Microsoft has indicated that it is intent on continued growth of 20% a year.
Has anyone calculated just how many years it will be before Microsoft corporate strategy requires that they own everything?:-).
If calculated literally, not very long. My calculus 101 professor once worked through a similar example: if the current human population growth of 3% per year continues unchecked, ignoring relativistic factors, how long will it be until the expanding sphere of human bodies reaches the speed of light?
IIRC, the time was surprisingly short (on the order of a few hundred thousand years or something).
The Microsoft example would probably take only a few decades.
I believe allot of the people who write GPL code purposefully intend for people to use it *FOR FREE*.
Well, if that's what they really intended, they should have written their own license. The GPL explicitly allows others to sell the code (or beg for donations), as long as the source remains freely available.
If they read the GPL and released the code under it anyway, we'll assume that they are OK with it.
Well, the Datahand keyboard is pretty compact. I wonder if it could fit on a laptop.
I've been thinking about looking into something like this to help my slowly deteriorating wrist tendons. Unfortunately, it's rather pricey, and I'm not sure how much it would really help over the long term. Anyone used this thing or something like it?
I've been too lazy to look up how IPV6 works, but this article sums it up neatly.
Now that I finally understand what all:those::colons:are in the addresses my OpenBSD box spits out, I'm no longer afraid of them. It's actually pretty straightforward.
And DON'T SMOKE NEAR YOUR MACHINE! You've no real association for the word "disgusting" until you've worked on a monitor that was used by a smoker. I've seen some monitors that I 'm surprised didn't die of cancer of the CRT, they had so much tar and nicotine on the bottle. You can go through an entire bottle of 99% isopropyl alchohol (DON'T use regular rubbing alcohol, it is 30% water!) and still not get all the gook off.
Here's some more important advice: DON'T SMOKE NEAR YOUR LUNGS! You can't swab them out with alchohol. Same goes for your coworkers' lungs.
Re:Flywheels are a great solution
on
Flywheel UPS
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· Score: 1
BTW: If you built portable flywheel "batteries", would they act like gyroscopes?
High school physics experiment: Use a string to dangle the 850 lb UPS by one corner. Watch it slowly precess around the string. It hangs in the air like magic!
A reasonably good amateur telescope could watch the spacecraft all the way there and back.
There is no proof that amateur telescopes exist.
Ham operators could pick up the radio signals -- and anyone with a dish could check the direction it came from.
There is no evidence that ham operators exist. There is no proof that a dish can monitor anything
That certainly includes the Soviets, who would have loved to have caught us faking it.
There is zero evidence that there was a "cold war", or that the SOVIETS UNION EVEN EXISTED.
Thousands of men worked on the rockets. Tens of thousands of bean counters checked that all that money was being spent properly (especially on bean counters).
WHAT BEANS??? WHAT COUNTERS???? WHERE'S THE PROOF!!???
No way could that many Americans keep a secret!
HOW CAN A NON-EXISTENT NATION EVEN HAVE SECRETS TO KEEP????? FACE IT: YOU HAVE NO PROOF!!!!!!!!!
(Actually, my sig is relevant to this topic if you think about it)
What really freaks me out is, why does Earth have exactly one moon?
That's easily explained by the anthropic principle. It's much more likely to get land-based life forms on a planet with large tidal activity (when the tide recedes, fish need to evolve lungs).
Large tides need large lunar mass. But multiple large moons would likely form unstable orbits that interfere with each other. Therefore, one large moon.
All I know is if I win in UT and my ping is less than 100ms, the loozers make snippy comments about my low ping time. My scientific conclusion: ping < 100ms == good.
To all you sore loozers: I'll just point out that just as in the real world, in the virtual world those who invest in good tools have an advantage.
Use Windows, Bill Gates uses soap and is straight!
Back in the 80's, one of the marketing guys at our company told me about a meeting he had recently attended with Bill Gates. He told me that Bill smelled pretty bad, and could use a shower. Of course he gave me no physical evidence to prove this, but I have no reason to doubt his story either.
But back then, Gates was only working on his first $billion, so I doubt that he had the resources to hire personal hygene advisors yet:).
Re:Will the same thing happen to RHAT?
on
Mandrake Shakeup
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· Score: 1
This SEC filing is no more pessimistic than any SEC filing from any publicly traded company. All companies issue doom and gloom SEC filings to cover their collective asses in case the stock value drops for any reason.
I still remember the first one of these I read years ago... there was a coupon on the side of a 6-pack of Samuel Adams beer announcing their upcoming IPO. I sent away for the prospectus. After reading the warnings in their filings, I concluded that the beer industry is a terrible business to be in; no beer stock for me.
It looks like too many tipsy consumers bought into the IPO, though. The stock dropped alot the first year, then has been flat. However, they're still in business, and the P/E is only 14. It didn't turn out as bad as it could have.
Re:Qt the de facto standard for cross platform ?
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 1
Get real!! The de facto standard for cross-platform development is Java, and will remain so.
Um, no. The Java GUI is and will remain the cross-platform standard for a toy.
Qt, on the other hand, looks and feels like a real user interface.
So what you're saying, is we solve all our problems by removing most of the government, thereby creating a huge power vacuum. We then just sit and hope that no bad guys raise up to fill that vacuum.
That's about as realistic as the dream of a pure communist state.
EFI lets each hardware vendor provide built-in drivers for all hardware. This could certainly mean that the OS has to use a binary-only driver to transmit something over the network card. Quality manufacturers will probably want an OS specific driver. At least EFI demands that the bundled driver follow a standard interface. The end result is that you may not have the source to some hardware drivers.
Well, I bet most non-trivial hardware has an embedded processor whose firmware source is not available. The source to the computer's BIOS is also not generally available, AFAIK.
This system seems to be making the boundaries between software drivers, BIOS and embedded firmware very fuzzy indeed. People currently have built-in expectations about which parts of the system should be open vs. which parts can be proprietary. They probably haven't thought much about those expectations yet, but I bet they will when this comes out.
425 ft-lbs of torque beats most of those so-called "super duty" pickup trucks.
They ought to make one of those ads showing a guy in a cowboy hat driving this thing through a muddy construction site pulling a bulldozer (with Bob Seger straining in the background).
Oh wait... I forgot about that "traction" thing. Never mind.
You're probably someone who is concerned with saving the environment, as you would rather have solar power than find more petroleum. Yet you want to roll the stuff across acres of the desert or the ocean. Do you know what this would do to the environment?
Like I said, it would take an amount of area similar to current paved roads. That's not a drastic impact on the enviromnent; nobody's claiming that today's pavement is causing Antarctica to melt.
As to finding more petroleum, that's probably not a big deal. We'll run out before doubling the current impact, and we'd need alot of it to make plastic tarp collectors anyway. The real disaster will be if we stupidly manage to burn all the coal that we could potentially scratch out of the ground. That's orders of magnitude more CO2. Have you checked the weather on Venus lately?
Why spend billions on an expensive, fragile space-based solution? The billions would be better spent on a crash program to develop solar cells embedded in cheap plastic tarp. Use some ideas similar to those being developed for plastic display technology.
It wouldn't have to be especially efficient, just cheap. Unroll acres of the stuff directly onto the desert floor, or float it on the ocean. Maybe put it in the diamond-shape gaps between those circular irrigated crop fields out west.
My math estimates a few thousand square miles of 5% efficient (at 1% overall system efficiency) collectors would satisfy all our energy needs. (If you think that's too much area, imagine explaining how much area would be paved over in 2001 to a guy from the 19th century. It can be done.)
If this was treated like the Manhatten project, I'd bet they could get production started in 7 years or so. By contrast, in 7 years, NASA would still only be doing feasiblity studies on a space-based solution.
The only problem is that the African honeybees don't form very large hives and don't seem to build up large stores of honey. It's an obvious adaptation to a warmer climate and much shorter winters, but makes them less-than-optimal for honey production.
This sounds like an excellent opportunity to use GM technology. Reprogram the killer bees to make more honey.
We'll fix our past mistake, and hope that no screw-ups happen (like accidently converting dairy cows to dispense honey from their udders).
The end result would be that you would lose all rights to home recording or time shifting.
Oh, I think they'll always let you time shift programs. The only catch will be, they'll disable the fast-forward for ads. Furthermore, the ads will be dynamically inserted in real time for each playback (like website banner ads). Plus, you'll probably have to log in so they can target you with your own personal spam. And probably, there will be more minutes of ads inserted for each succesive playback.
As a bonus, when you try to play it back a few years after recording it, you'll be locked out because the whole system will have become obsolete, unsupported, and non-functional.
You'll see lots of speculation by people who have no idea what they're talking about, but at least that won't get modded up. You'll also see lots of speculation by people who have a very slight idea of what they're talking about, and even though that speculation is little better, it will get modded up by other people who have a slight idea of what they're talking about, because it sounds plausible.
OK, folks, mod this guy up. His post speculating about the/. mod system qualifies under these terms:-).
And it would have been a lot cheaper(as a percentage of GDP) if we had gone in 1999 instead of 1969
Are you kidding? A moonshot today would involve a massive IT infrastructure. The computer systems budget alone would dwarf the expense of the Apollo program.
If the Apollo program had never happened, you could never convince today's mission planners that you could get to the moon with the computing power of a pocket calculator.
I do agree with you, however, that the current manned program (Space Shuttle, ISS) does little more than pour vast sums of money into a black hole for no good reason. People get all torqued out about losing a couple of Mars probes. I get torqued out about the insane cost of each shuttle launch. You could crash quite a few more mars probes and still not match the total cost of one shuttle launch.
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone calculated just how many years it will be before Microsoft corporate strategy requires that they own everything? :-).
If calculated literally, not very long. My calculus 101 professor once worked through a similar example: if the current human population growth of 3% per year continues unchecked, ignoring relativistic factors, how long will it be until the expanding sphere of human bodies reaches the speed of light?
IIRC, the time was surprisingly short (on the order of a few hundred thousand years or something).
The Microsoft example would probably take only a few decades.
Well, if that's what they really intended, they should have written their own license. The GPL explicitly allows others to sell the code (or beg for donations), as long as the source remains freely available.
If they read the GPL and released the code under it anyway, we'll assume that they are OK with it.
I've been thinking about looking into something like this to help my slowly deteriorating wrist tendons. Unfortunately, it's rather pricey, and I'm not sure how much it would really help over the long term. Anyone used this thing or something like it?
Now that I finally understand what all:those::colons:are in the addresses my OpenBSD box spits out, I'm no longer afraid of them. It's actually pretty straightforward.
Here's some more important advice: DON'T SMOKE NEAR YOUR LUNGS! You can't swab them out with alchohol. Same goes for your coworkers' lungs.
High school physics experiment: Use a string to dangle the 850 lb UPS by one corner. Watch it slowly precess around the string. It hangs in the air like magic!
There is no proof that amateur telescopes exist.
Ham operators could pick up the radio signals -- and anyone with a dish could check the direction it came from.
There is no evidence that ham operators exist. There is no proof that a dish can monitor anything
That certainly includes the Soviets, who would have loved to have caught us faking it.
There is zero evidence that there was a "cold war", or that the SOVIETS UNION EVEN EXISTED.
Thousands of men worked on the rockets. Tens of thousands of bean counters checked that all that money was being spent properly (especially on bean counters).
WHAT BEANS??? WHAT COUNTERS???? WHERE'S THE PROOF!!???
No way could that many Americans keep a secret!
HOW CAN A NON-EXISTENT NATION EVEN HAVE SECRETS TO KEEP????? FACE IT: YOU HAVE NO PROOF!!!!!!!!!
(Actually, my sig is relevant to this topic if you think about it)
That's easily explained by the anthropic principle. It's much more likely to get land-based life forms on a planet with large tidal activity (when the tide recedes, fish need to evolve lungs).
Large tides need large lunar mass. But multiple large moons would likely form unstable orbits that interfere with each other. Therefore, one large moon.
Q.E.D.
To all you sore loozers: I'll just point out that just as in the real world, in the virtual world those who invest in good tools have an advantage.
Back in the 80's, one of the marketing guys at our company told me about a meeting he had recently attended with Bill Gates. He told me that Bill smelled pretty bad, and could use a shower. Of course he gave me no physical evidence to prove this, but I have no reason to doubt his story either.
But back then, Gates was only working on his first $billion, so I doubt that he had the resources to hire personal hygene advisors yet :).
I still remember the first one of these I read years ago... there was a coupon on the side of a 6-pack of Samuel Adams beer announcing their upcoming IPO. I sent away for the prospectus. After reading the warnings in their filings, I concluded that the beer industry is a terrible business to be in; no beer stock for me.
It looks like too many tipsy consumers bought into the IPO, though. The stock dropped alot the first year, then has been flat. However, they're still in business, and the P/E is only 14. It didn't turn out as bad as it could have.
Um, no. The Java GUI is and will remain the cross-platform standard for a toy.
Qt, on the other hand, looks and feels like a real user interface.
That's about as realistic as the dream of a pure communist state.
Well, I bet most non-trivial hardware has an embedded processor whose firmware source is not available. The source to the computer's BIOS is also not generally available, AFAIK.
This system seems to be making the boundaries between software drivers, BIOS and embedded firmware very fuzzy indeed. People currently have built-in expectations about which parts of the system should be open vs. which parts can be proprietary. They probably haven't thought much about those expectations yet, but I bet they will when this comes out.
They ought to make one of those ads showing a guy in a cowboy hat driving this thing through a muddy construction site pulling a bulldozer (with Bob Seger straining in the background).
Oh wait... I forgot about that "traction" thing. Never mind.
Like I said, it would take an amount of area similar to current paved roads. That's not a drastic impact on the enviromnent; nobody's claiming that today's pavement is causing Antarctica to melt.
As to finding more petroleum, that's probably not a big deal. We'll run out before doubling the current impact, and we'd need alot of it to make plastic tarp collectors anyway. The real disaster will be if we stupidly manage to burn all the coal that we could potentially scratch out of the ground. That's orders of magnitude more CO2. Have you checked the weather on Venus lately?
It wouldn't have to be especially efficient, just cheap. Unroll acres of the stuff directly onto the desert floor, or float it on the ocean. Maybe put it in the diamond-shape gaps between those circular irrigated crop fields out west.
My math estimates a few thousand square miles of 5% efficient (at 1% overall system efficiency) collectors would satisfy all our energy needs. (If you think that's too much area, imagine explaining how much area would be paved over in 2001 to a guy from the 19th century. It can be done.)
If this was treated like the Manhatten project, I'd bet they could get production started in 7 years or so. By contrast, in 7 years, NASA would still only be doing feasiblity studies on a space-based solution.
nobody
parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus
Just wondering... why do so many "strict constructionist" constitutional commentators on /. have sigs written in latin? Seems like a trend.
Actually, I'm not certain it's latin, as I'm not a linguist. I certainly have no idea what it means. Looks cool, though.
This sounds like an excellent opportunity to use GM technology. Reprogram the killer bees to make more honey.
We'll fix our past mistake, and hope that no screw-ups happen (like accidently converting dairy cows to dispense honey from their udders).
Oh, I think they'll always let you time shift programs. The only catch will be, they'll disable the fast-forward for ads. Furthermore, the ads will be dynamically inserted in real time for each playback (like website banner ads). Plus, you'll probably have to log in so they can target you with your own personal spam. And probably, there will be more minutes of ads inserted for each succesive playback.
As a bonus, when you try to play it back a few years after recording it, you'll be locked out because the whole system will have become obsolete, unsupported, and non-functional.
All games will need to come with built-in aimbots, etc. as well...
OK, folks, mod this guy up. His post speculating about the /. mod system qualifies under these terms :-).
Are you kidding? A moonshot today would involve a massive IT infrastructure. The computer systems budget alone would dwarf the expense of the Apollo program.
If the Apollo program had never happened, you could never convince today's mission planners that you could get to the moon with the computing power of a pocket calculator.
I do agree with you, however, that the current manned program (Space Shuttle, ISS) does little more than pour vast sums of money into a black hole for no good reason. People get all torqued out about losing a couple of Mars probes. I get torqued out about the insane cost of each shuttle launch. You could crash quite a few more mars probes and still not match the total cost of one shuttle launch.
How true. The conditions on Mars are so harsh that it will make an outstanding location for a penal colony. Mars will be our prison!
Where I work, it seems that nobody can be bothered to do any of these, even when leaving for a 3-day weekend.