"in each second" should be "in each direction". Where is the edit function when you need it. Slashcode must be the only such software that doesn't include the facility for someone to edit their own post, or at least append onto the end of it.
And that damn Oracle advert messes up the page - nothing else appears.
No, the northbridge is on the hammer chip itself. the FSB is on the chip itself, between the core and the switch fabric that is on the chip that connects up the CPU core, the memory controller(s) and the HyperTransport interface(s).
HT is just a system level interconnect.
Running at 800MHz DDR (1600MTransfers/s), 16-bits in each direction for 3.2GB/s in each second in the case of Hammer.
Compared to the $297 of the AMD 2600+ (which will be cheaper to buy because AMD always have official prices higher than the buying price for some reason - I expect $260 to be a typical selling price in a months time). Maybe this is taking into account Intel's upcoming price cuts in September...
The THG review is the worst review of the 2600+ I have seen today. It has a lot of pointless crap, graphs that don't even include the 2400+ or 2600+... non-coherent, etc. The HardOCP, AMDZone, AMDMB, AcesHardware reviews are way way better.
Yes, I also work for a UK domain name registrar, and some of our customers have also received these bills from the Domain Registry of Europe.
The addresses were harvested from whois records against the terms and conditions of using the whois records as far as I can see.
Naturally I reported this to the registry we use, OpenSRS/Tucows, so they can handle it. UKReg also use OpenSRS/Tucows IIRC, so hopefully they are also reporting these letters their customers get.
Yes, the music companies do not earn any respect for the way in which they treat the people that give them the works that make them money.
I mean, the music companies deserve to make money, and they provide advertising and manufacturing capability to the artists, but that does not give them a right to f*ck over the artist.
Maybe one day a rich man or company will enter the music industry, and instead of being overlords of their serf-like artists, they will treat them as proper clients, provide the necessary means for their clients to sell their music, and be paid by the client for that work and knowledge. Yes, it might be $3 a CD, but that will let the artist price the CD at $10 to make $3 profit a CD instead of the current $0.03 profit or whatever music companies f*ck them over for.
Btw, with manufactured bands it is different. The music company pays the artists a wage to do a job (sing badly, prance around, be popular) and things are fair here all round (except for the purchaser)...
I agree totally. I once had nearly a couple of gigabytes of Napster sourced music for free (a lot of it I would never have bought though, and I do mean that) and I still have MP3's from that time, and more recently from Gnutella, but that is a complete hassle to use.
I justified it because everyone else was doing it, and you can't listen to the radio at work where the music was available. Pretty weak excuses, but the latter had some merit.
Now I have progressed to the stage where I still refuse to pay full price for albums, but once they are £10.99 in Tesco, or £9.99 then I will buy them. If they are really good, I will buy them as well. I have also realised that there is a bucketload of excellent old music out there, priced between £4.99 and £6.99 at places like 101cd.com and your local backstreet music store, and thus for a mere £110 I can buy 19 full albums of music that I like, even if it isn't the latest and "greatest" (ha!).
Once modern albums contain more than 2 or 3 good songs and 5 trash songs, then my money might start going on new music again. Tempting though "Baile del gorila" by Melody is, it is the only good song on the CD so I will not buy it. I bought a best of Boney M for £4.99 instead.
So I bought Aphex Twin Classics today for £5.99, I will buy two deftones albums for £5.99ea this weekend after England beat Denmark, possibly Madonna Music and Madonna Erotica Tour as well at the same price (and thus cover those MP3 downloads a year or two ago). And 19 CDs in the post as well... the next couple of weeks will be fun.
I love CDs, the cases, the physical things. But I will only pay reasonable prices for them. If all new CD albums were £8.99 then I would probably have a CD collection in the many hundreds by now...
Remember, if you listen to a £15.99 CD 20 times, then you are paying around 80p a listen. Too high for my liking. Listen to a £5.99 CD 20 times for 30p a shot - much better for background music most of the time.
Re:Not that revolutionary...
on
PalmOS 5 Turns Gold
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Another downfall of Palms current plan for OS 5 is that they are targetting a handheld unit with a 66mhz arm proccessor, yes a 66mhz proc..
Erm, PalmOS licenses the OS to PalmOS licensees like Palm Inc, Sony, Handera, Handspring. It is up to these manufacturers to build hardware. Palm have approved a 200MHz ARM chip from Texas Instruments IIRC. Sony can be guaranteed to use a damn fast processor as well.
Maybe you are confused, or you are spreading FUD? Maybe the OS developers are ensuring that PalmOS5 performs well on processors as slow as 66MHz (presumably the speed in power-saving mode) which is good surely?
Of course, a low cost ARM based PalmOS5 PDA running at 66MHz, with a 320x320 monochrome screen, at under $199 would be wonderful. As one of the articles pointed out, Palm are doing well because their devices are cheap and do the job, whereas PocketPC devices cost more than the sweet spot pricing...
Well, a 400MHz PPC8500 G5 processor from Motorola should deal with the PPC requirement, I dunno what power requirements that processor has though.
64MB is fine for the onboard memory of the system, but room for one of those 1" 1GB IBM microdrives would be great.
Erm, LCD screens are LCD, so why are you talking YUV? Most PDAs today are 16-bit. I would be happy with them taking it up to 24-bit, but 30-bit would be nice (10-bit R,G,B), but not necessary.
What are you going to do with 256MB of video memory on a PDA? The screen would be 640x480x32 which is 1.2MB. Allow for double buffering and 4MB of memory is more than adequate. Remember, you want a long battery life, and these memory chips also use up valuable physical space, so ideally you would share part of main memory. Maybe a updated mobile version of the old Amiga graphics system could be made? That was very good and suited for PDA graphical display, as is AmigaOS.
You are no way going to be able to build a PDA of the size you want to make with 512MB+ of on-board memory. You have a 2" by 4" motherboard, which will realistically allow to to put on around 4 chips, not including LCD controllers, etc. That is PPC8500, Graphics, Memory, Flash. You assume that the 8500 has built-in USB and other I/O already.
Seriously, this would be quite a useful little niche product. A real label printer (up to 4 inches by 2 inches say) with full graphical output. Some software for printing addresses could come with it. Extra software for printing product labels (description, prices, barcode, etc) would be available. Of course, you could print directly onto a continuous roll of 2" wide paper as well...
Okay, I admit it, it is yet another little geeky toy add-on..:)
And very possible. PDA's have serial ports/USB ports. You only need some kind of wrist-mounted printer/PDA. However, you might as well just buy the industrial PDAs that already do this I imagine? There must be some available?
The web server is the "paper" that stuff is published on. The publisher is the person that uses that "paper" to put their material on public show.
So like you wouldn't sue the paper manufacturer for something illegal/libellous/slanderous/defamatory that appeared in a newspaper printed on said paper, even though the paper made it possible in the first place, you shouldn't be able to sue the company providing the web server.
So if a user X puts material on the web via their ISP, X is the publisher, not the ISP. You cannot get the ISP to veto every "sheet of paper made" after their customer has "printed on that sheet" - that would be... highly illogical and time consuming, making paper (i.e., web hosting) cost about 500 times the amount it does currently.
And yes, Microsoft are free to use this argument if they want to, as are any other ISP who gets into a similar dilemma. Of course, there are probably a load of holes in the argument, but hey, there is always the Chewbacca argument.
Agreed, the original poster was wrong. A False Positive is when an innocent person is wrongly tagged as being wanted/terrorist/etc.
Of course, 1000 false positives to each true positive (0.01% false positive rate) is fine as long as the company has enough money to pay out for each of the lawsuits that would be placed by the victims (yes, this is the correct word, victims of first class assault by an airport employee), or if a false positive gave you upper-first-class seating on the journey and $10000 to not file a lawsuit.
Problem is, these systems are having a 10% or more false positive rate, which is 1000000 lawsuits to each captured terrorist (okay, so not everyone will get the special strip naked anal examination, but you get the point). Be sure to eat very strong curry the day before flying if you are a terrorist - you won't get the anal examination for sure!
If you explain to your insurance company that you are a low-milage driver, you will get a reduced rate. Otherwise, you use another insurance company.
Yes, pro-rata internet access is an interesting and logical option. The issue isn't the presence of it, but the rates and limits imposed.
For example, how about $10/m for cable access, etc, and then $10-$20/m for using it (per 5GB). Low users will pay low cable internet access, high users will pay for what they use. It is fair all around, and a CD ISO download will actually have a cost associated, $1 - $3, that the user can understand. Maybe more people would pay for their software and films then!
If Sony and Nintendo are not selling at a loss, and they suspect Microsoft are, then why don't they complain about unfair business practices by a competitor selling hardware at a loss? They would be fully within their rights to because Microsofts practices would be highly anti-competitive.
I will add "Not being able to sell hardware or software at a loss" to my personal list of Microsoft Monopoly Trial remedies...
> We know that XBOX 2 will have a bigger hard drive, > slightly better graphics, and shortly after > release an Office suite targeted to 'college > kids'.
That wouldn't be hard for Sony to do with the PS3... "Hi is that Sun? Yeah, we want an office suite like thing to come free with every PS3 keyboard and mouse kit we sell, so that we can give the whack to Microsoft. What? You will let us give away StarOffice 7 free for the PS3 keyboard/mouse combo? Excellent, you guys rock."
You can bet:
1) The PS3 will be able to run Linux without a problem - stick it on a bootable DVD even. 2) The PS3 will be around 10x more powerful that the PS2 at least. The PS2 runs Linux fine. 3) So PS3 OpenOffice is extremely likely, shipped on a bootable Linux PS3 DVD, saving documents to either a built in hard drive or to MemoryStick cards (read your OpenOffice PS3 documents on a Sony Cleo!) 4) I bet someone will do this for the PS2 version of Linux now...
It will help *European* online sales, as now consumers in europe will have a choice between buying from a local online retailer, and paying the sales tax, and buying from a non-EU retailer (which previously did not attract tax unless you were unlucky enough to get caught by customs) and paying tax. Hence European business was being punished online because the non-EU companies could sell the products for less.
I would tend to say though that the whole concept of VAT is obviously flawed in a world context where major countries don't charge VAT! The countries that don't charge VAT are using it as a competitive plus now to attract sales in their country. In the UK you can pay up to 40p in the pound on income tax, an extra 10% on national insurance, and then on top of that, 17.5% of the remaining money is also taxed on purchases! And they won't change the law to let us drink in pubs after 11pm, even though that measure was put in place over 50 years ago because of one of those world war thingies.
Sadly, I must agree completely with the parent poster.
Real Remedies for the Real Problem
1) Microsoft must license products on a RAND scheme (reasonable and non-discriminatory)
2) Microsoft must release full API documentation detailing all APIs that non-OS tasks can call.
3) Microsoft must release full file format documentation
4) Microsoft must NOT release any source code. That won't solve a thing - it will in fact make Microsoft a larger monopoly in the future as people cannot code competing operating systems due to having seen that code!
5) No internal cross-subsidy, similar in function to the limitations the British monopoly BT has
There is more that I cannot recall right now. A possible split in the company: OS vs. Apps & Services to put their application teams on a more level footing and to expose the true cost of the "free" software they give away.
Get a decent nForce system, one with the integrated graphics, but you don't need the integrated dolby surround digital 67 channel audio southbridge, nor do you require dual-channel DDR. They are icing on the cake otherwise, if you have enough memory. It has graphics, audio and network on board - what else does a corporate PC need?
What you need to do is use quality components from the beginning, all the way through your systems. That means a case that is easy to take apart, with good power supply (min 300W) - you are the one doing the repairs remember!
And try and get bulk discounts from suppliers if possible.
Another good idea is to have a few *really* powerful servers around to do the compiling on. I.e., dual athlon MP2000+'s with a SCSI raid array. This could obviate the need for new desktops for quite some time - maybe 6 months, maybe a year, if this is solution solves the problem.
Personally, I think that 400MHz should be more than fine. Your users have probably clogged up the hard drives with spyware, mp3 players and loads of crap. You might get a good return on simply wiping and rebuilding each machine from scratch (using an optimised ghost image or two), and locking down the machines from user interference. This solves the licence problem as well.
Also find out which of your users are Linux friendly and are willing to use it solely on the desktop (with the old 400MHz machine for Outlook and Word, if necessary). The research could come in handy down the line, and you can sneak Linux into the office for those users, and it might spread - saves money on Microsoft at any rate!
I will have to disagree. These people need something like Notepad, not VI.
Emacs would be better because at least you can type stuff straight in after running it, and it has some menus, and saving files is simple ctrl key stuff. In vi, doing 'i' to start editing, and then wondering why the cursor doesn't wrap around at the end of lines, and then "esc", ":" "w" to save the file is just too much for these people. Vi isn't normal! vilearn is a good tutorial program, but these people are not here to learn Vi. Mention Vi as an editor available on every Unix system, mention that it is complicated, but they can use gvim as an OLE editor within Visual Studio...
Pico is suitable - it is easy to use and has a help system. In a GUI environment, just use gedit or kate or whatnot.
Overall I agree with the people that advocate showing what you can do with a Unix system, not how to do it. Show the development tools available, show the services available, etc. Show differences between Windows and Unix equivalents. Don't be evangelical about Unix, be realistic. Explain that the systems are different, and both have advantages and disadvantages...
Some of the people that make the claims are at least trying to find proof, although it would be helpful if they didn't claim that every submerged city was 8000 years old or so before any dating had been done!
That Yellowstone super-volcano is scheduled to erupt within the next few hundred years isn't it?
Say 10,000 years ago a group of 40 people left africa and went to india. Assume that there are two surviving offspring per person, and that a generation is 25 years. 40 people are not going to build a city, but 25 years later there are 120 people + children, 25 years after that 240 people + children, then ~500, then ~1000 and so on. A couple of hundred years and you have a need for several joined communities (10-20,000 people). Someone else can do the maths assuming a lifespan of around 40-50 years and more accurate survival rates for offspring, and maybe the generation gap was as low as every 15 years... add a few droughts and other population killers into the mix, and sell the result to Maxis.
Agreed to some extent. Depends on the society that the humans lived in though. Caves could have been adequate for a society which did not grow in size. Nomadic societies have no reason for cities. Once a cave dweller discovers something that lets the society grow however, or the nomads discover somewhere that is always plentiful, then maybe the need for cities would arise. And they would most likely start off with wooden frames covered in skins or large leaves, mud walls perhaps first. And society would have lived like this for many thousands of years.
Then you get climate changes which force the society to move to better climes, and this is what most likely makes leaps in development. If you have a mud house, then why make a wooden house or a stone house? But if you have no house and there is a lot of wood or stone lying around, then why not use these for building your new dwelling? Especially if the soil is not suitable for making mud houses! Necessity breeds invention?
Carving blocks of stone with wood or bone doesn't work! You need something that can carve that stone - perhaps harder stone like flint on softer stone? But not much would remain of a sandstone dwelling after 10,000 years! To cut decent stone that would last to today you need metal. And when did people find out how to make metal? People will be asking these questions for hundreds of years to come...
I personally find all this ancient stuff fascinating.
Maybe these cities were built close to the shore because they were mainly fish-eating people? Another argument goes that cities built inland would have been built by rivers, and that over a few thousand years river action (erosion, silting, etc) would basically cover most of the cities up. Imagine 100 years of the Mississippi getting free reign over the landscape basically - how much would remain afterwards?
And smaller communities would most likely still be built with wood. Maybe a stone temple or something - but you try finding a 4000 year old stone building that is most likely collapsed and buried under mud!
When you look at these things, you have to look at them with an open mind. I.e., never trust any previously held beliefs about the origin of mankind, etc, that modern civilisation has its roots only in the last few thousand years and before that we were ooga-booga cavemen...
The ice age would have made most temperate climates pretty unlivable in, so an ancient civilisations would have been much closer to the equator. We are talking south America thru mexico, cuba, africa (which has undergone a major climate change over the last 3000 years anyway), india, china, etc.
And there appears to be plenty of evidence suggesting older civilisations did develop. Shame is, they built most of their cities it seems under 120ft above sea level. Which would wipe out many major cities today, btw. The sea is an obvious food source, trading mechanism, etc.
The only people currently that are finding these things are people that the "archaelogical community" think of as weirdos. However these people are the only people who are actually willing to look for these places, so what do you expect. Maybe in 50 years time we will have a greater knowledge of mankinds recent origins and they will be accepted as the truth.
And for every honest "nutcase" there will be a dishonest "nutcase" as well - in any field. The existence of one person claiming 20,000 year old civilisations that turns out to not be true does not mean that there were never any 20,000 year old civilisations. However the current oldest claims are about 12,000 years old, in South America.
Other interesting things are that geneticists have worked out that ALL current human beings are descended from around 2,000 humans at a point around 80,000 years ago. Yes, 2,000, separated out into separate clusters around the planet (China, Africa, etc). That is why humanity is not like other animals like dogs for which there are a myriad of different shapes and forms.
Still, I don't think it will ever turn out that Atlantis is buried in deep ice on Antartica and is basically a giant stasis field generator for when the Sun does a 12,000 year pulsar cycle...:) Nor do I think that UFOs built Atlantis or that we are the descendents of an Alien civilisation that landed here so many aeons ago...
If Microsoft cut the price of the XBox to $199, then their loss per box would double, assuming it is already $100 at $299.
If Microsoft get $10 per game sold, then that would mean an XBox owner needing to buy 20 games over 3 years just to make back the loss.
I doubt that most XBox owners will buy more than 5 games a year to be honest - sure you will get the few game-a-month people, but they will not make up for the majority who will only buy the mostest bestest games available.
Microsoft cannot afford to cut the price of the XBox any further until product costs drop as well. Expect to see the XBox selling for $249 this Christmas, against $199 PS2's and $149 Gamecubes. Except the latter two will be at the break-even price or less from the start, so all game sales will be profit, whereas the XBox will still be being sold at a loss.
Sure, when the XBox II comes out with XBox compatibility then things will get interesting. That is 3 years away though - consumers will not like a console being upgraded every 2 years!
Erm, ARM is 32-bit. MIPS is 32-bit. Both has 16-bit instruction size variants, Thumb and MIPS16 (IIRC). So in terms of code density there is not too much to choose between the two.
This chip is going to compete against the XScale processors primarily, and the other ARM based PDA processors as well from Motorola and TI. It is not going to be easy for AMD of course.
However if the processors are significantly more powerful than the previous two, then they have a good chance...
Oh, it just isn't as simple as your would hope unfortunately. There is plenty of stuff on the newsgroup comp.windows.x.kde that will sort you out should you have any problems.
Basically, the problems are with KDM launching KDE 3 if you are running 8.1. I got TWM whenever I selected KDE 3 from KDM, this is a problem with the chksession script which fails for sessions with spaces in the names... you need to mess around with files in/etc/X11 as well.
Slashdot Mirror
And that damn Oracle advert messes up the page - nothing else appears.
No, the northbridge is on the hammer chip itself. the FSB is on the chip itself, between the core and the switch fabric that is on the chip that connects up the CPU core, the memory controller(s) and the HyperTransport interface(s).
HT is just a system level interconnect.
Running at 800MHz DDR (1600MTransfers/s), 16-bits in each direction for 3.2GB/s in each second in the case of Hammer.
So no, Hammers do not have a FSB as such.
Yeah, the prices in that THG article are bogus.
... non-coherent, etc. The HardOCP, AMDZone, AMDMB, AcesHardware reviews are way way better.
NewEgg.com: Intel Pentium 4 / 2.53GHz Northwood 512K Socket 478 Processor 533MHz
$357.00
Compared to the $297 of the AMD 2600+ (which will be cheaper to buy because AMD always have official prices higher than the buying price for some reason - I expect $260 to be a typical selling price in a months time). Maybe this is taking into account Intel's upcoming price cuts in September...
The THG review is the worst review of the 2600+ I have seen today. It has a lot of pointless crap, graphs that don't even include the 2400+ or 2600+
Are there any benchmarks anywhere that compares the speed of code generated by GCC 3.2, 3.1, 3.0 and 2.9x?
That would be interesting to see, especially on modern processors with SSE, SSE2, etc.
The addresses were harvested from whois records against the terms and conditions of using the whois records as far as I can see.
Naturally I reported this to the registry we use, OpenSRS/Tucows, so they can handle it. UKReg also use OpenSRS/Tucows IIRC, so hopefully they are also reporting these letters their customers get.
I mean, the music companies deserve to make money, and they provide advertising and manufacturing capability to the artists, but that does not give them a right to f*ck over the artist.
Maybe one day a rich man or company will enter the music industry, and instead of being overlords of their serf-like artists, they will treat them as proper clients, provide the necessary means for their clients to sell their music, and be paid by the client for that work and knowledge. Yes, it might be $3 a CD, but that will let the artist price the CD at $10 to make $3 profit a CD instead of the current $0.03 profit or whatever music companies f*ck them over for.
Btw, with manufactured bands it is different. The music company pays the artists a wage to do a job (sing badly, prance around, be popular) and things are fair here all round (except for the purchaser)...
Graham
I justified it because everyone else was doing it, and you can't listen to the radio at work where the music was available. Pretty weak excuses, but the latter had some merit.
Now I have progressed to the stage where I still refuse to pay full price for albums, but once they are £10.99 in Tesco, or £9.99 then I will buy them. If they are really good, I will buy them as well. I have also realised that there is a bucketload of excellent old music out there, priced between £4.99 and £6.99 at places like 101cd.com and your local backstreet music store, and thus for a mere £110 I can buy 19 full albums of music that I like, even if it isn't the latest and "greatest" (ha!).
Once modern albums contain more than 2 or 3 good songs and 5 trash songs, then my money might start going on new music again. Tempting though "Baile del gorila" by Melody is, it is the only good song on the CD so I will not buy it. I bought a best of Boney M for £4.99 instead.
So I bought Aphex Twin Classics today for £5.99, I will buy two deftones albums for £5.99ea this weekend after England beat Denmark, possibly Madonna Music and Madonna Erotica Tour as well at the same price (and thus cover those MP3 downloads a year or two ago). And 19 CDs in the post as well... the next couple of weeks will be fun.
I love CDs, the cases, the physical things. But I will only pay reasonable prices for them. If all new CD albums were £8.99 then I would probably have a CD collection in the many hundreds by now...
Remember, if you listen to a £15.99 CD 20 times, then you are paying around 80p a listen. Too high for my liking. Listen to a £5.99 CD 20 times for 30p a shot - much better for background music most of the time.
Erm, PalmOS licenses the OS to PalmOS licensees like Palm Inc, Sony, Handera, Handspring. It is up to these manufacturers to build hardware. Palm have approved a 200MHz ARM chip from Texas Instruments IIRC. Sony can be guaranteed to use a damn fast processor as well.
Maybe you are confused, or you are spreading FUD? Maybe the OS developers are ensuring that PalmOS5 performs well on processors as slow as 66MHz (presumably the speed in power-saving mode) which is good surely?
Of course, a low cost ARM based PalmOS5 PDA running at 66MHz, with a 320x320 monochrome screen, at under $199 would be wonderful. As one of the articles pointed out, Palm are doing well because their devices are cheap and do the job, whereas PocketPC devices cost more than the sweet spot pricing...
64MB is fine for the onboard memory of the system, but room for one of those 1" 1GB IBM microdrives would be great.
Erm, LCD screens are LCD, so why are you talking YUV? Most PDAs today are 16-bit. I would be happy with them taking it up to 24-bit, but 30-bit would be nice (10-bit R,G,B), but not necessary.
What are you going to do with 256MB of video memory on a PDA? The screen would be 640x480x32 which is 1.2MB. Allow for double buffering and 4MB of memory is more than adequate. Remember, you want a long battery life, and these memory chips also use up valuable physical space, so ideally you would share part of main memory. Maybe a updated mobile version of the old Amiga graphics system could be made? That was very good and suited for PDA graphical display, as is AmigaOS.
You are no way going to be able to build a PDA of the size you want to make with 512MB+ of on-board memory. You have a 2" by 4" motherboard, which will realistically allow to to put on around 4 chips, not including LCD controllers, etc. That is PPC8500, Graphics, Memory, Flash. You assume that the 8500 has built-in USB and other I/O already.
Seriously, this would be quite a useful little niche product. A real label printer (up to 4 inches by 2 inches say) with full graphical output. Some software for printing addresses could come with it. Extra software for printing product labels (description, prices, barcode, etc) would be available. Of course, you could print directly onto a continuous roll of 2" wide paper as well... Okay, I admit it, it is yet another little geeky toy add-on.. :)
And very possible. PDA's have serial ports/USB ports. You only need some kind of wrist-mounted printer/PDA. However, you might as well just buy the industrial PDAs that already do this I imagine? There must be some available?
So like you wouldn't sue the paper manufacturer for something illegal/libellous/slanderous/defamatory that appeared in a newspaper printed on said paper, even though the paper made it possible in the first place, you shouldn't be able to sue the company providing the web server.
So if a user X puts material on the web via their ISP, X is the publisher, not the ISP. You cannot get the ISP to veto every "sheet of paper made" after their customer has "printed on that sheet" - that would be ... highly illogical and time consuming, making paper (i.e., web hosting) cost about 500 times the amount it does currently.
And yes, Microsoft are free to use this argument if they want to, as are any other ISP who gets into a similar dilemma. Of course, there are probably a load of holes in the argument, but hey, there is always the Chewbacca argument.
Of course, 1000 false positives to each true positive (0.01% false positive rate) is fine as long as the company has enough money to pay out for each of the lawsuits that would be placed by the victims (yes, this is the correct word, victims of first class assault by an airport employee), or if a false positive gave you upper-first-class seating on the journey and $10000 to not file a lawsuit.
Problem is, these systems are having a 10% or more false positive rate, which is 1000000 lawsuits to each captured terrorist (okay, so not everyone will get the special strip naked anal examination, but you get the point). Be sure to eat very strong curry the day before flying if you are a terrorist - you won't get the anal examination for sure!
Yes, pro-rata internet access is an interesting and logical option. The issue isn't the presence of it, but the rates and limits imposed.
For example, how about $10/m for cable access, etc, and then $10-$20 /m for using it (per 5GB). Low users will pay low cable internet access, high users will pay for what they use. It is fair all around, and a CD ISO download will actually have a cost associated, $1 - $3, that the user can understand. Maybe more people would pay for their software and films then!
I will add "Not being able to sell hardware or software at a loss" to my personal list of Microsoft Monopoly Trial remedies...
> We know that XBOX 2 will have a bigger hard drive,
> slightly better graphics, and shortly after
> release an Office suite targeted to 'college
> kids'.
That wouldn't be hard for Sony to do with the PS3... "Hi is that Sun? Yeah, we want an office suite like thing to come free with every PS3 keyboard and mouse kit we sell, so that we can give the whack to Microsoft. What? You will let us give away StarOffice 7 free for the PS3 keyboard/mouse combo? Excellent, you guys rock."
You can bet:
1) The PS3 will be able to run Linux without a problem - stick it on a bootable DVD even.
2) The PS3 will be around 10x more powerful that the PS2 at least. The PS2 runs Linux fine.
3) So PS3 OpenOffice is extremely likely, shipped on a bootable Linux PS3 DVD, saving documents to either a built in hard drive or to MemoryStick cards (read your OpenOffice PS3 documents on a Sony Cleo!)
4) I bet someone will do this for the PS2 version of Linux now...
I would tend to say though that the whole concept of VAT is obviously flawed in a world context where major countries don't charge VAT! The countries that don't charge VAT are using it as a competitive plus now to attract sales in their country. In the UK you can pay up to 40p in the pound on income tax, an extra 10% on national insurance, and then on top of that, 17.5% of the remaining money is also taxed on purchases! And they won't change the law to let us drink in pubs after 11pm, even though that measure was put in place over 50 years ago because of one of those world war thingies.
Real Remedies for the Real Problem
1) Microsoft must license products on a RAND scheme (reasonable and non-discriminatory)
2) Microsoft must release full API documentation detailing all APIs that non-OS tasks can call.
3) Microsoft must release full file format documentation
4) Microsoft must NOT release any source code. That won't solve a thing - it will in fact make Microsoft a larger monopoly in the future as people cannot code competing operating systems due to having seen that code!
5) No internal cross-subsidy, similar in function to the limitations the British monopoly BT has
There is more that I cannot recall right now. A possible split in the company: OS vs. Apps & Services to put their application teams on a more level footing and to expose the true cost of the "free" software they give away.
Get a decent nForce system, one with the integrated graphics, but you don't need the integrated dolby surround digital 67 channel audio southbridge, nor do you require dual-channel DDR. They are icing on the cake otherwise, if you have enough memory. It has graphics, audio and network on board - what else does a corporate PC need?
What you need to do is use quality components from the beginning, all the way through your systems. That means a case that is easy to take apart, with good power supply (min 300W) - you are the one doing the repairs remember!
And try and get bulk discounts from suppliers if possible.
Another good idea is to have a few *really* powerful servers around to do the compiling on. I.e., dual athlon MP2000+'s with a SCSI raid array. This could obviate the need for new desktops for quite some time - maybe 6 months, maybe a year, if this is solution solves the problem.
Personally, I think that 400MHz should be more than fine. Your users have probably clogged up the hard drives with spyware, mp3 players and loads of crap. You might get a good return on simply wiping and rebuilding each machine from scratch (using an optimised ghost image or two), and locking down the machines from user interference. This solves the licence problem as well.
Also find out which of your users are Linux friendly and are willing to use it solely on the desktop (with the old 400MHz machine for Outlook and Word, if necessary). The research could come in handy down the line, and you can sneak Linux into the office for those users, and it might spread - saves money on Microsoft at any rate!
Emacs would be better because at least you can type stuff straight in after running it, and it has some menus, and saving files is simple ctrl key stuff. In vi, doing 'i' to start editing, and then wondering why the cursor doesn't wrap around at the end of lines, and then "esc", ":" "w" to save the file is just too much for these people. Vi isn't normal! vilearn is a good tutorial program, but these people are not here to learn Vi. Mention Vi as an editor available on every Unix system, mention that it is complicated, but they can use gvim as an OLE editor within Visual Studio...
Pico is suitable - it is easy to use and has a help system. In a GUI environment, just use gedit or kate or whatnot.
Overall I agree with the people that advocate showing what you can do with a Unix system, not how to do it. Show the development tools available, show the services available, etc. Show differences between Windows and Unix equivalents. Don't be evangelical about Unix, be realistic. Explain that the systems are different, and both have advantages and disadvantages...
Some of the people that make the claims are at least trying to find proof, although it would be helpful if they didn't claim that every submerged city was 8000 years old or so before any dating had been done!
That Yellowstone super-volcano is scheduled to erupt within the next few hundred years isn't it?
Say 10,000 years ago a group of 40 people left africa and went to india. Assume that there are two surviving offspring per person, and that a generation is 25 years. 40 people are not going to build a city, but 25 years later there are 120 people + children, 25 years after that 240 people + children, then ~500, then ~1000 and so on. A couple of hundred years and you have a need for several joined communities (10-20,000 people). Someone else can do the maths assuming a lifespan of around 40-50 years and more accurate survival rates for offspring, and maybe the generation gap was as low as every 15 years... add a few droughts and other population killers into the mix, and sell the result to Maxis.
Then you get climate changes which force the society to move to better climes, and this is what most likely makes leaps in development. If you have a mud house, then why make a wooden house or a stone house? But if you have no house and there is a lot of wood or stone lying around, then why not use these for building your new dwelling? Especially if the soil is not suitable for making mud houses! Necessity breeds invention?
Carving blocks of stone with wood or bone doesn't work! You need something that can carve that stone - perhaps harder stone like flint on softer stone? But not much would remain of a sandstone dwelling after 10,000 years! To cut decent stone that would last to today you need metal. And when did people find out how to make metal? People will be asking these questions for hundreds of years to come...
Maybe these cities were built close to the shore because they were mainly fish-eating people? Another argument goes that cities built inland would have been built by rivers, and that over a few thousand years river action (erosion, silting, etc) would basically cover most of the cities up. Imagine 100 years of the Mississippi getting free reign over the landscape basically - how much would remain afterwards?
And smaller communities would most likely still be built with wood. Maybe a stone temple or something - but you try finding a 4000 year old stone building that is most likely collapsed and buried under mud!
When you look at these things, you have to look at them with an open mind. I.e., never trust any previously held beliefs about the origin of mankind, etc, that modern civilisation has its roots only in the last few thousand years and before that we were ooga-booga cavemen...
The ice age would have made most temperate climates pretty unlivable in, so an ancient civilisations would have been much closer to the equator. We are talking south America thru mexico, cuba, africa (which has undergone a major climate change over the last 3000 years anyway), india, china, etc.
And there appears to be plenty of evidence suggesting older civilisations did develop. Shame is, they built most of their cities it seems under 120ft above sea level. Which would wipe out many major cities today, btw. The sea is an obvious food source, trading mechanism, etc.
The only people currently that are finding these things are people that the "archaelogical community" think of as weirdos. However these people are the only people who are actually willing to look for these places, so what do you expect. Maybe in 50 years time we will have a greater knowledge of mankinds recent origins and they will be accepted as the truth.
And for every honest "nutcase" there will be a dishonest "nutcase" as well - in any field. The existence of one person claiming 20,000 year old civilisations that turns out to not be true does not mean that there were never any 20,000 year old civilisations. However the current oldest claims are about 12,000 years old, in South America.
Other interesting things are that geneticists have worked out that ALL current human beings are descended from around 2,000 humans at a point around 80,000 years ago. Yes, 2,000, separated out into separate clusters around the planet (China, Africa, etc). That is why humanity is not like other animals like dogs for which there are a myriad of different shapes and forms.
Still, I don't think it will ever turn out that Atlantis is buried in deep ice on Antartica and is basically a giant stasis field generator for when the Sun does a 12,000 year pulsar cycle... :) Nor do I think that UFOs built Atlantis or that we are the descendents of an Alien civilisation that landed here so many aeons ago...
If Microsoft get $10 per game sold, then that would mean an XBox owner needing to buy 20 games over 3 years just to make back the loss.
I doubt that most XBox owners will buy more than 5 games a year to be honest - sure you will get the few game-a-month people, but they will not make up for the majority who will only buy the mostest bestest games available.
Microsoft cannot afford to cut the price of the XBox any further until product costs drop as well. Expect to see the XBox selling for $249 this Christmas, against $199 PS2's and $149 Gamecubes. Except the latter two will be at the break-even price or less from the start, so all game sales will be profit, whereas the XBox will still be being sold at a loss.
Sure, when the XBox II comes out with XBox compatibility then things will get interesting. That is 3 years away though - consumers will not like a console being upgraded every 2 years!
This chip is going to compete against the XScale processors primarily, and the other ARM based PDA processors as well from Motorola and TI. It is not going to be easy for AMD of course.
However if the processors are significantly more powerful than the previous two, then they have a good chance...
Basically, the problems are with KDM launching KDE 3 if you are running 8.1. I got TWM whenever I selected KDE 3 from KDM, this is a problem with the chksession script which fails for sessions with spaces in the names... you need to mess around with files in /etc/X11 as well.