If a whole 95% of the newspapers in the U.S. disappear, there will still be more than a dozen dailies left in the end. From the perspective of the people employed by the newspapers, that's the death of the industry; roll a natural 20 or your job is gone. But from the perspective of people who read the news, though, there will still be more different newspapers than any individual needs.
And we'll still have CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, Fox News, PBS, NPR, local television affiliates, weeklies, and more. Oh, and the BBC and other foreign press.
Not yet. Per the website, this set is 1.0; modifications to work with MS Ofice are targeted for 1.1 (expected release this year), and LaTeX with 1.2 (expected release next year).
Not to be nit-picky but this situation calls for it: saying it "has" (present tense) a slow development cycle is not a claim that this has always been the case since its inception.
You think the situation calls for being nit-picky? Wonderful, sir. Then let us pick the nit in context:
It depends on how sound and useful the initial design was. The POSIX standard has a slow development cycle. So does the X Windowing Protocol.
Saying that "[i]t depends on how sound and useful the initial design was" is an explicit invocation of the case at the inception. And so the state of your examples at their respective inceptions is plainly relevant to evaluating your statement.
The risk would probably be considerably higher than the risk associated with a space shuttle launch and reentry
Actually, it would probably be significantly lower. First, you'll be doing it with a design that uses modern materials technology, not 30-odd-year-old materials technology. Second, you'll be doing it on a vehicle designed solely for launching and returning humans on short flights, not one that had to also be designed for launching cargo and for supporting humans in space for a week. Third, you'll be going up a lot less distance, coming down a lot less distance, and doing both for a lot less time at significantly slower speeds.
So, the spacecraft will be made of better materials than the Shuttle, it will be much simpler and thus have less to go wrong than the Shuttle, and it will be placed under significantly less stress than the Shuttle. All of that means it starts out significantly safer than the Shuttle; they'd have to do some really bad engineering to manage to push the danger up to Shuttle levels.
Selective breeding techniques for plants used most of the last hundred years involve breaking up chromosomes with radiation to create new and completely untested genes, then taking any of the mutants that seem to have benefited from this and spreading their randomly-created genes far and wide throughout the species.
Genetic engineering takes long-existing genes of known function and carefully inserts them into a species to create a predictable effect.
And yet people who do the second are the ones who get portrayed as having "vastly more potential to do damage to the environment".
The fact is, we know to a fairly high probability what, say, a Vitamin A producing gene spliced into rice from a bacterium could do if accidentally spread; it would, no matter where it wound up, create Vitamin A. That might have an accidental secondary effect if some species has a Vitamin A-bound process, of course. On the other hand, we do not know, to any degree of significance, what a new, radiation-created gene that seemed to increase maize yield will do in the wild. Yet it is the former, not the latter, which we have all the regulatory control upon, which the European Union bans, and you are comparing to atomic power plants.
Would you dare to make a claim, that ubiquitous use of genetic engineering does not lead to spreading of new genes (especially between plants) orders of magnitude faster than occurs naturally?
I thought we were comparing genetic engineering to selective breeding techniques in common use, not nature. It's provably true that genetic engineering does not spread new genes any faster than the methods of mutation and selective breeding used during the bulk of the last century. All that changes with genetic engineering is we can select existing genes of known function deliberately instead of creating new genes of unknown effects randomly.
Not an issue. Perpetual licenses, see?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 2, Informative
There are three ways to license ARM IP:
Perpetual (Implementation) License The perpetual license offers an ARM Partner the necessary rights to perpetually design and manufacture ARM technology-based products.
Term License This license is suitable for a Partner who wishes to design a number of ARM technology-based products within a specified time-frame (usually three years). The manufacturing rights are perpetual.
Per Use License The Per Use license is available on selected ARM IP and gives an ARM Partner the right to design a single ARM technology-based product within a specified time-frame (usually three years). The manufacturing rights are perpetual.
Notice that all three allow perpetual manufacture. Further, there are plenty of companies with the perpetual (implementation) license. So there is no way in the short or medium term an Apple takeover could seriously threaten current device-makers. In the long term, maybe the ARM available to people other than Apple would stagnate, but the long term is plenty of time to switch to, say, a new mobile device-optimized version of the current embedded PowerPC chips.
Yeah, such high barriers to entry that a small Stanford startup was completely unable to compete against AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, MSN Search . . .
the Empire State building stood up to a collision from a WW2 bomber plane and only lost three floors to fire
What took down the towers was the fuel-fed fire weakening the structural beams, not the impact. The B-25 carries a maximum of 670 gallons of fuel, while a 767ER carries 23,980 gallons, more than 35 times as much. Further, in both cases it was a flight from Boston to New York City, which was a much larger percentage of the B-25's flight range than a 767's. So, there was around two orders of magnitude more fuel feeding the fires at each WTC tower than there was feeding the Empire State Building fire, and thus a similarly increased level of total heat delivered to the structural steel.
If space-colonizing species are anything but hyper-rare, they're frequent enough that there should have been at least one with, say, a twenty-million year jump start on us. Twenty million years is plenty of time to go from the paleolithic to colonizing every star system in the galaxy, even with the lightspeed limit on travel. So, we should be able to "hear" them simply by looking around our own solar system and noticing objects that aren't acting like inert rocks. We accordingly can be sure that colonizing species either don't exist, or are deliberately hiding from us.
There is no way to pull open source Solaris back into closed source. It's out in the wild.
Sure, the code is out there. But there are all sorts of potential complications.
1) If Sun violated its agreements and Novell's copyrights with regard to OpenSolaris, Novell could potentially demand Oracle recompense it for damage the release of OpenSolaris did/is doing to sales of SUSE Linux. 2) If OpenSolaris violates Novell copyrights, Novell could demand that Oracle stop hosting, distributing, contributing to, and supporting OpenSolaris. 3) If OpenSolaris violates Novell copyrights, Novell could go after OpenSolaris users the same way SCO went after Linux users . . . this time, though, with an actual copyright holder going after actual (however trivial) copyright violations. 4) If Sun violated the agreements that allowed it to distribute SVRX as part of Solaris, every copy of not-Open Solaris shipped since the release of OpenSolaris could constitute a contract and/or copyright violation, resulting in damages owed to Novell.
So, what does this mean for Solaris?
on
Novell Wins vs. SCO
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· Score: 3, Insightful
1) The 1994 Sun-Novell license agreement prohibited Sun from disclosing SRVX code for a period of 20 years. It's not 2014 yet. 2) The jury just said Novell retained copyright to Unix, so SCO had no title to SVRX, and so no power to license SVRX except as provided in the Novell-SCO APA. 3) Under the APA, SCO "shall not, and shall not have the authority to, amend, modify, or waive any right under or assign any SVRX License without the prior written consent" of Novell.
As a result, SCO neither had the contractual right (under the APA) nor right of title in SVRX necessary to license the release of any SVRX code by Sun prior to 2014. If there is any SVRX in OpenSolaris, then, Oracle is in violation of its SVRX license agreement with Novell, and its right to distribute Solaris (assuming Solaris contains any SVRX) is, as a result, questionable.
Now, yes, the 2003 SCO-Sun agreement requires that SCO indemnify Sun against any claims arising under the agreement . . . but SCO is too bankrupt for that indemnity to have much value.
"Portable NetWare" (later called "NetWare for Unix") was running on Unix back in 1989. Yes, in-situ upgrades are a bitch, but there was pretty much no barrier at all to shipping "NetWare for Linux" back in, say, 1996, except for the lack of vision in Novell's executive suite.
Why? Lack of vision. Basically, while Linux was emerging, Novell was busy divesting itself of all Ray Noorda's Unix purchases in favor of concentrating on the "core competency" of selling the profitable NetWare, because their stock price was suffering from attempts to expand into other areas. For their lack of vision, they got eaten alive.
The vision of NetWare-on-(Unix|Linux) was continued over at a new company, called Caldera, founded by Novell people and financed by Ray Noorda. That company wound up positioning itself as the "business Linux", selling itself as the logical replacement for installations of SCO Xenix/Unix/UnixWare. To make such transitions easier, Caldera took a bunch of money it got from Microsoft in a lawsuit settlement and bought the Unix business of the Santa Cruz Operation. The trouble was that the SCO Xenix/Unix/UnixWare business it just bought was more profitable than the Linux business it was supposed to feed. And after a CEO change, Caldera switched to trying to concentrate on the "core competency" of selling the profitable SCO products, and threw in some lawsuits to stop other people from following the old Caldera strategy of switching from SCO to Linux. For its lack of vision. Caldera/SCO is now basically dead.
By this time, Novell's mistake had become obvious to Novell. If Caldera had still been following the business plan of former CEO Ransom Love, the obvious thing would have been for Novell to buy Caldera, incidentally re-acquiring many of the rights to UnixWare, and sell (Caldera|Novell) Linux as the heir to both NetWare and UnixWare. But with Darl McBride in charge at Caldrea/The SCO Group, Novell bought SuSE instead, and positioned that as the NetWare successor.
Okay, not exactly magic pixies. But in the dotcom bubble, there were a lot of companies laying fiber everywhere, companies which then evaporated when the bubble burst. Google was then able to buy lots of already-laid fiber for a fraction of cost to lay.
One of the results of how Google got the fiber is that they're not paying interest charges on its construction (either explicit by borrowing to build, or implicit by internally financing and forgoing interest on the cash used to pay for it) anywhere near that of companies that laid their own fiber at their own expense. So those companies are charging maintenance plus interest plus profit for access to non-peers, while Google is only paying maintenance.
Sure. Price elasticity is implicit in any mention of a demand curve. We can also look at the effects of regulatory approval and medical liability claims, and how they result in a supply curve that will drive prices higher relative to consumer electronics. But those factors just give us a price that is, in fact, derived from the workings of the "basic rules of economics".
My point was, the quoted retail price is even higher than the number you'd get from the basic rules of economics, because the nature of the institutional price negotiations result in the quoted retail price being higher than the (average) market price. Thus the person I was responding to was, in fact, wrong--the retail price was not solely a function of those basic rules.
So they're intentionally excluding any new browsers that may exist or may be built in the future
No. Per TFA, the market share is rechecked every six months. Further, the bottom seven combined have less than a single percentage point of the market. So, if you release a new browser good enough to get a mere half of a percent of the market, you'll wind up on the ballot in a matter of months.
Slashdot Mirror
If a whole 95% of the newspapers in the U.S. disappear, there will still be more than a dozen dailies left in the end. From the perspective of the people employed by the newspapers, that's the death of the industry; roll a natural 20 or your job is gone. But from the perspective of people who read the news, though, there will still be more different newspapers than any individual needs.
And we'll still have CNN, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, Fox News, PBS, NPR, local television affiliates, weeklies, and more. Oh, and the BBC and other foreign press.
TeX4ht renders TeX as HTML.
MathTeX is a CGI that renders TeX embedded in a webpage as an image.
The Techexplorer plugin, originally by IBM, will directly render TeX embedded in HTML.
Not yet. Per the website, this set is 1.0; modifications to work with MS Ofice are targeted for 1.1 (expected release this year), and LaTeX with 1.2 (expected release next year).
Steve Jobs has said that iTunes is the best application for Windows ever. How can you doubt his declaration?
It doesn't just "look like" the OS X desktop. Limbaugh is a long-time Mac user and evangelist.
You indirectly claim
Which is to say, I did not, in fact, explicitly make that claim.
Almost looks as if it could have been a deliberate test to see if you would treat others the way you say you'd like to be treated, no?
Not to be nit-picky but this situation calls for it: saying it "has" (present tense) a slow development cycle is not a claim that this has always been the case since its inception.
You think the situation calls for being nit-picky? Wonderful, sir. Then let us pick the nit in context:
It depends on how sound and useful the initial design was. The POSIX standard has a slow development cycle. So does the X Windowing Protocol.
Saying that "[i]t depends on how sound and useful the initial design was" is an explicit invocation of the case at the inception. And so the state of your examples at their respective inceptions is plainly relevant to evaluating your statement.
The POSIX standard has a slow development cycle. So does the X Windowing Protocol.
The X Windowing Protocol went through 11 incompatible versions in its first three-and-a-half years. So by comparison, Android is downright stodgy.
The risk would probably be considerably higher than the risk associated with a space shuttle launch and reentry
Actually, it would probably be significantly lower. First, you'll be doing it with a design that uses modern materials technology, not 30-odd-year-old materials technology. Second, you'll be doing it on a vehicle designed solely for launching and returning humans on short flights, not one that had to also be designed for launching cargo and for supporting humans in space for a week. Third, you'll be going up a lot less distance, coming down a lot less distance, and doing both for a lot less time at significantly slower speeds.
So, the spacecraft will be made of better materials than the Shuttle, it will be much simpler and thus have less to go wrong than the Shuttle, and it will be placed under significantly less stress than the Shuttle. All of that means it starts out significantly safer than the Shuttle; they'd have to do some really bad engineering to manage to push the danger up to Shuttle levels.
The console is almost 5 years old now
November 16, 2006 to May 7, 2010 is less than three and a half years, not "almost 5 years".
Selective breeding techniques for plants used most of the last hundred years involve breaking up chromosomes with radiation to create new and completely untested genes, then taking any of the mutants that seem to have benefited from this and spreading their randomly-created genes far and wide throughout the species.
Genetic engineering takes long-existing genes of known function and carefully inserts them into a species to create a predictable effect.
And yet people who do the second are the ones who get portrayed as having "vastly more potential to do damage to the environment".
The fact is, we know to a fairly high probability what, say, a Vitamin A producing gene spliced into rice from a bacterium could do if accidentally spread; it would, no matter where it wound up, create Vitamin A. That might have an accidental secondary effect if some species has a Vitamin A-bound process, of course. On the other hand, we do not know, to any degree of significance, what a new, radiation-created gene that seemed to increase maize yield will do in the wild. Yet it is the former, not the latter, which we have all the regulatory control upon, which the European Union bans, and you are comparing to atomic power plants.
Would you dare to make a claim, that ubiquitous use of genetic engineering does not lead to spreading of new genes (especially between plants) orders of magnitude faster than occurs naturally?
I thought we were comparing genetic engineering to selective breeding techniques in common use, not nature. It's provably true that genetic engineering does not spread new genes any faster than the methods of mutation and selective breeding used during the bulk of the last century. All that changes with genetic engineering is we can select existing genes of known function deliberately instead of creating new genes of unknown effects randomly.
There are three ways to license ARM IP:
Perpetual (Implementation) License
The perpetual license offers an ARM Partner the necessary rights to perpetually design and manufacture ARM technology-based products.
Term License
This license is suitable for a Partner who wishes to design a number of ARM technology-based products within a specified time-frame (usually three years). The manufacturing rights are perpetual.
Per Use License
The Per Use license is available on selected ARM IP and gives an ARM Partner the right to design a single ARM technology-based product within a specified time-frame (usually three years). The manufacturing rights are perpetual.
Notice that all three allow perpetual manufacture. Further, there are plenty of companies with the perpetual (implementation) license. So there is no way in the short or medium term an Apple takeover could seriously threaten current device-makers. In the long term, maybe the ARM available to people other than Apple would stagnate, but the long term is plenty of time to switch to, say, a new mobile device-optimized version of the current embedded PowerPC chips.
Yeah, such high barriers to entry that a small Stanford startup was completely unable to compete against AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, MSN Search . . .
the Empire State building stood up to a collision from a WW2 bomber plane and only lost three floors to fire
What took down the towers was the fuel-fed fire weakening the structural beams, not the impact. The B-25 carries a maximum of 670 gallons of fuel, while a 767ER carries 23,980 gallons, more than 35 times as much. Further, in both cases it was a flight from Boston to New York City, which was a much larger percentage of the B-25's flight range than a 767's. So, there was around two orders of magnitude more fuel feeding the fires at each WTC tower than there was feeding the Empire State Building fire, and thus a similarly increased level of total heat delivered to the structural steel.
3. What makes us think we can hear them?
If space-colonizing species are anything but hyper-rare, they're frequent enough that there should have been at least one with, say, a twenty-million year jump start on us. Twenty million years is plenty of time to go from the paleolithic to colonizing every star system in the galaxy, even with the lightspeed limit on travel. So, we should be able to "hear" them simply by looking around our own solar system and noticing objects that aren't acting like inert rocks. We accordingly can be sure that colonizing species either don't exist, or are deliberately hiding from us.
Nah, here's an easy one to memorize: Gorilla gorilla.
Five-digit? n00b.
The critics say it's just a big iPod. Your response is . . .
iPad's graphics capabilities come from a PowerVR SGX GPU, similar to the one found in the iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch.
But, hey, at least you're only paying double (32 GB iPod Touch, $299; 32 GB iPad, $599).
There is no way to pull open source Solaris back into closed source. It's out in the wild.
Sure, the code is out there. But there are all sorts of potential complications.
1) If Sun violated its agreements and Novell's copyrights with regard to OpenSolaris, Novell could potentially demand Oracle recompense it for damage the release of OpenSolaris did/is doing to sales of SUSE Linux.
2) If OpenSolaris violates Novell copyrights, Novell could demand that Oracle stop hosting, distributing, contributing to, and supporting OpenSolaris.
3) If OpenSolaris violates Novell copyrights, Novell could go after OpenSolaris users the same way SCO went after Linux users . . . this time, though, with an actual copyright holder going after actual (however trivial) copyright violations.
4) If Sun violated the agreements that allowed it to distribute SVRX as part of Solaris, every copy of not-Open Solaris shipped since the release of OpenSolaris could constitute a contract and/or copyright violation, resulting in damages owed to Novell.
1) The 1994 Sun-Novell license agreement prohibited Sun from disclosing SRVX code for a period of 20 years. It's not 2014 yet.
2) The jury just said Novell retained copyright to Unix, so SCO had no title to SVRX, and so no power to license SVRX except as provided in the Novell-SCO APA.
3) Under the APA, SCO "shall not, and shall not have the authority to, amend, modify, or waive any right under or assign any SVRX License without the prior written consent" of Novell.
As a result, SCO neither had the contractual right (under the APA) nor right of title in SVRX necessary to license the release of any SVRX code by Sun prior to 2014. If there is any SVRX in OpenSolaris, then, Oracle is in violation of its SVRX license agreement with Novell, and its right to distribute Solaris (assuming Solaris contains any SVRX) is, as a result, questionable.
Now, yes, the 2003 SCO-Sun agreement requires that SCO indemnify Sun against any claims arising under the agreement . . . but SCO is too bankrupt for that indemnity to have much value.
Because they can't.
"Portable NetWare" (later called "NetWare for Unix") was running on Unix back in 1989. Yes, in-situ upgrades are a bitch, but there was pretty much no barrier at all to shipping "NetWare for Linux" back in, say, 1996, except for the lack of vision in Novell's executive suite.
Why? Lack of vision. Basically, while Linux was emerging, Novell was busy divesting itself of all Ray Noorda's Unix purchases in favor of concentrating on the "core competency" of selling the profitable NetWare, because their stock price was suffering from attempts to expand into other areas. For their lack of vision, they got eaten alive.
The vision of NetWare-on-(Unix|Linux) was continued over at a new company, called Caldera, founded by Novell people and financed by Ray Noorda. That company wound up positioning itself as the "business Linux", selling itself as the logical replacement for installations of SCO Xenix/Unix/UnixWare. To make such transitions easier, Caldera took a bunch of money it got from Microsoft in a lawsuit settlement and bought the Unix business of the Santa Cruz Operation. The trouble was that the SCO Xenix/Unix/UnixWare business it just bought was more profitable than the Linux business it was supposed to feed. And after a CEO change, Caldera switched to trying to concentrate on the "core competency" of selling the profitable SCO products, and threw in some lawsuits to stop other people from following the old Caldera strategy of switching from SCO to Linux. For its lack of vision. Caldera/SCO is now basically dead.
By this time, Novell's mistake had become obvious to Novell. If Caldera had still been following the business plan of former CEO Ransom Love, the obvious thing would have been for Novell to buy Caldera, incidentally re-acquiring many of the rights to UnixWare, and sell (Caldera|Novell) Linux as the heir to both NetWare and UnixWare. But with Darl McBride in charge at Caldrea/The SCO Group, Novell bought SuSE instead, and positioned that as the NetWare successor.
Maybe magic pixies laid it for them.
They did.
Okay, not exactly magic pixies. But in the dotcom bubble, there were a lot of companies laying fiber everywhere, companies which then evaporated when the bubble burst. Google was then able to buy lots of already-laid fiber for a fraction of cost to lay.
One of the results of how Google got the fiber is that they're not paying interest charges on its construction (either explicit by borrowing to build, or implicit by internally financing and forgoing interest on the cash used to pay for it) anywhere near that of companies that laid their own fiber at their own expense. So those companies are charging maintenance plus interest plus profit for access to non-peers, while Google is only paying maintenance.
Sure. Price elasticity is implicit in any mention of a demand curve. We can also look at the effects of regulatory approval and medical liability claims, and how they result in a supply curve that will drive prices higher relative to consumer electronics. But those factors just give us a price that is, in fact, derived from the workings of the "basic rules of economics".
My point was, the quoted retail price is even higher than the number you'd get from the basic rules of economics, because the nature of the institutional price negotiations result in the quoted retail price being higher than the (average) market price. Thus the person I was responding to was, in fact, wrong--the retail price was not solely a function of those basic rules.
So they're intentionally excluding any new browsers that may exist or may be built in the future
No. Per TFA, the market share is rechecked every six months. Further, the bottom seven combined have less than a single percentage point of the market. So, if you release a new browser good enough to get a mere half of a percent of the market, you'll wind up on the ballot in a matter of months.