You're an idiot. RMS is "crusading" for freedom for software users, not free downloading of copyrighted material. Read the four freedoms document and also his opinion on why non-free written works are no problem.
I always thought the punishment suggestions were dumb too. Damages? Please. They have so much cash it would only hurt for that quarter. Plus they would just donate an "equivalent value" of Microsoft software to schools, ironically furthering their proprietary lock-in. Breakup? Yay, now we have four separate monopolies.
I always thought the best solution would be to require them to open their secret file formats, APIs, and network protocols, and invalidate their software patents. The market would take care of the rest from that point.
I find it very telling as to the strength of your argument that you can only rebut civil disobedience against copyright with examples of crimes against life, liberty, and property. There is a difference between laws that have a moral basis, and laws which are designed as a balancing factor to encourage something or other (in the case of copyright, to encourage development of raw ideas into complex works).
In the former case, in the absence of the law, the act is still wrong. In the latter, the act is not wrong except that it is thought to be detrimental to the balance required to maintain a productive society. However, that opinion may be wrong, since there are many ways a balance can be struck, so bible-thumping about ownership rights to works (which is a convenient fabrication anyway - nothing is owned in the case of copyright) doesn't really serve your argument, since you are using the definition of copyright to justify itself.
If you really want to be convincing, why don't you argue for what you feel that copyright should be? Infinite rights including limiting ownership rights? Infinite duration? Private policing powers? Or limited exclusive rights for a limited duration?
HyperZ was recently reverse engineered and integrated into the DRI drivers. That should provide a substantial performance boost (around 20% on average).
A company spokesman said they would "take actions" against possible copyright infringements of the Commodore name in the United States
Erm, don't they mean trademark infringements? I wonder if this executive is banking on the company being able to use the latest advances in federal copyright munitions, sponsored by the {MP|RI}AA...
You seem to suffer from the inability to distinguish between laws which have a moral basis, and those which do not. Perhaps you use the law as your moral basis, which is a very convenient position for those in power - they can revoke whatever freedom they want to and it will be justified in a circular fashion.
"Once something has been approved by the government, it's no longer immoral." - Rev. Lovejoy
In fact, it could be argued that by selling coke you are doing a service to your country, by satisfying demand that would otherwise be satisfied by foreign drug trafficking conspiracies, where the profits would then be used to fund jihads on the US. What's worse - admitting people want dope, or remaining wishfully ignorant of that fact and allowing third-world dictatorships and radical groups to capitalize on it?
Either a lot of people are (a) making typos or (b) underclocking their P-II's, it does exist.
When you see this mentioned in software requirements, they are probably confusing a Pentium-MMX with a PII, since from the applications perspective they are identical. When you see this mentioned as a dual system (i.e. the Dual PII-166 System I see as a first hit) they have probably confused it with the PPro, which was sold in 150, 166, 180, and 200MHz variants.
The 286 added protected mode, though not as nice as 386+. You could access up to 16MB of memory in 80286 Protected Mode. oh, baby!
It was worse than that; the 286 provided no mechanism to switch out of protected mode. Windows-286 was a dog because it depended on so many DOS interrupt routines which had to be executed in real mode (since the drivers had not been written as native VXDs yet). The only reason this was possible at all was because a facility was provided to reset the CPU through the keyboard controller. Every time the software needed to switch the CPU into real mode, it had to be completely reset through the keyboard controller. You can read all about the A20 mechanism here.
The 386 finally added the ability for the control program to switch back to real mode. With that it carried a bug that allowed the user to set a segment limit of 4GB while in protected mode and then quickly switch back to real mode, giving the user access to a 4GB address space in real mode (where only a 1MB address space should be available). Many games and demos circa 1992-1993 exploited this "Unreal-mode" feature like Ultima 7 and Zone 66, and were known to be the nastiest, most incompatible programs ever to exist, never getting along with any memory manager or multitasking operating system. If only game programmers had used something sane like DPMI back then!
IIRC the 486 added something related to cache, I forget if it was on-chip cache
Yes, it added an 8KB on-chip instruction cache - to the dismay of many legacy programs which used precisely timed tight loops for program timing.
The biggest innovation of the 80486, IMHO, was that it included the equivalent of the earlier math co-processors
Don't forget cache. It was only when the 486 showed up with its 8KB instruction cache that 386 vendors were motivated to start putting L2 cache on their boards. After that point, people started realizing just how much ass a cached machine could kick.
The slowest Pentium Pro was (I think) 150MHz, with the fastest being (IIRC) 233MHz.
The fastest PPro was 200MHz. Some boards would let you overclock them but I was never able to get mine stable at 233MHz.
Now is where it starts to get funny. The Pentium-II started at 166Mhz was a slightly-enhanced Pentium Pro with half-speed, off-chip cache in a Slot1 package.
The PII started at 233MHz, had twice the L1 cache (32KB) of the PPro, and MMX.
It was almost identical to the Pentium Pro, so identical that you could at once time buy "Pentium Pro Overdrive" chips to put in your P6 sockets, chips that were more or less socketed versions of the P-II.
You could also buy the converse - slots with socket-8 on them to put a PPro CPU in a PII board. Computernerd used to sell them. PPro 200 with 1MB on-chip L2 was tough to beat for a file server until PII went to a 100MHz FSB.
Now, if Linux came with a WORKING Win32s ABI layer (similarly to the BSDs which can run most native Linux binaries by providing the necessary ABI hooks), not just WINE
What are you talking about? WINE is an implementation of the Windows API and comes with a Windows executable loader. What exactly do you mean by an ABI? The BSD Linux emulation is done by hijacking int 0x80 and calling the BSD equivalent syscalls instead. WINE is so much more than that because it's not just emulating a Windows kernel like the BSD emulation emulates a Linux kernel, but also all the libraries and server processes that a user's Windows program expects to have available.
If developers could concentrate more on providing a full-fledged Win32s ABI instead of adding more and more bloatware-like eye-candy, it would be much more useful to a broader range of users.
Are you implying that WINE is bloatware and/or eye-candy? Exactly what is wrong with its design or approach?
I hope for the sake of your plan that you meant "certified" here. Requiring engineers to acquire a license to practice engineering is an extremely bad idea for numerous reasons.
our cable modems (regardless of brand, be it 3com, Ambit, Toshiba...etc) have a 10.x.x.x IP address that is not accessable to the public. Only if you have direct access to the CMTS system can you upload new BIN configuration files to these modems on the fly.
Well, I hope you don't use Motorola SB3100 or SB4100 modems, since they have a documented ARP poisoning attack that causes the modem to TFTP its config from the local Ethernet segment instead of the headend.
You want a process (its code and data) to stay on one CPU as much as possible, because cache is local to each CPU, and performance is dependent on cache hits. Locality of reference plays a big part in answering your question - do I want a particular CPU juggling data from two completely unrelated contexts in its cache, or do I want the CPU dealing with information flow that it is highly optimized for, namely that with a high locality of reference.
Of course, I'm completely ignoring the issue of load balancing and assuming 100% busy virtual partitions here. Having a scheduler that can cooperate with other instances of itself would be interesting - something like a single system cluster.
Actually, you're pretty close. LSB is a vendor consortium, so it's only going to be relevant to the commercial distributions. For example, Debian, the largest nonprofit distribution, has no representation in the LSB. The LSB will just solidify the fissure between commercial and noncommercial distributions if it is widely adopted.
LSB is nothing new. It's been around since 1998. It's also a vendor consortium, which means nonprofits like Debian have no say in the standards they publish. That fact alone will unfortunately limit its uptake to the commercial distributions, and in the end probably just cause a greater divide between the commercial and noncommercial distros.
IMHO, this is one great advantage that the FreeBSD project has - there are no "distros".
Uh, ok. Slackware Linux has the same advantage - there are no "distros" of Slackware Linux. Or are you implying that FreeBSD is not a distribution of 4.4BSD like OpenBSD and NetBSD? How about Dragonfly BSD, doesn't that count as a distro of FreeBSD?
Linux is always the biggest pain in the arse, due to the joyous work of glibc
That's a non sequitur. Why does glibc's high quality mean it's a big pain in the ass? Or were you being sarcastic, in which case you ought to be backing up your criticism?
and of course Redhat's need to do everything their own way
I think you're unfairly blaming Red Hat's poor release policy on glibc.
No,/. doesn't need to do anything, but if the original poster wants to convince anybody, he should back up his claim. The only innovative things I have ever observed come out of Microsoft are marketing innovations.
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Never became familiar with Occam's Razor, eh?
You're an idiot. RMS is "crusading" for freedom for software users, not free downloading of copyrighted material. Read the four freedoms document and also his opinion on why non-free written works are no problem.
I always thought the best solution would be to require them to open their secret file formats, APIs, and network protocols, and invalidate their software patents. The market would take care of the rest from that point.
In the former case, in the absence of the law, the act is still wrong. In the latter, the act is not wrong except that it is thought to be detrimental to the balance required to maintain a productive society. However, that opinion may be wrong, since there are many ways a balance can be struck, so bible-thumping about ownership rights to works (which is a convenient fabrication anyway - nothing is owned in the case of copyright) doesn't really serve your argument, since you are using the definition of copyright to justify itself.
If you really want to be convincing, why don't you argue for what you feel that copyright should be? Infinite rights including limiting ownership rights? Infinite duration? Private policing powers? Or limited exclusive rights for a limited duration?
HyperZ was recently reverse engineered and integrated into the DRI drivers. That should provide a substantial performance boost (around 20% on average).
Your Jefferson quote is nice, but unfortunately he was referring to patents and not copyrights.
"Once something has been approved by the government, it's no longer immoral." - Rev. Lovejoy
In fact, it could be argued that by selling coke you are doing a service to your country, by satisfying demand that would otherwise be satisfied by foreign drug trafficking conspiracies, where the profits would then be used to fund jihads on the US. What's worse - admitting people want dope, or remaining wishfully ignorant of that fact and allowing third-world dictatorships and radical groups to capitalize on it?
The 386 finally added the ability for the control program to switch back to real mode. With that it carried a bug that allowed the user to set a segment limit of 4GB while in protected mode and then quickly switch back to real mode, giving the user access to a 4GB address space in real mode (where only a 1MB address space should be available). Many games and demos circa 1992-1993 exploited this "Unreal-mode" feature like Ultima 7 and Zone 66, and were known to be the nastiest, most incompatible programs ever to exist, never getting along with any memory manager or multitasking operating system. If only game programmers had used something sane like DPMI back then!
Yes, it added an 8KB on-chip instruction cache - to the dismay of many legacy programs which used precisely timed tight loops for program timing.BTW, Win32S is not Win32.
This is usually referred to as the fallacy of the false dichotomy.
Of course, I'm completely ignoring the issue of load balancing and assuming 100% busy virtual partitions here. Having a scheduler that can cooperate with other instances of itself would be interesting - something like a single system cluster.
In what way? You are referring to the integration with the editor I presume?
It wasn't Linus that noticed the backdoor commit, it was Larry McVoy (the BK dude).
Actually, you're pretty close. LSB is a vendor consortium, so it's only going to be relevant to the commercial distributions. For example, Debian, the largest nonprofit distribution, has no representation in the LSB. The LSB will just solidify the fissure between commercial and noncommercial distributions if it is widely adopted.
LSB is nothing new. It's been around since 1998. It's also a vendor consortium, which means nonprofits like Debian have no say in the standards they publish. That fact alone will unfortunately limit its uptake to the commercial distributions, and in the end probably just cause a greater divide between the commercial and noncommercial distros.
No, /. doesn't need to do anything, but if the original poster wants to convince anybody, he should back up his claim. The only innovative things I have ever observed come out of Microsoft are marketing innovations.