Has MS finally given up supporting Alpha and made W2K completely single-architecture? NT was proclaimed to be architecture-independent when it first came out, but one by one all the ports to things like MIPS dropped away - leaving only the Alpha port (until now?)
> Region encoding benefits the average person because > movie studios can release a DVD while it is still in > theaters in other parts of the world. Without region > encoding, movie studios would have to wait until the > movie is done in all parts of the world before > releasing the DVD.
This argument is based upon a fallacy. There's no good reason why films should be released later in some regions than others. Obviously, it's worth doing trial runs of a film in a few cinemas in the US, to find out how marketable the film is. But once the film is released across the US, you have a very good idea of how it will do internationally. In the old days, the reason for this staggered release practise was that it took a lot of time to copy the film reels. But in today's world that excuse just doesn't hold water. It's now a method of getting more money out of non-US viewers (by lengthening the marketing cycle in those countries). Enforcing staggered releases (and dual-pricing) using DVD regional encoding is an anticompetitive practise which is against the spirit of international trade law. I see no benefit to anyone not employed by the media industry.
>I can kick the ass of very few people... like France
Err... France certainly has a more powerful army than the UK. It probably can't kick the asses of the USA, Russia or China but anybody else is fair game.
But you're right about ass-kicking not getting money back. The UK, at least, can be sued through the European Court and would probably have to pay up if found guilty. Although there is a world court, the chances of getting the US to cough up are negligable.
> [...] Win2k will require that you have perfectly > reliable hardware and software or even more BSOD's > will result.
Is there a circumstance when Linux will cope with dodgy hardware but NT will flake? I know that high end unices can detect and cope with broken hardware, but can linux do better than NT?
Sun are releasing Solaris 8 under a license which lets you obtain the source, but not distribute and modify it; so this license isn't Open Source (as certified by OSI) nor Free, as deined in the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
I.e. this is "free as in beer", not "free as in speech".
If Redhat's marketing make a thing about their installer being easy to use, and it blatantly isn't, then the poster might have a case. I don't think MS claim their *installer* is easy to use, so you probably can't get them on that.
> Itanium[...] like "titanium," but not quite -- > perhaps for their next processor Intel will be > inspired by "iron" and call it "Ron"
The next piece of Intel vapourware will be inspired by sodium and codenamed "Odium". It will have an undisableable serial number and a government-held backdoor password which overrides your security settings. In response to massive public outcry they will back down, and announce an alternative "Eon" chip, inspired by neon, which doesn't have a serial number and backdoor, but doesn't do very much very fast.
"Mond Linux is designed specifically for PCs attached to the University of Cambridge's PWF networks." (Unix Support home page, University Computing Service)
It's a centrally-administerable distribution. Each workstation has a UMSDOS root (which is checksummed on boot, for security) but gets most other stuff of a central server. This means the whole thing can be upgraded without having any access to the workstations, which is important because workstations may be geographically far apart, and since most of the time they run NT it wouldn't be possible for root to log in and make changes.
> At least its doing some good because other people are benefitting
The people who write the patch may be benefitting. Some of their users may be benefitting too. However, if anyone out there was thinking of making a free product that does this, then the existence of a freely-downloadable program which does the same thing has probably dented the number of developers they can get helping them. In other words, the existence of a proprietory product makes it harder for a free one to thrive. So if you allow proprietory derivatives, you may be hurting the free software community.
When I first glanced at this article, I just assumed that the licensing terms were the same as FreeBSD. I could easily have gone away assuming this; it's only when I read some comments I realised that it was non-free. A great many people will read the headline and assume that this is BSD-licensed stuff. Obviously if everyone was completely observant this wouldn't be a problem, but maybe the headline should have explicitly mentioned the licensing.
K = 2^10, M = 2^20, G = 2^30 etc.. k = 10^3, m = 10^6, g = 10^g etc..
As many people have pointed out, powers of two have no special meaning when refering to frequency, which is analogue, so there's no point in using big G. So the number will be 1.1 gHz (= 1.02 GHz). Also it's in AMD's interest to quote gHz because the number is higher!
The old maxim holds here. Any company with publically traded shares has a legal obligation to make as much profit as they're allowed. So all of them will start bad lawsuits given the right situation. We shouldn't support "MP3.com" here; instead we should support "the right to sell music you own in any format", which means that in this case we happen to be on MP3.com's side.
People who hated IBM in the old days often supported MS just because it was the underdog. They're not the underdog any more. MP3.com may not be the underdog one day. We should support their current policy, rather than the company per se.
The McLibel defendants may not have run up big legal bills (they represented themselves), but the strain of having McDonalds trying to crush you for several years must be enormous.
Corel's office suite is one of the three most popular office suites available (Lotus' is another one), though it is slowly getting hammered by MSOffice in the Windows market. As far as I know, all that Borland has which sells at all is some development tools, which are slowly getting hammered by MS in the Windows market.
Both companies have been unable to compete with MS on Windows. Both could potentially do well out of the Linux market. The new combined company must surely be relying on the Linux market for salvation.
I wonder if this means a big push for Borland Pascal/Delphi on Linux. Can someone who is familiar with Pascal say how GNU Pascal compares with Borland Pascal ATM?
Remember that Visual Basic was the big thing that got Windows a critical mass of apps (and some would say that "critical" describes many VB apps perfectly). Pascal on Linux *could* become popular, depending on Borland/Corel's marketing strategy.
$3 worth of Yen will buy you a lot less in Japan than $3 in America will. So $3 is not as expensive as it sounds. But you'd have to be stupid to pay $3 per *listen*.
That said, the price is still too high. The cost of getting a single into the shops in the high street is high, and there's a risk that you won't recoup your costs if sales are bad. The cost of putting a single online for download is approximately zero (plus some web page development, which will be good for *all* online sales) and there's no danger of not recouping this cost. I wonder what cut the artist gets of online sales? Still the same old 2%?
OTOH if online music sales in general take off then this is probably good for places like mp3.com who are giving artists decent percentages and not ripping the consumer off as much.
Sorry, I probably didn't explain myself clearly. I wasn't saying that all, or even most, Christians use the "God did it so we don't have to think about it" argument. I was just saying that the poster appeared to be using the argument on this occasion. Many top scientists are Christians who think hard about the creation question.
"God did it so we don't have to think any more" is not an acceptable answer. [Christians believe that] God makes atoms work, yet we have a good understanding of how they work, how they interact with other atoms, and how they can be created and destroyed through nuclear processes. Given a bucket of atoms, science has a very good understanding of how they will behave. In contrast, we don't know anything about the origins of life. We don't know where it started, when it started, whether it started more than once, whether it exists outside Earth, whether living organisms must have a body based upon chemical reactions, etc.. You may say "God created life" but you have no idea in what circumstances he created it. You don't know any more about it than an atheist who says life arose through processes he doesn't understand.
Just because you know[/believe] it was God's work, it doesn't mean you can stop trying to understand more.
... if the questions are as loaded as that. It means that at least 37% of the people polled have a strong enough negative opinion to answer "no" in spite of the large bias of the question. That means that with a bit of two-sided reporting, there's probably a big majority in *favour* of MS being split up.
Slashdot Mirror
Has MS finally given up supporting Alpha and made W2K completely single-architecture?
NT was proclaimed to be architecture-independent when it first came out, but one by one all the ports to things like MIPS dropped away - leaving only the Alpha port (until now?)
Error 503 forbidden.
> Region encoding benefits the average person because
> movie studios can release a DVD while it is still in
> theaters in other parts of the world. Without region
> encoding, movie studios would have to wait until the
> movie is done in all parts of the world before
> releasing the DVD.
This argument is based upon a fallacy. There's no good reason why films should be released later in some regions than others. Obviously, it's worth doing trial runs of a film in a few cinemas in the US, to find out how marketable the film is. But once the film is released across the US, you have a very good idea of how it will do internationally. In the old days, the reason for this staggered release practise was that it took a lot of time to copy the film reels. But in today's world that excuse just doesn't hold water. It's now a method of getting more money out of non-US viewers (by lengthening the marketing cycle in those countries). Enforcing staggered releases (and dual-pricing) using DVD regional encoding is an anticompetitive practise which is against the spirit of international trade law. I see no benefit to anyone not employed by the media industry.
>I can kick the ass of very few people ... like France
... France certainly has a more powerful army than the UK. It probably can't kick the asses of the USA, Russia or China but anybody else is fair game.
Err
But you're right about ass-kicking not getting money back. The UK, at least, can be sued through the European Court and would probably have to pay up if found guilty. Although there is a world court, the chances of getting the US to cough up are negligable.
> [...] Win2k will require that you have perfectly
> reliable hardware and software or even more BSOD's
> will result.
Is there a circumstance when Linux will cope with dodgy hardware but NT will flake? I know that high end unices can detect and cope with broken hardware, but can linux do better than NT?
Sun are releasing Solaris 8 under a license which lets you obtain the source, but not distribute and modify it; so this license isn't Open Source (as certified by OSI) nor Free, as deined in the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
I.e. this is "free as in beer", not "free as in speech".
If Redhat's marketing make a thing about their installer being easy to use, and it blatantly isn't, then the poster might have a case. I don't think MS claim their *installer* is easy to use, so you probably can't get them on that.
> Itanium[...] like "titanium," but not quite --
> perhaps for their next processor Intel will be
> inspired by "iron" and call it "Ron"
The next piece of Intel vapourware will be inspired by sodium and codenamed "Odium". It will have an undisableable serial number and a government-held backdoor password which overrides your security settings. In response to massive public outcry they will back down, and announce an alternative "Eon" chip, inspired by neon, which doesn't have a serial number and backdoor, but doesn't do very much very fast.
"Mond Linux is designed specifically for PCs attached to the University of Cambridge's PWF networks." (Unix Support home page, University Computing Service)
It's a centrally-administerable distribution. Each workstation has a UMSDOS root (which is checksummed on boot, for security) but gets most other stuff of a central server. This means the whole thing can be upgraded without having any access to the workstations, which is important because workstations may be geographically far apart, and since most of the time they run NT it wouldn't be possible for root to log in and make changes.
> At least its doing some good because other people are benefitting
The people who write the patch may be benefitting. Some of their users may be benefitting too. However, if anyone out there was thinking of making a free product that does this, then the existence of a freely-downloadable program which does the same thing has probably dented the number of developers they can get helping them. In other words, the existence of a proprietory product makes it harder for a free one to thrive. So if you allow proprietory derivatives, you may be hurting the free software community.
When I first glanced at this article, I just assumed that the licensing terms were the same as FreeBSD. I could easily have gone away assuming this; it's only when I read some comments I realised that it was non-free. A great many people will read the headline and assume that this is BSD-licensed stuff. Obviously if everyone was completely observant this wouldn't be a problem, but maybe the headline should have explicitly mentioned the licensing.
K = 2^10, M = 2^20, G = 2^30 etc..
k = 10^3, m = 10^6, g = 10^g etc..
As many people have pointed out, powers of two have no special meaning when refering to frequency, which is analogue, so there's no point in using big G. So the number will be 1.1 gHz (= 1.02 GHz). Also it's in AMD's interest to quote gHz because the number is higher!
The old maxim holds here. Any company with publically traded shares has a legal obligation to make as much profit as they're allowed. So all of them will start bad lawsuits given the right situation. We shouldn't support "MP3.com" here; instead we should support "the right to sell music you own in any format", which means that in this case we happen to be on MP3.com's side.
People who hated IBM in the old days often supported MS just because it was the underdog. They're not the underdog any more. MP3.com may not be the underdog one day. We should support their current policy, rather than the company per se.
The McLibel defendants may not have run up big legal bills (they represented themselves), but the strain of having McDonalds trying to crush you for several years must be enormous.
>There is no more such thing as privacy, kids.
Sure there is - just do all your outdoor activities under a big umbrella.
Corel's office suite is one of the three most popular office suites available (Lotus' is another one), though it is slowly getting hammered by MSOffice in the Windows market.
As far as I know, all that Borland has which sells at all is some development tools, which are slowly getting hammered by MS in the Windows market.
Both companies have been unable to compete with MS on Windows. Both could potentially do well out of the Linux market. The new combined company must surely be relying on the Linux market for salvation.
I wonder if this means a big push for Borland Pascal/Delphi on Linux. Can someone who is familiar with Pascal say how GNU Pascal compares with Borland Pascal ATM?
Remember that Visual Basic was the big thing that got Windows a critical mass of apps (and some would say that "critical" describes many VB apps perfectly). Pascal on Linux *could* become popular, depending on Borland/Corel's marketing strategy.
$3 worth of Yen will buy you a lot less in Japan than $3 in America will. So $3 is not as expensive as it sounds. But you'd have to be stupid to pay $3 per *listen*.
That said, the price is still too high. The cost of getting a single into the shops in the high street is high, and there's a risk that you won't recoup your costs if sales are bad. The cost of putting a single online for download is approximately zero (plus some web page development, which will be good for *all* online sales) and there's no danger of not recouping this cost. I wonder what cut the artist gets of online sales? Still the same old 2%?
OTOH if online music sales in general take off then this is probably good for places like mp3.com who are giving artists decent percentages and not ripping the consumer off as much.
though hopefully in real life they won't run "f***ing Windows 98" or invade Canada.
Sorry, I probably didn't explain myself clearly. I wasn't saying that all, or even most, Christians use the "God did it so we don't have to think about it" argument. I was just saying that the poster appeared to be using the argument on this occasion. Many top scientists are Christians who think hard about the creation question.
Yes. And soon PPC and ARM.
There's also Debian on HURD on Mach on i386 (!) available, but that's experimental.
2.2 Will also add Power PC and ARM. m68k and i386 both already available of course.
"God did it so we don't have to think any more" is not an acceptable answer. [Christians believe that] God makes atoms work, yet we have a good understanding of how they work, how they interact with other atoms, and how they can be created and destroyed through nuclear processes. Given a bucket of atoms, science has a very good understanding of how they will behave. In contrast, we don't know anything about the origins of life. We don't know where it started, when it started, whether it started more than once, whether it exists outside Earth, whether living organisms must have a body based upon chemical reactions, etc.. You may say "God created life" but you have no idea in what circumstances he created it. You don't know any more about it than an atheist who says life arose through processes he doesn't understand.
Just because you know[/believe] it was God's work, it doesn't mean you can stop trying to understand more.
... if the questions are as loaded as that. It means that at least 37% of the people polled have a strong enough negative opinion to answer "no" in spite of the large bias of the question. That means that with a bit of two-sided reporting, there's probably a big majority in *favour* of MS being split up.