An unregulated nuclear industry does not mean plants can pour waste in other people's property. And what happens if due to some accident they do spread a load of waste over other peoples property? Sure you can send them to PMITA prison but that doesn't fix anything. Sure you can sue them into bankrupcy but they are unlikely to have anything like the money to pay for the damage they caused.
Since governments regulate commons they must either take responsibility to ensure they are not destroyed Which requires them to 1: punish those who deliberately act to destroy them and 2: REGULATE actions that have an unacceptable chance of accidently destroying them.
or privatize them to internalize the externalities. Which is kinda impractical when the commons in question is the air we all have to live in and breathe.
If you took the time to read the description, you'd have learned that distributor are mandated to offer the french version of a game provided that it already exists somewhere else. Presumably this means that given that the upstream developer plans to release in english first and other languages later the canadian distributer has a couple of choices.
1: delay the release in quebec to wait for the french translation. This will piss off the gamers who want to get thier games quickly (much as it already pisses off a lot of european gamers). It will also hurt the retailers as many gamers may give up on them and order from the USA or other parts of canada.
2: deal with a double release, once with the american version and again with a version that includes french. That french release will have to be made no later than any french release elsewhere in the world and all shops in quebec who have stock of the english release will have to buy it or be unable to sell thier english stock.
Yeah, they took out a couple of skyscrapers by using airliners as missiles, a trick that will probablly be EXTREMELY difficult to repeat anytime soon because passengers will now remember that event whenever a hijacking occours.
It all comes down to numbers, sure terrorists may manage to take out the odd skyscraper from time to time and criminals may take out the odd windmill from time to time but there is no real terror in taking out the odd windmill unlike in taking out the odd skyscraper.
I wonder if that has a noticeable impact on the Earth's climate. I really don't know Lets try a quick calcuation to get an order of magnitude estimate on it's signficance.
according to wikipedia the suns intensity on reaching earth is over a kilowatt per square meter. The cross sectional area of the earth is rouhgly 10^14 square meters
combine those and you get a solar input energy of over 10^17 watts
10 terrawatts is 10^13 watts
So the energy we are releasing is roughly FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than the solar input energy. Sounds pretty minor to me.
Just like water vapor gets overlooked so often. IIRC water vapor is already pretty much saturated in the atnosphere so releasing more of it doesn't have any significant effect, it just comes back out. (IIRC it can be a feedback factor though)
2K/XP (which are really in the grand scheme of things pretty similar) gave us hugely more stability and scalability than 9x (at least if you had hardware it got along with, I used to have some hardware that just didn't get along with 2K). This was something most of us power users (who are the ones that drive the computing media) could really appreciate. Yes there WAS performance and compatibilty issues but at least we could see significant upsides as well as downsides.
On 9x you could exhaust GDI resources simply by filling a single row taskbar with browser windows (and this was pre tabbed browsing). Having to close some stuff so other stuff would get the GDI resources it needed to render properly was often a major PITA.
What does vista give you? some eye candy, some security improvements (most of which are half baked) and slightly better support for heavilly locked down drm media.
The "let new machines have vista" approach may be good for small/hetrogenous buisnesses but for larger buisness it means supporting and testing everything on two different operating system versions for no good reason. It also may mean extra costs training people on both systems.
Much easier to wait until the machine stock is all beefy enough to run windows 7 and then roll it out one class of user at a time.
Windows versions upgrades aren't exactly known for being a reliable option. I strongly suspect that most organisations who deploy a new version of windows will do so by building a new image from scratch and then reimaging the machines.
Unavailibility of a direct path for upgrading without reinstalling may be an issue in some edge cases but it's not a huge deal.
Vista 64 is a giant steaming pile of crap that needs to die,die,die,die.. Vista64 is typically the cause of every incompatibility report on the net for Vista it's a steaming pile of crap that is incompatible with everything. And you think the 64 bit version of windows 7 will be any better in that regard?
The fact is that 64 bit windows has compatibility issues that WILL NOT go away The only reasonable fix is for the vendors of hardware and software to update thier drivers to work in a 64 bit environment.
Sooner or later (MS currently give a date just under 5 years away though they may extend it) MS will stop security updates for XP. Running your main desktop image on a system that is no longer getting security updates seems rather reckless to me.
Plus I would expect once windows 7 comes out XP drivers may start to dry up. I doubt most vendors will want to support THREE versions of windows at once.
Also when windows 7 comes out OEM copies will probablly only come with downgrade rights to vista so if you want to keep using XP you will have to buy volume licenses for all new machines that you want to run XP on (granted many buisnesses do that anyway)
Another problem is software in general is stil getting gradually more bloated. Sooner or later it will become nessacery to take the pain of going 64 bit and drivers for XP professional x64 edition are often hard to find.
Standarising on XP is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for now and probablly for the next couple of years but i'm willing to bet that in a few years time there WILL be heavy pressures to upgrade just as most buisnesses eventually ended up on XP.
Last I checked XP was still an option on the dell website for ordinary customers buying buisness machines. I think it's even an option on one or two of thier consumer machines.
Yeah, plus how hard/expensive will it be to get a new PC with XP instead of Vista? Big customers don't care what the OEM windows sticker on the machine says. It's only purpose is to satisfy the fact that windows volume licenses are generally for upgrading/downgrading only not for installs on machines with no previous versions of windows. Thats why you see so many machines in big organisations with XP home or vista home basic license stickers even though they are running XP pro.
When the machine arrives it gets it's stock windows install blown away and replaced with a corporate image based on an install from VLK media. Some OEMs will even preload your image for you if you make a big enough order.
A bigger issue is drivers but I suspect as long as most big organisations want to run XP the big buisness PC vendors will supply them with XP drivers.
Eventually they will probablly have to upgrade to something but in most cases I doubt it will be vista (I suspect most of them will move to windows 7 in the end, some may also take the approach of running mostly linux with windows XP in a vm for apps that need it)
Big DC systems have thier problems too, if you run at telco standard 48V then the distribution losses are a killer. If you run at higher DC voltages you need all special stuff to safely handle the DC (DC is a LOT more prone to arcing at the same voltage, so you can't just take a switch or outlet rated for 500V AC and use it for 500V DC. They also only tend to save one conversion since you still need to convert from the distribution DC to the DC the server wants.
I read an APC paper not so long ago on this ( http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/SADE-5TNRLG_R4_EN.pdf ) that conculded that a hypothetical 500V DC system was marginally more efficiant than the 230/400 three phase AC system which is commonly used in europe now but the difference was far less than that between the american AC system and the european AC system.
Viewed in this light putting the battery IN the server seems to be the masterstroke, it brings the advantages of reduced conversion steps without the downsides of trying to distribute DC arround a datacenter.
Modern high speed chips (which draw the bulk of the power in a typical PC) run thier core logic at much lower voltages. Typically somewhere between 1V and 2V though I think some may have gone below a volt now. Theese very low voltages have to be produced very close to the chip that uses them to avoid huge losses.
This means that modern PC motherboards take most of thier power at 12V anyway. The 5V and 3.3V lines really only serve to power the low speed chips and some of the interfaces between chips.
Given that I doubt there would be too much efficiancy loss from making a 12V only board. You could probablly even design it to hapilly deal with an input that was only approximately 12V without losing too much (since most of that 12V power is going to the input of switchers anyway).
Carbon from biomass is just cycling in and out of the atmosphere, no big deal.
The problem is digging up carbon that has been buried for millions of years and releasing it (either directly into the atnosphere or into a place where it is likely to get released).
How is a mac mini [apple.com] different from what you want? The mini is a FAR lower spec machine than the imacs (though admittedly with the current gen it's not quite as bad as it used to be).
Yes, sadly theese days you pretty much have to treat CPU and motherboard as a unit. Still that doesn't mean there aren't lots of reasons for wanting to upgrade.
Graphics is generally upgradable, yes you may have problems with the uber high end stuff drawing a lot of power (but then apple doesn't offer the uber high end graphics at all) or with the switch from AGP to PCIe but generally it's not a huge problem (and I doubt PCIe is going to get replaced any time soon).
Storage is another area, if I want more storage on my desktop it's no problem I just bung another hard drive in (and maybe add a SATA card if it's an older machine). If I want more storage on an imac/mini I have to either replace the drive (a lot of work and considerablly reduces both the bang for buck and the maximum capacity obtainable) or use a crappy external drive.
Networking is another area, some of us have to use more than one network for various reasons, with the imac/mini the only way to do this is to use a crappy USB adaptor.
The pricing of Macs is really pretty simple to explain: Apple doesn't make cheap computers. That's "cheap" in the sense of "low price" and in the sense of "low quality". The have a wide range of performance specs available, but none of them are built like crap, which puts a floor on the product pricing. But at just about every level of quality, the price is pretty comparable to equal machines from the competition.
Yes and no even if you are looking for quality hardware the small range and weird contents of that small ranage often means it's far more expensive to get what you want. And sometimes you simply can't find a mac with what you want.
Look at dells site, even when you exclude the cheap end (though still reasonable quality in my experiance) inspiron and vostro lines you still see a HUGE choice and that is just one PC vendor.
Suppose for example I want a desktop with a proper desktop hard drive (for performance or capacity or whatever) and the ability to run a matched pair of monitors.
If I buy from apple the only way I can get this is to buy a mac pro which starts at £1899 (inc VAT and delivery). To add insult to injury I also have to buy a mini-displayport to DVI adaptor for the second monmitor.
If I buy a dell on the other hand I can get an optiplex 960 with XP pro, a quad core CPU at a higher clock, more ram and a comparable ammount of hdd space (though split accross two drives because for some reason dell don't sell large drives with this model) for £1,099.40 .
£830 is a BIG premium.
Sure the mac pro is built out of server hardware but unless you really need 8 cores or more than 8 gigs of ram I don't consider that a major advantage (also the current 4 core mac pro only seems to support 8 gig of ram, if you want more you are forced to go 8 core).
I can't find any apple markings on the ram that I pulled out of my macbook (which is getting on for two years old now) soon after I bought it. The hard drive which I replaced at the same time did have an apple logo on the label though.
BTW if anyone cares the modules I pulled out were hynix, the ones I replaced them with were crucial.
And yes apple does rip you off on the BTO options but they are far from the only offender in this regard. Recently I specced out a dell vostro desktop for my brother and the cost of getting them to put a DVD writer in place of the DVD rom was more than the cost of simply buying a DVD rom drive.
Consider PNG. It's a great format, and I prefer it over GIF whenever possible, but the fact remains that by the time real PNG support got widespread enough matter, the GIF patents had expired and so the original point of PNG was moot. Basic png support was pretty widespread quite some time before the patent expired.
Alpha channel support in browsers took longer but then the browsers didn't support alpha channel for any other formats either afaict.
Still a combination of misinformation and apathy meant that gif remained very common.
For a floppy you are going to use FAT12 which is old enough that even if it had been patented would now be free to use, FAT16 for small volumes is almost as old and probably not covered either. It's just for modern high capacity volumes that it's an issue. WRONG
The fat patents are to do with long filenames (a feature added with windows 95) and apply equally to the use of long filenames on FAT12 FAT16 and FAT32.
You could live without long filenames of course and some device manufacturers probablly will but it doesn't make for a particularlly nice user experiance.
For the four patents on wikipedia and based on information on US patent expiry on wikipedia (i'm not a lawyer nor am I in the US so if this is important to you check it yourself)
According to my calculations the first patent would expire on April 28 2016, the second on november 26 2014 and the third on may 26 1998.
I'm not sure when the fourth patent (which according to wikipedia experts think does not apply to most implementations on other operating systems) would expire because i'm not sure what this "priority" thing means but afaict it would be at the latest 2017
True, but this is where someone has to find something that offers something equivalent and easily implementable Thats easy enough, just use the same basic principles as FAT but design it for long filenames from the start.
The real problem is that device manufacturers want to be able to offer devices that are "driver free". That means using a filesystem that windows supports out of the box.
(note: FAT in this post reffers to FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 which all handle filenames in the same way, exFAT is completely different afaict)
"8.3 filenames" are the type of filename that FAT natively uses.
The character encoding is either ascii or the "OEM" character set of the machine (I don't remember which) all filenames are uppercased. Only one . is allowed (which isn't actually stored on the disk so "FILENAME" and "FILNAME." are equivilent) with up to 8 characters before and 3 characters afterwards.
MS added support for long filenames to FAT with windows 95 (and later NT) using a dirty hack (storing the long filename in specially crafted "volume label" entries and filling the filename with an autogenerated 8.3 alias (e.g. PROGRA~1). Somehow they managed to convince the patent office to accept a patent on their dirty hack. Worse after issuing some priliminary rejections during a reexam the patent office turned round and upheld the patent.
Well in the case of downloading from a conventional server (http, ftp, etc) the server operator and their hosting provider probablly know from thier logs. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the ??AA or thier cronies could either be running the website or get the logs through some means (e.g. discovery in a court case against the website).
Still you are far less likely to get in trouble for downloading illegal content from conventional servers than for getting it over P2P. P2P relies on connecting to unknown peers which have a far greater chance of being controlled by the ??AA. Bittorrent is particularlly dangerous because downloading practically requires uploading and anyone can get a list of IPs that are participating in the sharing of a particular file.
Nobody asks, when they buy a copy of a board game, who invented the game or who made this copy. They worry about price, and how much enjoyment they will get out of it, and such. If they like chess more than Risk, they'll buy chess, even though nobody has a copyright on it. If you point out they could make their own chess set instead of buying one, they'll point out that they'd rather buy one than spend the time and effort, thanks. If they'd rather spend the time and effort, they'd have already started making their own. The thing is there are loads of manufacturers of chess sets. If you are cheap you can buy whatever is cheapest. If you want something better you can ask friends for thier experiance with different brands, read reviews or whatever. OTOH if you want Risk there is only hasbro, take it or leave it (or possiblly make a pirate copy).
Both the retailers and the end users can easilly dump thier vendors if the quality of your chess sets goes down, the price goes up or the lead time gets worse. OTOH if the quality if hasbros risk sets goes down, the price goes up or the lead time gets worse people who want risk still have to keep getting it from hasbro (or pirating it but pirating a board game is a lot of work)
The same applies to linux and windows. If you want to carry on using linux (even redhat-like linux) but don't like redhat there are other options who will supply and support almost identicaly setups (or you could just download centos and forgo the support if you don't think you need it any more). If you want to keep using windows you have no choice but to keep buying from MS (or pirating it but pirating for a buisness is risky)
To put it another way Redhat's value is almost entirely in it's customer and employee goodwill. Both of those are things that are easilly lost in the SNAFUs that follow a typical merger.
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An unregulated nuclear industry does not mean plants can pour waste in other people's property.
And what happens if due to some accident they do spread a load of waste over other peoples property? Sure you can send them to PMITA prison but that doesn't fix anything. Sure you can sue them into bankrupcy but they are unlikely to have anything like the money to pay for the damage they caused.
Since governments regulate commons they must either take responsibility to ensure they are not destroyed
Which requires them to 1: punish those who deliberately act to destroy them and 2: REGULATE actions that have an unacceptable chance of accidently destroying them.
or privatize them to internalize the externalities.
Which is kinda impractical when the commons in question is the air we all have to live in and breathe.
If you took the time to read the description, you'd have learned that distributor are mandated to offer the french version of a game provided that it already exists somewhere else.
Presumably this means that given that the upstream developer plans to release in english first and other languages later the canadian distributer has a couple of choices.
1: delay the release in quebec to wait for the french translation. This will piss off the gamers who want to get thier games quickly (much as it already pisses off a lot of european gamers). It will also hurt the retailers as many gamers may give up on them and order from the USA or other parts of canada.
2: deal with a double release, once with the american version and again with a version that includes french. That french release will have to be made no later than any french release elsewhere in the world and all shops in quebec who have stock of the english release will have to buy it or be unable to sell thier english stock.
Yeah, they took out a couple of skyscrapers by using airliners as missiles, a trick that will probablly be EXTREMELY difficult to repeat anytime soon because passengers will now remember that event whenever a hijacking occours.
It all comes down to numbers, sure terrorists may manage to take out the odd skyscraper from time to time and criminals may take out the odd windmill from time to time but there is no real terror in taking out the odd windmill unlike in taking out the odd skyscraper.
I wonder if that has a noticeable impact on the Earth's climate. I really don't know
Lets try a quick calcuation to get an order of magnitude estimate on it's signficance.
according to wikipedia the suns intensity on reaching earth is over a kilowatt per square meter. The cross sectional area of the earth is rouhgly 10^14 square meters
combine those and you get a solar input energy of over 10^17 watts
10 terrawatts is 10^13 watts
So the energy we are releasing is roughly FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less than the solar input energy. Sounds pretty minor to me.
Just like water vapor gets overlooked so often.
IIRC water vapor is already pretty much saturated in the atnosphere so releasing more of it doesn't have any significant effect, it just comes back out. (IIRC it can be a feedback factor though)
2K/XP (which are really in the grand scheme of things pretty similar) gave us hugely more stability and scalability than 9x (at least if you had hardware it got along with, I used to have some hardware that just didn't get along with 2K). This was something most of us power users (who are the ones that drive the computing media) could really appreciate. Yes there WAS performance and compatibilty issues but at least we could see significant upsides as well as downsides.
On 9x you could exhaust GDI resources simply by filling a single row taskbar with browser windows (and this was pre tabbed browsing). Having to close some stuff so other stuff would get the GDI resources it needed to render properly was often a major PITA.
What does vista give you? some eye candy, some security improvements (most of which are half baked) and slightly better support for heavilly locked down drm media.
The "let new machines have vista" approach may be good for small/hetrogenous buisnesses but for larger buisness it means supporting and testing everything on two different operating system versions for no good reason. It also may mean extra costs training people on both systems.
Much easier to wait until the machine stock is all beefy enough to run windows 7 and then roll it out one class of user at a time.
Windows versions upgrades aren't exactly known for being a reliable option. I strongly suspect that most organisations who deploy a new version of windows will do so by building a new image from scratch and then reimaging the machines.
Unavailibility of a direct path for upgrading without reinstalling may be an issue in some edge cases but it's not a huge deal.
Vista 64 is a giant steaming pile of crap that needs to die,die,die,die.. Vista64 is typically the cause of every incompatibility report on the net for Vista it's a steaming pile of crap that is incompatible with everything.
And you think the 64 bit version of windows 7 will be any better in that regard?
The fact is that 64 bit windows has compatibility issues that WILL NOT go away The only reasonable fix is for the vendors of hardware and software to update thier drivers to work in a 64 bit environment.
Sooner or later (MS currently give a date just under 5 years away though they may extend it) MS will stop security updates for XP. Running your main desktop image on a system that is no longer getting security updates seems rather reckless to me.
Plus I would expect once windows 7 comes out XP drivers may start to dry up. I doubt most vendors will want to support THREE versions of windows at once.
Also when windows 7 comes out OEM copies will probablly only come with downgrade rights to vista so if you want to keep using XP you will have to buy volume licenses for all new machines that you want to run XP on (granted many buisnesses do that anyway)
Another problem is software in general is stil getting gradually more bloated. Sooner or later it will become nessacery to take the pain of going 64 bit and drivers for XP professional x64 edition are often hard to find.
Standarising on XP is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for now and probablly for the next couple of years but i'm willing to bet that in a few years time there WILL be heavy pressures to upgrade just as most buisnesses eventually ended up on XP.
Last I checked XP was still an option on the dell website for ordinary customers buying buisness machines. I think it's even an option on one or two of thier consumer machines.
Yeah, plus how hard/expensive will it be to get a new PC with XP instead of Vista?
Big customers don't care what the OEM windows sticker on the machine says. It's only purpose is to satisfy the fact that windows volume licenses are generally for upgrading/downgrading only not for installs on machines with no previous versions of windows. Thats why you see so many machines in big organisations with XP home or vista home basic license stickers even though they are running XP pro.
When the machine arrives it gets it's stock windows install blown away and replaced with a corporate image based on an install from VLK media. Some OEMs will even preload your image for you if you make a big enough order.
A bigger issue is drivers but I suspect as long as most big organisations want to run XP the big buisness PC vendors will supply them with XP drivers.
Eventually they will probablly have to upgrade to something but in most cases I doubt it will be vista (I suspect most of them will move to windows 7 in the end, some may also take the approach of running mostly linux with windows XP in a vm for apps that need it)
Big DC systems have thier problems too, if you run at telco standard 48V then the distribution losses are a killer. If you run at higher DC voltages you need all special stuff to safely handle the DC (DC is a LOT more prone to arcing at the same voltage, so you can't just take a switch or outlet rated for 500V AC and use it for 500V DC. They also only tend to save one conversion since you still need to convert from the distribution DC to the DC the server wants.
I read an APC paper not so long ago on this ( http://www.apcmedia.com/salestools/SADE-5TNRLG_R4_EN.pdf ) that conculded that a hypothetical 500V DC system was marginally more efficiant than the 230/400 three phase AC system which is commonly used in europe now but the difference was far less than that between the american AC system and the european AC system.
Viewed in this light putting the battery IN the server seems to be the masterstroke, it brings the advantages of reduced conversion steps without the downsides of trying to distribute DC arround a datacenter.
Modern high speed chips (which draw the bulk of the power in a typical PC) run thier core logic at much lower voltages. Typically somewhere between 1V and 2V though I think some may have gone below a volt now. Theese very low voltages have to be produced very close to the chip that uses them to avoid huge losses.
This means that modern PC motherboards take most of thier power at 12V anyway. The 5V and 3.3V lines really only serve to power the low speed chips and some of the interfaces between chips.
Given that I doubt there would be too much efficiancy loss from making a 12V only board. You could probablly even design it to hapilly deal with an input that was only approximately 12V without losing too much (since most of that 12V power is going to the input of switchers anyway).
Carbon from biomass is just cycling in and out of the atmosphere, no big deal.
The problem is digging up carbon that has been buried for millions of years and releasing it (either directly into the atnosphere or into a place where it is likely to get released).
How is a mac mini [apple.com] different from what you want?
The mini is a FAR lower spec machine than the imacs (though admittedly with the current gen it's not quite as bad as it used to be).
Yes, sadly theese days you pretty much have to treat CPU and motherboard as a unit. Still that doesn't mean there aren't lots of reasons for wanting to upgrade.
Graphics is generally upgradable, yes you may have problems with the uber high end stuff drawing a lot of power (but then apple doesn't offer the uber high end graphics at all) or with the switch from AGP to PCIe but generally it's not a huge problem (and I doubt PCIe is going to get replaced any time soon).
Storage is another area, if I want more storage on my desktop it's no problem I just bung another hard drive in (and maybe add a SATA card if it's an older machine). If I want more storage on an imac/mini I have to either replace the drive (a lot of work and considerablly reduces both the bang for buck and the maximum capacity obtainable) or use a crappy external drive.
Networking is another area, some of us have to use more than one network for various reasons, with the imac/mini the only way to do this is to use a crappy USB adaptor.
The pricing of Macs is really pretty simple to explain: Apple doesn't make cheap computers. That's "cheap" in the sense of "low price" and in the sense of "low quality". The have a wide range of performance specs available, but none of them are built like crap, which puts a floor on the product pricing. But at just about every level of quality, the price is pretty comparable to equal machines from the competition.
Yes and no even if you are looking for quality hardware the small range and weird contents of that small ranage often means it's far more expensive to get what you want. And sometimes you simply can't find a mac with what you want.
Look at dells site, even when you exclude the cheap end (though still reasonable quality in my experiance) inspiron and vostro lines you still see a HUGE choice and that is just one PC vendor.
Suppose for example I want a desktop with a proper desktop hard drive (for performance or capacity or whatever) and the ability to run a matched pair of monitors.
If I buy from apple the only way I can get this is to buy a mac pro which starts at £1899 (inc VAT and delivery). To add insult to injury I also have to buy a mini-displayport to DVI adaptor for the second monmitor.
If I buy a dell on the other hand I can get an optiplex 960 with XP pro, a quad core CPU at a higher clock, more ram and a comparable ammount of hdd space (though split accross two drives because for some reason dell don't sell large drives with this model) for £1,099.40 .
£830 is a BIG premium.
Sure the mac pro is built out of server hardware but unless you really need 8 cores or more than 8 gigs of ram I don't consider that a major advantage (also the current 4 core mac pro only seems to support 8 gig of ram, if you want more you are forced to go 8 core).
I can't find any apple markings on the ram that I pulled out of my macbook (which is getting on for two years old now) soon after I bought it. The hard drive which I replaced at the same time did have an apple logo on the label though.
BTW if anyone cares the modules I pulled out were hynix, the ones I replaced them with were crucial.
And yes apple does rip you off on the BTO options but they are far from the only offender in this regard. Recently I specced out a dell vostro desktop for my brother and the cost of getting them to put a DVD writer in place of the DVD rom was more than the cost of simply buying a DVD rom drive.
how does it measure length of posts though? does it measure grapheme clusters, console positions, code points or code units.
Consider PNG. It's a great format, and I prefer it over GIF whenever possible, but the fact remains that by the time real PNG support got widespread enough matter, the GIF patents had expired and so the original point of PNG was moot.
Basic png support was pretty widespread quite some time before the patent expired.
Alpha channel support in browsers took longer but then the browsers didn't support alpha channel for any other formats either afaict.
Still a combination of misinformation and apathy meant that gif remained very common.
For a floppy you are going to use FAT12 which is old enough that even if it had been patented would now be free to use, FAT16 for small volumes is almost as old and probably not covered either. It's just for modern high capacity volumes that it's an issue.
WRONG
The fat patents are to do with long filenames (a feature added with windows 95) and apply equally to the use of long filenames on FAT12 FAT16 and FAT32.
You could live without long filenames of course and some device manufacturers probablly will but it doesn't make for a particularlly nice user experiance.
For the four patents on wikipedia and based on information on US patent expiry on wikipedia (i'm not a lawyer nor am I in the US so if this is important to you check it yourself)
According to my calculations the first patent would expire on April 28 2016, the second on november 26 2014 and the third on may 26 1998.
I'm not sure when the fourth patent (which according to wikipedia experts think does not apply to most implementations on other operating systems) would expire because i'm not sure what this "priority" thing means but afaict it would be at the latest 2017
True, but this is where someone has to find something that offers something equivalent and easily implementable
Thats easy enough, just use the same basic principles as FAT but design it for long filenames from the start.
The real problem is that device manufacturers want to be able to offer devices that are "driver free". That means using a filesystem that windows supports out of the box.
(note: FAT in this post reffers to FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 which all handle filenames in the same way, exFAT is completely different afaict)
"8.3 filenames" are the type of filename that FAT natively uses.
The character encoding is either ascii or the "OEM" character set of the machine (I don't remember which) all filenames are uppercased. Only one . is allowed (which isn't actually stored on the disk so "FILENAME" and "FILNAME." are equivilent) with up to 8 characters before and 3 characters afterwards.
MS added support for long filenames to FAT with windows 95 (and later NT) using a dirty hack (storing the long filename in specially crafted "volume label" entries and filling the filename with an autogenerated 8.3 alias (e.g. PROGRA~1). Somehow they managed to convince the patent office to accept a patent on their dirty hack. Worse after issuing some priliminary rejections during a reexam the patent office turned round and upheld the patent.
Well in the case of downloading from a conventional server (http, ftp, etc) the server operator and their hosting provider probablly know from thier logs. It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the ??AA or thier cronies could either be running the website or get the logs through some means (e.g. discovery in a court case against the website).
Still you are far less likely to get in trouble for downloading illegal content from conventional servers than for getting it over P2P. P2P relies on connecting to unknown peers which have a far greater chance of being controlled by the ??AA. Bittorrent is particularlly dangerous because downloading practically requires uploading and anyone can get a list of IPs that are participating in the sharing of a particular file.
Nobody asks, when they buy a copy of a board game, who invented the game or who made this copy. They worry about price, and how much enjoyment they will get out of it, and such. If they like chess more than Risk, they'll buy chess, even though nobody has a copyright on it. If you point out they could make their own chess set instead of buying one, they'll point out that they'd rather buy one than spend the time and effort, thanks. If they'd rather spend the time and effort, they'd have already started making their own.
The thing is there are loads of manufacturers of chess sets. If you are cheap you can buy whatever is cheapest. If you want something better you can ask friends for thier experiance with different brands, read reviews or whatever. OTOH if you want Risk there is only hasbro, take it or leave it (or possiblly make a pirate copy).
Both the retailers and the end users can easilly dump thier vendors if the quality of your chess sets goes down, the price goes up or the lead time gets worse. OTOH if the quality if hasbros risk sets goes down, the price goes up or the lead time gets worse people who want risk still have to keep getting it from hasbro (or pirating it but pirating a board game is a lot of work)
The same applies to linux and windows. If you want to carry on using linux (even redhat-like linux) but don't like redhat there are other options who will supply and support almost identicaly setups (or you could just download centos and forgo the support if you don't think you need it any more). If you want to keep using windows you have no choice but to keep buying from MS (or pirating it but pirating for a buisness is risky)
To put it another way Redhat's value is almost entirely in it's customer and employee goodwill. Both of those are things that are easilly lost in the SNAFUs that follow a typical merger.