Actually it's not so bad as you would think. With the new Xeon processors rated at 150+ W per processor these 96 processors have about the same usage. The spec sheet says 150 W for the 96 proc system. And I don't believe the efficion processors have 1/96 the power of a 3.6 GHz Xeon.
There is an important difference. (Your response could also be said to be true for Sun, which is also based on BSD) Apple makes a proprietary operating system. They based it on BSD, and have released what they have had to to meet their Darwin obligations. You cannot build a free version of MacOS independent of apple. Thus they fit into the proprietary model, not the free software model.
For the business types to understand the point, you have to use their language.
IBM chose Linux over FreeBSD. They chose GPL over BSD license. So did Novell. So did HP. So did a lot of other companies. In fact I cannot think of a single large vendor who chose FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD over Linux, despite the fact that they offer a similar feature suite. (You may argue with the specifics of that, but to a business person, they are all operating systems, they all run on X86 hardware, use X11 as a windowing system, and on and on). Not one. The market has voted with its feet, and has said clearly that companies do not like BSD style licenses . If they believe that companies should chose BSD licenses, they might as well suggest that Detroit put big fins back on their cars, or that McDonalds only serve tofu burgers and rice cakes.
I do not know why business people trust the markets so much in some cases, but not in others. When some big company choses FreeBSD over Linux, they can talk about license changes, but for now there are only two that work: GPL (and LGPL if you want to get picky) and proprietary.
I disagree. Musician's (at least the ones I know) are trying to create a particular sound. When I play cello, I make artistic decisions about what I want my sound to be like. My choice about, for instance, whether to minimize bow attack noise or maximize it is part of my artistic choice. I suppose I could always make bow noise and then filter it out later, but I am a performer not a recording technician. The choice of amplifiers is akin to a choice of strings or pick. It changes the sound in predictable ways, and that choice is part of the music.
You make an important point. Good musicians don't want perfect reproduction. They want music. What they want is imperfect reproduction because they want a particular sound that their instrument doesn't naturally give. It's kind of like visual fidelity in movies. It you look at raw movie footage it looks very harsh, kind of like home movies. They have to artivicially color grade it to make it look good. Again they don't want perfect fidelity, because perfect fidelity looks bad. It's the imperfect fidelity that looks good.
It's kind of like the old Monte Python sketch in which the american movie director explains that he is shooting snow scenes on the beach because " It looks more like snow than snow."
I faced this set of questions in our department and had to find not only a solution, but a way to discuss the problem with technical neophytes. In the end I identified backups into disaster recovery backups (a drive or a server blows up) and archival backups (you wish you had an older copy of a file you have edited). For initial disaster recovery, we have a RAID 5+0 set-up with redundent servers, so a lot of hardware has to fail before we are in trouble. For archiving, we do a nightly copy onto a firewire drive (250 GB), with 4 drives in rotation, and one stored off-site. If somebody needs a deleted file from the last week we have it. For longer term, we are looking into a system which writes all files modified in the last 24 hours to a CD or DVD, and then writes the contents of the disk in an index folder. It's no good for disaster recovery, but if somebody needs a copy of a file from last thursday, the index tell which DVD to look at and then you pull the disk and restore the file. Permanent cheap storage, and fast to access. Of course we don't have the code finished yet, but . . .
Has anybody looked into whether there is any money from competitors involved in this? It seems like MS has been gunning for Google for a while, and if GMail succeeds, it would be the end of Hotmail forever. There must be a money trail somewhere.
Oh, and why is it that nobody cares about spyware which sends your browsing history to people without even telling you it is there, but this is so bad.
I suppose that they could be hit with a dumping penalty on the international markets, but I am not sure that dumping inside of the United States is illegal.
It certainly is illegal if they are a monopoly (which the courts have judged they are) for them to dump product to get into a new market. I just wonder if the current administration has the stomach to go there after their total capitulation on the original DOJ suit.
I'm sorry to break it to you but the fat lady sang the day the Boies and Schilling decided that a $1 billion contingency wasn't compelling enough and that they wanted to be paid by the hour. When your own lawyer doesn't believe you have a good case, the game is over.
Actually it's not so bad as you would think. With the new Xeon processors rated at 150+ W per processor these 96 processors have about the same usage. The spec sheet says 150 W for the 96 proc system. And I don't believe the efficion processors have 1/96 the power of a 3.6 GHz Xeon.
There is an important difference. (Your response could also be said to be true for Sun, which is also based on BSD) Apple makes a proprietary operating system. They based it on BSD, and have released what they have had to to meet their Darwin obligations. You cannot build a free version of MacOS independent of apple. Thus they fit into the proprietary model, not the free software model.
For the business types to understand the point, you have to use their language. IBM chose Linux over FreeBSD. They chose GPL over BSD license. So did Novell. So did HP. So did a lot of other companies. In fact I cannot think of a single large vendor who chose FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD over Linux, despite the fact that they offer a similar feature suite. (You may argue with the specifics of that, but to a business person, they are all operating systems, they all run on X86 hardware, use X11 as a windowing system, and on and on). Not one. The market has voted with its feet, and has said clearly that companies do not like BSD style licenses . If they believe that companies should chose BSD licenses, they might as well suggest that Detroit put big fins back on their cars, or that McDonalds only serve tofu burgers and rice cakes. I do not know why business people trust the markets so much in some cases, but not in others. When some big company choses FreeBSD over Linux, they can talk about license changes, but for now there are only two that work: GPL (and LGPL if you want to get picky) and proprietary.
I disagree. Musician's (at least the ones I know) are trying to create a particular sound. When I play cello, I make artistic decisions about what I want my sound to be like. My choice about, for instance, whether to minimize bow attack noise or maximize it is part of my artistic choice. I suppose I could always make bow noise and then filter it out later, but I am a performer not a recording technician. The choice of amplifiers is akin to a choice of strings or pick. It changes the sound in predictable ways, and that choice is part of the music.
You make an important point. Good musicians don't want perfect reproduction. They want music. What they want is imperfect reproduction because they want a particular sound that their instrument doesn't naturally give. It's kind of like visual fidelity in movies. It you look at raw movie footage it looks very harsh, kind of like home movies. They have to artivicially color grade it to make it look good. Again they don't want perfect fidelity, because perfect fidelity looks bad. It's the imperfect fidelity that looks good. It's kind of like the old Monte Python sketch in which the american movie director explains that he is shooting snow scenes on the beach because " It looks more like snow than snow."
I faced this set of questions in our department and had to find not only a solution, but a way to discuss the problem with technical neophytes. In the end I identified backups into disaster recovery backups (a drive or a server blows up) and archival backups (you wish you had an older copy of a file you have edited). For initial disaster recovery, we have a RAID 5+0 set-up with redundent servers, so a lot of hardware has to fail before we are in trouble. For archiving, we do a nightly copy onto a firewire drive (250 GB), with 4 drives in rotation, and one stored off-site. If somebody needs a deleted file from the last week we have it. For longer term, we are looking into a system which writes all files modified in the last 24 hours to a CD or DVD, and then writes the contents of the disk in an index folder. It's no good for disaster recovery, but if somebody needs a copy of a file from last thursday, the index tell which DVD to look at and then you pull the disk and restore the file. Permanent cheap storage, and fast to access. Of course we don't have the code finished yet, but . . .
Has anybody looked into whether there is any money from competitors involved in this? It seems like MS has been gunning for Google for a while, and if GMail succeeds, it would be the end of Hotmail forever. There must be a money trail somewhere. Oh, and why is it that nobody cares about spyware which sends your browsing history to people without even telling you it is there, but this is so bad.
I suppose that they could be hit with a dumping penalty on the international markets, but I am not sure that dumping inside of the United States is illegal. It certainly is illegal if they are a monopoly (which the courts have judged they are) for them to dump product to get into a new market. I just wonder if the current administration has the stomach to go there after their total capitulation on the original DOJ suit.
I did know a family with three girls: KayD, LayC and MinD. Does that count?
I'm sorry to break it to you but the fat lady sang the day the Boies and Schilling decided that a $1 billion contingency wasn't compelling enough and that they wanted to be paid by the hour. When your own lawyer doesn't believe you have a good case, the game is over.
Just think about how many cans of pringles those guys at NASA had to eat to get 100,000,000 miles out of their link.