Have several LOX-collectors airborne continuously, and do an in-flight-(re)fuel of the launch vehicle and orbiter from one of those.
Pluses:
refuelling technology is well refined (relatively safe)
The complex, bulky, drag-causing, heavy, delicate LOX-collecting gear doesn't have to be lofted to and returned from sub-orbit with the launcher (launcher can be smaller/lighter/more efficient)
The collecting vehicle could use more and smaller jet engines so that failure of a LOX-collector in flight needn't be fatal to a mission (by servicing several launches in a flight, and/or allowing a little extra time or storage to cope with such a loss)
Later, more-or-less permanently airborne collecting vehicles could be directly powered by satellite-based microwave beam (near zero chemical pollution, vastly reduced fuel requirements, much cheaper - maybe cheap enough to deliver LOX to ground in returning tanker or launcher at a profit, continuous operation may be more reliable than start/stop)
Greater opportunity to split out (subcontract) manufacture and service
Minuses:
Three types of vehicles involved instead of two (more design, more complex timing, more pilots)
One extra step involved (transfer from collector to launcher, more complexity == more risk)
MICROSOFT (FAMOUS FOR IP THEFT AND SUPPRESSION) CASUALLY LINKS OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT (FAMOUS FOR KEEPING IP AVAILABLE) WITH CLOSED-SOURCE NAPSTER (FAMOUS FOR IP THEFT)
Linux is developed in a so-called open-source environment in which the software code generally isn't owned by any one company. That, as well as programs such as music-sharing software from Napster Inc., means the world's largest software maker has to do a better job of talking to policymakers, [Microsoft's Jim Allchin] said.
What an honour-free asshole Jim Allchin is! I don't know about ``blowing it'' out his ass, but he's unmistakeably talking out of it! The level of chutzpah would be incredible if this were not Microsoft we're dealing with here...
Having failed at competing in the open market (yes, failed, look at W2k sales - and laugh at the thought of MS ever getting 15000 hits a second out of a single P-III-500 by any means), and failed to FUD enough of the public, and failed to fool DOJ, it appears that Microsoft is now embarked on pulling the wool over US Congress eyes... so...
U.S. CITIZENS! WRITE TO YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS AND POLITELY COMPLAIN!
If yu kan und3rstand m3, th3n the languag3 is d0ing itz job suffficiently, yes?
No, the holographic error-skipping logic built into that complicated and generally impossible wad of unset cement which we like to call ``our brains'' is doing its job. True, you need to have the odd error to keep it exercised, but if you have a common standard for language and stick to it, less expensive/embarrassing/frustrating mistakes are made. English is not particularly error-tolerant. Borking around with it makes it worse, like using slang and funny accents can make a potentially fuzzy and faded tape recording harder to understand.
Unfortunately, due to politics, the staff where I work get mail off an OpenVMS box, so there's no sendmail rules to kill it. The sparcs the other departments use have to have an admin modify rulesets.
I'd be quite surprised if SendMail doesn't run under VMS and maybe PostFix does as well... either way, sneak another box into the loop as a ``firewall'' for your problem child, and preprocess any inbound email before it gets there.
The same is true for modern econ[om]ics. Companies may not be battling for limited resources, but one of them always has more shareholder value, more market cap or whatever than the next.
More bugs. Microsoft has to win at something this year!
Anyone with a tap into the GPS traffic (say, park a sat nearby or crack a GPS sat) will know where every single vehicle in the UK is at any instant and, by setting the car's speed limit to zero (or as near as makes no difference) can effectively immobilise any car in the UK.
a virualent hatred of all things Microsoft might lead someone to run already-unstable games (every DirectX game has hardware and driver compatability problems) through emulators... [bolding mine]
Given that the mandate of these dudes is to make specific games work on Linux, and given that WINE proper has specific code to fix application bugs and incompatbilities, it seems an obvious next step to fix those hardware and driver compatibility problems in the interface layer (which is what WINE does, it is not an emulator).
And to all the WHINErs posting here, the reason for the subscription is that it's an experiment in business models. If you don't like it, write your own. If WINE had used the GPL instead of BSD licencing, the business model in question could not have happened; whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on your POV, and whether these patches would have been available at all is another unanswerable question.
More food for thought: not all DirectX apps are games.
Windows is about $Oz100 with new PCs: it's built into the price, not itemised. This means that Windows is not gratis-free; it comes with no source (unless you want to count pppmenu.scp and the like as source) and a deadly licencing agreement called the EULA. This means that Windows is not libre-free. So what are you dribbling about?
2. Windows has a GUI that is easy to use because it has been developed in conjunction with literally millions of beta testers and focus groups.
``Easy to use'' is a relative term - OS/2's desktop is much easier to use, much more consistent. And what of still more innovative design which was squashed either directly or indirectly by Pope Bill's drive to compete?
As to the millions of beta testers, other software makers use a different word for them: ``customers.''
So why bother? Why do this?
So you don't have to lose your 120 days of uptime just to play a game, nor crank up an emulator (which doesn' work anyway, another poster explains) and so (WINE does this, I've seen the code) so you can fix bugs in Windows programs without having the source.
Do you mind providing a link to the story about the "chappie" with no brain? I for one don't buy it.
Don't be lazy, find it yourself. I guess from your tone you wouldn't believe it if you did the scans personally. And if you couldn't be bothered to post nonymously, why should anyone take you seriously enough to go looking for you? Einstein was missing his parietal operculum, do you want photos of that, too?
I don't believe in god. Answers are too convenient when you turn to religion (ie. "Why does [insert anything] happen?" "Because god made it so.")
Sorry, am I to understand that you refuse to believe in God because some people use religion as an excuse for not thinking? Now doesn't that just sound soooo reasonable?
You yourself are using religion as an excuse for not thinking, aren't you?
GONG! for a startling example, one chappie achieving good university results hurt his head and had it scanned, only to discover that he had essentially no cerebrum (brain) at all. Yet until the scan, he and his friends family did not know.
3) Sentience is equivalent to a 'soul'.
GONG! ``And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.'' - Genesis 2:7 - and who would be better qualified to define a ``soul'' (herein, nephesh, also translated ``breath'')?
IMHO, if you make your own human body from scratch (and good luck with that little task!) you can do with it as you will. OTOH, if you tamper with existing, living genetic material you wind up with a damaged human being, not a mass of meat. You do realise that a foetus is fully human from conception, you haven't been sucked in by Heackel's 130-year-old lie? If you altered a zygote, you would be altering a person, just like yourself.
This is how they plan to win the Java war and it will work for them as it has in the past.
As I have said before, C# is just another Microsoft retake of Java,.NET is just another retake of the JVM.
Microsoft's method is to publish something crappy (either by buying comething crappy like the SpyGlass browser, or by making a slightly broken variation-on-a-theme like J++), then re-work it and re-announce it as if it were the Second Coming, then do that again, and again, and again until the buying public gives in. It's a war of attrition.
Java may suck in some ways, Java may not be a truly public standard, but compared to.NET it's a paragon of virtue. Microsoft have made no significant technical improvements over the JVM (indeed, none over the TCL browser plugin) with.NET - the entire purpose of it is to take market share from Sun and all of the other Java companies. And it wouldn't surprise me if an internal Microsoft email turned up which says just that.
Meanwhile, in allowing a cracker to take them off air for a day, Microsoft have graphically demonstrated that they are not competent to provide the underlying distribution (lock-in) system for the.NET platform.
I say tell them where to stick Microsoft.NOT, and go with more open standards and methods. I say computing power and storage is increasing so rapidly that a physically centralised server-push system like Microsoft's.NET/ASP vision is beyond silly.
If I drive over somebody in a car, then I am tried, convicted, and sent to prison.
Well,
IF there's enough evidence
IF you're caught
IF you don't get off on a technicality
THEN (in most places) you get a slap on the wrist
SO you go back and do it again
BUT do you see signs beside the road encouraging you to run someone down in your car? Do you see how-to books and magazines about running down pedestrians for sale (even in opaque wrappers and/or under the counter) in newsagencies? Would it really matter if the signs or magazines made their point using crash-test dummies or mannequins instead of real people?
IMHO, if the signs/books should be illegal, so should child-based or violent porn - and where do you draw the line? Is tickling violent?
Your point would be valid if justice were actually done. It would also be valid if we were not holistic in nature: if our thoughts truly were separated from our actions. They aren't. If you see (hear, smelll, whatever) or do something virtually or in fun often enough, it will be easier to do it for real. This is why athletes and other sportsmen practice things over and over, in reality and in imagination.
THE QUESTION WE SHOULD BE ASKING IS
If you can be jailed for inciting a riot, why can't you be jailed for inciting a rape or inciting paedophilia?
Some of their criticisms have justification, others do not.
In this piece, Microsoft have simply attacked features of the Australian corporate landscape that do not suit their own marketing ambitions; for example, they do not distinguish between piracy and greymarketing when criticising import policies, I guess because they are after maximum market monop^H^H^H^H^Hcontrol.
OTOH, there are a number of things that M$ should be complaining about (if they truly are ``disinterested'' critics of the situation) but don't.
Why do Telstra, for example, send ALL ADSL traffic to Melbourne (including from Perth - gawp at a map and be amazed), and why do they refuse to parity peer? Why are their ISDN and similar services relatively expensive ($Oz1.00/hr/channel vs 15c/call for voice on local calls) when an ISDN call uses no more exchange equipment than a voice call? Why hasn't the Oz gummint done anything about this?
Why do many Oz gummint websites use technology that only works ``properly'' with M$ clients? Why is the Oz gummint purchasing expensive software from a foreign monopoly for computers which are being used to train primary age students with a proprietary system which will be thoroughly obselete by the time said students hit the job market? Why can't said students pull apart their software and find out what makes it tick? Or improve it for themselves? That's the best way to breed developers!
I think this will hurt Microsoft less than it seems. Most new computers ship with the OS anyway, and Windows already was so cumbersome to install that few people bothered.
``Microsoft's authentication server's been down for four hours now, and we need that documentation out today! What can we do?''
[play dragnet tune] ``Well, I'm just back from the newsagent, and here's this Pocket Linux thingy, and it says it has gnomes in it with bits of StarOffice on an eazel, or something...'' [pan to Pocket Linux pack, the penguin on it winks]
[two days later] ``Hey, Microsoft's back on line again! Should I re-install Windows now?''
``Nah, maybe later. We're too busy catching up on our word-processing right now.'' [pan to PL pack, penguin is grinning and thumbs-up]
Alot of time and effort goes in to creating a quality, industry-strength OS that performs.
Absolutely! Microsoft should try it with Windows, instead of pumping resources into marketing and ``badge-engineering'' other people's software (or software companies). It might work for them one day.
It's a limited license that allows you to run the program for 50 sessions (I'm not sure what exactly qualifies as a session, but I have a pretty good feeling a session can last a maximum of 24 hours).
You consistently get 24 real hours out of MS-Office? How? I've never been able to do that.
I have, on the other hand, had StarOffice 5.2 open for many weeks at a time (my main computer becomes portable once a month, else it would be longer), used for various things daily, and nary a crash (under Mandrake 7.2rc1 on a K6-II-300).
Wouldn't it be cool to be able to prove by means of certificates that all your PCs were configured correctly?
Won't it be cool when both NetBus *and* BackOrifice have GUI tools for automatically improving the certification, thus easing sysadmin stress by removing the knowledge that most of his users' workstations are thoroughly 0wn3d. Not to mention MitM attacks, which one can practically guarantee.NET will be vulnerable to, given Microsoft's security and encryption track record.
Microsoft Certified morons are installing god knows what from god knows where and trampling over your windows\system32 directory with dlls from all over the place.
More fool you (them). Much better to have real live administrable user machines that will reimage themselves automatically or on demand in case of problems, and don't have library versioning conflicts because they can support every version since the Ark side by side, and you can inspect and alter *every* part of their software should you so desire or the need arise.
Soemtime in the 200-400 AD range (don't remember), a Christian convert Emperor of the Roman Empire wanted to spread Christianity
The emperor Constantine was not a Christian in the sense of one who believed in the historical Jesus Christ as the son of God. His Christianity was mostly political in nature (he captured the hearts and minds, or at least votes, of the growing Christian segement of his community, plus a many others who thought that the persecution of Christians had gone on for long enough). For example, he ``converted'' and ``baptised'' his entire army by the economical expedient of marching them through a river and pronouncing them Christians.
In 321AD, the emperor Constantine ordained that Sunday (Dies Solaris) should be the weekly day of rest (his next directive organised effective soothsaying in regard to lightning-struck buildings). All atheists take note: you can snub both Christian and Pagan traditions at once by working on Sundays. His mum Helen is also responsible for the mis-identification of countless ancient artefacts, most notably Mount Sinai, which is actually in Saudi Arabia - find it on maps under the name ``Jebel el Laws.''
so led the combination of the Roman Sun celebration (right after the Winter Solstice (sic?)) with Jesus' "birthday"
You're absolutely right, but Christmas was only one of many casualties of his reign.
Do they? Why? The origins of New Year celebration are thoroughly pagan, which most Atheists seem to have forgotten is as much anathema to them as Christianity, Islam or Judaism.
...and a bit of chronology, just to stir the pot: 25Dec is definitely not associated with the birth of Jesus Christ, since any shepherd watching their flocks by night would be watching them die of hypothermia and certainly wouldn't be seated on the cold ground (although, given that the hypothetical shepherd is stupid enough to freeze his lamb chops before butchering, he may also be stupid enough to not know that his rear was going cryogenic).
However, after a bit of close reading of a certain large collection of texts containing frighteningly accurate history and prophecy, you will discover that Jesus Christ was born on or about 29Sep. Backtracking 40 weeks to conception (argue about the suitability of that word on your own time) gives about 22Dec (depends on leap years, and 40 weeks is approximate), close to the winter solstice and only a few days away from most retailers' reason for living.
Their software market has fallen into a hole already, and they're basically coasting in investment earnings, frantically shovelling money around to temporarily cover their nakedness.
However, borrowing from the Peter Dept to pay the Paul Dept has always had a limited future and this case is no exception.
The plug has been pulled, but bath isn't empty yet. The Bill and Steve show are splashing around and loudly commenting on ``how fulsome and enjoyable this bath is.''
Pack about 20 CDs together (a MSDN set is as good for this as an AOL collection) to make a fat cyclinder, tape them so they don't wriggle, then take your hacksaw and chop 6 or 8 notches, evenly spaced about the perimeter and about 1cm deep, along the axis of the cylinder. Untape the CDs, which you can now ``plug 'n' play'' at right angles to make the most bizarre house-of-cards type structures. We also have a mobile made from CDs hanging from the kitchen ceiling. Our baby boy finds it fascinating, almost as entrancing as clocks.
Slashdot Mirror
Pluses:
Minuses:
What an honour-free asshole Jim Allchin is! I don't know about ``blowing it'' out his ass, but he's unmistakeably talking out of it! The level of chutzpah would be incredible if this were not Microsoft we're dealing with here...
Having failed at competing in the open market (yes, failed, look at W2k sales - and laugh at the thought of MS ever getting 15000 hits a second out of a single P-III-500 by any means), and failed to FUD enough of the public, and failed to fool DOJ, it appears that Microsoft is now embarked on pulling the wool over US Congress eyes... so...
U.S. CITIZENS! WRITE TO YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS AND POLITELY COMPLAIN!
If yu kan und3rstand m3, th3n the languag3 is d0ing itz job suffficiently, yes?
No, the holographic error-skipping logic built into that complicated and generally impossible wad of unset cement which we like to call ``our brains'' is doing its job. True, you need to have the odd error to keep it exercised, but if you have a common standard for language and stick to it, less expensive/embarrassing/frustrating mistakes are made. English is not particularly error-tolerant. Borking around with it makes it worse, like using slang and funny accents can make a potentially fuzzy and faded tape recording harder to understand.
Unfortunately, due to politics, the staff where I work get mail off an OpenVMS box, so there's no sendmail rules to kill it. The sparcs the other departments use have to have an admin modify rulesets.
I'd be quite surprised if SendMail doesn't run under VMS and maybe PostFix does as well... either way, sneak another box into the loop as a ``firewall'' for your problem child, and preprocess any inbound email before it gets there.
...is available from a number of places, such as OpenOffice. Another small skip-and-a-jump down the road to World Domination.
The same is true for modern econ[om]ics. Companies may not be battling for limited resources, but one of them always has more shareholder value, more market cap or whatever than the next.
More bugs. Microsoft has to win at something this year!
George Orwell would be very impressed.
Given that the mandate of these dudes is to make specific games work on Linux, and given that WINE proper has specific code to fix application bugs and incompatbilities, it seems an obvious next step to fix those hardware and driver compatibility problems in the interface layer (which is what WINE does, it is not an emulator).
And to all the WHINErs posting here, the reason for the subscription is that it's an experiment in business models. If you don't like it, write your own. If WINE had used the GPL instead of BSD licencing, the business model in question could not have happened; whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on your POV, and whether these patches would have been available at all is another unanswerable question.
More food for thought: not all DirectX apps are games.
Windows is about $Oz100 with new PCs: it's built into the price, not itemised. This means that Windows is not gratis-free; it comes with no source (unless you want to count pppmenu.scp and the like as source) and a deadly licencing agreement called the EULA. This means that Windows is not libre-free. So what are you dribbling about?
``Easy to use'' is a relative term - OS/2's desktop is much easier to use, much more consistent. And what of still more innovative design which was squashed either directly or indirectly by Pope Bill's drive to compete?
As to the millions of beta testers, other software makers use a different word for them: ``customers.''
So you don't have to lose your 120 days of uptime just to play a game, nor crank up an emulator (which doesn' work anyway, another poster explains) and so (WINE does this, I've seen the code) so you can fix bugs in Windows programs without having the source.
Don't be lazy, find it yourself. I guess from your tone you wouldn't believe it if you did the scans personally. And if you couldn't be bothered to post nonymously, why should anyone take you seriously enough to go looking for you? Einstein was missing his parietal operculum, do you want photos of that, too?
Sorry, am I to understand that you refuse to believe in God because some people use religion as an excuse for not thinking? Now doesn't that just sound soooo reasonable?
You yourself are using religion as an excuse for not thinking, aren't you?
GONG! for a startling example, one chappie achieving good university results hurt his head and had it scanned, only to discover that he had essentially no cerebrum (brain) at all. Yet until the scan, he and his friends family did not know.
GONG! ``And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.'' - Genesis 2:7 - and who would be better qualified to define a ``soul'' (herein, nephesh, also translated ``breath'')?
IMHO, if you make your own human body from scratch (and good luck with that little task!) you can do with it as you will. OTOH, if you tamper with existing, living genetic material you wind up with a damaged human being, not a mass of meat. You do realise that a foetus is fully human from conception, you haven't been sucked in by Heackel's 130-year-old lie? If you altered a zygote, you would be altering a person, just like yourself.
This is how they plan to win the Java war and it will work for them as it has in the past.
.NET is just another retake of the JVM.
.NET it's a paragon of virtue. Microsoft have made no significant technical improvements over the JVM (indeed, none over the TCL browser plugin) with .NET - the entire purpose of it is to take market share from Sun and all of the other Java companies. And it wouldn't surprise me if an internal Microsoft email turned up which says just that.
.NET platform.
.NOT, and go with more open standards and methods. I say computing power and storage is increasing so rapidly that a physically centralised server-push system like Microsoft's .NET/ASP vision is beyond silly.
As I have said before, C# is just another Microsoft retake of Java,
Microsoft's method is to publish something crappy (either by buying comething crappy like the SpyGlass browser, or by making a slightly broken variation-on-a-theme like J++), then re-work it and re-announce it as if it were the Second Coming, then do that again, and again, and again until the buying public gives in. It's a war of attrition.
Java may suck in some ways, Java may not be a truly public standard, but compared to
Meanwhile, in allowing a cracker to take them off air for a day, Microsoft have graphically demonstrated that they are not competent to provide the underlying distribution (lock-in) system for the
I say tell them where to stick Microsoft
Well,
BUT do you see signs beside the road encouraging you to run someone down in your car? Do you see how-to books and magazines about running down pedestrians for sale (even in opaque wrappers and/or under the counter) in newsagencies? Would it really matter if the signs or magazines made their point using crash-test dummies or mannequins instead of real people?
IMHO, if the signs/books should be illegal, so should child-based or violent porn - and where do you draw the line? Is tickling violent?
Your point would be valid if justice were actually done. It would also be valid if we were not holistic in nature: if our thoughts truly were separated from our actions. They aren't. If you see (hear, smelll, whatever) or do something virtually or in fun often enough, it will be easier to do it for real. This is why athletes and other sportsmen practice things over and over, in reality and in imagination.
THE QUESTION WE SHOULD BE ASKING IS
Atlas holding up a file chooser window (showing some of the root system and maybe a breakout of /usr)?
Some of their criticisms have justification, others do not.
In this piece, Microsoft have simply attacked features of the Australian corporate landscape that do not suit their own marketing ambitions; for example, they do not distinguish between piracy and greymarketing when criticising import policies, I guess because they are after maximum market monop^H^H^H^H^Hcontrol.
OTOH, there are a number of things that M$ should be complaining about (if they truly are ``disinterested'' critics of the situation) but don't.
Why do Telstra, for example, send ALL ADSL traffic to Melbourne (including from Perth - gawp at a map and be amazed), and why do they refuse to parity peer? Why are their ISDN and similar services relatively expensive ($Oz1.00/hr/channel vs 15c/call for voice on local calls) when an ISDN call uses no more exchange equipment than a voice call? Why hasn't the Oz gummint done anything about this?
Why do many Oz gummint websites use technology that only works ``properly'' with M$ clients? Why is the Oz gummint purchasing expensive software from a foreign monopoly for computers which are being used to train primary age students with a proprietary system which will be thoroughly obselete by the time said students hit the job market? Why can't said students pull apart their software and find out what makes it tick? Or improve it for themselves? That's the best way to breed developers!
...an eerie silence ensues from the M$ camp...
I think this will hurt Microsoft less than it seems. Most new computers ship with the OS anyway, and Windows already was so cumbersome to install that few people bothered.
``Microsoft's authentication server's been down for four hours now, and we need that documentation out today! What can we do?''
[play dragnet tune] ``Well, I'm just back from the newsagent, and here's this Pocket Linux thingy, and it says it has gnomes in it with bits of StarOffice on an eazel, or something...'' [pan to Pocket Linux pack, the penguin on it winks]
[two days later] ``Hey, Microsoft's back on line again! Should I re-install Windows now?''
``Nah, maybe later. We're too busy catching up on our word-processing right now.'' [pan to PL pack, penguin is grinning and thumbs-up]
Alot of time and effort goes in to creating a quality, industry-strength OS that performs.
Absolutely! Microsoft should try it with Windows, instead of pumping resources into marketing and ``badge-engineering'' other people's software (or software companies). It might work for them one day.
MS to AMD: Sorry, our OS only recognizes the Pentium serial #, no, you can't sue us for being a monopoly, that has already happened
It has. Your next 64-bit AMD CPU will be running Linux or a BSD, *not* Windows. AMD squinted at the wall and read, ``Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.'' (-:
It's a limited license that allows you to run the program for 50 sessions (I'm not sure what exactly qualifies as a session, but I have a pretty good feeling a session can last a maximum of 24 hours).
You consistently get 24 real hours out of MS-Office? How? I've never been able to do that.
I have, on the other hand, had StarOffice 5.2 open for many weeks at a time (my main computer becomes portable once a month, else it would be longer), used for various things daily, and nary a crash (under Mandrake 7.2rc1 on a K6-II-300).
Wouldn't it be cool to be able to prove by means of certificates that all your PCs were configured correctly?
.NET will be vulnerable to, given Microsoft's security and encryption track record.
Won't it be cool when both NetBus *and* BackOrifice have GUI tools for automatically improving the certification, thus easing sysadmin stress by removing the knowledge that most of his users' workstations are thoroughly 0wn3d. Not to mention MitM attacks, which one can practically guarantee
Microsoft Certified morons are installing god knows what from god knows where and trampling over your windows\system32 directory with dlls from all over the place.
More fool you (them). Much better to have real live administrable user machines that will reimage themselves automatically or on demand in case of problems, and don't have library versioning conflicts because they can support every version since the Ark side by side, and you can inspect and alter *every* part of their software should you so desire or the need arise.
Soemtime in the 200-400 AD range (don't remember), a Christian convert Emperor of the Roman Empire wanted to spread Christianity
The emperor Constantine was not a Christian in the sense of one who believed in the historical Jesus Christ as the son of God. His Christianity was mostly political in nature (he captured the hearts and minds, or at least votes, of the growing Christian segement of his community, plus a many others who thought that the persecution of Christians had gone on for long enough). For example, he ``converted'' and ``baptised'' his entire army by the economical expedient of marching them through a river and pronouncing them Christians.
In 321AD, the emperor Constantine ordained that Sunday (Dies Solaris) should be the weekly day of rest (his next directive organised effective soothsaying in regard to lightning-struck buildings). All atheists take note: you can snub both Christian and Pagan traditions at once by working on Sundays. His mum Helen is also responsible for the mis-identification of countless ancient artefacts, most notably Mount Sinai, which is actually in Saudi Arabia - find it on maps under the name ``Jebel el Laws.''
so led the combination of the Roman Sun celebration (right after the Winter Solstice (sic?)) with Jesus' "birthday"
You're absolutely right, but Christmas was only one of many casualties of his reign.
Atheist children celebrate the New Year's eve
Do they? Why? The origins of New Year celebration are thoroughly pagan, which most Atheists seem to have forgotten is as much anathema to them as Christianity, Islam or Judaism.
...and a bit of chronology, just to stir the pot: 25Dec is definitely not associated with the birth of Jesus Christ, since any shepherd watching their flocks by night would be watching them die of hypothermia and certainly wouldn't be seated on the cold ground (although, given that the hypothetical shepherd is stupid enough to freeze his lamb chops before butchering, he may also be stupid enough to not know that his rear was going cryogenic).
However, after a bit of close reading of a certain large collection of texts containing frighteningly accurate history and prophecy, you will discover that Jesus Christ was born on or about 29Sep. Backtracking 40 weeks to conception (argue about the suitability of that word on your own time) gives about 22Dec (depends on leap years, and 40 weeks is approximate), close to the winter solstice and only a few days away from most retailers' reason for living.
Their software market has fallen into a hole already, and they're basically coasting in investment earnings, frantically shovelling money around to temporarily cover their nakedness.
However, borrowing from the Peter Dept to pay the Paul Dept has always had a limited future and this case is no exception.
The plug has been pulled, but bath isn't empty yet. The Bill and Steve show are splashing around and loudly commenting on ``how fulsome and enjoyable this bath is.''
...that probably won't make M$ bug reports any less informative, but it is likely to at least make them funnier.
Pack about 20 CDs together (a MSDN set is as good for this as an AOL collection) to make a fat cyclinder, tape them so they don't wriggle, then take your hacksaw and chop 6 or 8 notches, evenly spaced about the perimeter and about 1cm deep, along the axis of the cylinder. Untape the CDs, which you can now ``plug 'n' play'' at right angles to make the most bizarre house-of-cards type structures. We also have a mobile made from CDs hanging from the kitchen ceiling. Our baby boy finds it fascinating, almost as entrancing as clocks.