Wow, so, that's like $20US/month? AOL, Earthlink, etc charges more than that for dialup here.
Cable TV alone, absolute basic service with no frills runs about $15/month alone. DSL/Cable modem service is advertised as $20 or $30/month, for 1-3 months, and after that it jumps to $45 or more, plus taxes, of course. That brings broadband up to over $50/month for most. (I won't say all, because I haven't searched for every service out there.)
You missed the entire point. A town was going to ban an item because of a creatively written web page on water. Now if that doesn't alert you to there being a slight issue, at least with that town's operation, I don't know what would....
Personally, I found the story quite funny, it truly brings to light how absolutely gullible some people are. Then again, the lottery would be another example.
Is it just me, or does this sound like it is just throwing more money at a problem and hoping it will solve itself? If the legislation doesn't have provisions to specify new procedures to actually get around to solving the problems, it is unlikely to solve much of anything.
Some info on PTO employees: they are generally easily promoted to GS-13 level (out of a max of GS-15). Now, GS-13 may sound high, but you work in DC. Guess what? The working level of most engineers/scientists in DC is a minimum of GS-12. (PS - I was already a high-end GS-13 before I left)
The PTO requires that you get a degree in patent law before getting your GS-13 (at least that's the quickest way). A GS-13 means about $5K extra a year, at least initially, over a GS-12. While they pay for schooling, you have to do it on your own time, while holding down your FT job. Once you hit your GS-13, you're making about 70-80K (it's been a few years, not sure what the new rates are and I'm too lazy to look it up) and you're stuck at that rate for quite a while, because promotions are scarce, as always. Oh, and your job's no different than the one you held as a GS-12, going over mind-numbing patent applications. (It's why the standard pay scale rate is a GS-13, and there was a requirement after getting your patent law degree, that you had to stay with the PTO 2 or 3 years or you had to repay your schooling, that's a really good incentive to not bolt the second you get your degree.)
Now, you're probably thinking, wow - 70-80K/yr is a pretty good pay rate, even in DC. Yeah, it sounds pretty good, until you realize that "reasonable" housing, in terms of location and quality of neighborhood, is somewhere between 380-600K (depending on being inside or outside the beltway). And, there's the little issue that as soon as you get your degree, you're worth somewhere between 110-140K to any of the numerous corporations/law firms in and around the area. So, that's why I only know some folks that had temporary stints with the PTO. They signed on, got their degree, put in their required time, and then reaped immediate significant rewards by leaving. If the PTO would like to hang on to more qualified folks, they need to up the pay scale significantly over time (more promotion possibilities) and give their employees more variety, such as going and defending cases, etc, since just shuffling paper appeals to them as much as most likely, you, the reader....
The simplest solution would be to drop broadband prices by 30-50%. Most average US homes don't want another $50+/month charge. Me, I couldn't live without broadband, having experienced the wonderful world of dialup at my folks just recently. Blah!
However, the HP was underrated. The waste gate supposedly popped open at 17psi boost, but the waste gate on the 88s was inadequate and, esp in cool weather, the boost far exceeded that pressure. (You could tell because the kick in the pants proceeded to kick even when the boost dial pegged (also above the 14 or 17 psi limit...)
Some things I didn't like about the car:
brakes wore out about every 20-25K miles.
Rotors lasted through at most 2 sets of brake pads (these were metallic, and both were undersized for the car).
The radiator had a horrible kludged design guaranteed to break because of how the intercooler's exit water was connected (basically a straight pipe screwed into a composite topped radiator - the turbo vibrates, the composite fractures - wahooo) Went through 7 radiators, the last one I had to buy so I got a custom copper tank made (cheaper than factory POS) that lasted longer than the previous 6 together).
Tires had to be rotated every 3K miles. This was not an option. Otherwise they wore out in 6K miles. With rotation, they lasted up to 25K
It was still an awesome to drive car, beating Mustang 5.0s off the line without really breaking a sweat, and would cruise above 130 with plenty of accelaration still available (max peak was supposed to be 148mph, red line was ~170mph. I don't think there was a regulator in there)
It should be noted that this was the street legal version of the Rally C cars they raced in Europe, the made just 5K a year for the 6 years they raced (and won) per Rally C requirements. The engine and transmission were the same as the race version, although the street version had an added catalytic convertor (dual stage) and smaller exhaust pipes.)
They should have always required opening up of these interfaces. The owner pretty much has to take the word of a very small select group of "in the know" mechanics on what condition their car is in. And we all know how trustworthy the average local mechanic/dealer mechanic is (do a google for Jiffy Lube, Sears, etc, and auto mechanics and lawsuits)
Then I recall my own wonderful personal experience. I had engine fluctuation issues in a turbo charged car. 15 trips to the dealer (under warranty) and replacement of virtually ever sensor and the car's computer failed to rectify the sporadic condition. The car had a computer interface, and it was telling them... well, I don't know what it was telling them - I couldn't access the interface....
Long story short though, one day, the engine started having RPM fluctuations while idling, so I popped open the hood and, since I hadn't been running long nor very hard, decided to take a quick look at the intercooler fluid level. I just happened to notice as I pulled out the intercooler cap that the float bob sensor attached to said cap was sunk to the bottom, even though the intercooler level was fine. I bypassed this sensor and all was fine for the next 100K miles. Odds are I'd have found this more quickly if I could have hooked up a computer to the interface to diagnose the problem while it was happening.
P2P is an extremely disruptive technology that's going to cause a massive shift in several industries. With that in mind, and noticing the effects it has already had, some common threads have been coming up time and again in this thread.
Copyrighted material should give the copyright holders some income stream if they're material is used
Currently, there are a number of revenue streams for copyrighted material that is used in "uncontrolled" ways (music fee paid by businesses, fees paid by web broadcasters, etc)
with those things in mind, and it rankles to suggest it, but ISPs (under gov regulations) should probably be the ones to tax P2P networks, or some service provider (Kazaa, Morpheus, etc) could also do that.
Of course, that suggestion makes me shiver, as I think about the "email" tax our #1 defender of the free, Billy Boy, is punditing. After all, P2P networks are generally services run on well-known ports, even if they are outside the bottom 1024. Email certainly is a service running on a well-known port. If a collection mechanism is set up for one, how long until that is extended to the others, esp knowing how much government entities love new tax revenue sources?
If you're buying a 50K product, and you know absolutely nothing about using it.....
I hope you bought some consultant time as well. Commercial FWs are nothing to play with for the inexperienced. Pay the consultant (and buy the freakin $40 book) and pay extremely close attention to the consultant, and pump for info (that's what you're paying him for) Odds are, he'll do it wrong, but you won't be 100% vulnerable. (Now there's a confidence statement!)
(FYI - current external access from my node is pure port 80, with the web server only accepting an extremely limited character set, heck the web server is limited...;)
Actually, if you notice, I did not dispute his main point. I took issue with his assertion that most Java coders understood OO programming quite well. My experience is that OO concepts are not well understood by many who profess to be OO programmers. That seems to be true both in the Java and C++ worlds, if his statements are to be believed.
Correctly written C++ code will run and compile just fine, doing exactly what you expect. That you can go beyond the conservative OO programming model and step outside of it, is part of C++'s strength and weakness as a langugage.
Java tries to enforce the OO paradigm much more strictly, but I've personally seen large code bases in Java from which, if you strip the "class" portion of the code, would almost become pure FORTRAN or PERL code as far as the code programming style and structure goes, along with all the associated problems of using that programming paradigm, despite the fact that it is written in Java.
I also don't disagree with your statement that some of the code displayed in these threads is abyssmally ugly almost unfollowable code, and I too programmed in C/C++ for quite a few years before jumping into Java. I may even wind up jumping back over to C#, which will include some of the "badness" of C/C++ with "unsafe code" as comopared to Java. Why they felt they needed this, especially in light of some of the performance tests that compare Java with C/C++, I don't know.
Ahh, but it follows the burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me adage. Gateway has lost my business until one of two things happen: Dell screws up, or Gateway winds up with something compelling to make me change. (BTW, since I now build my own machines entirely from scratch at about 50-70% of a Dell, I don't buy those personally anymore either. But I highly recommend Dell for business reasons, but again, specific models only.)
I'm happy your machine is fine. From my experience, that means you got the 1 in 4 machines that are largely problem-free. I have 0 desire to risk it again when there's no compelling reason to take that risk, or, in case of business, get major egg on face.
I'd have to disagree with you on the number of Java coders that truly understand OO well. Most that I've met do not understand it at all, or only vaguely comprehend what OO truly is. I'm not even sure I truly and fully understand OO, but at least I realize that. Most don't have a clue, and happily spout procedural style code within random class methods and call it OO.
I don't think you can have an exodus to a country already overflowing at the seams with 1B+ people and only enough work for a minute percentage of it..
As for curbing outsourcing, here's a suggestion for the government, although I'm almost loath to suggest it. Create a new VAT tax, which taxes everything at a relatively high rate (12%, 25%). That percent can be reduced by the amount of american payroll tax used to add value to that item.
It's a quick system to equalize product costs from unfair subsidies in foreign lands, skirts protectionism as the tax is applied to everything, and ensures that the gov gets relatively stable revenue flows.
From several other studies (do a google search on Java performance for the 1.4+ JDK) well written Java code performs equally with well written C++ code on the same hardware, and within 5% of the best C code for standard functionality. There are still some cases where C can definitely perform better. This does not necessarily mean using classes within the JDK to do some common functions, especially not the String class, and the collections classes, while convenient, are generally also not your best performers.
So that's where all those idiot^H^H^H^H^K inexperienced OO java programmers come from! I was wondering.
FYI, a bad OO programmer in C++ is most likely going to be a bad OO programmer in Java as well, except the language will most likely prevent them from taking down the entire machine.
Good OO programming is good OO programming, regardless of the language.
What Gateway needs more than anything else is a QA dept, and not another low-bid business. Over a 4-5 year period from 92-97, their computers went from predictable usable machines to absolute and utterly complete crap. I call it the low-bid phenomenom. Initially, they started low-bidding parts, so that if you palced an order for 20, or even 5 PCs, you had about 90% chance of getting at least 3 different configurations even if you ordered the exact same PC. (namely - different motherboard and memory manufacturers, other peripherals as well though). This lost them lots of business. Then they "dropped" the continuous low-bid philosphy, going for long-term low-bid contracts. yeah. Then we got the infamous 1 in 2 Viewsonic monitors and power supplies dying.
After going through about 2000 monitors, we stopped buying Gateway, forever, as the quality never has been rated anywhere equal to Dell. (Why'd we buy 4000 systems, very large organization, with large upgrade needs at the time, and they were an approved vendor with the best price. For some mysterious reason, after all the problems, everyone seemed to favor Dell for their next upgrade purchase. out of 500 machines ordered in the next year, we had 2 bad hard drives, and 1 bad keyboard.)
Having excellent customer service just doesn't compete with not needing customer service at all.
I would save the Hubble for now, only until it's replaced by something either on the new space station, or something on the moon. The reason why I would save it even with the new telescopes is that the Hubble still has a unique perception capability compared to those other telescopes. And for the mere cost of a single refit, the Hubble would last long enough for a proper replacement to come into existance, provided the rest happens on a somewhat reasonable schedule.
PS - I like the space elevator idea, but until we can build it, I wouldn't put forward any schedules based on it...;)
Would that be MS's stated support, or actual support? Me thinks those are 2 different things.
Then, there's MS's actual implementation (in their own apps) that completely ignores whatever they even state they support. I know this last statement is absolutely true, just witness a 10MB mail attachment download in Outlook vs, say Mozilla, and see which one pretty much mucks the entire system and which one allows the effective use of other apps. Not that Mozilla is perfect either (per the Acrobat Reader loader locking the entire Mozilla app set).
Granted, Outlook's locking of the system probably has a whole lot to do with that insidious IE "integration" into the OS than anything else, but this is MS's own explicit doing.
I always wondered about the seemingly single-threaded nature of all MS OSes. Apparently, MS is single-threaded in fact, as "in the Windows kernel... it runs nonthreaded internally". This may explain why NT based OSes still block for seemingly non-sensical reasons. I always thought the MS app programmers didn't understand multi-threading. Maybe the problem actually lay deeper, and the OS itself is the problem. However, that would beg the question of why other programs ported from true multi-threaded SMP type systems seem to not have multiple thread blocking issues. Guess maybe it's still a case of programmers not knowing how to properly write multi-threaded code, especially around a single-threaded OS.
So, P2P networks, according to this, will cause another round of copyright law to be written and P2P networks will have to pay some set fee as dictated by congress for those "publishing" works. That seems to be the pattern over time for content broadcasting.
No wonder the RIAA wants to prosecute under existing laws, the pattern of new copyright law for disruptive technologies appears to favor the new technologies over the existing system. This would mean the end for the RIAA
So, someone, somewhere (gee, didn't this already occur in Russia) should set up a "for pay" P2P network with some nominal fee, and start paying to the RIAA. Send them checks. Similar to the broadcast license now charged for any restaurant etc to replay music publicly. The RIAA will surely come down on them, but if the population is large enough, new copyright laws will be written, and viola - effectively no more RIAA.
Replace the shuttle, yesterday, with true space capable systems:
Develop lightweight manned launch system
Develop heavy lift unmanned, or lightly manned launch system
Build a true space station, not a low earth orbit guaranteed to be just about useless station.
Once the previous are done, development of a moon/mars shuttle type spacecraft (not the shuttle) and landing system should be developed
Go to moon, build base, most likely for mostly scientific studies, low manned capability, hopefully autonomous for most things (i.e., low cost - sending enough bio-material for lengthy manned stays is quite expensive, even with appropriate support systems)
Go to mars, build base (see moon base). If mars proves sustainable after initial base, then commit to a true base.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, so, that's like $20US/month? AOL, Earthlink, etc charges more than that for dialup here.
Cable TV alone, absolute basic service with no frills runs about $15/month alone. DSL/Cable modem service is advertised as $20 or $30/month, for 1-3 months, and after that it jumps to $45 or more, plus taxes, of course. That brings broadband up to over $50/month for most. (I won't say all, because I haven't searched for every service out there.)
the dawn of the BBC (Big Brother Computer) ;)
You missed the entire point. A town was going to ban an item because of a creatively written web page on water. Now if that doesn't alert you to there being a slight issue, at least with that town's operation, I don't know what would....
Personally, I found the story quite funny, it truly brings to light how absolutely gullible some people are. Then again, the lottery would be another example.
Excellent info - I just switched to Firefox (from Mozilla) and had not configured this little gem. Many thanks! I'd mod you up if I had points.
Some info on PTO employees: they are generally easily promoted to GS-13 level (out of a max of GS-15). Now, GS-13 may sound high, but you work in DC. Guess what? The working level of most engineers/scientists in DC is a minimum of GS-12. (PS - I was already a high-end GS-13 before I left)
The PTO requires that you get a degree in patent law before getting your GS-13 (at least that's the quickest way). A GS-13 means about $5K extra a year, at least initially, over a GS-12. While they pay for schooling, you have to do it on your own time, while holding down your FT job. Once you hit your GS-13, you're making about 70-80K (it's been a few years, not sure what the new rates are and I'm too lazy to look it up) and you're stuck at that rate for quite a while, because promotions are scarce, as always. Oh, and your job's no different than the one you held as a GS-12, going over mind-numbing patent applications. (It's why the standard pay scale rate is a GS-13, and there was a requirement after getting your patent law degree, that you had to stay with the PTO 2 or 3 years or you had to repay your schooling, that's a really good incentive to not bolt the second you get your degree.)
Now, you're probably thinking, wow - 70-80K /yr is a pretty good pay rate, even in DC. Yeah, it sounds pretty good, until you realize that "reasonable" housing, in terms of location and quality of neighborhood, is somewhere between 380-600K (depending on being inside or outside the beltway). And, there's the little issue that as soon as you get your degree, you're worth somewhere between 110-140K to any of the numerous corporations/law firms in and around the area. So, that's why I only know some folks that had temporary stints with the PTO. They signed on, got their degree, put in their required time, and then reaped immediate significant rewards by leaving. If the PTO would like to hang on to more qualified folks, they need to up the pay scale significantly over time (more promotion possibilities) and give their employees more variety, such as going and defending cases, etc, since just shuffling paper appeals to them as much as most likely, you, the reader....
The simplest solution would be to drop broadband prices by 30-50%. Most average US homes don't want another $50+/month charge. Me, I couldn't live without broadband, having experienced the wonderful world of dialup at my folks just recently. Blah!
You're right on almost everything. :)
However, the HP was underrated. The waste gate supposedly popped open at 17psi boost, but the waste gate on the 88s was inadequate and, esp in cool weather, the boost far exceeded that pressure. (You could tell because the kick in the pants proceeded to kick even when the boost dial pegged (also above the 14 or 17 psi limit...)
Some things I didn't like about the car:
- brakes wore out about every 20-25K miles.
- Rotors lasted through at most 2 sets of brake pads (these were metallic, and both were undersized for the car).
- The radiator had a horrible kludged design guaranteed to break because of how the intercooler's exit water was connected (basically a straight pipe screwed into a composite topped radiator - the turbo vibrates, the composite fractures - wahooo) Went through 7 radiators, the last one I had to buy so I got a custom copper tank made (cheaper than factory POS) that lasted longer than the previous 6 together).
- Tires had to be rotated every 3K miles. This was not an option. Otherwise they wore out in 6K miles. With rotation, they lasted up to 25K
It was still an awesome to drive car, beating Mustang 5.0s off the line without really breaking a sweat, and would cruise above 130 with plenty of accelaration still available (max peak was supposed to be 148mph, red line was ~170mph. I don't think there was a regulator in there)It should be noted that this was the street legal version of the Rally C cars they raced in Europe, the made just 5K a year for the 6 years they raced (and won) per Rally C requirements. The engine and transmission were the same as the race version, although the street version had an added catalytic convertor (dual stage) and smaller exhaust pipes.)
Lewie is right - he wins the cookie today! :)
They should have always required opening up of these interfaces. The owner pretty much has to take the word of a very small select group of "in the know" mechanics on what condition their car is in. And we all know how trustworthy the average local mechanic/dealer mechanic is (do a google for Jiffy Lube, Sears, etc, and auto mechanics and lawsuits)
Then I recall my own wonderful personal experience. I had engine fluctuation issues in a turbo charged car. 15 trips to the dealer (under warranty) and replacement of virtually ever sensor and the car's computer failed to rectify the sporadic condition. The car had a computer interface, and it was telling them... well, I don't know what it was telling them - I couldn't access the interface....
Long story short though, one day, the engine started having RPM fluctuations while idling, so I popped open the hood and, since I hadn't been running long nor very hard, decided to take a quick look at the intercooler fluid level. I just happened to notice as I pulled out the intercooler cap that the float bob sensor attached to said cap was sunk to the bottom, even though the intercooler level was fine. I bypassed this sensor and all was fine for the next 100K miles. Odds are I'd have found this more quickly if I could have hooked up a computer to the interface to diagnose the problem while it was happening.
P2P is an extremely disruptive technology that's going to cause a massive shift in several industries. With that in mind, and noticing the effects it has already had, some common threads have been coming up time and again in this thread.
with those things in mind, and it rankles to suggest it, but ISPs (under gov regulations) should probably be the ones to tax P2P networks, or some service provider (Kazaa, Morpheus, etc) could also do that.
Of course, that suggestion makes me shiver, as I think about the "email" tax our #1 defender of the free, Billy Boy, is punditing. After all, P2P networks are generally services run on well-known ports, even if they are outside the bottom 1024. Email certainly is a service running on a well-known port. If a collection mechanism is set up for one, how long until that is extended to the others, esp knowing how much government entities love new tax revenue sources?
Well said. Then again, if anyone wants to argue that the absolutely horribly C++ crap that was presented is perfectly acceptable coding practices....
If you're buying a 50K product, and you know absolutely nothing about using it.....
;)
I hope you bought some consultant time as well. Commercial FWs are nothing to play with for the inexperienced. Pay the consultant (and buy the freakin $40 book) and pay extremely close attention to the consultant, and pump for info (that's what you're paying him for) Odds are, he'll do it wrong, but you won't be 100% vulnerable. (Now there's a confidence statement!)
(FYI - current external access from my node is pure port 80, with the web server only accepting an extremely limited character set, heck the web server is limited...
Actually, if you notice, I did not dispute his main point. I took issue with his assertion that most Java coders understood OO programming quite well. My experience is that OO concepts are not well understood by many who profess to be OO programmers. That seems to be true both in the Java and C++ worlds, if his statements are to be believed.
Correctly written C++ code will run and compile just fine, doing exactly what you expect. That you can go beyond the conservative OO programming model and step outside of it, is part of C++'s strength and weakness as a langugage.
Java tries to enforce the OO paradigm much more strictly, but I've personally seen large code bases in Java from which, if you strip the "class" portion of the code, would almost become pure FORTRAN or PERL code as far as the code programming style and structure goes, along with all the associated problems of using that programming paradigm, despite the fact that it is written in Java.
I also don't disagree with your statement that some of the code displayed in these threads is abyssmally ugly almost unfollowable code, and I too programmed in C/C++ for quite a few years before jumping into Java. I may even wind up jumping back over to C#, which will include some of the "badness" of C/C++ with "unsafe code" as comopared to Java. Why they felt they needed this, especially in light of some of the performance tests that compare Java with C/C++, I don't know.
Ahh, but it follows the burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me adage. Gateway has lost my business until one of two things happen: Dell screws up, or Gateway winds up with something compelling to make me change. (BTW, since I now build my own machines entirely from scratch at about 50-70% of a Dell, I don't buy those personally anymore either. But I highly recommend Dell for business reasons, but again, specific models only.)
I'm happy your machine is fine. From my experience, that means you got the 1 in 4 machines that are largely problem-free. I have 0 desire to risk it again when there's no compelling reason to take that risk, or, in case of business, get major egg on face.
I'd have to disagree with you on the number of Java coders that truly understand OO well. Most that I've met do not understand it at all, or only vaguely comprehend what OO truly is. I'm not even sure I truly and fully understand OO, but at least I realize that. Most don't have a clue, and happily spout procedural style code within random class methods and call it OO.
I don't think you can have an exodus to a country already overflowing at the seams with 1B+ people and only enough work for a minute percentage of it..
As for curbing outsourcing, here's a suggestion for the government, although I'm almost loath to suggest it. Create a new VAT tax, which taxes everything at a relatively high rate (12%, 25%). That percent can be reduced by the amount of american payroll tax used to add value to that item.
It's a quick system to equalize product costs from unfair subsidies in foreign lands, skirts protectionism as the tax is applied to everything, and ensures that the gov gets relatively stable revenue flows.
From several other studies (do a google search on Java performance for the 1.4+ JDK) well written Java code performs equally with well written C++ code on the same hardware, and within 5% of the best C code for standard functionality. There are still some cases where C can definitely perform better. This does not necessarily mean using classes within the JDK to do some common functions, especially not the String class, and the collections classes, while convenient, are generally also not your best performers.
So that's where all those idiot^H^H^H^H^K inexperienced OO java programmers come from! I was wondering.
FYI, a bad OO programmer in C++ is most likely going to be a bad OO programmer in Java as well, except the language will most likely prevent them from taking down the entire machine.
Good OO programming is good OO programming, regardless of the language.
I'm curious, which would be the best user friendly application, and which is the best overall. DVD authoring is something I'm also looking at doing.
As for Roxio, 6 is fine for simple data disks, and music CDs, but that's about all.
What Gateway needs more than anything else is a QA dept, and not another low-bid business. Over a 4-5 year period from 92-97, their computers went from predictable usable machines to absolute and utterly complete crap. I call it the low-bid phenomenom. Initially, they started low-bidding parts, so that if you palced an order for 20, or even 5 PCs, you had about 90% chance of getting at least 3 different configurations even if you ordered the exact same PC. (namely - different motherboard and memory manufacturers, other peripherals as well though). This lost them lots of business. Then they "dropped" the continuous low-bid philosphy, going for long-term low-bid contracts. yeah. Then we got the infamous 1 in 2 Viewsonic monitors and power supplies dying.
After going through about 2000 monitors, we stopped buying Gateway, forever, as the quality never has been rated anywhere equal to Dell. (Why'd we buy 4000 systems, very large organization, with large upgrade needs at the time, and they were an approved vendor with the best price. For some mysterious reason, after all the problems, everyone seemed to favor Dell for their next upgrade purchase. out of 500 machines ordered in the next year, we had 2 bad hard drives, and 1 bad keyboard.)
Having excellent customer service just doesn't compete with not needing customer service at all.
I would save the Hubble for now, only until it's replaced by something either on the new space station, or something on the moon. The reason why I would save it even with the new telescopes is that the Hubble still has a unique perception capability compared to those other telescopes. And for the mere cost of a single refit, the Hubble would last long enough for a proper replacement to come into existance, provided the rest happens on a somewhat reasonable schedule.
PS - I like the space elevator idea, but until we can build it, I wouldn't put forward any schedules based on it...;)
Would that be MS's stated support, or actual support? Me thinks those are 2 different things.
Then, there's MS's actual implementation (in their own apps) that completely ignores whatever they even state they support. I know this last statement is absolutely true, just witness a 10MB mail attachment download in Outlook vs, say Mozilla, and see which one pretty much mucks the entire system and which one allows the effective use of other apps. Not that Mozilla is perfect either (per the Acrobat Reader loader locking the entire Mozilla app set).
Granted, Outlook's locking of the system probably has a whole lot to do with that insidious IE "integration" into the OS than anything else, but this is MS's own explicit doing.
I always wondered about the seemingly single-threaded nature of all MS OSes. Apparently, MS is single-threaded in fact, as "in the Windows kernel ... it runs nonthreaded internally". This may explain why NT based OSes still block for seemingly non-sensical reasons. I always thought the MS app programmers didn't understand multi-threading. Maybe the problem actually lay deeper, and the OS itself is the problem. However, that would beg the question of why other programs ported from true multi-threaded SMP type systems seem to not have multiple thread blocking issues. Guess maybe it's still a case of programmers not knowing how to properly write multi-threaded code, especially around a single-threaded OS.
So, P2P networks, according to this, will cause another round of copyright law to be written and P2P networks will have to pay some set fee as dictated by congress for those "publishing" works. That seems to be the pattern over time for content broadcasting.
No wonder the RIAA wants to prosecute under existing laws, the pattern of new copyright law for disruptive technologies appears to favor the new technologies over the existing system. This would mean the end for the RIAA
So, someone, somewhere (gee, didn't this already occur in Russia) should set up a "for pay" P2P network with some nominal fee, and start paying to the RIAA. Send them checks. Similar to the broadcast license now charged for any restaurant etc to replay music publicly. The RIAA will surely come down on them, but if the population is large enough, new copyright laws will be written, and viola - effectively no more RIAA.