The only problem is that DEC didn't have much/anything to do with CP/M. It is entirely possible that CP/M cribbed a lot of its ideas from VMS (if they did they may have taken 8.3 file names, "/", etc., but they didn't take ";#" to indicate file version numbers...).
Well, CoLinux works pretty good under Windows, better than Cygwin for sure. The only hitch is getting networking set up. The CoLinux wiki is a bad mashup of WinXP information. At one point I got it to work fine on a work computer under Windows 2000, but I tried the same at home (again, Win2K), and the colinux side does not connect to the net... *:(
Or, perhaps you're running a large server farm. You want an easy way to load balance a multitude of services, so you can run something that looks like 100 servers on perhaps 50. By dynamically balancing across nodes, services can automatically adjust themselves, independently of mechanisms built into their software (to some degree). When you want to add new hardware to the network, you just plug in the machine, and tasks start being farmed to it. When you want to retire some, you just tell the manager to stop moving tasks onto that machine, and wait for the tasks on that machine to move off.
You mean like the guys who wrote an article for Linux Journal about running SuSE Linux on an IBM Z-Series mainframe, partly to evaluate it with the Evolution server, and had like 6000 (or 60K?) virtual servers up, all running the Evolution server (and serving clients) quite nicely?
If it worked good enough, a couple of beefy (beefy as in lots of LPAR hardware) Z-Series could host quite a few virtual webservers vs racks and racks (or racks of blades) of PC hardware... The advantage of Linux in this instance scales as well...
I find this fanaticism in the open source community is what's crippling Linux
There's an 800 lb vorpal gorilla waiting to eat Linux any way it can. This so-called fanaticism is also protecting it, so that all it's really facing right now is the buzzing of a bunch of 2" wasps from Tibet, deer and horse flies, tsetse flies, tiger mosquitoes, etc., all buzzing about madly trying to get to the skin, but only succeeding very rarely, and not for very long. All the while, the gorilla sits in the corner, shouting out to any who it thinks will listen that it's not the enemy, these communist-hippy-hackers are.
The very real fear from the majority of those who work on Linux (not work with, i.e., users) is that this cracks open a door for lawyers and corporatistic bastards to jam a wedge into the very guts of the system. As long as their externalized as closed-source binary drivers, etc., it's a pain in the ass (sort of) for end-users, or at least those who are always updating their kernels and have to wait for new binary drivers to come out for their stuff, for most Linux users it's a non-issue.
Besides, with Linux there still is choice. Don't like closed drivers? Great. Stick with "pure" debian or slackware. Don't care? Even better, because there's all the other distros that include them, even for those who want to run with Debian/Slack-based distributions.
f an entity believe its needs to protect its IP, then why does that preclude their software from operating with GPL software
It doesn't, obviously. The two main entities involved in this discussion (ATI & NVidia), in case you haven't noticed, are kind of competitive with each other, and they have fears that releasing ANY details to outside parties would give the other too much information it doesn't want them to have.
They just want the function which coincidentally is the purpose of making software. The end is function! The end is the user! GPL is just a means to get there but it is not the only way.
Yes, most users just want things to f'ing work, me included (i.e., now there's support for Aureal sound cards...). And, most of the time I know I don't really care if something is open-source or not, but it sure is nice when it is. Kind of like the difference in some ways of growing your own fruits and vegetables, even if it's only in a pot on the back deck or under a grow light in your mom's basement, vs the crap that is sold in most grocery stores. (I'm not even throwing "organic" into the argument)
Yes, it's amazing now that you can go to Albertson's, Safeway or Krogers and buy strawberries in the middle of December. But it's hard to really call them "strawberries" once you pop them into your mouth.
In many ways, the binary drivers for Linux from NVidia and ATI are a lot like those strawberries (or maybe more appropriately, mangos, avocados, bananas, or leechee fruit. You know, fruit that doesn't grow well/at all in most of North America or Europe). We're dependent on others to grow enough of these to export to our stores, even if they're canned or the blandest varieties.
I'm glad that at least NVidia and ATI are providing something worthwhile, even if it's not ideal, just like I'm glad I can buy frozen vegetables, canned leechee fruit, and strawberries out of season. And, at least for vegetables and strawberries, I could grow them for myself, too (I've got the land and climate to raise both).
For what, SCSI? How much more is an Adaptec or Promise SATA controller card? Hmm...
Hint: Stop buying your stuff at Best Buy or Circuit City.
The chips you're talking about are the Northbridge/Southbridge chips. They manage I/O for devices and memory and CPU, but they're not the actual disk drive controllers.
If you want disk performance, you should be putting in SCSI anyways, and yes, that costs $$$ (But I got an Adaptec 2960 SCSI-II card on eBay a few years ago for only about $70...).
for any SCSI haters, you do realize that NT/2000/XP hangs its IDE drivers off of the SCSI subsystem, right?
"Assassin?...That sounds so exotic... I was just a murderer."
--Richard Kulinksi, The Iceman
If you've ever watched "The Iceman and the Psychiatrist" on HBO, where Richard Kulinksi is interviewed in prison, and the video game approaches this in its "stealth", then it's a pretty seriously fucked game.
One of Kulinksi's favorite ways to off someone was to take them up into a cave in the hills that had rats in it, tie them to a chair, set up a video camera, and watch the rats eat the victim... How's that for stealth?
I always understood a contract to have: 1) An offer 2) An acceptance 3) Consideration 4) Capacity to contract 5) Legality
Where are these elements in a EULA? Perhaps there's an offer, however there is no chance to decline acceptance. The consideration cannot be the email because it's one-sided. You aren't purchasing the EULA.
WHy is it possible for software EULAs to become binding at the time of sale, when the purchaser does not know the terms of any agreements he may be entering, when there is no practical way to back out of the deal (e.g., store or Microsoft won't take back opened software package if one doesn't agree to the EULA contained inside) when any other sale of real or chattel property would be laughed out of court if the same things were allowed?
If the cops run through your house looking for an escaped con running around your neighborhood, and happen upon your marijuana growing lab in your basement, you're gonna be busted.
Just like those people who were stuck in the snow in southern Oregon for a couple of weeks, where a couiple of them had outstanding warrants for their arrest in Arizona for methamphetamine production/distribution...
Steel mills tend to have on-site gas liquification facilities, and some of them are set up to also produce liquid hydrogen, but their main purpose is to make liquid oxygen. From the Linde process typically used with atmospheric air we also get liquid neon, argon, krypton, nitrogen and carbon dioxide as byproducts, as these liquids are "distilled" out at different heights (temperatures) of the cascade column.
Except that at least in the case of Japan, they have a lot of neukular power plants. It could be that they siphon the hydrogen and LOX off of the liquid gas extraction plants next to a couple of steel mills that are relatively close to the rail yard.
Much like biodiesel from recycled french fry oil doesn't scale, this method may not scale either, but it's good to actually have one to see how it pans out in real-world service.
It's no different really than Union Pacific's experiments with gas turbine locomotives, or US and European experiments with steam turbine locos, closed-cycle steam locos, etc.
I think more interesting will be how GE Locomotive's hybrid diesel-electrics work out. If the battery pack had enough amp-hours to replace one locomotive from the consist as a large train tries to power up a mountain grade, then perhaps it'll really justify itself. Of course, it won't work out on lines with multiple grades right after another (Appalachians?), but up places like Cajon Pass it might be beneficial.
Is the efficiency of a power plant really so much better than your car? Yes, from a thermodynamic perspective it is, as well as economy of scale-wise. The coal plant is running at a steady state, and the average car engine does not. The Otto cycle engine's advantage is its flexible power output curve, which is needed for cars, especially in urban driving. Supplant a smaller displacement Otto-cycle engine that meets the power needs of the car to cruise at 70mph on the flats with an electric assist motor (instant full torque) and battery pack, and you kind of get the best of both worlds without trying to make the gas engine too complicated (i.e., variable displacement, etc).
RPG's are a threat because they're small, they're mobile, they're cheap, and they're everywhere.
And Russia, our "friends" in the war on terror, is more than happy to keep pumping them out as fast as they can, selling them to whomever will will buy them. I'm guessing that they've even probably sold more than a few to their Checnyan anti-allies...
Well, say someone really liked the design of the SPARC (or PowerPC), and they wanted to develop their own version for use in environments, say, far different than desktop or server room environments, and perhaps with some value-add on the die itself as well. Say its a company that has already done work at hardening or ruggedizing silicon for different environments, so they've already sunk the capital into the processes etc to make it happen. Say AMD and Intel aren't interested in licensing their chip designs to this company (i.e., the license fees are rather high compared to past license fees). This company probably already has a contract fab facility at their disposal, they just want a cheaper way than Intel or AMD to make their chips. Both the PowerPC and SPARC "open" models could be good for them, and they'd probably go for the PowerPC model because the value of the extra stuff that comes with IBM's license and royalty fees is worth access to all that stuff that isn't available with OpenSparc.
Besides, at least at the Univ of Washington, more than a few projects involved developing silicon designs for projects. Now one has an open CPU design with OpenSPARC, and they can work within their project to try new things with the design as the basis, such as a RISC-based LISP CPU (or, better, Ruby CPU...).
Hmm... i think it's more of a way for AOL, Yahoo, etc. to instead get SOME money back from the spammers who currently leach off of their systems. As usual, the casual end-user is not even an afterthought.
Some of the "meddling" you mention also should include inaction as well. If a group inside a country is trying to work to overthrow the bastards in charge, and the ask the US for help, and we later retract that help or even change to working to help keep the bastards in charge stay in charge. some of the involvement in "internal affairs" is invoked when otherwise seemingly good working situations with US interests in other countries get messed on. Some of the interferences are probably justified, so why doesn't the US government instead crack down on those interests that are bringing the negativity on themselves?
If Shell or ExxonMobile are being bastards in Nigeria, instead of getting pissed off at the pissants in Nigeria who are tired of Shell's dirty business tacticsand are pushing back, why doesn't the President talk to the CEOs and say, "You know, things would be a whole lot better if you just backed off a bit and treated the people around your Nigerian facilities a little bit better, maybe throw them some extra coin, for example, or build them some schools and medical clinics, you know, be a little more benevolent and a little less authoritarian, because just look at Robert Mugabe to see what the worst-case scenario will be").
When one starts playing the Machiavellian political games, they eventually seem to come back to haunt you. Call it Karma, or whatever...
Gulf War Syndrome is also associated with soldiers who were in-theatre who were nowhere close to where any shooting was done with DU ammunition (M1A1 APDSFS rounds, 30mm rounds for A-10 cannon, 25mm rounds for Apache Chaingun/M2 cannon). My personal opinion is that it is some sort of low-grade viral infection that had sub-acute symptoms, but has long-lasting chronic after effects (kind of like West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, etc).
M1A1 DU rounds are handled by the case, not by the "bullet" part, and the penetrator is encased in a sabot anyways. Most of the ammo handling for the A10 is done with machines, unless you are counting loading the loader.
At some point, the arguments about DU rounds just start looking silly. Why is one DU round worse than hundreds or thoudsands of smaller 7.62 or 5.56mm lead bullets shot off equivalently instead? Or any residues left behind from exploded ordnance, trashed vehicles, burning buildings, etc?
Plus, if the target is moving through the atmosphere at high speeds, any cloud of ablated material or plasma is not going to stay around the ablation point for very long.
The problem with the mirrors is that they will still absorb some of the energy of the laser as heat. Adding some sort of cooling system or heat mass will then require other changes to the missile system, such as smaller payload to compensate for the added weight of those kinds of countermeasures.
You mean, cut off some chinese imports to stop illegal immigrants from coming up from Central America and Mexico into the US?
Because the longest election cycle in the US is 6 years, and then, it's only partial, then the Senate's election cycle doesn't count, because at any time 1/3rd of the US Senate is really focused on getting reelected, rather than trying to maintain a longish view on where the US is going. The HORs are working on getting reelected almost from the getgo once they take their oaths in January, since they're only in for 2 yrs. And the President any more is focusing on reelection at least two years away from the election, if only because it wants to influence the mid-term HOR races in order to help gauge and bolster its election run 3 years later.
10 year plan in the US? What that means in the US is passing legislation that is designed in part to hamstring the next president if the dominant party has a feeling it might lose the next presidential election.
No, but when they can skew the market through governmental interference to maintain that cashflow into their coffers, *THAT* is where things start to be fucked up and the market is no longer free.
As far as the tax thing goes, what cheeses most people is the perception that even though BillG may have a tax bill of $100,000, that there are ways he can offset or even negate a lot of that tax burden or create other ways so that that $100K is about 1% or 0% of his net income for the year.
BillG: "But I paid $100,000 to the US Treasury!"
TheRestOfUs: "But it was about.0001% of what you made last year, Bill..."
Or, like when I lived in Lake County, IL. My property tax bill on a $200,000 house was around $11,000/yr (Grayslake, IL). But a $1.5 million house in Lake Forest had property taxes of $15,000, and people in Lake Forest were bitching about how their schools didn't have enough $$$...
If I have to pay about 35-45%/yr in taxes, so should BillG.
Google is being very successful, but they haven't been assholes about it, so people in general don't have their underwear all wadded up trying to knock Google down a couple of notches.
But Microsoft has acted like one major bully. On one hand, they use the law (or whatever other means they can that are "legal" to beat their competitors/perceived enemies down. When the tables are finally turned on them, they cry foul.
Imagine your school days, when the biggest prick in the school was the star player of one of the Big Sports (in the US, that would be football, basketball or baseball). He did what he wanted, essentially, and no one would/could stand up to him. Teachers realized how well-connected his parents were to the rest of the school administration, the teams were pretty successful and high-profile for the community, and his friends tended to be taken care of outside of school.
Finally, a student or teacher has enough of this dickhead, and he's failed in a class for cheating, the week before a major game. The coach (who is no fine specimen of civil humanity himself) appeals to the teacher to "change his mind", first casually, but as the teacher holds his ground, the pressure starts to get nasty. Initially, the school administrators support the teacher, until somewhere along the way a rumor is created that the teacher enjoys a few kinky activities in his spare time, or the kid starts dating the daughter of the head of the school board, or the principal is remined of the benefits he enjoys at the school could easily be taken away, anyways, you get the idea.
So a couple of days before the Big Game, the teacher finally relents and the dickhead's grade is reevaluated, and he barely passes and gets to play in the Big Game.
Or, for those who can remember that long ago, remember when BillG was busted in Bellevue one night for speeding, and the cop had the balls to write him up a ticket for not having proof of insurance? Guess what happened after that? The cop was fired a couple of months after for having a "poor work record". Funny thing was, he had been a cop for quite a few years, and up to then he'd had good job evaluations...
But at least BillG and SteveB aren't in the same league as Andrew Carnegie, Pullman, and others from that era. As far as we know, no one has directly died as the result of trying to throw the shit back onto Microsoft (well, except for that one guy who tried to fight Microsoft when they were arguing that NT4.0 had met some difficult NSA/NIST security classification that he'd worked successfully on for NT 3.51, when the wording of the specifications was clear that NT 4.0 should probably have been reevaluated...).
As much as I don't like Paul Allen right now as a vulture...venture... capitalist (selling off TechTV, running Portland Trailblazers into the ground far worse than George Argyros or Jeff Smulyan tried to do with the Mariners, or even the owner of teh LA Clippers had been doing to that team up until this season), if the stories about him around when he left Microsoft are true, then at least he still has *some* character in him. Can't say the same for BillG or SteveB.
As much as Microsoft as a corporation is just an amoral entity, its soul and basic character come from the people who run it, just like any other corporation.
So, Microsoft isn't like Jesus (Linus Torvalds probably is moreso), but the Pharisees.
Among other things, Jesus kind of said things like, you don't need to talk to a priest to talk to god, and other things that struck hard at the business model of the Pharisees and their monopoly on access to God, as well as their sucking up to the Romans.
Well, if you have a PS2/XBox, you've already paid at least that much for a chunk of *HARDWARE* to play games you might want to play on them that aren't available on PCs/Macs.
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The only problem is that DEC didn't have much/anything to do with CP/M. It is entirely possible that CP/M cribbed a lot of its ideas from VMS (if they did they may have taken 8.3 file names, "/", etc., but they didn't take ";#" to indicate file version numbers...).
But how well will PowerScript work with scripts that use the objectified system access stuff they have now (WMI and ADSI)?
The core language syntax could definitely be better than VBScript, yes.
Me? I'd much rather hope for someone to "rubyize" ADSI and WMI for Ruby.
Good thing it won't work on Windows 2000, so I won't bother looking into it.
Well, CoLinux works pretty good under Windows, better than Cygwin for sure. The only hitch is getting networking set up. The CoLinux wiki is a bad mashup of WinXP information. At one point I got it to work fine on a work computer under Windows 2000, but I tried the same at home (again, Win2K), and the colinux side does not connect to the net... *:(
Or, perhaps you're running a large server farm. You want an easy way to load balance a multitude of services, so you can run something that looks like 100 servers on perhaps 50. By dynamically balancing across nodes, services can automatically adjust themselves, independently of mechanisms built into their software (to some degree). When you want to add new hardware to the network, you just plug in the machine, and tasks start being farmed to it. When you want to retire some, you just tell the manager to stop moving tasks onto that machine, and wait for the tasks on that machine to move off.
You mean like the guys who wrote an article for Linux Journal about running SuSE Linux on an IBM Z-Series mainframe, partly to evaluate it with the Evolution server, and had like 6000 (or 60K?) virtual servers up, all running the Evolution server (and serving clients) quite nicely?
If it worked good enough, a couple of beefy (beefy as in lots of LPAR hardware) Z-Series could host quite a few virtual webservers vs racks and racks (or racks of blades) of PC hardware... The advantage of Linux in this instance scales as well...
I find this fanaticism in the open source community is what's crippling Linux
There's an 800 lb vorpal gorilla waiting to eat Linux any way it can. This so-called fanaticism is also protecting it, so that all it's really facing right now is the buzzing of a bunch of 2" wasps from Tibet, deer and horse flies, tsetse flies, tiger mosquitoes, etc., all buzzing about madly trying to get to the skin, but only succeeding very rarely, and not for very long. All the while, the gorilla sits in the corner, shouting out to any who it thinks will listen that it's not the enemy, these communist-hippy-hackers are.
The very real fear from the majority of those who work on Linux (not work with, i.e., users) is that this cracks open a door for lawyers and corporatistic bastards to jam a wedge into the very guts of the system. As long as their externalized as closed-source binary drivers, etc., it's a pain in the ass (sort of) for end-users, or at least those who are always updating their kernels and have to wait for new binary drivers to come out for their stuff, for most Linux users it's a non-issue.
Besides, with Linux there still is choice. Don't like closed drivers? Great. Stick with "pure" debian or slackware. Don't care? Even better, because there's all the other distros that include them, even for those who want to run with Debian/Slack-based distributions.
f an entity believe its needs to protect its IP, then why does that preclude their software from operating with GPL software
It doesn't, obviously. The two main entities involved in this discussion (ATI & NVidia), in case you haven't noticed, are kind of competitive with each other, and they have fears that releasing ANY details to outside parties would give the other too much information it doesn't want them to have.
They just want the function which coincidentally is the purpose of making software. The end is function! The end is the user! GPL is just a means to get there but it is not the only way.
Yes, most users just want things to f'ing work, me included (i.e., now there's support for Aureal sound cards...). And, most of the time I know I don't really care if something is open-source or not, but it sure is nice when it is. Kind of like the difference in some ways of growing your own fruits and vegetables, even if it's only in a pot on the back deck or under a grow light in your mom's basement, vs the crap that is sold in most grocery stores. (I'm not even throwing "organic" into the argument)
Yes, it's amazing now that you can go to Albertson's, Safeway or Krogers and buy strawberries in the middle of December. But it's hard to really call them "strawberries" once you pop them into your mouth.
In many ways, the binary drivers for Linux from NVidia and ATI are a lot like those strawberries (or maybe more appropriately, mangos, avocados, bananas, or leechee fruit. You know, fruit that doesn't grow well/at all in most of North America or Europe). We're dependent on others to grow enough of these to export to our stores, even if they're canned or the blandest varieties.
I'm glad that at least NVidia and ATI are providing something worthwhile, even if it's not ideal, just like I'm glad I can buy frozen vegetables, canned leechee fruit, and strawberries out of season. And, at least for vegetables and strawberries, I could grow them for myself, too (I've got the land and climate to raise both).
For what, SCSI? How much more is an Adaptec or Promise SATA controller card? Hmm...
Hint: Stop buying your stuff at Best Buy or Circuit City.
The chips you're talking about are the Northbridge/Southbridge chips. They manage I/O for devices and memory and CPU, but they're not the actual disk drive controllers.
If you want disk performance, you should be putting in SCSI anyways, and yes, that costs $$$ (But I got an Adaptec 2960 SCSI-II card on eBay a few years ago for only about $70...).
for any SCSI haters, you do realize that NT/2000/XP hangs its IDE drivers off of the SCSI subsystem, right?
"Assassin?...That sounds so exotic... I was just a murderer."
--Richard Kulinksi, The Iceman
If you've ever watched "The Iceman and the Psychiatrist" on HBO, where Richard Kulinksi is interviewed in prison, and the video game approaches this in its "stealth", then it's a pretty seriously fucked game.
One of Kulinksi's favorite ways to off someone was to take them up into a cave in the hills that had rats in it, tie them to a chair, set up a video camera, and watch the rats eat the victim... How's that for stealth?
Let's rewrite this instead to be like this:
I always understood a contract to have:
1) An offer
2) An acceptance
3) Consideration
4) Capacity to contract
5) Legality
Where are these elements in a EULA? Perhaps there's an offer, however there is no chance to decline acceptance. The consideration cannot be the email because it's one-sided. You aren't purchasing the EULA.
WHy is it possible for software EULAs to become binding at the time of sale, when the purchaser does not know the terms of any agreements he may be entering, when there is no practical way to back out of the deal (e.g., store or Microsoft won't take back opened software package if one doesn't agree to the EULA contained inside) when any other sale of real or chattel property would be laughed out of court if the same things were allowed?
If the cops run through your house looking for an escaped con running around your neighborhood, and happen upon your marijuana growing lab in your basement, you're gonna be busted.
Just like those people who were stuck in the snow in southern Oregon for a couple of weeks, where a couiple of them had outstanding warrants for their arrest in Arizona for methamphetamine production/distribution...
Gaffer tape is pretty awesome, as is the sticky aluminum tape used to repair HVAC ductwork, holes in airplane skins, etc.
Does it work on polyethylene? Nothing seems to glue polyethylene together very well.
Steel mills tend to have on-site gas liquification facilities, and some of them are set up to also produce liquid hydrogen, but their main purpose is to make liquid oxygen. From the Linde process typically used with atmospheric air we also get liquid neon, argon, krypton, nitrogen and carbon dioxide as byproducts, as these liquids are "distilled" out at different heights (temperatures) of the cascade column.
no large capitol investment in line electrification & maintenance.
They *could* just do the third-rail trick as per NYC, Chicago, etc. subway systems, and that would eliminate the overhead catenary lines.
Except that at least in the case of Japan, they have a lot of neukular power plants. It could be that they siphon the hydrogen and LOX off of the liquid gas extraction plants next to a couple of steel mills that are relatively close to the rail yard.
Much like biodiesel from recycled french fry oil doesn't scale, this method may not scale either, but it's good to actually have one to see how it pans out in real-world service.
It's no different really than Union Pacific's experiments with gas turbine locomotives, or US and European experiments with steam turbine locos, closed-cycle steam locos, etc.
I think more interesting will be how GE Locomotive's hybrid diesel-electrics work out. If the battery pack had enough amp-hours to replace one locomotive from the consist as a large train tries to power up a mountain grade, then perhaps it'll really justify itself. Of course, it won't work out on lines with multiple grades right after another (Appalachians?), but up places like Cajon Pass it might be beneficial.
Is the efficiency of a power plant really so much better than your car?
Yes, from a thermodynamic perspective it is, as well as economy of scale-wise. The coal plant is running at a steady state, and the average car engine does not. The Otto cycle engine's advantage is its flexible power output curve, which is needed for cars, especially in urban driving. Supplant a smaller displacement Otto-cycle engine that meets the power needs of the car to cruise at 70mph on the flats with an electric assist motor (instant full torque) and battery pack, and you kind of get the best of both worlds without trying to make the gas engine too complicated (i.e., variable displacement, etc).
RPG's are a threat because they're small, they're mobile, they're cheap, and they're everywhere.
And Russia, our "friends" in the war on terror, is more than happy to keep pumping them out as fast as they can, selling them to whomever will will buy them. I'm guessing that they've even probably sold more than a few to their Checnyan anti-allies...
Well, say someone really liked the design of the SPARC (or PowerPC), and they wanted to develop their own version for use in environments, say, far different than desktop or server room environments, and perhaps with some value-add on the die itself as well. Say its a company that has already done work at hardening or ruggedizing silicon for different environments, so they've already sunk the capital into the processes etc to make it happen. Say AMD and Intel aren't interested in licensing their chip designs to this company (i.e., the license fees are rather high compared to past license fees). This company probably already has a contract fab facility at their disposal, they just want a cheaper way than Intel or AMD to make their chips. Both the PowerPC and SPARC "open" models could be good for them, and they'd probably go for the PowerPC model because the value of the extra stuff that comes with IBM's license and royalty fees is worth access to all that stuff that isn't available with OpenSparc.
Besides, at least at the Univ of Washington, more than a few projects involved developing silicon designs for projects. Now one has an open CPU design with OpenSPARC, and they can work within their project to try new things with the design as the basis, such as a RISC-based LISP CPU (or, better, Ruby CPU...).
Hmm... i think it's more of a way for AOL, Yahoo, etc. to instead get SOME money back from the spammers who currently leach off of their systems. As usual, the casual end-user is not even an afterthought.
Some of the "meddling" you mention also should include inaction as well. If a group inside a country is trying to work to overthrow the bastards in charge, and the ask the US for help, and we later retract that help or even change to working to help keep the bastards in charge stay in charge. some of the involvement in "internal affairs" is invoked when otherwise seemingly good working situations with US interests in other countries get messed on. Some of the interferences are probably justified, so why doesn't the US government instead crack down on those interests that are bringing the negativity on themselves?
If Shell or ExxonMobile are being bastards in Nigeria, instead of getting pissed off at the pissants in Nigeria who are tired of Shell's dirty business tacticsand are pushing back, why doesn't the President talk to the CEOs and say, "You know, things would be a whole lot better if you just backed off a bit and treated the people around your Nigerian facilities a little bit better, maybe throw them some extra coin, for example, or build them some schools and medical clinics, you know, be a little more benevolent and a little less authoritarian, because just look at Robert Mugabe to see what the worst-case scenario will be").
When one starts playing the Machiavellian political games, they eventually seem to come back to haunt you. Call it Karma, or whatever...
Gulf War Syndrome is also associated with soldiers who were in-theatre who were nowhere close to where any shooting was done with DU ammunition (M1A1 APDSFS rounds, 30mm rounds for A-10 cannon, 25mm rounds for Apache Chaingun/M2 cannon). My personal opinion is that it is some sort of low-grade viral infection that had sub-acute symptoms, but has long-lasting chronic after effects (kind of like West Nile Virus, Lyme disease, etc).
M1A1 DU rounds are handled by the case, not by the "bullet" part, and the penetrator is encased in a sabot anyways. Most of the ammo handling for the A10 is done with machines, unless you are counting loading the loader.
At some point, the arguments about DU rounds just start looking silly. Why is one DU round worse than hundreds or thoudsands of smaller 7.62 or 5.56mm lead bullets shot off equivalently instead? Or any residues left behind from exploded ordnance, trashed vehicles, burning buildings, etc?
Plus, if the target is moving through the atmosphere at high speeds, any cloud of ablated material or plasma is not going to stay around the ablation point for very long.
The problem with the mirrors is that they will still absorb some of the energy of the laser as heat. Adding some sort of cooling system or heat mass will then require other changes to the missile system, such as smaller payload to compensate for the added weight of those kinds of countermeasures.
You mean, cut off some chinese imports to stop illegal immigrants from coming up from Central America and Mexico into the US?
Because the longest election cycle in the US is 6 years, and then, it's only partial, then the Senate's election cycle doesn't count, because at any time 1/3rd of the US Senate is really focused on getting reelected, rather than trying to maintain a longish view on where the US is going. The HORs are working on getting reelected almost from the getgo once they take their oaths in January, since they're only in for 2 yrs. And the President any more is focusing on reelection at least two years away from the election, if only because it wants to influence the mid-term HOR races in order to help gauge and bolster its election run 3 years later.
10 year plan in the US? What that means in the US is passing legislation that is designed in part to hamstring the next president if the dominant party has a feeling it might lose the next presidential election.
No, but when they can skew the market through governmental interference to maintain that cashflow into their coffers, *THAT* is where things start to be fucked up and the market is no longer free.
.0001% of what you made last year, Bill..."
As far as the tax thing goes, what cheeses most people is the perception that even though BillG may have a tax bill of $100,000, that there are ways he can offset or even negate a lot of that tax burden or create other ways so that that $100K is about 1% or 0% of his net income for the year.
BillG: "But I paid $100,000 to the US Treasury!"
TheRestOfUs: "But it was about
Or, like when I lived in Lake County, IL. My property tax bill on a $200,000 house was around $11,000/yr (Grayslake, IL). But a $1.5 million house in Lake Forest had property taxes of $15,000, and people in Lake Forest were bitching about how their schools didn't have enough $$$...
If I have to pay about 35-45%/yr in taxes, so should BillG.
Google is being very successful, but they haven't been assholes about it, so people in general don't have their underwear all wadded up trying to knock Google down a couple of notches.
But Microsoft has acted like one major bully. On one hand, they use the law (or whatever other means they can that are "legal" to beat their competitors/perceived enemies down. When the tables are finally turned on them, they cry foul.
Imagine your school days, when the biggest prick in the school was the star player of one of the Big Sports (in the US, that would be football, basketball or baseball). He did what he wanted, essentially, and no one would/could stand up to him. Teachers realized how well-connected his parents were to the rest of the school administration, the teams were pretty successful and high-profile for the community, and his friends tended to be taken care of outside of school.
Finally, a student or teacher has enough of this dickhead, and he's failed in a class for cheating, the week before a major game. The coach (who is no fine specimen of civil humanity himself) appeals to the teacher to "change his mind", first casually, but as the teacher holds his ground, the pressure starts to get nasty. Initially, the school administrators support the teacher, until somewhere along the way a rumor is created that the teacher enjoys a few kinky activities in his spare time, or the kid starts dating the daughter of the head of the school board, or the principal is remined of the benefits he enjoys at the school could easily be taken away, anyways, you get the idea.
So a couple of days before the Big Game, the teacher finally relents and the dickhead's grade is reevaluated, and he barely passes and gets to play in the Big Game.
Or, for those who can remember that long ago, remember when BillG was busted in Bellevue one night for speeding, and the cop had the balls to write him up a ticket for not having proof of insurance? Guess what happened after that? The cop was fired a couple of months after for having a "poor work record". Funny thing was, he had been a cop for quite a few years, and up to then he'd had good job evaluations...
But at least BillG and SteveB aren't in the same league as Andrew Carnegie, Pullman, and others from that era. As far as we know, no one has directly died as the result of trying to throw the shit back onto Microsoft (well, except for that one guy who tried to fight Microsoft when they were arguing that NT4.0 had met some difficult NSA/NIST security classification that he'd worked successfully on for NT 3.51, when the wording of the specifications was clear that NT 4.0 should probably have been reevaluated...).
As much as I don't like Paul Allen right now as a vulture...venture... capitalist (selling off TechTV, running Portland Trailblazers into the ground far worse than George Argyros or Jeff Smulyan tried to do with the Mariners, or even the owner of teh LA Clippers had been doing to that team up until this season), if the stories about him around when he left Microsoft are true, then at least he still has *some* character in him. Can't say the same for BillG or SteveB.
As much as Microsoft as a corporation is just an amoral entity, its soul and basic character come from the people who run it, just like any other corporation.
So, Microsoft isn't like Jesus (Linus Torvalds probably is moreso), but the Pharisees.
Among other things, Jesus kind of said things like, you don't need to talk to a priest to talk to god, and other things that struck hard at the business model of the Pharisees and their monopoly on access to God, as well as their sucking up to the Romans.
Well, if you have a PS2/XBox, you've already paid at least that much for a chunk of *HARDWARE* to play games you might want to play on them that aren't available on PCs/Macs.