point where 2X400MHz CPUs is a whole lot faster than 4X200MHz.
Now if the whole thing including say 6 CPUs and 2 Megs of cache were put on a single chip at 500MHz to 2GHz, how fast would it be ? My guess is that this could easily be the fastest low end server or workstation chip by a good margin.
It has been said that the idea of money changing people has always been a myth. That what changes when you have money is how many of your own wishes you can fulfill.
In other words a jackass with a few billion is still a jackass and cool geak is still a cool geak. Most people have no desire to actually spend a billion dollars on themselves. Most billionaires think of it as taking care of some "basic stuff" like securing the future of the grand kids to the 5th generation or so with "safe" investments. A few homes and some cars, maybe a jet.
After that you look back and you still haven't cracked the Billion Dollar mark yet. That levees you with some money you could literally give away. However most of the current crop of Billionaires grew up with a distaste for the old stile charities. Some won't even give to the Red Cross.
So you have the same creativity that got them all wealthy in the 1st place being brought to beer on the problem. This is why Bill has a building named after him at an Ivy League school. He also sponsors more scholarships than anyone keeps track of. Including one on African History.
This goy is being a little more creative than most. He is thinking: What future is there for the young person who after high school can hold a job but has no way of affording university ? Sure in the US it may not be that tough but there are other countries where the best jobs you can land on a high school education pay a fraction of the tuition for university. A classic catch 22 that leaves only the wealthy and the few scholarship winners getting farther education.
An online university, once it's up and running will cost a lot to keep going. Especially in the area of content creation. The upside of this is that it can be "affiliated" with other brick and mortar school so a lecture presented at Princeton can be available in MP3 at the site. That will still cost money but not nearly as much as paying these professors to deliver the lecture to a camera and mike alone.
The really tough part will be the books. Most new books, in fact everything written for the past 80 years is still copyrighted. A few works out of that are available online. This school may be in a position to negotiate with those professors who still own the copyrights.
For this one there is a short anser and a very short anser.
The short one is that if you can get hold of every single author and they all agree to the new license it doesn't matter what the old license or the new license are. The change wold happen. This happened with KISDN when the authors changed from GPL to a proprietary, per user, per CPU etc... license. Latter after seeing how small the market was and that others wold simply continue building the GPLed version they switched back.
However the change wold have no effect on already released software. If you release something the depends heavily or lightly on a piece of Free Software then the free software is relicensed as something you can't use ( I.e. from LGPL to SCSL ) you must either start from scratch or consider the free code abandoned and find a new maintainer for it ( yourself if you can handle the extra work ).
As for proprietary work going open source that is even simpler. When you work for a company and collect a salary you are essentially selling them full rights to any code you write on the job. If at any time for any reason they feel the need to change the license on that code they don't even have to consult you. If you no longer work for them you will have to here about it on SlashDot just like the rest of us.
The very short anser is that; Yes, the authors can change without contacting anyone who didn't write code and that wold not be retroactive in any way.
This is just a hunch, but don't you get something for those taxes ? Like say good roads and free ( or subsidized ) basic services. Taxation for it's own sake is bad. That's not what you have.
BTW : About that 100% - 120% import duty. What figure is it charged on ? What you paid for the car, What the industry catalog ( who's name I can't remember ) values it at or what customes thinks it can sell for ? Here we use the highest of the 3 figures and it's usually the last one by about 3X.
Also a car doesn't need to be very big to go over the 100% mark. Very few American vehicles don't. A Corolla is about borderline.
Trust me. The US dose not do much brain draining from any country. Rather the country has to chase it's people away and in Jamaica's case the US just happens to offer the best deal for a migrant.
1: Shortest, and hence cheapest journey ( except for Cuba which doesn't need to import labor and most wouldn't want ).
2: Fast moving economy. Lots of new jobs every day for the aggressive job hunter ( When you land you have to find something before your cash runs out ).
3: High salaries. If Jamaica offered 1/2 of what the US did most immigrants would never have left. Around here you need a Collage degree to earn $540K per year. In the US that's what you get for flipping burgers. ( 540K J$ per year == U$250 per weak ).
If any of these things were not available we would be going elsware. Even then the Racism in the US is enough to make many Jamaicans look elsware. I.e. most have never been called "Niger" until landing there and often wind up breaking some skinhead in half shortly after. Like most people we would rather avoid violence.
Most people will stay home for a hell of a lot less than the travel for. Why would you want to leave comfortable weather ( to you ) and a familiar culture? Simply, put you don't.
BTW : The US doesn't encourage Jamaican immigrants. Anyone who has ever been to a visa interview here or been searched in Miami airport is left with the distinct impression that they don't even want us to visit.
Sure there is more to it than just the taxes. Economies are way too complex for anything to have a single cause. The Tax regime is however a major factor. The governments habit of planing in 3 month increments ( at best ) is another.
As for what we produce and earn. Tourism is the biggest earner. They come for sunshine and Reggae music. The Ganja, prostitutes and long cocked gigaloes have nothing to do with it.
Bauxite ( raw material for aluminum ) is big. Coffee is huge but we don't produce or export nearly enough of it ( Government bloat at work ).
The single largest source of foreign exchange coming into the country right now is simply classified as "money transfers". I.e. Western Union moves more money than any hotel chain or bauxite mine. This money is mostly from Jamaicans overseas taking care of the family back home. It turns out that the IRS as classed Jamaicans as one of the wealthiest ethnic gropes in the US, right next to the jews and no; for you cynics drug dealers don't pay taxes and are all rated as unemployed and broke by the IRS.
How many people here have a Jamaican coworker or snack at a Jamaican owned business etc... ? Probably a disproportionately large number, since this is a very small country. At 2.7 Million most of your cities are bigger:)
In other words our biggest export is skilled labor.
PS : Other places with huge taxes ( a few european countries come to mind ) guarantee, and deliver near flawless roads, free health care, subsidized public transport an efficient justice system and public education that leaves the wealthy without much reason to use private schools.
If you are in any doubt as to what that dose to an economy you need look no farther than Jamaica. Right now we carry a heavy tax burden. Our government is still trying to figure out new ways to bleed money from the economy. These include;
25% income tax
15% sales tax
40% import duty on consumer items ( like cloths ).
20% Duty on trucks
40% to 280% on cars ( depending on the CC rating. There are around 3 Cadilacs in kingston:)
1/2 the cost of gasoline and electricity are tax.
In fact the only sensible thing is that most computer equipment attracts only the 15% sales tax and books and magazines of all types are tax free.
What dose this do to an economy ?
17% to 35% unemployment ( depending on which figures you trust )
Devaluation ( from J$5 to U$1 in 1989 down to J$42 to U$1 now )
Low tax revenue. The cost of servicing the government debt actually exceeds the total tax revenue. Seriously, the old concept that "the more tax you charge the less you collect is true.
If you Americans want to follow the same path then go right ahead. Tax everything and tax it heavily. Maybe after a few decades of such abuse you will drop into the same hole as we are.
BTW : Our government has not figured out how to tax eComerse yet anyway.
Actually Public Domain is a bad idea since it doesn't let the author disclaim liability or protect his good name in any way.
I.e. If I release foo as Public Domain and you use it improperly to cause massive damage, I can be sued. If you create a broken modification or even a reimplimentation with the same name I look bad and can't do anything but cry fowl on the net.
This is why 90% of Public Domain software I have seen was produced by the US government. If you have a Million soldiers on call you don't need protection of any kind:).
The other 10% has fortunately not attracted enough notice to get the authors into trouble. My advise is that if you want to just give stuff away with no strings attached use the new BSD license.
Lets face it. The Chinese government is many things. Repressive and Brutal come to mind. However they are not hypocritical. They insist on blocking "politically dangerous" information from coming into the country or being distributed widely.
All they have done is move that policy online. Why should they even think about blocking porn ? It has precisely 0 effect on politics if you leave it alone. It's just people looking at pictures and reading pointless stories. If they tried to block porn *that* would become a political issue and one more battle to fight against their own people.
Contrast that which the US where you have legislators trying to impose unworkable censorship on adults in public libraries. Forcing a library to install a piece of software that will essentially block a random list of sites is stupid. When that list includes the whole "geocities.com" domain you are way over into the "you little citizens shouldn't talk to each other" territory.
At least in my country the politicians don't even bother to try. They only keep the onenforced and unenforceable laws against porn, buggy and prostitution as one more way to prosecute rapists and child molesters.
I.e. It's a lot easier to prove he was taking pictures of the little girls privates than that he touched her.
Which of the three is worse is a tough call to make. However China killing it's citizens for trivial things paints them as the worst of this bad lot.
This software blocks access to sites that criticize it under fraudulent reasons. This is enough to validate a suite for slander.
The obvious defense of course will be that they didn't block it deliberately which is why it is necessary to sue simultaneously for consumer deception. Any Australian taxpayer can file such a suite.
These people are caught between a rock and a hard place if you want to squeeze them. All you have to do is bang them around in court since they have no legs to stand on and get a settlement that says "we will only market to home users and actively discourage legislation that forces us on libraries and ISPs."
Time 3:35 PM Friday afternoon. Place Managers Office.
Manager: Mr. Johnson, I was to have done this report two weeks ago but it slipped me and now I have a priority 1 assignment to take care of in our Caribbean branch ( carnival on the beach ).
Johnson: Ohhhu.
Manager: I need for you to complete it for me.
Johnson: I'll get on it 1st thing monday morning.
Manager: That's when my boss is expecting it.
Johnson: Well I can't come in this weekend. It's our anniversary and Cindy ( his wife ) even sent the kids to grandma.
Manager: Ohh you will be able to find some time to look at it between your celebrations. Congratulations. By the way, how long has it been now?
Johnson: 7 years, but I won't be...
Manager: Good. See you on Monday.
Johnson: But the kids have the computer. They want to surf the net and stuff.
Manager: WHAT? Do you think that's why we gave it to you ? Here, I'll give you a little bonus to cover the gas so you can go get it...
/Johnson** (Breaks out in tears and collapses on the flour.)
AMD's idea of "introducing a 1GHz chip" is that you can go to gw2k.com , order a PC with that chip and expect it to be delivered in a few days or weeks.
iNTEL's idea is that there are a few sample chips for manufactures to practice tweaking motherboards.
AMD has sent chips to the larger retail stores and they should be on the shelf at Comp USSR soon ( if not already ).
iNTEL will be selling Gigahertz chips retail in a matter of months at best.
These people define release in vastly different ways and it will take your typical PC user a few more years to work out the difference. As for me personally, I am just happy that this will hammer the prices of the Celeron or K6-2 I can actually afford farther into the cheap range.
Yes, but all three of the posts I quoted are clearly talking about making law de jure. Of course legislation in one country or state potentially affects people living elsewhere. Just like environmental policy in the Caribbean affects the water I drink. But you don't see Jamaica offering me representation in their government, like the original poster feels he's being unfairly denied in the Virginia legislature.
Many years ago someone in high office was asked to explain why people vote. After much consideration he distilled it to an "Enlightened Self Interests".
The representation Jamaicans have in some parts of the US comes from the huge numbers of Jamaican with dual Citizenship living in some communities. Our interests generally don't stray far from what Black Americans want so it's not noticed as a "Jamaican Lobby". It's there though.
There are 2 aspects to this law. One is what parts of the license can be enforced in court and the other is what technical changes can be made to the actual code.
A license which is only acceptable under UCITA will be unenforceable in Jamaican court and you would have a hard time prosecuting a Jamaican for violating it here. Therefore the 1st aspect isn't such a great concern.
A "remote shutdown" backdoor is another matter. If there is some way to get it to work over significant distances ( say between washington and Virginia ) then It can also be made to work here. This would give an american company the right to hide behind the Virginia courts and enforce UCITA in places where it is clearly illegal.
Remember Noriaga ? He was violating american law but Panama didn't seam to mind. The US sent the troops in and dragged him to trial in a US court then sent him to an American prison.
Slashdot Mirror
Check the credentials of the people questioned and you realize that this article is heavily pro Linux.
1. Phil Roberts, systems manager for a network installer, ( anti )
2. Clive Longbottom, strategy analyst at Strategy Partners ( anti )
3. Bernie Dodwell, business development manager for System Security specialist Integralis Group ( anti )
4. Unix expert Malcolm Beattie, systems programmer for Oxford University Computer Service ( pro )
This is like coming out with some claim about the thrust required to launch a 15 tun object into space and having bunch of automechanics and a graphic artist give one view then getting another from the chief launch engineer at NASA.
Simply put the fact that the only Linux supporter comes down strongly against the other 3 and also has the best standing to make such claims speaks wonders. For those who don't know You can't name a top ten list of Universities without Oxford on it. Some of us would call it the #1 university on this planet.
This article has an old feel to it. Especially where it talks about OSs for ia64. That was the state of affairs in december of 1999. Things have shifted somewhat with Turbo Linux releasing a full distribution for Ia64.
Sure it's only Alpha quality but the fact that it exists and includes all the major parts of a Linux system. The web server runs fast enough and the file server flies. The compiler exists and works but has not been optimized nearly enough. GCC's strength has never been speed anyway, just cross platform consistency.
Apart from that this was a decent and well researched article. Frankly I think it was either just published late or Slashdot waited a few months to pick it up.
That's what I mean by breaking mathematical laws. They wold be selling Win2K to themselvs for a negetive figure in order to install the extra hardware and stay competitive.
Also removing some of the functionality of Win2K will actualy INCREAS the cost to them since it means more development work.
In this case MS is coming into the game at a minimum $300 handicap since that's the cost in Win2K licenses it will have to eat before lousing money on that 32 meg RAM gap and the 200 Meg storage gap. ( that's how much extra you need to make it useful ).
Set top box, Computing appliance, Game console, MP3 jukebox. The names vary but in the end the functionality will not. MS will have to "pull an Amazon" and defy a few fundamental laws of mathematics in order to make the X box fly. However according to Cringly they probably have no intention of ever selling them in volume. His contention that it exists only to "confuse the market makes sense.
As for the "i600" Ingram is a volume business. They don't know how to sell small numbers of high priced crap. As such they will probably be able to make a profit selling these boxes at $200 to $300 in volumes of 50k to 100k per week. At that rate you can tune your manufacturing processes to make the thing profitable.
Note that it just says "600MHz Processor". This might be another Linus machine ( I.e. One with Linux as software and Cruso for Hardware ).
The law of gravity may be violated next.
Actually this won't do squat to help us. It only protects us in those instances where we created and patented the specific invention in question before anybody else.
:).
Unfortunately these overly broad and near meaningless Internet patents, Business module patents and software patents that are stirring up trouble would still be a problem. How many OSS diehards would have thought of patenting "One click shopping" 2 years ago? I am willing to bet that even the geeks at Amazon who implemented this code didn't think of patenting it until the patent lawyers Bezos higherd went looking through the lab for anything add.
However in the event that we did have a cheap Patent on "One click shopping" we could still be sued for abusing the "Affiliates patent". In that event we would have no defense but to search for prior art to the Affiliate program. Just as if we had no patents at all.
However if we had a full patent on something ridicules like "threaded discussion on a web page" and someone decided to sue us for violating some unrelated patent ( Like "One click" ) we would only have to find evidence of them using Zope's "SquishDot" and the case is over. Out of court settlement with a written agreement to never file patent suite against any free software developer.
This is where Amazon can show weather it's a jungle or just a big river. Put the ridicules patents it owns into a pool managed by the FSF and LI. Ask every member of LI to contribute some patents to the pool. Then we can come back and talk about being attacked. Simply put it's not that difficult to assemble a set of 50 to 100 ridicules patents that every new or dynamic business on the planet violates one of. ( Those that have done nothing new for 30 years are protected since everything they do is prior art
There is a reason the GPL speaks in the overly broad language of "Linking" rather than the debatable "Patch".
Basically a Linked program can be anything from a few bytes up to several megs. The rule of thumb is that If you require the source code to produce your patch then the patch must be GPLed too. If you can produce it simply by bending the binary then you haven't used the GPLed source code at all.
However if challenged you will be called upon to prove that. If there are any wealthy suckers on this board I have a bet for you.
The best part of the whole thing is what they said when asked about being "compatible" with all the different Linux distributions. The answer amounted to the following ( not an exact quote but pretty much the meaning is intact ).
[metaquote]
"We will test on a couple of popular distribs and tell customers to use that and it WILL work. It's no different from testing a Win32 application because technically there are several different Win32 OS out there that are not compatible."
"One nice advantage of Linux is that we can negotiate to have our Runtimes distributed with the OS so that a developer on Linux will be able to send just the 50K file with his software on it to customers. we tried to make arrangements like this with MS and it didn't work."
[/metaquote].
I think our Free Development tools are entrenched enough that new closed and commercial tools like this will serve to widen the overall number of people developing for Linux rather than reduce the number of users on the GPLed tools. There is very little by way of core apps that hasn't already tied itself to Open Source tools anyway so who cares what the latest toys or custom business apps use? Running on Linux is good enough.
This is nothing new. Remember it was many YEARS after the release of the 386 MS came out with a version of Windows that used any 32bit features. For those who don't remember it was Windows 3.1 and the features were performance tweaks for virtual memory. It would still run on a 286 if you knew how to detune the setup.
All the apps for the platform were 16 bit however. It wasn't until yet more years that they actually released a 32 bit OS. It was Windows NT and though it had some 16 Bit stuff in there it qualified as a 32 bit OS even in early release.
MS will sell a 32 bit OS or even that hybrid 16/32 bit Win98 or WinME on Itanium and the market will lap it up. Perhaps not as quickly or in the volumes that Linux will enjoy but enough to be noticed.
As for Monterey. I have herd a lot of posturing from the people producing it and some talk from people who promise to ship it on boxes but I have yet to here customers who say "We want to use Monterey on Itanium to run our business". Why would they ? It's a compliantly unknown quantity. In the Jargon file it qualifies as Vaporware. I.e. Nobody has seen even an Alpha build.
Posting to the same story that you have moderated removes the moderation. Strangely enough he is still at +1 Offtopic though :).
:)
I do pity you however. They are gona lynch you in metamoderation
Adaptec has high bandwidth Hard drive controllers to sell on the x86 market. They believe iNTEL's claim that this will be Itanium in just a few short months. Therefore they must make this available for Itanium and support it as much as possible.
Since there is only one complete OS that's correctly capable of doing real work on Itanium today; they really have no choice. See this story for details about Turbo Linux on Itanium. This isn't just a kernel or a compiler but a full, functional Linux distribution. The closest thing anyone has to a Linux distribution ( in terms of included Apps ) is Microsoft's "Back Office suite".
You == IBM, iNTEL, AMD etc..
As for this IBM chip. What took you all so long ? SMP on a single chip is an obvious advance. When you vastly increase the amount of circuits on a chip as happens between a Celeron and a P3 without a matching increase in performance something has to give. Why not make that the number of cores on the chip? I hope this isn't patented because it really is obvious.
This brings up something I have been thinking about with the Cruise. If you can convert 32 bit instructions to 128 bit meta instructions and have the finished product run as fast as on the genuine 32 bit CPU.
What if the same technique is applied to an SMP setup in such a way that the software sees the processors as a single CPU. Right now this kind of abstraction is handled by the Operating system and except on the Mainframe that is very inefficient. To the point where 2X400MHz CPUs is a whole lot faster than 4X200MHz.
Now if the whole thing including say 6 CPUs and 2 Megs of cache were put on a single chip at 500MHz to 2GHz, how fast would it be ? My guess is that this could easily be the fastest low end server or workstation chip by a good margin.
It has been said that the idea of money changing people has always been a myth. That what changes when you have money is how many of your own wishes you can fulfill.
In other words a jackass with a few billion is still a jackass and cool geak is still a cool geak. Most people have no desire to actually spend a billion dollars on themselves. Most billionaires think of it as taking care of some "basic stuff" like securing the future of the grand kids to the 5th generation or so with "safe" investments. A few homes and some cars, maybe a jet.
After that you look back and you still haven't cracked the Billion Dollar mark yet. That levees you with some money you could literally give away. However most of the current crop of Billionaires grew up with a distaste for the old stile charities. Some won't even give to the Red Cross.
So you have the same creativity that got them all wealthy in the 1st place being brought to beer on the problem. This is why Bill has a building named after him at an Ivy League school. He also sponsors more scholarships than anyone keeps track of. Including one on African History.
This goy is being a little more creative than most. He is thinking: What future is there for the young person who after high school can hold a job but has no way of affording university ? Sure in the US it may not be that tough but there are other countries where the best jobs you can land on a high school education pay a fraction of the tuition for university. A classic catch 22 that leaves only the wealthy and the few scholarship winners getting farther education.
An online university, once it's up and running will cost a lot to keep going. Especially in the area of content creation. The upside of this is that it can be "affiliated" with other brick and mortar school so a lecture presented at Princeton can be available in MP3 at the site. That will still cost money but not nearly as much as paying these professors to deliver the lecture to a camera and mike alone.
The really tough part will be the books. Most new books, in fact everything written for the past 80 years is still copyrighted. A few works out of that are available online. This school may be in a position to negotiate with those professors who still own the copyrights.
All in all a very smooth move.
For this one there is a short anser and a very short anser.
The short one is that if you can get hold of every single author and they all agree to the new license it doesn't matter what the old license or the new license are. The change wold happen. This happened with KISDN when the authors changed from GPL to a proprietary, per user, per CPU etc... license. Latter after seeing how small the market was and that others wold simply continue building the GPLed version they switched back.
However the change wold have no effect on already released software. If you release something the depends heavily or lightly on a piece of Free Software then the free software is relicensed as something you can't use ( I.e. from LGPL to SCSL ) you must either start from scratch or consider the free code abandoned and find a new maintainer for it ( yourself if you can handle the extra work ).
As for proprietary work going open source that is even simpler. When you work for a company and collect a salary you are essentially selling them full rights to any code you write on the job. If at any time for any reason they feel the need to change the license on that code they don't even have to consult you. If you no longer work for them you will have to here about it on SlashDot just like the rest of us.
The very short anser is that; Yes, the authors can change without contacting anyone who didn't write code and that wold not be retroactive in any way.
This is just a hunch, but don't you get something for those taxes ? Like say good roads and free ( or subsidized ) basic services. Taxation for it's own sake is bad. That's not what you have.
BTW : About that 100% - 120% import duty. What figure is it charged on ? What you paid for the car, What the industry catalog ( who's name I can't remember ) values it at or what customes thinks it can sell for ? Here we use the highest of the 3 figures and it's usually the last one by about 3X.
Also a car doesn't need to be very big to go over the 100% mark. Very few American vehicles don't. A Corolla is about borderline.
Trust me. The US dose not do much brain draining from any country. Rather the country has to chase it's people away and in Jamaica's case the US just happens to offer the best deal for a migrant.
1: Shortest, and hence cheapest journey ( except for Cuba which doesn't need to import labor and most wouldn't want ).
2: Fast moving economy. Lots of new jobs every day for the aggressive job hunter ( When you land you have to find something before your cash runs out ).
3: High salaries. If Jamaica offered 1/2 of what the US did most immigrants would never have left. Around here you need a Collage degree to earn $540K per year. In the US that's what you get for flipping burgers. ( 540K J$ per year == U$250 per weak ).
If any of these things were not available we would be going elsware. Even then the Racism in the US is enough to make many Jamaicans look elsware. I.e. most have never been called "Niger" until landing there and often wind up breaking some skinhead in half shortly after. Like most people we would rather avoid violence.
Most people will stay home for a hell of a lot less than the travel for. Why would you want to leave comfortable weather ( to you ) and a familiar culture? Simply, put you don't.
BTW : The US doesn't encourage Jamaican immigrants. Anyone who has ever been to a visa interview here or been searched in Miami airport is left with the distinct impression that they don't even want us to visit.
Sure there is more to it than just the taxes. Economies are way too complex for anything to have a single cause. The Tax regime is however a major factor. The governments habit of planing in 3 month increments ( at best ) is another.
:)
As for what we produce and earn. Tourism is the biggest earner. They come for sunshine and Reggae music. The Ganja, prostitutes and long cocked gigaloes have nothing to do with it.
Bauxite ( raw material for aluminum ) is big. Coffee is huge but we don't produce or export nearly enough of it ( Government bloat at work ).
The single largest source of foreign exchange coming into the country right now is simply classified as "money transfers". I.e. Western Union moves more money than any hotel chain or bauxite mine. This money is mostly from Jamaicans overseas taking care of the family back home. It turns out that the IRS as classed Jamaicans as one of the wealthiest ethnic gropes in the US, right next to the jews and no; for you cynics drug dealers don't pay taxes and are all rated as unemployed and broke by the IRS.
How many people here have a Jamaican coworker or snack at a Jamaican owned business etc... ? Probably a disproportionately large number, since this is a very small country. At 2.7 Million most of your cities are bigger
In other words our biggest export is skilled labor.
PS : Other places with huge taxes ( a few european countries come to mind ) guarantee, and deliver near flawless roads, free health care, subsidized public transport an efficient justice system and public education that leaves the wealthy without much reason to use private schools.
If you are in any doubt as to what that dose to an economy you need look no farther than Jamaica. Right now we carry a heavy tax burden. Our government is still trying to figure out new ways to bleed money from the economy. These include;
:)
25% income tax
15% sales tax
40% import duty on consumer items ( like cloths ).
20% Duty on trucks
40% to 280% on cars ( depending on the CC rating. There are around 3 Cadilacs in kingston
1/2 the cost of gasoline and electricity are tax.
In fact the only sensible thing is that most computer equipment attracts only the 15% sales tax and books and magazines of all types are tax free.
What dose this do to an economy ?
17% to 35% unemployment ( depending on which figures you trust )
Devaluation ( from J$5 to U$1 in 1989 down to J$42 to U$1 now )
Low tax revenue. The cost of servicing the government debt actually exceeds the total tax revenue. Seriously, the old concept that "the more tax you charge the less you collect is true.
If you Americans want to follow the same path then go right ahead. Tax everything and tax it heavily. Maybe after a few decades of such abuse you will drop into the same hole as we are.
BTW : Our government has not figured out how to tax eComerse yet anyway.
Actually Public Domain is a bad idea since it doesn't let the author disclaim liability or protect his good name in any way.
:).
I.e. If I release foo as Public Domain and you use it improperly to cause massive damage, I can be sued. If you create a broken modification or even a reimplimentation with the same name I look bad and can't do anything but cry fowl on the net.
This is why 90% of Public Domain software I have seen was produced by the US government. If you have a Million soldiers on call you don't need protection of any kind
The other 10% has fortunately not attracted enough notice to get the authors into trouble. My advise is that if you want to just give stuff away with no strings attached use the new BSD license.
Read my coment again. They are They all part of the same are bad bunch.
Lets face it. The Chinese government is many things. Repressive and Brutal come to mind. However they are not hypocritical. They insist on blocking "politically dangerous" information from coming into the country or being distributed widely.
All they have done is move that policy online. Why should they even think about blocking porn ? It has precisely 0 effect on politics if you leave it alone. It's just people looking at pictures and reading pointless stories. If they tried to block porn *that* would become a political issue and one more battle to fight against their own people.
Contrast that which the US where you have legislators trying to impose unworkable censorship on adults in public libraries. Forcing a library to install a piece of software that will essentially block a random list of sites is stupid. When that list includes the whole "geocities.com" domain you are way over into the "you little citizens shouldn't talk to each other" territory.
At least in my country the politicians don't even bother to try. They only keep the onenforced and unenforceable laws against porn, buggy and prostitution as one more way to prosecute rapists and child molesters.
I.e. It's a lot easier to prove he was taking pictures of the little girls privates than that he touched her.
Which of the three is worse is a tough call to make. However China killing it's citizens for trivial things paints them as the worst of this bad lot.
This software blocks access to sites that criticize it under fraudulent reasons. This is enough to validate a suite for slander.
The obvious defense of course will be that they didn't block it deliberately which is why it is necessary to sue simultaneously for consumer deception. Any Australian taxpayer can file such a suite.
These people are caught between a rock and a hard place if you want to squeeze them. All you have to do is bang them around in court since they have no legs to stand on and get a settlement that says "we will only market to home users and actively discourage legislation that forces us on libraries and ISPs."
Time 3:35 PM Friday afternoon.
Place Managers Office.
Manager: Mr. Johnson, I was to have done this report two weeks ago but it slipped me and now I have a priority 1 assignment to take care of in our Caribbean branch ( carnival on the beach ).
Johnson: Ohhhu.
Manager: I need for you to complete it for me.
Johnson: I'll get on it 1st thing monday morning.
Manager: That's when my boss is expecting it.
Johnson: Well I can't come in this weekend. It's our anniversary and Cindy ( his wife ) even sent the kids to grandma.
Manager: Ohh you will be able to find some time to look at it between your celebrations. Congratulations. By the way, how long has it been now?
Johnson: 7 years, but I won't be...
Manager: Good. See you on Monday.
Johnson: But the kids have the computer. They want to surf the net and stuff.
Manager: WHAT? Do you think that's why we gave it to you ? Here, I'll give you a little bonus to cover the gas so you can go get it...
/Johnson** (Breaks out in tears and collapses on the flour.)
http://www.gw2k.com/prod/hm_sel_Matrix
AMD's idea of "introducing a 1GHz chip" is that you can go to gw2k.com , order a PC with that chip and expect it to be delivered in a few days or weeks.
iNTEL's idea is that there are a few sample chips for manufactures to practice tweaking motherboards.
AMD has sent chips to the larger retail stores and they should be on the shelf at Comp USSR soon ( if not already ).
iNTEL will be selling Gigahertz chips retail in a matter of months at best.
These people define release in vastly different ways and it will take your typical PC user a few more years to work out the difference. As for me personally, I am just happy that this will hammer the prices of the Celeron or K6-2 I can actually afford farther into the cheap range.
Many years ago someone in high office was asked to explain why people vote. After much consideration he distilled it to an "Enlightened Self Interests".
The representation Jamaicans have in some parts of the US comes from the huge numbers of Jamaican with dual Citizenship living in some communities. Our interests generally don't stray far from what Black Americans want so it's not noticed as a "Jamaican Lobby". It's there though.
There are 2 aspects to this law. One is what parts of the license can be enforced in court and the other is what technical changes can be made to the actual code.
A license which is only acceptable under UCITA will be unenforceable in Jamaican court and you would have a hard time prosecuting a Jamaican for violating it here. Therefore the 1st aspect isn't such a great concern.
A "remote shutdown" backdoor is another matter. If there is some way to get it to work over significant distances ( say between washington and Virginia ) then It can also be made to work here. This would give an american company the right to hide behind the Virginia courts and enforce UCITA in places where it is clearly illegal.
Remember Noriaga ? He was violating american law but Panama didn't seam to mind. The US sent the troops in and dragged him to trial in a US court then sent him to an American prison.
Most laws become international by default.