Aerogels had been largely forgotten when, in the late 1970s, the French government approached Stanislaus Teichner at Universite Claud Bernard, Lyon seeking a method for storing oxygen and rocket fuels in porous materials. There is a legend passed on between researchers in the aerogel community concerning what happened next. Teichner assigned one of his graduate students the task of preparing and studying aerogels for this application. However, using Kistler's method, which included two time-consuming and laborious solvent exchange steps, their first aerogel took weeks to prepare. Teichner then informed his student that a large number of aerogel samples would be needed for him to complete his dissertation. Realizing that this would take many, many years to accomplish, the student left Teichner's lab with a nervous breakdown. Upon returning after a brief rest, he was strongly motivated to find a better synthetic process. This directly lead to one of the major advances in aerogel science, namely the application of sol-gel chemistry to silica aerogel preparation. This process replaced the sodium silicate used by Kistler with an alkoxysilane, (tetramethyorthosilicate, TMOS). Hydrolyzing TMOS in a solution of methanol produced a gel in one step (called an "alcogel"). This eliminated two of the drawbacks in Kistler's procedure, namely, the water-to-alcohol exchange step and the presence of inorganic salts in the gel. Drying these alcogels under supercritical alcohol conditions produced high-quality silica aerogels. In subsequent years, Teichner's group, and others extended this approach to prepare aerogels of a wide variety of metal oxide aerogels. Check out virginia's writeup
I thought what I wrote earlier about sco and the gpl was germane to the current discussion. Lots of moderators agreeded...it's my post, what's the problem? It's not like I stole it from somebody else or something.
I don't mean to excure them, but I do think it's worth wondering aloud whether they got some not-so-subtle hints that the didn't need to mention this to the public.
In the float-up-the-DRM-balloon phase, most average people aren't likely to react. And that's fine. Right now, all it does is enable the use/play of protected content. And, as noted many times in this discussion thread and in the article itself, it's an add-on to the OS. Don't want it? Don't use it.
However, we've seen many instances of MS rolling an add-on into a service pack and then requiring that the service pack be installed for any future updates. It's then possible to enable the DRM package to restrict the legitimate use of non-protected content and/or software because the end-user won't have any other choice. MS will be holding all the cards. But I think that this will be their undoing.
If an unwitting user was able to use unprotected content both with and without the patch, then can't after MS sends the kill-code to the DRM package, most people will simply say that their computer is broken. They won't know that the DRM software is to blame unless someone tells them. And if a user's computer is "broken" due to some patch that was installed for them by MS, you can bet that those people will start looking for alternatives. Add all of that to the bad publicity MS will get about being "Big Brother", and more and more users will start to think of alternatives to MS software. (Ok, they've already started getting that reputation on their own with the Product Activation snafu, but it certainly doesn't help their situation.)
The first likely route an affected customer will go is to buy a Mac, assuming that there's $1500 or more to spend in the family budget. Another option may or may not be Linux. It very much depends on how much it has progressed in terms of instant usability (can the family make the transition with little- to no difficulty?), and whether or not money is an issue. But I bet that Apple might step in at some point and start offering it's own OS to upset owners of "broken" PCs as an alternative.
That is, of course, assuming that they even want to release it for the ix86 chipset to begin with. My fingers are crossed.
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This is a rather amusing e-mail signature I saw recently:
Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
FreeBSD: Are you guys coming or what?
Aerogels had been largely forgotten when, in the late 1970s, the French government approached Stanislaus Teichner at Universite Claud Bernard, Lyon seeking a method for storing oxygen and rocket fuels in porous materials. There is a legend passed on between researchers in the aerogel community concerning what happened next. Teichner assigned one of his graduate students the task of preparing and studying aerogels for this application. However, using Kistler's method, which included two time-consuming and laborious solvent exchange steps, their first aerogel took weeks to prepare. Teichner then informed his student that a large number of aerogel samples would be needed for him to complete his dissertation. Realizing that this would take many, many years to accomplish, the student left Teichner's lab with a nervous breakdown. Upon returning after a brief rest, he was strongly motivated to find a better synthetic process. This directly lead to one of the major advances in aerogel science, namely the application of sol-gel chemistry to silica aerogel preparation. This process replaced the sodium silicate used by Kistler with an alkoxysilane, (tetramethyorthosilicate, TMOS). Hydrolyzing TMOS in a solution of methanol produced a gel in one step (called an "alcogel"). This eliminated two of the drawbacks in Kistler's procedure, namely, the water-to-alcohol exchange step and the presence of inorganic salts in the gel. Drying these alcogels under supercritical alcohol conditions produced high-quality silica aerogels. In subsequent years, Teichner's group, and others extended this approach to prepare aerogels of a wide variety of metal oxide aerogels.
Check out virginia's writeup
I thought what I wrote earlier about sco and the gpl was germane to the current discussion. Lots of moderators agreeded...it's my post, what's the problem? It's not like I stole it from somebody else or something.
I don't mean to excure them, but I do think it's worth wondering aloud whether they got some not-so-subtle hints that the didn't need to mention this to the public.
In the float-up-the-DRM-balloon phase, most average people aren't likely to react. And that's fine. Right now, all it does is enable the use/play of protected content. And, as noted many times in this discussion thread and in the article itself, it's an add-on to the OS. Don't want it? Don't use it. However, we've seen many instances of MS rolling an add-on into a service pack and then requiring that the service pack be installed for any future updates. It's then possible to enable the DRM package to restrict the legitimate use of non-protected content and/or software because the end-user won't have any other choice. MS will be holding all the cards. But I think that this will be their undoing. If an unwitting user was able to use unprotected content both with and without the patch, then can't after MS sends the kill-code to the DRM package, most people will simply say that their computer is broken. They won't know that the DRM software is to blame unless someone tells them. And if a user's computer is "broken" due to some patch that was installed for them by MS, you can bet that those people will start looking for alternatives. Add all of that to the bad publicity MS will get about being "Big Brother", and more and more users will start to think of alternatives to MS software. (Ok, they've already started getting that reputation on their own with the Product Activation snafu, but it certainly doesn't help their situation.) The first likely route an affected customer will go is to buy a Mac, assuming that there's $1500 or more to spend in the family budget. Another option may or may not be Linux. It very much depends on how much it has progressed in terms of instant usability (can the family make the transition with little- to no difficulty?), and whether or not money is an issue. But I bet that Apple might step in at some point and start offering it's own OS to upset owners of "broken" PCs as an alternative. That is, of course, assuming that they even want to release it for the ix86 chipset to begin with. My fingers are crossed.