I find it possibly illegal they could include this feature. Where's this company based?
I mean, if Doom 3 started calling 1-900 numbers because I had to crack it since the braindead copy protection won't let me play my original copy, I'd personally hunt Carmack down and string him up. Unless he GPL'ed the source code, of course, which would make it inherently "good".
What about those porn-dialer trojans that call crazy 900 numbers in asia, do you consider those harmless?
Malicious may have been a better word, but "destructive" like most adjectives is pretty much subjective.
If you think about it, malware is destructive if you incur a cost.. Either in time, money or both.
I'd consider this more "destructive" than a virus that, say, wiped out my address book, because that would only 'cost' me about 20 seconds to resync to my PC. This would cost me the many hours and hassles to reverse the charges on my bill. Go ahead and dispute a charge with Verizon or Sprint and see how much fun it is.
They once billed me for a 27 hour call on my cell phone, which was absolutely ridiculous since it's battery is lucky to hold up for 45 minutes and it only uses battery power, even when plugged in.. The manual says its so I wont get electrocuted by mains power, which is equally silly, since it charges from a wall-wart that delivers a whole 300ma at 12V. Truly a piece of craptastic engineering.
Where was I? Oh yeah, cell tech sucks and I've yet to complete a conversation without the call being dropped. "Can you hear me now" my ass.
It sends to premium rate numbers, those numbers have been terminated, so at present it sends at the regular rates, which so far as I'm concerned, are premium enough.
If jacking your mobile bill 100 bucks a month isn't "destructive" enough for you, then, there's nothing I can do about that.
They "see" different wavelengths of light. JWST is designed to see farther. They'll be looking at completely different things.
The question is more like "has Hubble 'seen' enough?"
Are there any more things we can usefully point it at, or do we have enough images to analyse as it is? Besides pretty desktop wallpapers, what type of knowledge or discoveries will that 1.6 billion to keep it up there get us?
What's this have to do with free speech? They guy can say whatever he wants.
He just can't pretend, or try to trick people, into thinking he's someone else saying those things.
With freedom comes responsibility. With freedom of speech comes responsibility for deciept, slander, libel, harassment, etc..
So let him register Fallwellsucks.com or something else. I hate sleazy little scams like this.
What if I registered stallman.com and started selling XP Pro and SCO licenses through it, and ranting about viral licenses and how open source is destroying the economy? Or trovalds.com and I can talk about how crappy linux is.
Even with a microprint disclaimer at the bottom of the page saying "I am not affiliated with blah blah all similarities are pure coincidence".
I wonder if slashdotters would jump to defend my "freedom to pretend I'm Linus and tell people how much linux sucks and how many patents I willingly infringed".
On the server side, UnixWare Enterprise edition is more expensive for 150 users than either Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition, any of the Enterprise Linux distributions, or Solaris, with fewer available applications, fewer drivers for recent HBAs and other new hardware, and no currently available 64-bit version for either Opteron or Itanium processors
Fewer applications.. So Fucking What? Are we talking about 9000000 text editors?
Fewer drivers or support for new hardware.. So Fucking What? Hasn't stopped linux in the server world, has it?
No currently available 64 bit version... So Fucking What? I'm sure when 64 bit is mainstream, it'll show up. 64 bit is more a marketing buzzord than anything else. Will those extra "bits" make my hard drive spin faster? What will those 32 bits do? Let me put 920321 petabytes of ram in the box?
Because that's whats slowing down my database lookups.
More expensive? Dunno, sounds like those TCO studies MSFT did. They were "objective" too.
I'm sure there are still a few compelling technical reasons in UnixWare's favor. Like, it's been scaling to hundreds of CPUs for years before linux could, so that aspect of it should be mature. I don't know, I've never used it.
Not going to RTFA, why bother. It's not an objective review, it's a friggin OSS advocacy site. Anyone stupid enough to think they're going to objectively review anything of SCO's is silly.
Why bother masquerading this as news? We all know it's just another chance to rant and make lame Darl McBride jokes. Why not just post the article as "SCO sucks and we hate them, read for comments"?
Re:The problem is with *who* the cams are on...
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Judges Junk Jailcam
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How can he get a fair jury anyways, because of that logic. Before jury selection, he has to be charged and booked, right? When potential jurors go to sit on the stand for questioning, they have to know that someone has already been charged with a crime.
Juries are invariably just 12 morons who were too stupid to get out of jury duty.
Look up the wiretapping laws in your state/jurisdiction. It varies from place to place. In some states it's legal to tape your phone calls, in some it requires that both parties agree to the recording. (Ie; Linda Tripp running afoul of MD's wiretapping laws when she taped Lewinski)
Same types of things apply to the internet.
You think you have some hacker dead to rights, and wind up being sued. You know, those "rights to privacy" slashdotters are always on about - other people have those too.
Maybe, maybe, maybe...
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3D Monitor
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· Score: 5, Insightful
ATi will get off their asses and add stereoscopic rendering to their drivers. Until then, this is useless to ATi owners, since as far as I can tell it relies on left and right framebuffers, like the shutter glasses do.
There's been quite a bit of griping on rage3d.com over this issue, and ATi's unwillingness to do anything about it.
Gaming would be hit or miss, some games look awesome with the glasses, some dont. Graphics hacks which look great on a 2D monitor look lame in 3D.
Picture a driving game, where roadside signs fly past you.. Rather than properly rendering them in 3D, they're just sprites that expand as they're "closer". Rendered in real 3D, they look like some screwed up floating box that expands and shrinks..
Basically, for the game to look right, everything has to be rendered in 3D. Which is less of a problem these days, with the power that's in the average PC.
Re:Obligatory Futurama reference ...
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3D Monitor
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· Score: 5, Funny
Fry and Leela see the 3D Movie on the robot planet.
Fry: The 3D is amazing..
Leela shifts the glasses over her eye from red to blue and back again..
Of course it's a smart move. How long do you think selling CD/DVD burning software can be profitable for?
CD-R/DVD-R support is being handled by the OS these days, as it should be. CD/DVD burning in XP is pretty much right, drag files onto the CD and click start. They could copy Suns and Netscapes business strategy: sue MS. But that wouldn't work, unlike Java or IE, it'd be pretty hard to argue that MS shouldn't be allowed to support hardware at the OS level.
There's still a need for stuff like Alcohol 120 or Nero for more advanced compilations and disc layout voodoo, but we're talking about EZ-CD, something designed to just dump music and files onto discs.
That ship has sailed, they're smart to unload it on someone else, and focus on something that will probably only become more profitable - music sales through the Napster brand.
If the contract with Seagate is in Minnesota, then it doesn't matter where he goes to work, he broke a contract in Minnesota. That's simple enough.
Just like if you order a bunch of stuff from a store in CA, have it shipped COD, and then decide not to pay, because "tee hee I'm in NY, what's a CA court going to do about it?" Simple, swear out a warrant, or try you in absentia.
While they wouldnt get far in suing, it would generate a lot of bad press for MS, which is exactly why I have no doubt they'll try to put a stop to this.
Of course, the knee jerk reaction on slashdot will be some slippery slope crap about some imagined freedom of something or another. Oh yeah, fair use. Giving away MS software is fair use, I picked up that bit of wisdom from another post on this very article.
Infinitely useful? Marginally practical is a better term, I think.
MS has more bandwidth than jesus, and you'll download the patch much faster from them than from some torrent.
I've yet to see any torrent download max out my downstream on this T1 at work. They have no problem maxing out my upstream of course - I wind up sending at 150 and recieving at 20 or so. I've tried big torrents too, new linux releases, spiderman and matrix trailers, etc..
Which makes me wonder how well the bittorrent thing would/will be recieved by the general public. Why should our upstream bandwidth - which we pay for - be used to redistribute MSFT's shit? I don't see them mirroring our ftp distro site. I don't see them telling the Comcast rep to reactivate my account after it was suspended for bandwidth abuse. Fuck that, they already gouged me for 200 bucks for XP Pro, they can damn well foot the bandwidth bill for any patch I need to keep it working.
I mean, would you let (random big corporation) Johnson and Johnson store products in your living room, and deliver them using your car and your gas? Even if you got a 15% discount on shampoo?
MSFT can and does mind, and the reason is simple: Besides this torrent, there are a million hoaxes, hacks and fakes on eDonkey and Kazaa. MS has to deal with all that shit, and the millions of calls from customers claiming that SP2 deleted their hard drive and changed their homepage to goatse.cx.
SP2 isn't going to highlight the wonderful life-affirming applications of P2P, it'll highlight why getting your OS patches off of some anonymous assclown on the internet isn't a good idea.
While I don't agree with the INDUCE act, it doesn't ban all "P2P", it bans the setup of networks explicitly for exchanging pirated materials.. Ie; Kazaa, eDonkey.. Don't make yourself look like fools defending them, yeah there's some token 0.0001% of content that's legal on them.. Everyone knows that they're for downloading MP3s and DivX's and warez.
I don't see any law that threatens to make it illegal to send content from one node on the network (or peer) to another node - hence, peer to peer. I've never seen bittorrent threatened when used to distribute legal content, though sites like suprnova are walking a fine line by encouraging it as a means for piracy.
Complain, get active.. That's great. But dont exagerate or you wind up making a fool of yourself. If you want to write your congressperson or senator, do so with lucid well-thought arguments, not a bunch of "slippery slope" and hysterical dystopian visions of the future.. That, at most, gets chuckled at before crumpled and pitched into the can.
The way I read it, 1500 people in the community share that 1-2mbit pipe to the internet. Unless that pipe goes down, then everyone uses the DSL as fallbacks (ie; all sharing 256k up)
Sorry, but given how craptastically unreliable I've found wifi to be, that sounds like a pretty crap connection to the 'net. Terrible ping times (from a gaming perspective), unreliable bandwidth.
Thats why companies will still pay the big bucks for a T-1. We may only have 150k up, but we can count on it any time night or day.
Cartoon Network already has that show, it's called Time Squad, and is better written than anything that well ever spew from even the most talented Star Trek writers powerbook.
So Enterprise takes place, what a couple centuries before TOS, so somehow old fat Elvis^h^h^hKirk travels back in time to join the crew?
The lamest thing in Star Trek is the sloppy way they throw time travel in as a weak plot device to jam characters from the campy old 60s show into the modern ones. The TNG episodes with old timey characters: a 400 year old Bones, a Scotty who'd been stuck in a transporter beam for centuries, Spock - a vulcan who lives for centuries, shows up and even though physiologically he shouldnt be that much older, he looks like King Tut's corpse.
I guess it would be too much work to try and make Enterprise a genuinely interesting show. I'm sure the "James T Kirk appears on a very special Enterprise" promos will spike their ratings a point or two for the first half of the episode, then people tune out after realizing that the show just plain stinks.
Maybe Shatner will kill this crappy show. Perhaps Scott Bakula will mysteriously turn up floating face-down in a swimming pool.
It has nothing to do with theories, it's utter fact.
Why can VIA come out with a system on a single board, complete with 1ghz CPU, and offer it for about ~100 bucks out the door, CPU, board, chipsets, MPEG decoders and all - yet the "low end" intel or AMD CPU is about 100 bucks?
Because AMD and Intel own the market, and are screwing you, plain and simple.
How about Intel and AMD threatening to stop letting stores who carry the ITX gear and 3rd party CPUs (transmeta, et al) sell their "cheaper" OEM products? Kinda sounds like MSFT bullying Dell into not shipping boxes with Linux or BeOS, doesn't it? Why arent the geeks pissed off? No good reason.
Intel still makes and sells 1.0ghz Pentium 3s, for nearly 200 bucks. What kind of profit do you think they turn on those? By now, they cant cost more than 10 bucks to fab.
There's a huge market for truly cheap 1-2ghz processors, I'm talking 20-40 bucks. And they could be produced for that easily. That is if the technology wasn't owned and controlled by a slashdot-sanctioned duopoly.
The saddest thing is that everyone thinks there's "competition" in the CPU market.
Two companies is not real competition. They cross-license technologies, time their releases, fix their prices.. They work together to gouge as much cash out of us as possible.
Why can I not find a decent CPU to build a terminal out of for less than 50 bucks? How much should a 1.5ghz celeron (or tbred/whatever) be worth? Not anywhere close to what we're paying.
The same thing with ATi/nVidia. Two players means they each get half the market. All the fanboy knobbery (no matter who you're a fanboy for) just builds free hype. So long as whenever anyone anywhere goes to buy a video card, the only names in his head are "ATi" and "nVidia", both companies are happy.
Coke and Pepsi did the same thing to the soft drink market. There were really no "cola wars". They colluded until they dominated and controlled the market. Did you know that vending machine companies will not sell a backlit machine for any non-coke or non-pepsi product?
Just like you all think there's a real option this election day. Yeah, I'm suck of bush, I'm voting for "the other guy". There's no choice, there's no competition.
In a competitive market, Intel or AMD could both be knocked out by a third party. nVidia could go bankrupt tomorrow, like 3DFX did. Bush and Kerry could be golfing together in January, while President Nader is being inaugerated.
This fanboy idiocy creates these situations. It's ridiculous. Quit being such a bunch of stupid douchebags. I don't want to hear whether Intel or AMD is 2% faster on paper today. Tell me about Transmeta, VIA, Cyrix.. Tell me about PPC platforms (that dont cost $3000 extra for a fancy yet unneeded brushed nickel case) Tell me about the companies that may one day offer me an ACTUAL CHOICE and quit licking the balls of your corporate masters.
Slashdot Mirror
I wanna run the Barkley program with the Deanna-whore character, who came off much more conservative and respectable than the real Deanna character.
Is it?
Those japanese are always inventing stuff like this. I guess they got no square footage.
My American answer is to put your VR goggles on in the middle of one of our spacious fields or parks, and just run around all you want.
Drop someone in the middle of the desert with his LCD goggles and mo-cap mittens and he can VR his brains out.
I find it possibly illegal they could include this feature. Where's this company based?
I mean, if Doom 3 started calling 1-900 numbers because I had to crack it since the braindead copy protection won't let me play my original copy, I'd personally hunt Carmack down and string him up. Unless he GPL'ed the source code, of course, which would make it inherently "good".
What about those porn-dialer trojans that call crazy 900 numbers in asia, do you consider those harmless?
Malicious may have been a better word, but "destructive" like most adjectives is pretty much subjective.
If you think about it, malware is destructive if you incur a cost.. Either in time, money or both.
I'd consider this more "destructive" than a virus that, say, wiped out my address book, because that would only 'cost' me about 20 seconds to resync to my PC. This would cost me the many hours and hassles to reverse the charges on my bill. Go ahead and dispute a charge with Verizon or Sprint and see how much fun it is.
They once billed me for a 27 hour call on my cell phone, which was absolutely ridiculous since it's battery is lucky to hold up for 45 minutes and it only uses battery power, even when plugged in.. The manual says its so I wont get electrocuted by mains power, which is equally silly, since it charges from a wall-wart that delivers a whole 300ma at 12V. Truly a piece of craptastic engineering.
Where was I? Oh yeah, cell tech sucks and I've yet to complete a conversation without the call being dropped. "Can you hear me now" my ass.
It sends to premium rate numbers, those numbers have been terminated, so at present it sends at the regular rates, which so far as I'm concerned, are premium enough.
If jacking your mobile bill 100 bucks a month isn't "destructive" enough for you, then, there's nothing I can do about that.
They "see" different wavelengths of light. JWST is designed to see farther. They'll be looking at completely different things.
The question is more like "has Hubble 'seen' enough?"
Are there any more things we can usefully point it at, or do we have enough images to analyse as it is? Besides pretty desktop wallpapers, what type of knowledge or discoveries will that 1.6 billion to keep it up there get us?
What's this have to do with free speech? They guy can say whatever he wants.
He just can't pretend, or try to trick people, into thinking he's someone else saying those things.
With freedom comes responsibility. With freedom of speech comes responsibility for deciept, slander, libel, harassment, etc..
So let him register Fallwellsucks.com or something else. I hate sleazy little scams like this.
What if I registered stallman.com and started selling XP Pro and SCO licenses through it, and ranting about viral licenses and how open source is destroying the economy? Or trovalds.com and I can talk about how crappy linux is.
Even with a microprint disclaimer at the bottom of the page saying "I am not affiliated with blah blah all similarities are pure coincidence".
I wonder if slashdotters would jump to defend my "freedom to pretend I'm Linus and tell people how much linux sucks and how many patents I willingly infringed".
my new acronymn for "So Fucking What?"
On the server side, UnixWare Enterprise edition is more expensive for 150 users than either Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition, any of the Enterprise Linux distributions, or Solaris, with fewer available applications, fewer drivers for recent HBAs and other new hardware, and no currently available 64-bit version for either Opteron or Itanium processors
Fewer applications.. So Fucking What? Are we talking about 9000000 text editors?
Fewer drivers or support for new hardware.. So Fucking What? Hasn't stopped linux in the server world, has it?
No currently available 64 bit version... So Fucking What? I'm sure when 64 bit is mainstream, it'll show up. 64 bit is more a marketing buzzord than anything else. Will those extra "bits" make my hard drive spin faster? What will those 32 bits do? Let me put 920321 petabytes of ram in the box?
Because that's whats slowing down my database lookups.
More expensive? Dunno, sounds like those TCO studies MSFT did. They were "objective" too.
I'm sure there are still a few compelling technical reasons in UnixWare's favor. Like, it's been scaling to hundreds of CPUs for years before linux could, so that aspect of it should be mature. I don't know, I've never used it.
Not going to RTFA, why bother. It's not an objective review, it's a friggin OSS advocacy site. Anyone stupid enough to think they're going to objectively review anything of SCO's is silly.
Why bother masquerading this as news? We all know it's just another chance to rant and make lame Darl McBride jokes. Why not just post the article as "SCO sucks and we hate them, read for comments"?
How can he get a fair jury anyways, because of that logic. Before jury selection, he has to be charged and booked, right? When potential jurors go to sit on the stand for questioning, they have to know that someone has already been charged with a crime.
Juries are invariably just 12 morons who were too stupid to get out of jury duty.
Look up the wiretapping laws in your state/jurisdiction. It varies from place to place. In some states it's legal to tape your phone calls, in some it requires that both parties agree to the recording. (Ie; Linda Tripp running afoul of MD's wiretapping laws when she taped Lewinski)
Same types of things apply to the internet.
You think you have some hacker dead to rights, and wind up being sued. You know, those "rights to privacy" slashdotters are always on about - other people have those too.
ATi will get off their asses and add stereoscopic rendering to their drivers. Until then, this is useless to ATi owners, since as far as I can tell it relies on left and right framebuffers, like the shutter glasses do.
There's been quite a bit of griping on rage3d.com over this issue, and ATi's unwillingness to do anything about it.
Gaming would be hit or miss, some games look awesome with the glasses, some dont. Graphics hacks which look great on a 2D monitor look lame in 3D.
Picture a driving game, where roadside signs fly past you.. Rather than properly rendering them in 3D, they're just sprites that expand as they're "closer". Rendered in real 3D, they look like some screwed up floating box that expands and shrinks..
Basically, for the game to look right, everything has to be rendered in 3D. Which is less of a problem these days, with the power that's in the average PC.
Fry and Leela see the 3D Movie on the robot planet.
Fry: The 3D is amazing..
Leela shifts the glasses over her eye from red to blue and back again..
Leela: Mine's not working
Of course it's a smart move. How long do you think selling CD/DVD burning software can be profitable for?
CD-R/DVD-R support is being handled by the OS these days, as it should be. CD/DVD burning in XP is pretty much right, drag files onto the CD and click start. They could copy Suns and Netscapes business strategy: sue MS. But that wouldn't work, unlike Java or IE, it'd be pretty hard to argue that MS shouldn't be allowed to support hardware at the OS level.
There's still a need for stuff like Alcohol 120 or Nero for more advanced compilations and disc layout voodoo, but we're talking about EZ-CD, something designed to just dump music and files onto discs.
That ship has sailed, they're smart to unload it on someone else, and focus on something that will probably only become more profitable - music sales through the Napster brand.
If the contract with Seagate is in Minnesota, then it doesn't matter where he goes to work, he broke a contract in Minnesota. That's simple enough.
Just like if you order a bunch of stuff from a store in CA, have it shipped COD, and then decide not to pay, because "tee hee I'm in NY, what's a CA court going to do about it?" Simple, swear out a warrant, or try you in absentia.
While they wouldnt get far in suing, it would generate a lot of bad press for MS, which is exactly why I have no doubt they'll try to put a stop to this.
Of course, the knee jerk reaction on slashdot will be some slippery slope crap about some imagined freedom of something or another. Oh yeah, fair use. Giving away MS software is fair use, I picked up that bit of wisdom from another post on this very article.
Infinitely useful? Marginally practical is a better term, I think.
MS has more bandwidth than jesus, and you'll download the patch much faster from them than from some torrent.
I've yet to see any torrent download max out my downstream on this T1 at work. They have no problem maxing out my upstream of course - I wind up sending at 150 and recieving at 20 or so. I've tried big torrents too, new linux releases, spiderman and matrix trailers, etc..
Which makes me wonder how well the bittorrent thing would/will be recieved by the general public. Why should our upstream bandwidth - which we pay for - be used to redistribute MSFT's shit? I don't see them mirroring our ftp distro site. I don't see them telling the Comcast rep to reactivate my account after it was suspended for bandwidth abuse. Fuck that, they already gouged me for 200 bucks for XP Pro, they can damn well foot the bandwidth bill for any patch I need to keep it working.
I mean, would you let (random big corporation) Johnson and Johnson store products in your living room, and deliver them using your car and your gas? Even if you got a 15% discount on shampoo?
MSFT can and does mind, and the reason is simple: Besides this torrent, there are a million hoaxes, hacks and fakes on eDonkey and Kazaa. MS has to deal with all that shit, and the millions of calls from customers claiming that SP2 deleted their hard drive and changed their homepage to goatse.cx.
SP2 isn't going to highlight the wonderful life-affirming applications of P2P, it'll highlight why getting your OS patches off of some anonymous assclown on the internet isn't a good idea.
To slashdotters, "fair use" means "i can do anything with this music/movie/software except pay for it".
While I don't agree with the INDUCE act, it doesn't ban all "P2P", it bans the setup of networks explicitly for exchanging pirated materials.. Ie; Kazaa, eDonkey.. Don't make yourself look like fools defending them, yeah there's some token 0.0001% of content that's legal on them.. Everyone knows that they're for downloading MP3s and DivX's and warez.
I don't see any law that threatens to make it illegal to send content from one node on the network (or peer) to another node - hence, peer to peer. I've never seen bittorrent threatened when used to distribute legal content, though sites like suprnova are walking a fine line by encouraging it as a means for piracy.
Complain, get active.. That's great. But dont exagerate or you wind up making a fool of yourself. If you want to write your congressperson or senator, do so with lucid well-thought arguments, not a bunch of "slippery slope" and hysterical dystopian visions of the future.. That, at most, gets chuckled at before crumpled and pitched into the can.
The way I read it, 1500 people in the community share that 1-2mbit pipe to the internet. Unless that pipe goes down, then everyone uses the DSL as fallbacks (ie; all sharing 256k up)
Sorry, but given how craptastically unreliable I've found wifi to be, that sounds like a pretty crap connection to the 'net. Terrible ping times (from a gaming perspective), unreliable bandwidth.
Thats why companies will still pay the big bucks for a T-1. We may only have 150k up, but we can count on it any time night or day.
Cartoon Network already has that show, it's called Time Squad, and is better written than anything that well ever spew from even the most talented Star Trek writers powerbook.
So Enterprise takes place, what a couple centuries before TOS, so somehow old fat Elvis^h^h^hKirk travels back in time to join the crew?
The lamest thing in Star Trek is the sloppy way they throw time travel in as a weak plot device to jam characters from the campy old 60s show into the modern ones. The TNG episodes with old timey characters: a 400 year old Bones, a Scotty who'd been stuck in a transporter beam for centuries, Spock - a vulcan who lives for centuries, shows up and even though physiologically he shouldnt be that much older, he looks like King Tut's corpse.
I guess it would be too much work to try and make Enterprise a genuinely interesting show. I'm sure the "James T Kirk appears on a very special Enterprise" promos will spike their ratings a point or two for the first half of the episode, then people tune out after realizing that the show just plain stinks.
Maybe Shatner will kill this crappy show. Perhaps Scott Bakula will mysteriously turn up floating face-down in a swimming pool.
There is no new information here that wasn't in the last three articles about this cluster.
"NASA to piss away a lot of money on computers" is barely newsworthy, even on a tech site like slashdot.
It has nothing to do with theories, it's utter fact.
Why can VIA come out with a system on a single board, complete with 1ghz CPU, and offer it for about ~100 bucks out the door, CPU, board, chipsets, MPEG decoders and all - yet the "low end" intel or AMD CPU is about 100 bucks?
Because AMD and Intel own the market, and are screwing you, plain and simple.
How about Intel and AMD threatening to stop letting stores who carry the ITX gear and 3rd party CPUs (transmeta, et al) sell their "cheaper" OEM products? Kinda sounds like MSFT bullying Dell into not shipping boxes with Linux or BeOS, doesn't it? Why arent the geeks pissed off? No good reason.
Intel still makes and sells 1.0ghz Pentium 3s, for nearly 200 bucks. What kind of profit do you think they turn on those? By now, they cant cost more than 10 bucks to fab.
There's a huge market for truly cheap 1-2ghz processors, I'm talking 20-40 bucks. And they could be produced for that easily. That is if the technology wasn't owned and controlled by a slashdot-sanctioned duopoly.
The saddest thing is that everyone thinks there's "competition" in the CPU market.
Two companies is not real competition. They cross-license technologies, time their releases, fix their prices.. They work together to gouge as much cash out of us as possible.
Why can I not find a decent CPU to build a terminal out of for less than 50 bucks? How much should a 1.5ghz celeron (or tbred/whatever) be worth? Not anywhere close to what we're paying.
The same thing with ATi/nVidia. Two players means they each get half the market. All the fanboy knobbery (no matter who you're a fanboy for) just builds free hype. So long as whenever anyone anywhere goes to buy a video card, the only names in his head are "ATi" and "nVidia", both companies are happy.
Coke and Pepsi did the same thing to the soft drink market. There were really no "cola wars". They colluded until they dominated and controlled the market. Did you know that vending machine companies will not sell a backlit machine for any non-coke or non-pepsi product?
Just like you all think there's a real option this election day. Yeah, I'm suck of bush, I'm voting for "the other guy". There's no choice, there's no competition.
In a competitive market, Intel or AMD could both be knocked out by a third party. nVidia could go bankrupt tomorrow, like 3DFX did. Bush and Kerry could be golfing together in January, while President Nader is being inaugerated.
This fanboy idiocy creates these situations. It's ridiculous. Quit being such a bunch of stupid douchebags. I don't want to hear whether Intel or AMD is 2% faster on paper today. Tell me about Transmeta, VIA, Cyrix.. Tell me about PPC platforms (that dont cost $3000 extra for a fancy yet unneeded brushed nickel case) Tell me about the companies that may one day offer me an ACTUAL CHOICE and quit licking the balls of your corporate masters.