I believe he was referring to the fact that IE is started at bootup and takes up memory whether you are using it or not. "Starting up IE" is very close to the same thing as creating a new window in Netscape or Mozilla.
This is the same trick Microsoft played with their little "Office Bar" around Office 95 or so. They loaded a floating button area called the Office Bar with some shortcut buttons at startup. Click on "New Word Document" and it would popup really quickly. Wow! How'd they do that? Simple, the Office Bar started when you booted up your computer and loaded all the Office DLLs. People are used to their computer taking a long time to boot, so they don't notice it. Now, opening a Word document takes very little time since Word is already running! The only difference is that you could shut off the Office Bar.
Warning: By reading this you are entering into a legally binding agreement.
You hereby agree that, beginning at the start of the next hour, no license or contract which you do not sign with your actual written signature, your verbal promise, or your own authorized crytographic electronic signature will be binding on you.
I don't think it was Judge Jackson as much as MS, really.
TPJ was good, but MS lawyers were really bad.
As TPJ pointed out, MS doesn't actually believe they did anything wrong. They sabotaged their own trial. They manufactured evidence (badly). They were/are banking 100% on the appeal.
Well, personally, I don't think this guy deserves very much respect for this article. I wouldn't moderate it down unless it was overrated already, but I sure wouldn't moderate it up past 2.
He brings up a few good obvious points. 1) RMS is quite a bit screwy at times, and obviously not ALL proprietary software is evil.
2) ESR is a gun nut, and uses his popularity to spread gun-loving propoganda. (Though that link may have been there before he became hype-king for Open Source.)
3) Not all Open Source software is of a high quality. (duh! 90% of the stuff on Freshmeat isn't at 1.0 yet!)
Unfortunately, he completely violates his own principles. He starts off pointing out that it would be wrong to judge an idea by it's supporters. He then does exactly that by skewering ESR and RMS and claiming an exeption to his aforementioned rule because
But in the case at hand the connection is close, as Dr. Stallman is the living icon of the free software movement, widely admired, imitated and idolized (almost like a sect leader) by his followers
Here's a hint, just because RMS or someone critisizing RMS might say so, doesn't make it so.
Next, in skewering ESR's views on gun ownership, he himself uses his article to wage his personal, regurgitated, very weak war on gun ownership. I thought this was an article objectively looking at the free software movement?
He then implies that since RMS doesn't publicly denounce ESR as a gun nut, therefore RMS is a gun nut and all Open Source "followers" (gag. It's NOT a religion to all of us.) are as well.
He repeatedly refers to Microsoft as a company who's only crime is to try and make money off of its hard work. We can forgive him for this, since this article seems to have been written before Y2K and therefore he may not have been clued in on MicroSoft's business strategies.
He brings up the old and very lame "There's nobody to blame" criticism of free software. First of all, you CAN blame the author(s) of the software. Their emails are probably somewhere in the code. Alternatively, you can send your complaint to the sales department at Microsoft. Yes, GPL'd software comes with no warranty of any kind unless otherwise specified. Neither does any shrink-wrap software that I know of. The only time in our industry that you get a warranty with your software is custom, made-to-order, high-price software. This warranty is really just insurance and nothing more (i.e. after the fact), and won't change the fact that a patient died due to a software bug. If RedHat sold you that software, even though you could have obtained it for free, then talk to them about it's fitness for a particular purpose.
Some of this has been said by other's in this thread already, but I'll try and be short.
1) Not all people who get hit by this are actually stupid, they're just victims of bad windows design and made the mistake of trusting the people who designed their software... and have been trained to habitually click through a bunch of dialog boxes if they want to get their work done some time this millenium.
For example, the DEFAULT in windows is to "Hide extensions of known file types." I've always thought this is the most ridiculous option ever, since tiny icons are NOT intuitive, and even Windows friggin 2000 is still 100% trusting of file extensions for file types. What happens here? Well, they get a file attatchment on email that is named ILOVEYOU.TXT with an icon that symbolizes a VBScript, which they don't recognize. They hear their geek friend saying, "You can never get a virus from a.txt file", so they just click through all the dialog boxes. (Correct me if I'm 100% wrong here. I haven't verified this, just writing from memory of the one time in my life I used Outlook on a new machine.)
2) Even though it's possible to be multi-user safe in W2K, it isn't the norm. Windows as a multi-user platform sucks! Even Windows 2000. There is no such thing as a root shell. This means, whenever a user needs to do something that requires Superuser priveleges (like installing a font pack for IE), they must stop everything they are doing and log out, then log back in as Administrator. Sometimes this even involves bugging IT to do it for you (and even the worst MCSEs get bored installing font packs all day because someone sent a URL to a joke on a site in Israel to the whole company). A few pyschological penalties like this, and people just end up giving their normal user full priveleges.
3) Users are conditioned to just click-through everything. This isn't a Windows-only problem. I would say it's mostly Microsoft's fault, since they "innovated" the modern EULA as well as overuse modal dialog boxes. "To use this software you must agree to this 5-page EULA written in lawyerese and for some reason contained in a 20x20 scrollbox with tiny font. (Yes, I agree | No, I don't want to use this software I've already paid for)" "This page requires a plugin of type text/vbscript-hard-drive-eraser. Install now? (Yes | Yes | Yes | No)".
So, when the user gets "Attatchments may contain executable code [insert sound of adults talking in Charlie Brown]", they habitually just click yes. This is reinforced when they were a new user and they were frigthened by a threatening dialog box like "Unable to connect to host. Connection reset by peer", so they asked for help. The lab tech who came over says, "Oh for heaven's sake, just click OK and try again."
This has gotta hurt. It takes a lot of guts for a company to eat a bunch of revenue like that, especially when they aren't doing so hot in other areas.
[Off-the-wall and highly improbable conspiracy theory] Or maybe they are doing it purely to entrench RDRAM in the market.
Step 1) Oh no, that SDRAM makes things buggy. Let's replace it for free with RDRAM for ya! (Who wouldn't go for it?)
Step 2) Now that EVERY i820 board has RDRAM, more RAM companies make RDRAM, the price of RDRAM goes down, and the price of SDRAM goes up
Step 3) Revisionist history starts pointing the finger at SDRAM for being an unreliable technology, not the i820.
Step 4) More and more consumers scoff at anything that doesn't use RDRAM ("Sheesh, your RAM runs at a puny little 133Mhz! Mine runs at 800!")
Step 5) AMD is hurt by the fact that none of their CPUs run on a chipset that uses RDRAM.
Step 6) While Intel flushes cash fighting AMD, HP takes over the majority of the CPU biz. (OK, maybe not.)
Oh no! You mean this whole advertising-based economy could have to shift to making money some other way??? But there IS NO OTHER WAY! Oh my god it's the end of the world!!!! [/sarcasm]
I would not lament at all if the giant advertising economy crumbled to the ground. Wasting time watching TV is bad enough, but now more than 50% of what you watch is commercials! There's something like 13 minutes of commercials in the average "half-hour" program, and then there's those infomercials. I have to pay for cable/satellite anyways (there are less local stations in San Jose that I can receive than there were in Visalia when I was 10!), and they use that money to bombard me with ads!
People, ads are EVIL. Some are cute and all in good fun, but the system in general is really fscked up! I am pretty resistant to the lies and general fluff found in ads, ("You need this prescription drug. We won't tell you what it does, so ask your doctor about it. Get medicated with InActiviara and be a happy person. Side effects are mild and include vomiting, montezuma's revenge, priapism, and menstrual cramps.") but I am not resistant to my kids begging and pleading and they are not resistant to advertising.
In a perfect world, the internet would let us get past ads. Instead of being constantly being bombarded by ads everywhere I look (highway 101 anyone?), if I was in the mood to buy something I would look it up. Instead of shooting random ads at me, ad money would be spent answering my questions by a real person (or suitable bot) when I come investigating for myself. Products would be sold based on their quality and warranties, not on the fact that their commercial has burping frogs.
...and before anyone says something about "but that would disrupt such and such a system", I DON'T CARE! Humans have rights (and animals too). Corporations/Economic systems do NOT.
Re:Don't worry about it, Napster's a different iss
on
MP3.com Loses In Court
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· Score: 1
Wal-Mart sells CDs, which they bought wholesale from the record labels, and therefore they have license to distribute it.
My.MP3.com distributes the music without permission from the record labels to do so. Yes, the listeners are entitled to that music and they could not be sued (IANAL), but MP3.com is being sued for the distributing without permission.
You can sell a CD you acquired, but if you copy it first then sell it, you're breaking the law.
There are some market forces that are hindering the adoption of SMP.
1) OEMs don't like the idea. Most home users, facing a slow and outdated system, will simply buy a whole new system. If there were space for an extra CPU, they might start plopping in extra CPUs and RAM instead of buying a whole new system. Just look at all the "Afterburner" type chips that let a 486 motherboard run a Pentium CPU. Now multiply that benefit by 2.
2) While Intel likes it when big ass computers use 4 or 8 Xeons (the "Wait, why didn't I just buy an UltraSparc" configuration) because they make a load of money, they don't reaaaaally like SMP at the lower end. They make much higher margins on one cutting-edge cpu than they do on two celerons or even lower end Pwhatevers.
Now if a Transmeta chip could do SMP, that would be sweet! Those things are tiny and low power. Having an 8 or 16 CPU motherboard wouldn't take up a closet or require your own hydro-electric plant to run. So a 700Mhz Crusoe ~ 500Mhz PIII. Who cares! Look at the price/performance! (I believe the Crusoe was either $35 or $105. Either way, cheaper than a PIII 500)
I remeber seeing a very fancy and visually appealing commercial for an HP business PC. I had a cool, Mortal Kombatesque flavor to it.
As a shau-lin (sp?) monk faught off an evil-doer in the nether-realm, you hear, "The HP whatever business PC, featuring the unstoppable Windows NT operating system, which detects problems and knocks them out." How does this make the HP PC any different from a Yugo with a pentium in it?
You pay W dollars for your computer and internet connection too. You risk your computer crashing, time searching, and your hardware has this nasty habit of becoming obsolete.
If I walk up to a mountain stream in a place that's not a national park nor private property and take a drink, am I stealing?
As Phil-14 pointed out, water freezes at different temperatures, depending on what's dissolved in it and what the air pressure is. You can drop water to below 0 Celcius, put it in a near-vacum, and it will BOIL.
You can hold something in your hand, let go, and it will float upwards. It's called a balloon.
The common response: You're nitpicking. You know what I meant.
Yes, but many bugs/flaws/glitches appear when engineers fail to realize what they assumed was absolute, isn't.
Some famous scientist quoted in someone's sig here said something like, "For every complex answer, that is an answer that is simple... and wrong." (Geez, I'm sure I really mangled that quote).
Of course, in the spirit of "Nothing is absolute", I'm sure there has to be something that's absolute.
As I stated in an earlier reply, the GPL is NOT anti-commercial. It's very pro-commercial in a different way.
Companies would rather use BSD licensed code. Companies would rather release GPL'd code, which is less friendly to their commercial competitors.
This isn't a bad thing, since the public benefits whether or not the code is released BSD or GPL.
GPL is for "I want this to stay open damnit!" BSD is for "I dedicate this to the greater good of geek-kind."
Of course, some would argue that GPL is for "I dedicate this to the greater good of geek-kind. Therefore I'm using the GPL to insure that it stays open." and BSD is for "I want this to to be the best software it possibly can be. Therefore I'm BSD'ing it so that it will only become closed if the closed version offers a significant advantage over the open one."
Actually, I find the GPL more commercially friendly, but probably in a different way than many think of it.
The BSD is commercially friendly in that BigCo would rather grab a BSD'd project to adapt and make it their own.
However, the GPL is more commercially friendly in that if BigCo has written a fancy in-house load balancing system for Fujiriwirix GXTTP servers, which they don't feel like putting the marketing behind to sell, they can GPL it and release it and be confident that their competitors will never be able to take the software they developed and enhance it and compete with BigCo's current products. BigCo gets the advantage of all the eyeballs looking at their code.
There's software you write to sell and software you write because you need to use it. GPL the stuff you're not going to sell.
It was my understanding that while there is a larger minumum size if you use any visual components, Delphi code is NOT 50% larger than any other compiler. Sure, a 1MB gcc'd app might be 1.5MB if done in Delphi, but a 20MB gcc'd app would still be 20.5MB in Delphi.
Also, I guarantee you that a 1.5MB "bloated" Delphi app is going to run faster than a TCL/Tk app, which has to load an interpreter anyhow.
What it all comes down to is this; Do you want a 100% hand coded app that runs screeming fast but you have to spend a ton of time debugging why it segfaults when you open a popup menu Do you want to use a good RAD tool to plop down a GUI that just works with no headaches and spend your valuable time working on the backend and still get an app that runs fast?
Dephi not open? Valid argument, but it's a personal argument. As long as you can write Open Source Software(TM) with Delphi, I'm not so bugged that it's not GPL'd.
((Posting trouble. Apologies if this is a repeat))
... because on appliances so small, there's just not enough room to fit the whole intel inside label.
Seriously though, the Crusoe is being manufactured on 0.22 micron processes (processesi? processen?) and is already much lower power than any mobile pentium out there even on the 0.18 micron process. All Intel has is vaporware that's at least 1 year away. They probably hadn't started it until after the Crusoe was released. A whole year to develop a CPU based on a core you've already perfected?
Perhaps the MOST compelling reasons for corporations to participate in OSS projects is the fact that many necessary pieces of software are not commercially viable. In the closed-source world, if something is not believed to be commercially viable, it is not made.
Now, say BigCo needs software that will load balance their IDKFA servers. There's no way anyone could market software to load balance IDKFA servers, for various market reasons. BigCo can either a) foot the bill to write their own software from scratch or b) share the responsibility of producing the software by making it open source.
In A, the cost will be huge and if the programmer that wrote it leaves the company, the bugs will be difficult and costly to work out.
In situation B, even if they end up footing most of the bill for the software, they will get lots of help removing the bugs from evreryone else who load balances their IDKFA servers. If the programmer who designed it leaves the company, there are still many other programmers familiar with the code they can hire to update it.
The value of software is purely the value of what it does. Sometimes, you can sell it based on that value. Sometimes, you can't sell it, despite it's value. If it's valuable and you can't sell it, Open Source it! (duh)
And, there's that other little side benefit to participating in an OSS project. You'll have a lot of information gathered on who out there is a talented programmer you might want to recruit. No job interview is going to match how much you learn about a candidate from actually watching their work.
It's both, actually. They are storing it AND redistributing it. Sketchy subject all around, hence it will be decided in court.
I anticipate MP3.com will settle, unless the RIAA gets too gready and decides to use the court to the completely crush MP3.com, the self-appointed figurehead of the 'mp3 revolution'. (Hmmm, RIAA, greedy? Naw, that's too far-fetched)
Sorry if I'm not towing the party line, but if I've read the situation clearly, I think the RIAA has a strong case.
Yes, owning the CD gives the user every right to MP3 it for their own use. There is nothing harmful about the user downloading an MP3 with Beam-It if they already own the CD.
But for the Beam-It to work, MP3.com had to amass a huge database of commercial music, it seems. They don't have the license to re-distribute it, regardless if the listeners have the right to receive it.
If a person without a liquor license makes a habit of selling alchohol in a commercial setting, it doesn't matter if they only sell to people over 21. Selling drugs to a diplomat with diplomatic immunity will still get you thrown in jail. These examples are a stretch, I know, but the point is MP3.com was redistributing copyrighted materials which they did not have permission to redistribute.
Of course, I could be wrong and it's possible mp3.com did not redistribute anything they didn't have a right to redistribute.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe he was referring to the fact that IE is started at bootup and takes up memory whether you are using it or not. "Starting up IE" is very close to the same thing as creating a new window in Netscape or Mozilla.
This is the same trick Microsoft played with their little "Office Bar" around Office 95 or so. They loaded a floating button area called the Office Bar with some shortcut buttons at startup. Click on "New Word Document" and it would popup really quickly. Wow! How'd they do that? Simple, the Office Bar started when you booted up your computer and loaded all the Office DLLs. People are used to their computer taking a long time to boot, so they don't notice it. Now, opening a Word document takes very little time since Word is already running! The only difference is that you could shut off the Office Bar.
Warning: By reading this you are entering into a legally binding agreement.
You hereby agree that, beginning at the start of the next hour, no license or contract which you do not sign with your actual written signature, your verbal promise, or your own authorized crytographic electronic signature will be binding on you.
I don't think it was Judge Jackson as much as MS, really.
TPJ was good, but MS lawyers were really bad.
As TPJ pointed out, MS doesn't actually believe they did anything wrong. They sabotaged their own trial. They manufactured evidence (badly). They were/are banking 100% on the appeal.
Heheh.
MS - "Your Honor, I can proove beyond any and all doubt that the DOJ was out to get us from the start."
Supreme Court Justice - "Oh really?"
MS - "Yes. They filed suit against us. That's clear evidence that they are biased against us."
Wow. Shoulda read the rest of the comments before posting. There are some much better critiques of this article than mine.
He brings up a few good obvious points.
1) RMS is quite a bit screwy at times, and obviously not ALL proprietary software is evil.
2) ESR is a gun nut, and uses his popularity to spread gun-loving propoganda. (Though that link may have been there before he became hype-king for Open Source.)
3) Not all Open Source software is of a high quality. (duh! 90% of the stuff on Freshmeat isn't at 1.0 yet!)
Unfortunately, he completely violates his own principles. He starts off pointing out that it would be wrong to judge an idea by it's supporters. He then does exactly that by skewering ESR and RMS and claiming an exeption to his aforementioned rule because
Here's a hint, just because RMS or someone critisizing RMS might say so, doesn't make it so.
Next, in skewering ESR's views on gun ownership, he himself uses his article to wage his personal, regurgitated, very weak war on gun ownership. I thought this was an article objectively looking at the free software movement?
He then implies that since RMS doesn't publicly denounce ESR as a gun nut, therefore RMS is a gun nut and all Open Source "followers" (gag. It's NOT a religion to all of us.) are as well.
He repeatedly refers to Microsoft as a company who's only crime is to try and make money off of its hard work. We can forgive him for this, since this article seems to have been written before Y2K and therefore he may not have been clued in on MicroSoft's business strategies.
He brings up the old and very lame "There's nobody to blame" criticism of free software. First of all, you CAN blame the author(s) of the software. Their emails are probably somewhere in the code. Alternatively, you can send your complaint to the sales department at Microsoft. Yes, GPL'd software comes with no warranty of any kind unless otherwise specified. Neither does any shrink-wrap software that I know of. The only time in our industry that you get a warranty with your software is custom, made-to-order, high-price software. This warranty is really just insurance and nothing more (i.e. after the fact), and won't change the fact that a patient died due to a software bug. If RedHat sold you that software, even though you could have obtained it for free, then talk to them about it's fitness for a particular purpose.
He decries anecdotal evidence, then uses it.
He decries gross exagerations, then uses them.
anyhow, enough of my rant.
Some of this has been said by other's in this thread already, but I'll try and be short.
.txt file", so they just click through all the dialog boxes. (Correct me if I'm 100% wrong here. I haven't verified this, just writing from memory of the one time in my life I used Outlook on a new machine.)
1) Not all people who get hit by this are actually stupid, they're just victims of bad windows design and made the mistake of trusting the people who designed their software... and have been trained to habitually click through a bunch of dialog boxes if they want to get their work done some time this millenium.
For example, the DEFAULT in windows is to "Hide extensions of known file types." I've always thought this is the most ridiculous option ever, since tiny icons are NOT intuitive, and even Windows friggin 2000 is still 100% trusting of file extensions for file types. What happens here? Well, they get a file attatchment on email that is named ILOVEYOU.TXT with an icon that symbolizes a VBScript, which they don't recognize. They hear their geek friend saying, "You can never get a virus from a
2) Even though it's possible to be multi-user safe in W2K, it isn't the norm. Windows as a multi-user platform sucks! Even Windows 2000. There is no such thing as a root shell. This means, whenever a user needs to do something that requires Superuser priveleges (like installing a font pack for IE), they must stop everything they are doing and log out, then log back in as Administrator. Sometimes this even involves bugging IT to do it for you (and even the worst MCSEs get bored installing font packs all day because someone sent a URL to a joke on a site in Israel to the whole company). A few pyschological penalties like this, and people just end up giving their normal user full priveleges.
3) Users are conditioned to just click-through everything. This isn't a Windows-only problem. I would say it's mostly Microsoft's fault, since they "innovated" the modern EULA as well as overuse modal dialog boxes. "To use this software you must agree to this 5-page EULA written in lawyerese and for some reason contained in a 20x20 scrollbox with tiny font. (Yes, I agree | No, I don't want to use this software I've already paid for)" "This page requires a plugin of type text/vbscript-hard-drive-eraser. Install now? (Yes | Yes | Yes | No)".
So, when the user gets "Attatchments may contain executable code [insert sound of adults talking in Charlie Brown]", they habitually just click yes. This is reinforced when they were a new user and they were frigthened by a threatening dialog box like "Unable to connect to host. Connection reset by peer", so they asked for help. The lab tech who came over says, "Oh for heaven's sake, just click OK and try again."
[#include apologies_for_wordiness.h]
This has gotta hurt. It takes a lot of guts for a company to eat a bunch of revenue like that, especially when they aren't doing so hot in other areas.
[Off-the-wall and highly improbable conspiracy theory]
Or maybe they are doing it purely to entrench RDRAM in the market.
Step 1) Oh no, that SDRAM makes things buggy. Let's replace it for free with RDRAM for ya! (Who wouldn't go for it?)
Step 2) Now that EVERY i820 board has RDRAM, more RAM companies make RDRAM, the price of RDRAM goes down, and the price of SDRAM goes up
Step 3) Revisionist history starts pointing the finger at SDRAM for being an unreliable technology, not the i820.
Step 4) More and more consumers scoff at anything that doesn't use RDRAM ("Sheesh, your RAM runs at a puny little 133Mhz! Mine runs at 800!")
Step 5) AMD is hurt by the fact that none of their CPUs run on a chipset that uses RDRAM.
Step 6) While Intel flushes cash fighting AMD, HP takes over the majority of the CPU biz. (OK, maybe not.)
I saw that statistic somewhere. Are you counting the commercials after the end of the show too?
It may have been refering specifically to non-PBS children's programming as well.
That's not even counting the gratuitous product placement (*ahem* Apple).
any time that physical object contains copyrighted or otherwise legally controlled material.
You need a license from the copyright holder to sell copies of that copyrighted material.
Oh no! You mean this whole advertising-based economy could have to shift to making money some other way??? But there IS NO OTHER WAY! Oh my god it's the end of the world!!!!
[/sarcasm]
I would not lament at all if the giant advertising economy crumbled to the ground. Wasting time watching TV is bad enough, but now more than 50% of what you watch is commercials! There's something like 13 minutes of commercials in the average "half-hour" program, and then there's those infomercials. I have to pay for cable/satellite anyways (there are less local stations in San Jose that I can receive than there were in Visalia when I was 10!), and they use that money to bombard me with ads!
People, ads are EVIL. Some are cute and all in good fun, but the system in general is really fscked up! I am pretty resistant to the lies and general fluff found in ads, ("You need this prescription drug. We won't tell you what it does, so ask your doctor about it. Get medicated with InActiviara and be a happy person. Side effects are mild and include vomiting, montezuma's revenge, priapism, and menstrual cramps.") but I am not resistant to my kids begging and pleading and they are not resistant to advertising.
In a perfect world, the internet would let us get past ads. Instead of being constantly being bombarded by ads everywhere I look (highway 101 anyone?), if I was in the mood to buy something I would look it up. Instead of shooting random ads at me, ad money would be spent answering my questions by a real person (or suitable bot) when I come investigating for myself. Products would be sold based on their quality and warranties, not on the fact that their commercial has burping frogs.
...and before anyone says something about "but that would disrupt such and such a system", I DON'T CARE! Humans have rights (and animals too). Corporations/Economic systems do NOT.
Wal-Mart sells CDs, which they bought wholesale from the record labels, and therefore they have license to distribute it.
My.MP3.com distributes the music without permission from the record labels to do so. Yes, the listeners are entitled to that music and they could not be sued (IANAL), but MP3.com is being sued for the distributing without permission.
You can sell a CD you acquired, but if you copy it first then sell it, you're breaking the law.
There are some market forces that are hindering the adoption of SMP.
1) OEMs don't like the idea. Most home users, facing a slow and outdated system, will simply buy a whole new system. If there were space for an extra CPU, they might start plopping in extra CPUs and RAM instead of buying a whole new system. Just look at all the "Afterburner" type chips that let a 486 motherboard run a Pentium CPU. Now multiply that benefit by 2.
2) While Intel likes it when big ass computers use 4 or 8 Xeons (the "Wait, why didn't I just buy an UltraSparc" configuration) because they make a load of money, they don't reaaaaally like SMP at the lower end. They make much higher margins on one cutting-edge cpu than they do on two celerons or even lower end Pwhatevers.
Now if a Transmeta chip could do SMP, that would be sweet! Those things are tiny and low power. Having an 8 or 16 CPU motherboard wouldn't take up a closet or require your own hydro-electric plant to run. So a 700Mhz Crusoe ~ 500Mhz PIII. Who cares! Look at the price/performance! (I believe the Crusoe was either $35 or $105. Either way, cheaper than a PIII 500)
I, and I'm sure many otheres out there, take offense at you calling the swastika a "satanic, or rather pagan" symbol.
First of all, the Nazi symbol is a swastika going counter-clockwise. The original swastika generally, but not always, goes clockwise.
The swastika is an ancient symbol used by many peace-loving religions in India.
...no kidding.
I remeber seeing a very fancy and visually appealing commercial for an HP business PC. I had a cool, Mortal Kombatesque flavor to it.
As a shau-lin (sp?) monk faught off an evil-doer in the nether-realm, you hear, "The HP whatever business PC, featuring the unstoppable Windows NT operating system, which detects problems and knocks them out." How does this make the HP PC any different from a Yugo with a pentium in it?
Getting water out of a well...
You pay W dollars for drilling...
You pay W dollars for your computer and internet connection too. You risk your computer crashing, time searching, and your hardware has this nasty habit of becoming obsolete.
If I walk up to a mountain stream in a place that's not a national park nor private property and take a drink, am I stealing?
As Phil-14 pointed out, water freezes at different temperatures, depending on what's dissolved in it and what the air pressure is. You can drop water to below 0 Celcius, put it in a near-vacum, and it will BOIL.
You can hold something in your hand, let go, and it will float upwards. It's called a balloon.
The common response: You're nitpicking. You know what I meant.
Yes, but many bugs/flaws/glitches appear when engineers fail to realize what they assumed was absolute, isn't.
Some famous scientist quoted in someone's sig here said something like, "For every complex answer, that is an answer that is simple... and wrong." (Geez, I'm sure I really mangled that quote).
Of course, in the spirit of "Nothing is absolute", I'm sure there has to be something that's absolute.
As I stated in an earlier reply, the GPL is NOT anti-commercial. It's very pro-commercial in a different way.
Companies would rather use BSD licensed code.
Companies would rather release GPL'd code, which is less friendly to their commercial competitors.
This isn't a bad thing, since the public benefits whether or not the code is released BSD or GPL.
GPL is for "I want this to stay open damnit!"
BSD is for "I dedicate this to the greater good of geek-kind."
Of course, some would argue that
GPL is for "I dedicate this to the greater good of geek-kind. Therefore I'm using the GPL to insure that it stays open." and
BSD is for "I want this to to be the best software it possibly can be. Therefore I'm BSD'ing it so that it will only become closed if the closed version offers a significant advantage over the open one."
Actually, I find the GPL more commercially friendly, but probably in a different way than many think of it.
The BSD is commercially friendly in that BigCo would rather grab a BSD'd project to adapt and make it their own.
However, the GPL is more commercially friendly in that if BigCo has written a fancy in-house load balancing system for Fujiriwirix GXTTP servers, which they don't feel like putting the marketing behind to sell, they can GPL it and release it and be confident that their competitors will never be able to take the software they developed and enhance it and compete with BigCo's current products. BigCo gets the advantage of all the eyeballs looking at their code.
There's software you write to sell and software you write because you need to use it. GPL the stuff you're not going to sell.
It was my understanding that while there is a larger minumum size if you use any visual components, Delphi code is NOT 50% larger than any other compiler. Sure, a 1MB gcc'd app might be 1.5MB if done in Delphi, but a 20MB gcc'd app would still be 20.5MB in Delphi.
Also, I guarantee you that a 1.5MB "bloated" Delphi app is going to run faster than a TCL/Tk app, which has to load an interpreter anyhow.
What it all comes down to is this;
Do you want a 100% hand coded app that runs screeming fast but you have to spend a ton of time debugging why it segfaults when you open a popup menu
Do you want to use a good RAD tool to plop down a GUI that just works with no headaches and spend your valuable time working on the backend and still get an app that runs fast?
Dephi not open? Valid argument, but it's a personal argument. As long as you can write Open Source Software(TM) with Delphi, I'm not so bugged that it's not GPL'd.
((Posting trouble. Apologies if this is a repeat))
We've got memory leaks, and as we stay awake too long without a reboot, our swap space gets more active. Simple. :o)
... because on appliances so small, there's just not enough room to fit the whole intel inside label.
Seriously though, the Crusoe is being manufactured on 0.22 micron processes (processesi? processen?) and is already much lower power than any mobile pentium out there even on the 0.18 micron process. All Intel has is vaporware that's at least 1 year away. They probably hadn't started it until after the Crusoe was released. A whole year to develop a CPU based on a core you've already perfected?
Perhaps the MOST compelling reasons for corporations to participate in OSS projects is the fact that many necessary pieces of software are not commercially viable. In the closed-source world, if something is not believed to be commercially viable, it is not made.
Now, say BigCo needs software that will load balance their IDKFA servers. There's no way anyone could market software to load balance IDKFA servers, for various market reasons. BigCo can either a) foot the bill to write their own software from scratch or b) share the responsibility of producing the software by making it open source.
In A, the cost will be huge and if the programmer that wrote it leaves the company, the bugs will be difficult and costly to work out.
In situation B, even if they end up footing most of the bill for the software, they will get lots of help removing the bugs from evreryone else who load balances their IDKFA servers. If the programmer who designed it leaves the company, there are still many other programmers familiar with the code they can hire to update it.
The value of software is purely the value of what it does. Sometimes, you can sell it based on that value. Sometimes, you can't sell it, despite it's value. If it's valuable and you can't sell it, Open Source it! (duh)
And, there's that other little side benefit to participating in an OSS project. You'll have a lot of information gathered on who out there is a talented programmer you might want to recruit. No job interview is going to match how much you learn about a candidate from actually watching their work.
It's both, actually. They are storing it AND redistributing it. Sketchy subject all around, hence it will be decided in court.
I anticipate MP3.com will settle, unless the RIAA gets too gready and decides to use the court to the completely crush MP3.com, the self-appointed figurehead of the 'mp3 revolution'. (Hmmm, RIAA, greedy? Naw, that's too far-fetched)
Sorry if I'm not towing the party line, but if I've read the situation clearly, I think the RIAA has a strong case.
Yes, owning the CD gives the user every right to MP3 it for their own use. There is nothing harmful about the user downloading an MP3 with Beam-It if they already own the CD.
But for the Beam-It to work, MP3.com had to amass a huge database of commercial music, it seems. They don't have the license to re-distribute it, regardless if the listeners have the right to receive it.
If a person without a liquor license makes a habit of selling alchohol in a commercial setting, it doesn't matter if they only sell to people over 21. Selling drugs to a diplomat with diplomatic immunity will still get you thrown in jail. These examples are a stretch, I know, but the point is MP3.com was redistributing copyrighted materials which they did not have permission to redistribute.
Of course, I could be wrong and it's possible mp3.com did not redistribute anything they didn't have a right to redistribute.