They could, and with the signed drivers being required for at least 64-bit Vista, they could enforce it. But I'd be VERY willing to bet that if Microsoft even hinted at this, the hardware maker would just have to threaten to call the DOJ and Microsoft would backpedal faster than you could say "antitrust."
And you also mentioned the other solution if Microsoft does make threatening noises. With both the Windows and Linux kernel driver APIs being stable, it should be trivial to make a translation wrapper between the two. MS would have their hands tied in keeping drivers off Linux if that happens as they'd have to stop their own driver development. MS needs as many good drivers as they can get for even 32-bit Vista, let alone anything 64-bit. If I were Microsoft, I'd be helping out all I could to get a stable wrapper or translation layer so that a "universal" driver for both Linux and Vista could be made by device manufacturers. Vista notoriously lacks drivers, especially Vista 64-bit, and Linux has enough to make most things work, especially for corporate machines and in server rooms. Both of those areas are ones that are much more likely to consider switching to Linux from W2K/XP than to Vista than the ordinary Joe. Or they will sit on XP like many sat on W2K until around the time XP SP2 came out. Both results would give MS no sales, and since they are also MS's most profitable markets, not upgrading to Vista would be a serious blow to MS. So I think that taking a risk that some previous 2K/XP switch to Linux because of more driver support is far outweighed by the increased number of Vista sales because of better driver support.
Herpes is a virus, it does not have spores. And unless they put their hands in their mouths right after touching a keyboard that was very freshly seeded with herpes virus, it would die and they would not get it. However, a toxic mold would do the trick with the spores.
I would be willing to bet that it won't be as different as it was a few years ago. It's not usually the IT department that's against OSS, but generally the PHBs and the beancounters as they tend to hear as much as the MS FUD as the geeks do but none of the rebuttals. As such, they get scared and it's easy to say no when the financial benefits are unclear but the (apparent) risks are. Firefox has become popular enough without any legal trouble from MS or others that it's become a known quantity to most of the PHBs and beancounters, so they are starting to allow it.
There is also an uptick in interest in and installations of Linux and other non-MS OSes on the desktop in companies due to the planned forced license migration to Vista, the fact that most of them already run it in the server rooms to good effect, feature set, security, etc. Firefox is generally the default browser in those systems, so if you're in a non-MS shop, you'll not be using IE. I happen to work in a shop where all but one of the computers are Windows (my Linux dev machine is the exception), but almost all of them have Firefox installed and most people use Firefox instead of IE.
We use them both because they mean different things. In the US, a college is a two-year institution that grants associates' degrees and certificates while a university is a four-year or more institution that grants at least bachelor's degrees, and many also grant masters' and doctoral/professional degrees as well.
I don't know if there are the equivalent of two-year community/junior colleges in England, so that might explain a lack of the word "college" in an Englishman's vocabulary. I suppose an analog of that would be how there are very few "traffic circles" over here in the U.S., so the word isn't in our general vocabulary. Apparently neither is the ability to drive one, as the only one I know of has far more accidents per year than a flat intersection with roughly as much traffic.
Unfortunately, laws come as all-or-nothing affairs as they are supposed to be enforced completely.* A good law with bad rider provisions makes for a bad law. I think what you were looking for is "the main part of the DMCA would have been a good law, but the poisonous rider provisions ruined it."
*Obviously this is not always true in real-life as laws can be selectively enforced (e.g. letting somebody going 60 in a 55 zone pass by but nabbing the guy going 70) or not enforced at all. But one generally has to assume that a new law will be completely enforced as the bill intends when passing judgment on it, because one *could* be held to the letter of it and not let off easy.
But then what will the secretaries do for a pastime since they can't use 10 different fonts like MS Comic Sans and insert two dozen pieces of clip art into a simple one-sentence notice?
The indemnification is not against the maker of the OSS app will go after you for having it installed. It's against Microsoft or any other patent troll who claims that their patents are being stepped on by that OSS app you've installed going after you. Microsoft has rattled their patent saber a bunch, with the accusation that OpenOffce violated 60-some-odd patents patents, although Microsoft says they will neither disclose which patents were violated or sue OpenOffice.org users.
Indemnification is merely something to let people that buy into all the FUD sleep easier at night.
The DRM isn't just tied to DRM'ed music (or video) files and their players anymore, bud. DRM is in the OS all the way down to the hardware level. It runs no matter if you're playing non-DRM'ed or DRM'ed files, or even playing anything at all.
Apple did switch to Intel chips and Intel makes proprietary compilers for its chips. I'd be willing to bet that Apple and Intel might team up to make a MacOS X proprietary compiler if it hasn't already been started. That would rid Apple of having to use GCC. However, they still use a lot of the GNU userland and utilities in OS X and Apple would need to rewrite (or fork) those if they want them to stay GPLv2.
A cattle prod works better than a baseball bat, but locking the users in the tape safe is the only sure way to ensure that they can't steal CPU cycles.
Well, you could give us the specs and load of your computer, for one thing. It also might help to up the kernel timer to 1000 Hz too. I only see that kind of behavior when I am using a slow single-core machine and am absolutely burying the system with tasks. My dual-core desktop doesn't seem to have any lagging issues with X, even when it's pretty heavily loaded.
Four letters: T-C-P-A. You could probably still build your own, but it would have to be some kind of custom FPGA job because all "usual" hardware would require all of the hardware DRM nonsense. About the only part of the PC that doesn't have DRM applicable to it today is the power supply. Even your monitor has DRM in the form of HDCP. You also would not be able to connect to the Internet because "untrusted" machines would not be allowed to connect. So unless you want to build a cobbled-together FPGA unit and run it on an underground POTS network like in the old days, 'Tivoization' is really really bad news and Stallmann et. al. are right to see how bad it could get and try to prevent it.
Now WILL the doomsday scenario happen? That's up for debate. My guess is that it won't completely as there are both a bunch of legacy devices and programs that won't work and that DRM implementations are rarely well-implemented and commonly piss off Joe User. There are many more Joe Users than RMSes out there, so Joe User is much more influential in what manufacturers will push on people. But the mechanism of action is known and the hardware will certainly allow for it, so I'd be at least a bit antsy.
Re:To all those complainers
on
GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 1
Yes, but they all say pretty much the same things:
1. You are only buying a license and cannot copy or redistribute. 2. You have no access to the source code. 3. The license is not transferrable, either from person to person (can't sell it), machine to machine (can't take from one computer, put on another) or from media to media (can't take from a CD and put on a DVD.) 4. We are not liable for any damage the software causes due to malfunctioning (this is shared with the GPL as well.)
The Rage chip is in very few laptops any more- it's primarily seen in server motherboards today. Even then, the ES1000 is starting replacing the Rage in server boards. I have not seen any laptops in the past half-decade or more using the Rage chips. It's been Intel i810 IGP, 845/855 Extreme Graphics, or one of the GMA revisions; NVIDIA GeForce 6100/6150, or the ATi Xpress 200M/Radeon x12x0 if it wasn't a discrete card.
Yes and no. You are correct in that a two-platter 250 GB drive and a two-platter 320 GB drive likely use the same platters, with the 250 GB unit being "locked." But the hard drive manufacturer can and does vary the number of platters for differing capacities as well as putting in a different motor for different speeds. Intel generally has one set of dies for all of a certain arch of chip- the Core Duo, Core Solo, Pentium Dual Core, and Celeron M 400 series are made from the same mask. Even the Core 2 Duos are generally all made from one mask, with a handful of Merom-2Ms and Allendales being made from the smaller 111 mm^2 mask rather than the 140 mm^2 one for 4 MB L2 cache.
People always expect doctors to do something, even if the doctor is very vocal about there being no good treatment available. I've seen lots of people walk into doctors' offices and DEMAND a certain medication or treatment that is not advisable. A very common one used to be mothers demanding antibiotics to give to their kid who is sick with a viral flu. The doctor said in no uncertain terms that antibiotics will do absolutely nothing and that prescribing antibiotics will only cost money and perhaps have side effects. But the mothers had to have some medicine to feed to the kid just to satiate their mothering genes. Most of the docs I know told them to give the kid Tylenol if they had a fever or "prescribed" X ounces of fluids per hour- something to keep the mother mothering the kid.
People will also want the doctor to do "something" even if nothing is wrong because they don't want to feel dumb for going when nothing was wrong. They want to justify that something was actually wrong so they don't feel foolish. Add to that the fact that most people have to pay some as a co-pay for a doctor's office visit and "want to get their money's worth."
So sometimes picking "no action" can be very hard to do.
It would have to be a Core 2 Duo ULV, either the 1066 MHz or 1200 MHz model. No other Core 2 Duo would be able to run for 14 hours in that thin of a laptop.
Gasoline taxes are roughly 30 to 60 cents per gallon in the Midwestern U.S. I pay 38.7 cents of tax for every gallon of gas I buy here in Missouri in addition to about 8.3% sales tax- the 4.225% state sales tax plus the local sales tax of a little over 4% (yes, it's that high and I tend to buy goods out of town where the local sales taxes are ~2%.)
So if gas was untaxed, it would be the spot price that's seen on Bloomberg TV or any commodities ticker. It's currently at $2.40 for the NY Harbor market index.
Mediacom (AT&T subsidiary) 8 Mbps/512 Kbps cable. There aren't that many people on my trunk, so I never fail to hit 950 KB/sec transfer rate from a known good mirror, no matter the day or time. It's about $56/month which could be less, but their competition is the incumbent telco (CenturyTel) who sells 3 Mbps/256 Kbps DSL for $40/month and you cannot have a "dry" line, so that becomes $60/month.
8 Mbps is more than plenty for me- I'm very happy that the latest upgrades upped my upload speed from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps. Sending a picture or a large PDF is a real pain on a 256 Kbps connection. My parents have 1.5 Mbps/256 Kbps DSL at their house and it is sufficient, although one of my friend's 256 Kbps/256 Kbps DSL is just about useless for anything more than HTML-only Web browsing and receiving text e-mail. Downloading something so simple as a YouTube video is painful.
The current Core line of chips are rather efficient per core, but the trend of sticking tons of cores in a package makes for some pretty high TDPs. The Core 2 Quads are pretty warm, with the Q6600 being 105 watts, the QX6700 and 6800 are 130 watts. This is as bad as the hottest of the Pentium Ds and hotter than the Pentium 4s ever were. The average C2Ds are much cooler than the average P4s and PDs, but I'd definitely say that "fast" is not out of style at either company.
AMD would need to expand their cleanroom space a lot to be able to fab GPUs on SOI as well as CPUs. If they had the space, this would be a good investment as it would let them make chipsets and GPUs using the older 90 nm 200 mm wafer equipment that no longer makes CPUs. Intel currently does this and it saves them money and gives them more control than using a third-party foundry like TSMC.
However, I doubt that AMD would make SOI chipsets and GPUs in-house for some time because they can't swing the investment for the extra facilities at present. But they could have a foundry use their SOI methods to make chipsets and GPUs. I don't see any barriers to that.
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They could, and with the signed drivers being required for at least 64-bit Vista, they could enforce it. But I'd be VERY willing to bet that if Microsoft even hinted at this, the hardware maker would just have to threaten to call the DOJ and Microsoft would backpedal faster than you could say "antitrust."
And you also mentioned the other solution if Microsoft does make threatening noises. With both the Windows and Linux kernel driver APIs being stable, it should be trivial to make a translation wrapper between the two. MS would have their hands tied in keeping drivers off Linux if that happens as they'd have to stop their own driver development. MS needs as many good drivers as they can get for even 32-bit Vista, let alone anything 64-bit. If I were Microsoft, I'd be helping out all I could to get a stable wrapper or translation layer so that a "universal" driver for both Linux and Vista could be made by device manufacturers. Vista notoriously lacks drivers, especially Vista 64-bit, and Linux has enough to make most things work, especially for corporate machines and in server rooms. Both of those areas are ones that are much more likely to consider switching to Linux from W2K/XP than to Vista than the ordinary Joe. Or they will sit on XP like many sat on W2K until around the time XP SP2 came out. Both results would give MS no sales, and since they are also MS's most profitable markets, not upgrading to Vista would be a serious blow to MS. So I think that taking a risk that some previous 2K/XP switch to Linux because of more driver support is far outweighed by the increased number of Vista sales because of better driver support.
Herpes is a virus, it does not have spores. And unless they put their hands in their mouths right after touching a keyboard that was very freshly seeded with herpes virus, it would die and they would not get it. However, a toxic mold would do the trick with the spores.
I would be willing to bet that it won't be as different as it was a few years ago. It's not usually the IT department that's against OSS, but generally the PHBs and the beancounters as they tend to hear as much as the MS FUD as the geeks do but none of the rebuttals. As such, they get scared and it's easy to say no when the financial benefits are unclear but the (apparent) risks are. Firefox has become popular enough without any legal trouble from MS or others that it's become a known quantity to most of the PHBs and beancounters, so they are starting to allow it.
There is also an uptick in interest in and installations of Linux and other non-MS OSes on the desktop in companies due to the planned forced license migration to Vista, the fact that most of them already run it in the server rooms to good effect, feature set, security, etc. Firefox is generally the default browser in those systems, so if you're in a non-MS shop, you'll not be using IE. I happen to work in a shop where all but one of the computers are Windows (my Linux dev machine is the exception), but almost all of them have Firefox installed and most people use Firefox instead of IE.
We use them both because they mean different things. In the US, a college is a two-year institution that grants associates' degrees and certificates while a university is a four-year or more institution that grants at least bachelor's degrees, and many also grant masters' and doctoral/professional degrees as well.
I don't know if there are the equivalent of two-year community/junior colleges in England, so that might explain a lack of the word "college" in an Englishman's vocabulary. I suppose an analog of that would be how there are very few "traffic circles" over here in the U.S., so the word isn't in our general vocabulary. Apparently neither is the ability to drive one, as the only one I know of has far more accidents per year than a flat intersection with roughly as much traffic.
Unfortunately, laws come as all-or-nothing affairs as they are supposed to be enforced completely.* A good law with bad rider provisions makes for a bad law. I think what you were looking for is "the main part of the DMCA would have been a good law, but the poisonous rider provisions ruined it."
*Obviously this is not always true in real-life as laws can be selectively enforced (e.g. letting somebody going 60 in a 55 zone pass by but nabbing the guy going 70) or not enforced at all. But one generally has to assume that a new law will be completely enforced as the bill intends when passing judgment on it, because one *could* be held to the letter of it and not let off easy.
But then what will the secretaries do for a pastime since they can't use 10 different fonts like MS Comic Sans and insert two dozen pieces of clip art into a simple one-sentence notice?
The indemnification is not against the maker of the OSS app will go after you for having it installed. It's against Microsoft or any other patent troll who claims that their patents are being stepped on by that OSS app you've installed going after you. Microsoft has rattled their patent saber a bunch, with the accusation that OpenOffce violated 60-some-odd patents patents, although Microsoft says they will neither disclose which patents were violated or sue OpenOffice.org users.
Indemnification is merely something to let people that buy into all the FUD sleep easier at night.
The DRM isn't just tied to DRM'ed music (or video) files and their players anymore, bud. DRM is in the OS all the way down to the hardware level. It runs no matter if you're playing non-DRM'ed or DRM'ed files, or even playing anything at all.
Apple did switch to Intel chips and Intel makes proprietary compilers for its chips. I'd be willing to bet that Apple and Intel might team up to make a MacOS X proprietary compiler if it hasn't already been started. That would rid Apple of having to use GCC. However, they still use a lot of the GNU userland and utilities in OS X and Apple would need to rewrite (or fork) those if they want them to stay GPLv2.
A cattle prod works better than a baseball bat, but locking the users in the tape safe is the only sure way to ensure that they can't steal CPU cycles.
Well, you could give us the specs and load of your computer, for one thing. It also might help to up the kernel timer to 1000 Hz too. I only see that kind of behavior when I am using a slow single-core machine and am absolutely burying the system with tasks. My dual-core desktop doesn't seem to have any lagging issues with X, even when it's pretty heavily loaded.
I guess the Chinese government wants to be the only one spying on their citizens, huh?
Four letters: T-C-P-A. You could probably still build your own, but it would have to be some kind of custom FPGA job because all "usual" hardware would require all of the hardware DRM nonsense. About the only part of the PC that doesn't have DRM applicable to it today is the power supply. Even your monitor has DRM in the form of HDCP. You also would not be able to connect to the Internet because "untrusted" machines would not be allowed to connect. So unless you want to build a cobbled-together FPGA unit and run it on an underground POTS network like in the old days, 'Tivoization' is really really bad news and Stallmann et. al. are right to see how bad it could get and try to prevent it.
Now WILL the doomsday scenario happen? That's up for debate. My guess is that it won't completely as there are both a bunch of legacy devices and programs that won't work and that DRM implementations are rarely well-implemented and commonly piss off Joe User. There are many more Joe Users than RMSes out there, so Joe User is much more influential in what manufacturers will push on people. But the mechanism of action is known and the hardware will certainly allow for it, so I'd be at least a bit antsy.
Yes, but they all say pretty much the same things:
1. You are only buying a license and cannot copy or redistribute.
2. You have no access to the source code.
3. The license is not transferrable, either from person to person (can't sell it), machine to machine (can't take from one computer, put on another) or from media to media (can't take from a CD and put on a DVD.)
4. We are not liable for any damage the software causes due to malfunctioning (this is shared with the GPL as well.)
The Rage chip is in very few laptops any more- it's primarily seen in server motherboards today. Even then, the ES1000 is starting replacing the Rage in server boards. I have not seen any laptops in the past half-decade or more using the Rage chips. It's been Intel i810 IGP, 845/855 Extreme Graphics, or one of the GMA revisions; NVIDIA GeForce 6100/6150, or the ATi Xpress 200M/Radeon x12x0 if it wasn't a discrete card.
Yes and no. You are correct in that a two-platter 250 GB drive and a two-platter 320 GB drive likely use the same platters, with the 250 GB unit being "locked." But the hard drive manufacturer can and does vary the number of platters for differing capacities as well as putting in a different motor for different speeds. Intel generally has one set of dies for all of a certain arch of chip- the Core Duo, Core Solo, Pentium Dual Core, and Celeron M 400 series are made from the same mask. Even the Core 2 Duos are generally all made from one mask, with a handful of Merom-2Ms and Allendales being made from the smaller 111 mm^2 mask rather than the 140 mm^2 one for 4 MB L2 cache.
You forgot that they created the "WARNING: EXPLICIT CONTENT" sticker that looks so cool on T-shirts.
People always expect doctors to do something, even if the doctor is very vocal about there being no good treatment available. I've seen lots of people walk into doctors' offices and DEMAND a certain medication or treatment that is not advisable. A very common one used to be mothers demanding antibiotics to give to their kid who is sick with a viral flu. The doctor said in no uncertain terms that antibiotics will do absolutely nothing and that prescribing antibiotics will only cost money and perhaps have side effects. But the mothers had to have some medicine to feed to the kid just to satiate their mothering genes. Most of the docs I know told them to give the kid Tylenol if they had a fever or "prescribed" X ounces of fluids per hour- something to keep the mother mothering the kid.
People will also want the doctor to do "something" even if nothing is wrong because they don't want to feel dumb for going when nothing was wrong. They want to justify that something was actually wrong so they don't feel foolish. Add to that the fact that most people have to pay some as a co-pay for a doctor's office visit and "want to get their money's worth."
So sometimes picking "no action" can be very hard to do.
It would have to be a Core 2 Duo ULV, either the 1066 MHz or 1200 MHz model. No other Core 2 Duo would be able to run for 14 hours in that thin of a laptop.
The corrupt dictatorships that keep the countries third-world but live in massive palaces seem to have figured out that one, why not ask them?
Gasoline taxes are roughly 30 to 60 cents per gallon in the Midwestern U.S. I pay 38.7 cents of tax for every gallon of gas I buy here in Missouri in addition to about 8.3% sales tax- the 4.225% state sales tax plus the local sales tax of a little over 4% (yes, it's that high and I tend to buy goods out of town where the local sales taxes are ~2%.)
So if gas was untaxed, it would be the spot price that's seen on Bloomberg TV or any commodities ticker. It's currently at $2.40 for the NY Harbor market index.
Mediacom (AT&T subsidiary) 8 Mbps/512 Kbps cable. There aren't that many people on my trunk, so I never fail to hit 950 KB/sec transfer rate from a known good mirror, no matter the day or time. It's about $56/month which could be less, but their competition is the incumbent telco (CenturyTel) who sells 3 Mbps/256 Kbps DSL for $40/month and you cannot have a "dry" line, so that becomes $60/month.
8 Mbps is more than plenty for me- I'm very happy that the latest upgrades upped my upload speed from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps. Sending a picture or a large PDF is a real pain on a 256 Kbps connection. My parents have 1.5 Mbps/256 Kbps DSL at their house and it is sufficient, although one of my friend's 256 Kbps/256 Kbps DSL is just about useless for anything more than HTML-only Web browsing and receiving text e-mail. Downloading something so simple as a YouTube video is painful.
The current Core line of chips are rather efficient per core, but the trend of sticking tons of cores in a package makes for some pretty high TDPs. The Core 2 Quads are pretty warm, with the Q6600 being 105 watts, the QX6700 and 6800 are 130 watts. This is as bad as the hottest of the Pentium Ds and hotter than the Pentium 4s ever were. The average C2Ds are much cooler than the average P4s and PDs, but I'd definitely say that "fast" is not out of style at either company.
AMD would need to expand their cleanroom space a lot to be able to fab GPUs on SOI as well as CPUs. If they had the space, this would be a good investment as it would let them make chipsets and GPUs using the older 90 nm 200 mm wafer equipment that no longer makes CPUs. Intel currently does this and it saves them money and gives them more control than using a third-party foundry like TSMC.
However, I doubt that AMD would make SOI chipsets and GPUs in-house for some time because they can't swing the investment for the extra facilities at present. But they could have a foundry use their SOI methods to make chipsets and GPUs. I don't see any barriers to that.
Anybody want to bet that some AMD engineers are Family Guy aficionados?