When Intel triad to nail someone (amd?) for infringing their trademark on 80486 they found out that you can't trademark numbers. As a result, they renamed the '586 the pentium and the rest, as they saying goes, is marketing.
Well, it helps if the people reading your joke can follow the thought process. For people (like me) who didn't get the {t,}itanium -> cheap computers link, it looks like your posting really belonged in the transmetta notebook article -- and was even slightly off-topic for that one.
As far as I'm concerned you're lucky that someone posted a note that explained the wordplay in your joke before it got modded down to -1.
For those of you who don't know about the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), they do reasonably realistic recreataions of medieval times -- including combat (though they use padded and blunted weapons).
One fellow had the bright idea of making himself a titanium helmet. It looked more or less normal, but it was incredibly light, and it gave him massive bragging rights..... Until he got into battle. The first head hit, he went down with a concussion.
After that, the SCA changed the rules so that helmets had to have a minimal weight. It turns out that the added inertia is part of the protection that they provide.
Nah. They wouldn't be uncrushable: They'd be ultracrushable. They'd crush just fine, but when you let go of them.... sproint! they'd pop back into shape. You'd get to crush it again, and again, and....
If you looked at Linux in it's first two years of existence, you'd say that it failed too. Gnutella is young and pimpley. Whether it will live or die is still up in the air. I think that the fun part of Gnutella would be to put together a scalable system that's backwards compatible with the old system. If you can do that, you've got something very live.
Kinda like the X windows client/server thing. The machine providing the service is the server. The machine requesting the service is the client. That's why X-windows calls the display the server, and the big honkin iron that does all the computation the client. The Onyx wants to show off it's pretty numbers and the old sun-3/50 provides the service. That's why the compute server is the display client.
______
Just because we're used to something being some way doesn't mean it's supposed to only be that way. I'm mixed race black/white, but I grew up in an area where people almost never made a big thing about it. For me when band-aid advertized their invisible, ouchless bandages, I thought they were nuts. It certainly wasn't ouchless to take off, and if they thought that something pinkish was going to be even CLOSE to invisible on my skin they must have been freakin' BLIND. It wasn't until I was watching a comedy routing by a black man from Quebec (20 years later), that I remembered my thoughts about band-aids and realized that I was the one who didn't notice what the rest of the world was like -- and I was the one who was off-color.
But I still say that they lied about the 'ouchless'.
They'd quickly move to a
different theft device if this were ever implemented.
Is this a promise, or a threat? If somebody really does not want to share that badly, I wouldn't mind if they went away. All the more bodirectional bandwidth to share, then.
35 and counting. I'm glad that I don't have any mod points wrapped up in that mess. Personally, I think that sometimes good humor is hard to recognize as such, so that'd be a compliment for me.
My ADSL link peaks out at around 2Mb/sec, incomming. It cost me all of $75/month. (yeah, OK, I'm spoiled). Perhaps the University should just lease itself a handfull of ADSL links. (granted, the price that I get is a gift compared to most of what I've seen advertised elsewhere, but -- even so -- bandwidth is getting pretty CHEAP these days.
The GPL license has a borg intent -- to push people to GPL source code to attached code. If you include GPL code in another piece of software you're expected to release the source code to the rest of it. This principle is what was behind the recent blow-up around KDE/qt.
As such, if becker's code was distributed as part of Solaris, the distributer would be required to release the source code to Solaris (or not release the driver at all).
Sun, however, is skirting around the edges of the GPL. They're not distributing Becker's code with Solaris, but they're providing the tools for people (esp. hardware distributers) to compile a Linux driver so that it can load into Solaris. VARs who use this to distribute GPLed (as opposed to LGPLed drivers with Solaris would be in strict violation of the GPL -- unless they got the right to GPL the sources to the version of Solaris that they're distribituting it attached to.
This gets into a fuzzy area because distributing GPLed code linked into non-GPLed program is a violation of the spirit of the GPL (and why the LGPL was created -- to give authors a choice of terms). On the other hand, since it is being dynamically linked and could be conceivebly distributed quite separately from the larger OS binary it could be distributed separately from Solaris and not be in strict violation of the GPL... This despite the fact that it's unusable until it is part of the larger binary. (that's where the fuzz starts to seriously step in).
On the other hand, SUN is not (according to the GPL) responsible for enforcing the GPL with third parties that use their tool kits or any GPL source that they use it on (this is separate from the moral responsibility).
The upshot is that SUN is being bad, but not necessarily illegal.
As many ex lawyers are known to have said "The legal system has nothing to do with justice."
------
IANAL (my sister is, but she doesn't talk to me).
In Linux you either join the crowd or hit a brick wall
No, thanks, leave that kind of thinking back in the Microsoft world.
The open source philosophy is a crowd-based one. A thousand eyeballs requires about half that many developers. The difference with Open Source is that you always have the choice of creating your own crowd.
In Corel's case they seem to have attempted this third option in precisely the rong way.
I'll start from the claim that they chose Debian
because it would differentiate them from the other other popular distributions when they stole a big market share with their PR machinery.
If this is true, then it can be likened to shooting yourself in the foot -- Grenade jumping with an auto-cannon style for those quake/half-life types.
They separated themselves from the marked leaders. This meant that the consumer-friendly software
packets weren't available for their consumer crowd. At the same time, they pissed off the geek/developer Debian crowd by not wholeheartedly joining the code-release game. They seem to have thought that their market clout could give them enough consumer numbers to force third-party developers to bow to them.
Probably their core mistake was underestimating the value of word-of-mouth advertising. Having pissed off the current user base all they did was attract attention to Corel Linux. The general public, not knowing much of Linux, would hear of Corel and go to their geek friends and ask: "So what about this Corel version?"
Had Corel been wholeheartedly a supporter of the Open Source approach, they might have actually gained some real market share. Instead the geek reaction was likely to be "I don't like what I've heard about them doing". Without wholhearted geek respect, Corel couldn't really take a bite out of the newbie market. Add to that the problem that the commonly released software for the Debian base presumed an intelligent user who could take care of themselves (as opposed to the Corel market of interested newbies) and you have a serious 'grenade jump with autocannon' (Read: shoot yourself in the foot bigtime trying to get a jump on the competition).
So at best this is only going to get a small number of pages, and which pages they get will be related to their choices of spidering
techniques. It's kind of hard to get a truly random sample of pages from the entire selection of content - you're either forced to use
what the search engines have indexed or just attempt tor randomly follow links. You'll always miss sites.
Sounds kinda like life. Sooner or later you have to choose. Whatever you choose, you're going to miss whatever you don't choose. This is no reason to borrow your neighbour's shotgun.
"Better a good life than a bad marriage"
- My grandfather on moving in with his old mistress.
(don't ask me why, but it seems appropriate here.)
64-bit windows will not happen in the next few years. Even if Microsoft should ship a native 64-bit NT, _and_ actually finish up
Win64. It's the applications that matter, and that is one thing that Windows just do not have (despite popular (trash-media) belief).
I'm willing to bet that we'll see the MS Office suite ported by the time (if) it's released, as well as just about any other heavily-used M$ product.
People have been making fun of the perennual "The Internet Will Crumble" predictions since the early days of usenet, (when some backbone sites could get away with a 9600 baud link and many universities still weren't on the ARPANET)
has a decent deconstruction of precisely this question.
In the late 1980s, as KMI looked at the cables then in existence and the systems that were slated for the next few years, they noticed an almost monstrous imbalance.
The United States would, by the late 1990s, be massively connected to Europe by some 200,000 circuits across the Atlantic, and just as massively connected to Asia by a roughly equal number of circuits across the Pacific. But between Europe and Asia there would be fewer than 20,000 circuits.
The article is precisely about the building of that OC192 in the late 90's in response to the KMI study (well, it's about a lot of other things too, but that's what's at the core of the article.
The reason the web appears so much more vulnerable in this study than in previous studies and general opinion is that they focus on something different from the usual. They're looking at the web, not the internet.
Guh. They're looking at both the web and the internet. Their conclusion was that the web and th internet react in qualitatively the same manner. If you take out a few top nodes, things start to get nasty. If you take out random nodes, most people don't care much (unless you're looking for those specific node).
For the web, it's kinda like the difference between taking out google and my home page For the 'net, it's like the difference between taking a backhoe to (one of) Seattle's bacbone links vs. your phone company dropping your ADSL link.
Pretty much the same kinda response in both cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I'm sorry darling, but they haven't rebuilt that part yet....
When Intel triad to nail someone (amd?) for infringing their trademark on 80486 they found out that you can't trademark numbers. As a result, they renamed the '586 the pentium and the rest, as they saying goes, is marketing.
As far as I'm concerned you're lucky that someone posted a note that explained the wordplay in your joke before it got modded down to -1.
One fellow had the bright idea of making himself a titanium helmet. It looked more or less normal, but it was incredibly light, and it gave him massive bragging rights..... Until he got into battle. The first head hit, he went down with a concussion.
After that, the SCA changed the rules so that helmets had to have a minimal weight. It turns out that the added inertia is part of the protection that they provide.
Nah. They wouldn't be uncrushable: They'd be ultracrushable. They'd crush just fine, but when you let go of them.... sproint! they'd pop back into shape. You'd get to crush it again, and again, and....
End result: -1 funny (wow!)
It's a week and a half later, so I doubt that it's gonna get any more moderation. 52 points is pretty massive. I'm impressed.
If you looked at Linux in it's first two years of existence, you'd say that it failed too. Gnutella is young and pimpley. Whether it will live or die is still up in the air. I think that the fun part of Gnutella would be to put together a scalable system that's backwards compatible with the old system. If you can do that, you've got something very live.
______
Just because we're used to something being some way doesn't mean it's supposed to only be that way. I'm mixed race black/white, but I grew up in an area where people almost never made a big thing about it. For me when band-aid advertized their invisible, ouchless bandages, I thought they were nuts. It certainly wasn't ouchless to take off, and if they thought that something pinkish was going to be even CLOSE to invisible on my skin they must have been freakin' BLIND . It wasn't until I was watching a comedy routing by a black man from Quebec (20 years later), that I remembered my thoughts about band-aids and realized that I was the one who didn't notice what the rest of the world was like -- and I was the one who was off-color.
But I still say that they lied about the 'ouchless'.
... and home machines can be servers.
35 and counting. I'm glad that I don't have any mod points wrapped up in that mess. Personally, I think that sometimes good humor is hard to recognize as such, so that'd be a compliment for me.
My ADSL link peaks out at around 2Mb/sec, incomming. It cost me all of $75/month. (yeah, OK, I'm spoiled). Perhaps the University should just lease itself a handfull of ADSL links. (granted, the price that I get is a gift compared to most of what I've seen advertised elsewhere, but -- even so -- bandwidth is getting pretty CHEAP these days.
This does explain the extreme lack of relevant pokes..... Other than the name changes it's entirely a non-slashdot article.
As such, if becker's code was distributed as part of Solaris, the distributer would be required to release the source code to Solaris (or not release the driver at all).
Sun, however, is skirting around the edges of the GPL. They're not distributing Becker's code with Solaris, but they're providing the tools for people (esp. hardware distributers) to compile a Linux driver so that it can load into Solaris. VARs who use this to distribute GPLed (as opposed to LGPLed drivers with Solaris would be in strict violation of the GPL -- unless they got the right to GPL the sources to the version of Solaris that they're distribituting it attached to.
This gets into a fuzzy area because distributing GPLed code linked into non-GPLed program is a violation of the spirit of the GPL (and why the LGPL was created -- to give authors a choice of terms). On the other hand, since it is being dynamically linked and could be conceivebly distributed quite separately from the larger OS binary it could be distributed separately from Solaris and not be in strict violation of the GPL... This despite the fact that it's unusable until it is part of the larger binary. (that's where the fuzz starts to seriously step in).
On the other hand, SUN is not (according to the GPL) responsible for enforcing the GPL with third parties that use their tool kits or any GPL source that they use it on (this is separate from the moral responsibility).
The upshot is that SUN is being bad, but not necessarily illegal.
As many ex lawyers are known to have said "The legal system has nothing to do with justice."
------
IANAL (my sister is, but she doesn't talk to me).
I'll start from the claim that they chose Debian because it would differentiate them from the other other popular distributions when they stole a big market share with their PR machinery. If this is true, then it can be likened to shooting yourself in the foot -- Grenade jumping with an auto-cannon style for those quake/half-life types.
They separated themselves from the marked leaders. This meant that the consumer-friendly software packets weren't available for their consumer crowd. At the same time, they pissed off the geek/developer Debian crowd by not wholeheartedly joining the code-release game. They seem to have thought that their market clout could give them enough consumer numbers to force third-party developers to bow to them.
Probably their core mistake was underestimating the value of word-of-mouth advertising. Having pissed off the current user base all they did was attract attention to Corel Linux. The general public, not knowing much of Linux, would hear of Corel and go to their geek friends and ask: "So what about this Corel version?"
Had Corel been wholeheartedly a supporter of the Open Source approach, they might have actually gained some real market share. Instead the geek reaction was likely to be "I don't like what I've heard about them doing". Without wholhearted geek respect, Corel couldn't really take a bite out of the newbie market. Add to that the problem that the commonly released software for the Debian base presumed an intelligent user who could take care of themselves (as opposed to the Corel market of interested newbies) and you have a serious 'grenade jump with autocannon' (Read: shoot yourself in the foot bigtime trying to get a jump on the competition).
..... This was previously thought impossible.
"Better a good life than a bad marriage"
- My grandfather on moving in with his old mistress.
(don't ask me why, but it seems appropriate here.)
Try reading the first link on the announcement page. It gives a pretty decent explanation.
People have been making fun of the perennual "The Internet Will Crumble" predictions since the early days of usenet, (when some backbone sites could get away with a 9600 baud link and many universities still weren't on the ARPANET)
has a decent deconstruction of precisely this question.
The article is precisely about the building of that OC192 in the late 90's in response to the KMI study (well, it's about a lot of other things too, but that's what's at the core of the article.For the web, it's kinda like the difference between taking out google and my home page For the 'net, it's like the difference between taking a backhoe to (one of) Seattle's bacbone links vs. your phone company dropping your ADSL link.
Pretty much the same kinda response in both cases.