It is a shame that somebody spent the time and effort to get a PhD only to spout folk lore. I am an American and I have been to France many times and I have never had any difficulty at all. People have been almost uniformly polite and helpful including waiters. I also have several French friends, none of whom hate Americans. What they dislike is American foriegn policy which they basically see as 'kill everybody that stands in the way of profit' and which they recognize because it is very similar to the French Imperial tradition. The difference is that, for the most part, modern France sees that imperial tradition as largely immoral and anachronistic.
Unless they also gave out GPL compatible royalty free and nondiscriminatory licences to their entire patent pool, and that isn't goign to happen. MS Shared source is good for people that make kernel modules for Windows and sponsored researchers much like Sun's CDDL. Other than that it is much ado about nothing since you don't have a license to redistribute the derivative work.
they won't. The first thing every Longhorn user will do it set the theme back to what it was in the first version of Windows that they ever used. For me, that is Windows Classic (essentially win95). Of course, in my case, I've done the dance for the last time. There is no longer anything in Windows that I need that I can't get in Linux, and there is a lot of stuff in Windows, including this new theme, that I can do without. The machine that I'm typing this from is dual boot WinXP and Fedora Core 3. The last time I booted Windows was to run Windows update.
The point is that you shouldn't be installing software on every desktop in the first place, whether the synchronization is automated or not. The fact that you do means that you must store and virus scan those bits everywhere instead of in one or a handful of central servers. This is something that Unix got right ages ago that Microsoft never has. The fact that there are tools that make a bad design usable doesn't make it a good design. Though you are right that it does make the TCO closer to Linux/Unix TCO.
The Total will end up being a lot more than $900,000 per year. Microsoft TCO studies notwithstanding, anybody that has actually tried to keep both a Windows Network and a Linux/Unix network up and running will tell you that the Unix boxes are a lot less effort. Just being able to NFS mount applications from a handful of application servers instead of installing on every single machine is a godsend, as is the total lack of real, live Linux viruses. Again, MS FUD notwithstanding, theoretical viruses are much easier for a system administrator to deal with than actual ones.
The good news is that there is almost nothing under DRM that I actually want. Almost every author or musician that has something worth saying understands that the personal rewards of DRM are far less than the cost to society. In addition, I don't feel any need to financially support any author, musician, or software publisher that is working from the assumption that I am just
First, this isn't a vulnerability, this is a denial of service. The system isn't compromised, it just isn't usable.
Second, you have to have a login to run the DOS, and while you can forkbomb by default, most sysadmins don't allow untrusted users to login by default.Trusted users can be punished for violating that trust.
This article would have been vastly more useful if the author and said 'here a some useful defalt settings to put in/etc/security/limits.conf if you ar erunning a multi-user Fedora Core system', but of course, that isn't as satisfying as venting without ofering anything constructive. So, for instance, if one has a 'users' group, one might add the line
@users hard nproc 20
as suggested by the/etc/security/limits.conf file comments, and the 'problem' goes away.
1) Windows
Developed by Xerox, licensed from Apple, and Microsoft was on the market basically last.
2) VB
Copied from Dartmouth basic, everybody else had something at least as good, if not better(eg Hypercard)
3)32 bit OS
Old, obvious idea, Microsoft was last to market
4).NET
A copy of Java which itself was an incremetal improvement of a bunch of older stuff. Microsoft is basically last to market.
As for the stock, the one problem with being a monopoly is that after you already have 95% of the market, it is reall hard to grow faster than the market does. Windows Server is losing to Linux in the marketpalce because:
a) Windows Server is a much crapier product.
b) Windows server is much more expensive
c) Miscrosoft can't buy Linux like they have done, or tried to do every other time that they were outcompeted.
It is hard to see how any of that is Ballmer's fault. He has been dealt a really lousy hand if the metric of success is stock price, and frankly, he has been playing it really well. Any rational company attempting to maximize profit would have switched to Linux ages ago. That they haven't is a testament to Ballmer's powers of persuasion.
Ummm, WinXP already is Win2000 with a different theme. The only difference between what you propose and what Miscrosoft is actually doing is the price.
So the one feature that most of their customers really, really want, Microsoft isn't going to implement. What was it that Jackson said - 'many innovations that would truly benefit customers never happen becuase it isn't in Microsoft's interest to do so'. Jackson had these guys pegged as the unrepentant criminals that they really are. It is unfortunate that some indiscreet comments to a writer allowed them to get off scot free.
I've been using Unix or Unix-like systems since Interactive Systems-1 on a PDP-11 back in 1979, so for me, Windows is still virtually unusable until you install Cygwin from RedHat, Mozilla and/or Firefox from mozilla.org, Java and Netbeans 4.0 from Sun and then it makes it into the barely usable category. For me, Fedora Core 3 now does everything better than Windows, and I haven't booted Windows on my desktop machine in ages. I still boot my laptop into Windows to run MS SQLServer which we use at work. If it were my choice, it would be Postgresql, but it isn't. In any event, I'm down to a single 'must have' MS app, and hopefully it will be 0 before the end of the year.
If there is one misconception about GNU/Linux that should be easily buried it is that GNU/Linux will fork into incompatible variants as Unix did. This ignores four very import points.
1) Unix forked in large part because every vendor had their own proprietary hardware which required that every application be ported and tested on each platform and that end uses had to buy and support the applications that they used on each flavor of Unix that they used. For better or worse, there are essentially only three Enterprise ISA's now for Linux, x86-32, x86-64 and Power. Instead of splintering, in two or three years, there will be only two, X86-64 and Power. Applications that run on one Vendors GNU/Linux/x86-64 box will run on every vendors box.
2) Unix vendors introduced unique product differentiation and because the source was not licensed under the GPL, each vendor was forced to implement features their own way, usually in a way that was incompatible with every other vendors implementation. Because GNU/Linux software is licensed under the GPL, that simply can't happen. If one vendor has a feature, they can all have it, and since it is the same source, it will run the same way.
3) This is a corallary to point 2, but in the past, not only did all Unix vendors have their own window system, they didn't support the other systems, so if you had a Motif application, it wouldn't run on a Sun system unless you bundled Motif with your app. In Linux, if you install all the window system toolkits, and given the cost of disks and memorythere is no reason not to, every windowing application you buy will run. In addition, since Linux is Unix, in the Enterprise, there is no real reason to install desktop apps on the client. Install them on App servers, and make them available to clients using NFS. This is vastly preferable to the Windows install everywhere approach.
4)Finally, if it were not enough that GNU/Linux/x86-64 is becoming a single platform, a huge number of Enterprise applications are written in Java so underlying architectural differences simply don't matter anyway.
In summary, the Linux will fragment like Unix did is a truly stupid argument that ignores that fact the Linux bears no similarity to traditional Unix other than supporting the same API's.
If you read the article, Microsoft seems to be talking out of both sides of it's mouth. On the one hand, they want patents to be free for small businesses and non-profits, on the other hand, they don't want to be sued by 'inventors' that view holding a patent that Microsoft needs as a winning the lottery. These options are mutually exclusive as making patents free for small businesses would virtually guarantee that thousands of 'inventors' would get into the lottery. Why not, if the tickets are essentially free? In addition, Microsoft's proposal would result in the FSF (which is a non-profit) becoming the world's biggest software patent holder in short order, and I'm fairly certain that isn't what Microsoft has in mind. More to the point, why travel around the world threatening governments if they don't essentially sign up to implement the US patent system for software? Microsoft surely has many times more software patents then they have hardware patents, so if they were really interested in preventing future Eolas patent extortion schemes, they should have been agressively lobbying against software patents. Instead, they were the most vocal backer of software patents in the EU. Actions speak a heck of a lot louder than words, particulary where Microsoft is involved, and their actions all point to a desire to prevent competition by any means possible. It is going to take a lot more than a press release to convince me that pigs can fly, particularly, the biggest, fattest, pig in the pen.
That the Rutan flight represents some sort of triumph of capitalism over big, bad, governemnt is laughable. In the first place, Rutan's project relies on 'space age' materials pretty much all of which were invented on the government's nickel. IF Rutan had to fund all of the basic research that culminated in SS-1, he would have been bankrupt in a week. Second of all, SS-1 is capable of putting a few hundred pounds barely into space. The 30 year old shuttle design can put 20 to 30 TONS into low earth orbit. Delta and Titan rockets, developed by NASA, can put several ton objects in geosynchrous orbit. And, of course, NASA has sent men to the moon, and unmaned spacecraft to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Standing on NASA's shoulders, private industry has managed to put 200 pounds 60 miles up for a couple of seconds. Color me unimpressed.
There is a pretty strange thing going on here. Slashdot is news for nerds, which I always assumed included a substantial number of software developers. The comments are uniformly anti-software patents. As a software developer myself, I am 100% in agreement, software patents in general stifle innovation in order to protect monopolists. The amazing thing is that governments around the world have decided to 'protect' us against our will, so there must be some of us that support software patents. I invite all such people to post here and explain why. This would be an excellent topic for a slashdot poll in fact, as there are really only three choices:
It is worth pointing out that this isn't Carly's first debacle, she also drove Lucent into the ground. That's a mighty impressive record, destroying not only the company that made the transistor, but also one of the first companies to put it to good use. I think Bush sees alot of himself in Carly. Remember he had two failed business ventures, Spectrum 7 and Harken Energy. Harken bailed him out at Spectrum, and some skillful insider trading netted him a profit out of the second (it's not only good to be a King, being son of a President ain't so bad either).
I guess there are a few, like James Gosling, but primarily it is software publishers, not developers that are thourhgly enamored with software patents, and one software publisher in particular that is a convicted abusive monopolist. Slightly off topic, but many readers may not know that RMS' conviction on the evil's of software patents was triggered by a spat with Gosling over some display update code. I don't remeber the exact details, but both Gosling and RMS had developed versions of emacs. Gosling's version had a display update routine that RMS like so he copied it with, he claims, Goslings permission via email. Gosling subsequently sold his version to Unipress who promptly threatened RMS with litigation. RMS just as promptly completely rewrote the offending code so not only did it not infringe, it worked better.
First, to date, there has never been a successful prosecution for patent infringment against Linux, or in fact, any attempt, and until the patents are litigated we don't know if Linux infringes any valid patents or not. Second, as many posters have mentioned, the US has the most abused patent system in the world, and FOSS developers continue to develop. The Free Software Foundation is based in the US, and so is OSDL and Linus himself. Lastly, the expert 'admits' to being against software patents, but then asserts that the uncertainty in the EU is worse than a definitve resolution. This is sheer nonsense. If you are a FOSS developer, surely the current situation is better than a definitive resolution for software patents. Either this is a Microsoft FUD piece or the expert was seriously misquoted.
You are right. What the plants do is orders of magnitude more difficult than powering a light bulb. Fantastically more difficult. Fortunately, we don't have to do that. As for the available real estate, there are millions of roof tops out there already that are seriously underutilized. All they are doing is keeping the wind and the rain out, and the heat in. Given reasonable efficiency, durability, and initial purchase price (granted, all big IFs), the average south facing rooftop (in the nothern hemisphere) is plenty big enough hold enough solar cells to power the house underneath it during a typical day. We don't consume non-renewables because solar can't provide enough power. We consume non-renewables because to date, excluding the environmental effects, they have been cheaper. Cheap, efficient, durable solar cells, if they can be produced, would change that equation.
One thing that should be factored into the cost of oil in the US is a major portion of the DOD budget. We have spent about $200B so far to conquer Iraq and hopefully, it is clear to everybody by now that was entirely about oil and had nothing to do with defense. We will quite likely spend another $200B before the Iraqi's ask us to leave. You can buy one heck of a lot of solar cells for $400B. You can also institute a heck of a lot of conservation measures. For example, in the US we could classify SUV's as cars (which they clearly are) for the purposes of CAFE. That would cost almost nothing,
Nobody will acquire this company because they will be acquiring the IBM counterclaims as well, and unlike SCO's claims, it looks like SCO is guilty of copyright infringment and they are definitely at risk of being found guilty of Lanham act violations. I don't think a RICO inditement is out of the question either, and it is hard to see how they can avoid and SEC investigation related to their late 10K filing. I could see SCO trying to transfer whatever assets are left, including cash, to a shell company for less than it is worth leaving old new SCO (or is it new old SCO?) with just the litigation business. My guess is that IBM might have something to say about that. Of course, IANAL.
Anybody that inherits SCO vs IBM is also going to inherit the IBM counterclaims, and the Lanham Act charges at least look rock solid by now. Judge Kimball has practically announced that SCO had no evidence whatsoever of massive copyright violations when they were making extravagent claims. I believe the word he used was 'astonishing' to describe SCO's lack of evidence. In addition since SCO has already agreed that the GPL is a valid license, and the only authority they have to distribute IBM's JFS, RCU, and NUMA code is the GPL, it is going to be hard for the new owner to manufacture any anti-GPL FUD.There is an excellent chance that they will lose on CC6 which would leave them liable for millions of dollars in damages. SCO may go belly up, but their legal arguments are in the court record now. Even if there was some value in the bones of Unix, SCO's legal exposure makes the company positively radioactive from the point of view of any potential buyer. Note, IANAL, but you knew that.
Intel has apparently not posted SPEC numbers for these processors, and in fact seems to avoid publishing official SPEC numbers for non-Xeon processors. By contrast, AMD does post SPEC numbers for the FX-55, and the Opteron 252 results were available the day the chip was announced. The comparison between the latest Opterons and Xeons is none too flattering for Xeon although the 2MB cache should help the SPEC FP numbers quite a bit. The problem for Intel is that P4 still consumes gobs of power and produces a lot of heat even when it isn't doing anything. By contrast, the Athlon 64 3000+ (90NM) that I'm typing this on maxes out at about 65W, which is roughly the P4's idle power consumption. This machine torches the 2.6GHz P4 machine I have at work at compiling and running Java programs (of course, I'm running Fedora Core 3 here, and Win2K there so it isn't apples to apples). It is hard to see how Intel is going to cool 2 such cores on a single die whereas AMD shouldn't really have a problem. Note, that I'm not particularly an AMD fanboy. I have a couple of Dual Celeron boxes and a Dual PIII box, but Intel took a very wrong turn when they went the P4 route, and I don't see anything that indicates that they are getting back on track. The multimedia performance is nice, I gues, but realistically, how many users spend the bulk of their time encoding video?
Mueller makes the peculiar argument that the EU open standard requirement is a bad idea because it is not the same requirement as existing standard bodies use, ie, the EU desired practice is wrong because it is different from the current practice. Unfortunately, if this argument were valid, it would preclude ANY law or regulation from being passed as such an act would of neccessity change the staus quo. Libertarians would rejoice, but otherwise, it seems kind of pointless. One would imagine that should be the goal of the legislature to improve life for it's citizens, and whatever the merits of patent encumbered standards it is clear that from the consumers point fo view, they serve only to raise prices.
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> anytime I go to someones home, I have the ability to say, "I'm sorry, I can't do anything to help you. I haven't used Windows since Windows 95b".
Geez, you lucky bastard! I haven't *ever* really been a WIndows user, and when I go to my OWN HOME I'm still the computer guy!
It is a shame that somebody spent the time and effort to get a PhD only to spout folk lore. I am an American and I have been to France many times and I have never had any difficulty at all. People have been almost uniformly polite and helpful including waiters. I also have several French friends, none of whom hate Americans. What they dislike is American foriegn policy which they basically see as 'kill everybody that stands in the way of profit' and which they recognize because it is very similar to the French Imperial tradition. The difference is that, for the most part, modern France sees that imperial tradition as largely immoral and anachronistic.
Unless they also gave out GPL compatible royalty free and nondiscriminatory licences to their entire patent pool, and that isn't goign to happen. MS Shared source is good for people that make kernel modules for Windows and sponsored researchers much like Sun's CDDL. Other than that it is much ado about nothing since you don't have a license to redistribute the derivative work.
they won't. The first thing every Longhorn user will do it set the theme back to what it was in the first version of Windows that they ever used. For me, that is Windows Classic (essentially win95). Of course, in my case, I've done the dance for the last time. There is no longer anything in Windows that I need that I can't get in Linux, and there is a lot of stuff in Windows, including this new theme, that I can do without. The machine that I'm typing this from is dual boot WinXP and Fedora Core 3. The last time I booted Windows was to run Windows update.
The point is that you shouldn't be installing software on every desktop in the first place, whether the synchronization is automated or not. The fact that you do means that you must store and virus scan those bits everywhere instead of in one or a handful of central servers. This is something that Unix got right ages ago that Microsoft never has. The fact that there are tools that make a bad design usable doesn't make it a good design. Though you are right that it does make the TCO closer to Linux/Unix TCO.
The Total will end up being a lot more than $900,000 per year. Microsoft TCO studies notwithstanding, anybody that has actually tried to keep both a Windows Network and a Linux/Unix network up and running will tell you that the Unix boxes are a lot less effort. Just being able to NFS mount applications from a handful of application servers instead of installing on every single machine is a godsend, as is the total lack of real, live Linux viruses. Again, MS FUD notwithstanding, theoretical viruses are much easier for a system administrator to deal with than actual ones.
The good news is that there is almost nothing under DRM that I actually want. Almost every author or musician that has something worth saying understands that the personal rewards of DRM are far less than the cost to society. In addition, I don't feel any need to financially support any author, musician, or software publisher that is working from the assumption that I am just
1) A criminal
2) Another sheep to be fleeced
So we can both do just fine without each other.
First, this isn't a vulnerability, this is a denial of service. The system isn't compromised, it just isn't usable. /etc/security/limits.conf if you ar erunning a multi-user Fedora Core system', but of course, that isn't as satisfying as venting without ofering anything constructive. So, for instance, if one has a 'users' group, one might add the line
/etc/security/limits.conf file comments, and the 'problem' goes away.
Second, you have to have a login to run the DOS, and while you can forkbomb by default, most sysadmins don't allow untrusted users to login by default.Trusted users can be punished for violating that trust.
This article would have been vastly more useful if the author and said 'here a some useful defalt settings to put in
@users hard nproc 20
as suggested by the
1) Windows
Developed by Xerox, licensed from Apple, and Microsoft was on the market basically last.
2) VB
Copied from Dartmouth basic, everybody else had something at least as good, if not better(eg Hypercard)
3)32 bit OS
Old, obvious idea, Microsoft was last to market
4).NET
A copy of Java which itself was an incremetal improvement of a bunch of older stuff. Microsoft is basically last to market.
As for the stock, the one problem with being a monopoly is that after you already have 95% of the market, it is reall hard to grow faster than the market does. Windows Server is losing to Linux in the marketpalce because:
a) Windows Server is a much crapier product.
b) Windows server is much more expensive
c) Miscrosoft can't buy Linux like they have done, or tried to do every other time that they were outcompeted.
It is hard to see how any of that is Ballmer's fault. He has been dealt a really lousy hand if the metric of success is stock price, and frankly, he has been playing it really well. Any rational company attempting to maximize profit would have switched to Linux ages ago. That they haven't is a testament to Ballmer's powers of persuasion.
Ummm, WinXP already is Win2000 with a different theme. The only difference between what you propose and what Miscrosoft is actually doing is the price.
So the one feature that most of their customers really, really want, Microsoft isn't going to implement. What was it that Jackson said - 'many innovations that would truly benefit customers never happen becuase it isn't in Microsoft's interest to do so'. Jackson had these guys pegged as the unrepentant criminals that they really are. It is unfortunate that some indiscreet comments to a writer allowed them to get off scot free.
I've been using Unix or Unix-like systems since Interactive Systems-1 on a PDP-11 back in 1979, so for me, Windows is still virtually unusable until you install Cygwin from RedHat, Mozilla and/or Firefox from mozilla.org, Java and Netbeans 4.0 from Sun and then it makes it into the barely usable category. For me, Fedora Core 3 now does everything better than Windows, and I haven't booted Windows on my desktop machine in ages. I still boot my laptop into Windows to run MS SQLServer which we use at work. If it were my choice, it would be Postgresql, but it isn't. In any event, I'm down to a single 'must have' MS app, and hopefully it will be 0 before the end of the year.
If there is one misconception about GNU/Linux that should be easily buried it is that GNU/Linux will fork into incompatible variants as Unix did. This ignores four very import points.
1) Unix forked in large part because every vendor had their own proprietary hardware which required that every application be ported and tested on each platform and that end uses had to buy and support the applications that they used on each flavor of Unix that they used. For better or worse, there are essentially only three Enterprise ISA's now for Linux, x86-32, x86-64 and Power. Instead of splintering, in two or three years, there will be only two, X86-64 and Power. Applications that run on one Vendors GNU/Linux/x86-64 box will run on every vendors box.
2) Unix vendors introduced unique product differentiation and because the source was not licensed under the GPL, each vendor was forced to implement features their own way, usually in a way that was incompatible with every other vendors implementation. Because GNU/Linux software is licensed under the GPL, that simply can't happen. If one vendor has a feature, they can all have it, and since it is the same source, it will run the same way.
3) This is a corallary to point 2, but in the past, not only did all Unix vendors have their own window system, they didn't support the other systems, so if you had a Motif application, it wouldn't run on a Sun system unless you bundled Motif with your app. In Linux, if you install all the window system toolkits, and given the cost of disks and memorythere is no reason not to, every windowing application you buy will run. In addition, since Linux is Unix, in the Enterprise, there is no real reason to install desktop apps on the client. Install them on App servers, and make them available to clients using NFS. This is vastly preferable to the Windows install everywhere approach.
4)Finally, if it were not enough that GNU/Linux/x86-64 is becoming a single platform, a huge number of Enterprise applications are written in Java so underlying architectural differences simply don't matter anyway.
In summary, the Linux will fragment like Unix did is a truly stupid argument that ignores that fact the Linux bears no similarity to traditional Unix other than supporting the same API's.
If you read the article, Microsoft seems to be talking out of both sides of it's mouth. On the one hand, they want patents to be free for small businesses and non-profits, on the other hand, they don't want to be sued by 'inventors' that view holding a patent that Microsoft needs as a winning the lottery. These options are mutually exclusive as making patents free for small businesses would virtually guarantee that thousands of 'inventors' would get into the lottery. Why not, if the tickets are essentially free? In addition, Microsoft's proposal would result in the FSF (which is a non-profit) becoming the world's biggest software patent holder in short order, and I'm fairly certain that isn't what Microsoft has in mind. More to the point, why travel around the world threatening governments if they don't essentially sign up to implement the US patent system for software? Microsoft surely has many times more software patents then they have hardware patents, so if they were really interested in preventing future Eolas patent extortion schemes, they should have been agressively lobbying against software patents. Instead, they were the most vocal backer of software patents in the EU. Actions speak a heck of a lot louder than words, particulary where Microsoft is involved, and their actions all point to a desire to prevent competition by any means possible. It is going to take a lot more than a press release to convince me that pigs can fly, particularly, the biggest, fattest, pig in the pen.
That the Rutan flight represents some sort of triumph of capitalism over big, bad, governemnt is laughable. In the first place, Rutan's project relies on 'space age' materials pretty much all of which were invented on the government's nickel. IF Rutan had to fund all of the basic research that culminated in SS-1, he would have been bankrupt in a week. Second of all, SS-1 is capable of putting a few hundred pounds barely into space. The 30 year old shuttle design can put 20 to 30 TONS into low earth orbit. Delta and Titan rockets, developed by NASA, can put several ton objects in geosynchrous orbit. And, of course, NASA has sent men to the moon, and unmaned spacecraft to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Standing on NASA's shoulders, private industry has managed to put 200 pounds 60 miles up for a couple of seconds. Color me unimpressed.
There is a pretty strange thing going on here. Slashdot is news for nerds, which I always assumed included a substantial number of software developers. The comments are uniformly anti-software patents. As a software developer myself, I am 100% in agreement, software patents in general stifle innovation in order to protect monopolists. The amazing thing is that governments around the world have decided to 'protect' us against our will, so there must be some of us that support software patents. I invite all such people to post here and explain why. This would be an excellent topic for a slashdot poll in fact, as there are really only three choices:
1) No software patents
2) Allow software patents
3) Cowboy Neal
It is worth pointing out that this isn't Carly's first debacle, she also drove Lucent into the ground. That's a mighty impressive record, destroying not only the company that made the transistor, but also one of the first companies to put it to good use. I think Bush sees alot of himself in Carly. Remember he had two failed business ventures, Spectrum 7 and Harken Energy. Harken bailed him out at Spectrum, and some skillful insider trading netted him a profit out of the second (it's not only good to be a King, being son of a President ain't so bad either).
I guess there are a few, like James Gosling, but primarily it is software publishers, not developers that are thourhgly enamored with software patents, and one software publisher in particular that is a convicted abusive monopolist. Slightly off topic, but many readers may not know that RMS' conviction on the evil's of software patents was triggered by a spat with Gosling over some display update code. I don't remeber the exact details, but both Gosling and RMS had developed versions of emacs. Gosling's version had a display update routine that RMS like so he copied it with, he claims, Goslings permission via email. Gosling subsequently sold his version to Unipress who promptly threatened RMS with litigation. RMS just as promptly completely rewrote the offending code so not only did it not infringe, it worked better.
First, to date, there has never been a successful prosecution for patent infringment against Linux, or in fact, any attempt, and until the patents are litigated we don't know if Linux infringes any valid patents or not. Second, as many posters have mentioned, the US has the most abused patent system in the world, and FOSS developers continue to develop. The Free Software Foundation is based in the US, and so is OSDL and Linus himself. Lastly, the expert 'admits' to being against software patents, but then asserts that the uncertainty in the EU is worse than a definitve resolution. This is sheer nonsense. If you are a FOSS developer, surely the current situation is better than a definitive resolution for software patents. Either this is a Microsoft FUD piece or the expert was seriously misquoted.
You are right. What the plants do is orders of magnitude more difficult than powering a light bulb. Fantastically more difficult. Fortunately, we don't have to do that. As for the available real estate, there are millions of roof tops out there already that are seriously underutilized. All they are doing is keeping the wind and the rain out, and the heat in. Given reasonable efficiency, durability, and initial purchase price (granted, all big IFs), the average south facing rooftop (in the nothern hemisphere) is plenty big enough hold enough solar cells to power the house underneath it during a typical day. We don't consume non-renewables because solar can't provide enough power. We consume non-renewables because to date, excluding the environmental effects, they have been cheaper. Cheap, efficient, durable solar cells, if they can be produced, would change that equation.
One thing that should be factored into the cost of oil in the US is a major portion of the DOD budget. We have spent about $200B so far to conquer Iraq and hopefully, it is clear to everybody by now that was entirely about oil and had nothing to do with defense. We will quite likely spend another $200B before the Iraqi's ask us to leave. You can buy one heck of a lot of solar cells for $400B. You can also institute a heck of a lot of conservation measures. For example, in the US we could classify SUV's as cars (which they clearly are) for the purposes of CAFE. That would cost almost nothing,
Nobody will acquire this company because they will be acquiring the IBM counterclaims as well, and unlike SCO's claims, it looks like SCO is guilty of copyright infringment and they are definitely at risk of being found guilty of Lanham act violations. I don't think a RICO inditement is out of the question either, and it is hard to see how they can avoid and SEC investigation related to their late 10K filing. I could see SCO trying to transfer whatever assets are left, including cash, to a shell company for less than it is worth leaving old new SCO (or is it new old SCO?) with just the litigation business. My guess is that IBM might have something to say about that. Of course, IANAL.
Anybody that inherits SCO vs IBM is also going to inherit the IBM counterclaims, and the Lanham Act charges at least look rock solid by now. Judge Kimball has practically announced that SCO had no evidence whatsoever of massive copyright violations when they were making extravagent claims. I believe the word he used was 'astonishing' to describe SCO's lack of evidence. In addition since SCO has already agreed that the GPL is a valid license, and the only authority they have to distribute IBM's JFS, RCU, and NUMA code is the GPL, it is going to be hard for the new owner to manufacture any anti-GPL FUD.There is an excellent chance that they will lose on CC6 which would leave them liable for millions of dollars in damages. SCO may go belly up, but their legal arguments are in the court record now. Even if there was some value in the bones of Unix, SCO's legal exposure makes the company positively radioactive from the point of view of any potential buyer. Note, IANAL, but you knew that.
Intel has apparently not posted SPEC numbers for these processors, and in fact seems to avoid publishing official SPEC numbers for non-Xeon processors. By contrast, AMD does post SPEC numbers for the FX-55, and the Opteron 252 results were available the day the chip was announced. The comparison between the latest Opterons and Xeons is none too flattering for Xeon although the 2MB cache should help the SPEC FP numbers quite a bit. The problem for Intel is that P4 still consumes gobs of power and produces a lot of heat even when it isn't doing anything. By contrast, the Athlon 64 3000+ (90NM) that I'm typing this on maxes out at about 65W, which is roughly the P4's idle power consumption. This machine torches the 2.6GHz P4 machine I have at work at compiling and running Java programs (of course, I'm running Fedora Core 3 here, and Win2K there so it isn't apples to apples). It is hard to see how Intel is going to cool 2 such cores on a single die whereas AMD shouldn't really have a problem. Note, that I'm not particularly an AMD fanboy. I have a couple of Dual Celeron boxes and a Dual PIII box, but Intel took a very wrong turn when they went the P4 route, and I don't see anything that indicates that they are getting back on track. The multimedia performance is nice, I gues, but realistically, how many users spend the bulk of their time encoding video?
Mueller makes the peculiar argument that the EU open standard requirement is a bad idea because it is not the same requirement as existing standard bodies use, ie, the EU desired practice is wrong because it is different from the current practice. Unfortunately, if this argument were valid, it would preclude ANY law or regulation from being passed as such an act would of neccessity change the staus quo. Libertarians would rejoice, but otherwise, it seems kind of pointless. One would imagine that should be the goal of the legislature to improve life for it's citizens, and whatever the merits of patent encumbered standards it is clear that from the consumers point fo view, they serve only to raise prices.