I guess my point really should have been that these lawsuits are very dangerous to the information industry. I'm not saying that HP should not compensate you all that bought poorly made products from you. I certainly think that they should.
Many people who posted to this article concerning the HP lawsuit were excited and gleeful. They were just happy they are getting $200. They are not taking into consideration that frivolous lawsuits that net a person who was actually harmed by the defective product a meager couple of bucks, while some theif lawyer is raking in $USD 150 million.
Update on my previous post...as quoted in the New York Times concerning the suit against Toshiba:
The suit was filed in March in federal court in Beaumont, Texas, by two owners of Toshiba laptops -- Ethan Shaw, an attorney in that city, and Clive D. Moon, who lives in Plano, a Dallas suburb. According to Toshiba, the two men did not claim to have actually suffered any lost data or other damage from the flaw in the PC , but rather that they had been sold a defective product. Neither the plaintiffs nor their attorneys returned calls seeking comment.
...
Shaw and Moon, the two plaintiffs, are to receive $25,000 each. But their attorneys, led by the Beaumont law firm of Orgain, Bell & Tucker, stand to make $147.5 million.
Before any of you go off and Slashdot http://www.cdrecorderclassnotice.com/ keep in mind what you are going to be supporting. Recently, there have been a plethora of class action lawsuits filed against hardware manufacturers by a few less than scrupulous attorneys out to make a quick billion. Both Compaq and Toshiba have come under fire recently by these class action suits. Toshiba recently settled out of court one suit for $USD 2 billion.
Now, I'm not advocating that the companies that produce faulty hardware should not be liable for the quality of the products that they produce, but these suits are getting ridiculous. Toshiba HAD to settle that suit because the total value of the lawsuit was more than the $USD 9 billion. Here's an article from the New York Times.
This crap is getting out of hand. Toshiba, to me, has been a good company. They sold a flawed product, just as many manufacturers do. The flaw was minor and did not affect that many people. Now a couple of lawyers looking to make a quick 30% of the take have decided that their pocketbooks are more important than the thousands of jobs that Toshiba provides around the world. All of you that have bought the great products that Toshiba has made over the last few years are going to have to pay more for anything you buy from them because these bastards are legally stealing from Toshiba.
Compaq is on the chopping block for the same sort of trouble now too. Put "compaq class action" into a google search and see what you come up with. I just hope that more people take notice of this type of legalized theft before all hardware prices go up by 30%. What's next, "My Nvidia driver didn't work great, so I'm going to sue the company out of existence?"
Of course, no one is bringing suit against Microsoft for knowingly releasing a product with some 64,000 odd bugs....
Most of this might just go to the part of copyright law that states that a copyright holder must attempt to protect his/her/its copyright. If protection of a copyright is not attempted, a copyright holder may lose the copyright to the material in question. (Please note, I am too lazy to look up the actual statute and read through the damn thing, but from what I've been able to piece together from other/.'ers, what I've said above is fairly close to true. Please correct me if I'm not right.)
The other, more likely consideration is that Microsoft is just stupid. This whole thing just smacks of one of those situations where one party knows it's wrong. It hardly has a leg to stand on so it goes on the attack. The wrong party will do anything to keep on the offensive, because it has no defense to speak of.
Were IETF research to be under a license similar to GNU, we may not be having this problem. MS cannot take the Linux kernel, make extensions to it, and subsequently copyright its results. Why should they be able to do the same to Kerberos?
I seriously doubt that could happen. I think that if the FBI started trying to take guns away from gun-owners, peacefully, they might get by with that for about a day. After that, the NRA and what ever other militia groups that are out there would raise such hell in congress and perhaps go even farther. The NRA is the single most powerful lobbying body in the United States. Also, there's that little thing called the 2nd Amendment that the Supreme Court might have some trouble letting slip through the cracks.
I have to say that your argument is unconvincing. Even the link that you provided is a little sketchy. Many of the "incidents" described by this link involved nuclear weapons not containing fissile material. Nuclear weapons that do not contain fissile material are not nuclear weapons. They are only bombs.
This is not to say that any of the accidents involving fissile material are not serious. Contamination is very serious, and plutonium is one of the most deadly substances known to man. But we are not yet approaching the seriousness of a nuclear detonation.
The reason that I say that rising fuel prices would have more of an effect on undeveloped countries is because they do not have the resources to do research into alternative fuels. High oil prices would only speed the research that is already being done in the west to eliminate dependency on oil.
As for New Zealand. I did not intend to infer that New Zealand is an insignificant nation. My point was to say that New Zealand, unlike Iraq, North Korea and to a MUCH LESSER extent, China, is not about to have a war with the United States or one of its allies. New Zealand is not threating to invade its neighbors and is not threatening world peace. Nor is it ever likely to want to. That is why any statements that New Zealand makes regarding the politics of the United States are not going to cause much concern in the U.S.
1. I would really like a good reference to the alleged article describing the "inevitability" of an accidental nuclear launch. I don't believe you or your source, so give me a bibliography. It had better be something better than the National Enquirer.
2. $60-70 per barrel for oil would cause a world catastrophe. Not in the U.S. We would be affected, but we also have enough money and resources to get around such a problem. I think most of Europe would be just fine too. They are already accustomed to high fuel prices. The real devestation would be, say, farmers in Africa and South East Asia, who just bought their first farm tractor, only to see operating costs triple or quadruple. All because of some conflict thousands of miles away from them that they have nothing to do with and no control over.
And by the way, if New Zealand were to call the United States a "Rouge Superpower"...
>>New Zealand, for example, would face serious consequences.
WHAT? What are you talking about? Do you honestly think that a tounge lashing by New Zealand would concern the United States? Serious consequences? What serious consequences? Carol Mosley Braun (the U.S. Ambassador to N.Z.) might have to schedule a dinner party.
This is not to say that N.Z. is unimportant. The reason that N.Z. will never have anything to fear from the irrational juggernaut that is the U.S. public is because they are not trying to buy ignition devices for nuclear weapons from unscrupulous companies. They are not trying to buy the worlds largest cannon from other unscrupulous companies. They are not stockpiling Anthrax or VX gas. They do not have an arsenal of unguided ballistic missiles.
I saw that, and I completely agree with you. Everyone freaks out about Lee because he's not an American, and Deutch is using classified documents unprotected on his home computer. The computer he accesses the Internet with. Barely made the headlines....
You are certainly correct, or close enough for the purposes of this argument. Whether or not Fermi does any research is not the basis of my argument.
What I'm trying to say is that when you mention DoE to Joe Schmoe on the street, my guess is that nine times out of 10, Joe's going to be thinking about nukes. When Joe Schmoe starts thinking about nukes, he's not going to listen to reason. He's not going to care that Fermi is doing important particle research. Most Americans think that fusion reactors can go critical and explode. Most Americans think that fission is too dangerous to warrant building new nuke-you-lar power plants. Most Americans probably also think that all the DoE does is build nukes.
I'm not trying to say this argument is logical, or even morally correct. In fact, I believe it is neither. The problem is that when you deal with computer secrecy for the DoE, then you can easily build up the mass hysteria that the United States is prone to. I'll bet most Americans would chose to have the Chinese man (sorry I forget his name) accused of spying at Los Alamos strung up rather than give him a fair trial.
I guess my argument really is this: When dealing with what the DoE does, the public will willingly throw out logic, political correctness and even the Constitution of the United States of America. And if the public won't, I'm sure the NSA would be more than happy to oblige.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to take you to task on this one.
There is never an excuse for arrogance in front of a customer. In fact, there's rarely an excuse for arrogance, period. Saying that your brother and Cesar are Harvard grads and can't help being arrogant is no good. Perhaps Harvard needs to teach some customer facing skills in their MBA program.
You might want to cool it on the glitz in front of the customers, too. I can't think of anyone who would be anything but preturbed and/or intimidated by the description I read of your office surroundings. Neutral ground is usually the best for project proposals and presentations. It's okay to go out and reserve a nice hotel conference room, perhaps even spend a lot of money. Hotels are generally conservative and less intimidating than glitzy offices.
This isn't exactly a vague situation. There might be a little lee-way if we were talking about a normal corporation, but this is DOE.
If you don't like the new disclaimer, all you can do is quit. As far as my experience goes, when working with the government, and especially when dealing with the military branches, and even more especially working with DOE, you have no rights to anything what-so-ever.
It matters not that you are doing weapons research. It matters not that you are checking an email from you girlfriend/boyfriend. When DOE is involved, the courts hardly matter. There are very few people in this country who are going to give a flying fsck about your privacy as soon as someone mentions nukes.
I'm not trying to say that this is right or moral, just the way it is. The NSA (National Security Agency) has very broad powers when it comes to protecting nuclear secrets. The secrets could be anything from warhead design to the number of gallons of water in a reactor's coolant reservoir.
Personally, I think that they should be checking into just about everything having to do with DOE's security. There is very little on this planet more dangerous that the nuclear arsenal of the United States of America. I'd like to keep it that way.
Cryptonomicon is not only a great novel, but there are some interesting ideas in it about how crytography is going to shape the economy of the future. The biggest being the idea of a Data Haven, or a place, outside of the jurisdiction of major governments where people can store information and money. Kind of like the Swiss banks of old. The one's which would keep your information secret, no matter who you were.
The big problem that governments have with cryptography, specifically the U.S. government, is that it prevents the government from using some of its most powerful weapons against organized crime. It's very difficult to launder money when you cannot hide it.
I'm not sure about 3dsmax either. I'm not working with it currently, otherwise, I'd probably go check!;)
I'll bet it does offer similar functionality to Lightwave, but I never really had a need for that type of functionality. My need was really, "Get as much processor time as humanly possible." We even resorted to stealing the CAD machines at night to do rendering for us.
The big problem that we had rendering was that bridges have a shitload of polygons in them.;) Throw a few cars on the bridge and fly around it a couple of times and rendering all of a sudden takes 20 minutes per frame on a dual zeon 450 with half a gig of RAM!
I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with the comment that running 40k copies of Linux on a mainframe is not useful. Think of ISP's or other companies that do co-location of servers. How about telco's that do it? The cooling systems, battery backup, backup generators, human maintainers, etc...cost a fortune to operate in a large data center. What if one was able to take an ACRE, yes, an ACRE of servers and replace them with one s/390? The cost of floor space over the course of a year would pay for the mainframe.
You may not need less people to maintain it, but you will certainly need less facilities. I data center I've worked in charges over $20 per square foot per month to host a server. Multiply that by a couple of thousand and that mainframe starts looking VERY attractive...
Does anyone remember the exoskeleton that Ripley used in Alien? That big yellow walker in the cargo bay of the ship? Did anyone happen to notice the old Caterpillar logo on the walker? Caterpillar as in the construction equipment manufacturer.
Unfortunately, someone modded you down for what I consider to be an opinion issue.
Not all information wants to be free. Especially when it comes to microprocessor design. Code is one thing, which, by and large, can be created in one's basement with little overhead. Microprocessors, on the other hand, are designed and built with one thing in mind, to make money. Producing microprocessors is outrageously expensive and therefore, any technique that will enhance the quality of those processors is worth quite a good deal of money to those producing microprocessors.
Even if the information was free, it wouldn't do any of us Slashdotters any good. Unless of course one of us has a couple of million dollars to drop on turning our basement into a clean room full of silicon etching equipment.;)
If the technique is proven viable, IBM will surely get their patents in a row and start licensing the technology to all comers. Just because they have tech sharing with Transmeta and AMD doesn't mean that Intel, Motorola and Via are not going to be able to get their hands on this. IBM's revenues are not solely from hardware sales, and certainly not from chip sales alone. It is in IBM's best interest to license the patents out to whomever will pay for them.
So, on that note, I do believe that Transmeta and AMD will end up with this technology, assuming it is useful.
Does anyone know if there are any laws against this sort of thing? I seem to remember companies getting in all sorts of trouble by collecting information about minors. These companies got in trouble for collecting marketing information, specifically, but I don't really see how collecting psychological profiles would be any different, if not worse.
I've been sysadmin in a grapics department that has several dual CPU machines. The dual processing capability doesn't give one the option to multitask when rendering. Of course, I perhaps might have been able to set it up so that it would, but for the most part, 3DSMax rendering ate both processors for lunch. Granted, they were nearly twice as fast as the nearest single processor machine in the office, but during rendering, both procs maxed at 100% utilization.
Re:But is it because Linux is superior?
on
Linux Appliances
·
· Score: 2
And I'm the guy that meta-moderated your shitty moderation. What's the point of admitting that you moderated a comment if you post AC? Moderating something "troll" has nothing to do with the correctness of an arguement. Just because you don't agree with what someone has to say doesn't mean that you should be moderating down someone's opinion. I personally don't care if I get modded down cuz I gots plenty of karma to spare.
Which ever of you/. guys that came up with meta-moderation, my hat's off to you. This is one of several times that I've had the opportunity to keep a post up where it belongs regardless of opinion.
I didn't mean to imply that the P in P/E was profit. Sorry for the confusion. The way I understand it, Profit = Earnings. I really hate reading corporate financial reports and government budget figures. Numbers seem to get spun every which way and it is often difficult to determine "How much money was spent this year?" and "How much money did we have left over at the end of the year?".
I do understand the high P/E for growing companies and low P/E for troubled companies. Unfortunately, day-traders are screwing up P/E ratios for many high profile companies. No one is going to be able to convince me that Rambus is worth its 829 P/E or Yahoo worth its 1770 P/E. Rambus is at about 300 right now, and it was at 500 a couple of weeks ago! What the hell is up with that?
What I'm really curious about now is the original subject of the post. What makes a web site worth $$$? Where did mapletree (sorry if I'm wrong on the name) get his/her 3-5 multiple?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess my point really should have been that these lawsuits are very dangerous to the information industry. I'm not saying that HP should not compensate you all that bought poorly made products from you. I certainly think that they should.
Many people who posted to this article concerning the HP lawsuit were excited and gleeful. They were just happy they are getting $200. They are not taking into consideration that frivolous lawsuits that net a person who was actually harmed by the defective product a meager couple of bucks, while some theif lawyer is raking in $USD 150 million.
Update on my previous post...as quoted in the New York Times concerning the suit against Toshiba:
The suit was filed in March in federal court in Beaumont, Texas, by two owners of Toshiba laptops -- Ethan Shaw, an attorney in that city, and Clive D. Moon, who lives in Plano, a Dallas suburb. According to Toshiba, the two men did not claim to have actually suffered any lost data or other damage from the flaw in the PC , but rather that they had been sold a defective product. Neither the plaintiffs nor their attorneys returned calls seeking comment.
...
Shaw and Moon, the two plaintiffs, are to receive $25,000 each. But their attorneys, led by the Beaumont law firm of Orgain, Bell & Tucker, stand to make $147.5 million.
Before any of you go off and Slashdot http://www.cdrecorderclassnotice.com/ keep in mind what you are going to be supporting. Recently, there have been a plethora of class action lawsuits filed against hardware manufacturers by a few less than scrupulous attorneys out to make a quick billion. Both Compaq and Toshiba have come under fire recently by these class action suits. Toshiba recently settled out of court one suit for $USD 2 billion.
Now, I'm not advocating that the companies that produce faulty hardware should not be liable for the quality of the products that they produce, but these suits are getting ridiculous. Toshiba HAD to settle that suit because the total value of the lawsuit was more than the $USD 9 billion. Here's an article from the New York Times.
This crap is getting out of hand. Toshiba, to me, has been a good company. They sold a flawed product, just as many manufacturers do. The flaw was minor and did not affect that many people. Now a couple of lawyers looking to make a quick 30% of the take have decided that their pocketbooks are more important than the thousands of jobs that Toshiba provides around the world. All of you that have bought the great products that Toshiba has made over the last few years are going to have to pay more for anything you buy from them because these bastards are legally stealing from Toshiba.
Compaq is on the chopping block for the same sort of trouble now too. Put "compaq class action" into a google search and see what you come up with. I just hope that more people take notice of this type of legalized theft before all hardware prices go up by 30%. What's next, "My Nvidia driver didn't work great, so I'm going to sue the company out of existence?"
Of course, no one is bringing suit against Microsoft for knowingly releasing a product with some 64,000 odd bugs....
Thanks all for the links to DMCA!
Hmmmm....interesting....I'll have to look into that now. You don't happen to know where the DMCA (DCMA?) is posted on the Internet do you?
Most of this might just go to the part of copyright law that states that a copyright holder must attempt to protect his/her/its copyright. If protection of a copyright is not attempted, a copyright holder may lose the copyright to the material in question. (Please note, I am too lazy to look up the actual statute and read through the damn thing, but from what I've been able to piece together from other /.'ers, what I've said above is fairly close to true. Please correct me if I'm not right.)
The other, more likely consideration is that Microsoft is just stupid. This whole thing just smacks of one of those situations where one party knows it's wrong. It hardly has a leg to stand on so it goes on the attack. The wrong party will do anything to keep on the offensive, because it has no defense to speak of.
Were IETF research to be under a license similar to GNU, we may not be having this problem. MS cannot take the Linux kernel, make extensions to it, and subsequently copyright its results. Why should they be able to do the same to Kerberos?
I seriously doubt that could happen. I think that if the FBI started trying to take guns away from gun-owners, peacefully, they might get by with that for about a day. After that, the NRA and what ever other militia groups that are out there would raise such hell in congress and perhaps go even farther. The NRA is the single most powerful lobbying body in the United States. Also, there's that little thing called the 2nd Amendment that the Supreme Court might have some trouble letting slip through the cracks.
I have to say that your argument is unconvincing. Even the link that you provided is a little sketchy. Many of the "incidents" described by this link involved nuclear weapons not containing fissile material. Nuclear weapons that do not contain fissile material are not nuclear weapons. They are only bombs.
This is not to say that any of the accidents involving fissile material are not serious. Contamination is very serious, and plutonium is one of the most deadly substances known to man. But we are not yet approaching the seriousness of a nuclear detonation.
The reason that I say that rising fuel prices would have more of an effect on undeveloped countries is because they do not have the resources to do research into alternative fuels. High oil prices would only speed the research that is already being done in the west to eliminate dependency on oil.
As for New Zealand. I did not intend to infer that New Zealand is an insignificant nation. My point was to say that New Zealand, unlike Iraq, North Korea and to a MUCH LESSER extent, China, is not about to have a war with the United States or one of its allies. New Zealand is not threating to invade its neighbors and is not threatening world peace. Nor is it ever likely to want to. That is why any statements that New Zealand makes regarding the politics of the United States are not going to cause much concern in the U.S.
Two things for you:
1. I would really like a good reference to the alleged article describing the "inevitability" of an accidental nuclear launch. I don't believe you or your source, so give me a bibliography. It had better be something better than the National Enquirer.
2. $60-70 per barrel for oil would cause a world catastrophe. Not in the U.S. We would be affected, but we also have enough money and resources to get around such a problem. I think most of Europe would be just fine too. They are already accustomed to high fuel prices. The real devestation would be, say, farmers in Africa and South East Asia, who just bought their first farm tractor, only to see operating costs triple or quadruple. All because of some conflict thousands of miles away from them that they have nothing to do with and no control over.
And by the way, if New Zealand were to call the United States a "Rouge Superpower"...
>>New Zealand, for example, would face serious consequences.
WHAT? What are you talking about? Do you honestly think that a tounge lashing by New Zealand would concern the United States? Serious consequences? What serious consequences? Carol Mosley Braun (the U.S. Ambassador to N.Z.) might have to schedule a dinner party.
This is not to say that N.Z. is unimportant. The reason that N.Z. will never have anything to fear from the irrational juggernaut that is the U.S. public is because they are not trying to buy ignition devices for nuclear weapons from unscrupulous companies. They are not trying to buy the worlds largest cannon from other unscrupulous companies. They are not stockpiling Anthrax or VX gas. They do not have an arsenal of unguided ballistic missiles.
I saw that, and I completely agree with you. Everyone freaks out about Lee because he's not an American, and Deutch is using classified documents unprotected on his home computer. The computer he accesses the Internet with. Barely made the headlines....
Big Brother, where are you when we need you?
You are certainly correct, or close enough for the purposes of this argument. Whether or not Fermi does any research is not the basis of my argument.
What I'm trying to say is that when you mention DoE to Joe Schmoe on the street, my guess is that nine times out of 10, Joe's going to be thinking about nukes. When Joe Schmoe starts thinking about nukes, he's not going to listen to reason. He's not going to care that Fermi is doing important particle research. Most Americans think that fusion reactors can go critical and explode. Most Americans think that fission is too dangerous to warrant building new nuke-you-lar power plants. Most Americans probably also think that all the DoE does is build nukes.
I'm not trying to say this argument is logical, or even morally correct. In fact, I believe it is neither. The problem is that when you deal with computer secrecy for the DoE, then you can easily build up the mass hysteria that the United States is prone to. I'll bet most Americans would chose to have the Chinese man (sorry I forget his name) accused of spying at Los Alamos strung up rather than give him a fair trial.
I guess my argument really is this: When dealing with what the DoE does, the public will willingly throw out logic, political correctness and even the Constitution of the United States of America. And if the public won't, I'm sure the NSA would be more than happy to oblige.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to take you to task on this one.
There is never an excuse for arrogance in front of a customer. In fact, there's rarely an excuse for arrogance, period. Saying that your brother and Cesar are Harvard grads and can't help being arrogant is no good. Perhaps Harvard needs to teach some customer facing skills in their MBA program.
You might want to cool it on the glitz in front of the customers, too. I can't think of anyone who would be anything but preturbed and/or intimidated by the description I read of your office surroundings. Neutral ground is usually the best for project proposals and presentations. It's okay to go out and reserve a nice hotel conference room, perhaps even spend a lot of money. Hotels are generally conservative and less intimidating than glitzy offices.
This isn't exactly a vague situation. There might be a little lee-way if we were talking about a normal corporation, but this is DOE.
If you don't like the new disclaimer, all you can do is quit. As far as my experience goes, when working with the government, and especially when dealing with the military branches, and even more especially working with DOE, you have no rights to anything what-so-ever.
It matters not that you are doing weapons research. It matters not that you are checking an email from you girlfriend/boyfriend. When DOE is involved, the courts hardly matter. There are very few people in this country who are going to give a flying fsck about your privacy as soon as someone mentions nukes.
I'm not trying to say that this is right or moral, just the way it is. The NSA (National Security Agency) has very broad powers when it comes to protecting nuclear secrets. The secrets could be anything from warhead design to the number of gallons of water in a reactor's coolant reservoir.
Personally, I think that they should be checking into just about everything having to do with DOE's security. There is very little on this planet more dangerous that the nuclear arsenal of the United States of America. I'd like to keep it that way.
Cryptonomicon is not only a great novel, but there are some interesting ideas in it about how crytography is going to shape the economy of the future. The biggest being the idea of a Data Haven, or a place, outside of the jurisdiction of major governments where people can store information and money. Kind of like the Swiss banks of old. The one's which would keep your information secret, no matter who you were.
The big problem that governments have with cryptography, specifically the U.S. government, is that it prevents the government from using some of its most powerful weapons against organized crime. It's very difficult to launder money when you cannot hide it.
Well, I thought it was funny....
I'm not sure about 3dsmax either. I'm not working with it currently, otherwise, I'd probably go check! ;)
;) Throw a few cars on the bridge and fly around it a couple of times and rendering all of a sudden takes 20 minutes per frame on a dual zeon 450 with half a gig of RAM!
I'll bet it does offer similar functionality to Lightwave, but I never really had a need for that type of functionality. My need was really, "Get as much processor time as humanly possible." We even resorted to stealing the CAD machines at night to do rendering for us.
The big problem that we had rendering was that bridges have a shitload of polygons in them.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with the comment that running 40k copies of Linux on a mainframe is not useful. Think of ISP's or other companies that do co-location of servers. How about telco's that do it? The cooling systems, battery backup, backup generators, human maintainers, etc...cost a fortune to operate in a large data center. What if one was able to take an ACRE, yes, an ACRE of servers and replace them with one s/390? The cost of floor space over the course of a year would pay for the mainframe.
You may not need less people to maintain it, but you will certainly need less facilities. I data center I've worked in charges over $20 per square foot per month to host a server. Multiply that by a couple of thousand and that mainframe starts looking VERY attractive...
Does anyone remember the exoskeleton that Ripley used in Alien? That big yellow walker in the cargo bay of the ship? Did anyone happen to notice the old Caterpillar logo on the walker? Caterpillar as in the construction equipment manufacturer.
Unfortunately, someone modded you down for what I consider to be an opinion issue.
;)
Not all information wants to be free. Especially when it comes to microprocessor design. Code is one thing, which, by and large, can be created in one's basement with little overhead. Microprocessors, on the other hand, are designed and built with one thing in mind, to make money. Producing microprocessors is outrageously expensive and therefore, any technique that will enhance the quality of those processors is worth quite a good deal of money to those producing microprocessors.
Even if the information was free, it wouldn't do any of us Slashdotters any good. Unless of course one of us has a couple of million dollars to drop on turning our basement into a clean room full of silicon etching equipment.
If the technique is proven viable, IBM will surely get their patents in a row and start licensing the technology to all comers. Just because they have tech sharing with Transmeta and AMD doesn't mean that Intel, Motorola and Via are not going to be able to get their hands on this. IBM's revenues are not solely from hardware sales, and certainly not from chip sales alone. It is in IBM's best interest to license the patents out to whomever will pay for them.
So, on that note, I do believe that Transmeta and AMD will end up with this technology, assuming it is useful.
Does anyone know if there are any laws against this sort of thing? I seem to remember companies getting in all sorts of trouble by collecting information about minors. These companies got in trouble for collecting marketing information, specifically, but I don't really see how collecting psychological profiles would be any different, if not worse.
I've been sysadmin in a grapics department that has several dual CPU machines. The dual processing capability doesn't give one the option to multitask when rendering. Of course, I perhaps might have been able to set it up so that it would, but for the most part, 3DSMax rendering ate both processors for lunch. Granted, they were nearly twice as fast as the nearest single processor machine in the office, but during rendering, both procs maxed at 100% utilization.
And I'm the guy that meta-moderated your shitty moderation. What's the point of admitting that you moderated a comment if you post AC? Moderating something "troll" has nothing to do with the correctness of an arguement. Just because you don't agree with what someone has to say doesn't mean that you should be moderating down someone's opinion. I personally don't care if I get modded down cuz I gots plenty of karma to spare.
/. guys that came up with meta-moderation, my hat's off to you. This is one of several times that I've had the opportunity to keep a post up where it belongs regardless of opinion.
Which ever of you
Usless attempt to stay ontopic:
I think that Linux appliances are cool...
That was a great explanation! Thanks for taking the time.
I didn't mean to imply that the P in P/E was profit. Sorry for the confusion. The way I understand it, Profit = Earnings. I really hate reading corporate financial reports and government budget figures. Numbers seem to get spun every which way and it is often difficult to determine "How much money was spent this year?" and "How much money did we have left over at the end of the year?".
I do understand the high P/E for growing companies and low P/E for troubled companies. Unfortunately, day-traders are screwing up P/E ratios for many high profile companies. No one is going to be able to convince me that Rambus is worth its 829 P/E or Yahoo worth its 1770 P/E. Rambus is at about 300 right now, and it was at 500 a couple of weeks ago! What the hell is up with that?
What I'm really curious about now is the original subject of the post. What makes a web site worth $$$? Where did mapletree (sorry if I'm wrong on the name) get his/her 3-5 multiple?