Nope... that 11k, as others have pointed out, is probably EV1Servers, and I think it's a safe bet that they lost far more than $11k in revenue from that blunder.
Also notice how SCO claimed that it was 'a deal worth six figures' or something similar (I'd have to go back and look to get the quote exactly right, but I'm lazy), and they carefully didn't mention, at the time, that they actually RECEIVED a heck of a lot less than six figures.
It strikes me that a paper letter to Elliott Spitzer in New York is probably called for.
They're being, as usual, deliberately deceptive. (shock, horror!) With all the other numbers, they specifically mention last year and this year, but in the case of the SCOSource revenue, they mention ONLY last year in the main article body. They go right from 'SCOSource revenue for 2003' to 'total revenue for the first two quarters of 2004'. They never mention SCOSource revenue for 2004 in the main article body. They're hoping, by clever wording, that you won't notice.
To find the $11K number, you have to dig down into the numbers below. Lining things up on Slashdot is very difficult, so I'll just paste the relevant line:
SCOsource licensing revenue 11 8,250 31 8,250
That's telling you they made $11k in the prior three months, and $31K in the prior six months, as compared to $8250 last year. In 2003, it would appear, they made all their money in Q2, 8.25 million.
That's only partially right. You are confusing the energy being generated with the perceived loudness of a sound, which is quite different.
Your figures are correct for actual power output. However, a sound 10db higher, 10 times as much energy, is perceived as being only twice as loud. Each 10db increase doubles the sound volume, but increases the energy required by 10 times. That's why a really loud stereo takes so much power; to make a sound 4 times louder, it takes 100 times as much energy. 8 times as loud requires a THOUSAND times as much energy.
The reverse is true.... to cut the apparent loudness of your case fans by half, engineers have to drop the amount of generated noise by 10 times. One fourth as loud is 1/100th the original energy. So it really does give you an appreciation for a case that is 20db quieter than another.
So Apple's actual claims could be either 'energy' or 'loudness'. They say it is 'two times quieter', which I perceive as typical marketspeak bafflegab. It's hard to interpret. If the correct interpretation is 'half as loud', then the G5 is at -10db and is generating 1/10th as much sound energy. If it is 'half as much energy', then it's about 3db as you state, and would be perceived as slightly quieter.
Judging from how hard they're pushing this feature, I'm suspicious it's the former... people would be angry if their $3K computer didn't really sound half as loud.
I've been playing Second Life since shortly before the 1.2 release shipped, (last December), so I've been there for the whole land crunch/boom process. This newspaper article, like most, only scratches the surface... it vaguely describes the scenario, but gives no history and no clear understanding.
Second Life completely changed its economic system in 1.2. In the 1.1 and prior days, object creation and maintenance cost in-game money. Objects are made of 'primitives' or 'prims': spheres, rectangles, cones, toruses (torii??) and probably 1 or two more. For a long time, every object you created cost you 10 Linden Dollars to 'rez', or create. When you destroyed the object, you were refunded your money. Further, if you wanted to create permanent objects, you were taxed a maintenance fee on a daily basis, which you did not get back. Your weekly stipend was roughly $500, so it was critical to come up with goods and services to sell if you wanted to maintain any kind of large permanent structure in SL. This meant that everything was very secretive and hardly ANYTHING was for free, because giving away anything damaged your own ability to build things. Land was very cheap, often the minimum price of $1/square meter, simply because few people could afford to fill much space... only a few very successful people and groups could build really large structures. There was also a 'height tax'... an object high above the ground cost more than an object near the ground. This also discouraged large structures and tended to keep everyone low and small. (heck, at one time there was even a 'teleport tax'.... you had to pay to be teleported somewhere instead of flying. Abolished long before I got there.)
The entire economic model shifted when 1.2 came out. Suddenly, object creation was free. There was no maintenance on anything you built. Instead, you were allocated a certain number of prims to put on land...each land parcel is able to support a certain number of prims. (A starting player is allowed to buy 512m2, which will support about 115 prims: they can buy more land if they want to pay more each month.) The second really large change was that you could own as much land as you wanted, as long as you were willing to pay for it in RL $. You mostly still had to buy it with in-game currency, but you paid for the right to own extra land in real dollars. As an example, someone who wants to own 4,096m2, which is a pretty comfortable size, will have to pay around $25/mo to support it.
So, suddenly, land was very desirable, and almost instantly scarce. Apparently, Linden Labs also went back through their records, figured out every dollar of object tax that had ever been paid by residents, and refunded it. So a whole lot of Linden Dollars were injected into the system all at once. To make things worse, a whole new class of parasite arose, whose sole purpose was land speculation. They drove land prices into the stratosphere. At the same time, a new service, Gaming Open Market, was launched, which allows trading RL $ for L$. This meant that people who really wanted to own property or otherwise do something could throw a lot of real-life money at it. At about this same time, word seemed to get into the mass market about Second Life, and with the population explosion, speculation, and Gaming Open Market, prices went to really crazy levels. I believe some of the speculators, as well as a number of the early players who suddenly had large wads of virtual cash, made thousands of real dollars. In the case of the speculators, I despise them for doing this, because they provided nothing of benefit in exchange. They DETRACTED from the Second Life world, made it much harder for new people to get started, simply to line their own pockets. I think it's great when people get rich foom MAKING things, and am perfectly content with the tax refund, but I consider the speculators to be nothing more than by-the-rules thieves.
SL has grown WILDLY over the last four or five months. There continues to b
Pretty much his whole commentary, the strong point of his whole argument, is two words: "with NUKES!" This is religion, not science. Nukes are bad, unquestionably bad, so bad that they trump all other arguments. They are, after all, NUKES!
(pause for reader to quake in fear)
Nuclear power is, like any other energy source, a tool. Like all tools, it can be misused. You can make amazingly destructive bombs with nuclear power, so powerful, in fact, that they've never been used since the first two. But you can also make very, very effective explosives with oil... a fuel-air bomb is vastly destructive. And those, as far as I know, HAVE BEEN used. So which is really worse?
Mr. Sterling, whether he intends to or not, is playing on the confusion between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Think how silly his argument would look with a different energy source.... "with FIRE!"
Humans don't survive radiation very well, we are quite susceptible to it. That does not, however, imply that all of Nature is. In fact, it appears that very few species suffer from radiation as much as we do. The Earth has not always been as cozy and comfortable as it is now, and humans are a relatively recent evolutionary offshoot. We die from even small amounts of the stuff, but most species don't.
(we argued back and forth about why this is, in another thread... no conclusions drawn. Regardless, Bikini Atoll, the site of 20+ bomb tests, including the first hydrogen bomb, is a lush tropical paradise. It's not safe for people to live there, but Nature is doing JUST FINE.)
Since humans are the ones getting the primary benefit from nuclear power, it is just that we're the ones who suffer if we blow it. From an environmental standpoint, nuclear power is nearly perfect. If we screw up completely and have some horrid catastrophe that renders the Earth too radioactive for human habitation, it'll be the best possible outcome for most other species, since their most aggressive competitor would be wiped out.
Now, I did think his comment about how we'll just add nuclear power and keep using oil to be pretty accurate... we'd need a concerted effort to switch power sources, not just supplement them. And of course we'd have to take care of the waste, but that's far from an insurmountable problem. However much it costs, it'll probably take only one prevented major hurricane on the East Coast to pay for it. (which, of course, we wouldn't see directly... but if the weather stopped getting worse, it'd MORE than pay for itself.)
I do think we'd end up with 'nuclear slums', low-rent districts around most plants. Poor people would be the ones to suffer first, but that's ALWAYS true of EVERY technology. And in this case, it would at least be a deliberate choice.
I am cheerfully willing to trade nuclear slums for cleaner air, cleaner water, and more natural weather patterns. I'd probably even live in one.... since I'm such a strong proponent, I really oughta be putting myself in the line of fire, so to speak.
Sending money to Redmond, Washington, United States does not help your economy, unless you are in Redmond, or to a lesser degree in Washington State.
It's good for the economy when things like steel and coal and fabric gets cheaper, because it means a better standard of living for consumers. Businesses also become more efficient; when their raw material costs go down, they either make more money or drop prices, both of which are good for the local economy.
So if cheaper steel is good, why on earth is cheaper software bad?
But Microsoft is trying to assert that if you wnt any chance of growing your own Microsoft, you need a strong IP regime.
But the simple fact is that there will be no new Microsofts. The existing one will make very sure of that. Only people who completely change the rules and play a different game entirely can hope to succeed against a compaany with half the money in the world.
If your local economy actually DID 'hit gold' and come up with a wonderful new software idea, it's virtually certain that Microsoft would simply subsume it into Windows. This has happened many times over the last twenty years; Microsoft has put company after company out of business by leveraging Windows. (Stacker, Quarterdeck, Lotus 1-2-3, Netscape... the list goes on and on.) The Windows software ecosystem has very little diversity; there are a few big companies and a lot of small ones, but very very few midsize ones. The sharks eat them instead and get bigger.
In other words, with Microsoft already existing in the world, the chance of creating your own local Microsoft is ZERO. The creation of the closed source software industry was a very special event that will only happen once; it will not be repeated.
There can still be small software niches, of course, ones that are too small for Microsoft to bother with. But if you grant that you most likely can't make huge piles of money, why not give away the code for free and sell services and support instead?
As a government, why not encourage consulting-type technology businesses like this? Service businesses can make very comfortable amounts of money. While they don't have the huge potential upside of being able to sell, over and over again, a product that costs them nothing to duplicate, they don't really have that upside ANYWAY because of Microsoft. The open-source industry is still forming, and there's lots and lots of room for new companies.
If you REALLY want to help your economy out, get behind open source and PUSH. Your local government spending $5,000/year for local companies to support and fix their Linux servers is a HELL of a lot better for your economy than is sending a check to Microsoft. Money that goes to Redmond is gone; money that is spent locally stays in your local economy.
Now, if Microsoft offered solutions that were wildly better than their open-source counterparts, it might make financial and economic sense to buy Windows. If you can be twice as productive, say, on a Windows box, and the total cost of Windows is less than twice that of Linux, then it's an overall win to buy Windows. I'm setting aside control and forced upgrade issues, along with many others, but economics is ultimately about cost, and you can abstract all those factors into cost of ownership.
But if, as I believe, Windows' overall advantage over Linux is slim at best, then it's just wasteful to send money to Redmond when you can spend it locally instead.
There's one other scenario, too... you may be so technically savvy you that you don't NEED support. In that case, you you can drop your computing cost to ZERO. This is STILL better for the local economy, because that $200 you don't send to Redmond is money you can spend at the county fair.
In a world with free alternatives, paying for Windows is very much like a tax. Taxes are always harmful (at least directly) to an economy, because it's wasted money...profit that didn't get reinvested.
Sure, but for whatever reason, trees just don't seem to suffer much from radiation. It may be because they evolved when there was more natural radiation in the ecosphere; the Earth was a remarkably hostile place at one time. And they are much simpler organisms, there's a lot less to damage. Plus, only a small part of the tree is actively growing at any given time; the heartwood isn't dead, but I don't think it does very much.
If the radiation is intense enough to kill the bark cells before they can reproduce, then yes, a tree could die, but that would take a LOT of radiation.
As far as animals go, I used mammals as an example because, as far as I know, they are the most susceptible to radiation. Lizards and amphibians, to my best knowledge, will resist it better than most mammals. I don't remember why. It may, again, be related to complexity and lifespan.
Note that this is based on vague memories, so don't treat any of this as true without additional research... but it will at least give you an idea of what questions to ask.
Humans live a very long time, and it takes many many years for us to reach reproductive age. Radiation is fairly constant over time, so a short-lived mammal will suffer less damage from a given amount of background radiation. In an area where humans would die out, mice and wolves might be perfectly fine.
Additionally, most other species have better damage-repair mechanisms than we do. I don't remember the specifics, but all you have to do is look at Bikini Atoll, which was the site of over twenty nuclear tests, including the first hydrogen bomb. It is, as I pointed out in my original post, a tropical paradise, lush and green, with amazing biodiversity. It would be dangerous for humans to spend significant time there, but the ecosystem is just fine.
What's really frustrating about nuclear power is that the Greens are so vehemently opposed to it, and they're exactly the people who should love it and embrace it. They fear it because they think it's bad 'for nature', when in fact it's only bad FOR HUMANS. Humans are uniquely vulnerable to radioactivity. Most(all?) other species are not.
Consider Bikini Atoll. It was the site for many, many bomb tests, including the first hydrogen bomb. You probably think of it as a blasted desert, but in actual fact, it's a tropical paradise. It is in BETTER shape now, ecologically, then it was when humans lived there! It's even safe to visit, but you wouldn't want to eat the bananas.:-)
In other words, nuclear power is WONDERFUL for the environment; the more radioactivity, the better (within reason at least), because it chases nasty humans out of the area and lets normal plants and animals live in (relative) peace.
The primary beneficiaries of nuclear power are also the ones who are hurt most by it, which seems eminently fair. We need to be very careful with nuclear waste for OUR OWN sake, but as far as Nature is concerned, it just doesn't matter all that much. This is exactly backwards to our existing power generation, in which we get all the benefit but pay virtually none of the cost.
Additionally, although many people simply will refuse to hear this, we have made many improvements in nuclear power since we last built plants. We had a tendency to grandiose engineering in the 70s, and we paid for that. There are much cleaner and simpler designs now. Materials science has improved enormously as well. Couple that with our much improved ability to monitor remotely, and we should be able to build plants that are nearly failproof. And if they DO fail, well, it's only humanity that will suffer.
I just don't understand why the Greens aren't all over this.... if they don't embrace this idea, it seems likely to me that their true motivation is less about "loving Nature" and more about "hating humans".
Actually, they've done such an outstanding job that we've gone from rags (ext2 only) to riches (more journaled/reliable filesystems than I can easily count.) I believe Linux is possibly one of the best systems you could choose for data reliability now, at least on PC hardware. That is a truly impressive change, and I am very thankful for the work of so many.
Unfortunately, it still doesn't change the tone of most replies to perfectly reasonable questions about things that are hard to do in Linux. From a high-level perspective, it's a problem we just haven't been able to shake.
Of course, at the rate things are going, maybe everything will someday be easy and the zealots will go away.:-) (and yes, I realize that there will always be the 'next thing' that is still hard. )
Sure, both 2 and 5 were good ideas. However, they are NOT related to the problem that a filesystem SHOULD NOT BE DAMAGED by a power failure. Loss of data is likely; loss of the filesystem is simply not acceptable.
The fact that they are valid criticisms is irrelevant to the core problem. You're falling into the same trap yourself.
(and btw, back in 97-98, UPSes were really expensive and backups were hard to do well, if you weren't already a Unix guru. DOS brain damage takes many years to undo.)
Boy, one thing that really struck a chord here with me was Mr. Langa's observation of the "if we don't have it, you don't need it" syndrome. I've seen that so many times with Linux. If you ask how to do a given thing, and it turns out that thing is hard to do in Linux, inevitably multiple people will suggest that you shouldn't even need to do that. It doesn't matter what it is, if it's not in Linux, someone will tell you that your need is silly.
A great example is one of my early posts about how I didn't trust Linux filesystems, and that I'd lost files on numerous occasions due to power failures on ext2 systems. I went back and looked through my whole archive, but apparently this thread was before the cutoff date for archiving... lost to history.
Roughly summarizing, I posted that I didn't trust Linux in a production environment because ext2 was unreliable: you couldn't trust it in a power failure. I didn't get EVEN ONE useful response. What I got, instead, were a mix of (approximately):
1) "Well, gee, I've lost power 14,232 times and I've never lost a file"; (ie, problem doesn't exist)
2) "You should always have backups"; (problem is unimportant)
3) "You're an idiot, you should have copied a backup superblock. Moron. Go play with Windows." (problem is stupid user)
4) "I lost power to my NT machine and I lost 23,124 files!' (NT is worse so it's okay for Linux to suck.)
It was really interesting to see how different the posts were when I mentioned that a couple of years later. I can't find that post now, but by that time, Linux had journaled filesystems. We had a fairly interesting commentary back and forth about how NT 4.0 didn't really have journaling, and that it wasn't until 2K that NTFS was truly robust. But everyone agreed that journaling was good, now that Linux had it. Pretty significant shift in stance, eh?
I've seen this so many times that I'm forced to conclude it's some kind of defense mechanism.... if you really love your pet project, and it has shortcomings, gloss over them or dismiss them as unimportant. I think we would be wise to be more aware of this, and that users in general don't request things for no reason at all. They may just need education. It may be simple ignorance on how to approach the problem in Linux.
Chewing them out, on the other hand, for not manually repairing their filesystems by copying a backup superblock, well.... that's stupider than their not knowing how.
Remember that this number is about perception. Linus himself says he's more than twice as productive. The other developers say he's 10x as productive.
But what's their measurement? The number of patches from them he accepts. For years, Linux development was badly hamstrung by the fact that Linus couldn't work fast enough. The patch submission process, was, in essence, emailing him over and over and over, hammering away at the poor guy, trying to get your patch noticed. The developer frustration with this process was EXTREME. The single most common thing I heard about kernel development was "Linus doesn't scale". BK has changed that completely.
It seems entirely possible to me that Linus is now 10x better at processing and merging patches. But that's not all he does.... a 10x improvement in patch management could easily translate to a 2x overall productivity increase. Measurements of code changes show about a 2.5x overall improvement, which is pretty close to Linus' own guess.
In other words, these numbers aren't incompatible... productivity is a hard thing to measure, and there are a lot of angles from which you can look at it.
If the claim of 50 patches a day, 365 days a year are true... that's 18,250 patches a year. The fact that he can do that and get coding done TOO should be an object of reverence and awe.
Since BK was designed with Linus in mind, it probably won't affect other programmers as dramatically as it did him. Not all coders will think like he does, and his distributed coding needs are very specialized. It's not going to be applicable to all environments, but it's pretty obvious that at least in some cases, it is an enormous win and completely worth what they're charging for it.
I haven't shopped for desktop PCs in quite awhile, but the last time I was looking, Compaqs were 'build to the numbers' machines.... ie, they chose the absolute cheapest possible components to let them say '128-bit graphic accelerator!', even if other chips were faster and cheaper. They chose a marketing spec, and built the machine to meet the spec as cheaply as possible. Actual performance was the very, very last thing on their mind; they were preying on ignorance, not providing good value for dollars spent.
I don't think it's a coincidence that they were a dying company before HP (incredibly foolishly) spent a bucket of money to buy them out, apparently in the theory that lashing two sinking ships together will make both float.
The Compaq brand is a terrible choice here. Even if they actually DO manage to shake off their slimy marketing habits, how many gamers are going to be convinced? They should have come up with a new label. A brand is supposed to help, or at least do no harm, but "Compaq" is an active hurdle to acceptance by the target market.
The BIND part doesn't require a 'hacked' version. You just configure your local BIND to believe it is authoritative for debian.org. It doesn't check with any central authority; you can be authoritative for whitehouse.gov if you want. However, nobody in the outside Net will pay any attention to you, since the root servers tell them to check with the REAL whitehouse.gov servers. Only machines that use your nameservers by default will get the new debian.org addresses. (this, btw, is why you need to really be careful with your DNS servers; a compromised DNS will let an attacker play all kinds of nasty little games. )
Probably, all you'd have to do is construct a basic zone file with ftp and www.debian.org pointed at your local server. The rest of the net will just work. However, unless you spend some time on the zone file, your network will be unable to communicate with the REAL debian.org for the duration of the spoof.
Because of that, make sure your mirror machine either talks to an unspoofed DNS or just connects to an IP address, so it can find the real archive. That'll let you stay current if you're doing a multi-day event.
So you only get due process if you're suspected of a LITTLE crime? Once you add a few zeroes after the dollar sign, the rules change?
If we take away rights from whoever is unpopular with the government today, then we don't have rights, period. The whole IDEA of rights are to protect you from the government and other citizens. The worst scumbags in the world have rights. In fact, it's probably the scumbags who most SHOULD have them, because they NEED them the most.
The measure of your rights is what you retain when your your government hates you and wants you dead. Rights that you have only when popular aren't rights, but privileges, which are revocable.
Any group of people that values life over freedom is easy to enslave.
1. Do such an inept job at screening patents that it quietly expands their scope. 2. Watch as a whole industry is created out of filing for these new patents. 3. Watch incoming volume of new patent requests increase astronomically. 4. Whine to Congress about insufficient resources. 5. Swill at public trough. 6. Hire more workers. 7. Get big raise because you now manage many more workers. 8. Profit!!
Firefox (using it now, huge step forward in browsers) Spybot SD (spyware removal) Winamp 5 EZ-CD Creator Pro (although I use a cdrecord under Linux a lot, my DVD burner is on the Windows machine). NewsRover (I download many television episodes from Usenet: NR is the best way I've found to make this easy. Awesome program. Also good for porn, of course.:-) ) QuickPAR (handles both PAR and PAR2 files) WinRAR WinDVD (for DVDs and MPG files) K-Lite Codec Pack (for everything else) SecureCRT (SSH client, best I've found in Windows, but costly)
There are quite a few more programs I would install on my main machine, around 20 total, but those would normally be the first 10.
Interestingly, I do not run any kind of Office application. I hardly use paper for anything, and my printer doesn't get used much. I have a perfectly valid license for Office 2003, and I don't bother installing it because the security holes aren't worth the risks. If I need to read a.doc file, I open it under Linux. How's that for weird?:-)
Yeah, one potential advantage to doing this would be that you could hide the fact that the filesystem wasn't FAT or NTFS from most applications. You could transparently have your C drive mounted on your / drive without a problem. So you could probably avoid the one-big-file filesystems that you get now on VMWare (although those can be very useful at time!)
I imagine games would still be hard, though. Games are always tough.
The implication there is that it would be much easier to get non-Microsoft apps running, since presumably they don't use the undocumented calls. Unfortunately, Microsoft has consumed the entire Windows ecosystem, so there just aren't many non-Microsoft apps that matter. Intuit software, I suppose, and games... not a lot else.
Agreed re: cost savings. I just can't imagine how they can do this in a way that would let you avoid the Windows tax. If it works, I have no doubt that some people will find it very useful and will buy it, but I can't imagine it becoming adopted on a widespread basis, and it's virtually certain that Microsoft will change the EULA to make this illegal anyway.
Keep in mind that I'm speaking from a mile-in-the-sky standpoint. I have no personal knowledge of ANY of what I've been talking about here, I'm just passing along info from much more knowledgeable people.
That said, are you *sure*? Everything I have read suggests that Win32 is just a personality, and that the NT kernel can easily support others. (If Microsoft weren't so concerned about maintaining their monopoly, there might be other personalities for sale already.) I don't know exactly where the dividing line is, but windows managed in the kernel seems like it would badly violate that premise. Are you, perhaps, confusing the Win32 personality with the kernel? Are you looking deeply enough?
The 'don't need a copy of Windows' part just doesn't parse to me. If they're trying to replace the kernel, that's fine, but they have to get the Win32 personality from somewhere. The only legal way to get it is from Windows. If they're actually trying to replace Win32, then it's truly vapor... WINE hasn't managed it in 10+ years, I don't think they're going to do it in two months.:-)
If I understand what I'm reading correctly, they're in essence taking advantage of how NT/XP is designed.
As I have learned it, the NT Kernel is separate from the Win32 API. The Win32 system makes calls into the kernel to get system things done (like disk and screen I/O), but tracks all the Win32 stuff itself (like windows and message queues). Win32 is, in essence, just a 'personality' running on the NT core. Someone (Microsoft themselves, I think) is doing another personality module for the NT kernel that will let it run Unixy stuff too, at the same time as the Win32 stuff.
What WINE is doing, which is incredibly difficult, is rewriting the entire Win32 API so that existing programs will run under Unix. This has taken them many, many years, and it's fairly good now, but it's far from a complete solution, largely because it's so difficult.
It sounds like the David project will probably run the *existing* Win32 API (which is hard to replace), and write a new set of kernel routines to emulate the NT kernel. AFAIK, most of the work on NT is at the Win32 level, the kernel itself doesn't get that much work, because it's really solid and really stable. So they're not chasing a moving target in quite the same way.
Presumably, the separation between the Win32 personality and the NT kernel is drawn clearly enough that they can replace the kernel without breaking things too badly. At least, that would appear to be how they're thinking about it.
This would probably mean you'd need to install Windows under Linux, in order to get a proper Win32 personality. The net effect would be very much like the way that OS/2 used to run Windows 3.1. (remember 'a better Windows than Windows'? It was!)
I believe this could work. It would not, however, remove the need to own a copy of Windows, so its use would be more for the pragmatists ('we want it to work') than the idealists ('we want it to be free').
Carada, at www.carada.com, is a small outfit that makes very nice, inexpensive screens. They are robustly built, with 2" square hollow aluminum tubing covered in a very, very black fabric that absorbs light. The screen snaps onto the frame, and pulls perfectly smooth. It's a clever design that's fairly easy to disassemble for transit. I did struggle a bit on assembly: it just takes a screwdriver, but you need one that lets you apply a lot of torque. (read: big handle). I ended up using an electric. I cursed and swore a bit while building it, but now that it's done, I'm really, really happy with it.
I paid about $600, plus shipping ($50??) for my 100" screen. The website offers many, many sizes, and I think you can get custom sizes done reasonably. They offer three materials: normal white, bright white (1.4 gain), and light gray (0.95 gain). The bright white and gray materials cost more. On the 100" screen, they'd have cost me about $50 extra. I just went for the straight white, as I will probably keep the screen through several projectors, and I didn't want to tune it too closely to my present LCD. (a Studio Experience 2HD, which is a rebadged Sanyo PLV-Z2... incredibly good $2K projector.)
Most of the other screens I priced in that size range started at $1K and went up FAST. A Stewart Firehawk, which is specially designed for LCD-type projectors, would have cost me around $1700, plus shipping, and I'd have been forced to wait six weeks. (I got my Carada in two days!) Since the bloody projector ITSELF only cost about $2200, I just wasn't willing to spend that much on the screen.
What I ended up with doesn't have fancy material, but it does a very nice job, is very well-built, and cost me far less than most other options I've seen. If you're looking for a reasonably-priced quality screen, Carada is worth checking out.
By and large, Newegg costs about the same as most discount retailers. i've never needed to use their customer service, but they've always shipped quickly. They may be a few bucks more in some cases, but they'll be a few bucks less in others. I haven't found anyplace that I can get *consistently* better pricing. They're a good outfit.
The Amazon thing is probably a fluke... if it is the exact same memory, then Amazon probably doesn't yet know it'll cost them more to replace it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope... that 11k, as others have pointed out, is probably EV1Servers, and I think it's a safe bet that they lost far more than $11k in revenue from that blunder.
Also notice how SCO claimed that it was 'a deal worth six figures' or something similar (I'd have to go back and look to get the quote exactly right, but I'm lazy), and they carefully didn't mention, at the time, that they actually RECEIVED a heck of a lot less than six figures.
It strikes me that a paper letter to Elliott Spitzer in New York is probably called for.
To find the $11K number, you have to dig down into the numbers below. Lining things up on Slashdot is very difficult, so I'll just paste the relevant line:
That's telling you they made $11k in the prior three months, and $31K in the prior six months, as compared to $8250 last year. In 2003, it would appear, they made all their money in Q2, 8.25 million.That's only partially right. You are confusing the energy being generated with the perceived loudness of a sound, which is quite different.
Your figures are correct for actual power output. However, a sound 10db higher, 10 times as much energy, is perceived as being only twice as loud. Each 10db increase doubles the sound volume, but increases the energy required by 10 times. That's why a really loud stereo takes so much power; to make a sound 4 times louder, it takes 100 times as much energy. 8 times as loud requires a THOUSAND times as much energy.
The reverse is true.... to cut the apparent loudness of your case fans by half, engineers have to drop the amount of generated noise by 10 times. One fourth as loud is 1/100th the original energy. So it really does give you an appreciation for a case that is 20db quieter than another.
So Apple's actual claims could be either 'energy' or 'loudness'. They say it is 'two times quieter', which I perceive as typical marketspeak bafflegab. It's hard to interpret. If the correct interpretation is 'half as loud', then the G5 is at -10db and is generating 1/10th as much sound energy. If it is 'half as much energy', then it's about 3db as you state, and would be perceived as slightly quieter.
Judging from how hard they're pushing this feature, I'm suspicious it's the former... people would be angry if their $3K computer didn't really sound half as loud.
I've been playing Second Life since shortly before the 1.2 release shipped, (last December), so I've been there for the whole land crunch/boom process. This newspaper article, like most, only scratches the surface... it vaguely describes the scenario, but gives no history and no clear understanding.
Second Life completely changed its economic system in 1.2. In the 1.1 and prior days, object creation and maintenance cost in-game money. Objects are made of 'primitives' or 'prims': spheres, rectangles, cones, toruses (torii??) and probably 1 or two more. For a long time, every object you created cost you 10 Linden Dollars to 'rez', or create. When you destroyed the object, you were refunded your money. Further, if you wanted to create permanent objects, you were taxed a maintenance fee on a daily basis, which you did not get back. Your weekly stipend was roughly $500, so it was critical to come up with goods and services to sell if you wanted to maintain any kind of large permanent structure in SL. This meant that everything was very secretive and hardly ANYTHING was for free, because giving away anything damaged your own ability to build things. Land was very cheap, often the minimum price of $1/square meter, simply because few people could afford to fill much space... only a few very successful people and groups could build really large structures. There was also a 'height tax'... an object high above the ground cost more than an object near the ground. This also discouraged large structures and tended to keep everyone low and small. (heck, at one time there was even a 'teleport tax'.... you had to pay to be teleported somewhere instead of flying. Abolished long before I got there.)
The entire economic model shifted when 1.2 came out. Suddenly, object creation was free. There was no maintenance on anything you built. Instead, you were allocated a certain number of prims to put on land...each land parcel is able to support a certain number of prims. (A starting player is allowed to buy 512m2, which will support about 115 prims: they can buy more land if they want to pay more each month.) The second really large change was that you could own as much land as you wanted, as long as you were willing to pay for it in RL $. You mostly still had to buy it with in-game currency, but you paid for the right to own extra land in real dollars. As an example, someone who wants to own 4,096m2, which is a pretty comfortable size, will have to pay around $25/mo to support it.
So, suddenly, land was very desirable, and almost instantly scarce. Apparently, Linden Labs also went back through their records, figured out every dollar of object tax that had ever been paid by residents, and refunded it. So a whole lot of Linden Dollars were injected into the system all at once. To make things worse, a whole new class of parasite arose, whose sole purpose was land speculation. They drove land prices into the stratosphere. At the same time, a new service, Gaming Open Market, was launched, which allows trading RL $ for L$. This meant that people who really wanted to own property or otherwise do something could throw a lot of real-life money at it. At about this same time, word seemed to get into the mass market about Second Life, and with the population explosion, speculation, and Gaming Open Market, prices went to really crazy levels. I believe some of the speculators, as well as a number of the early players who suddenly had large wads of virtual cash, made thousands of real dollars. In the case of the speculators, I despise them for doing this, because they provided nothing of benefit in exchange. They DETRACTED from the Second Life world, made it much harder for new people to get started, simply to line their own pockets. I think it's great when people get rich foom MAKING things, and am perfectly content with the tax refund, but I consider the speculators to be nothing more than by-the-rules thieves.
SL has grown WILDLY over the last four or five months. There continues to b
Pretty much his whole commentary, the strong point of his whole argument, is two words: "with NUKES!" This is religion, not science. Nukes are bad, unquestionably bad, so bad that they trump all other arguments. They are, after all, NUKES!
(pause for reader to quake in fear)
Nuclear power is, like any other energy source, a tool. Like all tools, it can be misused. You can make amazingly destructive bombs with nuclear power, so powerful, in fact, that they've never been used since the first two. But you can also make very, very effective explosives with oil... a fuel-air bomb is vastly destructive. And those, as far as I know, HAVE BEEN used. So which is really worse?
Mr. Sterling, whether he intends to or not, is playing on the confusion between nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Think how silly his argument would look with a different energy source.... "with FIRE!"
Humans don't survive radiation very well, we are quite susceptible to it. That does not, however, imply that all of Nature is. In fact, it appears that very few species suffer from radiation as much as we do. The Earth has not always been as cozy and comfortable as it is now, and humans are a relatively recent evolutionary offshoot. We die from even small amounts of the stuff, but most species don't.
(we argued back and forth about why this is, in another thread... no conclusions drawn. Regardless, Bikini Atoll, the site of 20+ bomb tests, including the first hydrogen bomb, is a lush tropical paradise. It's not safe for people to live there, but Nature is doing JUST FINE.)
Since humans are the ones getting the primary benefit from nuclear power, it is just that we're the ones who suffer if we blow it. From an environmental standpoint, nuclear power is nearly perfect. If we screw up completely and have some horrid catastrophe that renders the Earth too radioactive for human habitation, it'll be the best possible outcome for most other species, since their most aggressive competitor would be wiped out.
Now, I did think his comment about how we'll just add nuclear power and keep using oil to be pretty accurate... we'd need a concerted effort to switch power sources, not just supplement them. And of course we'd have to take care of the waste, but that's far from an insurmountable problem. However much it costs, it'll probably take only one prevented major hurricane on the East Coast to pay for it. (which, of course, we wouldn't see directly... but if the weather stopped getting worse, it'd MORE than pay for itself.)
I do think we'd end up with 'nuclear slums', low-rent districts around most plants. Poor people would be the ones to suffer first, but that's ALWAYS true of EVERY technology. And in this case, it would at least be a deliberate choice.
I am cheerfully willing to trade nuclear slums for cleaner air, cleaner water, and more natural weather patterns. I'd probably even live in one.... since I'm such a strong proponent, I really oughta be putting myself in the line of fire, so to speak.
Sending money to Redmond, Washington, United States does not help your economy, unless you are in Redmond, or to a lesser degree in Washington State.
It's good for the economy when things like steel and coal and fabric gets cheaper, because it means a better standard of living for consumers. Businesses also become more efficient; when their raw material costs go down, they either make more money or drop prices, both of which are good for the local economy.
So if cheaper steel is good, why on earth is cheaper software bad?
But Microsoft is trying to assert that if you wnt any chance of growing your own Microsoft, you need a strong IP regime.
But the simple fact is that there will be no new Microsofts. The existing one will make very sure of that. Only people who completely change the rules and play a different game entirely can hope to succeed against a compaany with half the money in the world.
If your local economy actually DID 'hit gold' and come up with a wonderful new software idea, it's virtually certain that Microsoft would simply subsume it into Windows. This has happened many times over the last twenty years; Microsoft has put company after company out of business by leveraging Windows. (Stacker, Quarterdeck, Lotus 1-2-3, Netscape... the list goes on and on.) The Windows software ecosystem has very little diversity; there are a few big companies and a lot of small ones, but very very few midsize ones. The sharks eat them instead and get bigger.
In other words, with Microsoft already existing in the world, the chance of creating your own local Microsoft is ZERO. The creation of the closed source software industry was a very special event that will only happen once; it will not be repeated.
There can still be small software niches, of course, ones that are too small for Microsoft to bother with. But if you grant that you most likely can't make huge piles of money, why not give away the code for free and sell services and support instead?
As a government, why not encourage consulting-type technology businesses like this? Service businesses can make very comfortable amounts of money. While they don't have the huge potential upside of being able to sell, over and over again, a product that costs them nothing to duplicate, they don't really have that upside ANYWAY because of Microsoft. The open-source industry is still forming, and there's lots and lots of room for new companies.
If you REALLY want to help your economy out, get behind open source and PUSH. Your local government spending $5,000/year for local companies to support and fix their Linux servers is a HELL of a lot better for your economy than is sending a check to Microsoft. Money that goes to Redmond is gone; money that is spent locally stays in your local economy.
Now, if Microsoft offered solutions that were wildly better than their open-source counterparts, it might make financial and economic sense to buy Windows. If you can be twice as productive, say, on a Windows box, and the total cost of Windows is less than twice that of Linux, then it's an overall win to buy Windows. I'm setting aside control and forced upgrade issues, along with many others, but economics is ultimately about cost, and you can abstract all those factors into cost of ownership.
But if, as I believe, Windows' overall advantage over Linux is slim at best, then it's just wasteful to send money to Redmond when you can spend it locally instead.
There's one other scenario, too... you may be so technically savvy you that you don't NEED support. In that case, you you can drop your computing cost to ZERO. This is STILL better for the local economy, because that $200 you don't send to Redmond is money you can spend at the county fair.
In a world with free alternatives, paying for Windows is very much like a tax. Taxes are always harmful (at least directly) to an economy, because it's wasted money...profit that didn't get reinvested.
Sure, but for whatever reason, trees just don't seem to suffer much from radiation. It may be because they evolved when there was more natural radiation in the ecosphere; the Earth was a remarkably hostile place at one time. And they are much simpler organisms, there's a lot less to damage. Plus, only a small part of the tree is actively growing at any given time; the heartwood isn't dead, but I don't think it does very much.
If the radiation is intense enough to kill the bark cells before they can reproduce, then yes, a tree could die, but that would take a LOT of radiation.
As far as animals go, I used mammals as an example because, as far as I know, they are the most susceptible to radiation. Lizards and amphibians, to my best knowledge, will resist it better than most mammals. I don't remember why. It may, again, be related to complexity and lifespan.
Note that this is based on vague memories, so don't treat any of this as true without additional research... but it will at least give you an idea of what questions to ask.
You didn't think about it enough.
Humans live a very long time, and it takes many many years for us to reach reproductive age. Radiation is fairly constant over time, so a short-lived mammal will suffer less damage from a given amount of background radiation. In an area where humans would die out, mice and wolves might be perfectly fine.
Additionally, most other species have better damage-repair mechanisms than we do. I don't remember the specifics, but all you have to do is look at Bikini Atoll, which was the site of over twenty nuclear tests, including the first hydrogen bomb. It is, as I pointed out in my original post, a tropical paradise, lush and green, with amazing biodiversity. It would be dangerous for humans to spend significant time there, but the ecosystem is just fine.
So what part was ludicrous again?
What's really frustrating about nuclear power is that the Greens are so vehemently opposed to it, and they're exactly the people who should love it and embrace it. They fear it because they think it's bad 'for nature', when in fact it's only bad FOR HUMANS. Humans are uniquely vulnerable to radioactivity. Most(all?) other species are not.
:-)
Consider Bikini Atoll. It was the site for many, many bomb tests, including the first hydrogen bomb. You probably think of it as a blasted desert, but in actual fact, it's a tropical paradise. It is in BETTER shape now, ecologically, then it was when humans lived there! It's even safe to visit, but you wouldn't want to eat the bananas.
In other words, nuclear power is WONDERFUL for the environment; the more radioactivity, the better (within reason at least), because it chases nasty humans out of the area and lets normal plants and animals live in (relative) peace.
The primary beneficiaries of nuclear power are also the ones who are hurt most by it, which seems eminently fair. We need to be very careful with nuclear waste for OUR OWN sake, but as far as Nature is concerned, it just doesn't matter all that much. This is exactly backwards to our existing power generation, in which we get all the benefit but pay virtually none of the cost.
Additionally, although many people simply will refuse to hear this, we have made many improvements in nuclear power since we last built plants. We had a tendency to grandiose engineering in the 70s, and we paid for that. There are much cleaner and simpler designs now. Materials science has improved enormously as well. Couple that with our much improved ability to monitor remotely, and we should be able to build plants that are nearly failproof. And if they DO fail, well, it's only humanity that will suffer.
I just don't understand why the Greens aren't all over this.... if they don't embrace this idea, it seems likely to me that their true motivation is less about "loving Nature" and more about "hating humans".
Actually, they've done such an outstanding job that we've gone from rags (ext2 only) to riches (more journaled/reliable filesystems than I can easily count.) I believe Linux is possibly one of the best systems you could choose for data reliability now, at least on PC hardware. That is a truly impressive change, and I am very thankful for the work of so many.
:-) (and yes, I realize that there will always be the 'next thing' that is still hard. )
Unfortunately, it still doesn't change the tone of most replies to perfectly reasonable questions about things that are hard to do in Linux. From a high-level perspective, it's a problem we just haven't been able to shake.
Of course, at the rate things are going, maybe everything will someday be easy and the zealots will go away.
The fact that they are valid criticisms is irrelevant to the core problem. You're falling into the same trap yourself.
(and btw, back in 97-98, UPSes were really expensive and backups were hard to do well, if you weren't already a Unix guru. DOS brain damage takes many years to undo.)
Oops, I forgot one:
5) "What kind of idiot would run a server without a UPS?" (another variant on stupid user)
A great example is one of my early posts about how I didn't trust Linux filesystems, and that I'd lost files on numerous occasions due to power failures on ext2 systems. I went back and looked through my whole archive, but apparently this thread was before the cutoff date for archiving... lost to history.
Roughly summarizing, I posted that I didn't trust Linux in a production environment because ext2 was unreliable: you couldn't trust it in a power failure. I didn't get EVEN ONE useful response. What I got, instead, were a mix of (approximately):
1) "Well, gee, I've lost power 14,232 times and I've never lost a file"; (ie, problem doesn't exist)
2) "You should always have backups"; (problem is unimportant)
3) "You're an idiot, you should have copied a backup superblock. Moron. Go play with Windows." (problem is stupid user)
4) "I lost power to my NT machine and I lost 23,124 files!' (NT is worse so it's okay for Linux to suck.)
It was really interesting to see how different the posts were when I mentioned that a couple of years later. I can't find that post now, but by that time, Linux had journaled filesystems. We had a fairly interesting commentary back and forth about how NT 4.0 didn't really have journaling, and that it wasn't until 2K that NTFS was truly robust. But everyone agreed that journaling was good, now that Linux had it. Pretty significant shift in stance, eh?
I've seen this so many times that I'm forced to conclude it's some kind of defense mechanism.... if you really love your pet project, and it has shortcomings, gloss over them or dismiss them as unimportant. I think we would be wise to be more aware of this, and that users in general don't request things for no reason at all. They may just need education. It may be simple ignorance on how to approach the problem in Linux.
Chewing them out, on the other hand, for not manually repairing their filesystems by copying a backup superblock, well.... that's stupider than their not knowing how.
Remember that this number is about perception. Linus himself says he's more than twice as productive. The other developers say he's 10x as productive.
But what's their measurement? The number of patches from them he accepts. For years, Linux development was badly hamstrung by the fact that Linus couldn't work fast enough. The patch submission process, was, in essence, emailing him over and over and over, hammering away at the poor guy, trying to get your patch noticed. The developer frustration with this process was EXTREME. The single most common thing I heard about kernel development was "Linus doesn't scale". BK has changed that completely.
It seems entirely possible to me that Linus is now 10x better at processing and merging patches. But that's not all he does.... a 10x improvement in patch management could easily translate to a 2x overall productivity increase. Measurements of code changes show about a 2.5x overall improvement, which is pretty close to Linus' own guess.
In other words, these numbers aren't incompatible... productivity is a hard thing to measure, and there are a lot of angles from which you can look at it.
If the claim of 50 patches a day, 365 days a year are true... that's 18,250 patches a year. The fact that he can do that and get coding done TOO should be an object of reverence and awe.
Since BK was designed with Linus in mind, it probably won't affect other programmers as dramatically as it did him. Not all coders will think like he does, and his distributed coding needs are very specialized. It's not going to be applicable to all environments, but it's pretty obvious that at least in some cases, it is an enormous win and completely worth what they're charging for it.
I haven't shopped for desktop PCs in quite awhile, but the last time I was looking, Compaqs were 'build to the numbers' machines.... ie, they chose the absolute cheapest possible components to let them say '128-bit graphic accelerator!', even if other chips were faster and cheaper. They chose a marketing spec, and built the machine to meet the spec as cheaply as possible. Actual performance was the very, very last thing on their mind; they were preying on ignorance, not providing good value for dollars spent.
I don't think it's a coincidence that they were a dying company before HP (incredibly foolishly) spent a bucket of money to buy them out, apparently in the theory that lashing two sinking ships together will make both float.
The Compaq brand is a terrible choice here. Even if they actually DO manage to shake off their slimy marketing habits, how many gamers are going to be convinced? They should have come up with a new label. A brand is supposed to help, or at least do no harm, but "Compaq" is an active hurdle to acceptance by the target market.
The BIND part doesn't require a 'hacked' version. You just configure your local BIND to believe it is authoritative for debian.org. It doesn't check with any central authority; you can be authoritative for whitehouse.gov if you want. However, nobody in the outside Net will pay any attention to you, since the root servers tell them to check with the REAL whitehouse.gov servers. Only machines that use your nameservers by default will get the new debian.org addresses. (this, btw, is why you need to really be careful with your DNS servers; a compromised DNS will let an attacker play all kinds of nasty little games. )
Probably, all you'd have to do is construct a basic zone file with ftp and www.debian.org pointed at your local server. The rest of the net will just work. However, unless you spend some time on the zone file, your network will be unable to communicate with the REAL debian.org for the duration of the spoof.
Because of that, make sure your mirror machine either talks to an unspoofed DNS or just connects to an IP address, so it can find the real archive. That'll let you stay current if you're doing a multi-day event.
If we take away rights from whoever is unpopular with the government today, then we don't have rights, period. The whole IDEA of rights are to protect you from the government and other citizens. The worst scumbags in the world have rights. In fact, it's probably the scumbags who most SHOULD have them, because they NEED them the most.
The measure of your rights is what you retain when your your government hates you and wants you dead. Rights that you have only when popular aren't rights, but privileges, which are revocable.
Any group of people that values life over freedom is easy to enslave.
1. Do such an inept job at screening patents that it quietly expands their scope.
2. Watch as a whole industry is created out of filing for these new patents.
3. Watch incoming volume of new patent requests increase astronomically.
4. Whine to Congress about insufficient resources.
5. Swill at public trough.
6. Hire more workers.
7. Get big raise because you now manage many more workers.
8. Profit!!
What I do on a new install;
:-) )
.doc file, I open it under Linux. How's that for weird? :-)
Turn on firewall;
do all updates, sans DRM crap.
Install:
Firefox (using it now, huge step forward in browsers)
Spybot SD (spyware removal)
Winamp 5
EZ-CD Creator Pro (although I use a cdrecord under Linux a lot, my DVD burner is on the Windows machine).
NewsRover (I download many television episodes from Usenet: NR is the best way I've found to make this easy. Awesome program. Also good for porn, of course.
QuickPAR (handles both PAR and PAR2 files)
WinRAR
WinDVD (for DVDs and MPG files)
K-Lite Codec Pack (for everything else)
SecureCRT (SSH client, best I've found in Windows, but costly)
There are quite a few more programs I would install on my main machine, around 20 total, but those would normally be the first 10.
Interestingly, I do not run any kind of Office application. I hardly use paper for anything, and my printer doesn't get used much. I have a perfectly valid license for Office 2003, and I don't bother installing it because the security holes aren't worth the risks. If I need to read a
Yeah, one potential advantage to doing this would be that you could hide the fact that the filesystem wasn't FAT or NTFS from most applications. You could transparently have your C drive mounted on your / drive without a problem. So you could probably avoid the one-big-file filesystems that you get now on VMWare (although those can be very useful at time!)
I imagine games would still be hard, though. Games are always tough.
The implication there is that it would be much easier to get non-Microsoft apps running, since presumably they don't use the undocumented calls. Unfortunately, Microsoft has consumed the entire Windows ecosystem, so there just aren't many non-Microsoft apps that matter. Intuit software, I suppose, and games... not a lot else.
Agreed re: cost savings. I just can't imagine how they can do this in a way that would let you avoid the Windows tax. If it works, I have no doubt that some people will find it very useful and will buy it, but I can't imagine it becoming adopted on a widespread basis, and it's virtually certain that Microsoft will change the EULA to make this illegal anyway.
Keep in mind that I'm speaking from a mile-in-the-sky standpoint. I have no personal knowledge of ANY of what I've been talking about here, I'm just passing along info from much more knowledgeable people.
:-)
That said, are you *sure*? Everything I have read suggests that Win32 is just a personality, and that the NT kernel can easily support others. (If Microsoft weren't so concerned about maintaining their monopoly, there might be other personalities for sale already.) I don't know exactly where the dividing line is, but windows managed in the kernel seems like it would badly violate that premise. Are you, perhaps, confusing the Win32 personality with the kernel? Are you looking deeply enough?
The 'don't need a copy of Windows' part just doesn't parse to me. If they're trying to replace the kernel, that's fine, but they have to get the Win32 personality from somewhere. The only legal way to get it is from Windows. If they're actually trying to replace Win32, then it's truly vapor... WINE hasn't managed it in 10+ years, I don't think they're going to do it in two months.
If I understand what I'm reading correctly, they're in essence taking advantage of how NT/XP is designed.
As I have learned it, the NT Kernel is separate from the Win32 API. The Win32 system makes calls into the kernel to get system things done (like disk and screen I/O), but tracks all the Win32 stuff itself (like windows and message queues). Win32 is, in essence, just a 'personality' running on the NT core. Someone (Microsoft themselves, I think) is doing another personality module for the NT kernel that will let it run Unixy stuff too, at the same time as the Win32 stuff.
What WINE is doing, which is incredibly difficult, is rewriting the entire Win32 API so that existing programs will run under Unix. This has taken them many, many years, and it's fairly good now, but it's far from a complete solution, largely because it's so difficult.
It sounds like the David project will probably run the *existing* Win32 API (which is hard to replace), and write a new set of kernel routines to emulate the NT kernel. AFAIK, most of the work on NT is at the Win32 level, the kernel itself doesn't get that much work, because it's really solid and really stable. So they're not chasing a moving target in quite the same way.
Presumably, the separation between the Win32 personality and the NT kernel is drawn clearly enough that they can replace the kernel without breaking things too badly. At least, that would appear to be how they're thinking about it.
This would probably mean you'd need to install Windows under Linux, in order to get a proper Win32 personality. The net effect would be very much like the way that OS/2 used to run Windows 3.1. (remember 'a better Windows than Windows'? It was!)
I believe this could work. It would not, however, remove the need to own a copy of Windows, so its use would be more for the pragmatists ('we want it to work') than the idealists ('we want it to be free').
I paid about $600, plus shipping ($50??) for my 100" screen. The website offers many, many sizes, and I think you can get custom sizes done reasonably. They offer three materials: normal white, bright white (1.4 gain), and light gray (0.95 gain). The bright white and gray materials cost more. On the 100" screen, they'd have cost me about $50 extra. I just went for the straight white, as I will probably keep the screen through several projectors, and I didn't want to tune it too closely to my present LCD. (a Studio Experience 2HD, which is a rebadged Sanyo PLV-Z2... incredibly good $2K projector.)
Most of the other screens I priced in that size range started at $1K and went up FAST. A Stewart Firehawk, which is specially designed for LCD-type projectors, would have cost me around $1700, plus shipping, and I'd have been forced to wait six weeks. (I got my Carada in two days!) Since the bloody projector ITSELF only cost about $2200, I just wasn't willing to spend that much on the screen.
What I ended up with doesn't have fancy material, but it does a very nice job, is very well-built, and cost me far less than most other options I've seen. If you're looking for a reasonably-priced quality screen, Carada is worth checking out.
By and large, Newegg costs about the same as most discount retailers. i've never needed to use their customer service, but they've always shipped quickly. They may be a few bucks more in some cases, but they'll be a few bucks less in others. I haven't found anyplace that I can get *consistently* better pricing. They're a good outfit.
The Amazon thing is probably a fluke... if it is the exact same memory, then Amazon probably doesn't yet know it'll cost them more to replace it.