If non-dual-core chips are all that's on the market in this segment for the next two years, and AMD's chips hold the majority of that market, then why spoil two profitable years in which to recoup their investment in Opteron?
If they've got the technology, they can quietly enjoy their current position and make money until Intel releases something competitive, and trump them a week later (like ATI just did to Nvidia).
I still wouldn't call that simple functionality, since it relies upon an underlaying object/embedding framework. OLE/Bonobo/etc. is something that the OS exposes to the applications, not that they (normally) offer themselves.
Wrong. Groklaw's advice comes from a paralegal, whose job is legal research. PJ isn't a lawyer, but she's trained to read and interpret law and she has a lot of experience doing it. She's not worth $400 an hour, but she's better by training and experience than your average./ poster.
In the mid-late 90s, domain registrars were explicitly avoiding fixing their mistakes on legal counsel's advice, namely that to fix a mistake was to admit liability for that mistake, and to admit liability for that mistake was to open oneself up to damages in the millions. Thus, they all took the legal position that they weren't responsible for anything they did until it was proven otherwise.
Stupid from a common sense point of view, smart from a business point of view. I can think of a lot of domain name fuckups that, could the owner have sued, would have sunk the registrars. As it is, they've avoided huge lawsuits for the last 8 years.
It took a domain name with the potential money behind it of sex.com to push it all the way through the courts to the current situation.
It's not a lot of cash in and of itself, but when it seems unnecessary because I've already got a good rig... and while the console isn't that much, all the games I have to (re)buy for it adds up.
One con to consoles that you left out: for most people with a serious PC that can play most games, adding a second system hooked up to the TV seems like an unnecessary pain in the ass. If you're someone who normally has a pretty good computer in regular use, a console and a new set of games seems like an expensive luxury.
I think comparing the progress that software development makes to the progress of hardware development is a fundamental mistake. Moore's Law depends upon the properties of the materials we're using and our ability to exploit them--chip fabrication, heat conduction, power consumption--not upon our ability to design chips. It's not the chip layout that's improving, it's our ability to milk what's already in the materials, which yields exponential growth. We're not responsible for that growth curve, the materials are. Doubling the length of our lever gets us the ability to move four times the weight.
Software, on the other hand, is all about design. Of course it's not going to double in power every 18 months--we're not doubling in design ability every 18 months. If the computing of our hardware were limited to our chip design abilities, it would be going just as slowly.
Yes, $45/PC seems high, and is high considering what we currently get with a Windows OS. But I have to wonder what the period is that we should be looking at for recouping that tax. Basic R&D is notorious for taking years, even decades to pay off, and it sounds like that's what all of Microsoft's R&D funding is going towards. At the very least, I'm sure that Bill Gates is expecting it will take 5-10 years before his research department really gels. You can't just hire a bunch of smart people and give them money and put them in a room and expect nobel prizes to flow from it.
As much as Microsoft pisses me off (our network is MS), I wonder if we'll be thanking them in a decade or two for the long term investment in computing.
Wikipedia gets enough traffic, and has enough regular users, that all changes are reviewed by at least a couple people, in practice; that's all that's needed to keep vandalism manageable, it appears. On a few obscure pages I've authored, mass deletions and nasty comments were removed within hours; the higher traffic pages are even more monitored, to the extent that 'editing wars' break out over them, requiring editors to lock pages for a period of time to let tempers cool.
So what the linux questions wiki needs for reliability is a critical mass of users; the rest takes care of itself.
Isn't one of the traditional measures of how "evolved" any organism is, is a balance of well-adaptedness and biological complexity?
I realize that any argument about humans being more or less evolved than other species gets into a lot of collective racial ego, but typically more complex organisms are viewed as more evolved because they not only survive but make better use of their environment for higher purposes. Your single celled, deep water, hot volcanic dwelling organism is tough to kill (though raising it to the surface would probably explode it), but it's not particularly adapted, nor does it do anything but sit there and metabolize sulfur.
If you have any evidence, or anything beyond "it all fits" type speculation, then you've got a huge story there. If you don't, then your tinfoil hat is showing.
Good point, except that their debt was far less than cash-on-hand, which earns much less than 3%. Paying interest on debt while hanging onto cash earning less than that interest rate is less intelligent than paying off debt at a lower interest rate than investing it.
This was cleaning up a corner of the financial statements, for good PR.
It's not nice, but the U.S. government has always gone to bat for U.S. industries, because doing so strengthens the U.S. economy. There's no real English Canadian film industry because it's repeatedly torpedoed in trade negotiations between the two countries (that's why the NFB does little more than fund documentaries); likewise, trade agreements with other nations often have riders about distributing X number of American films in the country.
Open Source is going up against perceived national interest here. It's hard for a politician to (apparently) screw an American business, with American jobs.
I did read the article, and the article that you linked and that the original article linked is one of the reasons I'm mystified about him; I thought it was empty of insight and little more than a sketch of coding utopia. I was hoping that someone could point to something really seminal he'd done that would justify the hype around him, because I always get this deep feeling of cognitive dissonance whenever I see him mentioned on Edge.org.
Someone please explain to me why anyone listens to this guy. I've read his essays; they're pedantic and hand-wavey. The term "Virtual Reality pioneer" should be enough to disqualify him from serious discourse.
Somebody, please point me to something significant he's done so I'll know whether or not I should pay attention to him because, from everything I've seen so far, I shouldn't.
That Mr. Jones' article is immediately followed on Slashdot by an alarmist story about how the Win2K source has been leaked, and how this means a new flood of vulnerabilities is coming now that the source code is available.
Boy, secret propietary code sure is safe, isn't it?
When I built my house through an architect, I had a lawyer look over the contract and suggest what was not in my interest. In subsequent discussions with the architect, we modified the contract until we were both happy with it (mainly clauses relating to arbitration).
The important point is that we at all times had a friendly discussion about what we both wanted out of the contract, and both acted at all times like differences were small bumps to work around, not deal-killers or screw-me-screw-you options.
As long as you're polite and friendly about it, you can say "I'm not comfortable signing this contract as is, specifically because of these parts." Go in with your reasons and your alternatives (that should be acceptable to them as well as to you). Show that you understand their concerns, and how they're trying to protect themselves (in the IP case, they don't want you to become a millionaire instead of them by working on their ideas in the evening). And be prepared to walk away with a smile and a "too bad, maybe another time" attitude. Most especially, push for clarification of terms and limits, rather than "how can I protect myself from getting screwed?" approach (even thought that's what you're doing).
IANAL, and it would be a good idea to run it by one regardless.
Slashdot Mirror
If non-dual-core chips are all that's on the market in this segment for the next two years, and AMD's chips hold the majority of that market, then why spoil two profitable years in which to recoup their investment in Opteron?
If they've got the technology, they can quietly enjoy their current position and make money until Intel releases something competitive, and trump them a week later (like ATI just did to Nvidia).
I still wouldn't call that simple functionality, since it relies upon an underlaying object/embedding framework. OLE/Bonobo/etc. is something that the OS exposes to the applications, not that they (normally) offer themselves.
Embedding multimedia and animations into word processed documents is *simple functionality*?
When was the last time you jammed a Quicktime into your TPS cover sheet?
Wrong. Groklaw's advice comes from a paralegal, whose job is legal research. PJ isn't a lawyer, but she's trained to read and interpret law and she has a lot of experience doing it. She's not worth $400 an hour, but she's better by training and experience than your average ./ poster.
In the mid-late 90s, domain registrars were explicitly avoiding fixing their mistakes on legal counsel's advice, namely that to fix a mistake was to admit liability for that mistake, and to admit liability for that mistake was to open oneself up to damages in the millions. Thus, they all took the legal position that they weren't responsible for anything they did until it was proven otherwise.
Stupid from a common sense point of view, smart from a business point of view. I can think of a lot of domain name fuckups that, could the owner have sued, would have sunk the registrars. As it is, they've avoided huge lawsuits for the last 8 years.
It took a domain name with the potential money behind it of sex.com to push it all the way through the courts to the current situation.
Apple wasn't convicted of abusing its monopoly power, and specifically of monopoly leveraging by product tying.
Oh please... we are not *jocks*.
*whoosh*
Didn't someone already do this? And didn't the editors adopt it? As I recall, it was a nearly perfect updating.
It's not a lot of cash in and of itself, but when it seems unnecessary because I've already got a good rig... and while the console isn't that much, all the games I have to (re)buy for it adds up.
One con to consoles that you left out: for most people with a serious PC that can play most games, adding a second system hooked up to the TV seems like an unnecessary pain in the ass. If you're someone who normally has a pretty good computer in regular use, a console and a new set of games seems like an expensive luxury.
I think comparing the progress that software development makes to the progress of hardware development is a fundamental mistake. Moore's Law depends upon the properties of the materials we're using and our ability to exploit them--chip fabrication, heat conduction, power consumption--not upon our ability to design chips. It's not the chip layout that's improving, it's our ability to milk what's already in the materials, which yields exponential growth. We're not responsible for that growth curve, the materials are. Doubling the length of our lever gets us the ability to move four times the weight.
Software, on the other hand, is all about design. Of course it's not going to double in power every 18 months--we're not doubling in design ability every 18 months. If the computing of our hardware were limited to our chip design abilities, it would be going just as slowly.
Yes, $45/PC seems high, and is high considering what we currently get with a Windows OS. But I have to wonder what the period is that we should be looking at for recouping that tax. Basic R&D is notorious for taking years, even decades to pay off, and it sounds like that's what all of Microsoft's R&D funding is going towards. At the very least, I'm sure that Bill Gates is expecting it will take 5-10 years before his research department really gels. You can't just hire a bunch of smart people and give them money and put them in a room and expect nobel prizes to flow from it.
As much as Microsoft pisses me off (our network is MS), I wonder if we'll be thanking them in a decade or two for the long term investment in computing.
Wikipedia gets enough traffic, and has enough regular users, that all changes are reviewed by at least a couple people, in practice; that's all that's needed to keep vandalism manageable, it appears. On a few obscure pages I've authored, mass deletions and nasty comments were removed within hours; the higher traffic pages are even more monitored, to the extent that 'editing wars' break out over them, requiring editors to lock pages for a period of time to let tempers cool.
So what the linux questions wiki needs for reliability is a critical mass of users; the rest takes care of itself.
What if your arrangement of data is [name][telephone number] pairs? Should I be sued because I make use of the same arrangement to keep my phone list?
Isn't one of the traditional measures of how "evolved" any organism is, is a balance of well-adaptedness and biological complexity?
I realize that any argument about humans being more or less evolved than other species gets into a lot of collective racial ego, but typically more complex organisms are viewed as more evolved because they not only survive but make better use of their environment for higher purposes. Your single celled, deep water, hot volcanic dwelling organism is tough to kill (though raising it to the surface would probably explode it), but it's not particularly adapted, nor does it do anything but sit there and metabolize sulfur.
If you have any evidence, or anything beyond "it all fits" type speculation, then you've got a huge story there. If you don't, then your tinfoil hat is showing.
Or because they're drunk and fumbling with the tube at 70 miles an hour on the interstate.
Good point, except that their debt was far less than cash-on-hand, which earns much less than 3%. Paying interest on debt while hanging onto cash earning less than that interest rate is less intelligent than paying off debt at a lower interest rate than investing it.
This was cleaning up a corner of the financial statements, for good PR.
It's not nice, but the U.S. government has always gone to bat for U.S. industries, because doing so strengthens the U.S. economy. There's no real English Canadian film industry because it's repeatedly torpedoed in trade negotiations between the two countries (that's why the NFB does little more than fund documentaries); likewise, trade agreements with other nations often have riders about distributing X number of American films in the country.
Open Source is going up against perceived national interest here. It's hard for a politician to (apparently) screw an American business, with American jobs.
I did read the article, and the article that you linked and that the original article linked is one of the reasons I'm mystified about him; I thought it was empty of insight and little more than a sketch of coding utopia. I was hoping that someone could point to something really seminal he'd done that would justify the hype around him, because I always get this deep feeling of cognitive dissonance whenever I see him mentioned on Edge.org.
Someone please explain to me why anyone listens to this guy. I've read his essays; they're pedantic and hand-wavey. The term "Virtual Reality pioneer" should be enough to disqualify him from serious discourse.
Somebody, please point me to something significant he's done so I'll know whether or not I should pay attention to him because, from everything I've seen so far, I shouldn't.
That Mr. Jones' article is immediately followed on Slashdot by an alarmist story about how the Win2K source has been leaked, and how this means a new flood of vulnerabilities is coming now that the source code is available.
Boy, secret propietary code sure is safe, isn't it?
Like the synonym for hat. Feh-DOH-rah.
When I built my house through an architect, I had a lawyer look over the contract and suggest what was not in my interest. In subsequent discussions with the architect, we modified the contract until we were both happy with it (mainly clauses relating to arbitration).
The important point is that we at all times had a friendly discussion about what we both wanted out of the contract, and both acted at all times like differences were small bumps to work around, not deal-killers or screw-me-screw-you options.
As long as you're polite and friendly about it, you can say "I'm not comfortable signing this contract as is, specifically because of these parts." Go in with your reasons and your alternatives (that should be acceptable to them as well as to you). Show that you understand their concerns, and how they're trying to protect themselves (in the IP case, they don't want you to become a millionaire instead of them by working on their ideas in the evening). And be prepared to walk away with a smile and a "too bad, maybe another time" attitude. Most especially, push for clarification of terms and limits, rather than "how can I protect myself from getting screwed?" approach (even thought that's what you're doing).
IANAL, and it would be a good idea to run it by one regardless.