I don't know much about Go, but I do know that computers are getting faster and faster, and eventually it will just be a matter of time beforee Go can be "brute-forced". I don't know how long it will take, but it will happen eventually.
Telephone companies basically still have a monopoly. But the bottom line is that there's only one twisted-pair wire going to your house. Someone has to maintain it. Other phone companies can sell phone service over the teleco's wires, but that hasn't caught on. If you have different companies trying to serve the same people in the same area, you're going to have mass confusion. The system wasn't set up to work that way, and getting it to work that way will take lots of money. The government has to do a decent job of regulating the monopolies.
Electricity is only slightly different. You only have one source of electricity going to your house. It would cost A LOT of money to run new wires to your house so you could use someone else's electricity. And no one wants two ugly wires in their backyard instead of one. It's not really worth it to set up a new grid, the money would be better spent upgrading the current one. And as far as blackouts go, things like that happen, but not very often. Let's see, their power was out for 24 (maybe a little more) hours. That's 24 hours out of roughly how many hours per year? It's good reliability, and I doubt you could really get much better. Weird things can happen, and the equipment is designed to shut off rather than risk getting fried. Sometimes things don't work quite the way they're supposed to, but it's not like they could test the stuff (oh, sorry about that last blackout, we were just testing stuff. It didn't really have to happen, but we needed to see what would happen if you got a real blackout.)
The two days of training may not seem significant. But you have to realize that most people already know how to use MS office/outlook by using it at home or school, so by the time they get in the workforce they don't need training. For Linux, they will need a day or two of training.
BTW, anyone have a link to Ximian desktop? I use Ximian evolution for email, and think it's a nice program. I tried Thunderbird, but it's still not quite there yet (I know it's only 0.1 or something, but I want something that works, not something I have to bug-test)
I've read some of the comments, and most people don't seem to get it. 99% of kids don't WANT to learn C, C++, terminal usage, etc... To most of the kids in school, computer = WINDOWS. They've heard of Mac, maybe Linux, but they don't care. And for the most part, windows is what will be used in whatever their future job is. The small portion of people who want to use linux will use it at home, and have no problems switching to windows at school.
At my school (high school), there are a kabillion windows machines. The newspaper area uses macs, but other than that, it's all windows. People know how to use it. Computers are almost like cars these days. You don't have to know how an engine works to drive a car. Most peole don't want to know how the engine works, they just know "there's the steering wheel, the brake's on the left, gas is on the right, and the shifter is somewhere". Like it or not, Windows is by far the most dominant operating system on desktops today, and that isn't likely to change. People don't care what OS is on their computer, and they'll take whatever the manufactor gives them.
I wonder what SCO's claims are. I highly doubt that the AIX kernal and Linux kernal are similar enough to simply use the same code. So IBM would have had to do a rewrite of their code, or use an entirely different codebase. If the codebases are entirely different, then SCO can't claim it's a derivative work, because although they do the same thing, it's different code. If they did a rewrite, I'm not sure what the legal standing would be, if it's still AIX code, or if it's not.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and I don't know very much about the AIX or Linux kernals, but these are my best guesses.
You hit it right on. These people have been 'needing' better water, health care, etc for years. It's not like they don't have any water or health care, but it's certaintly not up to par with the developed world.
Education is the one thing that will help these villages succeed. If they know how to do more, and farm better, then the assumption is that they will make more money. If the people in the village have more money, then they will be able to modernize their village. Modern water and healthcare arent' cheap, and they don't appear on their own. The kiosks won't directly help this (you can't teleport the stuff over the kiosk), but it will help by education the people of the village so that they can make more money.
Their case is a contract dispute with IBM. IBM wrote RCU (among other things) and placed the code (which IBM owned) under the GPL so that it could be a part of Linux.
They also placed the code in AIX. SCO claims their contract with IBM says that any code that is put into SysV code becomes THEIRS. Based on that claim, SCO says that they own the RCU code, and that they don't want it to be GPL'd.
I don't know if anyone at SCO really is sure what their case is about. If I'm correct about what their case is about, the FSF has a very good defamation (and probably more severe charges, but IANAL) suit against SCO. The case has nothing to with the valadility of the GPL, or even code being copied into Linux. If I'm right about their case, then everyone knows that that code was put into Linux, and SCO is saying that it shouldn't have been put into Linux.
Even if they win, I think there's an excellent lawsuit against SCO. They're dragging this on, and spreading a bunch of crap, which is unnecessary. IANAL, but from the eleventy-billion SCO articles that have been run in Slashdot, I think I might be correct.
The other issue is, can they copyright the SysV code? How much of it is code that was fought over in ATT vs Berkely? I bet that 99.9% of this code is already copyright, and SCO can't go re-copyrighting it. Someone (*coughIBMFSFcough*) has to challenge this, and force them to show their code. We'd have to pick some programmers (not kernel developers, etc, because they would be come "tainted") to look at it and evaluate the claims.
The battle between Microsoft and Linux isn't necessarily about cost. Sure, that may be a factor, but the most important thing is the quality of the program. That is Linux's strongest point, although total cost is another strong point of Linux. If Microsoft makes CE shared-source, and improves CE so that it truly is better than Linux or some other open source OS for embedded systems, then they deserve to win. On the other hand, if Linux is better, than it deserves to win. It's all about the best tool for the job. My guess is that WinCE will continue to maintain a good hold on the PDA market for the same reason they have a stranglehold on the desktop marked (everyone knows how to use it), but for other embedded devices, Linux or any other OS will probably do much better.
Microsoft seems to be (slowly) improving their code stability, and now they just need to add security. If they really focused on building a solid OS instead of bells and whisles, they would probably be able to have something equivalent to Linux. Above cost, we should be pushing "Linux is a solid OS" to people who are debating between Linux and Windows.
Although Open Source may be morally better than closed-source, when it comes down to running a program, if the closed-source version is better, and at a reasonable cost, I'll take it over the OSS alternative. We have to realize that people aren't OSS purists, and to the end user, the fact that the source is open doesn't directly affect them (they're not going to go reading the source and change it. They want it to work out of the box).
Great! You replaced their interpreted languages with C! But...
What's the lowly webpage designer going to do when *gasp* they want to change a page? Are they going to have to go down into C source, and have to change it? The webpage designer probably is going to really screw things up becuase the page needs changing. C may be fast, but for webpage design, it's probably not the right tool. If you have a half-decent server (Resin, for example), Java's not going to be slow. And JSP is going to be MUCH easier to maintain that C.
And as far as black-and-white graphics, I hope the site still looks good... There are other image optimizations that you can do, and that's probably made some of the difference.
The article states that RF devices may induce currents in airplane wiring. I'm not sure how much commercial airliners cost, but I know it's probably well over 50 million. How much would it cost to use fiber optics instead of twisted-pair wiring? I'm sure relative to the cost of the airplane, it wouldn't be much, and that would eliminate having interference with the wires that must be run throughout the aircraft.
I don't know how much of the concern has to do with the computers themselves recieving interference, but I don't think it's that much. People use cell phones around computers all the time, and I don't think it causes any problems.
The only problem left then is potential interference with airplane navagation and communication systems. Again, the most critical times are when it's closest to the ground (takeoff and landing), but in those environments, I'd expect there to be a lot of cell phone usage by people in the airport, and that would (probably) cause as much interference as people in the plane.
The pilots and flight attendants that are blaming malfunctions on passenger RF interference aren't qualified to talk about it. They say "plane is having problems, passenger is using laptop, therefore laptop is causing problems". They don't have a clue what does and doesn't cause interference, and you'd have to get someone who knows the subject to tell me that that's the case before I'll believe it.
They may be making some money off of their Airfones, but I doubt they make much. On most recent flights that I've been on on typical airlines (Northwestern, ATA, Delta), I haven't seen the Airfones, and these weren't old planes.
On the other hand, if they could allow cell phones, that would probably bring in quite a few more ticket sales. "Fly (insert airline here), because you can use your cell phone on our flight!"
Don't think that that applies to just Bush. The higher a politician is, the harder it is to contact them. That applies to BOTH parties, not just whatever one you don't like.
Well, you have to think about the data for a second. It's basically saying that 2 G5 @ 2GHz are about the same as two P4's, 2.66GHz. That's not much of a biggie. The parts that you have bolded show that you didn't think about it. You're saying that 2 processors kick the butt of one processor. That's not suprising, that's what should have happened.
Basically, these numbers tell me that for the test run, P4's are roughly equal to a G5. Of course, it's the P4 at 2.66GHz that's equal to the 2GHz G5, but that can kinda be expected, because Intel seems to focus on processor speed (which is what sells the processors), instead of preformance/speed. And if you consider the cost, then the P4 wins hands-down.
I'm sure you can argue that for some things, the G5 is much faster than the P4, but you'd have to show me the tests that indicated that (as well as how you got them). Statistics can say anything you want them to.
Selling drugs (in less than certain amounts), most assault, and most other crimes are misdeminors(sp?). There's a HUGE difference between a misdeminor and a felony. I'm no criminal law expert, but here are some differences I can come up with off the top of my head: 1) A felonly sentence is longer than a misdeminor sentence. 2) Once you're out of jail, your chances of getting a job, etc go way down. 3) Felons can't vote, buy guns, run for office, and lots of other stuff.
So I'd say that selling drugs is FAR more lenient than what p2p would be under the new law. Copyright should have lighter prison sentences and stiffer fines, because by violating copyright, you've deprived the copyright owner of money, and other than that, no one gets hurt. Many, many people get hurt and killed dealing drugs. No one's gotten physically hurt from copyright infringement.
As has been said before, the Linux deal is cheaper in the long run. Most of the 36million is probably going to go to training people to use Linux, as well as be a Linux sysadmin. In several years, when they want to upgrade again, the sysadmins go download the latest release of Linux, and install it all, for virtually no cost other than labor. With Linux, the cost is mostly labor, the "parts" other than hardware (which will be the same for Linux or Windows) don't cost very much.
With Microsoft, it's the other way around. With Windows Update etc, it doesn't take as skilled (read: as expensive) of an admin to run the boxes. However, while the labor may be cheaper, the "parts" (software licenses) are much more expensive.
Frankly, if you're proNASA you're pretty much a communist- (no I'm not trolling, not everything that seems controversial is a troll) NASA is run by the country 'for the good of the country'. I don't want that. I want launching into space to be done for profit, not because they want to be nice to everyone. Being nice does not scale like profit motive does. We need to scale space up to put a reasonable number of people into space, you and me.
That's not exactly correct. By saying that, you're saying that supporting the government at all is bad, because most of what the government does is 'for the good of the country'. If you want to get spacefight done, or at least develop spacecraft, it requires A LOT of money. It requires a lot of money to develop the spacecraft, which is before you would have any profits. Private companies aren't going to be able to run for 5-6 years without a profit to develop a spacecraft and test it without running out of money. The government doesn't have to worry about profits, so theoritacilly (sp?) it can fund the research and development of new spacecraft.
Funding is the reason NASA isn't doing so hot. It doesn't get enough money to fund the Space Shuttle, unmanned spaceflight, and development of new spacecraft. Saying "we'll just cut the shuttle" won't work, because after the shuttle gets cut, NASA loses that money, and then they're no better off than they were before, except that they don't have the thing that they're best known for. The author of the article doesn't make this point: If NASA could spend as much money on research as the military does, (or even half that amount), we'd probably already have a Shuttle replacement.
Re:Decent book review
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All The Rave
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There's a big difference between the library and file-sharing. If I download a file off of kazaa, then I can use it, and the person who originally had it can use it two. That means two people are using the program, and the company was only paid for one copy of the program.
If I check a book out of the library, then no one else can use the book at the same time. One copy paid for, and only one copy is being used. I agree, in some ways they are the same, but in many ways they are different.
Slashdot polls! That's right, during the second Tuesday in November (I think??), the Slashdot poll will be: "Who will be president for the next four years?". Everyone who wants to vote will need to pick one of the choices (when it's multiple choice, you've got to pick one, tough). Choices will be: 1) Geroge Bush Jr. 2) (insert your favorite democrat here) 3) CowboyNeal runs my world, thank you very much.
No one is sure who will win, but CowboyNeal has a history of being popular in polls.
If they're relying on security-through-obscurity by running it on Windows and not releasing the source, the Slashdot poll will probably be about as secure. There are already people out there who have developed crytographic systems for voting, and because the source to the program will presumably be closed-source, it probably won't be very good. Voting isn't hard, and if you can't tell who you're voting for, it's not the voting machine's fault, IT'S YOURS!!!
These are all problems that affect individual servers. If you have the money to keep a site up and running for 500+ days, chances are you have load balancing and more than one server. If one server dies, and you have it set up right, you won't have any downtime. You can also take time to do mantainance on one server, and the other servers can pick up the slack.
If one machine dieing brought down Google, they'd probably be constantly down with the number of machines they have. However, they have enough machines, and it's set up correctly, so that it doesn't matter if just one dies.
I disagree with your suggestion for switching to C++ from Java because Java is controlled by Sun, which is now a new Evil Company. There's a fairly large community of Java developers, and there's IBM who writes their own tools. Although Sun controls the specs, other people implement it too, so that's not a concern.
For some things (like large webpages), Java is an excellent tool, and I wouldn't want to write a webpage in C++.
JSP and Servlets are complimentary, as said before. It's much much easier to put business logic inside a servlet. However, even if you're doing something other than out.println() in a servlet, making the HTML is still awkward, and much more difficult to change around. The other disadvantage is that it's quite difficult to quickly glance through the code and see what the page is going to produce.
Servlets should be used for things like handling form submissions, and then they should pass it on to a JSP page to present the results.
With JSP, it's a good idea to put almost no code in the page. The best thing to do is to write a tag that does what the code would do. It takes a little longer to write the code, but it saves time becuase it's easier to debug, and it can be used in different pages.
However, the ability to put code in JSP pages is frequently abused by people who don't know better, and that does result in mangled pages.
For the copyrights to be the same, it has to be in SCO's code as well as Linux's code. If it's a GPL, they can't claim "well, they copied our code and slapped a GPL on it" because the GPL or whatever copyright would be in their code too. I highly doubt they're that stupid. I bet the guy who commented on it just had absolutely no clue what he was talking about, and just regurgitated whatever the SCO guy told him.
This guy who commented on the sutff he was shown is obviously a non-programmer, or at least someone unfamiler with the Linux kernal. "Central Module"??? I thought (I may be mistaken) that someone else had said that the "code copying" wasn't in the kernal core, but that it was in something that wasn't as significant.
The court's ruling was correct, there isn't much legal backing for the case. It's more of a case that the adware programs are being general iddiots, and companies don't like it. We just need to start getting more people to download AdAware etc so that they can get a rid of these programs. Or, someone should hack the adware sites so they put an ad over Microsoft's web page. Then Microsoft will hear about it, get pissed, and start bundling some kind of program to get a rid of the AdWare (just hope that it's not DRM).
IBM does have a lot of patents. However, I doubt (I may be wrong, though) that many of them are "dumb" patents. By "dumb" patents, I mean things like one-click shopping, etc... I'm willing to be that IBM's patents are for real innovation, not thinking of something that's already implemented and patenting it. The laws in Europe are laws that will allow more of these dumb patents, and IBM wants to prevent that. IBM will still continue to get their patents on real innovation.
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I don't know much about Go, but I do know that computers are getting faster and faster, and eventually it will just be a matter of time beforee Go can be "brute-forced". I don't know how long it will take, but it will happen eventually.
DC can't be easily transmitted over long distances, that's why AC is used for the power grid instead of DC.
Telephone companies basically still have a monopoly. But the bottom line is that there's only one twisted-pair wire going to your house. Someone has to maintain it. Other phone companies can sell phone service over the teleco's wires, but that hasn't caught on. If you have different companies trying to serve the same people in the same area, you're going to have mass confusion. The system wasn't set up to work that way, and getting it to work that way will take lots of money. The government has to do a decent job of regulating the monopolies.
Electricity is only slightly different. You only have one source of electricity going to your house. It would cost A LOT of money to run new wires to your house so you could use someone else's electricity. And no one wants two ugly wires in their backyard instead of one. It's not really worth it to set up a new grid, the money would be better spent upgrading the current one. And as far as blackouts go, things like that happen, but not very often. Let's see, their power was out for 24 (maybe a little more) hours. That's 24 hours out of roughly how many hours per year? It's good reliability, and I doubt you could really get much better. Weird things can happen, and the equipment is designed to shut off rather than risk getting fried. Sometimes things don't work quite the way they're supposed to, but it's not like they could test the stuff (oh, sorry about that last blackout, we were just testing stuff. It didn't really have to happen, but we needed to see what would happen if you got a real blackout.)
The two days of training may not seem significant. But you have to realize that most people already know how to use MS office/outlook by using it at home or school, so by the time they get in the workforce they don't need training. For Linux, they will need a day or two of training.
BTW, anyone have a link to Ximian desktop? I use Ximian evolution for email, and think it's a nice program. I tried Thunderbird, but it's still not quite there yet (I know it's only 0.1 or something, but I want something that works, not something I have to bug-test)
I've read some of the comments, and most people don't seem to get it. 99% of kids don't WANT to learn C, C++, terminal usage, etc... To most of the kids in school, computer = WINDOWS. They've heard of Mac, maybe Linux, but they don't care. And for the most part, windows is what will be used in whatever their future job is. The small portion of people who want to use linux will use it at home, and have no problems switching to windows at school.
At my school (high school), there are a kabillion windows machines. The newspaper area uses macs, but other than that, it's all windows. People know how to use it. Computers are almost like cars these days. You don't have to know how an engine works to drive a car. Most peole don't want to know how the engine works, they just know "there's the steering wheel, the brake's on the left, gas is on the right, and the shifter is somewhere". Like it or not, Windows is by far the most dominant operating system on desktops today, and that isn't likely to change. People don't care what OS is on their computer, and they'll take whatever the manufactor gives them.
I wonder what SCO's claims are. I highly doubt that the AIX kernal and Linux kernal are similar enough to simply use the same code. So IBM would have had to do a rewrite of their code, or use an entirely different codebase. If the codebases are entirely different, then SCO can't claim it's a derivative work, because although they do the same thing, it's different code. If they did a rewrite, I'm not sure what the legal standing would be, if it's still AIX code, or if it's not.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and I don't know very much about the AIX or Linux kernals, but these are my best guesses.
You hit it right on. These people have been 'needing' better water, health care, etc for years. It's not like they don't have any water or health care, but it's certaintly not up to par with the developed world.
Education is the one thing that will help these villages succeed. If they know how to do more, and farm better, then the assumption is that they will make more money. If the people in the village have more money, then they will be able to modernize their village. Modern water and healthcare arent' cheap, and they don't appear on their own. The kiosks won't directly help this (you can't teleport the stuff over the kiosk), but it will help by education the people of the village so that they can make more money.
Their case is a contract dispute with IBM. IBM wrote RCU (among other things) and placed the code (which IBM owned) under the GPL so that it could be a part of Linux.
They also placed the code in AIX. SCO claims their contract with IBM says that any code that is put into SysV code becomes THEIRS. Based on that claim, SCO says that they own the RCU code, and that they don't want it to be GPL'd.
I don't know if anyone at SCO really is sure what their case is about. If I'm correct about what their case is about, the FSF has a very good defamation (and probably more severe charges, but IANAL) suit against SCO. The case has nothing to with the valadility of the GPL, or even code being copied into Linux. If I'm right about their case, then everyone knows that that code was put into Linux, and SCO is saying that it shouldn't have been put into Linux.
Even if they win, I think there's an excellent lawsuit against SCO. They're dragging this on, and spreading a bunch of crap, which is unnecessary. IANAL, but from the eleventy-billion SCO articles that have been run in Slashdot, I think I might be correct.
The other issue is, can they copyright the SysV code? How much of it is code that was fought over in ATT vs Berkely? I bet that 99.9% of this code is already copyright, and SCO can't go re-copyrighting it. Someone (*coughIBMFSFcough*) has to challenge this, and force them to show their code. We'd have to pick some programmers (not kernel developers, etc, because they would be come "tainted") to look at it and evaluate the claims.
Just my 2 (or maybe 3) cents, and IANAL.
The battle between Microsoft and Linux isn't necessarily about cost. Sure, that may be a factor, but the most important thing is the quality of the program. That is Linux's strongest point, although total cost is another strong point of Linux. If Microsoft makes CE shared-source, and improves CE so that it truly is better than Linux or some other open source OS for embedded systems, then they deserve to win. On the other hand, if Linux is better, than it deserves to win. It's all about the best tool for the job. My guess is that WinCE will continue to maintain a good hold on the PDA market for the same reason they have a stranglehold on the desktop marked (everyone knows how to use it), but for other embedded devices, Linux or any other OS will probably do much better.
Microsoft seems to be (slowly) improving their code stability, and now they just need to add security. If they really focused on building a solid OS instead of bells and whisles, they would probably be able to have something equivalent to Linux. Above cost, we should be pushing "Linux is a solid OS" to people who are debating between Linux and Windows.
Although Open Source may be morally better than closed-source, when it comes down to running a program, if the closed-source version is better, and at a reasonable cost, I'll take it over the OSS alternative. We have to realize that people aren't OSS purists, and to the end user, the fact that the source is open doesn't directly affect them (they're not going to go reading the source and change it. They want it to work out of the box).
Great! You replaced their interpreted languages with C! But...
What's the lowly webpage designer going to do when *gasp* they want to change a page? Are they going to have to go down into C source, and have to change it? The webpage designer probably is going to really screw things up becuase the page needs changing. C may be fast, but for webpage design, it's probably not the right tool. If you have a half-decent server (Resin, for example), Java's not going to be slow. And JSP is going to be MUCH easier to maintain that C.
And as far as black-and-white graphics, I hope the site still looks good... There are other image optimizations that you can do, and that's probably made some of the difference.
The article states that RF devices may induce currents in airplane wiring. I'm not sure how much commercial airliners cost, but I know it's probably well over 50 million. How much would it cost to use fiber optics instead of twisted-pair wiring? I'm sure relative to the cost of the airplane, it wouldn't be much, and that would eliminate having interference with the wires that must be run throughout the aircraft.
I don't know how much of the concern has to do with the computers themselves recieving interference, but I don't think it's that much. People use cell phones around computers all the time, and I don't think it causes any problems.
The only problem left then is potential interference with airplane navagation and communication systems. Again, the most critical times are when it's closest to the ground (takeoff and landing), but in those environments, I'd expect there to be a lot of cell phone usage by people in the airport, and that would (probably) cause as much interference as people in the plane.
The pilots and flight attendants that are blaming malfunctions on passenger RF interference aren't qualified to talk about it. They say "plane is having problems, passenger is using laptop, therefore laptop is causing problems". They don't have a clue what does and doesn't cause interference, and you'd have to get someone who knows the subject to tell me that that's the case before I'll believe it.
They may be making some money off of their Airfones, but I doubt they make much. On most recent flights that I've been on on typical airlines (Northwestern, ATA, Delta), I haven't seen the Airfones, and these weren't old planes.
On the other hand, if they could allow cell phones, that would probably bring in quite a few more ticket sales. "Fly (insert airline here), because you can use your cell phone on our flight!"
Don't think that that applies to just Bush. The higher a politician is, the harder it is to contact them. That applies to BOTH parties, not just whatever one you don't like.
Well, you have to think about the data for a second. It's basically saying that 2 G5 @ 2GHz are about the same as two P4's, 2.66GHz. That's not much of a biggie. The parts that you have bolded show that you didn't think about it. You're saying that 2 processors kick the butt of one processor. That's not suprising, that's what should have happened.
Basically, these numbers tell me that for the test run, P4's are roughly equal to a G5. Of course, it's the P4 at 2.66GHz that's equal to the 2GHz G5, but that can kinda be expected, because Intel seems to focus on processor speed (which is what sells the processors), instead of preformance/speed. And if you consider the cost, then the P4 wins hands-down.
I'm sure you can argue that for some things, the G5 is much faster than the P4, but you'd have to show me the tests that indicated that (as well as how you got them). Statistics can say anything you want them to.
Selling drugs (in less than certain amounts), most assault, and most other crimes are misdeminors(sp?). There's a HUGE difference between a misdeminor and a felony. I'm no criminal law expert, but here are some differences I can come up with off the top of my head:
1) A felonly sentence is longer than a misdeminor sentence.
2) Once you're out of jail, your chances of getting a job, etc go way down.
3) Felons can't vote, buy guns, run for office, and lots of other stuff.
So I'd say that selling drugs is FAR more lenient than what p2p would be under the new law. Copyright should have lighter prison sentences and stiffer fines, because by violating copyright, you've deprived the copyright owner of money, and other than that, no one gets hurt. Many, many people get hurt and killed dealing drugs. No one's gotten physically hurt from copyright infringement.
As has been said before, the Linux deal is cheaper in the long run. Most of the 36million is probably going to go to training people to use Linux, as well as be a Linux sysadmin. In several years, when they want to upgrade again, the sysadmins go download the latest release of Linux, and install it all, for virtually no cost other than labor. With Linux, the cost is mostly labor, the "parts" other than hardware (which will be the same for Linux or Windows) don't cost very much.
With Microsoft, it's the other way around. With Windows Update etc, it doesn't take as skilled (read: as expensive) of an admin to run the boxes. However, while the labor may be cheaper, the "parts" (software licenses) are much more expensive.
Frankly, if you're proNASA you're pretty much a communist- (no I'm not trolling, not everything that seems controversial is a troll) NASA is run by the country 'for the good of the country'. I don't want that. I want launching into space to be done for profit, not because they want to be nice to everyone. Being nice does not scale like profit motive does. We need to scale space up to put a reasonable number of people into space, you and me.
That's not exactly correct. By saying that, you're saying that supporting the government at all is bad, because most of what the government does is 'for the good of the country'. If you want to get spacefight done, or at least develop spacecraft, it requires A LOT of money. It requires a lot of money to develop the spacecraft, which is before you would have any profits. Private companies aren't going to be able to run for 5-6 years without a profit to develop a spacecraft and test it without running out of money. The government doesn't have to worry about profits, so theoritacilly (sp?) it can fund the research and development of new spacecraft.
Funding is the reason NASA isn't doing so hot. It doesn't get enough money to fund the Space Shuttle, unmanned spaceflight, and development of new spacecraft. Saying "we'll just cut the shuttle" won't work, because after the shuttle gets cut, NASA loses that money, and then they're no better off than they were before, except that they don't have the thing that they're best known for. The author of the article doesn't make this point: If NASA could spend as much money on research as the military does, (or even half that amount), we'd probably already have a Shuttle replacement.
There's a big difference between the library and file-sharing. If I download a file off of kazaa, then I can use it, and the person who originally had it can use it two. That means two people are using the program, and the company was only paid for one copy of the program.
If I check a book out of the library, then no one else can use the book at the same time. One copy paid for, and only one copy is being used. I agree, in some ways they are the same, but in many ways they are different.
Slashdot polls! That's right, during the second Tuesday in November (I think??), the Slashdot poll will be: "Who will be president for the next four years?". Everyone who wants to vote will need to pick one of the choices (when it's multiple choice, you've got to pick one, tough). Choices will be:
1) Geroge Bush Jr.
2) (insert your favorite democrat here)
3) CowboyNeal runs my world, thank you very much.
No one is sure who will win, but CowboyNeal has a history of being popular in polls.
If they're relying on security-through-obscurity by running it on Windows and not releasing the source, the Slashdot poll will probably be about as secure. There are already people out there who have developed crytographic systems for voting, and because the source to the program will presumably be closed-source, it probably won't be very good. Voting isn't hard, and if you can't tell who you're voting for, it's not the voting machine's fault, IT'S YOURS!!!
These are all problems that affect individual servers. If you have the money to keep a site up and running for 500+ days, chances are you have load balancing and more than one server. If one server dies, and you have it set up right, you won't have any downtime. You can also take time to do mantainance on one server, and the other servers can pick up the slack.
If one machine dieing brought down Google, they'd probably be constantly down with the number of machines they have. However, they have enough machines, and it's set up correctly, so that it doesn't matter if just one dies.
I disagree with your suggestion for switching to C++ from Java because Java is controlled by Sun, which is now a new Evil Company. There's a fairly large community of Java developers, and there's IBM who writes their own tools. Although Sun controls the specs, other people implement it too, so that's not a concern.
For some things (like large webpages), Java is an excellent tool, and I wouldn't want to write a webpage in C++.
JSP and Servlets are complimentary, as said before. It's much much easier to put business logic inside a servlet. However, even if you're doing something other than out.println() in a servlet, making the HTML is still awkward, and much more difficult to change around. The other disadvantage is that it's quite difficult to quickly glance through the code and see what the page is going to produce.
Servlets should be used for things like handling form submissions, and then they should pass it on to a JSP page to present the results.
With JSP, it's a good idea to put almost no code in the page. The best thing to do is to write a tag that does what the code would do. It takes a little longer to write the code, but it saves time becuase it's easier to debug, and it can be used in different pages.
However, the ability to put code in JSP pages is frequently abused by people who don't know better, and that does result in mangled pages.
For the copyrights to be the same, it has to be in SCO's code as well as Linux's code. If it's a GPL, they can't claim "well, they copied our code and slapped a GPL on it" because the GPL or whatever copyright would be in their code too. I highly doubt they're that stupid. I bet the guy who commented on it just had absolutely no clue what he was talking about, and just regurgitated whatever the SCO guy told him.
This guy who commented on the sutff he was shown is obviously a non-programmer, or at least someone unfamiler with the Linux kernal. "Central Module"??? I thought (I may be mistaken) that someone else had said that the "code copying" wasn't in the kernal core, but that it was in something that wasn't as significant.
The court's ruling was correct, there isn't much legal backing for the case. It's more of a case that the adware programs are being general iddiots, and companies don't like it. We just need to start getting more people to download AdAware etc so that they can get a rid of these programs.
Or, someone should hack the adware sites so they put an ad over Microsoft's web page. Then Microsoft will hear about it, get pissed, and start bundling some kind of program to get a rid of the AdWare (just hope that it's not DRM).
IBM does have a lot of patents. However, I doubt (I may be wrong, though) that many of them are "dumb" patents. By "dumb" patents, I mean things like one-click shopping, etc... I'm willing to be that IBM's patents are for real innovation, not thinking of something that's already implemented and patenting it.
The laws in Europe are laws that will allow more of these dumb patents, and IBM wants to prevent that. IBM will still continue to get their patents on real innovation.