Oh, and incidentally, your.sig calls for Clinton to be returned to power, though he has served both of his allowed terms
Oh I think that anyone but a Republican dittohead can see the humorous comparison to the 60s Vietnam slogan there, and the underlying point that His Fraudulency has committed far worse crimes against the consitution than fucking an intern.
Yes starting a war to distract attention from affairs at home is what Hitler used to do.
As for the claims that the media is right wing biased, they are certainly no less true than the claims that the media has a left wing bias. Ann Coulter and her ilk are really engaged on a campaign for more bias in the media and the suppression of left wing views by intimidating liberal voices. They have largely succeeded. Of course if you are a dittohead and consider any mention of a left wing view to be bias then you are going to always believe that the media is a left wing conspiracy, even Fox news.
This will really be an issue when the widower living on a fixed income only watching basic cable has to pay for such an upgrade. Pissing off that voting block is suicide.
The only mandate for HDTV is for broadcast signals. Cable will not be affected by the proposed mandate since a cable TV company can broadcase both standard and digital signals at the same time without conflict. Same goes for satelite.
The ridiculous part of this whole thing is that almost nobody who buys a big screen TV connects it to a broadcast signal as the primary feed. Most people watching HDTV signals for real today are taking them off satelite.
Broadcast HDTV so far is a bust, the signals don't work in appartment blocks with a set top antenna.
So if the edict did get made law the people affected would be the people who listen to broadcast signals - mostly people who can't be bothered with tv much, can't afford cable or are watching on second sets.
Withdrawing these people's ability to watch TV would be interpreted as yet another corporate, for the rich policy. But since those people won't be able to vote it does not matter. Any complaints that are made will merely divert attention away from the huge contracts Haliburton and other Bush crony-capitalism companies get to exploit Iraq's oil (bill for security paid for by US taxpayer) and of course the effort to remove the limit on presidential terms...
It just won't happen. This is an FCC/Hollywood pipe dream. If it does actually happen this way, there will be revolution, trust me.
Actually what this is about is two Congressional scams. The first is that the 'balanced' budget was predicated on the govt. getting paid a vast sum for the returned analog licenses. Of course the budget also assumed other things like 4% growth, no war with Iraq and the tax cuts not costing anything.
The second more important scam is the campaign bribe extortion racket. Tauzin and co want to milk this for as long as they can so don't expect the stupid Tauzin/Hollings deadlines to be kept. They don't want their meal ticket going away. They want this to be like the banking reform act which was kept on the boil for 15 years with cash extractions every campaign cycle.
As for a 'revolution', talk like that will get you up in front of an Ashcroft tribunal for a secret trial.
But a more relevant consideration is that without the media broadcasting their reassuring pro-Bush propaganda (complete with serious consideration of spurious claims of left wing bias) there is a serious prospect of regime change. So maybe the regime does want to disable home VCR use, don't want anyone challenging things when the regime tries to rewrite history again (like claiming they never campaigned for social security privatization or the spurious post-facto claim that the pledge to balance the budget had conditions).
This it a regime that very much wants to control the media. They are people for whom no power is sufficient. Even the US Presidency does not give them enough power, they want more.
Netscape is the direct descendant of NSCA Mosaic, the Ur browser. Frankly, I don't remember what the big deal about Netscape 1.0 was, relative to Mosaic, but there was much hype. Maybe something really hardcore, like introducing background colors?
Wrong in every respect.
First Mosaic was not the 'Ur browser'. Tim's NextStep browser was. Mosaic was browser number 15 or so. The significant things about Mosaic were that 1) it actually compiled without having to hack the code yourself or mess with 6 different support packages like tkwww and 2) it was the first X-Windows browser that did not look really amateur.
Second, Netscape does not contain any code from Mosaic, although it was written by the same main author - Eric Bina. NCSA sold the commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass.
Third IE was originally based on the Spyglass code, so if any browser is 'the direct descendant' it would be IE. Go look at the 'about' box on IE, although the original Mosaic actually had more lines of CERN code than NCSA code which were never acknowledged.
So why is this "junk"? If anything its good competition.
Probably because the guy is an apple-head and has drunk the kool-aide. It is amazing how people will react to something they feel threatens them. Like all the folk who will swear blind that CD sound is grossly inferior to vinyl...
What I would like is a device that combined a number of features of the devices listed. I want the mmc/sd slot, I want the microphone, I wanth the 1.8" drive.
I would also like the thing to have a PDA sized display. Perhaps what I really want is a pda with a 10Gb hard drive... Wonder If I could add one to my Zaurus...
The mmc/sd format is really cute. The chips are the size of a quarter. I have seen a 512Gb chip which OK costs $350 at the moment but will soon be on sale in costco for $50. A couple of those would last me quite a while.
The mmc/sd format is small enough that the chip and player could easily be built into a pair of headphones. If Bose would make something like that I would buy it in an instant...
Good God, man! What kind of university do you attend that can, in such a sweeping move, infringe upon your civil and legal rights? Bob Jones University?
Hey, could be worse, it could be Jim Jones university...
Just in case, I'd lay off any soft drinks
on offer
Enter pallidium. They are well aware of the inherent roblems with software playback. When the homebrew app that captures these bits is not signed, oh well for you.
I very much doubt that Palladium could possibly support region codes or anything close. In the first place it is quite likely that the EU will have found them to be an illegal device to suport differential pricing by the time Palladium launches.
But even without that, laptops are an international comodity as are motherboards.
It could probably be sold in higher volumes and hence cheaper if it did.
There are a number of micro boxes arround, most run windows. What is different about this one is that it does not require a hard drive or a fan. Windows would not be a good choice to run on a compact flash only system since the system tends to write to many places in the system disk. With Linux you can pretty much shut off all the logging and run from hard disk alone does not mean that is a great idea of course.
The features that somewhat disappoint me are the lack of a high seed firewire or USB2.0 port to attach a large capacity drive to. Also to run diskless I would want to have quite a bit more memory. Also the video looks pretty crappy.
The large pc box is comming to the end of its run. There was a time when I would worry about running out of pCI slots, these days pretty much every board has integrated ethernet and you can easily get firewire. The only pci slots I use are for WiFi and graphics - and even the graphics is no longer so critical.
If someone came out with a nice thin box for a home HiFi stack I would buy it, perhaps with just a couple of exansion slots, one pci, one agp. Unfortunately this form factor is currently considered a 'server' i.e. business, i.e. charge three times extra form factor.
Think about it--you can just stop eating and lose 41 lbs in a couple weeks. It doesn't make it healthy. You should really see your doctor and make sure everything's going okay.
Actually what the nutritionists say is that you should not lose more than about 10% of your weight in a month which for normal sized people is about 10 lbs.
If on the other hand you are 400lbs then 40lbs is within acceptable limits.
It seems to me that if anything, the only ones this serves is Microsoft, as the only functionality is to reclaim file types back to the Microsoft application. I could be misinterpreting the utility, but that's the way it seems to me.
Actually no, the utility is the only reason I installed Real Player. In the past I have avoided real like the plague because it keeps rebinding associations to stuff it has no business doing, sticks unpleasant upgrade warning icons in the system tray and generally behaving like a complete and utter prick.
Now I know I can blast the adware and spyware infected puss from my system if I want to I will load it up.
There are very few developers switching to.NET right now, and developing a game for it would be stupid. It's a VM, and so introduces greater overhead.
Untrue, it is not a VM. It is the intermediate object representation of the compiler. It is little more than a revision of the old C++ compiler intermediate language with the multiple inheritance workarrounds ripped out.
There were a bunch of benchmarls of C# vs C++ in that latest Dr Dobbs journal. Basically the performance difference comes down to whether you end up passing by value or reference. If you use references you can perform much better than C++, if you use values the overhead of copying stuff bites somewhat.
I use C# because all my code is manipulating XML and.NET has some of the better XML code arround, plus I want to know what Mr Softy is upo to. Now I don't do production code, I just write specs so I don't much care on performance, but from ease of writing the code it sure beats C and it is easier to learn C# than to use C++.
The third violation, ProComp charges, is that the middleware control is not intuitive and comes with no Help file for understanding how to use it.
This one is pretty ironic since one of the things that the HTML widget does these days is it is the interface to the help files. So people who are going to run Windows-DS (Disenting States edition) are pretty much saying they don't want IE based help.
Overall the list is pretty much the sort of thing amateur politicians throw together. If you have a good case the thing to do is to state only your best cases and avoid anything that could be attacked. If on the other case you have a weak case the tactic to use is to pull out every complaint no matter how pathetic and throw it all against the wall in the hope something sticks.
This is an example of the latter tactic. The only point that was marginally valid was the download issue. However that is pretty pathetic since anyone who is disabling IE is going to be downloading Netscape or Opera and those suckers are the same size as SP1.
Oh and in response to incorrect statements elsewhere in the thread, I have successfully compiled a C# program and run the.exe on a Windows 98 system without the.NET framework present (unless someone downloaded it while I was not looking which I doubt).
The.Net runtime does not even come included with Windows XP and Windows 2000. Why would they need to include an option to disable the.Net runtime, if it's required that the user of the OS to have downloaded and installed it?
The.NET runtime didn't even exist when Windows 2000 came out and was still in beta when XP went to manufacture.
I would not be suprised if Microsoft has already started distributing some.NET applications. It is a heck of a lot easier to code in C# than in C++ and wallow in the lossage. However part of the idea of.NET is that the applications should not be dependent on DLL hell. The whole concept of strong assemblies pretty much makes the idea of 'a framework' irrelevant. Basically the applications are going to load in the.NET components that they use.
Going forward Sun simply cannot be allowed to get away with this FUD. Java is simply not a subsitute for.NET, it is a closed proprietary system that they will not allow others to modify and will sick a bunch of lawyers on anyone who tries. So What Sun are arguing is that Microsoft is not allowed to ever implement any system that competes with Java.
If the Sun button did exist and the user had installed a.NET application, Sun's button would cause the application to be deleted.
If the user was running.NET server or any of the later versions of Windows that is.NET based uninstalling the framework would cause parts of the O/S to be unloaded.
This all goes back to the FUD that Sun threw up in the trial. They kept changing the definition of Internet Explorer according to the point they wanted to make. When Microsoft said that uninstalling the IE icon, the IE shell and the support libraries would cause the apllications that depend on the dlls to break (e.g. Quicken) the story was 'oh we only mean the shell and icon'. Now they have switched back to claiming that the dcree covers the shell, the icon and the libraries - including the.NET libraries which are yet to be written.
The.NET framework is not in any way similar to the Java VM.
Read the article...
on
Skydriving
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"There's no real science to it--it's hit or miss," says skydiver/skydriver Greg Gasson,
I don't know what we'd get from a Gore administration on this subject, but I'll bet it would be a lot better than this empty tripe.
Actually the document is not half bad, the problem is not in the document, it is in the follow through.
Since the document proposes neither a tax cut nor a politically opportune war I don't expect it to get a great deal of follow through from the Whitehouse.
I certainly don't expect the proposals to be made mandatory in any sense by this administration in this term, but then that was never going to happen whoever was in office. This is the 'cooperation phase' of regulation where self-governance is attempted.
The real decision will be taken in 2004/5 by which time the areas where self governance has failled will be apparent and the question of coercion will appear again.
That basically said that the FBI wants hackers, but their ethical screening keeps them from hiring people who think like hackers. That only eliminates 100% of the candidates! If you know how to gain unauthorized access to a secure network, the FBI wants you, but they won't be able to hire you!
That is rubbish. Most criminal hackers don't have the skills you would want for a white hat team. Hackers don't pitch their skills against security exerts, they take advantage of the incompetent.
You have to be much smarter than a hacker to catch a hacker. The few people with that level of skill can earn three times as much in industry.
The media promotes this hackers as uber-geeks myth because a) it sells papers and b) they are often socially engineered by the hackers. I watched a TLC program on Mitnick last night, never once did the reporter ask if Mitnick might be socally engineering him with a carefully chosen set of lies to make Mitnick sound like a victim rather than a crook.
The funniest part was using the Swiss Army Knife to do the assembly. I suppose it's possible, but I was LOL. And none of the "lilliputians" were wearing (ainti-static) wrist straps - bad form!
Oh come off it, don't try to fool people with that old 'static electricity' scam. I bet you try to get people to stick their razor blades under a pyramid to sharpen them.
The whole thing was a crock we invented back in the 80s when the yields of the fabs was not exactly good. We told the customers who rang up to complain about a bad one 'static electricity'.
Then we hit on the idea of these stupid wrist bands. The guy who 'invented' those later on went on to 'invent' the abdominizer and magnasoles. They were originally made to sell to people visiting executions down in Florida when they still used the electic chair as part of a 'share the experience' package. Kindof a sicko idea I suppose.
If you don't believe me go put on your best rubber soled shoes and run up and down on a nylon carpet then ground yourself on the cpu of your PC that you removed earlier. Oh and while you have the thing out you can remove some of those sharp spiky pins we put on the back of them. No IC ever needed more than 8 pins, its a fact, we only added the others because it makes them look cool, you can remove the others with a pair of pliers.
Something else that most people don't know, you can fry most CPUs in a microwave for long periods of time without damaging them. Just make sure you wear a wrist band while you do so.
Only thing to watch out for is that you don't accidentally discharge the battery backup for the microcode while you are doing all this. That might cause your CPU to misfunction so experiment at your own risk!
If they are his patents there's likely very little MS can do about it, except maybe try to sue him into oblivion, which is where the blackmail material would come in handy.
There is plenty Microsoft could do. However Microsoft tends to behave as a rational actor.
The release does not discuss the funding of the new venture but I would not be at all suprised if Gates, Balmer, Microsoft were investors. If so providing access to IP is not suprising.
I would not be suprised if there was not some sort of reciprocal IP agreement so Microsoft can use IP developed by the new company.
It is unlikely that the new company is going to grow so big that it puts Microsoft in the poor house. On the other hand they can probably buy it if it does lok like it has a winner.
Companies like Microsoft tend to find it very hard to get existing sales and marketing organizations to accept a new product that might canibalize an existing market (see Christiansen's Inovator's dilema). It is actually more effective to buy in R&D even at what appears to be a ludicrous premium over the cost of building from scratch.
Take Vermeer as an example, it is very unlikely that they would ever have made $180 mil in sales let alone profit. Microsoft has earned many times that from distributing their product, Frontpage through their existing channels.
Larry Burns is on record as saying "Heck, I even bathe in the stuff", shortly prior to a mystery accident which has hospitalised him. GM deny Burns' habit of smoking in the tub is to blame.
Set light to a match and you can give a person heat for a minute.
Set light to the person and you give them heat for the rest of their life
Actually most luxury cars have or are moving to drive by wire these days. I know the Infinity Q45, G35, and Nissan 350Z all use it, and I think some of the German luxury name plates are introducing it at the high end.
The new Jaguar models (apart from the manual X-type possibly) all have an entirely electronic transmission control. What appears to be the gear selector lever is actually just an electrical switch that tells the computer what gear is requested. The throtle is also just an electical switch. The reason they do this is that it allows them to ensure that they hit the emissions requirements, avoid the gas guzzler tax while at the same time gaining about 20hp through optimal tuning.
The brakes and steering are a combination of electronic with a mechanical failsafe - as are all ABS brake systems and power assisted steering systems.
The main objections to fly by wire came from Boeing FUD campaigns trying to convince the public that their obsolete 30 year old design was safer than the modern airbus. Although Boeing thinks fly by wire is perfectly safe for military jets it kinda got afraid of using it in a passenger jet. Despite the FUD the Airbus safety record ten years on is pretty much the same as the Boeing record.
The fly by wire systems that have been implicated in failures are the ones that attempt to fly the plane for the pilot. While every so often there is a loony attempt to bring cars that drive themselves to the market it is not very likely this will succeed.
Electric motors actually have more torque, pound-for-pound, than gasoline engines do. Furthermore, electric motors have a perfectly flat torque curve from 0 RPMs, whereas most gasoline engines don't hit their peak torque until at least 1,750 rpm. This means electric motors have a MUCH larger area under the torque curve !!
Which set me thinking that the way to get started with fuel cell vehicles would be to start an open wheel racing series. After Montoya's qualifying record at Monza last weekend it is clear that the big problem F1 now faces is that the cars are too damn fast. The only realistic way left to slow them is to reduce the engine capacity again and that will be mega expensive.
An open wheel fuel cell series would provide a showcase for fuel cell vehicles and a blank slate for interesting new developments.
How come we choose from just two people to run for president and fifty for Miss America?
Funny you should ask that, rumour has it that when the Miss North Carolina dispute reaches the supreme court that they are going to declare George W the winner again.
On the mods for cars theme, am I the only person who finds the pick up trucks with the body jacked up a foot over the axles to look utterly ridiculous?
The whole thing you want to get good handling is to make the chasis center of gravity as low as possible and the turning moment of inertia as low as possible. So sticking the chasis up on dork stilts is only going to make the thing steer like a cow.
Having the sound card, NIC and video on the mother board is good in theory. But wait 5 years when the next big OS comes out, and the propritary drivers will never be upgraded for it. Just use a $5 sound card, $5 NIC, and an NVIDIA (no other choice with new games, they force you to use it) video card.
My point exactly, I no longer bother about that issue because I don't buy a machine expecting it to have to last three years, let alone 5.
My main problem with motherboards is that for some reason the dweeble-brains who design the bios are incapable of understanding that disk sizes increase substantially over time. The Intel Providence motherboard I replaced simply would not boot to any disk available as standard today.
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Oh I think that anyone but a Republican dittohead can see the humorous comparison to the 60s Vietnam slogan there, and the underlying point that His Fraudulency has committed far worse crimes against the consitution than fucking an intern.
Yes starting a war to distract attention from affairs at home is what Hitler used to do.
As for the claims that the media is right wing biased, they are certainly no less true than the claims that the media has a left wing bias. Ann Coulter and her ilk are really engaged on a campaign for more bias in the media and the suppression of left wing views by intimidating liberal voices. They have largely succeeded. Of course if you are a dittohead and consider any mention of a left wing view to be bias then you are going to always believe that the media is a left wing conspiracy, even Fox news.
The only mandate for HDTV is for broadcast signals. Cable will not be affected by the proposed mandate since a cable TV company can broadcase both standard and digital signals at the same time without conflict. Same goes for satelite.
The ridiculous part of this whole thing is that almost nobody who buys a big screen TV connects it to a broadcast signal as the primary feed. Most people watching HDTV signals for real today are taking them off satelite.
Broadcast HDTV so far is a bust, the signals don't work in appartment blocks with a set top antenna.
So if the edict did get made law the people affected would be the people who listen to broadcast signals - mostly people who can't be bothered with tv much, can't afford cable or are watching on second sets.
Withdrawing these people's ability to watch TV would be interpreted as yet another corporate, for the rich policy. But since those people won't be able to vote it does not matter. Any complaints that are made will merely divert attention away from the huge contracts Haliburton and other Bush crony-capitalism companies get to exploit Iraq's oil (bill for security paid for by US taxpayer) and of course the effort to remove the limit on presidential terms...
Actually what this is about is two Congressional scams. The first is that the 'balanced' budget was predicated on the govt. getting paid a vast sum for the returned analog licenses. Of course the budget also assumed other things like 4% growth, no war with Iraq and the tax cuts not costing anything.
The second more important scam is the campaign bribe extortion racket. Tauzin and co want to milk this for as long as they can so don't expect the stupid Tauzin/Hollings deadlines to be kept. They don't want their meal ticket going away. They want this to be like the banking reform act which was kept on the boil for 15 years with cash extractions every campaign cycle.
As for a 'revolution', talk like that will get you up in front of an Ashcroft tribunal for a secret trial.
But a more relevant consideration is that without the media broadcasting their reassuring pro-Bush propaganda (complete with serious consideration of spurious claims of left wing bias) there is a serious prospect of regime change. So maybe the regime does want to disable home VCR use, don't want anyone challenging things when the regime tries to rewrite history again (like claiming they never campaigned for social security privatization or the spurious post-facto claim that the pledge to balance the budget had conditions).
This it a regime that very much wants to control the media. They are people for whom no power is sufficient. Even the US Presidency does not give them enough power, they want more.
Their noise canceling headphones appear to work a lot better than my Sony phones.
Wrong in every respect.
First Mosaic was not the 'Ur browser'. Tim's NextStep browser was. Mosaic was browser number 15 or so. The significant things about Mosaic were that 1) it actually compiled without having to hack the code yourself or mess with 6 different support packages like tkwww and 2) it was the first X-Windows browser that did not look really amateur.
Second, Netscape does not contain any code from Mosaic, although it was written by the same main author - Eric Bina. NCSA sold the commercial rights to Mosaic to Spyglass.
Third IE was originally based on the Spyglass code, so if any browser is 'the direct descendant' it would be IE. Go look at the 'about' box on IE, although the original Mosaic actually had more lines of CERN code than NCSA code which were never acknowledged.
Probably because the guy is an apple-head and has drunk the kool-aide. It is amazing how people will react to something they feel threatens them. Like all the folk who will swear blind that CD sound is grossly inferior to vinyl...
What I would like is a device that combined a number of features of the devices listed. I want the mmc/sd slot, I want the microphone, I wanth the 1.8" drive.
I would also like the thing to have a PDA sized display. Perhaps what I really want is a pda with a 10Gb hard drive... Wonder If I could add one to my Zaurus...
The mmc/sd format is really cute. The chips are the size of a quarter. I have seen a 512Gb chip which OK costs $350 at the moment but will soon be on sale in costco for $50. A couple of those would last me quite a while.
The mmc/sd format is small enough that the chip and player could easily be built into a pair of headphones. If Bose would make something like that I would buy it in an instant...
Hey, could be worse, it could be Jim Jones university...
Just in case, I'd lay off any soft drinks on offer
I very much doubt that Palladium could possibly support region codes or anything close. In the first place it is quite likely that the EU will have found them to be an illegal device to suport differential pricing by the time Palladium launches.
But even without that, laptops are an international comodity as are motherboards.
It could probably be sold in higher volumes and hence cheaper if it did.
There are a number of micro boxes arround, most run windows. What is different about this one is that it does not require a hard drive or a fan. Windows would not be a good choice to run on a compact flash only system since the system tends to write to many places in the system disk. With Linux you can pretty much shut off all the logging and run from hard disk alone does not mean that is a great idea of course.
The features that somewhat disappoint me are the lack of a high seed firewire or USB2.0 port to attach a large capacity drive to. Also to run diskless I would want to have quite a bit more memory. Also the video looks pretty crappy.
The large pc box is comming to the end of its run. There was a time when I would worry about running out of pCI slots, these days pretty much every board has integrated ethernet and you can easily get firewire. The only pci slots I use are for WiFi and graphics - and even the graphics is no longer so critical.
If someone came out with a nice thin box for a home HiFi stack I would buy it, perhaps with just a couple of exansion slots, one pci, one agp. Unfortunately this form factor is currently considered a 'server' i.e. business, i.e. charge three times extra form factor.
Actually what the nutritionists say is that you should not lose more than about 10% of your weight in a month which for normal sized people is about 10 lbs.
If on the other hand you are 400lbs then 40lbs is within acceptable limits.
Actually no, the utility is the only reason I installed Real Player. In the past I have avoided real like the plague because it keeps rebinding associations to stuff it has no business doing, sticks unpleasant upgrade warning icons in the system tray and generally behaving like a complete and utter prick.
Now I know I can blast the adware and spyware infected puss from my system if I want to I will load it up.
Untrue, it is not a VM. It is the intermediate object representation of the compiler. It is little more than a revision of the old C++ compiler intermediate language with the multiple inheritance workarrounds ripped out.
There were a bunch of benchmarls of C# vs C++ in that latest Dr Dobbs journal. Basically the performance difference comes down to whether you end up passing by value or reference. If you use references you can perform much better than C++, if you use values the overhead of copying stuff bites somewhat.
I use C# because all my code is manipulating XML and .NET has some of the better XML code arround, plus I want to know what Mr Softy is upo to. Now I don't do production code, I just write specs so I don't much care on performance, but from ease of writing the code it sure beats C and it is easier to learn C# than to use C++.
This one is pretty ironic since one of the things that the HTML widget does these days is it is the interface to the help files. So people who are going to run Windows-DS (Disenting States edition) are pretty much saying they don't want IE based help.
Overall the list is pretty much the sort of thing amateur politicians throw together. If you have a good case the thing to do is to state only your best cases and avoid anything that could be attacked. If on the other case you have a weak case the tactic to use is to pull out every complaint no matter how pathetic and throw it all against the wall in the hope something sticks.
This is an example of the latter tactic. The only point that was marginally valid was the download issue. However that is pretty pathetic since anyone who is disabling IE is going to be downloading Netscape or Opera and those suckers are the same size as SP1.
Oh and in response to incorrect statements elsewhere in the thread, I have successfully compiled a C# program and run the .exe on a Windows 98 system without the .NET framework present (unless someone downloaded it while I was not looking which I doubt).
The .NET runtime didn't even exist when Windows 2000 came out and was still in beta when XP went to manufacture.
I would not be suprised if Microsoft has already started distributing some .NET applications. It is a heck of a lot easier to code in C# than in C++ and wallow in the lossage. However part of the idea of .NET is that the applications should not be dependent on DLL hell. The whole concept of strong assemblies pretty much makes the idea of 'a framework' irrelevant. Basically the applications are going to load in the .NET components that they use.
Going forward Sun simply cannot be allowed to get away with this FUD. Java is simply not a subsitute for .NET, it is a closed proprietary system that they will not allow others to modify and will sick a bunch of lawyers on anyone who tries. So What Sun are arguing is that Microsoft is not allowed to ever implement any system that competes with Java.
If the Sun button did exist and the user had installed a .NET application, Sun's button would cause the application to be deleted.
If the user was running .NET server or any of the later versions of Windows that is .NET based uninstalling the framework would cause parts of the O/S to be unloaded.
This all goes back to the FUD that Sun threw up in the trial. They kept changing the definition of Internet Explorer according to the point they wanted to make. When Microsoft said that uninstalling the IE icon, the IE shell and the support libraries would cause the apllications that depend on the dlls to break (e.g. Quicken) the story was 'oh we only mean the shell and icon'. Now they have switched back to claiming that the dcree covers the shell, the icon and the libraries - including the .NET libraries which are yet to be written.
The .NET framework is not in any way similar to the Java VM.
How many times do the cars miss the ground?
Actually the document is not half bad, the problem is not in the document, it is in the follow through.
Since the document proposes neither a tax cut nor a politically opportune war I don't expect it to get a great deal of follow through from the Whitehouse.
I certainly don't expect the proposals to be made mandatory in any sense by this administration in this term, but then that was never going to happen whoever was in office. This is the 'cooperation phase' of regulation where self-governance is attempted.
The real decision will be taken in 2004/5 by which time the areas where self governance has failled will be apparent and the question of coercion will appear again.
That is rubbish. Most criminal hackers don't have the skills you would want for a white hat team. Hackers don't pitch their skills against security exerts, they take advantage of the incompetent.
You have to be much smarter than a hacker to catch a hacker. The few people with that level of skill can earn three times as much in industry.
The media promotes this hackers as uber-geeks myth because a) it sells papers and b) they are often socially engineered by the hackers. I watched a TLC program on Mitnick last night, never once did the reporter ask if Mitnick might be socally engineering him with a carefully chosen set of lies to make Mitnick sound like a victim rather than a crook.
Oh come off it, don't try to fool people with that old 'static electricity' scam. I bet you try to get people to stick their razor blades under a pyramid to sharpen them.
The whole thing was a crock we invented back in the 80s when the yields of the fabs was not exactly good. We told the customers who rang up to complain about a bad one 'static electricity'.
Then we hit on the idea of these stupid wrist bands. The guy who 'invented' those later on went on to 'invent' the abdominizer and magnasoles. They were originally made to sell to people visiting executions down in Florida when they still used the electic chair as part of a 'share the experience' package. Kindof a sicko idea I suppose.
If you don't believe me go put on your best rubber soled shoes and run up and down on a nylon carpet then ground yourself on the cpu of your PC that you removed earlier. Oh and while you have the thing out you can remove some of those sharp spiky pins we put on the back of them. No IC ever needed more than 8 pins, its a fact, we only added the others because it makes them look cool, you can remove the others with a pair of pliers.
Something else that most people don't know, you can fry most CPUs in a microwave for long periods of time without damaging them. Just make sure you wear a wrist band while you do so.
Only thing to watch out for is that you don't accidentally discharge the battery backup for the microcode while you are doing all this. That might cause your CPU to misfunction so experiment at your own risk!
There is plenty Microsoft could do. However Microsoft tends to behave as a rational actor.
The release does not discuss the funding of the new venture but I would not be at all suprised if Gates, Balmer, Microsoft were investors. If so providing access to IP is not suprising.
I would not be suprised if there was not some sort of reciprocal IP agreement so Microsoft can use IP developed by the new company.
It is unlikely that the new company is going to grow so big that it puts Microsoft in the poor house. On the other hand they can probably buy it if it does lok like it has a winner.
Companies like Microsoft tend to find it very hard to get existing sales and marketing organizations to accept a new product that might canibalize an existing market (see Christiansen's Inovator's dilema). It is actually more effective to buy in R&D even at what appears to be a ludicrous premium over the cost of building from scratch.
Take Vermeer as an example, it is very unlikely that they would ever have made $180 mil in sales let alone profit. Microsoft has earned many times that from distributing their product, Frontpage through their existing channels.
Set light to a match and you can give a person heat for a minute.
Set light to the person and you give them heat for the rest of their life
The new Jaguar models (apart from the manual X-type possibly) all have an entirely electronic transmission control. What appears to be the gear selector lever is actually just an electrical switch that tells the computer what gear is requested. The throtle is also just an electical switch. The reason they do this is that it allows them to ensure that they hit the emissions requirements, avoid the gas guzzler tax while at the same time gaining about 20hp through optimal tuning.
The brakes and steering are a combination of electronic with a mechanical failsafe - as are all ABS brake systems and power assisted steering systems.
The main objections to fly by wire came from Boeing FUD campaigns trying to convince the public that their obsolete 30 year old design was safer than the modern airbus. Although Boeing thinks fly by wire is perfectly safe for military jets it kinda got afraid of using it in a passenger jet. Despite the FUD the Airbus safety record ten years on is pretty much the same as the Boeing record.
The fly by wire systems that have been implicated in failures are the ones that attempt to fly the plane for the pilot. While every so often there is a loony attempt to bring cars that drive themselves to the market it is not very likely this will succeed.
Nah, most are sold to the Hertz concession at San Francisco airport where they have an enormous fleet of mustangs decked out in arrest-me-yellow.
It is like driving a huge banana
Which set me thinking that the way to get started with fuel cell vehicles would be to start an open wheel racing series. After Montoya's qualifying record at Monza last weekend it is clear that the big problem F1 now faces is that the cars are too damn fast. The only realistic way left to slow them is to reduce the engine capacity again and that will be mega expensive.
An open wheel fuel cell series would provide a showcase for fuel cell vehicles and a blank slate for interesting new developments.
Funny you should ask that, rumour has it that when the Miss North Carolina dispute reaches the supreme court that they are going to declare George W the winner again.
On the mods for cars theme, am I the only person who finds the pick up trucks with the body jacked up a foot over the axles to look utterly ridiculous?
The whole thing you want to get good handling is to make the chasis center of gravity as low as possible and the turning moment of inertia as low as possible. So sticking the chasis up on dork stilts is only going to make the thing steer like a cow.
My point exactly, I no longer bother about that issue because I don't buy a machine expecting it to have to last three years, let alone 5.
My main problem with motherboards is that for some reason the dweeble-brains who design the bios are incapable of understanding that disk sizes increase substantially over time. The Intel Providence motherboard I replaced simply would not boot to any disk available as standard today.