Read again, anonymous coward. Microsoft has the right to negotiate first. So? That has no value. MSoft will either offer some price or not offer. If they offer too much simonyi takes the deal, but Msoft is not stupid. So Simonyi negotiates with all buyers and microsoft keeps a finger in if they are interested and buys at market price.
I don't see where Microsoft demanding the right to be stupid is any kind of compensation for donating their shareholder's patent rights.:-)
Maybe there is a formulaic structure to that negotiation that isn't in the press release? Maybe a pricing formula? We don't know that part.
Companies can not get patents. Typically the human gets the patent and assigns the rights to the company.
A quick peek into the USPTO shows the Simonyi has something like 8 patents (probably from two applications, one of which was split into many parts) all of which are assigned to Microsoft.
So, Microsoft must have granted him rights to use the patents in his new venture. And Microsoft must have gotten something in return or they have not acted in the interest of their shareholders. What they got is the mystery.
At work we refer to this as Lazy Programmer Syndrome. In short, left to his own devices, a programmer will work on performance until it is just tolerable on his kick ass high end development machine. If he is developing a multiuser system he will only optimize until performance is tolerable with a single user (himself). Have pity on the server when 50 people start using the service simultaneously.
There is know known cure other than enlightened managers and these are hard to come by.
The cusomizable car was tried in the early '70s with the Volkswagen Thing. (some pictures of toys, its a hard term to search for.) It was a more extreme idea in some ways than GM's. Although the models were of more or less similar shape, the end user was able to change things. GM will sport more shapes but the end user will not be making changes.
So, if the cost of car is the sum of...
chassis design*
powerplant design*
interior design
body design
safety testing and government approval
marketing
support*
... I can see the ones with stars being reduced by sharing a chassis. There will be an additional cost/unit from being constrained at the chassis/body interface. After all, the car industry optimized away frames because they could save by providing that function in the body.
So, the finaly question is, does the savings in design and support justify the increased per unit cost? The answer has to be "it depends".
If GM only makes a couple of models and sells them with different trim in all their model lines like they do now, then the design savings is relatively small compared to the per unit cost.
If GM is planning to make many more models than they do now then this provides a large design savings which might more than make up for the increased per unit cost. I doubt it will work in the end. Marketing will be too expensive. It would be a nice way of letting the market decide what it wants in a car. Provide many choices and after a few years concentrate on the ones that people liked best.
This is just a summary judgement request. I've never been involved in a case (thankfully few) where both sides didn't file requests for summary judgement. Its just lawyer chest thumping. The lawyers says "My case is so strong there is no possible defense." Then the judge whips out his denied stamp, whacks both summary judegment requests and the case proceeds.
Now, if the judge grants this, then that would be newsworthy.
If a lawyer filing a summary judgement request is news, then you probably ought to cover every time they take a leak too.
I believe sort of VHS quality Tivo mode is about 6mbps which should fit nicely even in todays 11mbps wireless. (I get about 10mbps wireless from my access point upstairs to my tv room downstairs.)
Sure, higher quality video would be nice. High quality material to record would be nice too.:-)
All that talk about video had me thinking it could transfer video.:-( Looks like audio only, the video is for navigation menus.
Note to marketing weasels: Don't be using the generic term "media" when the more specific "audio" will suffice.
But, please let me know when it supports mpeg streams to video and zeroconf, aka, rezendezvouss (plus a bunch more french letters, look, if you aren't going to pronounce them I don't see why I should be bothered to remember where they go in the word)
Ideally it should have a tuner and an mpeg encoder, but thats going to rack up the cost. Note I didn't say it needed a disk drive. My computers can take care of that.
What I hear from the apple rumor mills is that iTunes 4 will have a plugin architecture and ogg support. It probably won't happen until 2003 sometime, but it is coming.
MacOS used to come with Eric's Solitaire way back in the system 8 or 9 days. It only played a few types of games unless you forked over some cash, but the game play was beautiful. You just sort of grabbed the cards and flung them where you wanted them and they zipped into place. Very natural. Always amazing to see other solitaires don't do it that way.
Disclaimer: maybe windows' solitaire does this. I've never played it. I speak of the one's in Debian and freely available for the mac.
The crufty among us will remember the ultimate minimalist connector. The original ethernet (thick wire) used a large coax cable as the backbone. You connected to it by drilling a tiny hole and inserting your tap into the cable in such a way that it made contact to the core and shield without shorting anything and wiping out the whole network.
It really made 50ohm BNC look good when it came out.:-)
The USB mechanical spec calls out that the USB logo be molded on one side of the cable in such a way that you can feel it and the other side be smooth. The logo is specified to go up.
And all was good.
Until manufacturers could save $0.02 by putting their jacks on upside down or sideways. Now you have a bunch of nicely polarized cables that you can orient blindly in the mess of cables, but have no idea which way the jack is oriented.:-(
(Yes, I have an upside down computer from a vendor that knows better and screwed me for $0.02.)
Well, Yes! Jay Nixon was a driving force behind out telemarketing opt-out law. It works quite well. I filled out a web form and get no telemarketing calls except for the local newspaper trying to sell me a subscription (which I already have, they are just too lazy to check) and the occasional call from a charity that I already give to.
They are pushing an update to the law to close the remaining loopholes.
http://www.ago.state.mo.us/ has the poop. Over 1 million Missouri phone lines are registered for no call. That's a pretty good chunk of the state. We only have 5.6Mfolk. The AG's office is even enforcing the law! >$600,000 in fines levied so far.
3) Systematically blow out the tires, with a small risk of blinding.
That is the example use we are hearing from the contractor that is being paid millions of dollars over 10 years to develop the system. I have very little faith that it will turn out that way in practice. After all, smart bombs were going to precisely strike their targets with a minimum of collateral damage. They do have quite a bit less collateral damage than dumb bombs, but they also do not perform anything like they were billed during their early days.
We are hearing the early day claims for the lasers. When they deploy and we find that say one in five tire shots reflects off of a fender or hubcap (ok, military trucks aren't known for these) and blinds three people will the weapon still be justifiable?
Or to be more in tune with 2010, when we program the laser carrying drones to make automated milk runs over enemy territory identifying targets and firing, what will the effect be?
None of the devices you listed are banned under the Geneva Convention. You should legitimately expect to encounter them in warfare and to use them if you have the means.
If the goggles are issued to maintenance people and a few key people like forward designators that is one thing. They are clearly a sensible safety protocol.
If the goggles are issued to all US troops and they wear them in normal combat situations then that is clearly another thing.
We will have to wait until 2010 or later to find out.
Also the US, a country that has shown that even it is unwilling to disregard the Geneva Conventions, wouldn't be so stupid as to blatantly break the GC.
Yeah, and all those prisoners we took in the war are not prisoners of war because we say they aren't. To justify that we even had to claim that generals in the Afghan army are iilegal combatants. But we did it.
And we would never deliberatly target civilian infrastructure like the electrical grid. Except when we do of course. (Bosnia,Serbia)
Anb we would never deliberatly target the Red Cross. Except when we do. I wonder if we sent a sympathy card to the familys of the Red Cross security guards? (Ahghanastan) (Actually, that one may not violate the Geneva Convention. I'm not sure it covers noncombatant organizations.)
Great, we've found a loophole to create a large scale blinding weapon. We call it a weapon for destroying hardware, but we are also embarking on sister program to create special protective goggles for our soldiers. Why on earth would we need those if the danger of blinding is so small?
Lets revive the microwave beam weapons while we are at it. We'll pretend they are for disrupting electronics or radar mapping, but they also do a great job of interfering with brain activity. (You only have to head the brain a couple of degrees.) We'll make protective headgear for our soldiers.
How about poison gas? I'm sure flourine and chlorine gasses do a great job of disrupting (corroding) electronics. We already have protective gear for our soldiers for that.
Or better yet, we could use tiny, indiscriminate robot devices that detect humans and explode and cripple anyone that comes near them for years to come. Oh wait, we already have that one and refuse to join in a ban on their production and use.
Among cruising sailors it is considered somewhat foolish not to pack a sextant and know how to use it. You'd hate to take a lightning strike 1000 miles from land and lose your GPS, RDF, Loran, or whatnot.
Maybe you'll be bad with the cheap sextant, but you should still get within 30 miles which will let you make landfall during daylight.
(Don't mod this up. Its just here for someone who might want more details.)
I have run my woody system multiheaded for quite some time. I like to keep a bunch of monitoring type programs running on one display and work on the other.
I do not use xinerama because I do not want the gnome panel to act like it is on one big monitor, thats just a PITA. (plus it had problems with opengl, some of my monitoring uses it heavily.)
It worked ok, except that the gnome session manager would 'gain' applications. All the stuff from the 2nd montor would get started on the first monitor at login time. This machine also has a firewire induced crashing problem, and after a crash even more applications would get started at the next login. Very ugly.
Also, running a panel on each monitor works ok, but the panels get confused about configuration. Maybe there is a way to specify an alternate config file for one of them.
All in all, it worked, but the gnome session and panel developers really need to have two monitors and feel the pain. So, if you can show to me that you are 'the' gnome session or panel developer and you need a PCI video card in order to have two monitors, get in touch with me. I'll give you my old one.
These are rackmount servers from one of the most reputable x86 vendors. These are not mystery boxes. The parts list would suggest that they run fine under linux, and I'm sure there are machines with those parts that do. Even the whizzy-scsi controller was listed as supported under linux.
A few years ago it was easier because the vendor would sell them in linux configurations, but that was stopped.
Your second paragraph is purely your unsupported (and contradicted in my first post) conjecture repackaged as facts about me.
What I'd really like to know is, How do you tell which PC hardware is crap? I was using the "buy server grade gear from reputable PC manufacturer" as my guideline and that has failed me miserably. I previously tried the "buy a couple different things, pick the best one then keep buying those" but the models change too fast for that to be practical.
Sure, eventually apple extended the Airport warranty, but when mine failed they hadn't. Their helpful phone guy made a veiled suggestion that I should call back and lie about when I bought it to get it replaced. (I soldered in some new capacitors and now run it with an open case.)
I have a PB5300 too. The case split at the back and Apple fixed it at no charge 3 years out of warranty. They kept offering me $500 to trade it in, but I always liked it too much to give it back. It was a nice machine. There is something to be said for a 640x480 active matrix screen. That was gorgeous. I know one person that traded a more modern 800x600 machine for the PB5300 because he liked the screen so much.
They do an great job of standing behind the occasional lemon, but that isn't going to make me feel much better if I have servers failing on a regular basis. What makes me feel good about the servers is how rare the lemons have been.
For me, having a quality hardware product with a reasonably secure OS that just works on it is the attraction.
The last batch of 6 1U x86 rackmount servers I bought from one of the largest PC manufacturers came with misprogrammed APICs that made them unable to run Linux without spending several days on hackery to get them going. The PCI slots are still useless, they can't deliver interrupts, but the rest of the machine works. I shuttled machines around so they don't need their PCI slots. (This machine was not purchased with Windows, it was a no-OS machine.) Two of these machines have failed in the 6 months that I have owned them.
The previous batch of 2U servers I purchased had a whiz-bang scsi controller that displayed a linux allergy and took me weeks of trying pre-release patches and waiting to get a linux version that worked acceptably. I still have to build custom kernels for these machines when I upgrade.
The biggest problem I have purchasing PC hardware is there is no good way to tell what is "server grade" and what has cheaped out components in the power supply or capacitors that will cause their MTBF to suffer. The extreme price pressure always tempts the manufacturers to cut corners.
So, the attactions...
Apple (with a couple of stunning counterexamples (AppleIII, first Airports, some monitors)) was an outstanding reputation for making high grade hardware.
The OS is going to work correctly on the hardware.
If I like the machine, I will be able to order more identical machines 6 months later.
I will not be rolling the dice to see if my OS will run on the new hardware.
The firewire ports will work. Even with two processes hitting the same disk at the same time.
Ok, they cost about 30% more than the servers I have been buying (and certainly outperforms them, but that is irrelevant, my servers are low cpu users). I'll take that. It vanishes in the unbilled hours dealing with mystery hardware and having to buy a bunch of spare machines to count on being able to replace a machine when needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Read again, anonymous coward. Microsoft has the right to negotiate first. So? That has no value. MSoft will either offer some price or not offer. If they offer too much simonyi takes the deal, but Msoft is not stupid. So Simonyi negotiates with all buyers and microsoft keeps a finger in if they are interested and buys at market price.
:-)
I don't see where Microsoft demanding the right to be stupid is any kind of compensation for donating their shareholder's patent rights.
Maybe there is a formulaic structure to that negotiation that isn't in the press release? Maybe a pricing formula? We don't know that part.
Companies can not get patents. Typically the human gets the patent and assigns the rights to the company.
A quick peek into the USPTO shows the Simonyi has something like 8 patents (probably from two applications, one of which was split into many parts) all of which are assigned to Microsoft.
So, Microsoft must have granted him rights to use the patents in his new venture. And Microsoft must have gotten something in return or they have not acted in the interest of their shareholders. What they got is the mystery.
Psst. I am the boss. :-)
At work we refer to this as Lazy Programmer Syndrome. In short, left to his own devices, a programmer will work on performance until it is just tolerable on his kick ass high end development machine. If he is developing a multiuser system he will only optimize until performance is tolerable with a single user (himself). Have pity on the server when 50 people start using the service simultaneously.
There is know known cure other than enlightened managers and these are hard to come by.
So, if the cost of car is the sum of...
- chassis design*
- powerplant design*
- interior design
- body design
- safety testing and government approval
- marketing
- support*
... I can see the ones with stars being reduced by sharing a chassis. There will be an additional cost/unit from being constrained at the chassis/body interface. After all, the car industry optimized away frames because they could save by providing that function in the body.So, the finaly question is, does the savings in design and support justify the increased per unit cost? The answer has to be "it depends".
If GM only makes a couple of models and sells them with different trim in all their model lines like they do now, then the design savings is relatively small compared to the per unit cost.
If GM is planning to make many more models than they do now then this provides a large design savings which might more than make up for the increased per unit cost. I doubt it will work in the end. Marketing will be too expensive. It would be a nice way of letting the market decide what it wants in a car. Provide many choices and after a few years concentrate on the ones that people liked best.
For the 10,000th time...
This is just a summary judgement request. I've never been involved in a case (thankfully few) where both sides didn't file requests for summary judgement. Its just lawyer chest thumping. The lawyers says "My case is so strong there is no possible defense." Then the judge whips out his denied stamp, whacks both summary judegment requests and the case proceeds.
Now, if the judge grants this, then that would be newsworthy.
If a lawyer filing a summary judgement request is news, then you probably ought to cover every time they take a leak too.
I believe sort of VHS quality Tivo mode is about 6mbps which should fit nicely even in todays 11mbps wireless. (I get about 10mbps wireless from my access point upstairs to my tv room downstairs.)
:-)
Sure, higher quality video would be nice. High quality material to record would be nice too.
All that talk about video had me thinking it could transfer video. :-( Looks like audio only, the video is for navigation menus.
Note to marketing weasels: Don't be using the generic term "media" when the more specific "audio" will suffice.
But, please let me know when it supports mpeg streams to video and zeroconf, aka, rezendezvouss (plus a bunch more french letters, look, if you aren't going to pronounce them I don't see why I should be bothered to remember where they go in the word)
Ideally it should have a tuner and an mpeg encoder, but thats going to rack up the cost. Note I didn't say it needed a disk drive. My computers can take care of that.
Someone please mod the parent into oblivion. I believe that is the active site list, not the surplus site list.
Some google cache hunting reveals that you can get the complete list in Excel format from... http://atcsdmaftp01.americantower.com/excelReports /NationalSiteList.xls. Now that "I got Mine!" I'll share the URL with you. :-)
WTF? Slashdot says I'm missing a subject or a body? I suppose that is the lameness-required filter that made me add this stupid paragraph.
What I hear from the apple rumor mills is that iTunes 4 will have a plugin architecture and ogg support. It probably won't happen until 2003 sometime, but it is coming.
MacOS used to come with Eric's Solitaire way back in the system 8 or 9 days. It only played a few types of games unless you forked over some cash, but the game play was beautiful. You just sort of grabbed the cards and flung them where you wanted them and they zipped into place. Very natural. Always amazing to see other solitaires don't do it that way.
Disclaimer: maybe windows' solitaire does this. I've never played it. I speak of the one's in Debian and freely available for the mac.
Linus Torvalds has received the award, but the plaque was engraved...
GNU/Linus Torvalds
in order to reduce confusion.
The crufty among us will remember the ultimate minimalist connector. The original ethernet (thick wire) used a large coax cable as the backbone. You connected to it by drilling a tiny hole and inserting your tap into the cable in such a way that it made contact to the core and shield without shorting anything and wiping out the whole network.
:-)
It really made 50ohm BNC look good when it came out.
The USB mechanical spec calls out that the USB logo be molded on one side of the cable in such a way that you can feel it and the other side be smooth. The logo is specified to go up.
:-(
And all was good.
Until manufacturers could save $0.02 by putting their jacks on upside down or sideways. Now you have a bunch of nicely polarized cables that you can orient blindly in the mess of cables, but have no idea which way the jack is oriented.
(Yes, I have an upside down computer from a vendor that knows better and screwed me for $0.02.)
Well, Yes! Jay Nixon was a driving force behind out telemarketing opt-out law. It works quite well. I filled out a web form and get no telemarketing calls except for the local newspaper trying to sell me a subscription (which I already have, they are just too lazy to check) and the occasional call from a charity that I already give to.
They are pushing an update to the law to close the remaining loopholes.
http://www.ago.state.mo.us/ has the poop. Over 1 million Missouri phone lines are registered for no call. That's a pretty good chunk of the state. We only have 5.6Mfolk. The AG's office is even enforcing the law! >$600,000 in fines levied so far.
3) Systematically blow out the tires, with a small risk of blinding.
That is the example use we are hearing from the contractor that is being paid millions of dollars over 10 years to develop the system. I have very little faith that it will turn out that way in practice. After all, smart bombs were going to precisely strike their targets with a minimum of collateral damage. They do have quite a bit less collateral damage than dumb bombs, but they also do not perform anything like they were billed during their early days.
We are hearing the early day claims for the lasers. When they deploy and we find that say one in five tire shots reflects off of a fender or hubcap (ok, military trucks aren't known for these) and blinds three people will the weapon still be justifiable?
Or to be more in tune with 2010, when we program the laser carrying drones to make automated milk runs over enemy territory identifying targets and firing, what will the effect be?
None of the devices you listed are banned under the Geneva Convention. You should legitimately expect to encounter them in warfare and to use them if you have the means.
If the goggles are issued to maintenance people and a few key people like forward designators that is one thing. They are clearly a sensible safety protocol.
If the goggles are issued to all US troops and they wear them in normal combat situations then that is clearly another thing.
We will have to wait until 2010 or later to find out.
Also the US, a country that has shown that even it is unwilling to disregard the Geneva Conventions, wouldn't be so stupid as to blatantly break the GC.
Yeah, and all those prisoners we took in the war are not prisoners of war because we say they aren't. To justify that we even had to claim that generals in the Afghan army are iilegal combatants. But we did it.
And we would never deliberatly target civilian infrastructure like the electrical grid. Except when we do of course. (Bosnia,Serbia)
Anb we would never deliberatly target the Red Cross. Except when we do. I wonder if we sent a sympathy card to the familys of the Red Cross security guards? (Ahghanastan) (Actually, that one may not violate the Geneva Convention. I'm not sure it covers noncombatant organizations.)
Great, we've found a loophole to create a large scale blinding weapon. We call it a weapon for destroying hardware, but we are also embarking on sister program to create special protective goggles for our soldiers. Why on earth would we need those if the danger of blinding is so small?
Lets revive the microwave beam weapons while we are at it. We'll pretend they are for disrupting electronics or radar mapping, but they also do a great job of interfering with brain activity. (You only have to head the brain a couple of degrees.) We'll make protective headgear for our soldiers.
How about poison gas? I'm sure flourine and chlorine gasses do a great job of disrupting (corroding) electronics. We already have protective gear for our soldiers for that.
Or better yet, we could use tiny, indiscriminate robot devices that detect humans and explode and cripple anyone that comes near them for years to come. Oh wait, we already have that one and refuse to join in a ban on their production and use.
I'm glad we are the good guys.
Among cruising sailors it is considered somewhat foolish not to pack a sextant and know how to use it. You'd hate to take a lightning strike 1000 miles from land and lose your GPS, RDF, Loran, or whatnot.
Maybe you'll be bad with the cheap sextant, but you should still get within 30 miles which will let you make landfall during daylight.
(Don't mod this up. Its just here for someone who might want more details.)
I have run my woody system multiheaded for quite some time. I like to keep a bunch of monitoring type programs running on one display and work on the other.
I do not use xinerama because I do not want the gnome panel to act like it is on one big monitor, thats just a PITA. (plus it had problems with opengl, some of my monitoring uses it heavily.)
It worked ok, except that the gnome session manager would 'gain' applications. All the stuff from the 2nd montor would get started on the first monitor at login time. This machine also has a firewire induced crashing problem, and after a crash even more applications would get started at the next login. Very ugly.
Also, running a panel on each monitor works ok, but the panels get confused about configuration. Maybe there is a way to specify an alternate config file for one of them.
All in all, it worked, but the gnome session and panel developers really need to have two monitors and feel the pain. So, if you can show to me that you are 'the' gnome session or panel developer and you need a PCI video card in order to have two monitors, get in touch with me. I'll give you my old one.
I usually don't respond to ACs, but...
These are rackmount servers from one of the most reputable x86 vendors. These are not mystery boxes. The parts list would suggest that they run fine under linux, and I'm sure there are machines with those parts that do. Even the whizzy-scsi controller was listed as supported under linux.
A few years ago it was easier because the vendor would sell them in linux configurations, but that was stopped.
Your second paragraph is purely your unsupported (and contradicted in my first post) conjecture repackaged as facts about me.
What I'd really like to know is, How do you tell which PC hardware is crap? I was using the "buy server grade gear from reputable PC manufacturer" as my guideline and that has failed me miserably. I previously tried the "buy a couple different things, pick the best one then keep buying those" but the models change too fast for that to be practical.
Sure, eventually apple extended the Airport warranty, but when mine failed they hadn't. Their helpful phone guy made a veiled suggestion that I should call back and lie about when I bought it to get it replaced. (I soldered in some new capacitors and now run it with an open case.)
I have a PB5300 too. The case split at the back and Apple fixed it at no charge 3 years out of warranty. They kept offering me $500 to trade it in, but I always liked it too much to give it back. It was a nice machine. There is something to be said for a 640x480 active matrix screen. That was gorgeous. I know one person that traded a more modern 800x600 machine for the PB5300 because he liked the screen so much.
They do an great job of standing behind the occasional lemon, but that isn't going to make me feel much better if I have servers failing on a regular basis. What makes me feel good about the servers is how rare the lemons have been.
The last batch of 6 1U x86 rackmount servers I bought from one of the largest PC manufacturers came with misprogrammed APICs that made them unable to run Linux without spending several days on hackery to get them going. The PCI slots are still useless, they can't deliver interrupts, but the rest of the machine works. I shuttled machines around so they don't need their PCI slots. (This machine was not purchased with Windows, it was a no-OS machine.) Two of these machines have failed in the 6 months that I have owned them.
The previous batch of 2U servers I purchased had a whiz-bang scsi controller that displayed a linux allergy and took me weeks of trying pre-release patches and waiting to get a linux version that worked acceptably. I still have to build custom kernels for these machines when I upgrade.
The biggest problem I have purchasing PC hardware is there is no good way to tell what is "server grade" and what has cheaped out components in the power supply or capacitors that will cause their MTBF to suffer. The extreme price pressure always tempts the manufacturers to cut corners.
So, the attactions...
Ok, they cost about 30% more than the servers I have been buying (and certainly outperforms them, but that is irrelevant, my servers are low cpu users). I'll take that. It vanishes in the unbilled hours dealing with mystery hardware and having to buy a bunch of spare machines to count on being able to replace a machine when needed.