The ones you saw at CompUSA were not free because they include documentation, etc. SO, since Sun bought them, has been free for use (free beer, not free speech), unless you wanted to redistribute. However, as of 13 Oct, SO 6.0 (now called OpenOffice) is dual licensed under the GPL/SISSL. You can find it at The Open Office website
Unfortunately, the person has no evidence to back up his claims. Now, let's take his point that a 4 person household could be met by 10 - 20 m2 of cells. Assuming 5KW for the household (i.e. they're efficient):
Solar power @ 1KW / m2 = 5 m2 to start with
Reduce by 50% for night, you're now to 10 m2
Reduce by another 50% (max 25% of total) due to weather (depends on area, it might be more or less), you're now at 20m2
Oops, these suckers are only (let's assume you grabbed the most efficient you could find) 25% efficient - you're now at 80m2.
Assuming you never have bad weather, you're at 40m2, which is double his high estimate - and that's a best case. Assuming his 10% efficiency, and you live in the NW or NE, you probably need 200m2 to power that house. Doable, but what's the cost to manufacture 200m2 of cells? What amount of energy goes into the manufacture? How long do they last (i.e. how often do you need to make new ones)?
And yes, I actually took a course in this in college. Solar cells are wonderful, but they're not the "silver bullet" - same with most things.
No, that's trademark law, or Unisys wouldn't be able to collect on GIF / LZW (which they didn't enforce for many years). Patents & Copyrights can be selectively enforced, not enforced, massively enforced, whatever, with no worries.
IANAL, but that's been the statement I've seen from many IP lawyers.
At an IBM show, I got shown the insides of an S/390 (one of the big ones, that was running right next to the baby S/390 running Linux). The MCM (containing, he said, 14 CPU's - twelve for processing & 2 system processors (main & spare)) is totally sealed. Thus, they have to use the software trick to turn on the CPUs. What they do is run some code on the system processors to activate the additional CPUs.
The really neat thing (from a HA stand-point) is they don't do this just to upgrade. Those system procs are there to control the module, including detecting failures. If they detect one of the CPUs failing, they switch in another one, and then phone home to let the IBM guys know they need to make a house call. So, you're running with 4 procs turned on, and one fails. The system swaps in a new one, reruns the program from failure point, and calls home. Your apps never notice that it got swapped on CPU!
They do similar tricks with memory, IO, and power. These suckers were made to stay up.
> I've heard that sound won't work for this reason and IBM refuses to release specs.
Talking to some of the IBM guys, the MWave (that modem thingie, also called a DSP, and much more than a modem) is jointly owned by IBM and another company. Thus, they cannot release the code without the other company's approval (and they're working on that, he said). What they can, they appear to be giving away. Check out JFS, Jikes, Linux/390, etc.
HA clusters are great when you have 24 copies of the program which can work on individual sections
of data and not have to report back or send results very often/fast, but they suck ass when you need the CPU's to be dependant on each other and what each other produces.
No, that's High Performance clusters, HA clusters is when you need another machine to take over when the active one fails, thus making it appear that the machine never went down (or very briefly). Both are clustering, but with very different requirements & techniques.
Interesting that you mention that, because every town I know of grants a monopoly franchise to the cable company. You're telling me all these towns are breaking the law?
BTW: I did a search on thomas, and the bill you talk about does nto forbid local governments from giving any monopoly franchises, but places limits on the abilities of local governments to govern rates on cable services, even if they are a monopoly in the area.
For High availability, I can name 2 products off the top of my head that are available now, work, and provide HA on Linux: Kimberlite (Open Source) and Convolo (Productized), both by Mission Critical LInux. Both enable you to build a cluster system that allows one node to take over the tasks of another node. Also, because it works in active-active mode, you can have both nodes working on different tasks (say database & NFS, or NFS & Samba), and the system will continue to work after failover, although at reduced performance.
The question before the court is whether MS broke the law. Whether the law is constitutional has been decided. Whether the law is absurd is for congress to decide, not the courts. That's the way the US constitution spells out the "separation of powers" (legislative, executive, judicial). And the monopoly MS has in on OS's sold with computers. Read the Finding of Fact, Finding of Law, Remedies, history of Anti-trust law, study the Constitution, and study the history of Law in the US.
BTW: Your first comment has earned you (after this) dumping in the bit-bucket. I understand very well passive resistance, and admire Martin Luthor King, Gandhi, and Rosa Parks. And, they recognized that by doing so, they risked imprisonment and punishment. For which I admire them. I also recognize that this case has nothing to do with moral rights, but with the power of a company to ignore the law. A well-known law enforced many times in the previous century. One supported by both liberals and conservatives. Your attempt to portray MS as being equivilent to the demonstrators at tianeman square is a sad indication of your level of thought.
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I will:
1. Monopoly in law does not mean 100%. MS is a monopoly, so found in Finding of Fact. Look up the history of Sherman & Clayton act, including all previous trials. No one (even Standard Oil) had 100%, and were still found guilty.
2. Despite what you might think, the Supreme Court (who have final say in it) has found that the Sherman & Clayton Acts are constitutional. Don't like it? Get Congress to repeal the Acts. Until then, they're the law of the land. (btw: whether other laws are legal or not isn't the issue, it's whether the Sherman & Clayton Acts are. Nice try at redirection).
3. Regardless of what others do, it's Microsoft on trial, Microsoft that is charged. If you believe others are violating the Sherman & Clayton Acts, talk to the Justice Department.
1. Linux is not a monopoly, MS is (read Finding of Fact).
2. Linux companies do not necessarily make the telnet et al that are bundled. MS makes all of their pieces (i.e. if they had bundled IE, Netscape, maybe Opera, and set it up so that you could choose whichever one you wanted, they wouldn't be accused of bundling)
3. Sherman & Clayton Acts (approximately 100 years old, it isn't new law).
4. They actively sought to use their monopoly to put competition out of business (Read Findings of Fact). This is what they're accused of, not having a monopoly (which is legal).
IBM (and the fact that its PC could be cloned) put a PC in something well under 75% of the homes in america. Gate's OS rode the wave. Gates took credit for the wave.
In terms of Linux, he copied Unix - and made it free (speech) which was his real innovation
Quite often Ive found that their problem is related to installing one or more programs and trying to use them without rebooting, if the programs updated windows dll's during install, often a reboot is necessary to force the OS to recognize the new code.
Two questions:
1. Why is a program installing updated windows dll's for any reason? If it needs them, it should let the installer know so he can get them - NEVER MESS WITH MY SYSTEM
2. If it's not installing updated dlls's, why do you need a reboot - isn't everything installed in the program's directory & listed in the configuration file?
Oh, I forgot, this is Windows - a single user OS where apps are part of the OS.
Again, reboot MASKS the issue, not fixes it. Unfortunately, from what you said, the real problem is Windows. Fortunately, the fix is Linux.
Actually, Domino is a workgroup product, which requies DB and e-mail / messaging. Workgroup products are designed to build automated workflow (i.e. in enrolling a new employee, HR needs to put in some info, the forms need to be routed to sysadmin to create accounts, payroll for to creatae pay stuff, etc. Workflow systems automatically route all the data, use a database to centralize storage for queries, and use e-mails for notification of need to do action). As such, it's a great product. However, that also means all of it's e-mail is heavily overloaded, so it basically sucks.
Of course, it would be better if they would design it / redesign it to work with standard mail interfaces, so you could plug in any e-mail system.
It waives accountability for those who put their money in and HAVE NO RESPONSIBILITY IN THE RUNNING OF THE COMPANY. I.e. the average shareholder does not handle day-to-day decisions. However, as I remember from my one course in contract law, the board, president, and other officers are accountable, and can go to jail.
no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
This is about representation in the senate (i.e. how many they have vs how many other states have). They would still have that. Electoral college may be based on reps + senators, but that doesn't mean senators vote for the Electors.
Unfortunately, my gutenberg links to the U.S. constitution are down at the moment, but I don't recall the electoral votes being in the senate part, but in the president part. Very different.
IANAL, but WTF?
Yes, electoral votes are based on (House + Senate), but allowing direct election of the President IN NO WAY changes the fact that each state gets 2 Senators. So, in no way can that clause of the Constitution apply to this situation.
> To do voice control you need fairly low level hooks in the gui
Interesting you should mention that. I saw a talk by Jim Gettys earlier this year (he was one of the developers of X). He showed a videotape of adding speech control to X - 7 or 8 years ago!
The reason it can be done is because X was designed under the assumption that they didn't know everything, so they made it easily extensible. They also kicked policy upstairs, so you can layer whatever policy you want on it.
The wonders of knowing what you don't know - you end up with good design because you HAVE to layer / modularize.
Which is what the (non-profit) after Debian was about. Still waiting for someone to name 3 companies (or even a non-profit) with similar access to and ability to modify Windows 2000 Source code.
but there are a lot more available options for support (well-documented, as well as "speaking to a human" options) for Microsoft products than Open Source stuff.
OK, name me three companies besides MS that will fix a kernel problem for you in Windows 2000. As in, they have the source, can make the fix, and get the fix resubmitted for inclusion in the next version of MS Windows 2000.
Yes, it does scan the ENTIRE registry at bootup & program load. Back when I used to use Windows, I discovered that if I nuked the entire setup, reinstall from scratch Windows & all apps, it speeded things up. One example: One time I did this, the registry went from 1.9MB to 800KB. I ended up with the exact same apps installed, yet cut over 1MB out of the registry. Why? Obvously kruft. Bootup time dropped considerably, program load by about 1/4.
Of course, if you nuke the registry, you're shafted as well.
(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED- (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
So one paragraph says you can't, and the next says your rights to do it are not affected. Now the courts get to decide which paragraphs rule.
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The ones you saw at CompUSA were not free because they include documentation, etc. SO, since Sun bought them, has been free for use (free beer, not free speech), unless you wanted to redistribute. However, as of 13 Oct, SO 6.0 (now called OpenOffice) is dual licensed under the GPL/SISSL. You can find it at The Open Office website
Unfortunately, the person has no evidence to back up his claims. Now, let's take his point that a 4 person household could be met by 10 - 20 m2 of cells. Assuming 5KW for the household (i.e. they're efficient):
Solar power @ 1KW / m2 = 5 m2 to start with
Reduce by 50% for night, you're now to 10 m2
Reduce by another 50% (max 25% of total) due to weather (depends on area, it might be more or less), you're now at 20m2
Oops, these suckers are only (let's assume you grabbed the most efficient you could find) 25% efficient - you're now at 80m2.
Assuming you never have bad weather, you're at 40m2, which is double his high estimate - and that's a best case. Assuming his 10% efficiency, and you live in the NW or NE, you probably need 200m2 to power that house. Doable, but what's the cost to manufacture 200m2 of cells? What amount of energy goes into the manufacture? How long do they last (i.e. how often do you need to make new ones)?
And yes, I actually took a course in this in college. Solar cells are wonderful, but they're not the "silver bullet" - same with most things.
No, that's trademark law, or Unisys wouldn't be able to collect on GIF / LZW (which they didn't enforce for many years). Patents & Copyrights can be selectively enforced, not enforced, massively enforced, whatever, with no worries.
IANAL, but that's been the statement I've seen from many IP lawyers.
At an IBM show, I got shown the insides of an S/390 (one of the big ones, that was running right next to the baby S/390 running Linux). The MCM (containing, he said, 14 CPU's - twelve for processing & 2 system processors (main & spare)) is totally sealed. Thus, they have to use the software trick to turn on the CPUs. What they do is run some code on the system processors to activate the additional CPUs.
The really neat thing (from a HA stand-point) is they don't do this just to upgrade. Those system procs are there to control the module, including detecting failures. If they detect one of the CPUs failing, they switch in another one, and then phone home to let the IBM guys know they need to make a house call. So, you're running with 4 procs turned on, and one fails. The system swaps in a new one, reruns the program from failure point, and calls home. Your apps never notice that it got swapped on CPU!
They do similar tricks with memory, IO, and power. These suckers were made to stay up.
> I've heard that sound won't work for this reason and IBM refuses to release specs.
Talking to some of the IBM guys, the MWave (that modem thingie, also called a DSP, and much more than a modem) is jointly owned by IBM and another company. Thus, they cannot release the code without the other company's approval (and they're working on that, he said). What they can, they appear to be giving away. Check out JFS, Jikes, Linux/390, etc.
No, that's High Performance clusters, HA clusters is when you need another machine to take over when the active one fails, thus making it appear that the machine never went down (or very briefly). Both are clustering, but with very different requirements & techniques.
Interesting that you mention that, because every town I know of grants a monopoly franchise to the cable company. You're telling me all these towns are breaking the law?
BTW: I did a search on thomas, and the bill you talk about does nto forbid local governments from giving any monopoly franchises, but places limits on the abilities of local governments to govern rates on cable services, even if they are a monopoly in the area.
For High availability, I can name 2 products off the top of my head that are available now, work, and provide HA on Linux: Kimberlite (Open Source) and Convolo (Productized), both by Mission Critical LInux. Both enable you to build a cluster system that allows one node to take over the tasks of another node. Also, because it works in active-active mode, you can have both nodes working on different tasks (say database & NFS, or NFS & Samba), and the system will continue to work after failover, although at reduced performance.
The question before the court is whether MS broke the law. Whether the law is constitutional has been decided. Whether the law is absurd is for congress to decide, not the courts. That's the way the US constitution spells out the "separation of powers" (legislative, executive, judicial). And the monopoly MS has in on OS's sold with computers. Read the Finding of Fact, Finding of Law, Remedies, history of Anti-trust law, study the Constitution, and study the history of Law in the US.
BTW: Your first comment has earned you (after this) dumping in the bit-bucket. I understand very well passive resistance, and admire Martin Luthor King, Gandhi, and Rosa Parks. And, they recognized that by doing so, they risked imprisonment and punishment. For which I admire them. I also recognize that this case has nothing to do with moral rights, but with the power of a company to ignore the law. A well-known law enforced many times in the previous century. One supported by both liberals and conservatives. Your attempt to portray MS as being equivilent to the demonstrators at tianeman square is a sad indication of your level of thought.
I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I will:
1. Monopoly in law does not mean 100%. MS is a monopoly, so found in Finding of Fact. Look up the history of Sherman & Clayton act, including all previous trials. No one (even Standard Oil) had 100%, and were still found guilty.
2. Despite what you might think, the Supreme Court (who have final say in it) has found that the Sherman & Clayton Acts are constitutional. Don't like it? Get Congress to repeal the Acts. Until then, they're the law of the land. (btw: whether other laws are legal or not isn't the issue, it's whether the Sherman & Clayton Acts are. Nice try at redirection).
3. Regardless of what others do, it's Microsoft on trial, Microsoft that is charged. If you believe others are violating the Sherman & Clayton Acts, talk to the Justice Department.
1. Linux is not a monopoly, MS is (read Finding of Fact).
2. Linux companies do not necessarily make the telnet et al that are bundled. MS makes all of their pieces (i.e. if they had bundled IE, Netscape, maybe Opera, and set it up so that you could choose whichever one you wanted, they wouldn't be accused of bundling)
3. Sherman & Clayton Acts (approximately 100 years old, it isn't new law).
4. They actively sought to use their monopoly to put competition out of business (Read Findings of Fact). This is what they're accused of, not having a monopoly (which is legal).
want me to continue?
IBM (and the fact that its PC could be cloned) put a PC in something well under 75% of the homes in america. Gate's OS rode the wave. Gates took credit for the wave.
In terms of Linux, he copied Unix - and made it free (speech) which was his real innovation
Two questions:
1. Why is a program installing updated windows dll's for any reason? If it needs them, it should let the installer know so he can get them - NEVER MESS WITH MY SYSTEM
2. If it's not installing updated dlls's, why do you need a reboot - isn't everything installed in the program's directory & listed in the configuration file?
Oh, I forgot, this is Windows - a single user OS where apps are part of the OS.
Again, reboot MASKS the issue, not fixes it. Unfortunately, from what you said, the real problem is Windows. Fortunately, the fix is Linux.
Actually, Domino is a workgroup product, which requies DB and e-mail / messaging. Workgroup products are designed to build automated workflow (i.e. in enrolling a new employee, HR needs to put in some info, the forms need to be routed to sysadmin to create accounts, payroll for to creatae pay stuff, etc. Workflow systems automatically route all the data, use a database to centralize storage for queries, and use e-mails for notification of need to do action). As such, it's a great product. However, that also means all of it's e-mail is heavily overloaded, so it basically sucks.
Of course, it would be better if they would design it / redesign it to work with standard mail interfaces, so you could plug in any e-mail system.
It waives accountability for those who put their money in and HAVE NO RESPONSIBILITY IN THE RUNNING OF THE COMPANY. I.e. the average shareholder does not handle day-to-day decisions. However, as I remember from my one course in contract law, the board, president, and other officers are accountable, and can go to jail.
Yep, let's keep the government out. No enforcement of patent, copyright, contract law, etc.
Oh, you only want the laws you DISAGREE with enforced?
This is about representation in the senate (i.e. how many they have vs how many other states have). They would still have that. Electoral college may be based on reps + senators, but that doesn't mean senators vote for the Electors.
Unfortunately, my gutenberg links to the U.S. constitution are down at the moment, but I don't recall the electoral votes being in the senate part, but in the president part. Very different.
IANAL, but WTF?
Yes, electoral votes are based on (House + Senate), but allowing direct election of the President IN NO WAY changes the fact that each state gets 2 Senators. So, in no way can that clause of the Constitution apply to this situation.
> To do voice control you need fairly low level hooks in the gui
Interesting you should mention that. I saw a talk by Jim Gettys earlier this year (he was one of the developers of X). He showed a videotape of adding speech control to X - 7 or 8 years ago!
The reason it can be done is because X was designed under the assumption that they didn't know everything, so they made it easily extensible. They also kicked policy upstairs, so you can layer whatever policy you want on it.
The wonders of knowing what you don't know - you end up with good design because you HAVE to layer / modularize.
Which is what the (non-profit) after Debian was about. Still waiting for someone to name 3 companies (or even a non-profit) with similar access to and ability to modify Windows 2000 Source code.
OK, name me three companies besides MS that will fix a kernel problem for you in Windows 2000. As in, they have the source, can make the fix, and get the fix resubmitted for inclusion in the next version of MS Windows 2000.
Here are three Linux companies that can do that:
Plus, you can hire whomever you want (including that really great programmer you know) to fix Linux for you.
Yes, it does scan the ENTIRE registry at bootup & program load. Back when I used to use Windows, I discovered that if I nuked the entire setup, reinstall from scratch Windows & all apps, it speeded things up. One example: One time I did this, the registry went from 1.9MB to 800KB. I ended up with the exact same apps installed, yet cut over 1MB out of the registry. Why? Obvously kruft. Bootup time dropped considerably, program load by about 1/4.
Of course, if you nuke the registry, you're shafted as well.
You're right, I got my angry senators mixed up. Hatch is the one who does music, helped author this stuff, and now is being told what he thought.
And a few paragraphs down:
(c) OTHER RIGHTS, ETC., NOT AFFECTED- (1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
So one paragraph says you can't, and the next says your rights to do it are not affected. Now the courts get to decide which paragraphs rule.