Let's assume for an instant that the story is correct.
It could be that Dell have started noticing that they're losing out on contracts because of the heat that their Intel based servers are kicking out. I know of several contracts (even in my limited circle of knowledge) where the Dell submision appeared to give the most bang-per-buck, but didn't get the contract when the cost of the extra air-con was included in the total cost of ownership.
Air-con is a non-negligible expense in any half-way serious machine room.
If you surf the internet, you can find a story like this about how somebody had difficulties dealing with a any large company of your choice. Although I'm not defending BT, no customer service system in history has every got it 100% perfect.
As a counter example to this story, I bought a house last year and the previous owner used NTL as their telco. I didn't want to use NTL (incidentally due to their poor customer service record.) To paraphrase the article, I went through the following process:
Stage 1, call BT asking for a line
Stage 2, Start using my new BT as it was connected exactly when they said it would be (7am on the morning after stage 1), even sending me a text message to let me know that it'd been done.
In my primary field of work, 'shit happens' is just not an acceptable excuse, I'm a pilot. We use checklists precisely for that reason, to make sure that shit doesn't happen. Every flight has a few phases where even one minor screw up can have serious consequences, so we have checks and balances built into the system to make sure that small screw up does NOT happen.
You have your pre-flight checklist as a result of previous failures. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of flights taking off and landing every day of the year and all the errors that have ocurred in the past (both large and small) have fed back into the procedures that you now go through to make sure that the same mistakes aren't made again.
In contrast, Huygens is the first of it's kind, mankind has never before put a lander on Titan. I think a better comparison would be between Huygens and a world war two bomber. Yes, similar things have been done before, but it's still basically flying by the seat of your pants into hostile territory and hope that roughly a thousand things don't all go wrong at the same time.
Looking at the list of companies in that list, I see one interesting omission from the list of companies being sued, namely Microsoft. I find this slightly surprizing given the number of MS products that use jpegs, doubly so if the aim of this exercise is to raise cash for the patent holders.
They can't be worried about hitting companies that can afford lots of lawyers as there are some big names in that list of companies already.
Anybody know whether the beast of Redmond has paid for a license?
I may not be a lawyer;-) but I have just finished a Ph.D. in astonomy and I've worked with Hubble images (included ACS images) before.
NaSa are wonderful at using Hubble to produce pretty publicity images. I'm not saying that the images of nebulae etc. are not without scientific justification, only that NaSa are very good at presenting them to the public.
These images are more typical of the data taken by Hubble on a day-to-day basis; single filter images (presented in black and white) of faint objects pushing down close to the detection limit of the instruments.
NEC is also developing a recharger for the battery that can be used at home as well as working on a way to prevent excessive discharge of power from the cell.
I think this is the bit that could be the technological stumbing block. What they mean by 'excessive discharge' is pretty vague, I don't want one of these batteries near any of my gizmos if there's a danger of it overloading and frying the components.
I'm no fan of M$, but I'd hope that, for once in their product line, their actually concentrating on getting the guts right before making it pretty.
Not likely, but I can hope..:-)
Besides, I guess that at this point there's still large chunks of XP code in Longhorn so it's not surprizing that it's not looking all that different yet.
Can't read the specs, they seem to be slashdotted, how did that happen...
Of course, the main thing that happens when a new form factor comes out is that everybody who wants to upgrade their motherboard needs to upgrade their case as well which means a nice fat pay-cheque for the the beige box builders... That, more than any technical reason, will probably drive the uptake of BTX.
In true Slashdot style, I haven't checked my stats bu tI thought that it least the PS2 was sold for a nominal profit having recouped most of its design cost when it was undesputed market leader.
In stark contrast to the Xbox which makes a loss on each box sold (IIRC)
I'm comming at this from a systems admin point of view and one of the biggest headaches that we have is the apparent complete lack of backwards compatability. This is more of a gcc grip than directly linux, but I guess that the two are so closely linked that I'm not too far off topic.
We've got a network of Solaris and Linux boxs that have shared/usr/local (obviously a different/usr/local for each architecture.) On the Solaris boxes, we've got 10 year old apps that run fine on any of the Suns regarless of OS version. However,/usr/local for the linux boxes is becomming a mess as (as sys admin) I've got to keep recompiling half the applications whenever sombody upgrades to the next OS. Almost nothing in/usr/local/bin is an application, it's all wrapper scripts that check which linux version a user iss running and then calling the appropriate executable
Needless to sat that this is time and therefore money intensive and could, in the long run, be something that stops companies migrating to linux.
While I applaud the EU for standing up to the Microsoft monopoly, I don't really think that these proceedings will have any long term effect. Quoting from the EU press release "With respect to tying, the Commission has set out two alternative proposed remedies. The first would be the untying of Windows Media Player from Windows, whereby Microsoft would be required to offer a version of Windows without Windows Media Player included."
Doesn't this just mean that the Windows installer will give you the option not to install WMP with a line two-thirds of the way down the license agreement that informs you that other media players are available? Although it sounds impressive, I'm betting that the long-term effect will be extremely minimal.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume for an instant that the story is correct.
It could be that Dell have started noticing that they're losing out on contracts because of the heat that their Intel based servers are kicking out. I know of several contracts (even in my limited circle of knowledge) where the Dell submision appeared to give the most bang-per-buck, but didn't get the contract when the cost of the extra air-con was included in the total cost of ownership.
Air-con is a non-negligible expense in any half-way serious machine room.
If you surf the internet, you can find a story like this about how somebody had difficulties dealing with a any large company of your choice. Although I'm not defending BT, no customer service system in history has every got it 100% perfect.
As a counter example to this story, I bought a house last year and the previous owner used NTL as their telco. I didn't want to use NTL (incidentally due to their poor customer service record.) To paraphrase the article, I went through the following process:
Stage 1, call BT asking for a line
Stage 2, Start using my new BT as it was connected exactly when they said it would be (7am on the morning after stage 1), even sending me a text message to let me know that it'd been done.
Seemed pretty good service to me.
You have your pre-flight checklist as a result of previous failures. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of flights taking off and landing every day of the year and all the errors that have ocurred in the past (both large and small) have fed back into the procedures that you now go through to make sure that the same mistakes aren't made again.
In contrast, Huygens is the first of it's kind, mankind has never before put a lander on Titan. I think a better comparison would be between Huygens and a world war two bomber. Yes, similar things have been done before, but it's still basically flying by the seat of your pants into hostile territory and hope that roughly a thousand things don't all go wrong at the same time.
Looking at the list of companies in that list, I see one interesting omission from the list of companies being sued, namely Microsoft. I find this slightly surprizing given the number of MS products that use jpegs, doubly so if the aim of this exercise is to raise cash for the patent holders.
They can't be worried about hitting companies that can afford lots of lawyers as there are some big names in that list of companies already.
Anybody know whether the beast of Redmond has paid for a license?
From the article:
There were no records before. I am the first one in the books for the record so it is neat.
Basically, the story is "Man uses Rocketbelt and happens to measure how high he went."
Hardly Rocket Science.... (BaDum Tish!)
I may not be a lawyer ;-) but I have just finished a Ph.D. in astonomy and I've worked with Hubble images (included ACS images) before.
NaSa are wonderful at using Hubble to produce pretty publicity images. I'm not saying that the images of nebulae etc. are not without scientific justification, only that NaSa are very good at presenting them to the public.
These images are more typical of the data taken by Hubble on a day-to-day basis; single filter images (presented in black and white) of faint objects pushing down close to the detection limit of the instruments.
I'm no fan of M$, but I'd hope that, for once in their product line, their actually concentrating on getting the guts right before making it pretty.
Not likely, but I can hope.. :-)
Besides, I guess that at this point there's still large chunks of XP code in Longhorn so it's not surprizing that it's not looking all that different yet.
Can't read the specs, they seem to be slashdotted, how did that happen... Of course, the main thing that happens when a new form factor comes out is that everybody who wants to upgrade their motherboard needs to upgrade their case as well which means a nice fat pay-cheque for the the beige box builders... That, more than any technical reason, will probably drive the uptake of BTX.
I think it says more about their PR department. Remember the golden rule, acronym first, meaning later...
In true Slashdot style, I haven't checked my stats bu tI thought that it least the PS2 was sold for a nominal profit having recouped most of its design cost when it was undesputed market leader. In stark contrast to the Xbox which makes a loss on each box sold (IIRC)
The number of 'offending' lines does appear to be going up. It was only 168,276 lines according to this slashdot article posted only a week ago.
I'm comming at this from a systems admin point of view and one of the biggest headaches that we have is the apparent complete lack of backwards compatability. This is more of a gcc grip than directly linux, but I guess that the two are so closely linked that I'm not too far off topic. We've got a network of Solaris and Linux boxs that have shared /usr/local (obviously a different /usr/local for each architecture.) On the Solaris boxes, we've got 10 year old apps that run fine on any of the Suns regarless of OS version. However, /usr/local for the linux boxes is becomming a mess as (as sys admin) I've got to keep recompiling half the applications whenever sombody upgrades to the next OS. Almost nothing in /usr/local/bin is an application, it's all wrapper scripts that check which linux version a user iss running and then calling the appropriate executable
Needless to sat that this is time and therefore money intensive and could, in the long run, be something that stops companies migrating to linux.
While I applaud the EU for standing up to the Microsoft monopoly, I don't really think that these proceedings will have any long term effect. Quoting from the EU press release
"With respect to tying, the Commission has set out two alternative proposed remedies. The first would be the untying of Windows Media Player from Windows, whereby Microsoft would be required to offer a version of Windows without Windows Media Player included."
Doesn't this just mean that the Windows installer will give you the option not to install WMP with a line two-thirds of the way down the license agreement that informs you that other media players are available?
Although it sounds impressive, I'm betting that the long-term effect will be extremely minimal.