First, Word and Excel for Mac predate Windows 2.0. At the time, the Mac certainly was winning in the PC GUI OS field, because it was the only one in that field.
Second, Microsoft needed to keep the Mac viable in an attempt to make it look like Windows had desktop competition.
Third, the recent deal to make Office for Mac better was part of one that made IE the default browser for Mac. A similar deal is impossible for Linux as an OS (albeit possible for a specific Linux distribution).
Well, the Linux code base currently supports x86, and it has already been adjusted to cleanly compile for 64-bit processors. So a 64-bit extension to x86/IA-32 shouldn't require very much in the way of new code; probably the most work would be getting gcc to compile for x86-64.
So, it isn't necessarily because Linux is/isn't easily ported, but that it's being ported to an architecture that doesn't differ very much from what the Linux code already supports.
Kepler's descriptive model of elliptical planetary orbits came before Newton's physics. Newton provided the theory that explained how Kepler's model worked. Steven E. Ehrbar
low-cost firewall for all those cable and DSL-wired households who don't know the first thing about security
I resent that. I'm fully secure; my LAN's gateway (the one attached to the cable modem) is a Windows 98 Second Edition box. Anybody tries to exploit it, and it BSODs spectacularly, cutting off all attacks. On the other hand, those Linux boxes people use as firewalls keep running, giving the cracker a chance to overcome its security. What's the point of a firewall if it doesn't go down in flames?
What are the differences between Windows Me and Windows 2000?
Windows Me is structurally based on the 16-bit DOS (Disk Operating System) code base, although it is a native 32-bit operating system. The underlying technology of Windows Me is very similar to the software platform on which Windows 95/98 was built. Windows 2000, in contrast, was designed from the Windows NT software platform, and on a completely different code structure. Windows NT and Windows 2000 are native 32-bit operating systems built upon a 32-bit code base.
Because Itanium is far more heavily dependent on optimization than x86.
You know how with tradtional RISC chips you needed to recompile the software when the instruction set's newest-core chip came out, or else you'd experience little to no performance improvement (or maybe even perfomance losses)?
VLIW/EPIC is even more dependent on the compiler. If the code is difficult to optimize in the first place, EPIC/VLIW will have a severe performance hit.
The origin of the terms "big-endian" and "little-endian" are from Gulliver's Travels, where there were people who opened their eggs on the big end and people who opened their eggs on the little end. These two groups were each going to war to impose their opening method on the other group.
The entire reason that the terms were derived from that part of Gulliver's Travels was to point out that the bit-order debate was as pointless as the egg debate.
When the oil starts to dry up and extraction costs raise 10-fold we will be in the fortunate position of only having a minor increase in price... then who'll be laughing as your economy topples. Sadly i'll be nearly dead by then:)
Actually, you will probably be dead by then, since there's lots of current technology that can produce gasoline and disel substitues at around $2.50 a US gallon ( £0.44 a liter, £2.00 a UK gallon). These include oily-algae farming, natural gas conversion, etc. Added as extenders when the U.S. price hits $2.60/gallon, chemically converted natural gas alone would extend current oil reserves over a century at current rates of increase in use.
Further, the oily algae is a renewable resource, and may well be enhanced by bioengineering. It's not like we've tried to breed them for oil production yet, or worked extensively on extraction techonolgy. That would make "oil reserves" for purposes of gasoline and disel essentially infinite.
Finally, extraction prices aren't all that high right now; OPEC extracts petroleum currently for an average of ~$2 a barrel. So a ten-fold increase in extraction costs would merely double the price of crude, itself only a minority part of the price of gasoline and diesel.
It didn't have a floppy drive. It started overpriced. It was dependent on a programming language which was never adopted in large numbers. There was no specific job for which it was more effective than other available options, leaving it with no way to "cross the chasm", and it was incompatible with everything.
However, it hasn't failed completely yet. NeXT's operating system is the ancestor of MacOS X much like Windows 3.0 and DOS are the ancestors of Windows 98.
Er, yes, they haven't made Irix builds recently, but they don't treat Linux as the only Unix. M16 supports Solaris, FreeBSD, HPUX, True64 and OpenVMS. That looks like five "other Unix" ports.
And a delay in ports of M17 arguably can be justified by the fact that the guy who maintained many of the Unix ports just died.
Given that Rob himself says "I'm abusing Slashdot", I think complaints that Rob is abusing Slashdot are inherently credible and reasonable. After all, if the site's creator thinks it's an abuse of his creation....
Or are Republicans simply not allowed to exercise free speech? It's not like we're trying to shut down Slashdot, we're just saying our opinion. Or do you think people should be prohibited from protesting other peoples' statements? Or that only the right people should be allowed to protest?
It is only a matter of time before the MS marketing people will find a way to leverage the constant finding/fixing issues in MS products versus the lack of any searching for holes in Open Source products.
So are you a troll, or just ignorant?
Last time I checked Bugtraq there were a whole bunch of people searching through all sorts of open source software for holes, and reporting them.
Last time I looked at www.openbsd.org, it had done a thourough review of any potential security holes in their open source operating system.
And last time I checked, neither the Netscape 4.x browser nor its Java component were Open Source.
Read the article again. The claim isn't "you have better practial protection from illegal invasions" with a cable modem. It's "you have better legal protection from law-enforcement invasions."
Yep, they're talking about the carbon tubes discovered at the same time as spherical Buckminsterfullerene. But this is different from the previous methods predicted of using the tubes or buckyballs as microbearings to lubricate larger mechanisms.
Here they're talking about using a large nanotube with the ends removed with a small one inside it. Apparently the smaller can be rotated within or pulled in and out without friction, and will also act like a spring or shock absorber.
You couldn't make steel at a reasonable price for train rails in 1840. Sure, it would have made railroad tracks able to carry more weight and wear far longer, but it just couldn't be made at a reasonable price for train rails. Then a guy named Bessemer came along with a new way of making steel, and by 1870 steel was more cost-effective than iron for train rails.
Sos how are we going to get nano down to a reasonable price? Good question, and if I knew, I'd have already patented it.
Roswell was during Truman's first term. Then came Truman's second term, Eisenhower's two terms, Kennedy, Kennedy's assassination, Johnson's first term, and then in Johnson's second term, Star Trek aired.
Eh, maybe, but not likely. Sunlight recieved falls off at the square of the distance, and E.E. starts out at half strength.
So the satellite starts with less than one thirty-sixth the solar radiation Earth gets, less than what our Jovian satellites get. That means it needs an atmosphere orders of magnitude thicker than Titan's to maintain surface water (although an ice world with a molten core is also possible).
Given Titan is the gas-giant satellite with the thickest atmosphere we know of, it means there isn't a lot of hope.
Good question. I know I could argue either side convincingly, neither having any less merit than the other.
That it denies access does not in and of itself make it an access control device, if the access control is merely incidental to its overall function. Of course, Microsoft would certainly claim access control was intended. But is a click-through EULA screen what Congress meant by a access control device in the DCMA, anyway?
And even after the DCMA, are you allowed to use an access control device to require the user to sacrifice his Fair Use and other rights to a legally-owned copy of a copyrighted work as a condition of using that work? Especially if the access control device has no other purpose?
While as a judge I would rule one way (the click-through program isn't what Congress meant by access control and, even if it were, access control devices designed solely to negate user rights violate Fair Use and are thus not protected by DCMA), I would not be suprised if the courts decided the other way.
He's claiming that he has all the rights granted in the Software Copyright Act of 1980 as soon as he buys the copy of the software. Thus, if he refuses to agree to the EULA, it doesn't matter -- he still can use the software under only those restrictions applied by the Software Copyright Act of 1980.
I am not a lawyer, but that actually looks like a possibly valid argument in court, if you can install the software without clicking the click-through license. Now, you'd have to patch the software to avoid the click-through, but that's legal under copyright law, and can't be prohibited by the EULA since you haven't agreed to it yet.
Again, I wouldn't advise trying it myself, especially since IANAL and I don't know case law on shrinkwrap licenses. But assuming there's no pro-shrinkwrap case law, the legal issues in using the software under the Software Copyright Act without agreeing to the EULA are unresolved.
Slashdot Mirror
Not equivalent situations.
First, Word and Excel for Mac predate Windows 2.0. At the time, the Mac certainly was winning in the PC GUI OS field, because it was the only one in that field.
Second, Microsoft needed to keep the Mac viable in an attempt to make it look like Windows had desktop competition.
Third, the recent deal to make Office for Mac better was part of one that made IE the default browser for Mac. A similar deal is impossible for Linux as an OS (albeit possible for a specific Linux distribution).
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, the Linux code base currently supports x86, and it has already been adjusted to cleanly compile for 64-bit processors. So a 64-bit extension to x86/IA-32 shouldn't require very much in the way of new code; probably the most work would be getting gcc to compile for x86-64.
So, it isn't necessarily because Linux is/isn't easily ported, but that it's being ported to an architecture that doesn't differ very much from what the Linux code already supports.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Kepler's descriptive model of elliptical planetary orbits came before Newton's physics. Newton provided the theory that explained how Kepler's model worked.
Steven E. Ehrbar
low-cost firewall for all those cable and DSL-wired households who don't know the first thing about security
I resent that. I'm fully secure; my LAN's gateway (the one attached to the cable modem) is a Windows 98 Second Edition box. Anybody tries to exploit it, and it BSODs spectacularly, cutting off all attacks. On the other hand, those Linux boxes people use as firewalls keep running, giving the cracker a chance to overcome its security. What's the point of a firewall if it doesn't go down in flames?
(By God I hope people realize I'm not serious.)
Steven E. Ehrbar
Hoax? Sure, a few people thought it was real, but some people took Johnathan's Swift's "A Modest Proposal" seriously, too.
Steven E. Ehrbar
You've misstated the number who got their memberships by an order of magnitude; 150,000+ people were sent their letters with PINs.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yep. I got my snailmail in May.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Steven E. Ehrbar
Because Itanium is far more heavily dependent on optimization than x86.
You know how with tradtional RISC chips you needed to recompile the software when the instruction set's newest-core chip came out, or else you'd experience little to no performance improvement (or maybe even perfomance losses)?
VLIW/EPIC is even more dependent on the compiler. If the code is difficult to optimize in the first place, EPIC/VLIW will have a severe performance hit.
Steven E. Ehrbar
The origin of the terms "big-endian" and "little-endian" are from Gulliver's Travels, where there were people who opened their eggs on the big end and people who opened their eggs on the little end. These two groups were each going to war to impose their opening method on the other group.
The entire reason that the terms were derived from that part of Gulliver's Travels was to point out that the bit-order debate was as pointless as the egg debate.
Steven E. Ehrbar
When the oil starts to dry up and extraction costs raise 10-fold we will be in the fortunate position of only having a minor increase in price... then who'll be laughing as your economy topples. Sadly i'll be nearly dead by then :)
Actually, you will probably be dead by then, since there's lots of current technology that can produce gasoline and disel substitues at around $2.50 a US gallon ( £0.44 a liter, £2.00 a UK gallon). These include oily-algae farming, natural gas conversion, etc. Added as extenders when the U.S. price hits $2.60/gallon, chemically converted natural gas alone would extend current oil reserves over a century at current rates of increase in use.
Further, the oily algae is a renewable resource, and may well be enhanced by bioengineering. It's not like we've tried to breed them for oil production yet, or worked extensively on extraction techonolgy. That would make "oil reserves" for purposes of gasoline and disel essentially infinite.
Finally, extraction prices aren't all that high right now; OPEC extracts petroleum currently for an average of ~$2 a barrel. So a ten-fold increase in extraction costs would merely double the price of crude, itself only a minority part of the price of gasoline and diesel.
Steven E. Ehrbar
It didn't have a floppy drive. It started overpriced. It was dependent on a programming language which was never adopted in large numbers. There was no specific job for which it was more effective than other available options, leaving it with no way to "cross the chasm", and it was incompatible with everything.
However, it hasn't failed completely yet. NeXT's operating system is the ancestor of MacOS X much like Windows 3.0 and DOS are the ancestors of Windows 98.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Dyson said if the NeXT caught on, Gates would produce software for it, because he "is a good businessman."
Since the NeXT never caught on, the prediction was never tested.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Er, yes, they haven't made Irix builds recently, but they don't treat Linux as the only Unix. M16 supports Solaris, FreeBSD, HPUX, True64 and OpenVMS. That looks like five "other Unix" ports.
And a delay in ports of M17 arguably can be justified by the fact that the guy who maintained many of the Unix ports just died.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Another thing: to claim that he is somehow abusing his position by throwing his slant into the headlines is nonsense.
Interesting. CmdrTaco himself says that he's abusing Slashdot, so obviously CmdrTaco is talking nonsense....
Steven E. Ehrbar
Given that Rob himself says "I'm abusing Slashdot", I think complaints that Rob is abusing Slashdot are inherently credible and reasonable. After all, if the site's creator thinks it's an abuse of his creation....
Or are Republicans simply not allowed to exercise free speech? It's not like we're trying to shut down Slashdot, we're just saying our opinion. Or do you think people should be prohibited from protesting other peoples' statements? Or that only the right people should be allowed to protest?
Steven E. Ehrbar
It is only a matter of time before the MS marketing people will find a way to leverage the constant finding/fixing issues in MS products versus the lack of any searching for holes in Open Source products.
So are you a troll, or just ignorant?
Last time I checked Bugtraq there were a whole bunch of people searching through all sorts of open source software for holes, and reporting them.
Last time I looked at www.openbsd.org, it had done a thourough review of any potential security holes in their open source operating system.
And last time I checked, neither the Netscape 4.x browser nor its Java component were Open Source.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Read the article again. The claim isn't "you have better practial protection from illegal invasions" with a cable modem. It's "you have better legal protection from law-enforcement invasions."
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yep, they're talking about the carbon tubes discovered at the same time as spherical Buckminsterfullerene. But this is different from the previous methods predicted of using the tubes or buckyballs as microbearings to lubricate larger mechanisms.
Here they're talking about using a large nanotube with the ends removed with a small one inside it. Apparently the smaller can be rotated within or pulled in and out without friction, and will also act like a spring or shock absorber.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Guess what?
You couldn't make steel at a reasonable price for train rails in 1840. Sure, it would have made railroad tracks able to carry more weight and wear far longer, but it just couldn't be made at a reasonable price for train rails. Then a guy named Bessemer came along with a new way of making steel, and by 1870 steel was more cost-effective than iron for train rails.
Sos how are we going to get nano down to a reasonable price? Good question, and if I knew, I'd have already patented it.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Well, yeah, Star Trek came along after Roswell.
Roswell was during Truman's first term. Then came Truman's second term, Eisenhower's two terms, Kennedy, Kennedy's assassination, Johnson's first term, and then in Johnson's second term, Star Trek aired.
A really slow follow-up, wouldn't you say?
Steven E. Ehrbar
Except E.E. is half as bright as the Sun, so this planet gets less solar radiation than Jupiter.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Eh, maybe, but not likely. Sunlight recieved falls off at the square of the distance, and E.E. starts out at half strength.
So the satellite starts with less than one thirty-sixth the solar radiation Earth gets, less than what our Jovian satellites get. That means it needs an atmosphere orders of magnitude thicker than Titan's to maintain surface water (although an ice world with a molten core is also possible).
Given Titan is the gas-giant satellite with the thickest atmosphere we know of, it means there isn't a lot of hope.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Good question. I know I could argue either side convincingly, neither having any less merit than the other.
That it denies access does not in and of itself make it an access control device, if the access control is merely incidental to its overall function. Of course, Microsoft would certainly claim access control was intended. But is a click-through EULA screen what Congress meant by a access control device in the DCMA, anyway?
And even after the DCMA, are you allowed to use an access control device to require the user to sacrifice his Fair Use and other rights to a legally-owned copy of a copyrighted work as a condition of using that work? Especially if the access control device has no other purpose?
While as a judge I would rule one way (the click-through program isn't what Congress meant by access control and, even if it were, access control devices designed solely to negate user rights violate Fair Use and are thus not protected by DCMA), I would not be suprised if the courts decided the other way.
Steven E. Ehrbar
You're missing his point.
He's claiming that he has all the rights granted in the Software Copyright Act of 1980 as soon as he buys the copy of the software. Thus, if he refuses to agree to the EULA, it doesn't matter -- he still can use the software under only those restrictions applied by the Software Copyright Act of 1980.
I am not a lawyer, but that actually looks like a possibly valid argument in court, if you can install the software without clicking the click-through license. Now, you'd have to patch the software to avoid the click-through, but that's legal under copyright law, and can't be prohibited by the EULA since you haven't agreed to it yet.
Again, I wouldn't advise trying it myself, especially since IANAL and I don't know case law on shrinkwrap licenses. But assuming there's no pro-shrinkwrap case law, the legal issues in using the software under the Software Copyright Act without agreeing to the EULA are unresolved.
Steven E. Ehrbar