I think treating corporations as People is a fallacy of the US legal system. While corporations need some rights to function (like the right to sue a customer that refuses to pay his bills), they do not deserve the same protections as our fellow humans. Following this train of thought, a "death threat" against a corporation does not strike me as a big problem. Only when it is carried out with illegal means, there should be a punishment. And that punishment should hit the persons who initiated the illegal activity *personally*.
Yes, we have seen similar lawsuits before. The results, however, vary wildly. On one hand we have things like the SCO vs. IBM ligitation, which seems meritless and might end with SCO destroyed by IBM's counterclaims. On the other hand, Microsoft has settled a few similar lawsuits by paying large sums, which indicates they had reason to fear the outcome of the lawsuit.
It seems that things have changed towards far greater paranoia. Today, it might be wise to get that invitation to hacking in writing. So you can prove that you did it with permission of the computer's owner.
Novell Netware is pretty much dead in marketing terms (I guess some big installations are still around), but Novell has bought SuSE and is promoting that Linux version now. So they have an interest in making Linux look good.
The good news about the GUI-based environment is that it's typically fairly easy to pick up a new Windows tool and figure it out. For the semi-casual administrator/developer, that can be immensely useful.
The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues. When bugs pop up, it's hard to know whether it's the software's fault or your own, with no good way to peek under the hood.
Exactly my experience, and I'd like to add that Microsoft online help tends to be similar: Basic tasks are well explained, but once you need help with complex issues, the approach of "open this window and click that button" breaks down. At this point you need information about how the application works, and that is usually absent in the help files. If you are lucky, you can find it online in the MSDN, but even that tends towards pre-formulated solutions.
If you follow the discussions about graphics and sound on Linux, you will find that poor support by chip vendors (especially ATI, to a lesser degree NVIDIA and Creative) is a problem. The more people use Linux, the more attractive working with the kernel developers and releasing decent specs will be. A company may ignore 5% Linux users on the desktop, but ignoring 20% will hit the bottom line enough to be visible.
Activision induced Spark into reducing and delaying certain of its rights under the contract by falsely promising... Assuming this is true: Shows what you get from relying on promises from managers. Never give something away without getting the promises in writing.
Nobody (well, nobody except some weirdos like China and so forth) is using weapons (non-lethal or not) against peaceful dissenters. And most of the recent major revolutions in which the good guys won were carried out peacefully. I beg to differ on both counts. Clobbering peaceful protesters happens in western countries too, one example was a police raid after the G8 summit in Genoa a few years ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1460036.st m
Considering revolutions, sometimes force is necessary. The Romanian Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution_o f_1989 for instance was quite bloody. And while it can be debated if the new governmen counted as "good guys", getting rid of Ceausescu was probably worth it.
e.g. in real life. He's a school kid. Yeah, Open Orifice is great for school, where the profs are more open minded than, say a 'client' or a 'boss'.
Not all businesses rely on exchanging machine-readable documents with their customers. For instance, I still get most of my invoices on paper. Except for invoices from my ISP, and those are PDFs. Probably because they don't want to irritate those customers who don't have MS Office.
That's fine for a manager who deals mostly with customers and lets the tech people do their job. As a glorified salesman, a manager can indeed get by with a superficial understanding of technology. But as soon as you go into a management position where you direct the development or usage of technology, you are supposed to know technology. Because otherwise, you will be unable to make well-informed decisions and be useless as a manager.
From personal experience, I believe that a manager should only interfere with projects at a detail level he understands. Micro-managing beyond your skills is a good way to cause problems.
I would not be surprised if this turns out to be a project of some Chinese intelligence agency. Worldwide espionage seems a "normal" activity for any large government. The USA do this at an even larger scale with a worldwide net of listening stations, the so-called Echelon net: http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html
Only if the new outsourcing countries can keep up with demand. As the article says, wages in India are already going up. And India is huge, $RandomThirdWorldCountry might not be able to supply the desired numbers of qualified workers. Maybe we'll see (more?) outsourcing to China, which still has a lot of very poor people. But once labor prices in China start rising too, it will become difficult to find a large reservoir of cheap IT workers.
Unless the Pentium-M line has, for whatever reason, reached a hard wall for performance, Intel would have done better to expand it to multi core I suspect that is exactly what they are doing, with a new label slapped on to suggest something really new and exciting. Considering the per-watt performance of the current Pentium M versus the AMD64 (both at 90nm), the Pentium M seems slightly superior. So Intel may actually take the lead there. In absolute performance, however, the AMDs are currently superior. Unless this changes, AMD CPUs will remain the choice for maximum performance, while a "sensible" office desktop may be best equipped with the new Intels.
but would prefer someone like David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington SciFi novels. His universe is a lot more logical and contains less contradictions. Which adds greatly to the believability of the virtual world.
I'm working in the medical device business, and a large part of our expenses is for stuff like clinical studies, documentation to comply with FDA regulations and such. Also, the relatively low numbers tend to make manufacturing more expensive than for mass-manufactured stuff.
Last but not least, the market seems to readily accept the high prices manufacturers are demanding. In fact, an ex-colleague told me a story about a surgical instrument that failed in the market because of a too low price. Doctors did not trust that "cheapshit" stuff. After a rebranding and raising of the price, the same instrument did fine in the market. Expect management to happily take advantage of such thinking.
Overall, I'm not surprised that a professional endoscope costs 30.000, even if something almost (I suspect Dr Nguyen Phuoc Huy made a few compromises in the used materials) equivalent can be built at 1000 in materials.
funny tho that China's trying to *buy* anything that has IP rights. the lack of IP is what has been, and is, hindering China. Why invest in research over there when anyone can rip it off from you and dupe it w/ China not doing a thing about it.
Which will probably change when the Chinese feel that they need to protect their research from in-country ripoffs. But not before. As mentioned in various Slashdot dicussions, the early USA ignored non-US intellectual property because it was in their interest to copy European technology without paying for licenses (for the record: I still think the short copyright duration back then was a good idea). Right now, I see the Chinese doing more or less the same thing: They feel they still have to catch up, so they pay only lip service to intellectual property. This may change when they have reached an equal technology level. But even then, cultural differences may keep the rules more relaxed than here. AFAIK imitation is considered a compliment rather than theft of ideas in asian cultures.
The german C't magazine sometimes tests power supplies, and they also measure efficiency. Most PSUs achieve around 70% at max. load, with lesser efficiency at small loads. 80% is unusually good and will probably make that PSU the test winner in terms of efficiency.
I sometimes do. When I compare the result to the specced value, it tends to match the spec surprisingly well. With less random deviations than I would expect.
Have you tried more than one measuring instrument? Yours might be defective, if it always shows 5% off. If you have access to other instruments, preferably high-quality and calibrated, check yours against one of those. Or buy/borrow a precision resistor, specced at +/- 1% or better. Check against that.
Some OSS developers try to get the newer ATI cards to run anyway. http://r300.sourceforge.net/R300.php By now, they claim success for the Radeon 9600, but the 9800 still locks up sometimes.
Unfortunately, this example also shows the timeframes for doing it without manufacturer support: My two year old Radeon 9600 might now be usable under an open source driver.
Resistors spec'd at 5% tolerance are found to consistantly be 5% less than their stated value, in order to save money on raw materials.
Bullshit. The price of a resistor does not vary greatly with resistance. Look in any electronics catalogue, and you will find resistors in the kiloohm range have the same price as resistors in the megaohm range (all other things being equal). Accuracy in manufacturing, however, is expensive. So being consistently near the lower end of the 5% would be more expensive for the manufacturer than aiming at the stated value and have +/- 5% random variations.
If I understand TFA correctly, there is some legislation in the works that goes beyond the usual trademark laws, for the specific purpose of allowing this restrictions. We'll see if british Parliament is corrupt enough to pass this law.
Maybe, but demanding license fees for using the trademark seems highly atypical for Linus, so I'm not quite convinced that this happens with his approval. Let's watch the news over the next few days, we might see this affair squashed real soon.
As long as the gigahertz hype worked, Intel was happy to disregard performance per watt outside of laptops. Only now, when they are hitting clockspeed limits with the P4 and look bad compared to AMD, "performance per watt" is suddenly interesting.
Ouch. The MS sales staff have "must sell MS products" in their job description and should thus be considered even less trustworthy than the zealots, when it comes to choosing software vendors. If your executives don't get that, they deserve to be called PHBs.
Slashdot Mirror
I think treating corporations as People is a fallacy of the US legal system. While corporations need some rights to function (like the right to sue a customer that refuses to pay his bills), they do not deserve the same protections as our fellow humans.
Following this train of thought, a "death threat" against a corporation does not strike me as a big problem. Only when it is carried out with illegal means, there should be a punishment. And that punishment should hit the persons who initiated the illegal activity *personally*.
Yes, we have seen similar lawsuits before. The results, however, vary wildly.
On one hand we have things like the SCO vs. IBM ligitation, which seems meritless and might end with SCO destroyed by IBM's counterclaims.
On the other hand, Microsoft has settled a few similar lawsuits by paying large sums, which indicates they had reason to fear the outcome of the lawsuit.
It seems that things have changed towards far greater paranoia. Today, it might be wise to get that invitation to hacking in writing. So you can prove that you did it with permission of the computer's owner.
Novell Netware is pretty much dead in marketing terms (I guess some big installations are still around), but Novell has bought SuSE and is promoting that Linux version now. So they have an interest in making Linux look good.
The good news about the GUI-based environment is that it's typically fairly easy to pick up a new Windows tool and figure it out. For the semi-casual administrator/developer, that can be immensely useful.
The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues. When bugs pop up, it's hard to know whether it's the software's fault or your own, with no good way to peek under the hood.
Exactly my experience, and I'd like to add that Microsoft online help tends to be similar:
Basic tasks are well explained, but once you need help with complex issues, the approach of "open this window and click that button" breaks down. At this point you need information about how the application works, and that is usually absent in the help files. If you are lucky, you can find it online in the MSDN, but even that tends towards pre-formulated solutions.
If you follow the discussions about graphics and sound on Linux, you will find that poor support by chip vendors (especially ATI, to a lesser degree NVIDIA and Creative) is a problem.
The more people use Linux, the more attractive working with the kernel developers and releasing decent specs will be. A company may ignore 5% Linux users on the desktop, but ignoring 20% will hit the bottom line enough to be visible.
Activision induced Spark into reducing and delaying certain of its rights under the contract by falsely promising...
Assuming this is true:
Shows what you get from relying on promises from managers. Never give something away without getting the promises in writing.
They probably will. But OSDL won't have wasted its own ressources in creating ammunition for Microsoft FUD.
Nobody (well, nobody except some weirdos like China and so forth) is using weapons (non-lethal or not) against peaceful dissenters. And most of the recent major revolutions in which the good guys won were carried out peacefully.t m
o f_1989
I beg to differ on both counts. Clobbering peaceful protesters happens in western countries too, one example was a police raid after the G8 summit in Genoa a few years ago:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1460036.s
Considering revolutions, sometimes force is necessary. The Romanian Revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution_
for instance was quite bloody. And while it can be debated if the new governmen counted as "good guys", getting rid of Ceausescu was probably worth it.
e.g. in real life. He's a school kid. Yeah, Open Orifice is great for school, where the profs are more open minded than, say a 'client' or a 'boss'.
Not all businesses rely on exchanging machine-readable documents with their customers. For instance, I still get most of my invoices on paper. Except for invoices from my ISP, and those are PDFs. Probably because they don't want to irritate those customers who don't have MS Office.
That's fine for a manager who deals mostly with customers and lets the tech people do their job. As a glorified salesman, a manager can indeed get by with a superficial understanding of technology.
But as soon as you go into a management position where you direct the development or usage of technology, you are supposed to know technology. Because otherwise, you will be unable to make well-informed decisions and be useless as a manager.
From personal experience, I believe that a manager should only interfere with projects at a detail level he understands. Micro-managing beyond your skills is a good way to cause problems.
I would not be surprised if this turns out to be a project of some Chinese intelligence agency. Worldwide espionage seems a "normal" activity for any large government. The USA do this at an even larger scale with a worldwide net of listening stations, the so-called Echelon net:
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html
Only if the new outsourcing countries can keep up with demand. As the article says, wages in India are already going up.
And India is huge, $RandomThirdWorldCountry might not be able to supply the desired numbers of qualified workers. Maybe we'll see (more?) outsourcing to China, which still has a lot of very poor people.
But once labor prices in China start rising too, it will become difficult to find a large reservoir of cheap IT workers.
Unless the Pentium-M line has, for whatever reason, reached a hard wall for performance, Intel would have done better to expand it to multi core
I suspect that is exactly what they are doing, with a new label slapped on to suggest something really new and exciting.
Considering the per-watt performance of the current Pentium M versus the AMD64 (both at 90nm), the Pentium M seems slightly superior. So Intel may actually take the lead there.
In absolute performance, however, the AMDs are currently superior. Unless this changes, AMD CPUs will remain the choice for maximum performance, while a "sensible" office desktop may be best equipped with the new Intels.
but would prefer someone like David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington SciFi novels. His universe is a lot more logical and contains less contradictions. Which adds greatly to the believability of the virtual world.
I'm working in the medical device business, and a large part of our expenses is for stuff like clinical studies, documentation to comply with FDA regulations and such. Also, the relatively low numbers tend to make manufacturing more expensive than for mass-manufactured stuff.
Last but not least, the market seems to readily accept the high prices manufacturers are demanding. In fact, an ex-colleague told me a story about a surgical instrument that failed in the market because of a too low price. Doctors did not trust that "cheapshit" stuff. After a rebranding and raising of the price, the same instrument did fine in the market. Expect management to happily take advantage of such thinking.
Overall, I'm not surprised that a professional endoscope costs 30.000, even if something almost (I suspect Dr Nguyen Phuoc Huy made a few compromises in the used materials) equivalent can be built at 1000 in materials.
funny tho that China's trying to *buy* anything that has IP rights. the lack of IP is what has been, and is, hindering China. Why invest in research over there when anyone can rip it off from you and dupe it w/ China not doing a thing about it.
Which will probably change when the Chinese feel that they need to protect their research from in-country ripoffs. But not before.
As mentioned in various Slashdot dicussions, the early USA ignored non-US intellectual property because it was in their interest to copy European technology without paying for licenses (for the record: I still think the short copyright duration back then was a good idea). Right now, I see the Chinese doing more or less the same thing:
They feel they still have to catch up, so they pay only lip service to intellectual property. This may change when they have reached an equal technology level. But even then, cultural differences may keep the rules more relaxed than here. AFAIK imitation is considered a compliment rather than theft of ideas in asian cultures.
The german C't magazine sometimes tests power supplies, and they also measure efficiency.
Most PSUs achieve around 70% at max. load, with lesser efficiency at small loads. 80% is unusually good and will probably make that PSU the test winner in terms of efficiency.
I sometimes do. When I compare the result to the specced value, it tends to match the spec surprisingly well. With less random deviations than I would expect.
Have you tried more than one measuring instrument? Yours might be defective, if it always shows 5% off. If you have access to other instruments, preferably high-quality and calibrated, check yours against one of those. Or buy/borrow a precision resistor, specced at +/- 1% or better. Check against that.
Some OSS developers try to get the newer ATI cards to run anyway. http://r300.sourceforge.net/R300.php
By now, they claim success for the Radeon 9600, but the 9800 still locks up sometimes.
Unfortunately, this example also shows the timeframes for doing it without manufacturer support:
My two year old Radeon 9600 might now be usable under an open source driver.
Resistors spec'd at 5% tolerance are found to consistantly be 5% less than their stated value, in order to save money on raw materials.
Bullshit. The price of a resistor does not vary greatly with resistance. Look in any electronics catalogue, and you will find resistors in the kiloohm range have the same price as resistors in the megaohm range (all other things being equal).
Accuracy in manufacturing, however, is expensive. So being consistently near the lower end of the 5% would be more expensive for the manufacturer than aiming at the stated value and have +/- 5% random variations.
If I understand TFA correctly, there is some legislation in the works that goes beyond the usual trademark laws, for the specific purpose of allowing this restrictions.
We'll see if british Parliament is corrupt enough to pass this law.
Maybe, but demanding license fees for using the trademark seems highly atypical for Linus, so I'm not quite convinced that this happens with his approval.
Let's watch the news over the next few days, we might see this affair squashed real soon.
As long as the gigahertz hype worked, Intel was happy to disregard performance per watt outside of laptops. Only now, when they are hitting clockspeed limits with the P4 and look bad compared to AMD, "performance per watt" is suddenly interesting.
Ouch. The MS sales staff have "must sell MS products" in their job description and should thus be considered even less trustworthy than the zealots, when it comes to choosing software vendors.
If your executives don't get that, they deserve to be called PHBs.