I poked around their website, not much to see. I guess it makes sense that some customers would be locked in and not have any choices; if it works and they have no expansion plans, no big harm in keeping it. But I am sooo glad I didn't take that job. I have worked at companies that were on both sides of similar lockin situations, and it gives me shudders to think of doing that again, from either side.
Are they still around? I interviewed there many years ago, only knew a little prior to the interview, and was astounded that they were going to write all their next stuff from scratch... GUI, TCP/IP... got out of there as fast as I could, figured they wouldn't be in business much longer if they had to do everything the hard way. A real bad attitude they had, snooty and snobby, like everyone else in the world was a loser and only they were doing the right thing. This was probably 1990 or so.
The point is that cheap access to space is the cornerstore to continuous access to space. If the Saturn moon shots had cost one tenth what they did, they wouldn't have been such a tempting target as to cancel the rest of the moon shots. This new program does nothing to make launches cheaper. All it will do is make more use of expensive launches and become just as big a target as any other expensive space program.
Get the launch costs down and you will have all the space traffic you can handle. There was a survey done some years ago, and something like 10,000 people in the US said they would be willing to spend $100K on a quick orbit or two for their vacation. No matter how many were just speculating, there are a lot of people willing to spend a lot of money just for a quick trip to orbit.
All this loftytalk of being a one planet species, wanting scientific exploration, etc etc etc... you could have all and more that if we had cheap access to space, and plenty of people who have been there and done that. Where would airplanes be today if some government bureaucracy were the only people allowed to fly?
As for funding, get rid of the war on drugs altogether, drop the prison population in half, cut the guards in half, put all the morality cops to something productive, stop funding revolutionaries and terrorists around the world which our politicians think we have to waste more money on fighting... there's all the funding you'd ever need.
If you had been much of an industry watcher, you'd be well aware of all the roadblcoks NASA has thrown up. The major one is their attitude, that only NASA can do it right, and it requires tons of money. They would like nothing better than to make private launches illegal. They hate the X-prize.
I am only talking about management, of course. The engineers don't think that way.
And besides, you apparently forgot to read the rest of that sentence, something about cheapest if reasonably reliable.
First lunacy: waste money bringing the space station up to snuff, then abandon our part in. That's one hell of a message to send to future prospective partners.
Second lunacy: only add $1B to NASA's budget. They will have to gut every other program to fund this return to the moon, and they appear to be eager to do so.
Third lunacy: nothing in this proposal has anything to do with making access to space cheaper.
What ought to happen is tell NASA to get out of the way of independent private companies who are trying to get into space for much less money than NASA spends just thinking about it. That's the key. Let NASA build satellites and telescopes and whatnot, but make it law that NASA has to go with the cheapest launcher of reasonable reliablity, and if that means going with some private company who can do it for 1/10th the cost of Lockheed or Boeing or Ariane, so be it.
Intel chose Pentium instead of 586 because numbers are not trademarkable. I think the same applies to plain words, thus Office is not the trademark, Windows Office.
If this is correct (and remember, IANATmL), then your examples are bogus, and the reason for bizarre names is to get something trademarkable. Would you rather xyzzy and plugh?
I believe the next hearing is 23 Jan, the first topic of discussion will be whether IBM is satisfied with what SCO gives them, and the judge made it pretty clear that they will not move on to SCO's complaints until IBM is happy. End of next week!
Ditto for hurricanes, floods, blizzards, fires, tornadoes, drought....
You remind me of my brother. Pisses and moans about paying for hurricane victims in Florida, then wanted a dam built to protect his house from a 100 year flood that he bought knowing it was in a flood plain.
Yet another idiotic complaint that X11 is holding Linux back.
The other replies to this handle the technical details fine. All I have to add is that I have been using X11 for years on funky 386s and up and never felt the GUI was any kind of bottleneck. If it worked fine on a 33Mhz 386, even if the screen wasn't as big, why the dickens won't it work on 3Ghz Pentiums and Opterons? Why is it that as processors and memory get faster and faster, more oddballs come out of the woodworks screaming about what a pig dog X11 is?
I propose a rule, unless your name is Bruce Almighty, you should keep your suggestions about what people should do to yourself. It's pointless, and it just makes the poster of such comments look absolutely ridiculous.
... that the phrase blew up on landing means exactly that, on landing, not before landing. If you confuse yourself by thinking inflating instead of exploding, same result, because they were supposed to inflate before landing.
Microsoft's business model has built up around the ever increasing share price, to buy other companies and to woo developers. The share price has increased steadily because the revenue has gone up steadily. The long article describes this in a lot more words.
Revenue can't increase any more. The US market is saturated. Foreign markets can't afford list price or anything close, so Microsoft has condoned piracy up until recently, rightly figuring a stolen copy buys mindshare that a legitimate copy of somebody else's software doesn't. But with all their carping on piracy, and especially with Hollywood screaming about piracy, foreigners have been cracking down on piracy and turning to alternatives like Linux.
As someone else pointed out, there's a ton of win9x out there. There are also tons of other computers out there, not just Linux, also BSD, AIX, Solaris... Microsoft does not have so much power that they can make all of them illegal. Especially Linux, it is simply too widespread. If Microsoft were so foolish as to try to use DRM to make Linux illegal, they would find themselves in a world of hurt from the competition and from legislators and prosecutors alerted by the competition and users.
I worked in a similar industry, communications cards. We also had secret sauce. But so did our competitors, and let me assure you that we disassembled our competitors software as soon as we could get our hands on it. We didn't disassemble chips themselves, but no need, we knew what they did in software.
I am sure every graphics company disassembles their competitors software. Are they each so arrogant as to think their competitors don't?
Slashdot Mirror
... I bet they have a better sense of humor than you!
I poked around their website, not much to see. I guess it makes sense that some customers would be locked in and not have any choices; if it works and they have no expansion plans, no big harm in keeping it. But I am sooo glad I didn't take that job. I have worked at companies that were on both sides of similar lockin situations, and it gives me shudders to think of doing that again, from either side.
Are they still around? I interviewed there many years ago, only knew a little prior to the interview, and was astounded that they were going to write all their next stuff from scratch ... GUI, TCP/IP ... got out of there as fast as I could, figured they wouldn't be in business much longer if they had to do everything the hard way. A real bad attitude they had, snooty and snobby, like everyone else in the world was a loser and only they were doing the right thing. This was probably 1990 or so.
The point is that cheap access to space is the cornerstore to continuous access to space. If the Saturn moon shots had cost one tenth what they did, they wouldn't have been such a tempting target as to cancel the rest of the moon shots. This new program does nothing to make launches cheaper. All it will do is make more use of expensive launches and become just as big a target as any other expensive space program.
... you could have all and more that if we had cheap access to space, and plenty of people who have been there and done that. Where would airplanes be today if some government bureaucracy were the only people allowed to fly?
... there's all the funding you'd ever need.
Get the launch costs down and you will have all the space traffic you can handle. There was a survey done some years ago, and something like 10,000 people in the US said they would be willing to spend $100K on a quick orbit or two for their vacation. No matter how many were just speculating, there are a lot of people willing to spend a lot of money just for a quick trip to orbit.
All this loftytalk of being a one planet species, wanting scientific exploration, etc etc etc
As for funding, get rid of the war on drugs altogether, drop the prison population in half, cut the guards in half, put all the morality cops to something productive, stop funding revolutionaries and terrorists around the world which our politicians think we have to waste more money on fighting
If you had been much of an industry watcher, you'd be well aware of all the roadblcoks NASA has thrown up. The major one is their attitude, that only NASA can do it right, and it requires tons of money. They would like nothing better than to make private launches illegal. They hate the X-prize.
I am only talking about management, of course. The engineers don't think that way.
And besides, you apparently forgot to read the rest of that sentence, something about cheapest if reasonably reliable.
First lunacy: waste money bringing the space station up to snuff, then abandon our part in. That's one hell of a message to send to future prospective partners.
Second lunacy: only add $1B to NASA's budget. They will have to gut every other program to fund this return to the moon, and they appear to be eager to do so.
Third lunacy: nothing in this proposal has anything to do with making access to space cheaper.
What ought to happen is tell NASA to get out of the way of independent private companies who are trying to get into space for much less money than NASA spends just thinking about it. That's the key. Let NASA build satellites and telescopes and whatnot, but make it law that NASA has to go with the cheapest launcher of reasonable reliablity, and if that means going with some private company who can do it for 1/10th the cost of Lockheed or Boeing or Ariane, so be it.
IANATmL, IANAIPL
Intel chose Pentium instead of 586 because numbers are not trademarkable. I think the same applies to plain words, thus Office is not the trademark, Windows Office.
If this is correct (and remember, IANATmL), then your examples are bogus, and the reason for bizarre names is to get something trademarkable. Would you rather xyzzy and plugh?
Unless you claim you came up with that name first ...
I believe the next hearing is 23 Jan, the first topic of discussion will be whether IBM is satisfied with what SCO gives them, and the judge made it pretty clear that they will not move on to SCO's complaints until IBM is happy. End of next week!
Ditto for hurricanes, floods, blizzards, fires, tornadoes, drought ....
You remind me of my brother. Pisses and moans about paying for hurricane victims in Florida, then wanted a dam built to protect his house from a 100 year flood that he bought knowing it was in a flood plain.
Here is a news article in the science journal which has the original report.
How about you? You care; they only had time to do so much; seems like you would be the obvious choice.
Yet another idiotic complaint that X11 is holding Linux back.
The other replies to this handle the technical details fine. All I have to add is that I have been using X11 for years on funky 386s and up and never felt the GUI was any kind of bottleneck. If it worked fine on a 33Mhz 386, even if the screen wasn't as big, why the dickens won't it work on 3Ghz Pentiums and Opterons? Why is it that as processors and memory get faster and faster, more oddballs come out of the woodworks screaming about what a pig dog X11 is?
To heck with a suit I want Darl in jail.
No no no. We want Darl in jail in a suit, not bare ass naked, we want something to cover up that bare ass and make it a more attractive target.
The GPL is a LICENSE not a contract.
Statutory damages can be tremendous, I believe $150,000 per violation if wilful.
The other penalty is that KISS will have to stop distribution altogether if they lose in court. That basically puts them out of business.
GPL protection has nothing to do with using or modifying, only with distribution.
You barely have anything right. You need to read more groklaw.
Maybe it's should as in he ought to know, he darned well better know, he's paid to know, why doesn't he know?
Rather than as in of course he knows.
Better example of the first instance is President Shrub, as in it's a damned cockup that he doesn't know much at all.
Better example of the second instance is Donald Knuth on a whoel lot of topics, where everyone knows that he knows what he is talking about.
Looks like you created that account just for this reply. You, sir, are a fanatic :-)
I propose a rule, unless your name is Bruce Almighty, you should keep your suggestions about what people should do to yourself. It's pointless, and it just makes the poster of such comments look absolutely ridiculous.
... that the phrase blew up on landing means exactly that, on landing, not before landing. If you confuse yourself by thinking inflating instead of exploding, same result, because they were supposed to inflate before landing.
welcomm our new antique spelling overlords. I have muche to learne.
Microsoft's business model has built up around the ever increasing share price, to buy other companies and to woo developers. The share price has increased steadily because the revenue has gone up steadily. The long article describes this in a lot more words.
Revenue can't increase any more. The US market is saturated. Foreign markets can't afford list price or anything close, so Microsoft has condoned piracy up until recently, rightly figuring a stolen copy buys mindshare that a legitimate copy of somebody else's software doesn't. But with all their carping on piracy, and especially with Hollywood screaming about piracy, foreigners have been cracking down on piracy and turning to alternatives like Linux.
That's the cause of the flattening.
As someone else pointed out, there's a ton of win9x out there. There are also tons of other computers out there, not just Linux, also BSD, AIX, Solaris ... Microsoft does not have so much power that they can make all of them illegal. Especially Linux, it is simply too widespread. If Microsoft were so foolish as to try to use DRM to make Linux illegal, they would find themselves in a world of hurt from the competition and from legislators and prosecutors alerted by the competition and users.
It simply will not happen.
Keerist in a bucket buddy, what makes you think I had any say in the matter?
I worked in a similar industry, communications cards. We also had secret sauce. But so did our competitors, and let me assure you that we disassembled our competitors software as soon as we could get our hands on it. We didn't disassemble chips themselves, but no need, we knew what they did in software.
I am sure every graphics company disassembles their competitors software. Are they each so arrogant as to think their competitors don't?
I guess satire is lost on some people.