"You might have heard of it, 545 Technology Square Cambs, Mass."
Nope. Should I?
MIT LCS and AI Labs, if they can't get Solaris to work properly without spending a week doing it the problem is the o/s vendor.
We thought this somewhat strange since at the time SunOS had a realy good reputation on campus. Then we discovered that what people were using was a custom distribution cut by MIT...
As for hypercubes, the ones I saw were Transputer machines. Never wrote any code for them though. They only let me loose on the VAX cluster with 10 lines of FORTRAN *puke*.
You can't build a hypercube from a device with 4 links, its a geometric fact that you need 2 links per dimension. I did use Transputers, including some of the 1000+ node machines. Perhaps if you had some experience of the machines you are ignorantly blathering about your posts would not get modded down.
Your entire post confirms the argument I was originally making, that the term 'UNIX' no longer describes the system internals, it merely describes the application interface. However the application interface is still a major constraint on application design.
If you study the internal architecture of NT you will find that, despite M$'s continual assertions that UNIX is dead, outmoded etc. etc., they have come up with a kernel that, with every new release, is looking more and more like some of the big commercial UNIX kernels of 5-10 years ago.
Clearly from the tone of your post you don't like Windows, I have great difficulty therefore in believing that you have spent such a great deal of time examining the WNT internals that you can come up with such an assessment.
It would not be so surprising if WNT shared some of the concepts in Mach given that Rashid has been working for Microsoft for some time. However the architectural principles have from start to finish been based on VMS.
I have to wonder whether the license is actually enforceable.
If Borland runs software that conducts a potentially illegal search on a user's machine the illegality is likely criminal in nature. I don't think that many State Attorney Generals would consider a clause in a shink-wrap license to consider 'informed consent'. I cannot see much value in Borland attempting to litigiate the matter in court, it is the type of case which a state AG might easily take to the SCOTUS. Borland's costs in lawyers fees and reputation would mount for several years.
Even if Borland succeeded in court, a state could easily reverse the judgement by simply legislating such clauses to be unenforceable. While the US congress has been successfully bought off on the privacy issue to date, the states are quite a different matter. And in any case 50 states are hard to bribe all at once. It is in the interests of the parties to defect every so often to keep the contributors dishonest.
Sounds to me like the type of behavior that some pipsqueak lawyer engages in when not being closely watched.
Unlike in the US, Australia has a mechanism to deter frivolous lawsuits, the loser pays the costs of both sides. Moreover since the case is completely unfounded the probability that the costs would be assesed on the indemnity scale are good.
The article does not state the grounds on which the case is brought. Tort law is quite restrictive, the issue is not whether you have sufered a loss, the issue is whether the defendant had a legal liability for the loss. There being no contract between any of the parties in the case breach of contract or inducing breach of contract is not going to apply. The spam victim had no responsibility to the spammer to provide service.
The only grounds I can think of that the spammer could claim to have a case is in libel. To win the case the spammer would have to claim that the statement made was false, i.e. that he was not spamming. While Australia shares the corrupt libel laws of the UK it is unlikely that the issue of whether the ISP was spamming or not would be hard to determine.
It would be interesting to know the history of the law firm acting for the plaintif. If the court comes to the same conclusion concerning the case as many on slashdot it would not go well for them.
Slowlaris, oh yes, I had Sun sell me that when it was still a real heap of junk. Took the sysadmin a day each to configure four machines. He never did manage to get the multimedia (sound, video camera) features to work, nor had anyone else in the building. You might have heard of it, 545 Technology Square Cambs, Mass.
If they can't get an O/S to function two years after release it does not qualify in my book as superb...
Solaris kicks its ass clean out of the arena. Solaris has an extremely sophisticated internal threading model and scales nearly perfectly linearly to over 100 processors.
As you will note in my original post I differentiated the architectural contributions of Ken Thomson and co from later developers who just had the misfortune to start from the constraints of their design. It is possible to get a UNIX shell to run on a machine whose internal architecture bears little resemblance to UNIX.
The question is what the application developer is required to do to take advantage of the result. Does their application work in scalable fashion across all 100 processors if written for 'UNIX'? Or is it the case (of course it is) that to scale the application must either be 100 independent applications running on each processor or if it is genuinely one application does it have to be rewritten for the specific UNIX variant?
In the old days some processors would have a mode switch. So the VAX could emulate a PDP-11 but while it was doing so it wasn't doing the types of thing you would expect of a VAX, like virtual memory or such.
I have written code for machines with several thousand processors. Absent some development in hardware I may be unaware of nobody has a machine that can load more than about 16 processors that does not have some pretty significant limitations. There is a good reason for this, any given generation of silicon can support a certain processor technology and a certain interconnection technology. Unless you go to some form aof non shared memory system performance tends to top out at 8 processors. Yes I can believe that Sun showed off a machine that can calculate the mandelbrot set on 100 processors with perfect linearity, I doubt that it responds in that manner to all applications. Even exotic MIMD machines don't do that when they are purpose built for the application.
What iron has NT ever run on with more that 16/32 processors?
If Intel are right and they can provide 10 times the performance per processor over Sun then Windows need only run on 16 processors to kick Sun's ass.
However since the benchmark in question compared a 2 processor Intel machine with an 8 processor Sun machine the nature of the game should be obvious. Intel clearly chose a problem for which Sun's platform does not respond with near perfect linearity and the benchmark is obviously skewed in that respect. Even so, if Intel have the higher raw processor performance they have the engineers to build machines with more processors. Intel has at various times developed extreemly fast research prototypes (Bill Dally's hypercube being an example. Intel spends 3.2 Bn on processor research a year, Sun spends only 2 Bn on all its research.
Asking the number of processors NT runs on when Intel is only starting its 64 bit processor line is kind of beside the point. The real issue is where we will be in 3 years time...
What was the reasoning behind the earlier Circuit Court decision? Why would the fact that amendments occured during the patent process have anything to do with the later scope of the patent, once issued?
There are several reasons why a patent is ammended in process. One of them is Lemelson type manipulation of the process (he is now a stiff and so the truth can be said of him without fear of libel).
Another common reason is to add to a patent ideas that have been published by others after the original application. Under the US patent office rules such ammendments get the advantage of the original priority date. So if you design a blue widget in January, I read of your design and propose that the same task could be done by a red widget and publish the idea in May, you can go back and ammend your application to cover both Red and Blue widgets even though you didn't think of the Blue widget idea.
And before patent lawyers claim the opposite, I know of many cases in which such patents have issued. They may not be enforceable, but it currently costs about $2 million to defend a patent case while the plantif's case is typically brought on a contingency basis.
If it was possible to recover costs from the people who file perjurous patents and the leeches who act for them I would have more sympathy for those who claim the USPTO is not a racketeing influenced corrupt organization.
The risk for the US is that historically no one country has remained the dominant economic power for all that long. If the US economy has a spell when it is not doing as well as it is currently relative to the world economy the focus of research and development dollars may move overseas again, at which point the dollars extorted from the economy by patent trolls may cease being a minor irritant and may become a major consideration when deciding where to do business. This afternoon I presented some of my work to an F50 company who is one of our partners, during the presentation someone asked what was new since the basic approaches I was using were all well established, only the application domain had changed, "hopefully nothing", I replied, "If there was anything new here, someone would tack it onto a submarine patent and claim to own it". The sad part being that everyone agreed that the strategy is sound. The patent system is not encouraging innovation, it is allowing leeches to collect undeserved taxes.
I would rather deal with Europe's labor laws that the US patent laws.
M$'s influence is negligible on all but the tiniest (1-4 way 32-bit) servers. So, on larger servers, you're talking about real OSes and huge applications for which 64-bit versions already exist (have for the best part of 10 years).
I don't know what you mean by a 'real OS' however having worked at the extreeme high end I can tell you that there are plenty of real fast machines with O/S that are in most respects (except performance) pure junk. And by high end I mean that some of the machines I worked on 10 years ago still outperform top end desktops.
The fact is that high performance machines are usually bought for fairly narrow purposes and as a result tend not to need a lot of an operating system. Back in the early 1990s an awfull lot of computationally intensive work was still being run on IBM mainframes running MVS and JCL which in many respects is not a whole lot better than MSDOS but you would never get the people who ran those piles of junk to admit it.
If you want high performance from a multiprocessor machine the architecture of the O/S does matter a lot, but may not determine the outcome. consider this analogy, when it comes to writing an optimizing compiler modern languages such as Eifel or Java give the compiler writer a heck of a lot more help than a language like Fortran. However until very recently many of the top benchmarks for compiled code were for Fortran compilers simply because brute effort could be used to compensate for poor architecture.
When it comes to the 'architectural features' required to make a multiprocessor machine work fast the cards are all with Microsoft. WNT was designed to work well on multiprocessor platforms and the design team were mainly DEC ex-VMS people who had a lot of experience in that area.
UNIX was originally architected for a UNIprocessor and there are a lot of design decisions that you just would not take if making it easy to run fast on multiprocessors was your objective. On the other hand this matters less than it might because there has been a lot of work since on compensating. The cost being that to make an SMP system work well under 'UNIX' often means having to use features that are proprietary.
The claim that UNIX has a better architecture than WNT is essentially as unprovable as the claim that vi is better than emacs. There are certainly still people in the computing world whose only experience of editing programs is with vi in line mode but will nevertheless post many gigabytes worth of posts to USEnet arguing the point. Having actually worked on O/S design, having used 20 odd O/S and having done system level programming on 4 (including UNIX) I can tell you that UNIX certainly did not get where it is on the strength of design merit alone. Many of the internals of UNIX are as confused and obfuscated as the syntax of the csh.
To port to a new 64-bit arch. with modern compilers and libs, it's not much more difficult than a recompile.
If you have nice 64 bit clean code that may be the case. The problem is that most people don't start from good code and even if they have tried to keep the code base clean they may not have succeeded. But remember that WNT has already been ported to a 64 bit architecture (Alpha) and although WNT is no longer supported on Alpha you have to believe that the compiler rules are still in place to detect code that is not 64 bit clean.
The issue that is probably more important for Microsoft is how.NET performs on itanium. With.NET they have the ability in theory to take applications and compile them for any architecture at installation time. I don't think there can be much doubt that this architecture is designed to support Itanium.
I'm actually surprised that any of them were really Nigerian. I would have expected the scam to be run by some guy named Tony living in New Jersey that had set up a psuedo-corporation in Nigeria.
The info I got on the scam was that there is a definite Nigerian connection. A number of people duped in the scheme have gone off to meet people in Nigeria, some have disappeared entirely.
Scams of that sort are much easier to conduct in a country where laws are not exactly diligently enforced so Nigeria would be a much more likely base than the US. Compared to the Nigerian mafia Tony Soprano is a real small time player, all he has is a garbage business and a strip joint, in Nigeria they run the country.
Presumably refering to the idea of Osama Bin Laden suing news agencies.
Claiming that the information is true is a possible defence
The question is not whether Bin Laden could win but whether he could sue, and sue he certainly could and probably cause CNN massive costs in the process. There is actual precedent for this, the 'historian' David Irving recently sued a number of publications who labelled him a neo-Nazi sympathizers. While the jury decided against him the costs for the defence were enormous and will probably never be recovered.
The Times of London is currently fighting a libel battle against a Russian ogliarch arising from a story that was originally sourced from MI6 briefings. The BBC just paid a major settlement to officials of a mining company that the BBC reported as being linked to Al Quaeda on the basis of public statements by US officials.
When it comes to Osama Bin Laden we have perported "evidence" and conspiracy theories with strong government and press backing.
Hardly real evidence of any of the claims made. Given an impartial court he'd probably win...
I somehow doubt it given the numerous statements Bin Laden has made in public, in particular the declaration of war against the US and the post 9-11 videos of him gloating.
However there are plenty of examples of the US and other powers making similar claims which later proved to be false, and in some cases turned out to have been deliberate lies. I don't think it is such a bad thing if the likes of CNN do not simply repeat unsubstantiated claims made by the administration. I for one have got somewhat suspicious of the fact that the announcement of possible terror alerts appears to coincide with criticism of the administration.
"Matthew Collins, an Australian lawyer who has written on Internet libel, said a decision by a United States appellate court affirming Mr. Young's jurisdictional claim could bolster judges in Australia and elsewhere. American courts, he said, are widely regarded as being the most protective of free expression, and a ruling adverse to news media interests would carry weight. "
You are so full of crap. What you've highlighted isn't even an opinion, it's a statement from a lawyer trying to defend his position by referring to USA law. You're treating it as if it is fact.
Reading the original statement it is quite clear that the possibility 'could' exist. So the statement made is a literal fact, just as the statement 'Jimmy Carter could run again for a second term' is a litteral fact even though it is entirely unlikely that he will.
Non-US courts have repeatedly asserted extra-territorial jurisdiction over US citizens, the Us has little room to complain in this respect however since the US has passed more laws claiming extra-territorial jurisdiction than any other. The infamous Helm-Burton act attempts to prosecute foreign companies for doing business with Cuba. But extra-terriroial law can be justifiable Osama Bin-Laden was charged with 'conspiring to murder US citizens abroad'. The US civil courts have recognised extra-territorial claims arrising out of the Holocaust.
Extra-territorial judgements are a primary source of what is called international law. However before getting steamed up, consider the fact that most countries court systems are over-loaded and so they tend to attempt to minimise their scope. So for example when a copule of US citizens tried to bring a libel action in the UK against a US company over an Internet publication the case was rejected on the grounds that the plaintifs had recourse in another jurisdiction that was more appropriate. On the other hand a Greek PM was able to bring a libel suit against a Greek newspaper with a tiny UK circulation as in that case Greek law did not permit a case to be brought.
There is however a much closer relationship between the law in the UK (except Scotland), the US and Australia, all are based on English common law and precedents in one jurisdiction may be raised in another. Such precedents are not binding, in much the same way that a judgement in the 1st Federal circuit is not binding on the 5th but can certainly be introduced and may carry weight. The whole point of common law is that the law should not be capricious and should be as predictable as possible so it is not a good thing if courts in one common law jurisdiction takes a different approach to another in the same circumstances.
I do not see the rulling haveing any effect on non-US courts however as the principle that a citizen can sue a US company in their local over a publication made on the Internet is already well established in most jurisdictions. I suspect that the rulling is more significant when it comes to enforcing a judgement. At the moment there is little point in bringing a suit in the UK against a US resident as the US resident can effectively resist collection through the US courts for an indefinite period.
Ed was in fact based on an earlier program QED, written at Berkeley by Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch. And ed itself was written by Ken Thompson.
That is irrelevant for a number of reasons, first all the UNIX guys were employed by Bell labs and had the resources of the lab there to assist them when they needed it. Without the computer they would not have done any programming at all - and in those days a computer cost $250K +++ which was a lot of money then.
Moreover Ed did not invent the concept of an editor, it was no more than an implementation of what had been a well established concept for ten years or more. It may look today what someone would produce as a prototype, but even then it was not novel.
There probably never was a true age of the lone inventor. Even Stephenson (1st commercial steam engine, winner of the Rainhill trials) had a large support staff. Edison invented a few things on his own but was much more effective after he set up his research lab.
Hopefully the age of the lone inventor is over, if someone has the talent and imagination they should be able to find funding today. At the very least there is the Internet which provides an unprecedented support network.
The lone inventor ideal is pretty much like the ideal of the 'amateur athlete' which really boils down to a pretty snobish view that sports should be reserved for the elite classes rich enough not to have to work for a living.
There is certainly a sense in which there might be a return of the 'lone' developer. Whereas doing cutting edge research used to be largely restricted to people with access to first rate academic libraries and lab facities the low cost of computers and the Web mean that the institution you are at counts for much less. And windfall profits from dotcom IPOs mean that quite a few folk can choose to give up the day job.
Even so, most people who are inventive would prefer to have the resorces available to them as the Chief Scientist or CTO of an Internet startup than try to do it absolutely on their own.
Then, Microsoft will send in the high priced lawyers and lobbyists. Europe, fearing losing Microsoft business will slap them on the wrist, and business will go on as usual.
While a number of European governments are as corrupt as the US Congress none of them operates in quite the same way. The EU officials who are in charge of implementing the directive do not stand for election and in any case European politicians do not collect campaign funds directly for their personal campaigns.
Nor does Microsoft have any significant political leverage with the EU. The only country it has significant investment in is the UK and that is a high powered research lab they are not going to close. Microsoft might ask the Bush administration to exercise leverage however after the steel tarifs and the farm bill the US does not have any.
Although Microsoft is not going to intimidate or bribe the EU into submission the Passport issue is not a problem. While Microsoft could in theory abuse their ability to collect personal info they merely have to undertake not to abuse the data, they do not have to design the system so that the data cannot posibly be abused.
While such 'undertakings' tend to be considered by US firms to be loopholes to be exploited while the government turns a blind eye, the EU is not like the US in that regard. Microsoft would be making a major mistake if they broke their undertakings. The EU can and will impose very very large fines.
I have a non-Tivo PVR that does not have a monthly fee and does not spy on my TV viewing habits.
Which one is it, Replay? Do tell!
It is whatever player Dish Network have been selling. I think it is actually an Ultimate TV underneath but it could be a Replay. I don't much care.
Like Tivo the device will record what I select from the program guide, and it will pause live TV. Unlike Tivo it does not try to guess what I will want to watch (just as well since the disk is usually full as it is. Also unlike Tivo the 30 second skip button is on the remote with no tricks required to use it.
I don't play a monthly fee for the player, but to get it for free I had to upgrade to the 150 program service ($60/mo) for one year which I planned to do anyway as Speedvision (which has the F1 season) is in that package.
Nobody knows what I watch, the device is not even hooked up to a phone line (I don't do pay per view, it costs too much compared to the price of a DVD).
The only feature I really miss isn't available on Tivo either, I would like to be able to program the recorder from the Internet so I could set it to record stuff while at work or on a business trip.
I wish that Tivo owners could lay off being weenies occasionally. There are other, better products on the market. Tivo does not have a monopoly on PVRs but they seem to think it does.
You should just let that clue grenade blow up in your hand. You obviously haven't bought or used a TiVo. If you buy a 40 hour TiVo, you have no footing to complain that it only records 40 hours and not 42 hours.
Now what would people say if Microsoft pulled a similar trick?
If there was a genuinely free market in DVRs the features would be determined by the capability of the technology rather than the business model of the vendor. This is yet another reason to avoid Tivo and buy from a company that does not consider its customers serfs to be exploited six ways from sunday.
Fortunately there are Tivo competitors, although not very many and the networks are doing their best to take out Replay TV with a lawsuit.
I pay $60 a month for my satelite TV. I think that gives me the moral right to watch it how I like. If corporate USA can't figure how to make money then tough. However you can be sure that corporatist lackeys will always be arround on slashdot to defend (and cheer) any type of gouging practice with the words "oh grow up, expect to be exploited".
I don't much care for Tivo, they loudly proclaim that they are out to establish a razor and blades business model. Good for them, bad for us. I don't want them to succeed which is why I have a non-Tivo PVR that does not have a monthly fee and does not spy on my TV viewing habits.
Unless Tivo manages to establish a monopoly in DVR technology these outrages are going to be temporary in nature. Other companies will appear and give us the technology we paid for without the slimeware. Problem is that with the inanities of the USPTO being what they are it is impossible to have confidence that Tivo won't get a stranglehold somehow.
How can using linux halve the cost of a computer lab when the cost of operating system software is typically $100 per machine or less and the cost of hardware is typically $800 or more?
There is an advantage to teaching kids on multiple operating systems. However Unix is not at all suitable for general introductory courses. If you have highly motivated and intelligent kids they could probably learn on anything, including JCL. But most kids are not in that category (just as well or else our skills would not be in the same demand).
I suspect that this is simply a guy who wants to wage religious war rather than someone who wants to do the right thing for the kids. He will be lauded on slashdot but how much will the kids learn? Will they look at the csh command structure and conclude that computers are very hard to use, mysterious and probably deliberately so and resist using them? I suspect so.
US education is too full of people persuing their own agendas at the expense of the kids. The creationists want to ram their religious propaganda down everyone's craw. There are quack educational theories calling themselves liberal and even more quackish ones calling themselves traditional. In some parts of the US recess has been abolished - ignoring several centuries of experience and all psychological studies that show that kids have a limited attention span and will learn more with regular breaks.
When I started with computers the machines were much less powerful than anything in use today. But the big advantage of learning on an 8K PET computer is that you could quickly get the feeling that you understood how it worked. That is not true of Linux or Windows which are both overly complex.
They already made their point to the judge. Microsoft said it can't be done. Now the judge knows that it can be done. That's all that the states were trying to get across.
No, the judge does not know that it can be done, she knows that the states claimed that it could be done but backed out when Microsoft asked for time to investigate the 'demonstration' and prepare for a rebuttal.
The issue is not over whether Windows XP can be made to run with specific pieces added or subtracted, the issue is whether such an O/S could be sold to end consumers and would not cause confusion, loss of interoperability etc.
Windows Embedded is not a replacement for Windows XP, it does not provide features that consumers are likely to expect in an O/S like the ability to instal any program. You can run Word on windows embedded but you have to decide at the time you cut the O/S whether it is included or not
The critical test for an alleged stripped down version of windows is whether you can still use it to run commercial software. Can you take the CD of tombraider and install it on the machine? Can you run Lotus Notes on the machine etc?
In the end the court case is entirely irrelevant as Microsoft could "comply" with any modularization order from the judge by issuing a new version of Windows, calling it Windows FL (For Lusers) and putting a sticker on the box stating '9 Dissenting States Compliant Software, don't complain to us if the software you want to run requires a module we were not allowed to include'. I can guarantee that there would be no hardware manufaturer who would want to buy it.
What ever happened to modularity of code being one of the pillars of software engineering?
That is actually what the prof is getting at. IE is actually a pretty small EXE that calls several DLLs that are part of the O/S proper.
What this means is that every program running on Windows can make use of the http protocol module without having to write its own. Every program can make use of the XML parser, HTML display widget etc. etc.
On a linux box Mozilla is a monolithic piece of code. You can add plug ins into Mozilla, but it is not designed to allow you to reuse the components (except by going to the source).
What this means is that there are a lot of other Windows features that depend on the IE dlls. For example Quicken and tax cut both use the http and html DLLs. So you can remove the IE shell from the system, but that is only the interface, it is not the application. If you remove the IE DLLs really bad things start to happen (and things you want to happen stop happening).
I've gotten to the point that I don't even have Real's products installed on my systems anymore.
I regard it as just another type of malware. I don't mind the ads, but I do mind the stupid blinking icon in my task bar telling me to upgrade. And I sure as heck dislike the way Real try to hijack a large part of my registry to make it hard to uninstall.
Sound should be treated no differently from image processing. Nobody expects IE to pop up third part image viewers to display JPG or PNG. Why should the browser hand off sound to a separate program that is going to pop up an unnecessary additional dialog panel?
If Real think they are providing value to the user they can always write their own browser shell. It is not that big a deal if you use the windows built in HTML widget, transports etc. In fact they have a lot of the code already.
Well, the govt. used to care, and used to want to bring anti-trust charges against Microsoft, but then, Microsoft used to not donate money to any political party.
I don't work for Microsoft, but I had a member of Newt Gingrich's staff tell me that the 'problem with Microsoft is that they make all this money but they do not play a social role'.
For anyone who knows beltway speak that is code for 'give campaign donnations' in the same way that supporting the 'right of southern states to cellebrate their heritage' is code for 'we are racists and would like to see the return of the KKK and segregation but we will settle for flying the stars and bars from the capitol' etc. etc.
At the time Gates had recently donated the first $100 mil. to his foundation and announced his intention to donate substantially more so the 'social role' considered was not charitable in nature.
You are most definitly correct. Oracle will most definitly sue CA for breach of contract
Bzzzt! Wrong!!
Read the damn article, Oracle offered to let CA out of the contract. Moreover the company with severre legal difficulties is the agent which took money to consult defining the state database needs then sold the software. That is at the very least a conflict of interest. The state attorney general appears to be alledging that there was something more.
Oracle is offering to let CA out of the contract for good reason, the cost to oracle's reputation of a major investigation of whitewater proportions would be vast. The state (and national) repubicans have a vested interest in that type of investigation, both to damage Davis who is a possible opponent to GWB in 2004 and more importantly to draw attention away from the stench comming from the GOP/GWB Enron connection.
While US politics is corrupted to a major extent by campaign contribribetions, $25K is simply too small a kickback on a $95 million contract to be a bribe. The going rate is at least 1%.
GWB and the GOP received several million in cash and services in return for being allowed to rape the CA energy market. GWB was lent a jet plane by 'Kenny Boy' for the campaign. That cost consumers an additional $20 billion.
The printer business is just latching onto the "razor and blade" business model that worked so well for other industries, especially the video game business.
The strategy is only profitable if it succeeds. Most cases it fails, largely because purchasers factor in the cost of consumables into the purchase cost. I have seen lost of dotcom companies try to establish a razor and blades model only to fail miserably.
In this case the printer market is very competative and is more likely to clear in the long run than result in a steady state razor and blades model. As the companies no longer compete on quality alone the bottom feeder companies will attempt to increase market share by raising the issue of running costs.
Of course the problem arises out of abuse of IP. According to anti-trust law tied sales are illegal. The courts have so far invalidated a number of uses of IP to require tied sales (the nintendo case, various parts cases etc.) Unfortunately they have not been as pro-active on trade secrets.
If slashweenies jabbering on about microsoft would apply the same principles on a general basis this type of behavior would be more universaly condemned.
Yes, but the cartreges in the new printer are only half full, so you are doing it twice as often.
It is actually a rational strategy that over time defeats the printer manufacturers.
The printer manufacturers strategy appears to be to seel the printer as a loss leader for the cartridge. That strategy starts to become seriously painful for the printer manufacturers if people start buying the printers and not the cartridges. People who treat the printers as disposable are costing the manufacturers $20 or so every time they get a new one. If that takes hold the printer manufacturers will be forced to make it more attractive to buy the refills.
The salient point for me is that companies that invested in the Shake platform are now going to have much less choice in the hardware they use.
The graphics market has for a long time been driven by the games market. The $400 high end video cards made by the likes of nvidia outperform most of the 'high end' graphics workstations. With the exception of Evans and Sutherland and some 3DLabs stuff with $20K price tags and requiring multiple PCI slots this market is driven by the PC hardware platform.
While Shake is obviously bypassing a lot of the graphics hardware in renderfarm mode you want a combination of realtime and renderfarm. The closer you can get with your draft mode output the less you cycles it takes on the renderfarm.
There is no sign that Apple hardware is going to catch up in hardware speed any time soon so the lack of a PC version is a negative.
Then there are people like myself who loath the Mac user interface which was originally designed to allow newbies to learn to use computers quickly. Having used computers extensively for 25 years I don't need some idiot at Apple telling me how many of the buttons on my mouse are going to work (yes I know you can plug a three button mouse into a MAC, try using right click to bring up context sensitive menus.)
The monopoly issue is beside the point. It may be legal for Apple to behave this way, but that does not make it ethical or right. Apple continually does to its users what Microsoft is accused of doing to other companies. It is like a wierd S/M relationship, the worse Apple treats its customers the more they band round to defend the company. So ignore the fact that the mid range apples now cost double to three times the cost of the equivalent PC and will be obsolete faster because apple plays interface manipulation games.
It never ceases to amaze me how companies who claim to be technology companies, or corporations who adopt technological representations of their media cry when all of a sudden they have to deal with a new set of rules that comes with the new medium. If you're unprepared to deal with the ramifications of the technology, then don't invent/publish/distribute using it. Period. End of story.
Fortunately corporate lickspittle like the above poster don't have very much influence in the EU. The abuse of copyright and patent protections to establish and maintain monopolies has been prosecuted repeatedly.
In particular the DVD companies are about to get their ass handed to them for the use of the DVD zone encoding for illegal price manipulation. If the case sticks (it should) the studios stand to receive fines of tens of billions of dollars each. And don't think foreign courts can't enforce judegments on a US company, they can, if necessary sequestering the copyrights of the company.
Thank God for the almighty dollar!
The question at issue is the almighty Euro which is not as effectatious when it comes to bribing politicians. Unlike in the US European politicians do not collect funds directly for their personal campaigns. So there is no Senator for Disney (Hollings) or Novell (Hatch). Archers Daniels Midland does not get off anti-trust investigations by purchasing the majority leader (Dole).
There are cases in which technology has been used to establish a market monopoly. For example Rupert Murdoch controlls the UK satelite broadcast market through control of the ViaCrypt system. Fear that he might be regulated by the EU is the reason the Murdoch press is anti-EU. Murdoch has power because of his newspaper interests however and it is a limited power.
I have seen nothing to support your suspicion that he is opposed to the concept [of] money (which would be a ridiculous thing to be opposed to as it is merely an abstract of goods and services used to facilitate trade above a primitive barter system.) On what do you base this suspicion of yours?
The fact he is a hippie who lives in his office and does not take baths or showers.
Now in ordinary cases that might just be ad-hominem, but the thing about RMS is that he has no social interface whatsoever.
The free software thing originally began as he got upset that many people in the AI lab left to go work at symbolics. Now Genera is an introspective O/S and you can get the whole code tree from the code, there never was a 'closed source' issue, it was not about the source code it was about the copyright.
I think that copyright can presently covers more than simply the representation of an idea as illustrated by the (fairly) recent court decision to supress a retelling of Gone With the Wind from the point of view of one of the servents in a book titled The Wind Done Gone due to the decendents of the original author's copyright claims over the characters and storyline.
The book is currently on sale so the legal theories can't have been too compelling. In that particular case the argument made was that the characters Scarlet etc. were representations in their own right. There may also have been a trademark claim, I did not read the briefs and it is never a good idea to go by journalists accounts which are often either completely wrong or describe a legal theory that is tactical rather than expected to work.
The court found that the work was a parody and thus protected under the first ammendment as 'fair comment'. The broader principle that an author has rights over the characters they create in a novel is well established however. Anyone can write a love story set in the racist south during the civil war, however the characters Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler are normally considered a representation rather than an idea. The same would not hold however if the characters were not fictitious. I believe that the various Amistrad lawsuits were mainly dismissed on the grounds that the idea of writing a book or making a film of a historical event is not protected. Cases based on historical events typically center on the actual prose - for example in the Alex Halley Roots case. It was the specific description of a storm at sea that was at issue, not the idea of a slave ship in a storm.
And the GPL couldn't assign away MS's patent or copyright rights anyway, it can't give away what it doesn't own
At issue is what happens when someone sells an item that has GPL code embedded in a part of it, possibly without the knowledge that it is there. Microsoft subcontracts a lot of development, there is a risk that someone might sell Microsoft GPL code, that Microsoft would incorporate it into a product and that later someone might claim they have a right to pirate the software on those grounds. Probably not going to work as a legal theory but if someone tries it would be expensive.
sigh) and as for your claim that RMS is against selling software, he has sold software in the past,
Expecting consistency from RMS at that level suggests that you have never met him. I know the history of the FSF CDROM and the various arguments that surrounded it. I can't say for certain which side that RMS was on in that case, I suspect both. I also suspect that he is actually opposed to the concept money. There are not many people who would hold out living in an office building to be the ideal lifestyle. Certainly he has no concept of how an economy works.
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MIT LCS and AI Labs, if they can't get Solaris to work properly without spending a week doing it the problem is the o/s vendor.
We thought this somewhat strange since at the time SunOS had a realy good reputation on campus. Then we discovered that what people were using was a custom distribution cut by MIT...
As for hypercubes, the ones I saw were Transputer machines. Never wrote any code for them though. They only let me loose on the VAX cluster with 10 lines of FORTRAN *puke*.
You can't build a hypercube from a device with 4 links, its a geometric fact that you need 2 links per dimension. I did use Transputers, including some of the 1000+ node machines. Perhaps if you had some experience of the machines you are ignorantly blathering about your posts would not get modded down.
Your entire post confirms the argument I was originally making, that the term 'UNIX' no longer describes the system internals, it merely describes the application interface. However the application interface is still a major constraint on application design.
If you study the internal architecture of NT you will find that, despite M$'s continual assertions that UNIX is dead, outmoded etc. etc., they have come up with a kernel that, with every new release, is looking more and more like some of the big commercial UNIX kernels of 5-10 years ago.
Clearly from the tone of your post you don't like Windows, I have great difficulty therefore in believing that you have spent such a great deal of time examining the WNT internals that you can come up with such an assessment.
It would not be so surprising if WNT shared some of the concepts in Mach given that Rashid has been working for Microsoft for some time. However the architectural principles have from start to finish been based on VMS.
If Borland runs software that conducts a potentially illegal search on a user's machine the illegality is likely criminal in nature. I don't think that many State Attorney Generals would consider a clause in a shink-wrap license to consider 'informed consent'. I cannot see much value in Borland attempting to litigiate the matter in court, it is the type of case which a state AG might easily take to the SCOTUS. Borland's costs in lawyers fees and reputation would mount for several years.
Even if Borland succeeded in court, a state could easily reverse the judgement by simply legislating such clauses to be unenforceable. While the US congress has been successfully bought off on the privacy issue to date, the states are quite a different matter. And in any case 50 states are hard to bribe all at once. It is in the interests of the parties to defect every so often to keep the contributors dishonest.
Sounds to me like the type of behavior that some pipsqueak lawyer engages in when not being closely watched.
The article does not state the grounds on which the case is brought. Tort law is quite restrictive, the issue is not whether you have sufered a loss, the issue is whether the defendant had a legal liability for the loss. There being no contract between any of the parties in the case breach of contract or inducing breach of contract is not going to apply. The spam victim had no responsibility to the spammer to provide service.
The only grounds I can think of that the spammer could claim to have a case is in libel. To win the case the spammer would have to claim that the statement made was false, i.e. that he was not spamming. While Australia shares the corrupt libel laws of the UK it is unlikely that the issue of whether the ISP was spamming or not would be hard to determine.
It would be interesting to know the history of the law firm acting for the plaintif. If the court comes to the same conclusion concerning the case as many on slashdot it would not go well for them.
Slowlaris, oh yes, I had Sun sell me that when it was still a real heap of junk. Took the sysadmin a day each to configure four machines. He never did manage to get the multimedia (sound, video camera) features to work, nor had anyone else in the building. You might have heard of it, 545 Technology Square Cambs, Mass.
If they can't get an O/S to function two years after release it does not qualify in my book as superb...
Solaris kicks its ass clean out of the arena. Solaris has an extremely sophisticated internal threading model and scales nearly perfectly linearly to over 100 processors.
As you will note in my original post I differentiated the architectural contributions of Ken Thomson and co from later developers who just had the misfortune to start from the constraints of their design. It is possible to get a UNIX shell to run on a machine whose internal architecture bears little resemblance to UNIX.
The question is what the application developer is required to do to take advantage of the result. Does their application work in scalable fashion across all 100 processors if written for 'UNIX'? Or is it the case (of course it is) that to scale the application must either be 100 independent applications running on each processor or if it is genuinely one application does it have to be rewritten for the specific UNIX variant?
In the old days some processors would have a mode switch. So the VAX could emulate a PDP-11 but while it was doing so it wasn't doing the types of thing you would expect of a VAX, like virtual memory or such.
I have written code for machines with several thousand processors. Absent some development in hardware I may be unaware of nobody has a machine that can load more than about 16 processors that does not have some pretty significant limitations. There is a good reason for this, any given generation of silicon can support a certain processor technology and a certain interconnection technology. Unless you go to some form aof non shared memory system performance tends to top out at 8 processors. Yes I can believe that Sun showed off a machine that can calculate the mandelbrot set on 100 processors with perfect linearity, I doubt that it responds in that manner to all applications. Even exotic MIMD machines don't do that when they are purpose built for the application.
What iron has NT ever run on with more that 16/32 processors?
If Intel are right and they can provide 10 times the performance per processor over Sun then Windows need only run on 16 processors to kick Sun's ass.
However since the benchmark in question compared a 2 processor Intel machine with an 8 processor Sun machine the nature of the game should be obvious. Intel clearly chose a problem for which Sun's platform does not respond with near perfect linearity and the benchmark is obviously skewed in that respect. Even so, if Intel have the higher raw processor performance they have the engineers to build machines with more processors. Intel has at various times developed extreemly fast research prototypes (Bill Dally's hypercube being an example. Intel spends 3.2 Bn on processor research a year, Sun spends only 2 Bn on all its research.
Asking the number of processors NT runs on when Intel is only starting its 64 bit processor line is kind of beside the point. The real issue is where we will be in 3 years time...
There are several reasons why a patent is ammended in process. One of them is Lemelson type manipulation of the process (he is now a stiff and so the truth can be said of him without fear of libel).
Another common reason is to add to a patent ideas that have been published by others after the original application. Under the US patent office rules such ammendments get the advantage of the original priority date. So if you design a blue widget in January, I read of your design and propose that the same task could be done by a red widget and publish the idea in May, you can go back and ammend your application to cover both Red and Blue widgets even though you didn't think of the Blue widget idea.
And before patent lawyers claim the opposite, I know of many cases in which such patents have issued. They may not be enforceable, but it currently costs about $2 million to defend a patent case while the plantif's case is typically brought on a contingency basis.
If it was possible to recover costs from the people who file perjurous patents and the leeches who act for them I would have more sympathy for those who claim the USPTO is not a racketeing influenced corrupt organization.
The risk for the US is that historically no one country has remained the dominant economic power for all that long. If the US economy has a spell when it is not doing as well as it is currently relative to the world economy the focus of research and development dollars may move overseas again, at which point the dollars extorted from the economy by patent trolls may cease being a minor irritant and may become a major consideration when deciding where to do business. This afternoon I presented some of my work to an F50 company who is one of our partners, during the presentation someone asked what was new since the basic approaches I was using were all well established, only the application domain had changed, "hopefully nothing", I replied, "If there was anything new here, someone would tack it onto a submarine patent and claim to own it". The sad part being that everyone agreed that the strategy is sound. The patent system is not encouraging innovation, it is allowing leeches to collect undeserved taxes.
I would rather deal with Europe's labor laws that the US patent laws.
I don't know what you mean by a 'real OS' however having worked at the extreeme high end I can tell you that there are plenty of real fast machines with O/S that are in most respects (except performance) pure junk. And by high end I mean that some of the machines I worked on 10 years ago still outperform top end desktops.
The fact is that high performance machines are usually bought for fairly narrow purposes and as a result tend not to need a lot of an operating system. Back in the early 1990s an awfull lot of computationally intensive work was still being run on IBM mainframes running MVS and JCL which in many respects is not a whole lot better than MSDOS but you would never get the people who ran those piles of junk to admit it.
If you want high performance from a multiprocessor machine the architecture of the O/S does matter a lot, but may not determine the outcome. consider this analogy, when it comes to writing an optimizing compiler modern languages such as Eifel or Java give the compiler writer a heck of a lot more help than a language like Fortran. However until very recently many of the top benchmarks for compiled code were for Fortran compilers simply because brute effort could be used to compensate for poor architecture.
When it comes to the 'architectural features' required to make a multiprocessor machine work fast the cards are all with Microsoft. WNT was designed to work well on multiprocessor platforms and the design team were mainly DEC ex-VMS people who had a lot of experience in that area.
UNIX was originally architected for a UNIprocessor and there are a lot of design decisions that you just would not take if making it easy to run fast on multiprocessors was your objective. On the other hand this matters less than it might because there has been a lot of work since on compensating. The cost being that to make an SMP system work well under 'UNIX' often means having to use features that are proprietary.
The claim that UNIX has a better architecture than WNT is essentially as unprovable as the claim that vi is better than emacs. There are certainly still people in the computing world whose only experience of editing programs is with vi in line mode but will nevertheless post many gigabytes worth of posts to USEnet arguing the point. Having actually worked on O/S design, having used 20 odd O/S and having done system level programming on 4 (including UNIX) I can tell you that UNIX certainly did not get where it is on the strength of design merit alone. Many of the internals of UNIX are as confused and obfuscated as the syntax of the csh.
To port to a new 64-bit arch. with modern compilers and libs, it's not much more difficult than a recompile.
If you have nice 64 bit clean code that may be the case. The problem is that most people don't start from good code and even if they have tried to keep the code base clean they may not have succeeded. But remember that WNT has already been ported to a 64 bit architecture (Alpha) and although WNT is no longer supported on Alpha you have to believe that the compiler rules are still in place to detect code that is not 64 bit clean.
The issue that is probably more important for Microsoft is how .NET performs on itanium. With .NET they have the ability in theory to take applications and compile them for any architecture at installation time. I don't think there can be much doubt that this architecture is designed to support Itanium.
The info I got on the scam was that there is a definite Nigerian connection. A number of people duped in the scheme have gone off to meet people in Nigeria, some have disappeared entirely.
Scams of that sort are much easier to conduct in a country where laws are not exactly diligently enforced so Nigeria would be a much more likely base than the US. Compared to the Nigerian mafia Tony Soprano is a real small time player, all he has is a garbage business and a strip joint, in Nigeria they run the country.
The question is not whether Bin Laden could win but whether he could sue, and sue he certainly could and probably cause CNN massive costs in the process. There is actual precedent for this, the 'historian' David Irving recently sued a number of publications who labelled him a neo-Nazi sympathizers. While the jury decided against him the costs for the defence were enormous and will probably never be recovered.
The Times of London is currently fighting a libel battle against a Russian ogliarch arising from a story that was originally sourced from MI6 briefings. The BBC just paid a major settlement to officials of a mining company that the BBC reported as being linked to Al Quaeda on the basis of public statements by US officials.
When it comes to Osama Bin Laden we have perported "evidence" and conspiracy theories with strong government and press backing. Hardly real evidence of any of the claims made. Given an impartial court he'd probably win...
I somehow doubt it given the numerous statements Bin Laden has made in public, in particular the declaration of war against the US and the post 9-11 videos of him gloating.
However there are plenty of examples of the US and other powers making similar claims which later proved to be false, and in some cases turned out to have been deliberate lies. I don't think it is such a bad thing if the likes of CNN do not simply repeat unsubstantiated claims made by the administration. I for one have got somewhat suspicious of the fact that the announcement of possible terror alerts appears to coincide with criticism of the administration.
You are so full of crap. What you've highlighted isn't even an opinion, it's a statement from a lawyer trying to defend his position by referring to USA law. You're treating it as if it is fact.
Reading the original statement it is quite clear that the possibility 'could' exist. So the statement made is a literal fact, just as the statement 'Jimmy Carter could run again for a second term' is a litteral fact even though it is entirely unlikely that he will.
Non-US courts have repeatedly asserted extra-territorial jurisdiction over US citizens, the Us has little room to complain in this respect however since the US has passed more laws claiming extra-territorial jurisdiction than any other. The infamous Helm-Burton act attempts to prosecute foreign companies for doing business with Cuba. But extra-terriroial law can be justifiable Osama Bin-Laden was charged with 'conspiring to murder US citizens abroad'. The US civil courts have recognised extra-territorial claims arrising out of the Holocaust.
Extra-territorial judgements are a primary source of what is called international law. However before getting steamed up, consider the fact that most countries court systems are over-loaded and so they tend to attempt to minimise their scope. So for example when a copule of US citizens tried to bring a libel action in the UK against a US company over an Internet publication the case was rejected on the grounds that the plaintifs had recourse in another jurisdiction that was more appropriate. On the other hand a Greek PM was able to bring a libel suit against a Greek newspaper with a tiny UK circulation as in that case Greek law did not permit a case to be brought.
There is however a much closer relationship between the law in the UK (except Scotland), the US and Australia, all are based on English common law and precedents in one jurisdiction may be raised in another. Such precedents are not binding, in much the same way that a judgement in the 1st Federal circuit is not binding on the 5th but can certainly be introduced and may carry weight. The whole point of common law is that the law should not be capricious and should be as predictable as possible so it is not a good thing if courts in one common law jurisdiction takes a different approach to another in the same circumstances.
I do not see the rulling haveing any effect on non-US courts however as the principle that a citizen can sue a US company in their local over a publication made on the Internet is already well established in most jurisdictions. I suspect that the rulling is more significant when it comes to enforcing a judgement. At the moment there is little point in bringing a suit in the UK against a US resident as the US resident can effectively resist collection through the US courts for an indefinite period.
That is irrelevant for a number of reasons, first all the UNIX guys were employed by Bell labs and had the resources of the lab there to assist them when they needed it. Without the computer they would not have done any programming at all - and in those days a computer cost $250K +++ which was a lot of money then.
Moreover Ed did not invent the concept of an editor, it was no more than an implementation of what had been a well established concept for ten years or more. It may look today what someone would produce as a prototype, but even then it was not novel.
There probably never was a true age of the lone inventor. Even Stephenson (1st commercial steam engine, winner of the Rainhill trials) had a large support staff. Edison invented a few things on his own but was much more effective after he set up his research lab.
Hopefully the age of the lone inventor is over, if someone has the talent and imagination they should be able to find funding today. At the very least there is the Internet which provides an unprecedented support network.
The lone inventor ideal is pretty much like the ideal of the 'amateur athlete' which really boils down to a pretty snobish view that sports should be reserved for the elite classes rich enough not to have to work for a living.
There is certainly a sense in which there might be a return of the 'lone' developer. Whereas doing cutting edge research used to be largely restricted to people with access to first rate academic libraries and lab facities the low cost of computers and the Web mean that the institution you are at counts for much less. And windfall profits from dotcom IPOs mean that quite a few folk can choose to give up the day job.
Even so, most people who are inventive would prefer to have the resorces available to them as the Chief Scientist or CTO of an Internet startup than try to do it absolutely on their own.
While a number of European governments are as corrupt as the US Congress none of them operates in quite the same way. The EU officials who are in charge of implementing the directive do not stand for election and in any case European politicians do not collect campaign funds directly for their personal campaigns.
Nor does Microsoft have any significant political leverage with the EU. The only country it has significant investment in is the UK and that is a high powered research lab they are not going to close. Microsoft might ask the Bush administration to exercise leverage however after the steel tarifs and the farm bill the US does not have any.
Although Microsoft is not going to intimidate or bribe the EU into submission the Passport issue is not a problem. While Microsoft could in theory abuse their ability to collect personal info they merely have to undertake not to abuse the data, they do not have to design the system so that the data cannot posibly be abused.
While such 'undertakings' tend to be considered by US firms to be loopholes to be exploited while the government turns a blind eye, the EU is not like the US in that regard. Microsoft would be making a major mistake if they broke their undertakings. The EU can and will impose very very large fines.
It is whatever player Dish Network have been selling. I think it is actually an Ultimate TV underneath but it could be a Replay. I don't much care.
Like Tivo the device will record what I select from the program guide, and it will pause live TV. Unlike Tivo it does not try to guess what I will want to watch (just as well since the disk is usually full as it is. Also unlike Tivo the 30 second skip button is on the remote with no tricks required to use it.
I don't play a monthly fee for the player, but to get it for free I had to upgrade to the 150 program service ($60/mo) for one year which I planned to do anyway as Speedvision (which has the F1 season) is in that package.
Nobody knows what I watch, the device is not even hooked up to a phone line (I don't do pay per view, it costs too much compared to the price of a DVD).
The only feature I really miss isn't available on Tivo either, I would like to be able to program the recorder from the Internet so I could set it to record stuff while at work or on a business trip.
I wish that Tivo owners could lay off being weenies occasionally. There are other, better products on the market. Tivo does not have a monopoly on PVRs but they seem to think it does.
Now what would people say if Microsoft pulled a similar trick?
If there was a genuinely free market in DVRs the features would be determined by the capability of the technology rather than the business model of the vendor. This is yet another reason to avoid Tivo and buy from a company that does not consider its customers serfs to be exploited six ways from sunday.
Fortunately there are Tivo competitors, although not very many and the networks are doing their best to take out Replay TV with a lawsuit.
I pay $60 a month for my satelite TV. I think that gives me the moral right to watch it how I like. If corporate USA can't figure how to make money then tough. However you can be sure that corporatist lackeys will always be arround on slashdot to defend (and cheer) any type of gouging practice with the words "oh grow up, expect to be exploited".
I don't much care for Tivo, they loudly proclaim that they are out to establish a razor and blades business model. Good for them, bad for us. I don't want them to succeed which is why I have a non-Tivo PVR that does not have a monthly fee and does not spy on my TV viewing habits.
Unless Tivo manages to establish a monopoly in DVR technology these outrages are going to be temporary in nature. Other companies will appear and give us the technology we paid for without the slimeware. Problem is that with the inanities of the USPTO being what they are it is impossible to have confidence that Tivo won't get a stranglehold somehow.
There is an advantage to teaching kids on multiple operating systems. However Unix is not at all suitable for general introductory courses. If you have highly motivated and intelligent kids they could probably learn on anything, including JCL. But most kids are not in that category (just as well or else our skills would not be in the same demand).
I suspect that this is simply a guy who wants to wage religious war rather than someone who wants to do the right thing for the kids. He will be lauded on slashdot but how much will the kids learn? Will they look at the csh command structure and conclude that computers are very hard to use, mysterious and probably deliberately so and resist using them? I suspect so.
US education is too full of people persuing their own agendas at the expense of the kids. The creationists want to ram their religious propaganda down everyone's craw. There are quack educational theories calling themselves liberal and even more quackish ones calling themselves traditional. In some parts of the US recess has been abolished - ignoring several centuries of experience and all psychological studies that show that kids have a limited attention span and will learn more with regular breaks.
When I started with computers the machines were much less powerful than anything in use today. But the big advantage of learning on an 8K PET computer is that you could quickly get the feeling that you understood how it worked. That is not true of Linux or Windows which are both overly complex.
No, the judge does not know that it can be done, she knows that the states claimed that it could be done but backed out when Microsoft asked for time to investigate the 'demonstration' and prepare for a rebuttal.
The issue is not over whether Windows XP can be made to run with specific pieces added or subtracted, the issue is whether such an O/S could be sold to end consumers and would not cause confusion, loss of interoperability etc.
Windows Embedded is not a replacement for Windows XP, it does not provide features that consumers are likely to expect in an O/S like the ability to instal any program. You can run Word on windows embedded but you have to decide at the time you cut the O/S whether it is included or not
The critical test for an alleged stripped down version of windows is whether you can still use it to run commercial software. Can you take the CD of tombraider and install it on the machine? Can you run Lotus Notes on the machine etc?
In the end the court case is entirely irrelevant as Microsoft could "comply" with any modularization order from the judge by issuing a new version of Windows, calling it Windows FL (For Lusers) and putting a sticker on the box stating '9 Dissenting States Compliant Software, don't complain to us if the software you want to run requires a module we were not allowed to include'. I can guarantee that there would be no hardware manufaturer who would want to buy it.
That is actually what the prof is getting at. IE is actually a pretty small EXE that calls several DLLs that are part of the O/S proper.
What this means is that every program running on Windows can make use of the http protocol module without having to write its own. Every program can make use of the XML parser, HTML display widget etc. etc.
On a linux box Mozilla is a monolithic piece of code. You can add plug ins into Mozilla, but it is not designed to allow you to reuse the components (except by going to the source).
What this means is that there are a lot of other Windows features that depend on the IE dlls. For example Quicken and tax cut both use the http and html DLLs. So you can remove the IE shell from the system, but that is only the interface, it is not the application. If you remove the IE DLLs really bad things start to happen (and things you want to happen stop happening).
I regard it as just another type of malware. I don't mind the ads, but I do mind the stupid blinking icon in my task bar telling me to upgrade. And I sure as heck dislike the way Real try to hijack a large part of my registry to make it hard to uninstall.
Sound should be treated no differently from image processing. Nobody expects IE to pop up third part image viewers to display JPG or PNG. Why should the browser hand off sound to a separate program that is going to pop up an unnecessary additional dialog panel?
If Real think they are providing value to the user they can always write their own browser shell. It is not that big a deal if you use the windows built in HTML widget, transports etc. In fact they have a lot of the code already.
I don't work for Microsoft, but I had a member of Newt Gingrich's staff tell me that the 'problem with Microsoft is that they make all this money but they do not play a social role'.
For anyone who knows beltway speak that is code for 'give campaign donnations' in the same way that supporting the 'right of southern states to cellebrate their heritage' is code for 'we are racists and would like to see the return of the KKK and segregation but we will settle for flying the stars and bars from the capitol' etc. etc.
At the time Gates had recently donated the first $100 mil. to his foundation and announced his intention to donate substantially more so the 'social role' considered was not charitable in nature.
Bzzzt! Wrong!!
Read the damn article, Oracle offered to let CA out of the contract. Moreover the company with severre legal difficulties is the agent which took money to consult defining the state database needs then sold the software. That is at the very least a conflict of interest. The state attorney general appears to be alledging that there was something more.
Oracle is offering to let CA out of the contract for good reason, the cost to oracle's reputation of a major investigation of whitewater proportions would be vast. The state (and national) repubicans have a vested interest in that type of investigation, both to damage Davis who is a possible opponent to GWB in 2004 and more importantly to draw attention away from the stench comming from the GOP/GWB Enron connection.
While US politics is corrupted to a major extent by campaign contribribetions, $25K is simply too small a kickback on a $95 million contract to be a bribe. The going rate is at least 1%.
GWB and the GOP received several million in cash and services in return for being allowed to rape the CA energy market. GWB was lent a jet plane by 'Kenny Boy' for the campaign. That cost consumers an additional $20 billion.
The printer business is just latching onto the "razor and blade" business model that worked so well for other industries, especially the video game business.
The strategy is only profitable if it succeeds. Most cases it fails, largely because purchasers factor in the cost of consumables into the purchase cost. I have seen lost of dotcom companies try to establish a razor and blades model only to fail miserably.
In this case the printer market is very competative and is more likely to clear in the long run than result in a steady state razor and blades model. As the companies no longer compete on quality alone the bottom feeder companies will attempt to increase market share by raising the issue of running costs.
Of course the problem arises out of abuse of IP. According to anti-trust law tied sales are illegal. The courts have so far invalidated a number of uses of IP to require tied sales (the nintendo case, various parts cases etc.) Unfortunately they have not been as pro-active on trade secrets.
If slashweenies jabbering on about microsoft would apply the same principles on a general basis this type of behavior would be more universaly condemned.
It is actually a rational strategy that over time defeats the printer manufacturers.
The printer manufacturers strategy appears to be to seel the printer as a loss leader for the cartridge. That strategy starts to become seriously painful for the printer manufacturers if people start buying the printers and not the cartridges. People who treat the printers as disposable are costing the manufacturers $20 or so every time they get a new one. If that takes hold the printer manufacturers will be forced to make it more attractive to buy the refills.
The graphics market has for a long time been driven by the games market. The $400 high end video cards made by the likes of nvidia outperform most of the 'high end' graphics workstations. With the exception of Evans and Sutherland and some 3DLabs stuff with $20K price tags and requiring multiple PCI slots this market is driven by the PC hardware platform.
While Shake is obviously bypassing a lot of the graphics hardware in renderfarm mode you want a combination of realtime and renderfarm. The closer you can get with your draft mode output the less you cycles it takes on the renderfarm.
There is no sign that Apple hardware is going to catch up in hardware speed any time soon so the lack of a PC version is a negative.
Then there are people like myself who loath the Mac user interface which was originally designed to allow newbies to learn to use computers quickly. Having used computers extensively for 25 years I don't need some idiot at Apple telling me how many of the buttons on my mouse are going to work (yes I know you can plug a three button mouse into a MAC, try using right click to bring up context sensitive menus.)
The monopoly issue is beside the point. It may be legal for Apple to behave this way, but that does not make it ethical or right. Apple continually does to its users what Microsoft is accused of doing to other companies. It is like a wierd S/M relationship, the worse Apple treats its customers the more they band round to defend the company. So ignore the fact that the mid range apples now cost double to three times the cost of the equivalent PC and will be obsolete faster because apple plays interface manipulation games.
Just because it is legal does not make it right.
Fortunately corporate lickspittle like the above poster don't have very much influence in the EU. The abuse of copyright and patent protections to establish and maintain monopolies has been prosecuted repeatedly.
In particular the DVD companies are about to get their ass handed to them for the use of the DVD zone encoding for illegal price manipulation. If the case sticks (it should) the studios stand to receive fines of tens of billions of dollars each. And don't think foreign courts can't enforce judegments on a US company, they can, if necessary sequestering the copyrights of the company.
Thank God for the almighty dollar!
The question at issue is the almighty Euro which is not as effectatious when it comes to bribing politicians. Unlike in the US European politicians do not collect funds directly for their personal campaigns. So there is no Senator for Disney (Hollings) or Novell (Hatch). Archers Daniels Midland does not get off anti-trust investigations by purchasing the majority leader (Dole).
There are cases in which technology has been used to establish a market monopoly. For example Rupert Murdoch controlls the UK satelite broadcast market through control of the ViaCrypt system. Fear that he might be regulated by the EU is the reason the Murdoch press is anti-EU. Murdoch has power because of his newspaper interests however and it is a limited power.
The fact he is a hippie who lives in his office and does not take baths or showers.
Now in ordinary cases that might just be ad-hominem, but the thing about RMS is that he has no social interface whatsoever.
The free software thing originally began as he got upset that many people in the AI lab left to go work at symbolics. Now Genera is an introspective O/S and you can get the whole code tree from the code, there never was a 'closed source' issue, it was not about the source code it was about the copyright.
The book is currently on sale so the legal theories can't have been too compelling. In that particular case the argument made was that the characters Scarlet etc. were representations in their own right. There may also have been a trademark claim, I did not read the briefs and it is never a good idea to go by journalists accounts which are often either completely wrong or describe a legal theory that is tactical rather than expected to work.
The court found that the work was a parody and thus protected under the first ammendment as 'fair comment'. The broader principle that an author has rights over the characters they create in a novel is well established however. Anyone can write a love story set in the racist south during the civil war, however the characters Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler are normally considered a representation rather than an idea. The same would not hold however if the characters were not fictitious. I believe that the various Amistrad lawsuits were mainly dismissed on the grounds that the idea of writing a book or making a film of a historical event is not protected. Cases based on historical events typically center on the actual prose - for example in the Alex Halley Roots case. It was the specific description of a storm at sea that was at issue, not the idea of a slave ship in a storm.
And the GPL couldn't assign away MS's patent or copyright rights anyway, it can't give away what it doesn't own
At issue is what happens when someone sells an item that has GPL code embedded in a part of it, possibly without the knowledge that it is there. Microsoft subcontracts a lot of development, there is a risk that someone might sell Microsoft GPL code, that Microsoft would incorporate it into a product and that later someone might claim they have a right to pirate the software on those grounds. Probably not going to work as a legal theory but if someone tries it would be expensive.
sigh) and as for your claim that RMS is against selling software, he has sold software in the past,
Expecting consistency from RMS at that level suggests that you have never met him. I know the history of the FSF CDROM and the various arguments that surrounded it. I can't say for certain which side that RMS was on in that case, I suspect both. I also suspect that he is actually opposed to the concept money. There are not many people who would hold out living in an office building to be the ideal lifestyle. Certainly he has no concept of how an economy works.