"you build the expencive elevator on the moon and start up a few mining/refining outposts with self suporting habitats."
Better yet just use remote controlled mining + refining equipment and then the people controlling them can sit nice and safe on Earth, and you don't have the massive cost of the self-supporting habitats.
It allows organisations to easily draw up contracts that ensure that the programs they are purchasing/licensing conform to a known standard.
At the moment it's quite hard for organisations to specify how 'open' they'd like their office tools to be.
If they can just write into the contract that the programs must be able to save and load files in ISO standard 12345 then it becomes a lot easier to understand and enforce the contract, which lowers the cost and the risk of that contract.
As for this upsetting Microsoft, don't be too sure.
Oh it's not upsetting, it's devastating for Microsoft.
Do you remember when Microsoft was spreading FUD about how you couldn't be sure if GPL software was legitimate so you should stick with closed source software ?
Well you haven't heard that argument for a while because this whole court case arose from closed source software, that just isn't a problem in open source. (or at least shouldn't be as big a problem).
So Microsoft salesman have lost one of the biggest arguments against open source, which is a big issue for them.
Apparently the storage facilities are also covered with scaffolding at the moment which obviously increase drage and are an extra weight on the building.
WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things.
Translation:
We thought it was a good idea but no-one else has done an implementation that we can copy off, so we can't really figure out how to do it.
Can anyone explain exactly what will be in Longhorn, now that the new filesystem and graphics system is not going to be in it ?
A computer that can be run backwards to reverse the calculation has no thermodymanic limit on its minimum power consumption.
Translation - a computer that isn't subject to the laws of thermodynamics can be run without subject to the laws fo thermodynamics.
As I said, I would be very interested in seeing an actual working version of this machine.
it isn't computing per se that necessarily takes energy
From the paper you linked to "to perform an elementary logical operation in time delta t requires an average amount of energy E *h/2*delta t.". Think about it - you're deliberately changing the state of a machine. No matter what type of machine it is that will consume energy (work) that cannot be recovered at 100% efficiency. Otherwise you've created a perpetual motion machine.
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
There is something wrong where the author of a work doesn't give a damn about people using his material but his descendants get to control it for almost a century after his death.
Yeah, it's out of date - far too busy to update it.
It's actually _really_ hard to figure out how much money Microsoft has lost on the whole Xbox project, as figure for:
1) Sales of Xboxes. 2) The cost of developing and supporting Xbox live are unknown (and can be very very large) 3) How much marketing assistance they're giving to companies.
If anyone had firm data on those I'd be interested in hearing them.
They had 1.2 million dollars in the bank late December, and no one knows what happened to that.
That is bugger all money. The rent was alledgedly $150,000 a month. There were 100 employees left averaging 4k a month salary = $400,000 a month. As it's now june, not surprising there isn't any cash left.
Actually you can make Windows 98 very stable, by removing some of the crap that was bundled with the OS eg MediaPlayer, Internet Explorer.
You can do this most easily with the Windows 98lite packs that are available.
Also some machines are just _lucky_ and seem stable with Windows 98 anyway - where other machines just fall over from it for no particular reason. If the guy has a stable machine then he's probably best off sticking with it.
Seriously though, Copyright laws are just broken with respect to format shifting.
Consumers do not want to and are going to refuse to pay for multiple versions of the same copyrighted material.
Producers of copyrighted material (mostly) want to maximise the cash they can get for it, and are in fact obligated to do so if they work for a company that has shareholders.
Decent cartoons actually cost far more than the crap reality shows to make. Alledgedly Futurama cost something like $1 million dollars an episode to produce, due to it's high quality animation.
Thats why Fox canned them in the first place - they did it to bump their short term profits.
However quality shows like Futurama and Family Guy have much greater long term value - they can be shown on TV for years and DVD sales are also very great - whereas who gives a rats ass about last years reality shows ? And who wants to watch repeats of them for years on end ?
1) The air is cooler and stiller at night - which lets sound pass through more easily
2) The trains will toot there horn more at night, as the drivers can't see as far.
3) At least in the UK, there are relatively more heavy goods trains on the rails at night compared to during the day, which are way heavier and so take much longer to stop - hence they needed louder horns to warn people further away.
4) As other people have mentioned ambient noise is much lower at night, so other sounds seem much louder and annoying - particularly when you are trying to get to sleep.
So should the media stop showing films of any accidents where people die - I know I don't want to see any graphic images, but I've seen the film of both Space Shuttles blow up repeated without anybody being outraged.
What about all the images of bomb drops released by the US in the Gulf War 1 + 2. You do realise that the little dots running around (and then not running around) are people ?
Wow. You're right - shurely the Department of Homeland security was meant to have made sure that vital infrastructure in the US is robust in the face of terrorist action, not just people being dumb.
a Verizon spokesman, said the telephone company would now require a second person to double-check any entry of data that could affect the 911 system
So, they've just announced to all the terrorists in the world - this problem still exists, is going to remain there and if any terrorist organisation can get one of their members on the inside, they'll be able to take the 911 lines down anytime they want. great.
If this game was released 9 months to a year ago like Valve was promising, I may have invested the $30 or $40 to buy it. Now, however, It's just not worth it to me."
Seeing as it's going to be another year before HalfLife 2 is released, and CounterStrike is now pretty much broken (post the 1.6 patch) it's probably worth the money.
They're being fined for their behaviour in the products they released in Europe, which hurt European consumers and Europeans businesses, who because of Microsofts monopoly tactics had to pay higher prices for software in Europe.
So Microsoft is just bringing less bacon back to the US, the EU isn't gaining at your cost.
Slashdot Mirror
"you build the expencive elevator on the moon and start up a few mining/refining outposts with self suporting habitats."
Better yet just use remote controlled mining + refining equipment and then the people controlling them can sit nice and safe on Earth, and you don't have the massive cost of the self-supporting habitats.
It allows organisations to easily draw up contracts that ensure that the programs they are purchasing/licensing conform to a known standard.
At the moment it's quite hard for organisations to specify how 'open' they'd like their office tools to be.
If they can just write into the contract that the programs must be able to save and load files in ISO standard 12345 then it becomes a lot easier to understand and enforce the contract, which lowers the cost and the risk of that contract.
$50 is more than a week of groceries for a family of four for most of the world, including in the US.
$50 / four people = $12.50 per person
$12.50 / 8 (more than a week) = $1.57 per day
$1.57 / 3 meals a day = 52 cents a meal.
You must _really_ like ramen.
As for this upsetting Microsoft, don't be too sure.
Oh it's not upsetting, it's devastating for Microsoft.
Do you remember when Microsoft was spreading FUD about how you couldn't be sure if GPL software was legitimate so you should stick with closed source software ?
Well you haven't heard that argument for a while because this whole court case arose from closed source software, that just isn't a problem in open source. (or at least shouldn't be as big a problem).
So Microsoft salesman have lost one of the biggest arguments against open source, which is a big issue for them.
Apparently the storage facilities are also covered with scaffolding at the moment which obviously increase drage and are an extra weight on the building.
So it's either drop compatability and lose customers, or retain compatability and lose customers?
Yep, that's what happens when you have 98% of a market, no matter what you do you're probably going to lose customers.
WinFS, I'd be the first to say, is very ambitious. Nobody has ever brought together the world of documents, media and structured information in giving you one simple set of verbs that lets you richly find, move around and replicate those things.
Translation:
We thought it was a good idea but no-one else has done an implementation that we can copy off, so we can't really figure out how to do it.
Can anyone explain exactly what will be in Longhorn, now that the new filesystem and graphics system is not going to be in it ?
A computer that can be run backwards to reverse the calculation has no thermodymanic limit on its minimum power consumption.
Translation - a computer that isn't subject to the laws of thermodynamics can be run without subject to the laws fo thermodynamics.
As I said, I would be very interested in seeing an actual working version of this machine.
it isn't computing per se that necessarily takes energy
From the paper you linked to "to perform an elementary logical operation in time delta t requires an average amount of energy E *h/2*delta t.". Think about it - you're deliberately changing the state of a machine. No matter what type of machine it is that will consume energy (work) that cannot be recovered at 100% efficiency. Otherwise you've created a perpetual motion machine.
If the computation is carried out using a reversible (classical) computer, thermodynamics does not place any such restriction on computation.
I would be _very_ interested in buying any machine off you that is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics.
So what rubber is not chemical?
I presume they mean synthetic rubber as opposed to natural rubber, such as one might harvest from a rubber tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latex
From wikipedia Woody Guthrie has already given his permission.
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
There is something wrong where the author of a work doesn't give a damn about people using his material but his descendants get to control it for almost a century after his death.
Derek Smart is an asshole. That is a well documented fact.
Further more he is a liar, a braggart, a bully and an all round crazy person.
May I present the evidence for the prosecution:
http://www.werewolves.org/~follies/
At the site above are many instances of Mr Smart lying, bullying people then lying about the lies etc etc.
When you're not allowed to say 'fuck', you're not allowed to say 'fuck the government'.
At the risk of emerging from the woodwork, here is my estimate for Microsofts Xbox losses as of last year
http://www.basereality.com/XboxLoss.php
Yeah, it's out of date - far too busy to update it.
It's actually _really_ hard to figure out how much money Microsoft has lost on the whole Xbox project, as figure for:
1) Sales of Xboxes.
2) The cost of developing and supporting Xbox live are unknown (and can be very very large)
3) How much marketing assistance they're giving to companies.
If anyone had firm data on those I'd be interested in hearing them.
That is bugger all money. The rent was alledgedly $150,000 a month. There were 100 employees left averaging 4k a month salary = $400,000 a month. As it's now june, not surprising there isn't any cash left.
The rent was $150,000 a month.
They were three months in arrears at the start of May.
$600,000 isn't small change.
Actually you can make Windows 98 very stable, by removing some of the crap that was bundled with the OS eg MediaPlayer, Internet Explorer.
You can do this most easily with the Windows 98lite packs that are available.
Also some machines are just _lucky_ and seem stable with Windows 98 anyway - where other machines just fall over from it for no particular reason.
If the guy has a stable machine then he's probably best off sticking with it.
So take it from the album version.
Seriously though, Copyright laws are just broken with respect to format shifting.
Consumers do not want to and are going to refuse to pay for multiple versions of the same copyrighted material.
Producers of copyrighted material (mostly) want to maximise the cash they can get for it, and are in fact obligated to do so if they work for a company that has shareholders.
At some point something is going to have to give.
You are one hundred percent wrong.
Decent cartoons actually cost far more than the crap reality shows to make. Alledgedly Futurama cost something like $1 million dollars an episode to produce, due to it's high quality animation.
Thats why Fox canned them in the first place - they did it to bump their short term profits.
However quality shows like Futurama and Family Guy have much greater long term value - they can be shown on TV for years and DVD sales are also very great - whereas who gives a rats ass about last years reality shows ? And who wants to watch repeats of them for years on end ?
Several suggestions out of my arse.
1) The air is cooler and stiller at night - which lets sound pass through more easily
2) The trains will toot there horn more at night, as the drivers can't see as far.
3) At least in the UK, there are relatively more heavy goods trains on the rails at night compared to during the day, which are way heavier and so take much longer to stop - hence they needed louder horns to warn people further away.
4) As other people have mentioned ambient noise is much lower at night, so other sounds seem much louder and annoying - particularly when you are trying to get to sleep.
So should the media stop showing films of any accidents where people die - I know I don't want to see any graphic images, but I've seen the film of both Space Shuttles blow up repeated without anybody being outraged.
What about all the images of bomb drops released by the US in the Gulf War 1 + 2. You do realise that the little dots running around (and then not running around) are people ?
So, they've just announced to all the terrorists in the world - this problem still exists, is going to remain there and if any terrorist organisation can get one of their members on the inside, they'll be able to take the 911 lines down anytime they want. great.
Seeing as it's going to be another year before HalfLife 2 is released, and CounterStrike is now pretty much broken (post the 1.6 patch) it's probably worth the money.
pointing out the (apparently not so) obvious.....
They're being fined for their behaviour in the products they released in Europe, which hurt European consumers and Europeans businesses, who because of Microsofts monopoly tactics had to pay higher prices for software in Europe.
So Microsoft is just bringing less bacon back to the US, the EU isn't gaining at your cost.
I think what you mean is that in the future your computer will be designed be an Electrical Engineer.
EEs can calculate anything they want! EEs calculate ALL the time and don't even think twice about it.