Put your money where your mouth is and set the precedent. Fill in the following: Real name: Main email: Home address: Home phone: Social security number: Current place of employment: Salary:
I don't see the point in buying DVD while the regonal codes are still in effect. (I did't buy one yet and is is very unlikely I will in near future) If no consumer ever bothered buying a DVD-player it would die of a quick death. Considering the huge amount of money put into the development of the DVD technology, I guess that the first thing they would kick out, would be the regional codes...just to save on the $$$ they spent and eventually make it popular. As mentioned in a previous post, it would be easy by encoding region code 0 on all DVD's: no harware changes are hardware needed;-)
The regional codes don't effect everybody. For the average north american consumer who has access to a huge body of titles they want to see DVD is the right choice. There's no point for them to boycott.
The region codes may be unpopular, but there is a legitimate reason for their introduction (though there may be unlegitimate reasons they're currently used, I don't know). People going to the theater and watching a movie is still a huge revenue stream for the people involved with films. The problem is that the distribution of movies to theaters isn't instantaneous. North America gets the first run at first run movies followed by Europe and other venues. The DVD might be available in North America before the movie is even available overseas. I would imagine that the same is true for overseas movies (though the average american consumer has little interest). The region codes were meant to protect the first run theater market. This wasn't as much as a problem with VHS tapes since VHS tapes suck as far as picture quality goes. DVD on a decent home system is pretty sweet.
Even though I personally agree that region codes are the wrong way to go about it I'm not about to boycott DVD's. I'm not a zealot, the DVD meets most of my needs, I like the format and hope it keeps growing. I've never purchased a movie on VHS but I've got over 100 on DVD. One format sucks and the other doesn't.
One last comment, region zero isn't a way to get around region coding from what I've read. At one time it worked but newer DVD players refuse to play region zero discs.
First of all, the cube is to be released in August. The ATi Radeon is to ship as an AGP card in September. It's possible that Apple has some early release cards but in the past ATi has been pathetic at releasing their hardware. Based on the release schedules of the two products the ATi RAGE 128 Pro would make more sense as the (initially) shipping card.
Second of all, all the press materials (PDF spec sheets etc) all refer to the ATi RAGE 128, this is a lot of work for a large company to do in about a week which is the length of time this contraversy has existed.
Third of all why would Apple weaken their product line to spite ATi? If anything Jobs would be more likely to say "Bend over so I can stick your card where it belongs, we're giving the contract to 3DFx". Weakening their product line would have impact on their profits.
Basically on a rumors site anybody can say anything and it will get posted just in case it happens to be true. Being correct 1% of the time seems to make up for the 99% of the time they're incorrect or partially correct.
Sites like MacOS Rumors doesn't exist just for the fun of the people running it. That may be part of it, but like slashdot, part of it is also financial. They have to report on the rumors, not reporting on the rumors, even to spite Apple, would hurt them a whole lot more than it would hurt Apple. It would mean that whoever did report it would get to claim a 'scoop' over those who didn't. This moves people around and cuts in on the number of click throughs which are their income stream.
Hope that this spells the start of fair reporting by ZDNet's publications. First out the door should be Jesse Berst and John Taschek;) </blockquote>
If anything it will mean more of the same. ZDNet and C-net both specialize in biased reporting. It's what their main customers want. They cater to the drooling masses who want reaffirmation that using Microsoft is the best solution.
I'm not saying that the assertion is true or not, or sometimes true or sometimes not true. What I'm saying is that regardless of the preponderance of the evidence people like Jesse Berst will state that "Microsoft's product X is clearly better and more spongeworthy than the competitor's product Y"
ZD magazines have some credibility compared to some of the junk in the UK. Linux Format must be the most pathetic excuse for a magazine I've seen since the 8-bit explosion of 1983. Five pounds for lots of irrelevant pictures, large display fonts and inaccurate content. I've got a bet on that it won't last beyond the end of this year.
Now thanks to the overwhelming power of the internet you too can get irrelevant and inaccurate material for free!
Neither Ziff-Davis or C-Net has any credibility to speak of if you really look at what they say and there motives behind it. Either company will jump on whatever bandwagon is most convenient so the result of this merger really won't be a dilution of credible news on the internet.
I can't think of a mainstream computer rag that really has any credibility, online or in dead tree format. There are some decent specialist publications such as Dr. Jobb's Journal (or it was decent last time I checked, maybe its pulled a Byte and catered to the lowest common denominator).
Sites like slashdot are not in the same league as even Ziff-Davis or C-net however. Slashdot compiles stories from other companies, such as C-net or Ziff-Davis, and provides a forum for people to respond to.
If slashdot really wants to compete in that arena they would have to do a lot more mainstream journalism: more interviews, write-ups on new technology, product reviews etc. User comments would have to be secondary to the news.
There are some sites that do this fairly well within the narrow scope that they're interested in. It doesn't mean that slashdot needs to do this however, it really would no longer be slashdot. I've always viewed slashdot as a BBS more than a news source. There is occasionaly something to be learned but usually its from the commentary and not the 'news'.
Stop whining. Take the bus. In addition to saving a couple of bucks, it'll help prevent your kids from getting skin cancer. </i>
In any cities I've been to or lived in the bus does not save money over a given trip in comparision to the cost of gas to fuel a car for the same number of trips. Busses are not all that cost effective of a means of transportation. Factor in time wasted that would otherwise be your free time waiting for the bus, transfers and so on its a big money loser including the payments on a cheap new vehicle.
Cities with mass transport such as subways are often a better deal than owning a car, but I've never seen the bus win on cost of ownership.
That's partially correct, Netscape has not only been slow to release but has worried more about pretty features than adhering to standards. Unfortunately MS 'features' will only become a proprietary standard which means they will never appear on Linux unless Microsoft makes a Linux port of Internet Explorer.
There will be an increasing amount of web space that can't be seen by Linux (or BSD or BeOS etc.) users in a short time.
I've got a couple of problems with online voting. Sure, it allows more people to vote but if people are too lazy to get to a poll then why cater to them? I really hate dumbing down to the lowest common denominator, or in this case lazying down. There are some valid reasons such as for shut ins but there are already mechanisms for that.
The more alarming thing to me is that nobody has yet built an internet based system that was capable of working through a denial of service attack. Most cities aren't homogeneous masses, they are clusters of people with common economic or social status. There are rich neighbourhoods and there are poor neighbourhoods. Depending on where you live there are Italian neighbourhoods and there are Chinese neighbourhoods and gay neighbourhoods and so on.
This dilineates the vote, voters from certain neighbourhoods are more likely to vote in a certain way. A denial of service attack against one or more target neighbourhoods effectively could sway the outcome of the vote.
It's theoretically possible to do this in real life of course. Stand in front of the poll station with a gun (popular in many of your favourite third world stations) but the repurcussions tend to be rather immediate and drastic.
It's slashdot's right to post whatever they want. It's your right to go elsewhere as I did for a long while. I voted with my feet. Their reason for posting it could only be because somebody made the editorial decision that perhaps people would be interested in reading it.
They were obviously correct, a number of people, including yourself, read it.
In the context of comparing the post to amazon.com it may well be redundant but not everybody browses book reviews at amazon.com. All of the postings on slashdot are redundant, all slashdot does is (attempt to) distill down information that its readers may find interesting.
Why was it written? It may have been because somebody thought they were doing a favour. It could have been because they get off in seeing their name in lights or it could be for additional positive karma.
The GPL, as far as I know, doesn't preclude you from releasing code under another license as long as you're the owner of the code.
I can release SquigglyWord under the GPL. It's then available for free to anybody who asks, with source. CodeBloat INC could still contact me about releasing a Bloat Enhanced (TM) version of SquigglyWord under a restrictive license. The availability of this product, both gratis and libris, would be entirely up to the licensing agreements on this particular version.
I'm not sure about doing this with versions of SquigglyWord enhanced with community provided patches though. I don't know the status of the ownership of the patches.
This announcement (assuming its accurate and the gene is actually mapped) just means that they're at the point where they've got a genetic Rosetta stone. It was a big job, it was important, but it isn't the final outcome. It's just a significant milestone.
The next step will be determining the purpose of each part the genome. This is the act of translating the genetic Rosetta stone. This is a significant milestone. It still isn't the final outcome.
Once this information is known it will be time to try and influence genetic makeup in a controlled and predictable manner, resulting in the potential for: new treatments for diseases; in utero or in ovum genetic modification; genetic enhancement; organ growth etc.
There are a lot of compelling reasons to develop under Linux in my opinion. It's important to note that disclaimer in that sentence however: In my opinion. My first experiences with programming were BASIC on a Commodore Pet. While in university I did a lot of programming under UNIX and became used to the pervasive way in which text and data could be handled and manipulated.
I also realize that if it weren't for this sudden immersion I wouldn't find these reasons all that compelling. I've coded in MetroWerk's IDE under MacOS as well as with the shell-like IDE MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workship). If I had first used an IDE to program I'm not sure I'd ever have really felt as comfortable without one. Most of the reasons that I feel so comfortable programming in a shell environment under UNIX are due to the ability to manipulate data with PERL, sed, awk, sort, cut, paste and so on. I'm not sure that most people get data in alien formats (if you produce the data, you've got some control over the format, if you produce a format that you can't use then you didn't produce a very good format).
I've toyed with IDE's under linux but haven't ever felt the need to change. Under MacOS I prefer an IDE. Under MacOS X I will probably prefer command line utilities.
I think the important thing with anything is to be comfortable with what you are using regardless of whether somebody else feels that there is a better opinion or not.
There's been some work on asynchronous computers, even more on asynchronous implementations of algorithms. If you do a google search you'll find a bunch of hits.
There is some overhead in asynchronous circuits. The circuit needs to be able to send a signal which can act as the clock upon completion. Depending on what the circuit is supposed to do the overhead can be considerable when compared to a synchronous circuit running at its maximum speed.
In addition gates often can't start processing until all the inputs are fed. Consider a simple AND gate with inputs A0, A1, A2 and A3 and an output Z.
If A0 comes in first and comes in high there still is not enough information to start computing Z. In fact until the very last input bit arrives or a zero Z can not be computed.
I'm not an expert in asynchronous circuits, take what I've said with a grain of salt. I've worked with a few people who explored asynchronous circuits and this was the state at that particular point of time.
I suppose that if there were compelling benefits for asynchronous logic for microprocessors we would see them: power is related to the clock rate, synchronous circuits are always clocked, asynchronous circuits only clock when they're doing useful stuff, hence power should be lower. If you can get the overhead for the completion flags low then theoretically you should be able to run faster etc.
It seems that asynchronous microprocessors are always "just around the corner".
The Renaissance happened. A lot of what are now considered great works of art were created during that period. Intellectual property was alive and well as was the concept of being compensated for your work. This is where the concept of patron of the arts came into being. It had little to do with giving a donation to your favourite theater. The elite would provide housing, food and money for an artist who interested them. The artist would in turn work on portraits of the patrons family but was provided with the funds to be able to work on more challenging, contraversial or important works of art. If I recall correctly there was a bit on this in James Burke'sThe Day the Universe Changed
I've been considering a linux laptop for a while. I'm going off on vacation for over a month next year and would like to bring along a lap top for finding maps, checking email and journaling.
The only thing thats held me back is battery life. Does Linux handle the normal features that say Windows or MacOS does to preserve battery life?
Opening your source won't necessarily weaken your IP in of itself. You're still protected by copyright law. You are however at the mercy of unscrupulous people. True Open Source software such as the linux kernel or the GNU tools that make up an operating system are protected because the community protects itself. If there are any violations it rapidly gets posted to here or technocrat.net. It usually (as far as I know) gets resolved amicably. I don't recall reading about any legal bitchslapping.
Microsoft would be faced with policing things themselves. They could handle this, they're presently a huge company. Investors wouldn't like this however, it would affect the profitability of the company and involve years of litigation. Microsoft is already facing years of litigation in all likelyhood due to the DOJ decision.
At the present time Open Sourcing Windows would hurt Microsoft and benefit its competitors. Microsoft would almost be subjecting itself to the same thing that it subjects the rest of the world to. They develop the standards, everybody else duplicates it. The only difference would be that the standards probably wouldn't be extended at the expense of breaking the real standard.
This situation may change soon assuming that there are restrictions in place preventing collusion between the MS OS company and the MS Apps company. The MS OS company only profits if they sell huge quantities of their product. This only happens if the applications are available for it and work well. Applications are a huge portion of why Microsoft won. Having Excel, Word and the other applications interoperate smoothly is a huge advantage. If MS Apps can't get access to a lot of MS OS IP then the applications will suffer. At the same time if they release information under NDA to MS Apps then MS OS would also have to entertain NDAing it to other developers.
MS Apps starts with an advantage in having an application set that integrates well with Windows already. It then becomes a business decision on whether they port to alternative operating systems. It always was a business decision, but part of the business considered had to be "will we be gutting Windows marketshare by releasing these applications for MacOS, Linux, BeOS etc?"
Look through their document and examine their claims very carefully.
Claim 1: Windows offers better reliability.
They show refer to reports that Sun isn't 100% reliable. They point to reports that say that Sun has failed in ways that cost customers money. You can grant both of these claims, but we know beforehand that 100% reliability is fiction for a variety of reasons. They don't offer a shred of evidence that Windows is any more reliable. Their only claim compares apples and oranges: The NT based front end of a leading online auction hasn't failed while the Sun based backend has. Notice they don't provide any real numbers anywhere. There are statistical means of determining the chance of failure given the probability of a server running a specific OS and the probability of the server in turn failing.
Claim 2: Microsoft Windows runs on lots and lots of (secure|e-business|business-to-business) sites.
Grant them this claim but also offer some perspective: Windows runs 25% of all web sites world wide v.s. 19% for Sun worldwide. Most people don't need any more power than a windows box can provide to serve their internet needs. Jackiee's World of Macrame probably doesn't warrant enough traffic for anything beyond a virtual server at a relatively inexpensive NT based server farm. Most web sites fall into this category. What really is required here in terms of statistics is a measure of expectation. This would require a measure of the product of the number of users and probability that for the given number of users its NT or Sun.
Also they're dealing against a fragmented market. There's IBM, SGI and a variety of Linux distributions that combine to give the overall UNIX marketshare. Microsoft would look small against this so they don't release these statistics. I am willing to bet that if Linux ever claims the dominant position they will fight back by fragmenting the claim by comparing Microsoft against the leading distribution, such as SUSE or RedHat.
usually (I haven't looked at a license agreement in ages) you're ok as long as you've got enough licenses to cover the number of simultaneous users. You may or may not have to implement a license management system (i.e. users are actually locked out from using the app if all licenses are used)
You'd have to purchase enough licenses to cover your users to make it legit. One copy of MS Office or Windows wouldn't cut it.
I'm not sure what the business or technical justification would be for serving VMware in this manner. From a zealocy standpoint, sure, you get to say "We're a Linux shop" but there would be no real technical merit to it or probably even a sound business case.
You still need N Windows licenses, and M licenses for your applications plus a license for VMware (maybe N of these too) and a beefy enough server to handle it.
This is still going to be pretty pricy. The 95 dollar price tag is for a chip, not for a PCI board. Add in engineering and manufacturing costs and the price will put it beyond casual "Ooh, I've got a gigabyte network in my house" costs.
There are even cheaper pure 1000baseT chips out there. The only really noteable thing about the National Semiconductor chip is that it can talk down to 10/100 base T.
AOL and Earthlink and I'm sure many other services have an astoundingly large number of locations to dial in. As mentioned AOL has 500 free hours, I'm not at all sure whether they'll block you from this due to your nationality.
If you can't get it for free remember that you're only talking 200 bucks for a full years service, maybe less. It's pretty easy to make this back just by having access to local numbers to dial in from or 1-800 numbers.
One other option is if you've already got friends in the US, see about arranging accounts at Universities in advance. I've done this for trips to Alaska but only for the final destination, not stops along the way.
Please check your facts. Connectix tries very hard to prevent piracy but other people have patches available that get around this. You can also purchase 'upgrades' for your PlayStation that will do the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Put your money where your mouth is and set the precedent. Fill in the following: Real name: Main email: Home address: Home phone: Social security number: Current place of employment: Salary:
The region codes may be unpopular, but there is a legitimate reason for their introduction (though there may be unlegitimate reasons they're currently used, I don't know). People going to the theater and watching a movie is still a huge revenue stream for the people involved with films. The problem is that the distribution of movies to theaters isn't instantaneous. North America gets the first run at first run movies followed by Europe and other venues. The DVD might be available in North America before the movie is even available overseas. I would imagine that the same is true for overseas movies (though the average american consumer has little interest). The region codes were meant to protect the first run theater market. This wasn't as much as a problem with VHS tapes since VHS tapes suck as far as picture quality goes. DVD on a decent home system is pretty sweet.
Even though I personally agree that region codes are the wrong way to go about it I'm not about to boycott DVD's. I'm not a zealot, the DVD meets most of my needs, I like the format and hope it keeps growing. I've never purchased a movie on VHS but I've got over 100 on DVD. One format sucks and the other doesn't.
One last comment, region zero isn't a way to get around region coding from what I've read. At one time it worked but newer DVD players refuse to play region zero discs.
Second of all, all the press materials (PDF spec sheets etc) all refer to the ATi RAGE 128, this is a lot of work for a large company to do in about a week which is the length of time this contraversy has existed.
Third of all why would Apple weaken their product line to spite ATi? If anything Jobs would be more likely to say "Bend over so I can stick your card where it belongs, we're giving the contract to 3DFx". Weakening their product line would have impact on their profits.
Basically on a rumors site anybody can say anything and it will get posted just in case it happens to be true. Being correct 1% of the time seems to make up for the 99% of the time they're incorrect or partially correct.
Sites like MacOS Rumors doesn't exist just for the fun of the people running it. That may be part of it, but like slashdot, part of it is also financial. They have to report on the rumors, not reporting on the rumors, even to spite Apple, would hurt them a whole lot more than it would hurt Apple. It would mean that whoever did report it would get to claim a 'scoop' over those who didn't. This moves people around and cuts in on the number of click throughs which are their income stream.
Neither Ziff-Davis or C-Net has any credibility to speak of if you really look at what they say and there motives behind it. Either company will jump on whatever bandwagon is most convenient so the result of this merger really won't be a dilution of credible news on the internet.
I can't think of a mainstream computer rag that really has any credibility, online or in dead tree format. There are some decent specialist publications such as Dr. Jobb's Journal (or it was decent last time I checked, maybe its pulled a Byte and catered to the lowest common denominator).
Sites like slashdot are not in the same league as even Ziff-Davis or C-net however. Slashdot compiles stories from other companies, such as C-net or Ziff-Davis, and provides a forum for people to respond to.
If slashdot really wants to compete in that arena they would have to do a lot more mainstream journalism: more interviews, write-ups on new technology, product reviews etc. User comments would have to be secondary to the news.
There are some sites that do this fairly well within the narrow scope that they're interested in. It doesn't mean that slashdot needs to do this however, it really would no longer be slashdot. I've always viewed slashdot as a BBS more than a news source. There is occasionaly something to be learned but usually its from the commentary and not the 'news'.
Stop whining. Take the bus. In addition to saving a couple of bucks, it'll help prevent your kids from getting skin cancer.
</i>
In any cities I've been to or lived in the bus does not save money over a given trip in comparision to the cost of gas to fuel a car for the same number of trips. Busses are not all that cost effective of a means of transportation. Factor in time wasted that would otherwise be your free time waiting for the bus, transfers and so on its a big money loser including the payments on a cheap new vehicle.
Cities with mass transport such as subways are often a better deal than owning a car, but I've never seen the bus win on cost of ownership.
That's partially correct, Netscape has not only been slow to release but has worried more about pretty features than adhering to standards. Unfortunately MS 'features' will only become a proprietary standard which means they will never appear on Linux unless Microsoft makes a Linux port of Internet Explorer.
There will be an increasing amount of web space that can't be seen by Linux (or BSD or BeOS etc.) users in a short time.
I've got a couple of problems with online voting. Sure, it allows more people to vote but if people are too lazy to get to a poll then why cater to them? I really hate dumbing down to the lowest common denominator, or in this case lazying down. There are some valid reasons such as for shut ins but there are already mechanisms for that.
The more alarming thing to me is that nobody has yet built an internet based system that was capable of working through a denial of service attack. Most cities aren't homogeneous masses, they are clusters of people with common economic or social status. There are rich neighbourhoods and there are poor neighbourhoods. Depending on where you live there are Italian neighbourhoods and there are Chinese neighbourhoods and gay neighbourhoods and so on.
This dilineates the vote, voters from certain neighbourhoods are more likely to vote in a certain way. A denial of service attack against one or more target neighbourhoods effectively could sway the outcome of the vote.
It's theoretically possible to do this in real life of course. Stand in front of the poll station with a gun (popular in many of your favourite third world stations) but the repurcussions tend to be rather immediate and drastic.
It's slashdot's right to post whatever they want. It's your right to go elsewhere as I did for a long while. I voted with my feet. Their reason for posting it could only be because somebody made the editorial decision that perhaps people would be interested in reading it.
They were obviously correct, a number of people, including yourself, read it.
In the context of comparing the post to amazon.com it may well be redundant but not everybody browses book reviews at amazon.com. All of the postings on slashdot are redundant, all slashdot does is (attempt to) distill down information that its readers may find interesting.
Why was it written? It may have been because somebody thought they were doing a favour. It could have been because they get off in seeing their name in lights or it could be for additional positive karma.
The GPL, as far as I know, doesn't preclude you from releasing code under another license as long as you're the owner of the code.
I can release SquigglyWord under the GPL. It's then available for free to anybody who asks, with source. CodeBloat INC could still contact me about releasing a Bloat Enhanced (TM) version of SquigglyWord under a restrictive license. The availability of this product, both gratis and libris, would be entirely up to the licensing agreements on this particular version.
I'm not sure about doing this with versions of SquigglyWord enhanced with community provided patches though. I don't know the status of the ownership of the patches.
This announcement (assuming its accurate and the gene is actually mapped) just means that they're at the point where they've got a genetic Rosetta stone. It was a big job, it was important, but it isn't the final outcome. It's just a significant milestone.
The next step will be determining the purpose of each part the genome. This is the act of translating the genetic Rosetta stone. This is a significant milestone. It still isn't the final outcome.
Once this information is known it will be time to try and influence genetic makeup in a controlled and predictable manner, resulting in the potential for: new treatments for diseases; in utero or in ovum genetic modification; genetic enhancement; organ growth etc.
There are a lot of compelling reasons to develop under Linux in my opinion. It's important to note that disclaimer in that sentence however: In my opinion. My first experiences with programming were BASIC on a Commodore Pet. While in university I did a lot of programming under UNIX and became used to the pervasive way in which text and data could be handled and manipulated.
I also realize that if it weren't for this sudden immersion I wouldn't find these reasons all that compelling. I've coded in MetroWerk's IDE under MacOS as well as with the shell-like IDE MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workship). If I had first used an IDE to program I'm not sure I'd ever have really felt as comfortable without one. Most of the reasons that I feel so comfortable programming in a shell environment under UNIX are due to the ability to manipulate data with PERL, sed, awk, sort, cut, paste and so on. I'm not sure that most people get data in alien formats (if you produce the data, you've got some control over the format, if you produce a format that you can't use then you didn't produce a very good format).
I've toyed with IDE's under linux but haven't ever felt the need to change. Under MacOS I prefer an IDE. Under MacOS X I will probably prefer command line utilities.
I think the important thing with anything is to be comfortable with what you are using regardless of whether somebody else feels that there is a better opinion or not.
There's been some work on asynchronous computers, even more on asynchronous implementations of algorithms. If you do a google search you'll find a bunch of hits.
There is some overhead in asynchronous circuits. The circuit needs to be able to send a signal which can act as the clock upon completion. Depending on what the circuit is supposed to do the overhead can be considerable when compared to a synchronous circuit running at its maximum speed.
In addition gates often can't start processing until all the inputs are fed. Consider a simple AND gate with inputs A0, A1, A2 and A3 and an output Z.
If A0 comes in first and comes in high there still is not enough information to start computing Z. In fact until the very last input bit arrives or a zero Z can not be computed.
I'm not an expert in asynchronous circuits, take what I've said with a grain of salt. I've worked with a few people who explored asynchronous circuits and this was the state at that particular point of time.
I suppose that if there were compelling benefits for asynchronous logic for microprocessors we would see them: power is related to the clock rate, synchronous circuits are always clocked, asynchronous circuits only clock when they're doing useful stuff, hence power should be lower. If you can get the overhead for the completion flags low then theoretically you should be able to run faster etc.
It seems that asynchronous microprocessors are always "just around the corner".
If anybody is interested there's a dec ent write up on IP law</a>. Venice, 1474 - inventors were provided exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited time.
Sorry to interject facts into Goalias' 'sarcasm'.
The Renaissance happened. A lot of what are now considered great works of art were created during that period. Intellectual property was alive and well as was the concept of being compensated for your work. This is where the concept of patron of the arts came into being. It had little to do with giving a donation to your favourite theater. The elite would provide housing, food and money for an artist who interested them. The artist would in turn work on portraits of the patrons family but was provided with the funds to be able to work on more challenging, contraversial or important works of art. If I recall correctly there was a bit on this in James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed
I've been considering a linux laptop for a while. I'm going off on vacation for over a month next year and would like to bring along a lap top for finding maps, checking email and journaling.
The only thing thats held me back is battery life. Does Linux handle the normal features that say Windows or MacOS does to preserve battery life?
Opening your source won't necessarily weaken your IP in of itself. You're still protected by copyright law. You are however at the mercy of unscrupulous people. True Open Source software such as the linux kernel or the GNU tools that make up an operating system are protected because the community protects itself. If there are any violations it rapidly gets posted to here or technocrat.net. It usually (as far as I know) gets resolved amicably. I don't recall reading about any legal bitchslapping.
Microsoft would be faced with policing things themselves. They could handle this, they're presently a huge company. Investors wouldn't like this however, it would affect the profitability of the company and involve years of litigation. Microsoft is already facing years of litigation in all likelyhood due to the DOJ decision.
At the present time Open Sourcing Windows would hurt Microsoft and benefit its competitors. Microsoft would almost be subjecting itself to the same thing that it subjects the rest of the world to. They develop the standards, everybody else duplicates it. The only difference would be that the standards probably wouldn't be extended at the expense of breaking the real standard.
This situation may change soon assuming that there are restrictions in place preventing collusion between the MS OS company and the MS Apps company. The MS OS company only profits if they sell huge quantities of their product. This only happens if the applications are available for it and work well. Applications are a huge portion of why Microsoft won. Having Excel, Word and the other applications interoperate smoothly is a huge advantage. If MS Apps can't get access to a lot of MS OS IP then the applications will suffer. At the same time if they release information under NDA to MS Apps then MS OS would also have to entertain NDAing it to other developers.
MS Apps starts with an advantage in having an application set that integrates well with Windows already. It then becomes a business decision on whether they port to alternative operating systems. It always was a business decision, but part of the business considered had to be "will we be gutting Windows marketshare by releasing these applications for MacOS, Linux, BeOS etc?"
- Claim 1: Windows offers better reliability.
- Claim 2: Microsoft Windows runs on lots and lots of (secure|e-business|business-to-business) sites.
Also they're dealing against a fragmented market. There's IBM, SGI and a variety of Linux distributions that combine to give the overall UNIX marketshare. Microsoft would look small against this so they don't release these statistics. I am willing to bet that if Linux ever claims the dominant position they will fight back by fragmenting the claim by comparing Microsoft against the leading distribution, such as SUSE or RedHat.They show refer to reports that Sun isn't 100% reliable. They point to reports that say that Sun has failed in ways that cost customers money. You can grant both of these claims, but we know beforehand that 100% reliability is fiction for a variety of reasons. They don't offer a shred of evidence that Windows is any more reliable. Their only claim compares apples and oranges: The NT based front end of a leading online auction hasn't failed while the Sun based backend has. Notice they don't provide any real numbers anywhere. There are statistical means of determining the chance of failure given the probability of a server running a specific OS and the probability of the server in turn failing.
Grant them this claim but also offer some perspective: Windows runs 25% of all web sites world wide v.s. 19% for Sun worldwide. Most people don't need any more power than a windows box can provide to serve their internet needs. Jackiee's World of Macrame probably doesn't warrant enough traffic for anything beyond a virtual server at a relatively inexpensive NT based server farm. Most web sites fall into this category. What really is required here in terms of statistics is a measure of expectation. This would require a measure of the product of the number of users and probability that for the given number of users its NT or Sun.
Ahh,
usually (I haven't looked at a license agreement in ages) you're ok as long as you've got enough licenses to cover the number of simultaneous users. You may or may not have to implement a license management system (i.e. users are actually locked out from using the app if all licenses are used)
You'd have to purchase enough licenses to cover your users to make it legit. One copy of MS Office or Windows wouldn't cut it.
I'm not sure what the business or technical justification would be for serving VMware in this manner. From a zealocy standpoint, sure, you get to say "We're a Linux shop" but there would be no real technical merit to it or probably even a sound business case.
You still need N Windows licenses, and M licenses for your applications plus a license for VMware (maybe N of these too) and a beefy enough server to handle it.
This is still going to be pretty pricy. The 95 dollar price tag is for a chip, not for a PCI board. Add in engineering and manufacturing costs and the price will put it beyond casual "Ooh, I've got a gigabyte network in my house" costs.
There are even cheaper pure 1000baseT chips out there. The only really noteable thing about the National Semiconductor chip is that it can talk down to 10/100 base T.
AOL and Earthlink and I'm sure many other services have an astoundingly large number of locations to dial in. As mentioned AOL has 500 free hours, I'm not at all sure whether they'll block you from this due to your nationality.
If you can't get it for free remember that you're only talking 200 bucks for a full years service, maybe less. It's pretty easy to make this back just by having access to local numbers to dial in from or 1-800 numbers.
One other option is if you've already got friends in the US, see about arranging accounts at Universities in advance. I've done this for trips to Alaska but only for the final destination, not stops along the way.
Please check your facts. Connectix tries very hard to prevent piracy but other people have patches available that get around this. You can also purchase 'upgrades' for your PlayStation that will do the same thing.