Equating the temporary shutdown of a portion of the Internet with terrorism should be extremely insulting to all people who have been touched by terrorist attacks.
Well, internet being down for a few days would indirectly kill more people than 911 ever did. There are a lot of systems which rely on the internet to work nowadays. Power networks, medical equipment etc. are monitored through the net. They might have a backup but I am sure atleast a few people would miss it , leading to some damage.
Sometime ago there was a story on/. which said that a few mainframes on a powerstation caused a shutdown because NT machines on the same network got viruses and clogged the network up. If it happens to the whole net, I am sure there would be some area in the world where a power shutdown would be catastrophic.
Do Indians know that the Argentines go completely apeshit when you refer to the Faulkand Islands as such, rather than by their preferred name for them?
Indians certainly know of this, because football (ok, soccer) is reasonably popular around here. Everytime a match comes up this issue comes up, but it doesnt stop the Indian newspapers from calling them Falklands anyway.
You missed the fact that Richard Stallman has proven that a full operating system can be written in lisp. He even attained sainthood for it.
Too bad he never managed to write a good editor for it.
The problem with Dell is not really with chips but the subsystems. Dell has a really good supply-chain which allows them to produce machines faster than anyone else.
It is much easier to work with a few trusted,tested suppliers than to deal with 20-30 companies which make motherboards, RAM,fans cases etc. With Intel, they can buy the chips, sometimes mobo etc. from Intel and the other parts from some other traditional vendors. Moving to AMD willl mean signing up a lot of supplier agreements, redesigning their factory layout (the process for building a computer is almost like a car-chassis moving around collecting peripherals) etc. etc.
This is one reason they never have the latest-hottest stuff with them. It is cheaper to mass produce a lot of not-so-cutting edge stuff than to make some of lotsa-premium-but-consumers-are-wary stuff.In addition, It seems it is also more profitable for Dell. Quite unlike the old world Sony who used to thrive on the 6 month margin before the generic-product manufacturers kicked in.
To each his own I suppose.
1. What kind of music should go with which kind of plant? Roses for Guns N Roses? Potted plants for Grateful Dead music?
Lower the frequency, bigger the speaker, so
Banana plants for sub-woofers, rose plants for midrange, cherry blossoms for treble.
I think the plan is working. Now Sco is on top of google for "litigious bastards" and litigious bastards.
They are also on top for litigious and just plain bastards !!!
China is not playing hardball like US does. What they seem to be doing with their standards is something like " if you want to sell it in China, support this standard". So the chinese manufacturers build products which support dual protocols. For the rest of the world, it is still cheaper to buy stuff which works with dual standards and are made in china than the normal stuff which are made in the west, simply because labour in china is cheaper. Anyway it is the software-like parts that change, not the hardware
(eg. if a player can read a dvd it can read a cd and can read evd with minimal changes as long as it supports the most data-dense of the formats -sort of)
Good thing they chose a headline like that. The first hit for "Linux" on google news now is this slashdot story, luckily enough the second link is this heading about Alien puppet Linux....
I think Slashdot sometimes does more harm than good giving flaimbaits like this too much publicity...
There are 2 parts to a religion. One is the "god is so and so" part you described. The other one is the set of customs/philosophy it carries along. These customs are usually attached to the first part by a "god said so" clause.
For example, the islamic god and the jewish god and the christian god are all the same. But they differ on what god's sayings are. Jews codified their ancient customs into their laws, christians took whatever jesus said, added to some older customs and on top whatever the popes said and made it into their religion. Islam took whatever Mohammed said and whatever god supposedly told him as the law.Each represents the culture and times at which the religions were formed
On the other hand, Hinduism has hundreds of millions of gods but are counted as a single group because of the common customs (there is no single law book, there are pagan rules, magic rules, philosphically influenced rules etc. but the customs of the hindu society are common) of marriage,idol worship etc.
The third category is Buddhism which atleast in its Hinayana form does not really worry about god. The whole religion started with an axiom "life is a pain" and worked on that to form a religious format (no doubt helped by Asoka who started prozelytising).Ok, some people do consider buddha to be a god himself, but I would attribute that to Hindu/east asian influences.
I don't know much about african religions except probably rastafarianism, which I can approximately dump as a type 1 religion.
So, there is another common belief,
4) God said so!!
This alone can form a religion. And this rule varies from people to people and certainly species to species. (Imagine if dogs had a religion, they certainly won't accept "thy shall not covet thy neighbours wife" part, dogs are not monogamous)
So alien races might have religions, and if they have they most probably will not be like human religions.
The design and engineering, however, is almost exclusively Porche's (though there are some allegations he stole some of the body design from another designer, I don't rightly remember who that would be though).
There is more to it than that. Skoda had a design for a car that looked like a beetle (with some similarities to the Citroen's bug car).They even displayed it at the Berlin motorshow before the war. The stroy goes that the Skoda guys were pretty friendly with hitler and gave him the blueprints of the car. When the war started, czechkoslovakia was invaded by germany. Hitler meanwhile passed on the blueprints which were used in making the beetle. The designer of the Skoda car, Hans Ledwinka, lost a lot of patents and fame. After the war he was a prisoner in the Russian prisons for years.
Skoda, in their museum at their hometown, still has a display of what the beetle would have looked like, if they made it.
So yes, Hitler has a lot to do with it.
BTW add Hinduism/Indian myth to the list. The god vishnu is supposed to have been born (the first avatar as they say) as a fish to guide a boat in a great flood, described almost as in the bible. It looks like everyone except the chinese/far east had this story of flood somewhere But I doubt that this proves anything except that Indians sailed/travelled to mideast and that they had a bunch of common stories which they swapped (unless the people in India migrated from Mideast into India bringing their language with them - not very impossible seeing how similar sanskrit is to Zorastrian tongue)
Well one thing about Islam...
Islam has the Koran and they have the assorted sayings of the prophet, hadith or something. After Mohammeds death, they decided to transcribe the whole thing down. This probably was the most enlightened period for Islam, so they decided to be as correct as possible about what was going on. They decided that they will not only write down what they thought Mohammed said but also who said that mohammed said so. So it comes out like, A told me that B was told by mohammed at the lunch that world is so and so.
So the Koran etc. are some of the most undiluted historic texts probably. Most of the extremism in Islam is either quoting mohammed out of context for example: suppose Mohammed says in Koran "We are at war with the unbelievers in Mecca, Kill the unbelievers" and somebody quotes only "Kill the unbelievers" .
BTW: Im not a muslim though I have a friend who is and he told me this. I am not religious
As far as I know if you're deploying a large database it's still advisable to have a big huge IBM mainframe or a Unisys box or a Sun 10k instead of 4,8 or 16 clustered 8 proc machines.
A database is the last place you would need a supercomputer. This is one of the easily parellelised jobs, if you want to lookup or write some data it is easy to read it from a lot of nodes. Node 1 will have the first 100 records node 2 will have 100-200 etc. (OK the example is very trivial). This sort of lookup is easily parallelised. Oracle even does most of this automatically and the vendors will give you a fully installed "solution" with failover and whatnot.
Tasks which cannot be parallelised is when all the taks have complex interrelationships. eg. simulation of particle motions or on a larger scale weather prediction. One way out is to have iterative solutions each guess being parallelised. eg. Matrix inversion, each row of a matrix affects all the rows of the result matrix . So it is not easily parallelised. The solution to this involves making a guess a the result, checking how much the error is (approximately similar to newton-raphson method ) and then correcting for it, and then iterating again. When you do it this way, the main work is now to calculate the error, and this task is parallelisable.
I live in India and AFAIK apple has zero investment here (no call centers, never seen a Apple retailer here). Near zero percentage of Indians use Macs too.
Moreover, the sarovar website is hosted by Asianet, which is a leftleaning TV channel in a state with a history of communist governments (BTW communist is not a bad word here). So not only are they cool with the idea of community ownership of information they are also not to be messed with easily since they can very well publicise it.
Not saying that India has never censored information (pakistani news/TV is the most commonly banned), but its not very common either.
Well, In India we have both CDMA and GSM
The telephone towers for CDMA seem give around 10 Kms of radius coverage. GSM towers around 2-3.Unless the equipment in the towers are radically different the price ratio you quoted should be correct.
But there is no difference in sound quality wrt delays or "dropped packets" in GSM vs CDMA (I had a nokia 5510 on GSM which sounded better than the LGRD 2030 phone I have now but that is just the speakers -5510 had an mp3 player) . Plus accessing the net on a GSM phone is a bad situation, costlier on average and slower everywhere. CDMA gives around 3 times faster access in practice (GSM claims 56kbps while CDMA guys claim some 115 kbps).
The problem ofcourse is that CDMA does not have a sim and I have to go back to the service provider everytime I want to change the phone. But for the netaccess and for cheapness factor I picked CDMA.
I wonder why google has tied up with orkut? Orkut by itself is not too much of a product (it is good , but it is too dotcomish, no easy way of getting revenues unless they make it a paid service) Similar to pagerank, the data in orkut points out the links between people in real world. I don't know how they can use it in a product/service, but I bet that the data is going to one of googles research products.
I dunno, maybe a jobfinder/peoplefinder as a paid service? (Nah, too cliched). A service to verify the authenicity of people for online trade etc. ? (Possible, but will it be used in large scales in the near future to make any money? ) . Any guesses ?
I think you have to pick your news sources right and then average them out.
In the case of Iraq war, take Fox news,al-jazeera, Raeds blog, a couple of european news sources (not BBC, they switched their POV around a couple of times about the war) average them out and you get a good idea of what is happenning. But the same mix would probably not work if you wanted any information on Vladmir Putin. For that I would prefer a russian news paper,one chinese or Indian and BBC. It appears that reading the top 3 and bottom 1 links on googlenews give an approximate idea. Any other suggestions/solutions anyone has?
It should not be too much of a problem once people get used to it. And it shouldnt be too much more difficult than to control than actually (vocally) talking without thinking. Humans right now are trained to keep their mouth shut even when they are thinking, or even talk exactly opposite of what they think. We yet are not used to controlling the previous level, ie subconsciously talking (ever noticed people at bus stops muttering to themselves or even smiling?).Once this technology has become mainstream, we should be able to adapt and to think only at a brain level instead of translating into vocal commands. (Qustion: Do Spanish people think differently from Chinese people who don't have a proper phonetic language if they are thinking to themselves?)
And I think we have done this before. Imagine a non-humanoid alien landing on earth. I am sure he would be surprised that all the humans can actually balance themselves on 2 foot and even run around (They would probably think it a waste trying to balance yourself on a point while crawling is much less brain intensive). And Imagine, these beings can even balance themselves on 2 inch thick wheels around a metre above earth (bicycles).And this technique has no evolutionary basis, almost all the humans learned it within a 100 years or so. Looks like a very adaptable race to me.
My friend, that is a battle that is already half won. Everyone of the big hardware companies have a linux option on their servers, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun etc. The difference between high end workstation and a server is often a video card. As soon as the vendors have decent Linux drivers, the workstation market should be open to Linux too. Even without that, IBM etc. do have a Linux option on the workstation.
This is nothing new, odd, illegal, unethical or strange either. It is a common business practice of publicly traded firms.
I don't know about unethical or illegal, but it is certainly odd. A buyback occours only when the company feels that the share prices are too low. Now if the prices are low now, they certainly were low a few months back at 50 cents or so. What has changed between now and then which causes the values of the company to grow 18 fold? Even if we assume SCO's lawsuit has merit now, we must then assume that it had merit then.Its not as if Linus added code worth 17 times the value of SCO into the kernel in the last year. And SCO certainly must have known either way. So either the lawsuit is odd or the buyback is odd
I would think this is a simple trick to use shareholders money - the company capital - to buymore shares, thus inflating the prices artificially. This would let the "insiders" sell their shares, celebrate a "going bust" party and go off to the Caymans. And then, it would be both unethical and illegal
I'm gonna be able to build a sweet linux computer!
This is something i don't understand. In India and many parts of Asia, due to duty structures (computer parts have lesser taxes than fully assembled systems etc) and due to proximity to china, it is cheaper to build your own computer than to buy it pre-built. So I have built all my computers myself - buying RAM from one shop and video cards from another. My computer had an Intel i810 mobo when they just came out. They had reasonably bad Linux support(video would not work with Linuxes avbl. then) , this was in 99 I think.
But after that I have built myself atleast 3 computers, 1 intel and 2 AMD , and Redhat has worked straight out of the box. This is inspite of me buying the cheapest mobos available, with integrated everything, or going for the absolutely latest on others. On the otherhand, until I put in the manufacturer provided binary drivers, windows support has always been bad - No SVGA, no network etc.
Ofcourse, it might have something to do with the fact that sometimes I can put up with non-spectacular video performance (when I get totally bored reconfiguring XFree86 ), but still Linux supports more machines out of the box than windows from what I have seen- assuming that each different motherboard/cards etc are given equal weightage irrespective of how many of them get sold.
The experience is not different for myy friends either.
Re:Yeah right.......the whole world misunderstood
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Please do not equate what Darl is doing to communism. What Darl is doing is exploiting the loopholes of Capitalistic setup for money
Moreover, Lenin and Stalin are entirely different. Lenin is to Stalin what Nepolean was to Hitler. Lenin was not really responsible for mass murder of civilians (though the formation of USSR out of neighbours might not be very good thing to do in retrospect). Similarly Napolean never sent Jews to the gas chambers either though he,like hitler, attaccked all his neighbours.
Slashdot Mirror
Money is an excellent deterent.
That it may be, but money is not an equal deterrent. Rich people can pay more while the poor can only pay less.
Equating the temporary shutdown of a portion of the Internet with terrorism should be extremely insulting to all people who have been touched by terrorist attacks. /. which said that a few mainframes on a powerstation caused a shutdown because NT machines on the same network got viruses and clogged the network up. If it happens to the whole net, I am sure there would be some area in the world where a power shutdown would be catastrophic.
Well, internet being down for a few days would indirectly kill more people than 911 ever did. There are a lot of systems which rely on the internet to work nowadays. Power networks, medical equipment etc. are monitored through the net. They might have a backup but I am sure atleast a few people would miss it , leading to some damage.
Sometime ago there was a story on
Do Indians know that the Argentines go completely apeshit when you refer to the Faulkand Islands as such, rather than by their preferred name for them?
Indians certainly know of this, because football (ok, soccer) is reasonably popular around here. Everytime a match comes up this issue comes up, but it doesnt stop the Indian newspapers from calling them Falklands anyway.
You missed the fact that Richard Stallman has proven that a full operating system can be written in lisp. He even attained sainthood for it.
Too bad he never managed to write a good editor for it.
The problem with Dell is not really with chips but the subsystems. Dell has a really good supply-chain which allows them to produce machines faster than anyone else. ,fans cases etc. With Intel, they can buy the chips, sometimes mobo etc. from Intel and the other parts from some other traditional vendors. .In addition, It seems it is also more profitable for Dell. Quite unlike the old world Sony who used to thrive on the 6 month margin before the generic-product manufacturers kicked in.
To each his own I suppose.
It is much easier to work with a few trusted,tested suppliers than to deal with 20-30 companies which make motherboards, RAM
Moving to AMD willl mean signing up a lot of supplier agreements, redesigning their factory layout (the process for building a computer is almost like a car-chassis moving around collecting peripherals) etc. etc.
This is one reason they never have the latest-hottest stuff with them. It is cheaper to mass produce a lot of not-so-cutting edge stuff than to make some of lotsa-premium-but-consumers-are-wary stuff
1. What kind of music should go with which kind of plant? Roses for Guns N Roses? Potted plants for Grateful Dead music?
Lower the frequency, bigger the speaker, so
Banana plants for sub-woofers, rose plants for midrange, cherry blossoms for treble.
I think the plan is working. Now Sco is on top of google for "litigious bastards" and litigious bastards.
They are also on top for litigious and just plain bastards !!!
China is not playing hardball like US does. What they seem to be doing with their standards is something like " if you want to sell it in China, support this standard". So the chinese manufacturers build products which support dual protocols. For the rest of the world, it is still cheaper to buy stuff which works with dual standards and are made in china than the normal stuff which are made in the west, simply because labour in china is cheaper. Anyway it is the software-like parts that change, not the hardware (eg. if a player can read a dvd it can read a cd and can read evd with minimal changes as long as it supports the most data-dense of the formats -sort of)
Good thing they chose a headline like that. The first hit for "Linux" on google news now is this slashdot story, luckily enough the second link is this heading about Alien puppet Linux....
I think Slashdot sometimes does more harm than good giving flaimbaits like this too much publicity...
There are 2 parts to a religion. One is the "god is so and so" part you described. The other one is the set of customs/philosophy it carries along. These customs are usually attached to the first part by a "god said so" clause.
For example, the islamic god and the jewish god and the christian god are all the same. But they differ on what god's sayings are. Jews codified their ancient customs into their laws, christians took whatever jesus said, added to some older customs and on top whatever the popes said and made it into their religion. Islam took whatever Mohammed said and whatever god supposedly told him as the law.Each represents the culture and times at which the religions were formed
On the other hand, Hinduism has hundreds of millions of gods but are counted as a single group because of the common customs (there is no single law book, there are pagan rules, magic rules, philosphically influenced rules etc. but the customs of the hindu society are common) of marriage,idol worship etc.
The third category is Buddhism which atleast in its Hinayana form does not really worry about god. The whole religion started with an axiom "life is a pain" and worked on that to form a religious format (no doubt helped by Asoka who started prozelytising).Ok, some people do consider buddha to be a god himself, but I would attribute that to Hindu/east asian influences.
I don't know much about african religions except probably rastafarianism, which I can approximately dump as a type 1 religion.
So, there is another common belief,
4) God said so!!
This alone can form a religion. And this rule varies from people to people and certainly species to species. (Imagine if dogs had a religion, they certainly won't accept "thy shall not covet thy neighbours wife" part, dogs are not monogamous)
So alien races might have religions, and if they have they most probably will not be like human religions.
How dare you suggest that there is alien life?
Can't god rest even on a Sunday ??
The design and engineering, however, is almost exclusively Porche's (though there are some allegations he stole some of the body design from another designer, I don't rightly remember who that would be though).
There is more to it than that. Skoda had a design for a car that looked like a beetle (with some similarities to the Citroen's bug car).They even displayed it at the Berlin motorshow before the war. The stroy goes that the Skoda guys were pretty friendly with hitler and gave him the blueprints of the car. When the war started, czechkoslovakia was invaded by germany. Hitler meanwhile passed on the blueprints which were used in making the beetle. The designer of the Skoda car, Hans Ledwinka, lost a lot of patents and fame. After the war he was a prisoner in the Russian prisons for years.
Skoda, in their museum at their hometown, still has a display of what the beetle would have looked like, if they made it.
So yes, Hitler has a lot to do with it.
BTW add Hinduism/Indian myth to the list. The god vishnu is supposed to have been born (the first avatar as they say) as a fish to guide a boat in a great flood, described almost as in the bible. It looks like everyone except the chinese/far east had this story of flood somewhere
But I doubt that this proves anything except that Indians sailed/travelled to mideast and that they had a bunch of common stories which they swapped (unless the people in India migrated from Mideast into India bringing their language with them - not very impossible seeing how similar sanskrit is to Zorastrian tongue)
Well one thing about Islam...
Islam has the Koran and they have the assorted sayings of the prophet, hadith or something. After Mohammeds death, they decided to transcribe the whole thing down. This probably was the most enlightened period for Islam, so they decided to be as correct as possible about what was going on. They decided that they will not only write down what they thought Mohammed said but also who said that mohammed said so. So it comes out like, A told me that B was told by mohammed at the lunch that world is so and so.
So the Koran etc. are some of the most undiluted historic texts probably. Most of the extremism in Islam is either quoting mohammed out of context for example: suppose Mohammed says in Koran "We are at war with the unbelievers in Mecca, Kill the unbelievers" and somebody quotes only "Kill the unbelievers" .
BTW: Im not a muslim though I have a friend who is and he told me this. I am not religious
As far as I know if you're deploying a large database it's still advisable to have a big huge IBM mainframe or a Unisys box or a Sun 10k instead of 4,8 or 16 clustered 8 proc machines.
A database is the last place you would need a supercomputer. This is one of the easily parellelised jobs, if you want to lookup or write some data it is easy to read it from a lot of nodes. Node 1 will have the first 100 records node 2 will have 100-200 etc. (OK the example is very trivial). This sort of lookup is easily parallelised. Oracle even does most of this automatically and the vendors will give you a fully installed "solution" with failover and whatnot.
Tasks which cannot be parallelised is when all the taks have complex interrelationships. eg. simulation of particle motions or on a larger scale weather prediction. One way out is to have iterative solutions each guess being parallelised.
eg. Matrix inversion, each row of a matrix affects all the rows of the result matrix . So it is not easily parallelised. The solution to this involves making a guess a the result, checking how much the error is (approximately similar to newton-raphson method ) and then correcting for it, and then iterating again. When you do it this way, the main work is now to calculate the error, and this task is parallelisable.
But would you run naked around the town shouting "Thats funny" ?
I live in India and AFAIK apple has zero investment here (no call centers, never seen a Apple retailer here). Near zero percentage of Indians use Macs too.
Moreover, the sarovar website is hosted by Asianet, which is a leftleaning TV channel in a state with a history of communist governments (BTW communist is not a bad word here). So not only are they cool with the idea of community ownership of information they are also not to be messed with easily since they can very well publicise it.
Not saying that India has never censored information (pakistani news/TV is the most commonly banned), but its not very common either.
Well, In India we have both CDMA and GSM
The telephone towers for CDMA seem give around 10 Kms of radius coverage. GSM towers around 2-3.Unless the equipment in the towers are radically different the price ratio you quoted should be correct.
But there is no difference in sound quality wrt delays or "dropped packets" in GSM vs CDMA (I had a nokia 5510 on GSM which sounded better than the LGRD 2030 phone I have now but that is just the speakers -5510 had an mp3 player) . Plus accessing the net on a GSM phone is a bad situation, costlier on average and slower everywhere. CDMA gives around 3 times faster access in practice (GSM claims 56kbps while CDMA guys claim some 115 kbps).
The problem ofcourse is that CDMA does not have a sim and I have to go back to the service provider everytime I want to change the phone. But for the netaccess and for cheapness factor I picked CDMA.
I wonder why google has tied up with orkut? Orkut by itself is not too much of a product (it is good , but it is too dotcomish, no easy way of getting revenues unless they make it a paid service)
Similar to pagerank, the data in orkut points out the links between people in real world. I don't know how they can use it in a product/service, but I bet that the data is going to one of googles research products.
I dunno, maybe a jobfinder/peoplefinder as a paid service? (Nah, too cliched).
A service to verify the authenicity of people for online trade etc. ? (Possible, but will it be used in large scales in the near future to make any money? ) .
Any guesses ?
I think you have to pick your news sources right and then average them out. ,al-jazeera, Raeds blog, a couple of european news sources (not BBC, they switched their POV around a couple of times about the war) average them out and you get a good idea of what is happenning. But the same mix would probably not work if you wanted any information on Vladmir Putin. For that I would prefer a russian news paper ,one chinese or Indian and BBC.
In the case of Iraq war, take Fox news
It appears that reading the top 3 and bottom 1 links on googlenews give an approximate idea. Any other suggestions/solutions anyone has?
It should not be too much of a problem once people get used to it. And it shouldnt be too much more difficult than to control than actually (vocally) talking without thinking. .Once this technology has become mainstream, we should be able to adapt and to think only at a brain level instead of translating into vocal commands. (Qustion: Do Spanish people think differently from Chinese people who don't have a proper phonetic language if they are thinking to themselves?)
Humans right now are trained to keep their mouth shut even when they are thinking, or even talk exactly opposite of what they think. We yet are not used to controlling the previous level, ie subconsciously talking (ever noticed people at bus stops muttering to themselves or even smiling?)
And I think we have done this before. Imagine a non-humanoid alien landing on earth. I am sure he would be surprised that all the humans can actually balance themselves on 2 foot and even run around (They would probably think it a waste trying to balance yourself on a point while crawling is much less brain intensive). And Imagine, these beings can even balance themselves on 2 inch thick wheels around a metre above earth (bicycles).And this technique has no evolutionary basis, almost all the humans learned it within a 100 years or so. Looks like a very adaptable race to me.
My friend, that is a battle that is already half won.
Everyone of the big hardware companies have a linux option on their servers, IBM, HP, Dell, Sun etc. The difference between high end workstation and a server is often a video card. As soon as the vendors have decent Linux drivers, the workstation market should be open to Linux too. Even without that, IBM etc. do have a Linux option on the workstation.
This is nothing new, odd, illegal, unethical or strange either. It is a common business practice of publicly traded firms.
I don't know about unethical or illegal, but it is certainly odd. A buyback occours only when the company feels that the share prices are too low. Now if the prices are low now, they certainly were low a few months back at 50 cents or so. What has changed between now and then which causes the values of the company to grow 18 fold? Even if we assume SCO's lawsuit has merit now, we must then assume that it had merit then.Its not as if Linus added code worth 17 times the value of SCO into the kernel in the last year. And SCO certainly must have known either way.
So either the lawsuit is odd or the buyback is odd
I would think this is a simple trick to use shareholders money - the company capital - to buymore shares, thus inflating the prices artificially. This would let the "insiders" sell their shares, celebrate a "going bust" party and go off to the Caymans. And then, it would be both unethical and illegal
I'm gonna be able to build a sweet linux computer!
This is something i don't understand. In India and many parts of Asia, due to duty structures (computer parts have lesser taxes than fully assembled systems etc) and due to proximity to china, it is cheaper to build your own computer than to buy it pre-built. So I have built all my computers myself - buying RAM from one shop and video cards from another.
My computer had an Intel i810 mobo when they just came out. They had reasonably bad Linux support(video would not work with Linuxes avbl. then) , this was in 99 I think.
But after that I have built myself atleast 3 computers, 1 intel and 2 AMD , and Redhat has worked straight out of the box. This is inspite of me buying the cheapest mobos available, with integrated everything, or going for the absolutely latest on others. On the otherhand, until I put in the manufacturer provided binary drivers, windows support has always been bad - No SVGA, no network etc.
Ofcourse, it might have something to do with the fact that sometimes I can put up with non-spectacular video performance (when I get totally bored reconfiguring XFree86 ), but still Linux supports more machines out of the box than windows from what I have seen- assuming that each different motherboard/cards etc are given equal weightage irrespective of how many of them get sold.
The experience is not different for myy friends either.
Please do not equate what Darl is doing to communism. What Darl is doing is exploiting the loopholes of Capitalistic setup for money
Moreover, Lenin and Stalin are entirely different. Lenin is to Stalin what Nepolean was to Hitler. Lenin was not really responsible for mass murder of civilians (though the formation of USSR out of neighbours might not be very good thing to do in retrospect). Similarly Napolean never sent Jews to the gas chambers either though he,like hitler, attaccked all his neighbours.