The reason computer sellers still put Windows on every computer is to keep their bulk OEM license price down. If they lower the number of Windows licenses they purchase the price goes up.
The problem is that MS probably knows how many copies each seller needs and offers a price/volume curve that is specific to that seller. The curve probably encourages more sales, and severly penalizes a drop from their normal volume so any attempt to offer some alternatives hurts a lot.
Yeah, whenever someone brings up the CMM, I point out that NASA is CMM level 5 and they managed to smash probes into Mars because of unit conversion issues. This date issue is just another example. NASA does neat stuff, but that is not an indicator of the quality of their develoment process.
Such is the great conceit of Americans, to think that the legal system of a foreign country timed a verdict so as to coincide with our mid-term elections.
Who established that court? Who has been overseeing the trial? Who is desperate not to have his party lose control of congress on Tuesday? The only hole in the conspiracy theory is that it presumes that Americans would actually see it as some sort of victory, and change their minds about the whole thing. I think it's actually BAD timing for Bush, as it makes the trial look rigged/planned/whatever like the grandparent post said.
Not only is it quick enough. If you hired temp workers to do it, the cost compared to what you pay in taxes would be absolutely irrelevant. 3 seconds of labor at what hourly rate?
In the letter, he criticised the study as biased and warns that its policy recommendations, if carried out, could derail the European software economy.
But what about the benefits to other parts of the economy?
There are things that should be done with Firefox that can't because of the license. The biggest feature I'd add to Firefox would be integration of EVINCE or some other GPLed PDF viewer - you know, one that isn't a separate download from Adobe and doesn't advertise updates and other product, and loads quickly. Unfortunately the main Firefox codebase can not accept such things because they have multiple licenses and some (MPL) can not integrate GPLed code. I think a GPL only fork of Firefox could easily win out because of issues like this. However, they do need a better name IMHO. Hopefully the fork will be maintained as a set of patches against the official version so they can be Firefox plus extras - then they'll always be ahead.
An intermediate step would be suborbital transcontinental flight. Imagine traveling between EU and US via something like this. You'd get the 1 hour ride to 50,000 feet and then a short (long compared to this) rocket ride across the ocean, followed by a glide into the local spaceport.
So real world copyright law will apply in the virtual world. Will real-world designers start to steal from the virtual one? Is that a copyright violation? Hmmm.
Is OOo trying to turn into a general distribution of cool software? I hope not. I think they need to stick to the software that they develop and leave the other apps to the other teams.
My wife is still using an old K7-700 running windows 98. She recently uninstalled some unused apps and broke more recent current apps that she still uses. Reinstalling the new apps doesn't work. Anyway, 98 is starting to break and we have considered running Linux on it (she uses my PC also which runs Fedora). Consider that new distros with up-to-date kernels require newer video drivers for acceleration. The 98 Box has an old TNT2 video card, which is not supported by the latest nVidia drivers. The old drivers don't work with the newer kernels.
Now I have to check, because I *think* nVidia may have some drivers that support this card and work with new kernels. I'd have to check. If so, I'm wrong. Some time ago, it really was the case that the old cards were not supported. Some time in the future, it will probably be the case again.
the claim that best-gas-price-hunting is an effort that could be better used on other products
I'm not a gas-price-shopper, but I know several people who are. It actually takes zero time to do since you're driving past all the big price signs on the way to and from work every day. To say the effort could be better used somewhere else is silly. Sure, people should make an effort for other products, but that would require... effort!
The President is tasked in a time of war to protect the country as he/she sees fit, and guess what we are at war. Our enemy has said that they are at war with us.
There are a couple problems with that. 1) Only congress can declare war - and hence enable the wartime powers of the president (see that constitution thing). Foreign governments (or anyone else) can not invoke an escalation of the presidents power - duh. 2) Even if I concede that we are at war, who is the enemy? How do we decide when it's over? A war on "terrorism" is not well defined - you can always say there may be someone plotting something that falls under that term. We have not had a "terrorist" atrack on the US in 5 years. Where is this war you speak of? Iraq? That's "peace keeping", not war any more.
Yes, the modern world has problems that were not anticipated when the constitution was written. However, the behavior of the current administration IS the type of thing the constitution was designed to protect us from, and those protections are getting thrown out. OK, as far as I know, bush is not an evil dictator and probably has good intentions. But how do we know the next guy won't be? Or the one after that? What about behind the scenes abuse of a system challenged only in "secret" courts? WTF? New laws enacted without record of who voted for them? WTF? Now that I think of it, your post must just be an attempt to stir the pot. I guess that makes me a sucker for responding.
How about if you are bogged down in a peace-keeping and rebuilding operation where 90% of the population wants you out of their country and the Prime Minister has said it's okay to kill American troops?
That sounds like a war to me - the Prime Minister has OKed kill our guys? That's the real problem these days, people don't want to be realistic about what's going on. If their guys are killing our guys, we need to clean up over there. If as you said 90% of their people want us out of their country (including the leadership) then we should leave. The situation you describe is military occupation, not "peace-keeping". If the locals want to fight each other, let them have a civil war. If one side wants our help, help them - but declare war on the other side since that's what it would be. We all need to be a little more honest about what's going on in various situations. "politically correct" language has no place in such discussions - it confuses the issues.
The main problem I've seen with hiring is that the people doing the interviewing often are not qualified to evaluate the technical ability of the people they hire. One place I worked (in embedded software - the SOC kind) the cheif engineer had a list of questions for all the software candidates. They were specific questions - as a single example: he'd ask if they knew what the "volatile" keyword was for in C, and when you might use it. If they didn't know the answers to these types of questions (or at least several of them) they clearly weren't the people we were looking for. Now if you have a non-expert doing the hiring, some other test may at least offer some idea of a persons problem solving ability. It's not perfectly tailored to the job so it shouldn't be the only criteria, but I can see some value in it.
Who cares about how much hydrogen you can get into a given volume. It should be all about energy per volume. It will be great when someone notices the energy density of hydrogen atoms attached to carbon chains - i.e. hydrocarbons. Oh wait...
At $129 the HD5500 from pchdtv.com isn't the cheapest one out there, but it does recieve OTA and unencrypted cable HDTV. There are cheaper solutions out there, this is just a later rev of the one I've had for 2 years. You are correct that an HTPC won't support cable card. OTOH, it does support burning to DVD.
I've ridden both the Segway and the iBOT (down stairs too). And I can tell you the iBOT is the most conmfortable transportation device I've ever ridden. The Segway is cool, but the chair in balance mode is unbelievable. Way down on my thing-to-do-some-day list is to build my own Segway-like device with a chair. Perhaps an office chair with the air-shock:-) Man that would be comfy.
Only part of the client source code is downloadable, not the whole; this is a violation of the GPL. Also, the iChessU has an EULA which violates the GPL by placing new restrictions on how the code may be used.
Lets just remember that you are supposed to claim copyright violation in court, not GPL violation. When the defendant says they have permission to redistribute your code, you ask where they got permission and let them point to the GPL. Then you point out how they have not lived up to their end of the deal and point to the termination clause. IANAL, but if you claim GPL violation, wouldn't the court just tell them to stop? If you claim copyright infringement, clearly there are laws and penalties (money) involved right? Of course this is not in the US so DMCA type (outrageous) penalties don't apply.
Raytracing does not scale nicely with the amount of geometry
It actually scales exceptionally well with the amount of geometry O(log n) where GPUs suck. Read the linked article. Also, the spatial index used in ray tracing is a non-trivial data structure which is not handled well on a GPU. I've also found that ray tracing works better (fewer/no artifacts) with double precision floating point which is not available on a GPU. In a few years, the CPU will be quite capable of realtime ray tracing, so at that point, the GPU becomes a truely redundant part. And in spite of all the "GPGPU" hype, they still don't run word processors or other useful app. When you can use either chip for graphics, but only one of them can do all the other things, which one do you think will get dropped?
BTW, compositing windows can be done on the CPU today, so why all this talk about using the 3D card for it? Have people forgotten how to write fast graphics code? (unless it's GPU assembler of course)
I did RTchess a few years back (a link would kill my friends server). The core RT code has been pulled into a library and improved significantly since then. I was actually meaning to write an artice making the same point as the one in the summary. Multi-core will make realtime ray tracing common in a five years, and then there will be no use for the GPU. Why rasterize when you can ray trace instead? Ray tracing scales exceptionally well with polygon count (log n). Why add a second chip? Not to mention the geometry needs to be present in the CPU anyway when you do physics. Why maintain all the geometry data in 2 places?
The Intel guy has some funny stats about ray-somethings per second. Intersection tests are irrelevant. Generated rays per second is too. There is already a "Benchmark for Animated Ray Tracing" called BART. Frame rates on those animations are much more important. Unfortunately I haven't even had time to patch that code together with mine to get numbers. It's down there on the to-do list. Is Intel hiring? If someone could pay me to work on it, things would come together quickly.
Rather than pay codec "owners" to let us use their crummy codecs, why not pay the device makers to support the existing open codecs? Wouldn't that be a better use of money - assuming one doesn't think paying either way is stupid.
Keep a notebook with your ideas with dates. Then should something ever become disputed because you didn't disclose it, then at least you have some documentation that you thought of it prior to working for them. This is of course in addition to other advice you may get here or from a real lawyer.
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You don't get to CMM level 5 without having a processes to oversee your suppliers...
Yeah, whenever someone brings up the CMM, I point out that NASA is CMM level 5 and they managed to smash probes into Mars because of unit conversion issues. This date issue is just another example. NASA does neat stuff, but that is not an indicator of the quality of their develoment process.
Not only is it quick enough. If you hired temp workers to do it, the cost compared to what you pay in taxes would be absolutely irrelevant. 3 seconds of labor at what hourly rate?
There are things that should be done with Firefox that can't because of the license. The biggest feature I'd add to Firefox would be integration of EVINCE or some other GPLed PDF viewer - you know, one that isn't a separate download from Adobe and doesn't advertise updates and other product, and loads quickly. Unfortunately the main Firefox codebase can not accept such things because they have multiple licenses and some (MPL) can not integrate GPLed code. I think a GPL only fork of Firefox could easily win out because of issues like this. However, they do need a better name IMHO. Hopefully the fork will be maintained as a set of patches against the official version so they can be Firefox plus extras - then they'll always be ahead.
An intermediate step would be suborbital transcontinental flight. Imagine traveling between EU and US via something like this. You'd get the 1 hour ride to 50,000 feet and then a short (long compared to this) rocket ride across the ocean, followed by a glide into the local spaceport.
So real world copyright law will apply in the virtual world. Will real-world designers start to steal from the virtual one? Is that a copyright violation? Hmmm.
Is OOo trying to turn into a general distribution of cool software? I hope not. I think they need to stick to the software that they develop and leave the other apps to the other teams.
That would be "Duct Tape". What you're talking about is something you use when kidnapping a duck.
Now I have to check, because I *think* nVidia may have some drivers that support this card and work with new kernels. I'd have to check. If so, I'm wrong. Some time ago, it really was the case that the old cards were not supported. Some time in the future, it will probably be the case again.
Yes, the modern world has problems that were not anticipated when the constitution was written. However, the behavior of the current administration IS the type of thing the constitution was designed to protect us from, and those protections are getting thrown out. OK, as far as I know, bush is not an evil dictator and probably has good intentions. But how do we know the next guy won't be? Or the one after that? What about behind the scenes abuse of a system challenged only in "secret" courts? WTF? New laws enacted without record of who voted for them? WTF? Now that I think of it, your post must just be an attempt to stir the pot. I guess that makes me a sucker for responding.
The main problem I've seen with hiring is that the people doing the interviewing often are not qualified to evaluate the technical ability of the people they hire. One place I worked (in embedded software - the SOC kind) the cheif engineer had a list of questions for all the software candidates. They were specific questions - as a single example: he'd ask if they knew what the "volatile" keyword was for in C, and when you might use it. If they didn't know the answers to these types of questions (or at least several of them) they clearly weren't the people we were looking for. Now if you have a non-expert doing the hiring, some other test may at least offer some idea of a persons problem solving ability. It's not perfectly tailored to the job so it shouldn't be the only criteria, but I can see some value in it.
Who cares about how much hydrogen you can get into a given volume. It should be all about energy per volume. It will be great when someone notices the energy density of hydrogen atoms attached to carbon chains - i.e. hydrocarbons. Oh wait...
I'm still waiting for chips made out of diamond semiconductor. It'll be hard to label them "carbon free" when they're made from the stuff.
I've ridden both the Segway and the iBOT (down stairs too). And I can tell you the iBOT is the most conmfortable transportation device I've ever ridden. The Segway is cool, but the chair in balance mode is unbelievable. Way down on my thing-to-do-some-day list is to build my own Segway-like device with a chair. Perhaps an office chair with the air-shock :-) Man that would be comfy.
It actually scales exceptionally well with the amount of geometry O(log n) where GPUs suck. Read the linked article. Also, the spatial index used in ray tracing is a non-trivial data structure which is not handled well on a GPU. I've also found that ray tracing works better (fewer/no artifacts) with double precision floating point which is not available on a GPU. In a few years, the CPU will be quite capable of realtime ray tracing, so at that point, the GPU becomes a truely redundant part. And in spite of all the "GPGPU" hype, they still don't run word processors or other useful app. When you can use either chip for graphics, but only one of them can do all the other things, which one do you think will get dropped?
BTW, compositing windows can be done on the CPU today, so why all this talk about using the 3D card for it? Have people forgotten how to write fast graphics code? (unless it's GPU assembler of course)
I did RTchess a few years back (a link would kill my friends server). The core RT code has been pulled into a library and improved significantly since then. I was actually meaning to write an artice making the same point as the one in the summary. Multi-core will make realtime ray tracing common in a five years, and then there will be no use for the GPU. Why rasterize when you can ray trace instead? Ray tracing scales exceptionally well with polygon count (log n). Why add a second chip? Not to mention the geometry needs to be present in the CPU anyway when you do physics. Why maintain all the geometry data in 2 places?
The Intel guy has some funny stats about ray-somethings per second. Intersection tests are irrelevant. Generated rays per second is too. There is already a "Benchmark for Animated Ray Tracing" called BART. Frame rates on those animations are much more important. Unfortunately I haven't even had time to patch that code together with mine to get numbers. It's down there on the to-do list. Is Intel hiring? If someone could pay me to work on it, things would come together quickly.
Rather than pay codec "owners" to let us use their crummy codecs, why not pay the device makers to support the existing open codecs? Wouldn't that be a better use of money - assuming one doesn't think paying either way is stupid.
Keep a notebook with your ideas with dates. Then should something ever become disputed because you didn't disclose it, then at least you have some documentation that you thought of it prior to working for them. This is of course in addition to other advice you may get here or from a real lawyer.