...Linux wouldn't be suitable as a server or client in nearly as many situations as it is today. Believe it or not, lots of people still do use SMB, and support for it on Linux makes it possible to use it in such an environment.
Much in the same way as support for Novell networking made Windows a more suitable client and server in many environments.
The last digit should be an estimate, and the number should have an attached margin of error to indicate how much of an estimate. I.e. 10.5 +/- 0.3 indicates that the 10 is exactly accurate, and the 0.5 is an estimate to within +/- 0.3.
You're not supposed to do things like 10.51 +/- 0.23 though -- that should become 10.5 +/- 0.2 (or +/- 0.3 if you're being conservative).
You're right, it'd take far more money than most people are willing to offer to actually pay for development at a reasonable rate. However, I could see it working as a way to encourage authors to continue working on their projects, while getting your pet features a bit higher up on the priority list. If I were a project manager and I had 5 or so features I was planning to implement in the near future, if someone paid $100 in favor of one of them, I might well not mind getting that one done first. Sure, for $100 few people will develop an entirely new feature that otherwise they wouldn't have done, but it might be enough to encourage them to shift priorities around a bit.
But soft drinks seemed ridiculously expensive last time I was there. I'm used to buying a 0,5-L bottle for EUR 0.50 in both the U.S. and Greece, and it was 2-3x that in Holland...
I find Cppreference.com to be very simple and to the point. It's got information on both the standard C library, the C++ STL, and a few other common core components of both C and C++. Definitely just a lookup resource for people already familiar with one or both languages, and not entirely complete, but a quite useful resource nonetheless, especially for mundane but necessary things like function names and parameter order/datatype.
The fraud was to hide financial problems -- they hid losses and overstated profits to make it look like they were making money when they were actually losing it. So this can't be the cause of their problems; it merely hid them so everyone else didn't think they had problems (thus inflating their stock price). If they had been more carefully accounted, they'd still be losing money, we just would've known about it as it was happening, instead of finding out years later.
As for whether they've been losing money because of over-regulation or because of some other reason, I don't know.
Creative accounting merely hides losses by basically listing a bunch of income that isn't really there. The actual money loss comes from somewhere else, such as selling bandwidth for too cheap.
They might have added more, but I've had to stop even a few years ago. I know the westbound checkpoint on I-10 right as you're entering California from Arizona has been there for decades, primarily to stop the movement of agricultural pests like fruit flies across the desert and into the central California farming regions (they make you throw out any fresh fruit or vegetables you have with you basically). Eastbound through Texas there's also been a checkpoint about 75-100 miles east of El Paso (just a bit after I-10 stops following the Mexican border and turns northwards), primarily to check for smuggling (of immigrants and drugs) from Mexico, and that one's been there for at least 3-4 years, if not more.
The people behind PNG and Ogg Vorbis are well aware that patent law and copyright law are two entirely separate beasts, which is why they did not content themselves with just implementing things on their own. They in fact did exhaustive patent searches to make sure that nothing they did was in conflict with existing patents. In both cases it is likely, though not 100% certain, that they have suceeded. The PNG standard was pored over with a fine-toothed comb by the FSF's lawyers, and so far it appears to be clean, which is about as good as you can reasonably expect. Ogg Vorbis has not only been checked out by a lawyer hired by Ogg, but in fact has been vetted by AOL Time Warner (a corporation that's no stranger to patent law itself) because the current version of Winamp includes support for Ogg, and AOL (which owns Winamp) wanted to be sure that they weren't getting themselves into trouble by doing that.
In several places along the western half of Interstate 10 (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas), all cars must exit and submit to random searches. They're mostly looking for smuggling of drugs and illegal immigrants.
In the non-computer world, you can generally only patent specific tools, not concepts of tools. For example, if a pharmaceutical company comes up with a medicine that cures cancer, they can patent that particular medicine. They can't patent the concept of using medicines to cure cancer. Thus someone else could develop a different medicine to cure cancer without infringing on their patent.
In the computer world this doesn't seem to be enforced.
If not, you're vulnerable to a worm that's been going around that is similar to Code Red (hijacks your server and turns it into a DDoS platform). I know at least 4-5 people who were hit by this in the 2 days it took the fix to get into security.debian.org.
Hmm, I must have less a tolerance for noise, because I'd consider Asche, Morgenstern, Haus Arafna, etc. to be "rhythmic noise", whereas Merzbow et al are "arrythmic noise". "Industrial" is what I'd call more structured (and usually less noisy) things like Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Foetus, and possibly Coil.
I said I wasn't going to mention the "straight industrial" bands. If I were going to, I'd probably mention Skinny Puppy, Download, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Ministry, The Tear Garden, Foetus, and Coil, among others.
If you're not into the whole "electronica" scene, there's still plenty of good electronic music out there. I concentrate here on music with vocals, as that's mostly what I listen to.
Synthpop is basically synthesizer pop. For mainstream examples, think New Order and a host of other 80s pop. Less mainstream synthpop ranges from "darker" music with goth-influenced lyrics to the happy sort of stuff you're used to from the 80s.
Industrial is heavy, distorted electronic music. It may have real instruments (most often guitars), but there will generally be much electronic treatment of both the instruments and often the vocals ("treatment" usually consists of various sorts of distortion).
EBM stands for "Electronic Body Music" (dumb genre name, I know), and is sometimes called "industrial dance". It's essentially a mixture of Synthpop and Industrial. There's incessant arguments over what is and isn't EBM, but pretty much anything from industrial with a vague beat to synthpop with a bit of a harsher edge can fall into the category, depending on who you ask. But the classification isn't really that important anyway.
Some good bands (almost all of these are European, as there's very little of a "scene" in North America) include:
[I'm concentrating on EBM here, as straight industrial tends to be less electronically-oriented]
VNV Nation - Their earlier albums are industrial-leaning EBM, while their newer stuff is very bombastic uplifting synthpop. One of the best out there. Some good songs: Standing, Further, Darkangel, Epicentre, Joy, Kingdom.
Apoptygma Berzerk - Their earlier albums are goth/industrial/ebm hybrids, while their newest one is barely synthpopish trance (a common trend; I guess industrial/ebm is getting less popular these days). Some good songs: Non-Stop Violence, Starsign, Deep Red, Eclipse, Unicorn.
Kraftwerk - Okay, so they're not really synthpop, EBM, or industrial, but they heavily influenced those genres, especially with their industrial (in the original literal sense of the term) instrumentation. And if you're interested in electronic music at all, you at least have to give them a listen. Some good songs: Radioactivity, Pocket Calculator, Boing Boom Tschak, The Robots, The Model.
Beborn Beton - Synthpop, with a darker yet optimistic tone. Some good songs: Deeper Than the Usual Feeling, Hemoglobin, Winter, Another World, Phoenix.
Einstürzende Neubauten - One of the original industrial bands, with the home-made industrial implements to prove it. Their earlier stuff is rather legendary, though a bit inaccesible and very noisy. Their more recent stuff alternates between melodic ballads and noisy clanging pieces, though the instrumentation is still all things from sheet metal to large mechanically-operated flutes. Some good songs include: Was Ist Ist, Zebulon, Sabrina, Salamandrina, Newton's Gravitätlichkeit.
Front 242 - The original EBM band. It's sparse industrial with a beat. Some good songs: Headhunter, Quite Unusual, Body to Body, Im Rhythmus Bleiben, Circling Overland, Welcome to Paradise.
Deine Lakaien - Very melodic synthpop, with the occasional noisy EBM song thrown in. Some good songs: Kiss the Future, Mindmachine, Down Down Down, Return.
Funker Vogt - Aggressive industrial-oriented EBM, with distorted vocals on every single song. The choruses are very catchy and easy to dance to though. Good songs: Killing Fields, Gunman, Nuclear Winter, Funker Vogt, Black Hole, Subspace.:Wumpscut: - Industrial/EBM with a very bleak worldview. Good songs: Totmacher, Deliverance, Embryodead, Sag Es Jetzt, Concrete Rage.
L'âme Immortelle - Industrial/EBM that alternates between distorted male vocals and beautifully clean female vocals. Very good. Some good songs: Tears in the Rain, Epitaph, Gefallen, Judgement, Forgive Me.
Assemblage 23 - Probably the best American EBM/synthpop band. Somewhat similar in style to VNV Nation, but a bit darker. Some good songs: House on Fire, Disappoint, Bi-Polar, Naked, Purgatory, Awake.
Blank - Italian EBM with heavily layered industrial-influenced but catchy music. And even better, you can download 192kbps full mp3s of both their albums from their official site (add a few legal mp3s to your collection!). I'm not going to bother listing good songs, because you can just go get them all and decide for yourself.
Cat Rapes Dog - Amusing (but possibly offensive) lyrics in an EBM/industrial format. You'll probably need to find some lyrics sheets to understand them all, but they're worth it. Some good songs: Don't Wanna Work, Things I Hate, Trojan Whores, The World Is Good and Nothing Bad Ever Happens, Dead Boys Don't Say No, Capitalist Punishment, Eating People is Fun.
Wolfsheim - Very, very good darkwave/synthpop. Some good songs: Heroin She Said,...Scars Remain..., Lovesong, Künstliche Welten, Once in a Lifetime, Youth and Greed, The Sparrows and the Nightingales.
There's of course lots more, but that's about all I have the inclination to type up at the moment, so that should serve as a good start if you're unfamiliar with the genre.
Or at least used to be (their newest album has a bit of electronica, or at least dance, influence in it). EBM is a dumb genre name that stands for "electronic body music," and was originally something akin to "industrial dance" -- think Front 242. Nowadays the genre loosely can describe anything from industrial with a beat (Front 242 still, Funker Vogt,:Wumpscut:, etc.) to synthpop with a harsher edge (VNV Nation, Covenant, Apoptygma Berzerk, etc.).
And yes, VNV is great. But if you like their style of music, I'd suggest looking for other EBM (some of the bands I mentioned above are a good place to start), rather than the repetative vocal-less nonsense that is "electronica".
To revoke licenses that have already been granted, yes. But there's nothing to stop them from granting further licenses, meaning no further implementations.
This isn't like the GPL, where you can't rescind it because it allows other people to pass on the license. With the GPL, the original company could decide to stop licensing the code, but you could still get the already in-the-wild code from someone who already has it, who can then license it to you under the GPL. I doubt the royalty-free patent license OpenGL uses is a viral GPL style one though.
Unless there was actually a contract signed stating that these patents would be licensed in perpetuity under a no-royalty license. Then Microsoft charging for its patents would be breach of contract. But I'm not aware of any such contract -- just implicit agreements, which aren't legally binding.
There's no such thing as "donating patents to the public domain" as far as I know. What you can do is grant a blanket royalty-free license to use your patents. But I don't think there's anything to stop you from rescinding the license.
But most companies don't care, so don't even bother calling themselves such. What they want is to be able to say "compatible with Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) 95, 98, ME, 2k, XP" on their box. They don't care about "certified 100% OpenGL(r) compliant" labels. In fact as mentioned, many video cards didn't even pretend to be OpenGL compliant for a long time -- 3dfx only shipped a "MiniGL" driver that supported exactly the subset of OpenGL that Quake used, because that's the only thing anyone used OpenGL for anyway.
With Time-Warner it's already $35/mo for "extended basic" cable (i.e. you get local channels, CNN, MTV, CSPAN, etc., but no movie channels or premium channels or sports channels) and $40-$45/mo for standard cablemodem service. That's already $75-$80/mo currently. You can bet if they add some newfangled wireless service to it you'll be paying at least $100 total.
Also, the new Civic Hybrid is a full five-passenger hybrid sedan, which really means that there's no reason anyone (who doesn't need a minivan) can't get a hybrid vehicles these days. The Prius and Insight, due to their smaller size, get better mileage, but at 45 mpg city and 50 mpg highway the Civic isn't bad either.
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...Linux wouldn't be suitable as a server or client in nearly as many situations as it is today. Believe it or not, lots of people still do use SMB, and support for it on Linux makes it possible to use it in such an environment.
Much in the same way as support for Novell networking made Windows a more suitable client and server in many environments.
The last digit should be an estimate, and the number should have an attached margin of error to indicate how much of an estimate. I.e. 10.5 +/- 0.3 indicates that the 10 is exactly accurate, and the 0.5 is an estimate to within +/- 0.3.
You're not supposed to do things like 10.51 +/- 0.23 though -- that should become 10.5 +/- 0.2 (or +/- 0.3 if you're being conservative).
A 2-L bottle of coca cola costs around 0,90 - 1,00 in the US...
You're right, it'd take far more money than most people are willing to offer to actually pay for development at a reasonable rate. However, I could see it working as a way to encourage authors to continue working on their projects, while getting your pet features a bit higher up on the priority list. If I were a project manager and I had 5 or so features I was planning to implement in the near future, if someone paid $100 in favor of one of them, I might well not mind getting that one done first. Sure, for $100 few people will develop an entirely new feature that otherwise they wouldn't have done, but it might be enough to encourage them to shift priorities around a bit.
But soft drinks seemed ridiculously expensive last time I was there. I'm used to buying a 0,5-L bottle for EUR 0.50 in both the U.S. and Greece, and it was 2-3x that in Holland...
I find Cppreference.com to be very simple and to the point. It's got information on both the standard C library, the C++ STL, and a few other common core components of both C and C++. Definitely just a lookup resource for people already familiar with one or both languages, and not entirely complete, but a quite useful resource nonetheless, especially for mundane but necessary things like function names and parameter order/datatype.
The fraud was to hide financial problems -- they hid losses and overstated profits to make it look like they were making money when they were actually losing it. So this can't be the cause of their problems; it merely hid them so everyone else didn't think they had problems (thus inflating their stock price). If they had been more carefully accounted, they'd still be losing money, we just would've known about it as it was happening, instead of finding out years later.
As for whether they've been losing money because of over-regulation or because of some other reason, I don't know.
Creative accounting merely hides losses by basically listing a bunch of income that isn't really there. The actual money loss comes from somewhere else, such as selling bandwidth for too cheap.
They might have added more, but I've had to stop even a few years ago. I know the westbound checkpoint on I-10 right as you're entering California from Arizona has been there for decades, primarily to stop the movement of agricultural pests like fruit flies across the desert and into the central California farming regions (they make you throw out any fresh fruit or vegetables you have with you basically). Eastbound through Texas there's also been a checkpoint about 75-100 miles east of El Paso (just a bit after I-10 stops following the Mexican border and turns northwards), primarily to check for smuggling (of immigrants and drugs) from Mexico, and that one's been there for at least 3-4 years, if not more.
The people behind PNG and Ogg Vorbis are well aware that patent law and copyright law are two entirely separate beasts, which is why they did not content themselves with just implementing things on their own. They in fact did exhaustive patent searches to make sure that nothing they did was in conflict with existing patents. In both cases it is likely, though not 100% certain, that they have suceeded. The PNG standard was pored over with a fine-toothed comb by the FSF's lawyers, and so far it appears to be clean, which is about as good as you can reasonably expect. Ogg Vorbis has not only been checked out by a lawyer hired by Ogg, but in fact has been vetted by AOL Time Warner (a corporation that's no stranger to patent law itself) because the current version of Winamp includes support for Ogg, and AOL (which owns Winamp) wanted to be sure that they weren't getting themselves into trouble by doing that.
In several places along the western half of Interstate 10 (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas), all cars must exit and submit to random searches. They're mostly looking for smuggling of drugs and illegal immigrants.
In the non-computer world, you can generally only patent specific tools, not concepts of tools. For example, if a pharmaceutical company comes up with a medicine that cures cancer, they can patent that particular medicine. They can't patent the concept of using medicines to cure cancer. Thus someone else could develop a different medicine to cure cancer without infringing on their patent.
In the computer world this doesn't seem to be enforced.
So perhaps those who drink lots of caffeine don't live long enough to develop Alzheimer's?
If not, you're vulnerable to a worm that's been going around that is similar to Code Red (hijacks your server and turns it into a DDoS platform). I know at least 4-5 people who were hit by this in the 2 days it took the fix to get into security.debian.org.
Perhaps you haven't been following the remote Apache worm that's been going around lately?
Hmm, I must have less a tolerance for noise, because I'd consider Asche, Morgenstern, Haus Arafna, etc. to be "rhythmic noise", whereas Merzbow et al are "arrythmic noise". "Industrial" is what I'd call more structured (and usually less noisy) things like Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Foetus, and possibly Coil.
I said I wasn't going to mention the "straight industrial" bands. If I were going to, I'd probably mention Skinny Puppy, Download, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Ministry, The Tear Garden, Foetus, and Coil, among others.
If you're not into the whole "electronica" scene, there's still plenty of good electronic music out there. I concentrate here on music with vocals, as that's mostly what I listen to.
:Wumpscut: - Industrial/EBM with a very bleak worldview. Good songs: Totmacher, Deliverance, Embryodead, Sag Es Jetzt, Concrete Rage.
...Scars Remain..., Lovesong, Künstliche Welten, Once in a Lifetime, Youth and Greed, The Sparrows and the Nightingales.
Synthpop is basically synthesizer pop. For mainstream examples, think New Order and a host of other 80s pop. Less mainstream synthpop ranges from "darker" music with goth-influenced lyrics to the happy sort of stuff you're used to from the 80s.
Industrial is heavy, distorted electronic music. It may have real instruments (most often guitars), but there will generally be much electronic treatment of both the instruments and often the vocals ("treatment" usually consists of various sorts of distortion).
EBM stands for "Electronic Body Music" (dumb genre name, I know), and is sometimes called "industrial dance". It's essentially a mixture of Synthpop and Industrial. There's incessant arguments over what is and isn't EBM, but pretty much anything from industrial with a vague beat to synthpop with a bit of a harsher edge can fall into the category, depending on who you ask. But the classification isn't really that important anyway.
Some good bands (almost all of these are European, as there's very little of a "scene" in North America) include:
[I'm concentrating on EBM here, as straight industrial tends to be less electronically-oriented]
VNV Nation - Their earlier albums are industrial-leaning EBM, while their newer stuff is very bombastic uplifting synthpop. One of the best out there. Some good songs: Standing, Further, Darkangel, Epicentre, Joy, Kingdom.
Apoptygma Berzerk - Their earlier albums are goth/industrial/ebm hybrids, while their newest one is barely synthpopish trance (a common trend; I guess industrial/ebm is getting less popular these days). Some good songs: Non-Stop Violence, Starsign, Deep Red, Eclipse, Unicorn.
Kraftwerk - Okay, so they're not really synthpop, EBM, or industrial, but they heavily influenced those genres, especially with their industrial (in the original literal sense of the term) instrumentation. And if you're interested in electronic music at all, you at least have to give them a listen. Some good songs: Radioactivity, Pocket Calculator, Boing Boom Tschak, The Robots, The Model.
Beborn Beton - Synthpop, with a darker yet optimistic tone. Some good songs: Deeper Than the Usual Feeling, Hemoglobin, Winter, Another World, Phoenix.
Einstürzende Neubauten - One of the original industrial bands, with the home-made industrial implements to prove it. Their earlier stuff is rather legendary, though a bit inaccesible and very noisy. Their more recent stuff alternates between melodic ballads and noisy clanging pieces, though the instrumentation is still all things from sheet metal to large mechanically-operated flutes. Some good songs include: Was Ist Ist, Zebulon, Sabrina, Salamandrina, Newton's Gravitätlichkeit.
Front 242 - The original EBM band. It's sparse industrial with a beat. Some good songs: Headhunter, Quite Unusual, Body to Body, Im Rhythmus Bleiben, Circling Overland, Welcome to Paradise.
Deine Lakaien - Very melodic synthpop, with the occasional noisy EBM song thrown in. Some good songs: Kiss the Future, Mindmachine, Down Down Down, Return.
Funker Vogt - Aggressive industrial-oriented EBM, with distorted vocals on every single song. The choruses are very catchy and easy to dance to though. Good songs: Killing Fields, Gunman, Nuclear Winter, Funker Vogt, Black Hole, Subspace.
L'âme Immortelle - Industrial/EBM that alternates between distorted male vocals and beautifully clean female vocals. Very good. Some good songs: Tears in the Rain, Epitaph, Gefallen, Judgement, Forgive Me.
Assemblage 23 - Probably the best American EBM/synthpop band. Somewhat similar in style to VNV Nation, but a bit darker. Some good songs: House on Fire, Disappoint, Bi-Polar, Naked, Purgatory, Awake.
Blank - Italian EBM with heavily layered industrial-influenced but catchy music. And even better, you can download 192kbps full mp3s of both their albums from their official site (add a few legal mp3s to your collection!). I'm not going to bother listing good songs, because you can just go get them all and decide for yourself.
Cat Rapes Dog - Amusing (but possibly offensive) lyrics in an EBM/industrial format. You'll probably need to find some lyrics sheets to understand them all, but they're worth it. Some good songs: Don't Wanna Work, Things I Hate, Trojan Whores, The World Is Good and Nothing Bad Ever Happens, Dead Boys Don't Say No, Capitalist Punishment, Eating People is Fun.
Wolfsheim - Very, very good darkwave/synthpop. Some good songs: Heroin She Said,
There's of course lots more, but that's about all I have the inclination to type up at the moment, so that should serve as a good start if you're unfamiliar with the genre.
Or at least used to be (their newest album has a bit of electronica, or at least dance, influence in it). EBM is a dumb genre name that stands for "electronic body music," and was originally something akin to "industrial dance" -- think Front 242. Nowadays the genre loosely can describe anything from industrial with a beat (Front 242 still, Funker Vogt, :Wumpscut:, etc.) to synthpop with a harsher edge (VNV Nation, Covenant, Apoptygma Berzerk, etc.).
And yes, VNV is great. But if you like their style of music, I'd suggest looking for other EBM (some of the bands I mentioned above are a good place to start), rather than the repetative vocal-less nonsense that is "electronica".
To revoke licenses that have already been granted, yes. But there's nothing to stop them from granting further licenses, meaning no further implementations.
This isn't like the GPL, where you can't rescind it because it allows other people to pass on the license. With the GPL, the original company could decide to stop licensing the code, but you could still get the already in-the-wild code from someone who already has it, who can then license it to you under the GPL. I doubt the royalty-free patent license OpenGL uses is a viral GPL style one though.
Unless there was actually a contract signed stating that these patents would be licensed in perpetuity under a no-royalty license. Then Microsoft charging for its patents would be breach of contract. But I'm not aware of any such contract -- just implicit agreements, which aren't legally binding.
There's no such thing as "donating patents to the public domain" as far as I know. What you can do is grant a blanket royalty-free license to use your patents. But I don't think there's anything to stop you from rescinding the license.
But most companies don't care, so don't even bother calling themselves such. What they want is to be able to say "compatible with Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) 95, 98, ME, 2k, XP" on their box. They don't care about "certified 100% OpenGL(r) compliant" labels. In fact as mentioned, many video cards didn't even pretend to be OpenGL compliant for a long time -- 3dfx only shipped a "MiniGL" driver that supported exactly the subset of OpenGL that Quake used, because that's the only thing anyone used OpenGL for anyway.
With Time-Warner it's already $35/mo for "extended basic" cable (i.e. you get local channels, CNN, MTV, CSPAN, etc., but no movie channels or premium channels or sports channels) and $40-$45/mo for standard cablemodem service. That's already $75-$80/mo currently. You can bet if they add some newfangled wireless service to it you'll be paying at least $100 total.
Also, the new Civic Hybrid is a full five-passenger hybrid sedan, which really means that there's no reason anyone (who doesn't need a minivan) can't get a hybrid vehicles these days. The Prius and Insight, due to their smaller size, get better mileage, but at 45 mpg city and 50 mpg highway the Civic isn't bad either.