Even at $24.95/mo, you'd be saving 60 cents a year on OS upgrades by ditching OSX. $25 is the break-even point for you OS X'ers. Are there really OS-X realeases every 6 months? and do many people really buy all of them at full price?
and there is no way to have any kinda access to address spaces of other processes There are however ways to have sections of memory that map into the address space of multiple processes.
As you might know, Virtual memory is completely interlinked with hardware and has its own cost. It does, but it is highly optimised in modern hardware. There is a cost at context switch time of course but I'm not convinced a context switch between software isolated processes would be that much cheaper.
I mean, take Stallman, even -he- who wrote the GPLv3 in part to counter DRM isn't against code signing. He just requires that the keys necessary to sign code be included, so the owner of the hardware and user of GPLv3 code can sign it, and thereby be free to make modifications and excercise all the freedoms intended by the gpl. Right which is the antithesis of what "trusted computing" is all about. Trusted computing is all about allowing vendors like microsoft to trust the computer to work in thier partners interests rather than the users.
C++ does know the size of arrays. Not quite, C and C++ know the size of memory blocks allocated with malloc or new and can retrive that information given a pointer to the start of the block.
What they don't know is given a pointer to an array whether that pointer points to the start of a memory block on the heap or to an array on the stack or to part of a larger array on the heap.
This makes it rather difficult to add strong bounds checking in a way that doesn't break existing correct code.
For example, an apple iPod classic 80GB black - $228.54 in the USA, £140.97 in the UK. Using the current exchange rate, that's $280 US. $50 difference, about 20%. Less than the software, but it might be indicative. Do remember that uk prices are usually quoted inclusive of VAT while US prices are usually quoted exclusive of sales tax so those prices aren't as different as they first appear.
It probablly is but electronics is typically covered in all sorts of crap (both from the manufacturing process and picked up during use) so your pure water won't stay pure for long.
Also if the device is immersed in impure water then your pure water will gradually mix with the impure stuff.
Afaict thier buisness model is to give away the stuff you can get for free elsewhere in the hope of tempting you to upgrade to a version with more features.
I think vmware is going to strugle long term though. As MS and FOSS keep uppping the features I think vmware will strugle to find features that people are willing to pay for.
trouble is open source isn't exactly a brilliant term either because there is plenty of software where the source is easilly availible (either to customers or even to the general public) but under licenses that mean you can do very little with it.
I'm sure they knew this would happen when they went Intel. Afaict apple didn't really have much choice but to go to intel (or maybe they could have gone AMD but that would have had all of the downsides and less of the upsides of going to intel). The G5 was unsuitable for laptops and lacked little endian mode crippling virtual pc. The G4 was getting very old and way behind the performance of PC technology (even the G5 wasn't exactly doing brilliantly in this regard).
If you don't agree to the GPL and you distribute GPL covered software then you committing copyright infringement. In most western countries including the USA copyright infingement is both a crime (those this sort of case is unlikely to hit the criminal courts in pracitce) and grounds for some pretty scary statutory damages in civil court.
EULAs are based on a similar theory assuming the copies you make onto your hard drive and into ram are infringing. But that is on much shakier legal ground.
This sort of knowledge gap exists in many arenas. A classic error in client-server software: never trust the client. So many "hacks" in online games boil down to the game server trusting the game client to obey the rules, when it's really the server's responsibility to handle all the rule enforcement. Unfortunately for a game to be popular it needs to be responsive. Often that means the client doing some of the movement and hit calculations and then the server adjusting those to keep the world somewhat in sync rather than the game doing all the calculations.
And of course it would be crazy to do all the rendering on the server so the client ends of
OTOH more serious software certainly should not be trusting clients without a very good reason.
Ubuntu is built off a snapshot of Unstable, Not exactly, changes are auto-imported from debian unstable only for packages that don't have any ubuntu specific changes.
so I don't see how Debian's freeze will affect it. Debian tries to keep testing and unstable pretty close to each other. Changes in unstable that are not wanted in testing can be a major PITA when bugs need to be fixed (there is another way into testing but they prefer not to use it because the packages get far less testing when they are introduced by that route).
So while unstable is not technically frozen developers are strongly discouraged from uploading stuff to unstable that are not intended to become part of lenny
Using stable in your sources.list is generally a bad idea. Moving from release to release should be a concious dessision done with a copy of the release notes in hand. Going in with a blind dist-upgrade often causes problems which may be tricky to recover from.
Presumablly if you were paying someone to sit your exam for you then you would give them your key.
Thumb readers don't seem like they would help much either.
To be honest I think having students sit exams on thier own computers in thier own homes is unreasonablly risky even with a camera. How do you know that the camera is next to the keyboard that is being used to do the test. A monitor splitter and a dummy keyboard should fool someone looking through the camera especially if the resoloution is crappy.
Laws generally only work correctly when everyone buys into the system. True but that is an ideal that is unlikley to be reached.
Do you drive with flat tires? Do you drive at night with your lights off? Do you burn other people's houses down for fun? No? Why? Because it is illegal? Probably not. Rather, it is bad for the car, dangerous, and ethically wrong, respectively. Indeed i'm sure that is true for most people. Unfortunately for every rule there are exceptions.
It doesn't take many people driving without any respect for othere drivers to fuck things up big time for all the other drivers in the area. It doesn't take many people burning down houses for fun to set a whole neighbourhood on fire. People who would consider doing theese things need to be either scared into not doing them or if that fails rounded up and removed from society,
IMO it is a similar case with cheating in exams.
Lets assume that naturally 5% of students get marks in the top band and that 10% of students would cheat to get into that top band if they thought they could get away with it. You would end up in a situation where most of the students receiving top marks were cheaters. That would seriously fuck things up for the real high achivers and those looking to employ said high achivers.
IMO it is at least highly deceptive to call yourself a "university" and call what you issue "degrees" when it is awarded under far lower standards than degrees from the traditional institutions. Unfortunately it seems that in the USA that cat is far too far out of the bag to put back in.
Learning on your own has a few problems. The lack of a bit of paper is one problem but it's certainly not the only one. Other big ones are.
Access to resources: This is not an issue for all disciplines but for something like EE or chemistry you really need to get experiance with kit most people won't be able to keep at home.
Planning: Figuring out what to learn, what not to learn, what order to learn it in and so on can be very hard if you have no experiance in the field.
Discipline: Having the discipline to learn things that don't come naturally to many people but without which you can never truly understand many things that are important to your field (e.g. calculus for those studying physics and most types of engineering).
Access to experiance: When you have a problem understanding something it is often far more productive to talk to people who have more experiance in the field than you. At university you generally have access to such people.
I'm assuming that when "upgrading" from XP to Vista you pay the full Vista price, is that correct? No you buy an upgrade copy which is considerablly cheaper than a full retail version.
Or if you are prepared to bend the rules you buy a system builder pack because that is cheaper than either retail or retail upgrade.
In fact, Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs moved to Brazil and became a citizen before anybody in the UK knew where he was (this was decades ago) and when they asked Brazil to extradite him, they were told basically "It sucks to be you". I was under the impression that he secured the protection from extridition by having a child over there.
A Mac can set you back a few thousand, but Microsoft's PC only... uh... okay, Microsoft don't sell PCs. They don't but they have a large network of OEMs who produce functional hardware at low prices with windows on it.
Sure if you try and spec out a PC that is similar to a mac you will end up with a similar price but the fact is that isn't how people select PCs.
So OS X costs $129, which is just ridiculous compared to Microsoft's Vista, which is only... oh. $239 is the recommended price for Home Premium, and goes up to $399 for Ultimate. Apples separately sold copies of mac OS (X or otherwise) come with a clause in the license agreement only allowing them to be used on apple hardware. This makes them essentially upgrades (since all apple hardware came with an existing copy of mac os). When you compare apples separately sold copies of OS-X with Microsoft's upgrade copies of windows the price range is similar (though apple does give a good deal to home users with multiple macs)
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Even at $24.95/mo, you'd be saving 60 cents a year on OS upgrades by ditching OSX. $25 is the break-even point for you OS X'ers.
Are there really OS-X realeases every 6 months? and do many people really buy all of them at full price?
and there is no way to have any kinda access to address spaces of other processes
There are however ways to have sections of memory that map into the address space of multiple processes.
As you might know, Virtual memory is completely interlinked with hardware and has its own cost.
It does, but it is highly optimised in modern hardware. There is a cost at context switch time of course but I'm not convinced a context switch between software isolated processes would be that much cheaper.
I mean, take Stallman, even -he- who wrote the GPLv3 in part to counter DRM isn't against code signing. He just requires that the keys necessary to sign code be included, so the owner of the hardware and user of GPLv3 code can sign it, and thereby be free to make modifications and excercise all the freedoms intended by the gpl.
Right which is the antithesis of what "trusted computing" is all about. Trusted computing is all about allowing vendors like microsoft to trust the computer to work in thier partners interests rather than the users.
C++ does know the size of arrays.
Not quite, C and C++ know the size of memory blocks allocated with malloc or new and can retrive that information given a pointer to the start of the block.
What they don't know is given a pointer to an array whether that pointer points to the start of a memory block on the heap or to an array on the stack or to part of a larger array on the heap.
This makes it rather difficult to add strong bounds checking in a way that doesn't break existing correct code.
They have to do the translations anyway, so why not ship all translations with every copy.
Because they can make more money if they don't.
For example, an apple iPod classic 80GB black - $228.54 in the USA, £140.97 in the UK. Using the current exchange rate, that's $280 US. $50 difference, about 20%. Less than the software, but it might be indicative.
Do remember that uk prices are usually quoted inclusive of VAT while US prices are usually quoted exclusive of sales tax so those prices aren't as different as they first appear.
and remember that many parts of the USA have state or local income tax as well!
It probablly is but electronics is typically covered in all sorts of crap (both from the manufacturing process and picked up during use) so your pure water won't stay pure for long.
Also if the device is immersed in impure water then your pure water will gradually mix with the impure stuff.
Afaict thier buisness model is to give away the stuff you can get for free elsewhere in the hope of tempting you to upgrade to a version with more features.
I think vmware is going to strugle long term though. As MS and FOSS keep uppping the features I think vmware will strugle to find features that people are willing to pay for.
trouble is open source isn't exactly a brilliant term either because there is plenty of software where the source is easilly availible (either to customers or even to the general public) but under licenses that mean you can do very little with it.
I'm sure they knew this would happen when they went Intel.
Afaict apple didn't really have much choice but to go to intel (or maybe they could have gone AMD but that would have had all of the downsides and less of the upsides of going to intel). The G5 was unsuitable for laptops and lacked little endian mode crippling virtual pc. The G4 was getting very old and way behind the performance of PC technology (even the G5 wasn't exactly doing brilliantly in this regard).
Who needs server logs, they can just sit on the tracker and log all the ip/port combos they see.
If you don't agree to the GPL and you distribute GPL covered software then you committing copyright infringement. In most western countries including the USA copyright infingement is both a crime (those this sort of case is unlikely to hit the criminal courts in pracitce) and grounds for some pretty scary statutory damages in civil court.
EULAs are based on a similar theory assuming the copies you make onto your hard drive and into ram are infringing. But that is on much shakier legal ground.
and then there is dreamspark where MS officially gives thier software away to students.
This sort of knowledge gap exists in many arenas. A classic error in client-server software: never trust the client. So many "hacks" in online games boil down to the game server trusting the game client to obey the rules, when it's really the server's responsibility to handle all the rule enforcement.
Unfortunately for a game to be popular it needs to be responsive. Often that means the client doing some of the movement and hit calculations and then the server adjusting those to keep the world somewhat in sync rather than the game doing all the calculations.
And of course it would be crazy to do all the rendering on the server so the client ends of
OTOH more serious software certainly should not be trusting clients without a very good reason.
Ubuntu is built off a snapshot of Unstable,
Not exactly, changes are auto-imported from debian unstable only for packages that don't have any ubuntu specific changes.
so I don't see how Debian's freeze will affect it.
Debian tries to keep testing and unstable pretty close to each other. Changes in unstable that are not wanted in testing can be a major PITA when bugs need to be fixed (there is another way into testing but they prefer not to use it because the packages get far less testing when they are introduced by that route).
So while unstable is not technically frozen developers are strongly discouraged from uploading stuff to unstable that are not intended to become part of lenny
his link was wrong
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/libatlas3gf-base
Using stable in your sources.list is generally a bad idea. Moving from release to release should be a concious dessision done with a copy of the release notes in hand. Going in with a blind dist-upgrade often causes problems which may be tricky to recover from.
Presumablly if you were paying someone to sit your exam for you then you would give them your key.
Thumb readers don't seem like they would help much either.
To be honest I think having students sit exams on thier own computers in thier own homes is unreasonablly risky even with a camera. How do you know that the camera is next to the keyboard that is being used to do the test. A monitor splitter and a dummy keyboard should fool someone looking through the camera especially if the resoloution is crappy.
Laws generally only work correctly when everyone buys into the system.
True but that is an ideal that is unlikley to be reached.
Do you drive with flat tires? Do you drive at night with your lights off? Do you burn other people's houses down for fun? No? Why? Because it is illegal? Probably not. Rather, it is bad for the car, dangerous, and ethically wrong, respectively.
Indeed i'm sure that is true for most people. Unfortunately for every rule there are exceptions.
It doesn't take many people driving without any respect for othere drivers to fuck things up big time for all the other drivers in the area. It doesn't take many people burning down houses for fun to set a whole neighbourhood on fire. People who would consider doing theese things need to be either scared into not doing them or if that fails rounded up and removed from society,
IMO it is a similar case with cheating in exams.
Lets assume that naturally 5% of students get marks in the top band and that 10% of students would cheat to get into that top band if they thought they could get away with it. You would end up in a situation where most of the students receiving top marks were cheaters. That would seriously fuck things up for the real high achivers and those looking to employ said high achivers.
IMO it is at least highly deceptive to call yourself a "university" and call what you issue "degrees" when it is awarded under far lower standards than degrees from the traditional institutions. Unfortunately it seems that in the USA that cat is far too far out of the bag to put back in.
Learning on your own has a few problems. The lack of a bit of paper is one problem but it's certainly not the only one. Other big ones are.
Access to resources: This is not an issue for all disciplines but for something like EE or chemistry you really need to get experiance with kit most people won't be able to keep at home.
Planning: Figuring out what to learn, what not to learn, what order to learn it in and so on can be very hard if you have no experiance in the field.
Discipline: Having the discipline to learn things that don't come naturally to many people but without which you can never truly understand many things that are important to your field (e.g. calculus for those studying physics and most types of engineering).
Access to experiance: When you have a problem understanding something it is often far more productive to talk to people who have more experiance in the field than you. At university you generally have access to such people.
I'm assuming that when "upgrading" from XP to Vista you pay the full Vista price, is that correct?
No you buy an upgrade copy which is considerablly cheaper than a full retail version.
Or if you are prepared to bend the rules you buy a system builder pack because that is cheaper than either retail or retail upgrade.
In fact, Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs moved to Brazil and became a citizen before anybody in the UK knew where he was (this was decades ago) and when they asked Brazil to extradite him, they were told basically "It sucks to be you".
I was under the impression that he secured the protection from extridition by having a child over there.
A Mac can set you back a few thousand, but Microsoft's PC only... uh... okay, Microsoft don't sell PCs.
They don't but they have a large network of OEMs who produce functional hardware at low prices with windows on it.
Sure if you try and spec out a PC that is similar to a mac you will end up with a similar price but the fact is that isn't how people select PCs.
So OS X costs $129, which is just ridiculous compared to Microsoft's Vista, which is only... oh. $239 is the recommended price for Home Premium, and goes up to $399 for Ultimate.
Apples separately sold copies of mac OS (X or otherwise) come with a clause in the license agreement only allowing them to be used on apple hardware. This makes them essentially upgrades (since all apple hardware came with an existing copy of mac os). When you compare apples separately sold copies of OS-X with Microsoft's upgrade copies of windows the price range is similar (though apple does give a good deal to home users with multiple macs)