Exactly right. If I were running Adobe, I'd be rushing like mad to get every product in the price book on Linux, and maybe even price the Linux version under the Windows version. Heck, I might even take a flyer on producing turnkey Linux distributions targeted at particular applications like digital video editing/transcoding. Buy a white box PC to Adobe's specification with no OS, install your Adobe Video Station software, and start creating. Maybe they could even get Dell to offer the systems pre-installed. In any event Microsoft has declared war on Adobe, and in the past, companies that think they can survive with a peaceful coexistance policy have ended up dead and buried.
I haven't been able to look at the screenshots as the site appears to be slashdoted, but I find it impossible to believe that any UI could be uglier than XP. My major complaint with XP isn't really the look though, it is the incredible amount of screen space it wastes in favor of eye candy. The first thing I do with an XP machine is set it back to Win95 mode and pick the classic skin for media player (which is truly an abomination with the default skin). Of course, these days I hardly run Windows at all since Fedora Core 3 does everything that I need a computer to do, and does it better and for less money than any version of Windows. I doubt Longhorn will be a train wreck as there are millions of people that will upgrade no matter how good or bad it is, and Microsoft will spend billions persuading them it is the best thing to do. It is amazing that people never catch on to the old wine in a new bottle trick. Of course, in the case of Windows, we aren't just talking about any old wine, we talking about vintage 30 year old Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
>The current administration carefully scripts, stages and choreographs virtually every major public event.
This is the one that bothers me more than anything else when coupled with the fact that virtually every single major news media reports these events as if they were newsworthy and actually meant something instead of presenting for what they are: propaganda events. I'll lose points for making a comparison to Nazi's, but if there is a difference between Bush's Town Meetings with the screened, sympathetic, demographically correct audience lobbing scripted (or pre-screened) softball questions, and Joseph Goebel's use of 'ordinary citizens' to wander through the crowd muttering 'He's right, you know', I can't see what it is. The technology is more impressive, but the objective is the same; to persuade the voters that if they believe something other than what the Bush Administration is selling, they (the dissenters) must be deluded. I would dearly love for the US to adopt the British tradition (or is it law?) and have the President come to Congress once a week and have to defend his administration under hostile questioning. Whatever you think about Tony Blair, it is obvious that he is clever, well informed, and articulate. GWB wouldn't last through one such grilling without his army of handlers, flacks, speech writers, and PR consultants. The fact of the matter is that to survive, the Bushites have to eliminate all dissenting voices. It is an administartion where virtually all policy is based on 'big lies' some of which are so grotesque that they can only survive with continual repetition and perfect mimicry. Fortunately, they have a slavish media to dote on their every word.
Not that is is a valid excuse, but the reality is that Bush's defense policy was centered on deploying SDI, a Maginot line for the 21st century, though that analogy is flawed because, unlike SDI, the Maginot line actually worked pretty much as designed. Bush didn't care about terrorism much because there wasn't as much pork to dole out to corporate contributors. In addition, the philisopical belief that most functions of government should be turned over to the private sector left programs that would actually defend the nation against realistic threats, like airport security, to the lowest bidder with little government oversight. It is worth asking why we have a Department of Defense with a $400B/year budget that is so incapable of defending the country against actual threats that we also need a seperate Department of Homeland Security. Bush ignored the memo because he was/is incompetent and because it didn't fit into his political agenda. No amount of text formating is going to turn an incompetent President into a competent one. The truly scary part is the GWB is much more competent on defense policy then he is on economic policy. You have to imagine that he gets a briefing ever day that the current long term deficits are unsustainable, but apparently, they go straight into the circular file.
Political Reporting is no different
on
Paul Graham on PR
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· Score: 1
I mean really, do you think that President Bush has a plan to 'reform' or 'save' Social Security? Of course, not. He has a plan to create millions of elderly poor. But you would never know it from the newspapers because they just print whatever comes off the wire. He gets away with it because the center-right wing of the Republican party, also known as the Democrats, have no plan at all so they can't even issue a press release. The only time there is ever 'balance' in media is when there are two equally well funded sides that can issue opposing press releases, like insurance companies vs. trial lawyers.
Was available in 1988 and was a full 32bit desktop OS that was primarily sold to Wall St. traders as a desktop trading platform. WinNT was 32 bit from the start and was available shortly later. NeXt was 32 bit as well. These were hardly the first 32 bit desktop machines, but they certainly qualify as mainstream. 32 bit computing didn't become mainstream in the consumer market primarily because Microsoft used their monopoly power to make sure that it didn't happen until they were ready.
Which is why he insists on calling it the GNU/Linux system which contains not only the Linux kernel, but all of the other modules that sit between the kernel and your business application. It is strange that we keep getting these 'Linux can't reduce Window's market share' when it is doing just that on the server side, and just starting to do the same on the client side. If China, India, and South America start installing significant numbers of GNU/Linux computers, Windows world wide market share will go down. The author is right that GNU/Linux can't kill Windows on the client, but who cares? It doesn't bother me if somebody else choses to use Windows as long as I don't have to.
In fact Sun applied for (and I think was granted) a patent for the 'smoosh' algorithm that allowed NSE lite and Teamware to merge two SCCS files. This is a central idea in BitKeeper as well. If remember correctly, while Larry was certainly involved, Glen Skinner was credited as the inventor, but I could easily be wrong. It was along time ago. Somebody that really cared could probably look it up in the USPTO database. Changeset's are a lot older than that and date back to IBM and CDC mainframe days.
Bitkeeper traces it's roots to Sun's Teamware, which was not written by Larry McVoy, to Sun's NSE-lite which was partially written by McVoy, to Sun's NSE which McVoy had absolutely nothing to do with except being an unhappy customer, to Eric Scmidt's PhD dissertation which Larry had nothing to do with, to Apollo's DSEE which Larry had nothing to do with, to SCCS which Larry had nothing to do with. Bitkeeper is largely an amalgamation of 3 previously existing ideas, the Teamware/NSE distributed development model, changesets, and the CVS pserver. It's a little hypocritical for Larry to complain about other people riding on his coat tails when Bitkeeper is, like most successful products, a really good implementation of a bunch of ideas that were invented by a lot of other people over a lot of time.
We don't know what the actual report says (and I'm sure not going to buy a copy), but there are some definite red flags surrounding this report.
1) Infotech says that Microsoft didn't pay for this report, but they weren't asked who did pay for it, nor were they asked how much of their business is derived from Microsoft.
2) We don't know who the 1400 executives were. Were they all in the IT department? If not, do they erally know what is in use in their IT department?
3) According to the survey 27% of these companies were already using Linux. That is a huge number. I think it is save to say that 10 years ago, the number was 0%. The report says that Linux use has 'stalled' in this market, but if they haven't been doing the survey every year, how do they know that?
4)Even if it were true, it at best represents a snapshot of the marker today. GNU/Linux is continuing to improve at an extremely rapid pace, and Windows is not.
5) Finally, and most import, who cares what other businesses are doing? If your business can benefit from using Linux (or not), that is the only thing that matters.
If the Yankee Group in general, and Laura DiDio in particular, are worried that their credibility is being questioned, perhaps they should improve their research methodology so that it is beyond reproach. The first thing they need to disclose is how much of their revenue is derived from Microsoft and/or from corporations that are strongly tied to Microsoft. To be fair, they should also disclose how much of their revenue is tied to Linux companies, or companies strongly tied to Linux such as IBM, but I'm guessing that number is $0.
How does these posts get rated '5 insightful'? If the government service is really as lousy as you say, then private ISPs would be able to compete. If, as you say, they can't compete, then they manifestly aren't providing sufficient added value to justify the extra cost. If a government subsidized entity actually does 'suck the life out of a market' then that strongly implies the government is in fact doing a better job than the for profit entities that it displaced. It is truly unfortunate that reality doesn't conform to simplistic, libertarian, laissez faire economic theory, but sometimes life just sucks that way.
BitMover's core problem has nothing to do with supporting Linux for free. Their problem is that they absolutely refuse to compete on price for commercial business. I really wanted to use BitKeeper when I convinced by employer that VSS was destroying productivity,however, BitMover was totally unwilling to match the price of Perforce. End of story. We are a perforce shop now, and probably always will be. They could have had an extra $15,000 per year now, and more over time as our development team grows, just by being competitive, and they turned it down. The 'cost of sales' was practically nil as well since I found them (I had worked on Sun's Teamware, the precursor to Bitkeeper so I already knew about the product). It would have taken 1 sales day to close the deal. I willing to bet that scenario has played out dozens, if not hundreds of times. Everybody would use bitkeeper if the price was right. It isn't, so they don't.
BitKeeper is largely based on Teamware anyway, though Teamwaer doesn't have changesets. Sun completely botched marketing of Teamware and it is end of lifed. The big problem of course is that Sun dislikes the GPL even more than Larry McVoy, so the only terms they would make it available under, if they would do it at all, is the CDDL. That might be good enough as it is unlikely that you would want to use any of the code elsewhere.
The manned mission to the moon and mars aren't science programs, they are corporate welfare programs, and, to a much lesser extent, get out the vote programs. I've said it before, and I'll say it again here; space exploration is a job for the bots. They can tolerate much greater ranges temperature, don't need a lot of oxygen, water, or food, can go on missions lasting dozens of years, and nobody cares if you don't bring them back. The return of knowledge relative to investment has been enormous for unmanned space exploration and paltry for manned exploration. If we have learned anything from the ISS, it should be that putting people aren't well adapted for living in space and putting them there despite that fact just isn't a good use of scarce resources.
Bush doesn't care much about knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Heck, he is massively ignorant on just about every topic, and look what it did for him? He has his finger on the button, and you don't.
As far as Bush (or more accurately, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney) are concerned, the purpose of the space program is to dole out dollars to campaign supporters, and that means large aerospace and defense contractors. Progams like data acquisition from Voyager may be good for scientists, but it is chicken feed for Boeing, so funding can safely be cut. Instead, we get SDI, a Maginot line for the 21st century, and the 'man on mars' program both of which guarantee billions of dollars of profit for years to come with no likelihood of any tangible benefit.
Reading the article, I have to agree with a previous poster; the hang up is that, as near as I can tell, Microsoft is still not willing to provide full and accurate descriptions of it's protocols, api's, and file formats under a license that is comaptible with the GPL. This is what they consider their 'IP'. Again, as near as I can tell, Microsoft is inventing a ficticious requirement that it thinks will seem unfair to people, the requirement that they give away their source code. NOBODY has asked for this. NOBODY in the GPL world wants their source code. Tuis requirement seems to be an invention of Microsoft's PR department.
What is it with all these enthusiast sites that run huge suites of 'benchmarks' on CPU's that measure just about everything except actual CPU performance? Are they unable to come up with the scratch to buy a copy of the SPEC benchmark suite? Is it really a surprise that Dual Core CPU's don't help much for running games or MS Office? Did anybody really need to test this? By contrast, it would be nice to know what the SPECRate FP and SPECRate Int is for these chips. For thwt matter, does anybody really care about the performance of a chip that you can't buy? For future reference, if you want to have a pretty good idea of the 'guaranteed not to exceed' performance for a CPU that you can actually purchase, go to http://www.spec.org/ and get the numbers without the ads.
>His mistake was underestimating in just how low esteem Democrats hold the US Constituition.
Are we talking about George 'I love the Constitution so much I lock people up for 3 years without charges and without access to an attorney' W. Bush? Here is what those wacko ultra-liberal Democrats (NOT!) at the Cato Insitute have to say about it http://www.cato.org/dailys/08-21-03.html/
Or are we talking about the guy that wanted to ammend the Consitution to prohibit one particular form of free speech, not so much because he actually cared (because deep down in side, he cares about nothing) but because he wanted to pander to the anti-liberty wing of the Republican party http://www.patridiots.com/000875.html/
Whatever else he is, W. is no fan of the Consitution as it is today, and certainly no fan of liberty. But hey, that's OK, he has a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle. Nobody in the last 100 years has proposed an Amendment to give people more freedom, we only seem to get amendments to take freedom away.
I couldn't have said it better. Wolfowitz and his fellow cowards should rot in hell. W/R/T to the Post, I don't know how 'liberal' they are anymore. For instance, the other day we have this hatchet job
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A575 5-2005Mar27.html/
Which is basically a propaganda piece direct off the presses from Wolfowitz and his old buddies at the Whitehouse. Most notably, Diehl accuses Chavez of 'destroying' the economy of Venezuela. According to Economist, the Venezuelean economy grew at about 18% this year. Diehl also reports the terrifying news that Venezuela is buying 100,000 AK47;s and 25 or so fo the dreaded Brazilian made Super Tocanos
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/brazi l/emb312.htm/
According to the CIA world fact bookhttp://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/g eos/ve.html/
Venezuela spends about $1B/year on defense, or about 1/3 the amoun that neighborign Columbia gets in military aid from the US, or about 1/450th of the annual US defense budget. The US, unlike Venezuela, also has along history of invading and supporting terrorist movements in Latin America, So exactly which country is the destabilizing force?
Finally, to Diehl's main point, he is afraid that reporters will go to jail for deliberatly spreading false information. Having read Diehl's column, I'm not sure that is such a bad idea anymore.
If Microsoft really only did what was best for their customers as they claim, SQLServer would have been on Unix a long time ago. It couldn't possibly have taken all that much development effort since Sybase was already on Unix to begin with. But of course, the idea is always to do what is best for Microsoft. There is nothing really wrong with that as that is what all companies do, but it makes you want to puke when MS goes on and on about how much they care only about the customer. As for IE on Unix, isn't it strange that somethig that couldn't possibly be seperated from the Operating System could run with MainWin and a recompile on completely different OSes? And after installing IE on Solaris, if you de-installed it, Solaris continued to run just fine (well, better, actually)?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly right. If I were running Adobe, I'd be rushing like mad to get every product in the price book on Linux, and maybe even price the Linux version under the Windows version. Heck, I might even take a flyer on producing turnkey Linux distributions targeted at particular applications like digital video editing/transcoding. Buy a white box PC to Adobe's specification with no OS, install your Adobe Video Station software, and start creating. Maybe they could even get Dell to offer the systems pre-installed. In any event Microsoft has declared war on Adobe, and in the past, companies that think they can survive with a peaceful coexistance policy have ended up dead and buried.
I haven't been able to look at the screenshots as the site appears to be slashdoted, but I find it impossible to believe that any UI could be uglier than XP. My major complaint with XP isn't really the look though, it is the incredible amount of screen space it wastes in favor of eye candy. The first thing I do with an XP machine is set it back to Win95 mode and pick the classic skin for media player (which is truly an abomination with the default skin). Of course, these days I hardly run Windows at all since Fedora Core 3 does everything that I need a computer to do, and does it better and for less money than any version of Windows. I doubt Longhorn will be a train wreck as there are millions of people that will upgrade no matter how good or bad it is, and Microsoft will spend billions persuading them it is the best thing to do. It is amazing that people never catch on to the old wine in a new bottle trick. Of course, in the case of Windows, we aren't just talking about any old wine, we talking about vintage 30 year old Gallo Hearty Burgundy.
>The current administration carefully scripts, stages and choreographs virtually every major public event. This is the one that bothers me more than anything else when coupled with the fact that virtually every single major news media reports these events as if they were newsworthy and actually meant something instead of presenting for what they are: propaganda events. I'll lose points for making a comparison to Nazi's, but if there is a difference between Bush's Town Meetings with the screened, sympathetic, demographically correct audience lobbing scripted (or pre-screened) softball questions, and Joseph Goebel's use of 'ordinary citizens' to wander through the crowd muttering 'He's right, you know', I can't see what it is. The technology is more impressive, but the objective is the same; to persuade the voters that if they believe something other than what the Bush Administration is selling, they (the dissenters) must be deluded. I would dearly love for the US to adopt the British tradition (or is it law?) and have the President come to Congress once a week and have to defend his administration under hostile questioning. Whatever you think about Tony Blair, it is obvious that he is clever, well informed, and articulate. GWB wouldn't last through one such grilling without his army of handlers, flacks, speech writers, and PR consultants. The fact of the matter is that to survive, the Bushites have to eliminate all dissenting voices. It is an administartion where virtually all policy is based on 'big lies' some of which are so grotesque that they can only survive with continual repetition and perfect mimicry. Fortunately, they have a slavish media to dote on their every word.
Not that is is a valid excuse, but the reality is that Bush's defense policy was centered on deploying SDI, a Maginot line for the 21st century, though that analogy is flawed because, unlike SDI, the Maginot line actually worked pretty much as designed. Bush didn't care about terrorism much because there wasn't as much pork to dole out to corporate contributors. In addition, the philisopical belief that most functions of government should be turned over to the private sector left programs that would actually defend the nation against realistic threats, like airport security, to the lowest bidder with little government oversight. It is worth asking why we have a Department of Defense with a $400B/year budget that is so incapable of defending the country against actual threats that we also need a seperate Department of Homeland Security. Bush ignored the memo because he was/is incompetent and because it didn't fit into his political agenda. No amount of text formating is going to turn an incompetent President into a competent one. The truly scary part is the GWB is much more competent on defense policy then he is on economic policy. You have to imagine that he gets a briefing ever day that the current long term deficits are unsustainable, but apparently, they go straight into the circular file.
I mean really, do you think that President Bush has a plan to 'reform' or 'save' Social Security? Of course, not. He has a plan to create millions of elderly poor. But you would never know it from the newspapers because they just print whatever comes off the wire. He gets away with it because the center-right wing of the Republican party, also known as the Democrats, have no plan at all so they can't even issue a press release. The only time there is ever 'balance' in media is when there are two equally well funded sides that can issue opposing press releases, like insurance companies vs. trial lawyers.
>For all the talk about it, I don't think I've ever actually known anyone to do the classic accidental rm -Rf / as root. I've done it. Once.
Because that is when the Unix time value rolls over. Were Thompson and Ritchie psychic or what?
Was available in 1988 and was a full 32bit desktop OS that was primarily sold to Wall St. traders as a desktop trading platform. WinNT was 32 bit from the start and was available shortly later. NeXt was 32 bit as well. These were hardly the first 32 bit desktop machines, but they certainly qualify as mainstream. 32 bit computing didn't become mainstream in the consumer market primarily because Microsoft used their monopoly power to make sure that it didn't happen until they were ready.
Which is why he insists on calling it the GNU/Linux system which contains not only the Linux kernel, but all of the other modules that sit between the kernel and your business application. It is strange that we keep getting these 'Linux can't reduce Window's market share' when it is doing just that on the server side, and just starting to do the same on the client side. If China, India, and South America start installing significant numbers of GNU/Linux computers, Windows world wide market share will go down. The author is right that GNU/Linux can't kill Windows on the client, but who cares? It doesn't bother me if somebody else choses to use Windows as long as I don't have to.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =5&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1='Sun+Microsystems'.A SNM.&s2=skinner.INZZ.&OS=AN/%22Sun+Microsystems%22 +AND+IN/skinner&RS=AN/%22Sun+Microsystems%22+AND+I N/skinner
I believe Larry thinks he should be listed as co-inventor (and he probably should), but that isn't what the patent says. I don't really care for the purposes of this dicussion, but just wanted to verify that my memory isn't completely gone. Note that there was a fair amount of prior art leading up to this.
In fact Sun applied for (and I think was granted) a patent for the 'smoosh' algorithm that allowed NSE lite and Teamware to merge two SCCS files. This is a central idea in BitKeeper as well. If remember correctly, while Larry was certainly involved, Glen Skinner was credited as the inventor, but I could easily be wrong. It was along time ago. Somebody that really cared could probably look it up in the USPTO database. Changeset's are a lot older than that and date back to IBM and CDC mainframe days.
Bitkeeper traces it's roots to Sun's Teamware, which was not written by Larry McVoy, to Sun's NSE-lite which was partially written by McVoy, to Sun's NSE which McVoy had absolutely nothing to do with except being an unhappy customer, to Eric Scmidt's PhD dissertation which Larry had nothing to do with, to Apollo's DSEE which Larry had nothing to do with, to SCCS which Larry had nothing to do with. Bitkeeper is largely an amalgamation of 3 previously existing ideas, the Teamware/NSE distributed development model, changesets, and the CVS pserver. It's a little hypocritical for Larry to complain about other people riding on his coat tails when Bitkeeper is, like most successful products, a really good implementation of a bunch of ideas that were invented by a lot of other people over a lot of time.
We don't know what the actual report says (and I'm sure not going to buy a copy), but there are some definite red flags surrounding this report.
1) Infotech says that Microsoft didn't pay for this report, but they weren't asked who did pay for it, nor were they asked how much of their business is derived from Microsoft.
2) We don't know who the 1400 executives were. Were they all in the IT department? If not, do they erally know what is in use in their IT department?
3) According to the survey 27% of these companies were already using Linux. That is a huge number. I think it is save to say that 10 years ago, the number was 0%. The report says that Linux use has 'stalled' in this market, but if they haven't been doing the survey every year, how do they know that?
4)Even if it were true, it at best represents a snapshot of the marker today. GNU/Linux is continuing to improve at an extremely rapid pace, and Windows is not.
5) Finally, and most import, who cares what other businesses are doing? If your business can benefit from using Linux (or not), that is the only thing that matters.
Yeah, well, they said Crippen was crazy. (PS, who the heck was Crippen, anyway?)
If the Yankee Group in general, and Laura DiDio in particular, are worried that their credibility is being questioned, perhaps they should improve their research methodology so that it is beyond reproach. The first thing they need to disclose is how much of their revenue is derived from Microsoft and/or from corporations that are strongly tied to Microsoft. To be fair, they should also disclose how much of their revenue is tied to Linux companies, or companies strongly tied to Linux such as IBM, but I'm guessing that number is $0.
How does these posts get rated '5 insightful'? If the government service is really as lousy as you say, then private ISPs would be able to compete. If, as you say, they can't compete, then they manifestly aren't providing sufficient added value to justify the extra cost. If a government subsidized entity actually does 'suck the life out of a market' then that strongly implies the government is in fact doing a better job than the for profit entities that it displaced. It is truly unfortunate that reality doesn't conform to simplistic, libertarian, laissez faire economic theory, but sometimes life just sucks that way.
BitMover's core problem has nothing to do with supporting Linux for free. Their problem is that they absolutely refuse to compete on price for commercial business. I really wanted to use BitKeeper when I convinced by employer that VSS was destroying productivity,however, BitMover was totally unwilling to match the price of Perforce. End of story. We are a perforce shop now, and probably always will be. They could have had an extra $15,000 per year now, and more over time as our development team grows, just by being competitive, and they turned it down. The 'cost of sales' was practically nil as well since I found them (I had worked on Sun's Teamware, the precursor to Bitkeeper so I already knew about the product). It would have taken 1 sales day to close the deal. I willing to bet that scenario has played out dozens, if not hundreds of times. Everybody would use bitkeeper if the price was right. It isn't, so they don't.
BitKeeper is largely based on Teamware anyway, though Teamwaer doesn't have changesets. Sun completely botched marketing of Teamware and it is end of lifed. The big problem of course is that Sun dislikes the GPL even more than Larry McVoy, so the only terms they would make it available under, if they would do it at all, is the CDDL. That might be good enough as it is unlikely that you would want to use any of the code elsewhere.
The manned mission to the moon and mars aren't science programs, they are corporate welfare programs, and, to a much lesser extent, get out the vote programs. I've said it before, and I'll say it again here; space exploration is a job for the bots. They can tolerate much greater ranges temperature, don't need a lot of oxygen, water, or food, can go on missions lasting dozens of years, and nobody cares if you don't bring them back. The return of knowledge relative to investment has been enormous for unmanned space exploration and paltry for manned exploration. If we have learned anything from the ISS, it should be that putting people aren't well adapted for living in space and putting them there despite that fact just isn't a good use of scarce resources.
Bush doesn't care much about knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Heck, he is massively ignorant on just about every topic, and look what it did for him? He has his finger on the button, and you don't.
As far as Bush (or more accurately, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney) are concerned, the purpose of the space program is to dole out dollars to campaign supporters, and that means large aerospace and defense contractors. Progams like data acquisition from Voyager may be good for scientists, but it is chicken feed for Boeing, so funding can safely be cut. Instead, we get SDI, a Maginot line for the 21st century, and the 'man on mars' program both of which guarantee billions of dollars of profit for years to come with no likelihood of any tangible benefit.
Reading the article, I have to agree with a previous poster; the hang up is that, as near as I can tell, Microsoft is still not willing to provide full and accurate descriptions of it's protocols, api's, and file formats under a license that is comaptible with the GPL. This is what they consider their 'IP'. Again, as near as I can tell, Microsoft is inventing a ficticious requirement that it thinks will seem unfair to people, the requirement that they give away their source code. NOBODY has asked for this. NOBODY in the GPL world wants their source code. Tuis requirement seems to be an invention of Microsoft's PR department.
What is it with all these enthusiast sites that run huge suites of 'benchmarks' on CPU's that measure just about everything except actual CPU performance? Are they unable to come up with the scratch to buy a copy of the SPEC benchmark suite? Is it really a surprise that Dual Core CPU's don't help much for running games or MS Office? Did anybody really need to test this? By contrast, it would be nice to know what the SPECRate FP and SPECRate Int is for these chips. For thwt matter, does anybody really care about the performance of a chip that you can't buy? For future reference, if you want to have a pretty good idea of the 'guaranteed not to exceed' performance for a CPU that you can actually purchase, go to http://www.spec.org/ and get the numbers without the ads.
>His mistake was underestimating in just how low esteem Democrats hold the US Constituition.
s c-d95.html/
p rez.bush.marriage/
Bush?
Are we talking about George 'I love the Constitution so much I lock people up for 3 years without charges and without access to an attorney' W. Bush? Here is what those wacko ultra-liberal Democrats (NOT!) at the Cato Insitute have to say about it http://www.cato.org/dailys/08-21-03.html/
Are are we talking about the George W. 'I love free speech so much I have the secret service arrest people that try to ruin my photo opportunities' Bush? http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/docs/bursey-d
Or are we talking about the guy that wanted to ammend the Consitution to prohibit one particular form of free speech, not so much because he actually cared (because deep down in side, he cares about nothing) but because he wanted to pander to the anti-liberty wing of the Republican party http://www.patridiots.com/000875.html/
Or are we talking about the George W. 'Pass the religious Bigotry and Homophobia act of 2005 and my signature will be on it tomorrow' http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/02/24/elec04.
Whatever else he is, W. is no fan of the Consitution as it is today, and certainly no fan of liberty. But hey, that's OK, he has a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle. Nobody in the last 100 years has proposed an Amendment to give people more freedom, we only seem to get amendments to take freedom away.
I couldn't have said it better. Wolfowitz and his fellow cowards should rot in hell. W/R/T to the Post, I don't know how 'liberal' they are anymore. For instance, the other day we have this hatchet job http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A575 5-2005Mar27.html/
Which is basically a propaganda piece direct off the presses from Wolfowitz and his old buddies at the Whitehouse. Most notably, Diehl accuses Chavez of 'destroying' the economy of Venezuela. According to Economist, the Venezuelean economy grew at about 18% this year. Diehl also reports the terrifying news that Venezuela is buying 100,000 AK47;s and 25 or so fo the dreaded Brazilian made Super Tocanos
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/brazi l/emb312.htm/
According to the CIA world fact bookhttp://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/g eos/ve.html/
Venezuela spends about $1B/year on defense, or about 1/3 the amoun that neighborign Columbia gets in military aid from the US, or about 1/450th of the annual US defense budget. The US, unlike Venezuela, also has along history of invading and supporting terrorist movements in Latin America, So exactly which country is the destabilizing force?
Finally, to Diehl's main point, he is afraid that reporters will go to jail for deliberatly spreading false information. Having read Diehl's column, I'm not sure that is such a bad idea anymore.
If Microsoft really only did what was best for their customers as they claim, SQLServer would have been on Unix a long time ago. It couldn't possibly have taken all that much development effort since Sybase was already on Unix to begin with. But of course, the idea is always to do what is best for Microsoft. There is nothing really wrong with that as that is what all companies do, but it makes you want to puke when MS goes on and on about how much they care only about the customer. As for IE on Unix, isn't it strange that somethig that couldn't possibly be seperated from the Operating System could run with MainWin and a recompile on completely different OSes? And after installing IE on Solaris, if you de-installed it, Solaris continued to run just fine (well, better, actually)?