Possibility 2) AMD and Intel will come up with *different* measurements to determine their "equivalency number". AMD will focus on chip feature X and Intel on chip feature Y, each probably choosing the one that best supports their case. Both will accuse the other one of using an inaccurate and artificial metric. Each one focuses on improving their score in their chosen test. The performance profiles of the two chips diverges more. Since most software must be least-common-denominator, all developers except those few that choose to include custom-compiled or assembly bits and processor-specific support will make software that runs slower on average. (i.e. consumer loses).
Interestingly this scenario make a very good case open source software. If you are compiling it yourself you will certainly always be reasonably optimised to the processor. If you're buying a distribution - well, given most of the major vendors supply architecture specific kernels and the like already - no great stretch there. Sure, not all the software would be optimised, but most of it doesn't matter that much - as long as the key bits (such as the kernel) are well optimised you'll do fine.
Then, on the other side you'll have "Windows AMD Opteron2 edition, Windows Opteron3 edition, Windows AMD64++ edition, Windows Intel Pentium 6 edition, etc. unless they start selling you a version of windows with a modular kernel that you can swap in and out...
This change in CPU naming might indicate a recognition that its rivals may overtake it in clockspeed. Perhaps they're planning strategic changes that could take them below Apple or AMD in clockspeed and want to jump on the "clockspeed ain't everything" bandwagon as soon as they can.
I suspect, to be honest, that it has as much to do with Intel's recently announced 64 bit desktop chip foray. Presuming they do something similar to AMD and have more general purpose registers for 64 bit mode, they need a way to recognise and market the advantage that that brings (because it sure doesn't bring any clock speed benefits). That is, this is potentially as much about Intel competing with their own chips as it is with AMD and Apple.
There are so many ups and downs with this film. Based on Asimov material? That's defintiely a good thing. Screenplay cowritten by one of the more pathetic writers in Hollywood - definite downside. Directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) - that's all positive. Starring Will Smith? Enough said.
I watched the trailer, and well, it could still go either way very easily.
Why do they pay less? Because the goods and services that those well-paid programmers consume are made by a poverty-stricken people who are abused.
Bzzt. Wrong. That may be true in some places, but just because goods cost less DOES NOT MEAN that workers are getting abused. New Zealand is cheaper than the US for many things (though similar to the grandparent post tech toys are the same cost) yet you will struggle to find worker abuse in New Zealand - in fact, I think you'll find worker protections in NZ are stronger than those in the US in many ways.
Programmers may have it better in India than most, but you have to look at the big picture. Things are cheaper there because the people of that country are being abused.
Why is it that people seem to think that if it's cheaper than in the US, it must involve abuse of workers? Did you consider that maybe land and housing are cheaper? If you don't have to earn as much to afford a house, then the businesses can afford to pay their workers less because they don't _need_ the larger amounts of money for a decent lifestyle... etc.
A lot of things in New Zealand are a lot cheaper than they are in the US (and some are comparatively more expensive), but I can assure you there is very little in the way of worker abuse in New Zealand.
We forget that the reason the founding fathers included it in the Bill of Rights was not to defend your right to shoot a turkey for dinner. It was to protect your right and responsibility to rise up against our government in rebellion when it is necessary.
Unfortunately people having the odd assault rifle lying around does not a successful armed revolution make - not in this day and age anyway. I applaud the intent, but I suspect you'd find that any attempted revolt would quickly find itself labelled "terrorists" and have the full force of the US military brought to bear if necessary.
Which is to say, in this day and age, unless you have a lot of high powered armaments to threaten with, the only thing a standing army is good for is making large red smears when the cruise missles and fuel air explosives arrive.
By all means, defend your right to bear arms - but if you want to stage any form of revolution in the US you're better of forgetting your hoarded assault rifles, and start getting a decent chunk of the US military on your side first.
Jedidiah.
Re:no manufacturing costs for windows?
on
Is Windows Worth $45?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
this guy is a total asshat. how can he say that windows has no manufacturing costs? 3-4 weeks ago on slashdot after the windows source code leak, folks were saying "holy shit guys - look at the 4.5 million lines of code that becomes windows! what a crappy, bloated OS!". now this dumbass claims that it costs nothing to manufacture. how many man-hours did it take to write windows 2000? windows xp? the media it is shipped on costs very little, but one-time cost of writing is also counted in the total-cost. so unless it was written by non-paid interns (which we know is not the case), this guy is grossly underestimating the profit.
I think you'll find he'll be considering development costs as R&D costs, not manufacturing costs. The comparison was hardware manufacturers - Intel spends vast amounts of time and effort designing their chip; comparable to development time for a new version of windows. The difference is, once Intel is done, they still have a manufacturing cost on every chip they sell. Fabricating chips costs serious cash. In comparison, once the design work is done for Microsoft, they have a new version of windows - the only manufacturing cost is stamping CDs.
In other news, Microsoft most likely doesn't write those 4.5 million lines of code from scratch for each new version of windows. One would hope that the bulk of that code is fairly stable and not undergoing constant rewrites and changes. Which is to say, you are grossly overstating the development work involved in producing a new version of Windows.
So, in summary: You are overstating the amount of development work required to create a new version of windows, and the author of the article is already factoring that cost in anyway.
So basically Microsoft needs to just wait, work on Longhorn, make it stable and release it once it is completely finished, with much much more stability
That's a bit of problem though, because a lot of the timelines are now starting to place Longhorn at around 2008. That's an awfully long time for Microsoft to be sitting on their hands really.
Yes, there are plenty of promises of wonderful new features in Longhorn, but then MS was promising a OO filesystem in "Cairo" the update to WinNT that was perpetually delayed and never quite arrived. As long as Longhorn is several years away they can promise all the amazing innovations they like - we have to wait to see what they actually deliver
Imagine there was a regulation that said all software needed to be at least X secure. Both MS and OSS are screwed.
Imagine if there was regulation that said that buildings had to at least X stable. Fly by night architects would be screwed.
Think of all the innovative architectural designs that are being stifled as we speak by those bizarre regulations that require buildings to not fall down.
My vote is the tale of Berin and Luthien. It's probably very marketable. You've got a hero (Berin), Tolkien's principal kick-ass heroine (Luthien), a villain that's much scarier than a large disembodied eye, and a Simaril. And don't forget the hot man-on-elf sex. What more could any geek ask for?
A nice tragic story about a somewhat socially inept (cursed in fact), but otherwise likeable guy, who is remarkably handy with a sword, for whom life constatly goes terribly wrong. Despite unending failures and setbacks he plods along as best he can and manages to slay the father of all dragons before being utterly carried away by the tide of failures stacked against him by his curse, and killing himself.
Hooray for dark gritty story telling that doesn't involve elf maidens dressing up as giant vampire bats.
Oh, and if you want beautiful women in the story, there's both Morwen and Nienor.
Well, let's just hope they ARE interested in Open Source, instead of trying to write all these non-gpl applications that only work right on their distribution.
That's still to be seen isn't it. It's all very well to talk the talk (which they've been doing a good job of so far), the reall question will be how well they follow through with it.
My personal guess is that Novell will remain fairly proprietary - There's too much invested in ZenWorks and the like to just open source it all now (from a politcla, justify to your uneducated shareholders viewpoint) - But I do think they'll produce a fairly clean distribution, and at the least have fairly distribution agnostic proprietary parts.
This will be interesting to hear indeed. ALl the other interviews I've seen (with Novell and Ximian staff for instance) have implied that this really is the new direction for Novell - that is, that from top to bottom Novell has grasped that open source is a powerful way forward and is busy trying to absorb open source culture into their ranks. They went as far as suggesting that one of te reasons for the purchase of Ximian was integrate the Ximian staff into the company and thereby imbue the different divisions with an open source mindset.
Of course all of that can quite easily be a lot of spin - some nice fluffy stories to keep the open source community on side. Then again, they prompty bought SuSE after that, so obviously they were still well interested in open source.
The real promise of this is the concept of a big company really getting open source and moving to it in a powerful way. The credibility alone would be fantastic. Yes, IBM backs Linux, but not in the same way Novell potentially promises to. Right now IBM has Linux as a nice side project, whereas Novell is talking about swallowing open source to it's core.
I look forward to seeing where Novell goes - it could be a very long way indeed.
Should Peter Jackson really feel the need to make more Tolkien movies even after The Hobbit, I think he should look at the tale of Beren and Luthien (one of the more independent chapters from The Silmarillion, and not as complex as the rest of the book).
Actually, I think the tale of Turin would work equally well. You could even, perhaps, make something useful out of Tuor and the fall of Gondolin.
There's plenty of material to mine in the Silmarillion, you just have to try to find good ways to isolate out elements of it. Usefully, of course, the more of the independent stories you tell, the more background you end up providing along the way, which allows you to work on the slightly more interwoven tales (the story of Earendil, for instance, would be fantastic, assuming a little bit of established background).
Jedidiah.
Jedidiah.
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Example: Factor 56,029,043 into primes. You're welcome to use Matlab, octave, xcalc, or whatever.
You need to pick bigger primes: $ factor 56029043
56029043: 7 19 43 97 101
$
never underestimate the effectiveness of a little GNU tool like factor - sitting waiting right at your nearest bash prompt (which can be surprisingly close).
Your point is entirely valid of course, the example is just a little too easy.
If you want multi-CPU 64bit servers then Sun provides plenty in that category. Likewise IBM has their mainframes, and PPC970. With x86-64 chewing up the low end and big extablished players like that in the high end I don't think Itanium will fare well at all. It is already struggling to make much dent into the heavy duty server market, with only support from HP and SGI.
Meanwhile Cray has their ultrfast interconnect system rigged up with Opterons for serious high performance computing, so once again, a well established player is not making any moves toward Itanium.
All I can see is Itanium getting it's market squeezed from below by these x86-64 chips - I don't really see it managing to expand it's market upward any.
It'll be one hell of a backtrack if they do drop Itanium. Yet it will be hard to keep Itanium viable with another 64bit chip that is (presumably) much better at handling x86 code.
What this really signals is that Opteron, and AMD64 are really quite impressive indeed. It's billions that Intel will be dropping so they can compete with it, and you don't make that sort of move unless you're really very very worried.
As to whether they will be compatible with AMDs extensions: I suspect Intel won't be ale to bring themselves to that. The "One operating system will support all 64bit extensions" sounds more like a deal has been cut with Microsoft to make the 64bit version of windows work with Intel's 64bit extensions as well of those AMD. In practice I suspect that means Intel will be very close to AMDs extensions, with a few quirks, and the intention of trying to grab the market and drag things away with their own extra extensions with newer chips.
Could this be behind the slowness of 64bit windows for Opterons?
Not mentioning specifics, but this is just like me creating a sodapop called KocaKola, nd branding it in a white script font against a red background.
(1) It's more like branding you drink "Kola". Windows is a generic computer term for a GUI display, while Microsoft Windows is the product. Similarly Cola is generic term for a flavour (and is often associated with carbonated beverages), while the product is Coca Cola (as opposed to, say Pepsi Cola).
(2) The LindowsOS logo looks very little like the the windows logo, or even the microsoft logo - oh, I'm sorry, they're both blue. How many random off brand cola drinks come in red packaging?
I use software, including games, that simply does not exist for Linux. I bought a copy of XP Pro because of this. However, because I was buying hardware at the same time (motherboard, processor, etc), I was eligible to buy an OEM copy. That's *half* the price of the retail one.
If MS didn't have all the guaranteed pre-installs, do you really think a retail boxed version of windows would be selling at the current price? Hell no. In fact, I suspect that if this measure were taken you'd see MS selling Windows for something in the $25-$75 range.
Why aren't they suing BMW for including radios in their automobiles?
Probably because BMW don't have a virtual monopoly on the car market.
Or, more accurately, ecause BMW doesn't have an effective monopoly on car manufacture and aren't including a BMW brand radio that has default (and difficult to change) tunings to BMW radio stations.
Oddly, I suspect that were that the case, we'd be seeing some serious litigation going on.
maybe it benefits "someone", to make a fuss out of this. so now they can say "SEE! we told you it was no good!"...
No conspiracy theories needed - the media simply enjoys making a fuss out of anything they can get their hands on. Look at all the deluded reporting that went on accompanying the windows source leak! Or Janet Jackson at the superbowl for that matter. Hype, hype, and hype again. If more people could take a "yeah, whatever. Next please" attitude to all these unnecessary stories we wouldn't be quite so nose in crap.
So migrating all the systems from Win98 and Windows NT to Windows 2003 Server and WinXP desktops would have run within schedule and under budget? I think not. This is an IT project for god's sake, they never get completed on time and within budget. You will always strike issues and problems once you get into the thick of it.
Why all the fuss? Why any fuss? Sounds like business as usual to me.
There is a distinction between metaphor and definition. If I say a function is a machine for turning elements of the input set into elements of the output set, then this is a metaphor in which I have used the word machine to describe a function. I suspect that what you are arguing is that the word function itself is a metaphor. This is incorrect. The word function has a defintion. A function f:X->Y is a subset of XxY such that for every x in X there is a unique y in Y such that (x,y) is in the subset. This is not a metaphor.
Which doesn't mean mathematicians don't use metaphor a lot. The catch is that they like to have solid rigorous definitions to tie things back to. Often when doing mathematics you will think in terms of the metaphors to percieve a way to proceed, and then try and explain the process you just considered in terms of definitions.
If you want a metaphor for that: Published mathematics tends to be assembly code: low level with strong static typing, and everything very explicit. That doesn't mean that mathematicians don't write it in their heads in Python or Java and compile it. Think of research mathematicans as powerful metaphor compilers as well as programmers.
Except they aren't swastikas - they run clockwise not anticlockwise. This is a common symbol for Buddhist temples in Japan (and I presume the rest of Asia). The fact that they were right alongside a common symbol for Shinto shrines makes it pretty obvious really.
Slashdot Mirror
Possibility 2) AMD and Intel will come up with *different* measurements to determine their "equivalency number". AMD will focus on chip feature X and Intel on chip feature Y, each probably choosing the one that best supports their case. Both will accuse the other one of using an inaccurate and artificial metric. Each one focuses on improving their score in their chosen test. The performance profiles of the two chips diverges more. Since most software must be least-common-denominator, all developers except those few that choose to include custom-compiled or assembly bits and processor-specific support will make software that runs slower on average. (i.e. consumer loses).
Interestingly this scenario make a very good case open source software. If you are compiling it yourself you will certainly always be reasonably optimised to the processor. If you're buying a distribution - well, given most of the major vendors supply architecture specific kernels and the like already - no great stretch there. Sure, not all the software would be optimised, but most of it doesn't matter that much - as long as the key bits (such as the kernel) are well optimised you'll do fine.
Then, on the other side you'll have "Windows AMD Opteron2 edition, Windows Opteron3 edition, Windows AMD64++ edition, Windows Intel Pentium 6 edition, etc. unless they start selling you a version of windows with a modular kernel that you can swap in and out...
Jedidiah.
This change in CPU naming might indicate a recognition that its rivals may overtake it in clockspeed. Perhaps they're planning strategic changes that could take them below Apple or AMD in clockspeed and want to jump on the "clockspeed ain't everything" bandwagon as soon as they can.
I suspect, to be honest, that it has as much to do with Intel's recently announced 64 bit desktop chip foray. Presuming they do something similar to AMD and have more general purpose registers for 64 bit mode, they need a way to recognise and market the advantage that that brings (because it sure doesn't bring any clock speed benefits). That is, this is potentially as much about Intel competing with their own chips as it is with AMD and Apple.
Jedidiah.
There are so many ups and downs with this film. Based on Asimov material? That's defintiely a good thing. Screenplay cowritten by one of the more pathetic writers in Hollywood - definite downside. Directed by Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) - that's all positive. Starring Will Smith? Enough said.
I watched the trailer, and well, it could still go either way very easily.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Jedidiah.
Why do they pay less? Because the goods and services that those well-paid programmers consume are made by a poverty-stricken people who are abused.
Bzzt. Wrong. That may be true in some places, but just because goods cost less DOES NOT MEAN that workers are getting abused. New Zealand is cheaper than the US for many things (though similar to the grandparent post tech toys are the same cost) yet you will struggle to find worker abuse in New Zealand - in fact, I think you'll find worker protections in NZ are stronger than those in the US in many ways.
Please don't make stupid assumptions.
Jedidiah.
Programmers may have it better in India than most, but you have to look at the big picture. Things are cheaper there because the people of that country are being abused.
Why is it that people seem to think that if it's cheaper than in the US, it must involve abuse of workers? Did you consider that maybe land and housing are cheaper? If you don't have to earn as much to afford a house, then the businesses can afford to pay their workers less because they don't _need_ the larger amounts of money for a decent lifestyle... etc.
A lot of things in New Zealand are a lot cheaper than they are in the US (and some are comparatively more expensive), but I can assure you there is very little in the way of worker abuse in New Zealand.
Don't make stupid assumptions.
Jedidiah.
We forget that the reason the founding fathers included it in the Bill of Rights was not to defend your right to shoot a turkey for dinner. It was to protect your right and responsibility to rise up against our government in rebellion when it is necessary.
Unfortunately people having the odd assault rifle lying around does not a successful armed revolution make - not in this day and age anyway. I applaud the intent, but I suspect you'd find that any attempted revolt would quickly find itself labelled "terrorists" and have the full force of the US military brought to bear if necessary.
Which is to say, in this day and age, unless you have a lot of high powered armaments to threaten with, the only thing a standing army is good for is making large red smears when the cruise missles and fuel air explosives arrive.
By all means, defend your right to bear arms - but if you want to stage any form of revolution in the US you're better of forgetting your hoarded assault rifles, and start getting a decent chunk of the US military on your side first.
Jedidiah.
this guy is a total asshat. how can he say that windows has no manufacturing costs? 3-4 weeks ago on slashdot after the windows source code leak, folks were saying "holy shit guys - look at the 4.5 million lines of code that becomes windows! what a crappy, bloated OS!". now this dumbass claims that it costs nothing to manufacture. how many man-hours did it take to write windows 2000? windows xp? the media it is shipped on costs very little, but one-time cost of writing is also counted in the total-cost. so unless it was written by non-paid interns (which we know is not the case), this guy is grossly underestimating the profit.
I think you'll find he'll be considering development costs as R&D costs, not manufacturing costs. The comparison was hardware manufacturers - Intel spends vast amounts of time and effort designing their chip; comparable to development time for a new version of windows. The difference is, once Intel is done, they still have a manufacturing cost on every chip they sell. Fabricating chips costs serious cash. In comparison, once the design work is done for Microsoft, they have a new version of windows - the only manufacturing cost is stamping CDs.
In other news, Microsoft most likely doesn't write those 4.5 million lines of code from scratch for each new version of windows. One would hope that the bulk of that code is fairly stable and not undergoing constant rewrites and changes. Which is to say, you are grossly overstating the development work involved in producing a new version of Windows.
So, in summary: You are overstating the amount of development work required to create a new version of windows, and the author of the article is already factoring that cost in anyway.
Jedidiah.
So basically Microsoft needs to just wait, work on Longhorn, make it stable and release it once it is completely finished, with much much more stability
That's a bit of problem though, because a lot of the timelines are now starting to place Longhorn at around 2008. That's an awfully long time for Microsoft to be sitting on their hands really.
Yes, there are plenty of promises of wonderful new features in Longhorn, but then MS was promising a OO filesystem in "Cairo" the update to WinNT that was perpetually delayed and never quite arrived. As long as Longhorn is several years away they can promise all the amazing innovations they like - we have to wait to see what they actually deliver
Jedidiah
Imagine there was a regulation that said all software needed to be at least X secure. Both MS and OSS are screwed.
Imagine if there was regulation that said that buildings had to at least X stable. Fly by night architects would be screwed.
Think of all the innovative architectural designs that are being stifled as we speak by those bizarre regulations that require buildings to not fall down.
Jedidiah.
My vote is the tale of Berin and Luthien. It's probably very marketable. You've got a hero (Berin), Tolkien's principal kick-ass heroine (Luthien), a villain that's much scarier than a large disembodied eye, and a Simaril. And don't forget the hot man-on-elf sex. What more could any geek ask for?
A nice tragic story about a somewhat socially inept (cursed in fact), but otherwise likeable guy, who is remarkably handy with a sword, for whom life constatly goes terribly wrong. Despite unending failures and setbacks he plods along as best he can and manages to slay the father of all dragons before being utterly carried away by the tide of failures stacked against him by his curse, and killing himself.
Hooray for dark gritty story telling that doesn't involve elf maidens dressing up as giant vampire bats.
Oh, and if you want beautiful women in the story, there's both Morwen and Nienor.
Jedidiah.
Well, let's just hope they ARE interested in Open Source, instead of trying to write all these non-gpl applications that only work right on their distribution.
That's still to be seen isn't it. It's all very well to talk the talk (which they've been doing a good job of so far), the reall question will be how well they follow through with it.
My personal guess is that Novell will remain fairly proprietary - There's too much invested in ZenWorks and the like to just open source it all now (from a politcla, justify to your uneducated shareholders viewpoint) - But I do think they'll produce a fairly clean distribution, and at the least have fairly distribution agnostic proprietary parts.
Only time will tell though.
This will be interesting to hear indeed. ALl the other interviews I've seen (with Novell and Ximian staff for instance) have implied that this really is the new direction for Novell - that is, that from top to bottom Novell has grasped that open source is a powerful way forward and is busy trying to absorb open source culture into their ranks. They went as far as suggesting that one of te reasons for the purchase of Ximian was integrate the Ximian staff into the company and thereby imbue the different divisions with an open source mindset.
Of course all of that can quite easily be a lot of spin - some nice fluffy stories to keep the open source community on side. Then again, they prompty bought SuSE after that, so obviously they were still well interested in open source.
The real promise of this is the concept of a big company really getting open source and moving to it in a powerful way. The credibility alone would be fantastic. Yes, IBM backs Linux, but not in the same way Novell potentially promises to. Right now IBM has Linux as a nice side project, whereas Novell is talking about swallowing open source to it's core.
I look forward to seeing where Novell goes - it could be a very long way indeed.
Jedidiah
Should Peter Jackson really feel the need to make more Tolkien movies even after The Hobbit, I think he should look at the tale of Beren and Luthien (one of the more independent chapters from The Silmarillion, and not as complex as the rest of the book).
Actually, I think the tale of Turin would work equally well. You could even, perhaps, make something useful out of Tuor and the fall of Gondolin.
There's plenty of material to mine in the Silmarillion, you just have to try to find good ways to isolate out elements of it. Usefully, of course, the more of the independent stories you tell, the more background you end up providing along the way, which allows you to work on the slightly more interwoven tales (the story of Earendil, for instance, would be fantastic, assuming a little bit of established background).
Jedidiah.
Jedidiah.
Example: Factor 56,029,043 into primes. You're welcome to use Matlab, octave, xcalc, or whatever.
You need to pick bigger primes:
$ factor 56029043
56029043: 7 19 43 97 101
$
never underestimate the effectiveness of a little GNU tool like factor - sitting waiting right at your nearest bash prompt (which can be surprisingly close).
Your point is entirely valid of course, the example is just a little too easy.
Jedidiah.
If you want multi-CPU 64bit servers then Sun provides plenty in that category. Likewise IBM has their mainframes, and PPC970. With x86-64 chewing up the low end and big extablished players like that in the high end I don't think Itanium will fare well at all. It is already struggling to make much dent into the heavy duty server market, with only support from HP and SGI.
Meanwhile Cray has their ultrfast interconnect system rigged up with Opterons for serious high performance computing, so once again, a well established player is not making any moves toward Itanium.
All I can see is Itanium getting it's market squeezed from below by these x86-64 chips - I don't really see it managing to expand it's market upward any.
Jedidiah.
It'll be one hell of a backtrack if they do drop Itanium. Yet it will be hard to keep Itanium viable with another 64bit chip that is (presumably) much better at handling x86 code.
What this really signals is that Opteron, and AMD64 are really quite impressive indeed. It's billions that Intel will be dropping so they can compete with it, and you don't make that sort of move unless you're really very very worried.
As to whether they will be compatible with AMDs extensions: I suspect Intel won't be ale to bring themselves to that. The "One operating system will support all 64bit extensions" sounds more like a deal has been cut with Microsoft to make the 64bit version of windows work with Intel's 64bit extensions as well of those AMD. In practice I suspect that means Intel will be very close to AMDs extensions, with a few quirks, and the intention of trying to grab the market and drag things away with their own extra extensions with newer chips.
Could this be behind the slowness of 64bit windows for Opterons?
Jedidiah.
Not mentioning specifics, but this is just like me creating a sodapop called KocaKola, nd branding it in a white script font against a red background.
(1) It's more like branding you drink "Kola". Windows is a generic computer term for a GUI display, while Microsoft Windows is the product. Similarly Cola is generic term for a flavour (and is often associated with carbonated beverages), while the product is Coca Cola (as opposed to, say Pepsi Cola).
(2) The LindowsOS logo looks very little like the the windows logo, or even the microsoft logo - oh, I'm sorry, they're both blue. How many random off brand cola drinks come in red packaging?
Jedidiah.
I'm sure you'll agree that i cant stard Fjord Motor Company, a car maker.
No, but I suspect General Engines might pass.
Jedidiah.
I use software, including games, that simply does not exist for Linux. I bought a copy of XP Pro because of this. However, because I was buying hardware at the same time (motherboard, processor, etc), I was eligible to buy an OEM copy. That's *half* the price of the retail one.
If MS didn't have all the guaranteed pre-installs, do you really think a retail boxed version of windows would be selling at the current price? Hell no. In fact, I suspect that if this measure were taken you'd see MS selling Windows for something in the $25-$75 range.
Jedidiah.
Or, more accurately, ecause BMW doesn't have an effective monopoly on car manufacture and aren't including a BMW brand radio that has default (and difficult to change) tunings to BMW radio stations.
Oddly, I suspect that were that the case, we'd be seeing some serious litigation going on.
Jedidiah.
why all the fuss? good question, i think...
maybe it benefits "someone", to make a fuss out of this. so now they can say "SEE! we told you it was no good!"...
No conspiracy theories needed - the media simply enjoys making a fuss out of anything they can get their hands on. Look at all the deluded reporting that went on accompanying the windows source leak! Or Janet Jackson at the superbowl for that matter. Hype, hype, and hype again. If more people could take a "yeah, whatever. Next please" attitude to all these unnecessary stories we wouldn't be quite so nose in crap.
Jedidiah.
So migrating all the systems from Win98 and Windows NT to Windows 2003 Server and WinXP desktops would have run within schedule and under budget? I think not. This is an IT project for god's sake, they never get completed on time and within budget. You will always strike issues and problems once you get into the thick of it.
Why all the fuss? Why any fuss? Sounds like business as usual to me.
Jedidiah
How exactly is this informative?
It seems more likely that it was a set up post for the usual "GNOME has turned to crap ever since it went 2.0" trolls.
Jedidiah.
There is a distinction between metaphor and definition. If I say a function is a machine for turning elements of the input set into elements of the output set, then this is a metaphor in which I have used the word machine to describe a function. I suspect that what you are arguing is that the word function itself is a metaphor. This is incorrect. The word function has a defintion. A function f:X->Y is a subset of XxY such that for every x in X there is a unique y in Y such that (x,y) is in the subset. This is not a metaphor.
Which doesn't mean mathematicians don't use metaphor a lot. The catch is that they like to have solid rigorous definitions to tie things back to. Often when doing mathematics you will think in terms of the metaphors to percieve a way to proceed, and then try and explain the process you just considered in terms of definitions.
If you want a metaphor for that: Published mathematics tends to be assembly code: low level with strong static typing, and everything very explicit. That doesn't mean that mathematicians don't write it in their heads in Python or Java and compile it. Think of research mathematicans as powerful metaphor compilers as well as programmers.
Jedidiah.
Except they aren't swastikas - they run clockwise not anticlockwise. This is a common symbol for Buddhist temples in Japan (and I presume the rest of Asia). The fact that they were right alongside a common symbol for Shinto shrines makes it pretty obvious really.
Ah well.
Jedidiah.