if people really think Microsoft is getting too big for its britches, they should create a new company to compete.
You overspecified. What you should have said is "they should create a new competitor".
And they have. It's called Linux. And Apache. And OpenOffice. And PostFix. And Mozilla. And KDE. And FreeBSD. And so on... the fact that these are generally not companies as such doesn't stop them from being competition, and that's how Microsoft are treating them.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, who are still stupid enough to try to attack them as if they were a company but are rapidly wising up, they're able to compete in ways inaccessible to corporations and totally alien to Microsoft's usual modus operandi. Microsoft (and other large corps) do have some advantages in terms of political reach and sheer material resources, but it's probably not going to be enough.
...when it turns out that the octopus isn't quite dead yet? That one'll stick with your 10 year old until his dying day. (-:
BTW, you could get squid rings about the size of a truck tyre, but won't because squid use ammonia to adjust their bouyancy, and the larger squids use more than the littlies. Windex on a stick, yummo! (-:
Delete MS-Windows from consideration entirely. Yes, I am serious.
Start pestering your vertical market suppliers for a Linux edition now; that gives them nearly two years to get an act, and if they can port it to Linux (or to be more specific, off MS-Windows), then they can port it everywhere so if you elect to go FreeBSD or OS X instead, it doesn't matter much.
The OS (as Linux and many others do) can check why the pagefault happened and raise a segfault if it's being loaded at CS:PC and shouldn't be. Note that this is quite do-able even without NX or the like, the reason MS-Windows doesn't do more checking along those lines is because the internal structure is too chaotic (it really has degraded quite a bit since it was VMS 5.0 (AKA MICA) - or at least, spelling-error compatible with it).
NX-style bits and better have existed since at least DECsystem-10 days; their absence from the x86 architecture is mute testimony to its inherent bankruptcy. And I should add in the true spelling/grammar Nazi spirit that discussion of lesser architectural flaws is moot.
Yes, people who post as AC all the time are lazy and annoying. I wish they wouldn't do it. However, I'm glad the AC option exists despite the trolling and other abuse that happens under it. As in real life, it causes a lot of low-level annoyance plus the occasional life-saver.
Security here's a joke. You can't carry a screwdriver onto an aircraft, but you have a clear path to drive a vehicle laden with explosives straight into the international or either of the two domestic air terminals. There are also many clear paths for driving a vehicle onto the strip, impeded only by a pipe-and-cyclone-mesh gate - and of course you then have a choice: do I drive under a stationary but full aircraft and blow it up, or chase one out onto the tarmac, or wait until one's ready to land and then nip out in front of it, or charge up the ground-level departure gates and self-destruct under a full passenger lounge? Either way, nobody's even going to realise what you're up to, let alone empty or divert a 'plane, before it's all over. If you rolled half a dozen light trucks through each terminal (two into the buildings, three under 'planes and one onto the strip), you'd kill thousands and effectively shut the airport to jet traffic for days, possibly weeks.
A space elevator would be damn hard to hit with an aircraft, and dead easy to defend even with current technology. With a nuke power station near the base, StarWars-type energy weapons would be able to nail anything within about 50km of it in atmosphere, and the meteor/junk defences would do that for you more or less automatically above that. To get it with a missile, you'd basically have to nuke it, although a big chemical head targeted on a vehicle on the elevator might do it. If it breaks near the ground, it does insignificant harm and would be relatively easy to repair. If it breaks well up into space, it's much harder to fix but still does negligible damage to anything on the ground.
I think a certain graphics editor has just about lost its naming rights. What made me think that was hearing J Random Dumb Blonde use the word correctly as a verb on a public train.
Reminds me of a scifi series which involved being able to clone personalities into someone else's brain as a skill-set, and particularly useful personalities (great entertainers, detectives, scientists etc) were mass-produced. And their names become verbs/common-nouns. So if you wanted to build an OS, you hired a swarm of people willing to be linustorvaldsed.
I'd like to see separate Agree/Disagree mods that don't use up karma, and don't have a cap (on either the post's rating or the user's hoarding ability). I'd also like to see high-score tables for those (as in, all-time agreeable and disagreeable posts, most and least agreeable average-over-lifetime and -over-last-20-posts, plus the extremes for this month, the last 24 hours, and top/bottom 3 posts in each story.
Maybe allocate one agree/disagree point per user per visit-day (ACs don't get any) and allow someone to spend up to two on a post (as in "strongly-agree, agree, don't-know-or-don't-care, disagree, strongly-disagree").
I think having a discrete "agree/disagree" channel will help the noodles get feelings off their chests without modding to their feelings instead of impartial merit.
I'd also like to see the "real" mods split out into quality-of-language, quality-of-interest and quality-of-data. At the moment, there's no way of saying "this is interesting and based on quality data/good links but the language sucks" or "nice post but lacks supporting data".
This is an issue for which follow-up research would be very interesting to see.
It certainly would.
Miller apparently had a go at chasing up his aminos, and got nowhere. All I can find in the area is speculation, not research. If there are any chemical "back doors" leading straight through the energy barriers from a partial set of aminos to, say, a protein then nobody's knocked on them yet - at least, not publicly. Yet so much hangs on this (hangs as in cliff-hanger, hangs as in "hang fire").
If it didn't take ages to do the experiments, you could probably sell tickets. (-:
What gripes me is not that their efforts are now effectively non-Free (they have every right to do that under a MIT licence) but that they started out by promising that it would be Free and that seems to have been an empty promise. When WINE saw they, they switched from a MIT-ish licence to LGPL.
OTOH, Transgaming have apparently been contributing some code to WINE. So slowly that the WINE people gave up on the TG version of DirectX support and wrote their own.
I think it's a good illustration of how risky any shareware-like model is like - from both sides - and also of a major benefit of open source (code around the problem) and finally of the risks and benefits of BSD (we now have Cedega - at a price - which we didn't have before and which (they say) wouldn't have flown on an LGPL, but OTOH it's had a lot of the Freedom filed off).
It's a tribute. TSG're stuck at the physical level, we've been virtual for some time now, so far transcendent above mere hardware that it's as if we don't exist. (-:
I wrote IDG a nastygram about the article. A copy of it's on the GrokLaw page.
And perhaps more importantly, we're not talking about the relative dead-set certainty that million-to-one odds are when held up against odds which are hundreds of orders of magnitude short of the mark.
Many people have a problem with that.
The odds of being hit by lightning are roughly one in half a million, which means that roughly four people in this city (Perth, Western Australia) will be hit by lightning during the course of their lives. That's odds of better than one in 1E6.
Now say that four thousand of the denizens of Perth were struck by lightning at least once during the course of their lives. Would you call that a coincidence?
The odds of that happening are vanishingly small, probably about 1E37, but still only a very small fraction of a hundred orders of magnitude against.
The odds you face in combining enough of the right molecules the right way around to make a lifeform are considerably steeper than a "mere" hundred orders of magnitude - and that would only get you a lifeform not necessarily a living creature.
Slashdot Mirror
KDE == Koroba, Papua New Guinea
GNU == Goodnews Bay, USA
GPL == Guapiles, Costa Rica
CPM == Compton, USA
Big irony? TLA is unclaimed! (-:
...blah blah blah blah blah blah; you have the helm, Number One. (-:
Here was me thinking that qubit was the little round dude that hopped around on all of those coloured cubes.
...vouchers for free copies of competing FOSS products?
Done right, that could be an excellent publicity gimmick.
And they have. It's called Linux. And Apache. And OpenOffice. And PostFix. And Mozilla. And KDE. And FreeBSD. And so on... the fact that these are generally not companies as such doesn't stop them from being competition, and that's how Microsoft are treating them.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, who are still stupid enough to try to attack them as if they were a company but are rapidly wising up, they're able to compete in ways inaccessible to corporations and totally alien to Microsoft's usual modus operandi. Microsoft (and other large corps) do have some advantages in terms of political reach and sheer material resources, but it's probably not going to be enough.
Known as LogLan in a previous incarnation.
...when it turns out that the octopus isn't quite dead yet? That one'll stick with your 10 year old until his dying day. (-:
BTW, you could get squid rings about the size of a truck tyre, but won't because squid use ammonia to adjust their bouyancy, and the larger squids use more than the littlies. Windex on a stick, yummo! (-:
Delete MS-Windows from consideration entirely. Yes, I am serious.
Start pestering your vertical market suppliers for a Linux edition now; that gives them nearly two years to get an act, and if they can port it to Linux (or to be more specific, off MS-Windows), then they can port it everywhere so if you elect to go FreeBSD or OS X instead, it doesn't matter much.
The OS (as Linux and many others do) can check why the pagefault happened and raise a segfault if it's being loaded at CS:PC and shouldn't be. Note that this is quite do-able even without NX or the like, the reason MS-Windows doesn't do more checking along those lines is because the internal structure is too chaotic (it really has degraded quite a bit since it was VMS 5.0 (AKA MICA) - or at least, spelling-error compatible with it).
NX-style bits and better have existed since at least DECsystem-10 days; their absence from the x86 architecture is mute testimony to its inherent bankruptcy. And I should add in the true spelling/grammar Nazi spirit that discussion of lesser architectural flaws is moot.
Your == belongs to you
Yes, people who post as AC all the time are lazy and annoying. I wish they wouldn't do it. However, I'm glad the AC option exists despite the trolling and other abuse that happens under it. As in real life, it causes a lot of low-level annoyance plus the occasional life-saver.
Security here's a joke. You can't carry a screwdriver onto an aircraft, but you have a clear path to drive a vehicle laden with explosives straight into the international or either of the two domestic air terminals. There are also many clear paths for driving a vehicle onto the strip, impeded only by a pipe-and-cyclone-mesh gate - and of course you then have a choice: do I drive under a stationary but full aircraft and blow it up, or chase one out onto the tarmac, or wait until one's ready to land and then nip out in front of it, or charge up the ground-level departure gates and self-destruct under a full passenger lounge? Either way, nobody's even going to realise what you're up to, let alone empty or divert a 'plane, before it's all over. If you rolled half a dozen light trucks through each terminal (two into the buildings, three under 'planes and one onto the strip), you'd kill thousands and effectively shut the airport to jet traffic for days, possibly weeks.
A space elevator would be damn hard to hit with an aircraft, and dead easy to defend even with current technology. With a nuke power station near the base, StarWars-type energy weapons would be able to nail anything within about 50km of it in atmosphere, and the meteor/junk defences would do that for you more or less automatically above that. To get it with a missile, you'd basically have to nuke it, although a big chemical head targeted on a vehicle on the elevator might do it. If it breaks near the ground, it does insignificant harm and would be relatively easy to repair. If it breaks well up into space, it's much harder to fix but still does negligible damage to anything on the ground.
...in about 40 years... picture it. (-:
...all of the details are still up in the air?
Mods: please don't get too highly strung, go ballistic or hit the roof over this.
You don't have the first clue how it all works, do you?
Third choice is rewrite the drive to use libusb instead. Which I would do if I had a Phillips camera.
IRL, I'd rather have an Ethernet-connected camera and get decent distance out of the sucker.
If Phillips choose to make their gear hard to work with, they can't expect free support for it. Evolution in action.
I think a certain graphics editor has just about lost its naming rights. What made me think that was hearing J Random Dumb Blonde use the word correctly as a verb on a public train.
Reminds me of a scifi series which involved being able to clone personalities into someone else's brain as a skill-set, and particularly useful personalities (great entertainers, detectives, scientists etc) were mass-produced. And their names become verbs/common-nouns. So if you wanted to build an OS, you hired a swarm of people willing to be linustorvaldsed.
"You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands!"
"Your proposal is... acceptable."
Can't find a still of Edgar getting his face ripped off, though.
I'd like to see separate Agree/Disagree mods that don't use up karma, and don't have a cap (on either the post's rating or the user's hoarding ability). I'd also like to see high-score tables for those (as in, all-time agreeable and disagreeable posts, most and least agreeable average-over-lifetime and -over-last-20-posts, plus the extremes for this month, the last 24 hours, and top/bottom 3 posts in each story.
Maybe allocate one agree/disagree point per user per visit-day (ACs don't get any) and allow someone to spend up to two on a post (as in "strongly-agree, agree, don't-know-or-don't-care, disagree, strongly-disagree").
I think having a discrete "agree/disagree" channel will help the noodles get feelings off their chests without modding to their feelings instead of impartial merit.
I'd also like to see the "real" mods split out into quality-of-language, quality-of-interest and quality-of-data. At the moment, there's no way of saying "this is interesting and based on quality data/good links but the language sucks" or "nice post but lacks supporting data".
Miller apparently had a go at chasing up his aminos, and got nowhere. All I can find in the area is speculation, not research. If there are any chemical "back doors" leading straight through the energy barriers from a partial set of aminos to, say, a protein then nobody's knocked on them yet - at least, not publicly. Yet so much hangs on this (hangs as in cliff-hanger, hangs as in "hang fire").
If it didn't take ages to do the experiments, you could probably sell tickets. (-:
So what the system does is effectively treat a stroke as a Westerner would treat a letter, and a whole ideogram as a word?
The code they forked was MIT-licenced (like BSD).
What gripes me is not that their efforts are now effectively non-Free (they have every right to do that under a MIT licence) but that they started out by promising that it would be Free and that seems to have been an empty promise. When WINE saw they, they switched from a MIT-ish licence to LGPL.
OTOH, Transgaming have apparently been contributing some code to WINE. So slowly that the WINE people gave up on the TG version of DirectX support and wrote their own.
I think it's a good illustration of how risky any shareware-like model is like - from both sides - and also of a major benefit of open source (code around the problem) and finally of the risks and benefits of BSD (we now have Cedega - at a price - which we didn't have before and which (they say) wouldn't have flown on an LGPL, but OTOH it's had a lot of the Freedom filed off).
...when the last of the debris stops bouncing. (-:
Maybe TSG used to have an office on Mars? It would certainly explain how those meteorites got here.
It's already done.
Double the irony, no extra charge.
It's already done.
It's a tribute. TSG're stuck at the physical level, we've been virtual for some time now, so far transcendent above mere hardware that it's as if we don't exist. (-:
I wrote IDG a nastygram about the article. A copy of it's on the GrokLaw page.
And perhaps more importantly, we're not talking about the relative dead-set certainty that million-to-one odds are when held up against odds which are hundreds of orders of magnitude short of the mark.
Many people have a problem with that.
The odds of being hit by lightning are roughly one in half a million, which means that roughly four people in this city (Perth, Western Australia) will be hit by lightning during the course of their lives. That's odds of better than one in 1E6.
Now say that four thousand of the denizens of Perth were struck by lightning at least once during the course of their lives. Would you call that a coincidence?
The odds of that happening are vanishingly small, probably about 1E37, but still only a very small fraction of a hundred orders of magnitude against.
The odds you face in combining enough of the right molecules the right way around to make a lifeform are considerably steeper than a "mere" hundred orders of magnitude - and that would only get you a lifeform not necessarily a living creature.