There have been several of these stories in the last month or so. Enough to make one suspect that someone has an agenda.
It's all fantasy and dreaming until there's some hard evidence. For all the theories for there being intelligent life Out There, there are as many that run against it.
The simple fact is we don't know and, apart from a desire to find something, we have no reason to suspect that there is life beyond this planet.
So far we have one life-bearing planet in this solar system. The others we've inspected have drawn blanks.
Again, there is no good reason to suspect that we are not alone. If we aren't, so much the better. But these breathless items about how many planets *might* support life serve no purpose. May as well say they'll cure cancer.
Apple would be annihilated too- there's no way they could compete with free, not if they had a 90% market share to beat.
They could do it easily. In fact they'd have to if Microsoft went free. Apple's product, unlike Microsoft, isn't the OS. It's the Mac. Giving away the OS would be inconvenient and probably costly but it's not a show-stopper for Apple.
It might even hurt Microsoft more than Apple.
Microsoft could probably just buy the companies the technology is licensed from outright, if open sourcing Windows was critical to their business model. Or reimplement those features.
I think buying up the companies might run them foul of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Microsoft is already a monopolist; this would make things worse.
they would have a huge market as their product would run on Macs as well with little re-engineering.
Oh, yes. Just what we need. More X-based applications that look horrible.
I think this lack of appreciation of appearance is the biggest thing that's holding back Linux; that and usability.
I assume when you say internet you actually mean the Web.
When I worked for IBM in the '80s we had access to the internet over IBM's VNET through a portal somewhere in Armonk, IIRC. Mostly newsgroups and FTP, but it was the internet.
Haven't you read The Cuckoo's Egg?
Just to keep the record straight:
Apple MacOSX 10.5 retail $129.00
Apple MacOSX 10.5 Family 5-pack $229.00
Point upgrades from 10.5.0 up to (but not including)10.6 are free.
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic $199.95
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium $259.95
Over the seven years of XP you got 3 service packs.
The obvious flaw is that if Office for Mac was simply a port we wouldn't have all these compatibility issues with Office for Windows.
The compatibility issues between the various Office for Windows versions are bad enough but then there are the Office for Mac ones on top of that.
Also, the two Offices do not proceed in lock-step. They are usually a year or so out of synch and each may contain features that don't appear in the other for some time.
Would you like to nominate which "service packs" Apple charged for?
OSX 10.5 isn't a service pack; it's a new release. 10.5.1 might be a service pack for 10.5 but it's free.
Can't patch ROMs? Rubbish! We installed patches on ROM-based systems. Each code module checked an expansion address, if anything was there that code was used instead. This is what happens in professional systems.
Point is, not all devices will necessarily do FLAC. For the ones that do, great, it'll probably sound good enough. For the rest, there's a generational loss.
Does anyone in the mainstream use FLAC? Could it be because no-one is quite sure if it's safe to do so, patent-wise?
You want to discuss the rights of operating system owners with people like Cisco? How do you think Cisco would react if you started to sell "clones" of their routers running their OS?
Do I remember correctly that there's a dormant Trusted Computing chip in the Mac motherboard?
If Apple wants to get nasty they cab flip the bit and we can all say goodbye to frankenmacs. OSX will then run only on Apple motherboards. Circumventing the chip would likely be DMCA fodder.
And who will we have to thank for that? Not Apple. Psystar, that's who.
Zero carbon means zero people. How about we stop using PC shorthand? The problem isn't carbon, it's carbon dioxide. Giving carbon, an element we contain in abundance and depend on for our existence,a bad name is not helping anyone.
Just look at the customers who buy these machines. Insurance companies and banks will buy six-packs of these new main-frames for their data-centres.
Current financial situation aside, these people know value when they see it. The mantra "Nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM" doesn't hold up any more. If there was any sort of competition from other platforms these people would buy them.
In the past manufacturers like Honeywell, Burroughs, NatSemi, Amdahl and so on have built IBM mainframe clones and prospered.
But they didn't control the OS. (Aside: I spoke to one operator on a clone system that came with its own OS. He said that the OS manuals were photocopies of IBM manuals). There is a huge legacy of MVS specific software, too. Unless someone can come up with a FOSS version of each, forget it.
It would be a brave (or foolhardy) bank that would trust its online network to anything but Big Blue. We're talking real banks here, not these Mom&Pop operations that pass for banks in the US. Maybe millions of transactions per minute. No Wintel PC is going to handle that.
They are demonstrating it to Middle Eastern states. "We can isolate you just like that". Now, who would want to do that? The West could do it without resorting to destroying valuable assets. Just block the countries. This has to be someone who can't do that but wants the power to do so.
When you look at TCP/IP you have to wonder if it was ever intended for WAN use. The extravagant use of bandwidth in contrast with IBM's SNA/SDLC is a pointer. It wasn't all that long ago that you tied datacenters together with 64K links.
The simple facts are that X.25 didn't match the customers' topology needs and it wasn't reliable enough. Even during the early '90s a telecom's sales engineer told us (with disarming frankness) that he wouldn't recommend it for line of business applications. Too unreliable. All those Z80s out there on the network trying to cope.
About the same time I was given the job of proposing an X.25 backbone for a large client. Imagine trying to design a network with remote word processors running echoplex across it to implement screen formatting. That's right. Each keystroke was 2 packets. One each way. No PAD on earth would fix that.
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There have been several of these stories in the last month or so. Enough to make one suspect that someone has an agenda. It's all fantasy and dreaming until there's some hard evidence. For all the theories for there being intelligent life Out There, there are as many that run against it. The simple fact is we don't know and, apart from a desire to find something, we have no reason to suspect that there is life beyond this planet. So far we have one life-bearing planet in this solar system. The others we've inspected have drawn blanks. Again, there is no good reason to suspect that we are not alone. If we aren't, so much the better. But these breathless items about how many planets *might* support life serve no purpose. May as well say they'll cure cancer.
It is the precise reason Microsoft did not open sourced OS/2.
That, and the fact that OS/2 belongs to IBM.
Apple would be annihilated too- there's no way they could compete with free, not if they had a 90% market share to beat.
They could do it easily. In fact they'd have to if Microsoft went free. Apple's product, unlike Microsoft, isn't the OS. It's the Mac. Giving away the OS would be inconvenient and probably costly but it's not a show-stopper for Apple.
It might even hurt Microsoft more than Apple.
Microsoft could probably just buy the companies the technology is licensed from outright, if open sourcing Windows was critical to their business model. Or reimplement those features.
I think buying up the companies might run them foul of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Microsoft is already a monopolist; this would make things worse.
they would have a huge market as their product would run on Macs as well with little re-engineering.
Oh, yes. Just what we need. More X-based applications that look horrible.
I think this lack of appreciation of appearance is the biggest thing that's holding back Linux; that and usability.
The year of the internet is, sadly, 1993.
I assume when you say internet you actually mean the Web.
When I worked for IBM in the '80s we had access to the internet over IBM's VNET through a portal somewhere in Armonk, IIRC. Mostly newsgroups and FTP, but it was the internet.
Haven't you read The Cuckoo's Egg?
The shift, if any, is to MacOS, which took an open source OS and locked the fucker down.
Not the whole OS; only the proprietary stuff. The underlying OS (Darwin) is free for downloading.
Just to keep the record straight:
Apple MacOSX 10.5 retail $129.00
Apple MacOSX 10.5 Family 5-pack $229.00
Point upgrades from 10.5.0 up to (but not including)10.6 are free.
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic $199.95
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium $259.95
Over the seven years of XP you got 3 service packs.
The obvious flaw is that if Office for Mac was simply a port we wouldn't have all these compatibility issues with Office for Windows.
The compatibility issues between the various Office for Windows versions are bad enough but then there are the Office for Mac ones on top of that.
Also, the two Offices do not proceed in lock-step. They are usually a year or so out of synch and each may contain features that don't appear in the other for some time.
Would you like to nominate which "service packs" Apple charged for? OSX 10.5 isn't a service pack; it's a new release. 10.5.1 might be a service pack for 10.5 but it's free.
Hey! Just who are you calling cracker, boy?
Can't patch ROMs? Rubbish! We installed patches on ROM-based systems. Each code module checked an expansion address, if anything was there that code was used instead. This is what happens in professional systems.
Made-up statistics are unconvincing... unless you have a barrow to push.
Point is, not all devices will necessarily do FLAC. For the ones that do, great, it'll probably sound good enough. For the rest, there's a generational loss. Does anyone in the mainstream use FLAC? Could it be because no-one is quite sure if it's safe to do so, patent-wise?
You want to discuss the rights of operating system owners with people like Cisco? How do you think Cisco would react if you started to sell "clones" of their routers running their OS?
"If you seek justice you are in the wrong place. This is a court of law". Someone or other. Probably O.W.Holmes.
Do I remember correctly that there's a dormant Trusted Computing chip in the Mac motherboard? If Apple wants to get nasty they cab flip the bit and we can all say goodbye to frankenmacs. OSX will then run only on Apple motherboards. Circumventing the chip would likely be DMCA fodder. And who will we have to thank for that? Not Apple. Psystar, that's who.
Zero carbon means zero people. How about we stop using PC shorthand? The problem isn't carbon, it's carbon dioxide. Giving carbon, an element we contain in abundance and depend on for our existence,a bad name is not helping anyone.
If a linux iTunes is such a show-stopper why hasn't someone written one?
Isn't that what OSS is all about? The author of a linux iTunes would have brimming tip jar.
This might be correct if the Windows boxes on my network didn't have any AV.
...
You want me to run AV on my Mac so your AV-protected Windows PCs won't get clobbered?
Just how does that work? If you guys are running AV I shouldn't need to. And if you aren't
Part of the reason is probably that the rovers weren't supposed to last long enough to need cleaning.
Obviously, they were over-engineered because the environment on Mars was not known very well at design time.
If it had been known very well there would have been no point in sending them.
What I want to know is why the dust can't be shaken loose by rocking either the solar panel or the whole rover.
Just look at the customers who buy these machines. Insurance companies and banks will buy six-packs of these new main-frames for their data-centres.
Current financial situation aside, these people know value when they see it. The mantra "Nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM" doesn't hold up any more. If there was any sort of competition from other platforms these people would buy them.
In the past manufacturers like Honeywell, Burroughs, NatSemi, Amdahl and so on have built IBM mainframe clones and prospered.
But they didn't control the OS. (Aside: I spoke to one operator on a clone system that came with its own OS. He said that the OS manuals were photocopies of IBM manuals). There is a huge legacy of MVS specific software, too. Unless someone can come up with a FOSS version of each, forget it.
It would be a brave (or foolhardy) bank that would trust its online network to anything but Big Blue. We're talking real banks here, not these Mom&Pop operations that pass for banks in the US. Maybe millions of transactions per minute. No Wintel PC is going to handle that.
They are demonstrating it to Middle Eastern states. "We can isolate you just like that". Now, who would want to do that? The West could do it without resorting to destroying valuable assets. Just block the countries. This has to be someone who can't do that but wants the power to do so.
When you look at TCP/IP you have to wonder if it was ever intended for WAN use. The extravagant use of bandwidth in contrast with IBM's SNA/SDLC is a pointer. It wasn't all that long ago that you tied datacenters together with 64K links.
The simple facts are that X.25 didn't match the customers' topology needs and it wasn't reliable enough. Even during the early '90s a telecom's sales engineer told us (with disarming frankness) that he wouldn't recommend it for line of business applications. Too unreliable. All those Z80s out there on the network trying to cope.
About the same time I was given the job of proposing an X.25 backbone for a large client. Imagine trying to design a network with remote word processors running echoplex across it to implement screen formatting. That's right. Each keystroke was 2 packets. One each way. No PAD on earth would fix that.