... but indirectly. MS makes money out of the OS so that must be what they are ultimately attacking.
With multi-platform flash and Ajax etc, the underlying OS is not very important. All you need is to have a system that can support flash etc and you can browse, watch movies.... That's part of the reason people have not been compelled to get Vista - they work less and less with the OS.
So the challenge for MS is to get people to want their OS again? The only way to do this is to get people to adopt their media platforms, then, at some stage, bind those platforms back to the OS.
There is a perception amongst many that white spaces are unused. That is not always correct. These white spaces can serve a purpose.
In some cases, RF automatic tunig circuits need the white spaces as a way to distinguish the signal envelope (ie. the "edges" of the signal it is tracking). If you pack the white spaces with RF then those edges get blurred and some AFC circuitry will malfunction.
Sure, you can tell the difference between MP3 and CD, but untimately what is important is what the customers want. CD is technically overspecced. There is little point in having CD quality recordings which are a significant number of dB better than the microphones, speakers, funtiture, carpets, road noise, your eardums and other distortions and noise that inject their way into the deliver path.
There's probably a sweet spot somewhere between MP3 and CD where you would not notice the difference.
Clearly MP3 is good enough for most people. To use the car analogy: sure, a Rolls Royce might be technically better than a Toyota, but where is Rolls Royce now? Does Rolls Royce actually deliver a vehicle that is useful to anybody?
If somehow the game ads were linked to RealWorld or GameWorld rewards. eg. Phone order pizza chain could run some sort of real-time promotion scheme: quote some number or whatever and get a discount.
No doubt some shareholders thought SCO might have a genuine case. Many more thought that IBM would pay or buy SCO just to get them out of way. Even more though that they might be able to buy their stock low and sell them to scavengers after the next SCO announcement/stock pump. For a lot of people it was a gamble: perhaps there was a perceived 20% chance of a payout/settlement with the chance of a better than 5:1 payback.
If there is a reasonable alternative use then don't expect to get prosecuted. A maker of steel pipes won't get charged on firearms offences even though you could saw off a length of pipe, stuff it with explosives and nails and make a firearm.
Likely, people with a good reason to posess hacker tools (eg. legitimate anti-virus folk) will be allowed controlled tools - much like how the people who design kevlar vests are allowed to have automatic weapons etc for legitimate test purposes.
but patents are one measure to determine the way the industrial trends are moving.
Using patents as a scoreboad are stupid though. I expect USA is over represented in http://www.patentlysilly.com/. To use patents as a meaningful indicator needs better analysis than just raw numbers. Rather you need to look at the rate of patenting high quality (impoortant and non-duplicate) ideas.
atime really hurts some file systems, particularly flash file systems. Many/most flash file systems don't support atime for that reason. So, even if you're running atime in the kernel you will often not be getting atime in the fs.
If you're using a desktop system with a hard disk you'll hardly notice any difference unless you hammer the system really hard.
Remember though that most Linux systems are either embedded (using mainly flash) or servers. In both these cases atime updates can be very damaging to performance and should be avoided unless there's a very good reason to turn it on.
Most medical tests are not run because theres a need, but because the test is available and it is run as an extra screening tool.
A significant number of xrays and blood tests are run "just to make sure", not because a problem is expected.
If one of these lung viewers was available you can be sure it would get used to check out coughs and all sorts of complaints "just to make sure" and would find its way into medical examinations too.
If the volumes stay low then the price stays low and the motivation for piracy should also stay low.
As the volumes increase, the price increases and the piracy might increase.
What is interesting is that this model possibly finds the "perfect price". So much for economic theory.
In reality, a pirate will not buy some low-cost stuff and pirate high-cost stuff according to some built-in threshold. Once they have free piracy access to music they will use that for everything they can.
Now I'm going to explain the difference between a pervert and an interested citizen.
Both peep into locker rooms and watch 12 year-olds undressing, but there's a big difference! The pervert is doing it because he is a criminal and the concerned citizen is just doing it to see how it is done so that they can know how perverts do it.
Please folks... just proving you can break into someone elses computer or their car or spy on their daughters is wrong. If you really want to do something for experimental reasons then set up your own car, computer or whatever.
All cracking/hacking someone elses equipment is back hat.
"Everyone ends up using it, but everyone adds their own touches to make it different/better"
If the design is GPL then those people will have to release their own touches etc under GPL too. They'd rather have LGPL or BSD licensed cores.
Fully commoditised hardware is going to be a very difficult thing to get hardware companies to sign up to.
As for FPGAs... You can get a few ARM7 cores onto a single FPGA that costs less than $10 and those prices are dropping. I have no idea how complex an OpenSPARC is, but I assume it is something equivalent to an ARM9 or so and will fit in a $10-or-so FPGA.
The hurdles are not technology, but political. Sure people want free-as-in-beer cores, but they don't want GPL cores that force them to release their design.
Slashdot Mirror
Change to Wifi because that can't have NIC faults.
C'mon folk... help me out here!
With multi-platform flash and Ajax etc, the underlying OS is not very important. All you need is to have a system that can support flash etc and you can browse, watch movies.... That's part of the reason people have not been compelled to get Vista - they work less and less with the OS.
So the challenge for MS is to get people to want their OS again? The only way to do this is to get people to adopt their media platforms, then, at some stage, bind those platforms back to the OS.
The ozone is needed at high altitude to provide a shield. At low altitudes ozone is bad stuff to have around and is highly damaging.
At $750 it won't take many downloads to get your money back!
In some cases, RF automatic tunig circuits need the white spaces as a way to distinguish the signal envelope (ie. the "edges" of the signal it is tracking). If you pack the white spaces with RF then those edges get blurred and some AFC circuitry will malfunction.
Like sell it on ebay for food?
Kick sand in their face!
There's probably a sweet spot somewhere between MP3 and CD where you would not notice the difference.
Clearly MP3 is good enough for most people. To use the car analogy: sure, a Rolls Royce might be technically better than a Toyota, but where is Rolls Royce now? Does Rolls Royce actually deliver a vehicle that is useful to anybody?
If somehow the game ads were linked to RealWorld or GameWorld rewards. eg. Phone order pizza chain could run some sort of real-time promotion scheme: quote some number or whatever and get a discount.
There are two ways to fix this:
1. Fix the server access problem so that people work as intended.
2. Use something like CVS to store back critical data.
Using a laptop backup process to keep a broken system going is silly. Rather fix the system so it does not need backups.
Surely if you are doing any development etc work then you should be storing code/data in CVS or equivalent running on a server.
Remember that source control is not limited to just software. You can use it to store all kinds of stuff (documentation, artwork, video...).
Any business model that depends on critical data in laptops is broken.
No doubt some shareholders thought SCO might have a genuine case. Many more thought that IBM would pay or buy SCO just to get them out of way. Even more though that they might be able to buy their stock low and sell them to scavengers after the next SCO announcement/stock pump. For a lot of people it was a gamble: perhaps there was a perceived 20% chance of a payout/settlement with the chance of a better than 5:1 payback.
Likely, people with a good reason to posess hacker tools (eg. legitimate anti-virus folk) will be allowed controlled tools - much like how the people who design kevlar vests are allowed to have automatic weapons etc for legitimate test purposes.
American company help oppressive regime. Nothing new.
How fitting.
Using patents as a scoreboad are stupid though. I expect USA is over represented in http://www.patentlysilly.com/. To use patents as a meaningful indicator needs better analysis than just raw numbers. Rather you need to look at the rate of patenting high quality (impoortant and non-duplicate) ideas.
USPTO is not shy about issuing many patents for the same idea. I'm sure they would happily issue a US patent for a CHinese idea!
But then, I wonder if anyone cares!
Not all file systems support atime, and they can tell the kernel that. Result: that fs does not get the atimer performance hits.
If you're using a desktop system with a hard disk you'll hardly notice any difference unless you hammer the system really hard.
Remember though that most Linux systems are either embedded (using mainly flash) or servers. In both these cases atime updates can be very damaging to performance and should be avoided unless there's a very good reason to turn it on.
A significant number of xrays and blood tests are run "just to make sure", not because a problem is expected.
If one of these lung viewers was available you can be sure it would get used to check out coughs and all sorts of complaints "just to make sure" and would find its way into medical examinations too.
As the volumes increase, the price increases and the piracy might increase.
What is interesting is that this model possibly finds the "perfect price". So much for economic theory.
In reality, a pirate will not buy some low-cost stuff and pirate high-cost stuff according to some built-in threshold. Once they have free piracy access to music they will use that for everything they can.
Both peep into locker rooms and watch 12 year-olds undressing, but there's a big difference! The pervert is doing it because he is a criminal and the concerned citizen is just doing it to see how it is done so that they can know how perverts do it.
Please folks... just proving you can break into someone elses computer or their car or spy on their daughters is wrong. If you really want to do something for experimental reasons then set up your own car, computer or whatever.
All cracking/hacking someone elses equipment is back hat.
If the design is GPL then those people will have to release their own touches etc under GPL too. They'd rather have LGPL or BSD licensed cores.
Fully commoditised hardware is going to be a very difficult thing to get hardware companies to sign up to.
As for FPGAs... You can get a few ARM7 cores onto a single FPGA that costs less than $10 and those prices are dropping. I have no idea how complex an OpenSPARC is, but I assume it is something equivalent to an ARM9 or so and will fit in a $10-or-so FPGA.
The hurdles are not technology, but political. Sure people want free-as-in-beer cores, but they don't want GPL cores that force them to release their design.