I'd like to see you carbon date anything 11 million years old, given that carbon dating is only able to date things less than 0.06 million years old.
But the answers are no, and no. Coelocanths are a previous example of "only known from millions-of-years-old fossils until found alive". And plenty of living creatures strongly resemble ancestral creatures that existed 11 million years ago. Sharks and turtles are the classic "evolved hundreds of millions of years ago, and then stopped because they were so well-adapted" animals, and there are vastly more if we drop the timeframe to a mere 11 million years. See, for example, the genus Canis, which dates back to the Miocene.
we all know Apple went through a horrible near-death "dip" several years ago.
That's the point -- they sold more computers during the five years that include the "near-death" period than they have in the last five years. (Numbers, in millions, are taken from Apple's own SEC 10-K filings) --
1996: 3.960 1997: 2.874 1998: 2.763 1999: 3.448 2000: 4.558 5-year total: 17.603 million, plus around 0.5 million clones.
-- and it'll be interesting to see if it annualizes. There is a question, however, of how many 05-06 FY sales were "borrowed" from the future, as people bought Power Macs (in fear of them becoming unavailable) or Intel Macs (to make the platform transition) earlier than they normally would upgrade-cycle.
The fact is, Jobs's performance since returning to Apple doesn't show any indication he knows how to grow the Mac installed base. He's great at turning a profit on the same volume of Macs, yes, but selling more? If 2006 grows over 2005, it'll be the first time Apple's seen three straight years of unit sales growth since Sculley was CEO.
Well, there are already around a million fewer Mac operating system computers in service today than there were five years ago*, and now there's the inherent bumpiness of a platform change (especially for Carbon apps). So there's already going to be a loss of ISVs around at least the edges anyway.
And the Windows emulation experience on Intel Macs is already going to improve, both because of the closer-to-native execution and the fact that the Intel Macs won't lag in performance behind PCs like the later-generation PowerPCs did. The result is that Windows apps are already going to be an increasingly viable alternative on Macs. Sure, people will prefer native apps, but so did OS/2 users, which didn't stop places considering their Windows 3.x apps sufficient OS/2 support.
So, dual-booting or not, there's already trouble on the horizon.
* Apple itself claims that Macs have a mean lifespan of 5 years. Apple fiscal years 1996-2000, 17.6 million Macs and 0.5 million Mac clones shipped. Apple fiscal years 2001-2005, 17.0 million Macs shipped. It's a rough estimate, but certainly the Mac software market is at best flat.
Two hours a month volunteering to elect candidates who will put a stop to this slide into fascism will do infinitely more good than a million hours posting on Slashdot.
Well, let's see. In the 2004 Presidential election, our choices were:
1) George W. Bush, who signed the USAPATRIOT Act into law; and 2) John Kerry, who personally wrote the financial tracking provisions of the USAPATRIOT Act, and who called on his website for making the terms even stricter.
Which candidate is the one who would have "put a stop to this slide into fascism"?
This battlefield is suited for Apple, where they have control of software and hardware. Sony, not being an OS or software maker, is at a huge disadvantage.
That would be relevant if Apple could actually sell computers running its OS. But over the last decade, Apple conclusively proved it it can't grow the market for computers running its operating system. Apple sold 17.6 million computers fiscal years 1996-2000, and the clone makers sold more than half a million units, for a total of over 18 million Mac OS computers sold 1996-2000. In the next five Apple fiscal years, 2001-2005, Apple sold 17 milliom computers.
When people go looking for something to plug into their PCs, they're going to go looking for stuff that plugs into their Windows PCs, because that's what they have. And there Apple has no advantage over Sony.
What it looks like is that Dan Brown has essentially written a story set in a world someone else invented. I pretty sure that's a no-no.
If Holy Blood, Holy Grail were a work of fiction, then yes, Dan Brown's book could be argued to be "set in a world someone else invented."
However, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (the US title; the UK title was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) purports to be a nonfiction work of history, documenting the real world. In which case, the setting of The Da Vinci Code is not something that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail invented, but merely the real world. If Jesus really had kids and the Catholic Church really is still actively covering that up, those facts are fair game for all authors to use.
Which is why I, personally, welcome the lawsuit. The only way the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail can win it is by admitting under oath that their book was a work of fiction. And if they do that, that's one more nail in the coffin of this conspiracy theory.
Granted, Disney would be a ludicrously silly acquisition.
Still, Apple's own estimates are that an average Mac is in service for five years. Sure, there are execptions to longevity (like the machine I'm writing this on, a Blue & White G3 tower), but an average means there are as many exceptions the other way. The result is that the FY 2005 sales spike, slightly smaller than the FY 2000 spike, probably means there were just about the same number of Macs in use 2005/09/25 as in 2000/09/25.
That's in a world with a growing population and an overall personal computer market that has yet to see a failure to grow in year-to-year unit sales since at least the Apple II introduction.
Apple isn't going away, and neither are Macs, but the same can be said for IBM and mainframes. Based on the last ten years, it's not where future company growth is going to come from, even as it remains an important and quite profitable part of the business.
Apple isn't just a underdog in the computer world. It's a declining computer company which fortunately has a growing music player and music distribution company in-house. Total Mac units sold, FY 1996-2000, were 17.6 million. In the next five years, 2001-2005, the number of Macs sold was 17.0 million. After backing out the iPod and iTMS sales, revenue went from $36.972 billion FY 1996-2000 to $31.938 billion 2001-2005.
Yeah, Jobs could spend time and effort trying to grow the computer business. But given that Apple has been so richly rewarded by restructuring it to turn a profit on a shrinking userbase and turning its main attention to growth in another industry, why bother?
Look at the "% of computer sales to home users" and you will see that Apple is making vast in-roads in its target audience
Wrong.
Total Mac unit sales, each fiscal year, from Apple's annual filings: 1996: 3.960 million 1997: 2.874 million 1998: 2.763 million 1999: 3.448 million 2000: 4.558 million 2001: 3.087 million 2002: 3.101 million 2003: 3.012 million 2004: 3.290 million 2005: 4.534 million
So, the number of Macs sold in the last five Apple fiscal years were 17.024 million. The number of Macs sold in the five years previous to that were 17.603 million. That means Mac slaes declined 3.29% in the last five years compared to the previous five.
That's not a decline in marketshare, which can be explained by PC sales merely growing faster than Mac sales. That's an actual 579,000-computer decline in the number of Macs sold from one five-year period to the next. Macs aren't making massive inroads in any market segment; they're maybe selling well enough to replace themselves, given Apple's 5-year-average-lifespan claims.
1) Digging through all of SCO's dealings and getting them put in the public record makes them available as ammunition in any future legal disputes. You can even analyze them to see if they support bringing a private antitrust claim against Microsoft (which, since Lenovo means IBM no longer has to buy Windows from MS, is nowadays reasonably possibile).
2) Fighting this has been good PR for IBM. IBM serving as a defender of Free/Open Source Software may well translate into additional sales.
3) Bad PR for competitors Microsoft and Sun may well discourage dealings with them, benefitting IBM indirectly.
4) Emotional responses do happen; executives are not automatons.
5) Crushing SCO, rather than paying it off, will discourage others from suing.
6) IBM's accused of breach of contract. Making it clear IBM didn't breach the contract is good for IBM's reputation in future business deals.
7) IBM is invested in Linux; anything that leaves Linux's status unresolved in the general case is a problem for IBM because it leaves potential Linus users worried. A settlement leaves no precedent.
There are probably more reasons, too. Overall, this is perhaps the ideal sort of case for IBM to fight rather than settle.
In the real world, of course, since the courts have upheld clickwrap, Apple doesn't need to even print any warning. So my argument isn't so much legal as moral -- if you want to attach conditions to my use of the product, you should have a positive duty to inform me of those conditions before you complete the sale.
By that standard, a notice on the box would at least be a step in the right direction. I'd rather that Apple had to have an affirmative agreement before the sale . . . .
It would, of course, be a burden on Apple and any other EULA-sporting software company to do so. But if you want to license the software instead of selling a copy, you should make the consumer enter a license agreement beforehand, rather than sell him a copy and then present license terms after the sale is complete.
Actually, it's called a violation of their user license agreement.
Which is nonsense, even if clickwrap licenses are nonsense the courts have decided to allow.
I already own a copy of the software before I ever see the license. If Apple wants me to license their software, rather than buy a copy, they can present me with the terms of the license before I pay and make agreement to the license a condition of the transaction. Since the implicit contract of purchase is complete before I see the license, Apple should not be able to add post-facto conditions, any more than I can put post-facto conditions on their use of the money I give them. The transaction, and the opportunity to place conditions on it, is over when payment has been rendered and the goods have entered my posession.
This is, of course, largely theoretical at this time in the case of x86 MacOS X, but . . .
If Apple wants to sell me the software under terms other than the legally-established default terms for sales of copies of software, they should present me with them in advance. Presenting me with the terms after payment has been rendered is what is immoral, even if clickthrough EULAs have been blessed by the courts.
What are those default terms?
Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117 (a) of the United States Code reads:
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner[.]
If I have bought a retail copy of Mac OS X 10.4, when I walked out of the store with the copy, those are the terms I purchased it under. If I need to modify it to get it to run on my Pegasos box, then I have that right, as owner of a copy of the software. If Apple doesn't want me to do that, they could have required I agree to license terms before I bought it. Since they did not, they're the ones in the position of saying the already-concluded implicit contract involved in any purchase is unacceptable. And that, as in the case of the after-the-fact reneging on the book deal, is wrong.
Um, no, temperature changes will not eliminate the Gulf Stream entirely. The northern split-off extension of the Gulf Stream called the North Atlantic Drift is thermocline-driven, but the rest of the Gulf Stream is just the inevitable effect of the Earth's rotation -- the Coriolis effect on the current-driving winds.
You just deliberately undercut trust in Skype in order to make a short-term profit! There's no way that Google and its federation partners like the Gizmo Project will be able to take advantage of this!
To an observer, the minimum time for another object to move from a point to another a light-year away is one year, yes; that's what makes c invariant. However, for the object moving, experinced time goes down asympotically as the speed of light is approached. If you were moving at c, you would experience literally no passage of time on the trip to Alpha Centauri from Earth, even though it would take you 4.3 years to an observer on Earth.
Another way to state it is that from the perspective of someone moving near the speed of light, the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri shrinks; with the distance shorter, of course it takes less time to travel. However, the distance is still the same to the observer on Earth, and so the time for the trip as viewed by the observer is much longer.
(By the way, this is part of the reason why nothing can go faster than the speed of light; the distance between two points can't shrink to less than zero.)
This difference in space-or-time from different perspectives is why the theory is called relativity; space and time are not absolute constants for everyone evverywhere, but always exist relative to your reference frame.
Yes, yes it is. Because, you see, the late Indian resistance leader Mohandas, and the members of the family of late Prime Ministers of India Indira and Rajiv, are named Gandhi.
They had the masses of the outer planets wrong by as much as a percent, and there was a specific set of bad observational data being used as part of the calculations of Uranus's orbit. The gravitationally-influenced flight arcs of the Voyager probes have given us much better data, and if we'd been using our current numbers in the early 20th, nobody would have been looking for a ninth planet based on the orbits of the gas giants.
Brown dwarfs max out at about 29,000 Earth masses, and the distance of Nemesis wuld be no closer than a light-year or so (63,000 AU). Gravity follows an inverse-square of the distance law.
The Earth masses divided by approximate average AU distance squared value for the pull of Neptune's gravity on Uranus is ~0.02, with a max at closest approach of ~0.14. The equivalent value for the pull of Nemesis on Uranus is ~0.000007.
So, the average gravitational pull of Neptune on Uranus is about three thousand times greater than the pull of Nemesis, if it exists, on Uranus. The pull of the Earth on Uranus works out to about three hundred and fifty times the pull of a maximum-size Nemesis on Uranus. This means the pull of Nemesis on the solar system is so low as to be lost in the noise of orbital measurement and planetary mass estimate errors.
VirtualPC already needs a BIOS emulator to run Windows on non-PC hardware. Given the success of Win2k running on the LinuxBIOS-ADLO-Bochs BIOS stack, the problem is certainly managable even if it isn't trivial.
"I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
"Without efficient micropayments, there will be little Internet commerce, except, maybe, but probably not, some advertising."
"Even if, as Nielsen just reported, 37 million North Americans tried the Internet in the last three months, we'll discover in 1996 that the vast majority surfed for several hours and then went back to watching TV."
"[T]he Internet's naive flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth, if there were any, but there won't be, so no problem."
"So, in 1996, CD-ROMs through Federal Express will emerge as the information superhighway. Instead of an Internet brimming with Web pages under construction, too few of us will haunt ghost pages."
As I understand it, if the refractive index had an absolute value of less than 1 (that is, between 1 and -1), then it would indicate an increase in speed. If the absolute value is 1 or greater and the sign is negative, then it acts just like it would if the value were positive.
But, the negative sign indicates a reversal of several properties. For example, the Doppler shift goes backwards; through a negative refractive index material, a blueshift indicates the light source is moving away from you.
Look, yes, SPARC hardware kicks the crap out of commodity x86, sure. But it's not, as I understand it, nearly that far ahead of IBM POWER hardware. The biggest problem with POWER was that you had to use AIX or Linux, both with definite deficiencies relative to Solaris.
But now there's OpenSolaris, and OpenSolaris is being ported to IBM RISC hardware at no cost to IBM. IBM will then be able to pick it up, polish it, offer support contracts, and provide you with a complete Solaris-on-quality-RISC solution, without a dime going to Sun.
I'm not saying it will happen, but it's certainly a reasonable possibility, something Sun should have a plan for in its business case. If IBM starts offering Solaris-on-RISC, how is Sun going to avoid losing market share -- and thus resources for further development -- to IBM? What's its differentiator?
In short, does Sun actually have a plan? Or is it in "We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do it!" mode?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see you carbon date anything 11 million years old, given that carbon dating is only able to date things less than 0.06 million years old.
But the answers are no, and no. Coelocanths are a previous example of "only known from millions-of-years-old fossils until found alive". And plenty of living creatures strongly resemble ancestral creatures that existed 11 million years ago. Sharks and turtles are the classic "evolved hundreds of millions of years ago, and then stopped because they were so well-adapted" animals, and there are vastly more if we drop the timeframe to a mere 11 million years. See, for example, the genus Canis, which dates back to the Miocene.
we all know Apple went through a horrible near-death "dip" several years ago.
That's the point -- they sold more computers during the five years that include the "near-death" period than they have in the last five years. (Numbers, in millions, are taken from Apple's own SEC 10-K filings) --
1996: 3.960
1997: 2.874
1998: 2.763
1999: 3.448
2000: 4.558
5-year total: 17.603 million, plus around 0.5 million clones.
2001: 3.087
2002: 3.101
2003: 3.012
2004: 3.290
2005: 4.534
5-year total: 17.024 million
So, in the last five years, Apple has never once sold as many Macs as they did in 2000.
Now, there is a growth indication for this year ---
Q1-98 0.635
Q1-99 0.944
Q1-00 1.377
Q1-01 0.659
Q1-02 0.746
Q1-03 0.743
Q1-04 0.829
Q1-05 1.046
Q1-06 1.254
-- and it'll be interesting to see if it annualizes. There is a question, however, of how many 05-06 FY sales were "borrowed" from the future, as people bought Power Macs (in fear of them becoming unavailable) or Intel Macs (to make the platform transition) earlier than they normally would upgrade-cycle.
The fact is, Jobs's performance since returning to Apple doesn't show any indication he knows how to grow the Mac installed base. He's great at turning a profit on the same volume of Macs, yes, but selling more? If 2006 grows over 2005, it'll be the first time Apple's seen three straight years of unit sales growth since Sculley was CEO.
Well, there are already around a million fewer Mac operating system computers in service today than there were five years ago*, and now there's the inherent bumpiness of a platform change (especially for Carbon apps). So there's already going to be a loss of ISVs around at least the edges anyway.
And the Windows emulation experience on Intel Macs is already going to improve, both because of the closer-to-native execution and the fact that the Intel Macs won't lag in performance behind PCs like the later-generation PowerPCs did. The result is that Windows apps are already going to be an increasingly viable alternative on Macs. Sure, people will prefer native apps, but so did OS/2 users, which didn't stop places considering their Windows 3.x apps sufficient OS/2 support.
So, dual-booting or not, there's already trouble on the horizon.
* Apple itself claims that Macs have a mean lifespan of 5 years. Apple fiscal years 1996-2000, 17.6 million Macs and 0.5 million Mac clones shipped. Apple fiscal years 2001-2005, 17.0 million Macs shipped. It's a rough estimate, but certainly the Mac software market is at best flat.
Two hours a month volunteering to elect candidates who will put a stop to this slide into fascism will do infinitely more good than a million hours posting on Slashdot.
Well, let's see. In the 2004 Presidential election, our choices were:
1) George W. Bush, who signed the USAPATRIOT Act into law; and
2) John Kerry, who personally wrote the financial tracking provisions of the USAPATRIOT Act, and who called on his website for making the terms even stricter.
Which candidate is the one who would have "put a stop to this slide into fascism"?
And it hasnt appeared on the front page of the NYT.
Okay, help me out here. Is that an argument for or against its credibility?
This battlefield is suited for Apple, where they have control of software and hardware. Sony, not being an OS or software maker, is at a huge disadvantage.
That would be relevant if Apple could actually sell computers running its OS. But over the last decade, Apple conclusively proved it it can't grow the market for computers running its operating system. Apple sold 17.6 million computers fiscal years 1996-2000, and the clone makers sold more than half a million units, for a total of over 18 million Mac OS computers sold 1996-2000. In the next five Apple fiscal years, 2001-2005, Apple sold 17 milliom computers.
When people go looking for something to plug into their PCs, they're going to go looking for stuff that plugs into their Windows PCs, because that's what they have. And there Apple has no advantage over Sony.
What it looks like is that Dan Brown has essentially written a story set in a world someone else invented. I pretty sure that's a no-no.
If Holy Blood, Holy Grail were a work of fiction, then yes, Dan Brown's book could be argued to be "set in a world someone else invented."
However, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (the US title; the UK title was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) purports to be a nonfiction work of history, documenting the real world. In which case, the setting of The Da Vinci Code is not something that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail invented, but merely the real world. If Jesus really had kids and the Catholic Church really is still actively covering that up, those facts are fair game for all authors to use.
Which is why I, personally, welcome the lawsuit. The only way the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail can win it is by admitting under oath that their book was a work of fiction. And if they do that, that's one more nail in the coffin of this conspiracy theory.
Granted, Disney would be a ludicrously silly acquisition.
Still, Apple's own estimates are that an average Mac is in service for five years. Sure, there are execptions to longevity (like the machine I'm writing this on, a Blue & White G3 tower), but an average means there are as many exceptions the other way. The result is that the FY 2005 sales spike, slightly smaller than the FY 2000 spike, probably means there were just about the same number of Macs in use 2005/09/25 as in 2000/09/25.
That's in a world with a growing population and an overall personal computer market that has yet to see a failure to grow in year-to-year unit sales since at least the Apple II introduction.
Apple isn't going away, and neither are Macs, but the same can be said for IBM and mainframes. Based on the last ten years, it's not where future company growth is going to come from, even as it remains an important and quite profitable part of the business.
Apple isn't just a underdog in the computer world. It's a declining computer company which fortunately has a growing music player and music distribution company in-house. Total Mac units sold, FY 1996-2000, were 17.6 million. In the next five years, 2001-2005, the number of Macs sold was 17.0 million. After backing out the iPod and iTMS sales, revenue went from $36.972 billion FY 1996-2000 to $31.938 billion 2001-2005.
Yeah, Jobs could spend time and effort trying to grow the computer business. But given that Apple has been so richly rewarded by restructuring it to turn a profit on a shrinking userbase and turning its main attention to growth in another industry, why bother?
Look at the "% of computer sales to home users" and you will see that Apple is making vast in-roads in its target audience
Wrong.
Total Mac unit sales, each fiscal year, from Apple's annual filings:
1996: 3.960 million
1997: 2.874 million
1998: 2.763 million
1999: 3.448 million
2000: 4.558 million
2001: 3.087 million
2002: 3.101 million
2003: 3.012 million
2004: 3.290 million
2005: 4.534 million
So, the number of Macs sold in the last five Apple fiscal years were 17.024 million. The number of Macs sold in the five years previous to that were 17.603 million. That means Mac slaes declined 3.29% in the last five years compared to the previous five.
That's not a decline in marketshare, which can be explained by PC sales merely growing faster than Mac sales. That's an actual 579,000-computer decline in the number of Macs sold from one five-year period to the next. Macs aren't making massive inroads in any market segment; they're maybe selling well enough to replace themselves, given Apple's 5-year-average-lifespan claims.
1) Digging through all of SCO's dealings and getting them put in the public record makes them available as ammunition in any future legal disputes. You can even analyze them to see if they support bringing a private antitrust claim against Microsoft (which, since Lenovo means IBM no longer has to buy Windows from MS, is nowadays reasonably possibile).
2) Fighting this has been good PR for IBM. IBM serving as a defender of Free/Open Source Software may well translate into additional sales.
3) Bad PR for competitors Microsoft and Sun may well discourage dealings with them, benefitting IBM indirectly.
4) Emotional responses do happen; executives are not automatons.
5) Crushing SCO, rather than paying it off, will discourage others from suing.
6) IBM's accused of breach of contract. Making it clear IBM didn't breach the contract is good for IBM's reputation in future business deals.
7) IBM is invested in Linux; anything that leaves Linux's status unresolved in the general case is a problem for IBM because it leaves potential Linus users worried. A settlement leaves no precedent.
There are probably more reasons, too. Overall, this is perhaps the ideal sort of case for IBM to fight rather than settle.
In the real world, of course, since the courts have upheld clickwrap, Apple doesn't need to even print any warning. So my argument isn't so much legal as moral -- if you want to attach conditions to my use of the product, you should have a positive duty to inform me of those conditions before you complete the sale.
By that standard, a notice on the box would at least be a step in the right direction. I'd rather that Apple had to have an affirmative agreement before the sale . . . .
It would, of course, be a burden on Apple and any other EULA-sporting software company to do so. But if you want to license the software instead of selling a copy, you should make the consumer enter a license agreement beforehand, rather than sell him a copy and then present license terms after the sale is complete.
Eh. I don't get to write the laws.
Actually, it's called a violation of their user license agreement.
Which is nonsense, even if clickwrap licenses are nonsense the courts have decided to allow.
I already own a copy of the software before I ever see the license. If Apple wants me to license their software, rather than buy a copy, they can present me with the terms of the license before I pay and make agreement to the license a condition of the transaction. Since the implicit contract of purchase is complete before I see the license, Apple should not be able to add post-facto conditions, any more than I can put post-facto conditions on their use of the money I give them. The transaction, and the opportunity to place conditions on it, is over when payment has been rendered and the goods have entered my posession.
This is, of course, largely theoretical at this time in the case of x86 MacOS X, but . . .
If Apple wants to sell me the software under terms other than the legally-established default terms for sales of copies of software, they should present me with them in advance. Presenting me with the terms after payment has been rendered is what is immoral, even if clickthrough EULAs have been blessed by the courts.
What are those default terms?
Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117 (a) of the United States Code reads:
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner[.]
If I have bought a retail copy of Mac OS X 10.4, when I walked out of the store with the copy, those are the terms I purchased it under. If I need to modify it to get it to run on my Pegasos box, then I have that right, as owner of a copy of the software. If Apple doesn't want me to do that, they could have required I agree to license terms before I bought it. Since they did not, they're the ones in the position of saying the already-concluded implicit contract involved in any purchase is unacceptable. And that, as in the case of the after-the-fact reneging on the book deal, is wrong.
Um, no, temperature changes will not eliminate the Gulf Stream entirely. The northern split-off extension of the Gulf Stream called the North Atlantic Drift is thermocline-driven, but the rest of the Gulf Stream is just the inevitable effect of the Earth's rotation -- the Coriolis effect on the current-driving winds.
You just deliberately undercut trust in Skype in order to make a short-term profit! There's no way that Google and its federation partners like the Gizmo Project will be able to take advantage of this!
Whatever you may personally think, he doesn't.
To an observer, the minimum time for another object to move from a point to another a light-year away is one year, yes; that's what makes c invariant. However, for the object moving, experinced time goes down asympotically as the speed of light is approached. If you were moving at c, you would experience literally no passage of time on the trip to Alpha Centauri from Earth, even though it would take you 4.3 years to an observer on Earth.
Another way to state it is that from the perspective of someone moving near the speed of light, the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri shrinks; with the distance shorter, of course it takes less time to travel. However, the distance is still the same to the observer on Earth, and so the time for the trip as viewed by the observer is much longer.
(By the way, this is part of the reason why nothing can go faster than the speed of light; the distance between two points can't shrink to less than zero.)
This difference in space-or-time from different perspectives is why the theory is called relativity; space and time are not absolute constants for everyone evverywhere, but always exist relative to your reference frame.
Is Ghandi axiomatically Bad?
Yes, yes it is. Because, you see, the late Indian resistance leader Mohandas, and the members of the family of late Prime Ministers of India Indira and Rajiv, are named Gandhi.
They had the masses of the outer planets wrong by as much as a percent, and there was a specific set of bad observational data being used as part of the calculations of Uranus's orbit. The gravitationally-influenced flight arcs of the Voyager probes have given us much better data, and if we'd been using our current numbers in the early 20th, nobody would have been looking for a ninth planet based on the orbits of the gas giants.
Brown dwarfs max out at about 29,000 Earth masses, and the distance of Nemesis wuld be no closer than a light-year or so (63,000 AU). Gravity follows an inverse-square of the distance law.
The Earth masses divided by approximate average AU distance squared value for the pull of Neptune's gravity on Uranus is ~0.02, with a max at closest approach of ~0.14. The equivalent value for the pull of Nemesis on Uranus is ~0.000007.
So, the average gravitational pull of Neptune on Uranus is about three thousand times greater than the pull of Nemesis, if it exists, on Uranus. The pull of the Earth on Uranus works out to about three hundred and fifty times the pull of a maximum-size Nemesis on Uranus. This means the pull of Nemesis on the solar system is so low as to be lost in the noise of orbital measurement and planetary mass estimate errors.
VirtualPC already needs a BIOS emulator to run Windows on non-PC hardware. Given the success of Win2k running on the LinuxBIOS-ADLO-Bochs BIOS stack, the problem is certainly managable even if it isn't trivial.
1) The Texas AG case is not settled by this.
2) The settlement still leaves room for members of the class to sue for damages to their computer.
Don't think of this as Sony getting off. Think of this as a first payment on what Sony is going to go through.
in this column:
"I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."
"Without efficient micropayments, there will be little Internet commerce, except, maybe, but probably not, some advertising."
"Even if, as Nielsen just reported, 37 million North Americans tried the Internet in the last three months, we'll discover in 1996 that the vast majority surfed for several hours and then went back to watching TV."
"[T]he Internet's naive flat-rate business model is incapable of financing the new capacity it would need to serve continued growth, if there were any, but there won't be, so no problem."
"So, in 1996, CD-ROMs through Federal Express will emerge as the information superhighway. Instead of an Internet brimming with Web pages under construction, too few of us will haunt ghost pages."
As I understand it, if the refractive index had an absolute value of less than 1 (that is, between 1 and -1), then it would indicate an increase in speed. If the absolute value is 1 or greater and the sign is negative, then it acts just like it would if the value were positive.
But, the negative sign indicates a reversal of several properties. For example, the Doppler shift goes backwards; through a negative refractive index material, a blueshift indicates the light source is moving away from you.
Look, yes, SPARC hardware kicks the crap out of commodity x86, sure. But it's not, as I understand it, nearly that far ahead of IBM POWER hardware. The biggest problem with POWER was that you had to use AIX or Linux, both with definite deficiencies relative to Solaris.
But now there's OpenSolaris, and OpenSolaris is being ported to IBM RISC hardware at no cost to IBM. IBM will then be able to pick it up, polish it, offer support contracts, and provide you with a complete Solaris-on-quality-RISC solution, without a dime going to Sun.
I'm not saying it will happen, but it's certainly a reasonable possibility, something Sun should have a plan for in its business case. If IBM starts offering Solaris-on-RISC, how is Sun going to avoid losing market share -- and thus resources for further development -- to IBM? What's its differentiator?
In short, does Sun actually have a plan? Or is it in "We must do something; this is something; therefore we must do it!" mode?