Not everything else improves. Music CD technology came out and eventually killed dynamic range
Er, no, try again. On a GOOD turntable you might get 45dB of dynamic range and about 30-45dB of channel separation, on a GOOD vinyl pressing, with a GOOD receiver or preamp.
With CD you get approximately 90dB of both. What you DON'T get with CD is an infinite number of intermediary volume levels, and frequency response has a hard lower limit of 20hz and a hard upper limit of 22,050hz, whereas vinyl can extend to well beyond 25khz. However, these aspects will not affect most people who have destroyed their hearing by blasting their ears with headphones, excessive concertgoing and clubbing, using power tools with no ear protection, or using mass transportation like subways where one is subjected to prolonged sound levels of greater than 85dB..
But go ahead and continue believing CDs killed dynamic range, I'll bet you believe that "HD Radio" offers better fidelity than FM.
Publicly post the judge's and the plaintiff's email addresses publicly on every messageboard and blog known to man, sign them up for every known advertising list, freebie offer, etc. and extend this to their families as well.
You'll see the order rescinded and the spammer's case thrown out of court with prejudice.
There are exactly two shows worth watching on Adult Swim:
1. Futurama 2. Family Guy
and #2 is actually questionable, even though I find the show hilarious. FG is incredibly funny, but relies too much on pop culture references and sheer repetition.
Because it's strapped (belted, if you will) to your back, of course.
It seems to me you have to concentrate so much on remaining upright that you would working too hard to have fun and actually enjoy a flight.
Re:Gyroscopic stabilizers
on
Rocket Men
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That is not the only problem; other problems include fuel capacity (range) and thermal management. I would love, repeat, LOVE to fly one of those, but a homebuilt high-performance jet aircraft (like Viperjet) or even someday a homebuilt spacecraft would be more fun, IMHO.
(TOS was so bad it made Windoze3.1 look good - god I hated it).
Although at the time I'd agree that no GUI came close to AmigaOS, I'd argue that TOS was far superior to Windows versions up to and including Windows 3.11. It was on par with early MacOS versions as well. So it was a little blocky compared to MacOS's 512x384 display; what 320x200 display WASN'T blocky? But at least it wasn't monochrome; it could display up to 512 colors, which was second only to the Amiga in the desktop graphics department. To do anything better than that one had to spend tens to hundreds of thousands on very proprietary graphics workstations from Sun Microsystems or SGI, and the next step up from there was multi-million-dollar supercomputers.
TOS users had it pretty good in the 1980s. I liked it, despite being very partial to the Amiga.
Well as far as the Unix "licensing" is concerned, Microsoft may have had to pay it in order to legally distribute their Services for Unix product. Those fees were supposed to be handed off to Novell but never were. I never did and still don't see their paying SCO those fees as funding of SCO's "we own Linux" claim.
This is a new and separate development, unless it can be shown that when discussing this "guarantee" that Microsoft hinted that SCO should not hand over the large sum of money they paid in Unix royalties to Novell, but instead use it to slander Linux and GPLed OSS at large.
With that said, I'm not surprised at all that this went on; Microsoft is deathly afraid of Linux, OS X, OpenOffice, ODF, and other projects and specs which pose a significant threat to their maintaining not only their monopoly, but the vendor lock guaranteering that monopoly. Why do you think they've been balking at not only becoming compliant with the netbios spec, but documenting their extensions to it to promote the interoperability they always preach? Why do you think they go to great lengths with their Get the FUD campain, going as far as redefining "downtime" to mean something other than what the rest of the industry means? As others have pointed out, Microsoft execs are well aware that their massive growth curve has long ago reached plateau and has nowhere to go but down, very likely in a massive crash.
All the same, until there can be some direct connection shown between the Unix royalties they paid AND this "guarantee," those royalty fees they have paid should be viewed separately, and although one should remain suspicious and watchful, not as direct financing of SCO's "GPL is evil and illegal" crusade. From a legal perspective, until a link with firm evidence can be shown to prove otherwise, one can only presume innocence on the part of Microsoft regarding the Unix royalties.
The core of the Amiga was definitely the OS - the underlying hardware simply made it possible.
The Amiga had it all - a usable GUI, smooth preemptive multitasking, GENLOCk capabilities, incredible (for the time) graphics and sound, and plug and play. Not only that, but it had a real command shell, a very powerful internal BASIC, and early availability of many compilers. Automation capabilities were excellent (sadly, SOHO networking was not yet in place so the need for automation outside of animation shops was merely academic). Basically, it arrived before the technology could be put into practical use outside of multimedia production, and C= execs really didn't understand what they had on their hands. Had they possessed the foresight Tramiel did, rather than embezzling funds, they'd have seen the humongous growth potential and would have let R&D and marketing have full access to their budgets and reaped the benefits just a few years later when computing and computer networking went fully mainstream.
Now, Linux (and bsd) offer most of the business advantages the Amiga could have offered in the mid-90s, Windows and OS X are very capable in multimedia, so it's going to be an uphill battle for Amiga. I hope they can catch on, but it's going to be a niche market at best. Maybe they can move back into professional video production since SGI has abandoned it by and large in SGI's misguided attempt to become a Windows NT whitebox PC manufacturer.
FWIW, the engineers and marketers were proclaiming "wait to see what we have next" but Amigas were being bought hand over fist by the folks who knew they existed and wanted a capable computer.
The problem was that the CxOs were too busy embezzeling funds, diverting money from the R&D and marketing budgets into their own coffers, causing AmigaOS AND the hardware to stagnate, while the PC was quickly catching up to and passing the Amiga's capabilities.
You responded selectively, ignoring how he uses download. Let's focus on the essence:
just to try out an artist.
There ya go. There is no current try-before-you-buy except Top40 rotations on pop stations, and they play only singles from a fixed rotation. DJs are a thing of the past, so how does one get exposed to new material?
My experience: during the days of Napster I downloaded RANDOM stuff (I'd download anything containing say, the letter "a"), listen to a bunch of it, then go out and buy the CDs I liked. I discovered I like jazz this way. During that 18 months or so, I bought more CDs than I did in the previous 13 years I owned CD players. I know my case isn't the same as everyone else's, but in my case the record companies made a few thousand dollars as a direct result of the existence of the then-free Napster P2P network. I quit running Napster (and quit buying CDs - since 2000 or 2001 I've bought maybe THREE CDs, TOTAL, from RIAA member labels and affiliates) when they started suing their own customer base, and quit exposing myself to new material as much as possible. I instead listen to classical, classic rock, or talk radio stations when driving, and avoid pop and "alternative" stations (the "alternative" stations play big-label-affiliate "fake" indepdendent label music).
Now I spend my entertainment on movies instead - on DVD - because the MPAA hasn't been quite as evil as the RIAA about the try-before-you-buy thing. I occasionally download movies (usually if I miss on cable) and buy the ones I like on DVD. I record a lot off cable, too, but movies I like I will go out and buy on DVD because I can avoid nasty digitable cable artifacts and get widescreen format for nearly every movie on DVD.
twirl desktop around, notice speedy performance even with lowly embedded Intel chipsets
Use kompose - notice windows draw, animate and redraw VERY quickly
Enable transparancy and open about 12 windows with various levels of translucency - OK, it's not speedy then, but neither is it unusable. With a lowly Nvidia 5200 or 6600, it's downright blazingly fast
Notice as you move windows around they wiggle, and even on the embedded chipset the animation is very smooth
Use the new task switcher - notice the thumbnails draw very quickly, and as you tab between apps there is zero lag
Notice at NO time did any applications leave droppings/ghosts behind during these tests
This is OSS vs. Proprietary software, folks, and while XGL is not fully functional yet, it's extremely efficient and stable, stable enough that I put it into production on one desktop (can't on the others until it's fully integrated with X.org). OSS is buggy? Uh, er, right. Yeah, some stuff (in alpha) is, but much of it isn't. So many projects depend on X.org (and soon XGL) that the base OSS projects will often be far more stable than proprietary offerings.
A short "get rid of DRM" from one or two people isn't going to change anything; but neither is a couple of feature requests here and there. They will know exactly to what you are referring, but they simply won't care.
Hundreds of brief "get rid of DRM" messages from hundreds of people might get looked at, maybe even noted as a potential support issue, but will not change the product. They will know exactly to what you are referring, but they simply won't care, because a few hundred users would be representative of only a few percentage points of the market; they can stand to lose 3-5% of their market compared to not forcing an upgrade cycle with this new release.
Thousands of brief messages with a short and sweet "Get rid of DRM or I/We/our company/etc. Will not buy Vista, but will look at Mac OS X and Linux as alternatives" will force their hand into dropping DRM from the operating system, because so few customers bother to provide feedback that thousands of responses from separate organizations/families/companies will be representative of a very large percentage of the target market, and in the face of making only $30bil next year from Vista sales vs. $200bil, they will have to drop DRM, or answer to shareholders when they start asking why instead of 98% of new computers shipping with Vista, but 30%+ are shipping with OS X or Linux instead.
So, go right ahead, and send them a "drop the DRM or I|We|my company|our organization|other is|are switching to OS X|Linux|BSD|other when Vista is released" because if enough people do it, they WILL take notice out of sheer necessity to maintain revenue growth.
I suspect the screwdriver they're going to use is DirectX 10, since Microsoft claims they can't make it work under Windows XP.
Despite claims of developers from video card vendors who have posted on here about Microsoft's DirectX installer for Windows XP?
Do not believe it "can't" be done for a single second. It's (allegedly) already been done, is supposedly stable, and they just won't release it to the public. Of course, these claims have yet to be substantiated, but really, how many here think it is impossible for them to implement the DirectX API for Windows XP?
You know, if it is true, I truly hope that DirectX 10 for XP gets leaked out to a few torrent sites.
Well, if 90% of myspace users spell "your" or "you're" as "ur," does that make it correct? Is everything so relativistic and touchy-feely that there cannot any longer be an absolute correct spelling for a word? I'm an American, and although I generally spell it "color," I recognise that yes, we (collectively speaking, in the distant past" did in fact bastardise the English language, in fact, for the express intent of "dumbing it down" to make it easier to learn to spell. In fact, the bar has been lowered so far even since I graduated from high school that I'm surprised the official spelling of "your" and "you're" isn't "ur" and that "dumb" isn't now "dum."
Uh, that was NOT flamebait, it is an outline of a hypothetical situation; one that is not just possible, but also very likely.
If you've ever done ANY reading on battery technologies, you would know that lithium ion is an extremely poor choice for power tools due to the above (fictional) scenario.
Well I use SuSE (retail) at my business (most machines are SuSE, some are CentOS) because we kicked Windows out, by and large. When I evaluated SLE and SLES, I could not stand the default desktop. Sure, you can install and select KDE as the default, but KDE integration was nowhere as polished as SuSE retail was (this was in the 9.0/9.1 timeframe) plus the enterprise packages were fairly outdated; it was too much work to set up the environments I wanted to deploy, and it was too much money (despite the buy once/install everywhere "licensing") considering the amount of work, and that 9.1 was almost where I wanted Linux desktops to be, right out of the box. PLUS, I really don't need tech support from Novell - most of the support I need is for third-party packages (mostly build issues and bugs) and online support resources have thus far been sufficient for those. I could take a look at SLES and SLE again to see if it's where I want our desktops to be out of the box, but why should I bother when SuSE Retail (now SuSE) is EXACTLY what we need and want? We do reevaluate distributions every quarter or so (kubuntu is looking better and better with each release) but until we need to switch, we won't; we have too much "real" work to do to divert attention to scripting deployment for a 20 user shop.
Platform decisions should be based on problem-solving, and picking the best solution for the problem. Sometimes OSS is the best decision, sometimes proprietary is. When moving away from Exchange we compared several alternatives - the last straw that drove the evaluation to execution was when the Info Store went south due to a patch, and M$'s "solution" was R&R, restore the latest backup. My solution was to compare backups to see what patches had modified, roll back, work with ISINTEG until the Info Store would mount, then use IMAP to migrate data to then-proprietary Scalix{now Open Source} on Linux and punt Exchange. This decision was not based on free lunch vs. pay software - the software was paid for long, long ago - but maintainability and vendor lock. While we (at the time) did not have source for Scalix, the data was stored in a very open format, not prone to defragmentation, and all maintenance could be performed live. We decided that this was the best solution despite having a paid-for solution in place already, because when the Info Store does go down, it's a lot of work and downtime to get back up and running. Since Scalix is now OSS, OSS is the best groupware solution for us at this point (at the time it was proprietary, and we chose it when it was propritary vs. OSS).
Oh, I should have pointed out before submitting that "this has not actually happened, but it could, because Li-Ions react poorly to high current loads, deep cycles, and short circuits."
Just pointing this out so that folks don't take my post seriously and falsely believe that the above has occurred. My point is that it could and they should have chosen NiMH, secondary alkaline, or other technologies long before even considering Li-Ion.
and Milwaukee's V28 power tools, the first line to use lithium-ion batteries instead of nickel cadmium.
The legendary Milwakee, a company up to now renown for high-quality, durable power tools, has issued a recall of every V28 power tool kit, citing potential fire hazards. The V28 series power tools have been identified as the cause of a five-alarm fire in an 18th century apartment complex when their lithium batteries carelessly left loose in toolboxes spontaneously caught fire, presumably when the contents shifted and contacts were shorted by other items in the container. Unfortunately, due to 18th century construction techniques and the well-seasoned wood, and to the lack of fire escapes, 30 tenants died due to burns and smoke inhalation.
Milwaukee's V28 product manager remarked "This was a regretful event, to be sure, and while Sony is the manufacture of the lithium ion cells and they lack appropriate safety features to prevent thermal runaway reactions which lead to explosive fires, ultimately it is our responsibility because we chose lithium ion over environment-friendly secondary alkaline, Ni-MH, and other rechargable technologies. We have also reports of our Li-Ion products bursting into flames while under heavy load. Our engineers advised us that Li-Ion batteries can be hazardous when used in high-load items such as power tools, but I made the decision to choose Li-Ion battery technology over Ni-MH or Alkaline, both of which are designed for high-current applications. This was my decision, and I am announcing my resignation effective immediately after all shipped V28 units we have recalled have been received. I take full responsibility for this decision."
Milwaukee stock tumbled by 78% at closing following the press conference.
The current version of their code for checking this, in the form of WGA, is notorious for giving false positives on large numbers of legitimate boxes, causing the annoyware to kick in. Microsoft are fully aware of this, to the point where they have written a piece of software which can detect that it is happening - they have not fixed the problem, their solution is for you to reinstall Windows.
That's a perfect reason to download a torrent of XP with service packs and patches slipstreamed in. They're only alienating legitimate customers with their current tactics, and not affecting professional "pirates" in the slightest.
That is precisely why instead of using OpenSUSE or downloading retail SuSE for free, I have been buying the retail boxed version of SuSE. Now that Novell has killed it off and I do not particularly care for SLES or SLE (I prefer a KDE-centric distro, SLES/SLE are too gnome-centric {the "dumb down all dialogs to the point where users are treated like retards" mentality of gnome rubs me the wrong way}) I will no longer be contributing money to Novell's Linux project. Sad too, because retail SuSE is a great distribution and I'd happily continue paying for it.
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Er, no, try again. On a GOOD turntable you might get 45dB of dynamic range and about 30-45dB of channel separation, on a GOOD vinyl pressing, with a GOOD receiver or preamp.
With CD you get approximately 90dB of both. What you DON'T get with CD is an infinite number of intermediary volume levels, and frequency response has a hard lower limit of 20hz and a hard upper limit of 22,050hz, whereas vinyl can extend to well beyond 25khz. However, these aspects will not affect most people who have destroyed their hearing by blasting their ears with headphones, excessive concertgoing and clubbing, using power tools with no ear protection, or using mass transportation like subways where one is subjected to prolonged sound levels of greater than 85dB..
But go ahead and continue believing CDs killed dynamic range, I'll bet you believe that "HD Radio" offers better fidelity than FM.
Publicly post the judge's and the plaintiff's email addresses publicly on every messageboard and blog known to man, sign them up for every known advertising list, freebie offer, etc. and extend this to their families as well.
You'll see the order rescinded and the spammer's case thrown out of court with prejudice.
There are exactly two shows worth watching on Adult Swim:
1. Futurama
2. Family Guy
and #2 is actually questionable, even though I find the show hilarious. FG is incredibly funny, but relies too much on pop culture references and sheer repetition.
Kim Jong-il just may be insane enough to use them.
Because it's strapped (belted, if you will) to your back, of course.
It seems to me you have to concentrate so much on remaining upright that you would working too hard to have fun and actually enjoy a flight.
That is not the only problem; other problems include fuel capacity (range) and thermal management. I would love, repeat, LOVE to fly one of those, but a homebuilt high-performance jet aircraft (like Viperjet) or even someday a homebuilt spacecraft would be more fun, IMHO.
Although at the time I'd agree that no GUI came close to AmigaOS, I'd argue that TOS was far superior to Windows versions up to and including Windows 3.11. It was on par with early MacOS versions as well. So it was a little blocky compared to MacOS's 512x384 display; what 320x200 display WASN'T blocky? But at least it wasn't monochrome; it could display up to 512 colors, which was second only to the Amiga in the desktop graphics department. To do anything better than that one had to spend tens to hundreds of thousands on very proprietary graphics workstations from Sun Microsystems or SGI, and the next step up from there was multi-million-dollar supercomputers.
TOS users had it pretty good in the 1980s. I liked it, despite being very partial to the Amiga.
Well as far as the Unix "licensing" is concerned, Microsoft may have had to pay it in order to legally distribute their Services for Unix product. Those fees were supposed to be handed off to Novell but never were. I never did and still don't see their paying SCO those fees as funding of SCO's "we own Linux" claim.
This is a new and separate development, unless it can be shown that when discussing this "guarantee" that Microsoft hinted that SCO should not hand over the large sum of money they paid in Unix royalties to Novell, but instead use it to slander Linux and GPLed OSS at large.
With that said, I'm not surprised at all that this went on; Microsoft is deathly afraid of Linux, OS X, OpenOffice, ODF, and other projects and specs which pose a significant threat to their maintaining not only their monopoly, but the vendor lock guaranteering that monopoly. Why do you think they've been balking at not only becoming compliant with the netbios spec, but documenting their extensions to it to promote the interoperability they always preach? Why do you think they go to great lengths with their Get the FUD campain, going as far as redefining "downtime" to mean something other than what the rest of the industry means? As others have pointed out, Microsoft execs are well aware that their massive growth curve has long ago reached plateau and has nowhere to go but down, very likely in a massive crash.
All the same, until there can be some direct connection shown between the Unix royalties they paid AND this "guarantee," those royalty fees they have paid should be viewed separately, and although one should remain suspicious and watchful, not as direct financing of SCO's "GPL is evil and illegal" crusade. From a legal perspective, until a link with firm evidence can be shown to prove otherwise, one can only presume innocence on the part of Microsoft regarding the Unix royalties.
The 1541 drive (5.25") was 170K, FWIW.
The core of the Amiga was definitely the OS - the underlying hardware simply made it possible.
The Amiga had it all - a usable GUI, smooth preemptive multitasking, GENLOCk capabilities, incredible (for the time) graphics and sound, and plug and play. Not only that, but it had a real command shell, a very powerful internal BASIC, and early availability of many compilers. Automation capabilities were excellent (sadly, SOHO networking was not yet in place so the need for automation outside of animation shops was merely academic). Basically, it arrived before the technology could be put into practical use outside of multimedia production, and C= execs really didn't understand what they had on their hands. Had they possessed the foresight Tramiel did, rather than embezzling funds, they'd have seen the humongous growth potential and would have let R&D and marketing have full access to their budgets and reaped the benefits just a few years later when computing and computer networking went fully mainstream.
Now, Linux (and bsd) offer most of the business advantages the Amiga could have offered in the mid-90s, Windows and OS X are very capable in multimedia, so it's going to be an uphill battle for Amiga. I hope they can catch on, but it's going to be a niche market at best. Maybe they can move back into professional video production since SGI has abandoned it by and large in SGI's misguided attempt to become a Windows NT whitebox PC manufacturer.
FWIW, the engineers and marketers were proclaiming "wait to see what we have next" but Amigas were being bought hand over fist by the folks who knew they existed and wanted a capable computer.
The problem was that the CxOs were too busy embezzeling funds, diverting money from the R&D and marketing budgets into their own coffers, causing AmigaOS AND the hardware to stagnate, while the PC was quickly catching up to and passing the Amiga's capabilities.
There ya go. There is no current try-before-you-buy except Top40 rotations on pop stations, and they play only singles from a fixed rotation. DJs are a thing of the past, so how does one get exposed to new material?
My experience: during the days of Napster I downloaded RANDOM stuff (I'd download anything containing say, the letter "a"), listen to a bunch of it, then go out and buy the CDs I liked. I discovered I like jazz this way. During that 18 months or so, I bought more CDs than I did in the previous 13 years I owned CD players. I know my case isn't the same as everyone else's, but in my case the record companies made a few thousand dollars as a direct result of the existence of the then-free Napster P2P network. I quit running Napster (and quit buying CDs - since 2000 or 2001 I've bought maybe THREE CDs, TOTAL, from RIAA member labels and affiliates) when they started suing their own customer base, and quit exposing myself to new material as much as possible. I instead listen to classical, classic rock, or talk radio stations when driving, and avoid pop and "alternative" stations (the "alternative" stations play big-label-affiliate "fake" indepdendent label music).
Now I spend my entertainment on movies instead - on DVD - because the MPAA hasn't been quite as evil as the RIAA about the try-before-you-buy thing. I occasionally download movies (usually if I miss on cable) and buy the ones I like on DVD. I record a lot off cable, too, but movies I like I will go out and buy on DVD because I can avoid nasty digitable cable artifacts and get widescreen format for nearly every movie on DVD.
This is OSS vs. Proprietary software, folks, and while XGL is not fully functional yet, it's extremely efficient and stable, stable enough that I put it into production on one desktop (can't on the others until it's fully integrated with X.org). OSS is buggy? Uh, er, right. Yeah, some stuff (in alpha) is, but much of it isn't. So many projects depend on X.org (and soon XGL) that the base OSS projects will often be far more stable than proprietary offerings.
FWIW, sometimes the blunt approach works.
A short "get rid of DRM" from one or two people isn't going to change anything; but neither is a couple of feature requests here and there. They will know exactly to what you are referring, but they simply won't care.
Hundreds of brief "get rid of DRM" messages from hundreds of people might get looked at, maybe even noted as a potential support issue, but will not change the product. They will know exactly to what you are referring, but they simply won't care, because a few hundred users would be representative of only a few percentage points of the market; they can stand to lose 3-5% of their market compared to not forcing an upgrade cycle with this new release.
Thousands of brief messages with a short and sweet "Get rid of DRM or I/We/our company/etc. Will not buy Vista, but will look at Mac OS X and Linux as alternatives" will force their hand into dropping DRM from the operating system, because so few customers bother to provide feedback that thousands of responses from separate organizations/families/companies will be representative of a very large percentage of the target market, and in the face of making only $30bil next year from Vista sales vs. $200bil, they will have to drop DRM, or answer to shareholders when they start asking why instead of 98% of new computers shipping with Vista, but 30%+ are shipping with OS X or Linux instead.
So, go right ahead, and send them a "drop the DRM or I|We|my company|our organization|other is|are switching to OS X|Linux|BSD|other when Vista is released" because if enough people do it, they WILL take notice out of sheer necessity to maintain revenue growth.
Despite claims of developers from video card vendors who have posted on here about Microsoft's DirectX installer for Windows XP?
Do not believe it "can't" be done for a single second. It's (allegedly) already been done, is supposedly stable, and they just won't release it to the public. Of course, these claims have yet to be substantiated, but really, how many here think it is impossible for them to implement the DirectX API for Windows XP?
You know, if it is true, I truly hope that DirectX 10 for XP gets leaked out to a few torrent sites.
A whole five? Novell devotes more than that to the Linux kernel alone, don't they?
Well, if 90% of myspace users spell "your" or "you're" as "ur," does that make it correct? Is everything so relativistic and touchy-feely that there cannot any longer be an absolute correct spelling for a word? I'm an American, and although I generally spell it "color," I recognise that yes, we (collectively speaking, in the distant past" did in fact bastardise the English language, in fact, for the express intent of "dumbing it down" to make it easier to learn to spell. In fact, the bar has been lowered so far even since I graduated from high school that I'm surprised the official spelling of "your" and "you're" isn't "ur" and that "dumb" isn't now "dum."
How was Star Wars ruined? Those three movies were great!
*is in denial of post-1997 Star Wars productions*
Please, let my memory repression efforts work!
The companies still on NT4 are NOT fine. They are sadistic bastards who hate their IT staff. Win2K is the sweet spot for Microsoft operating systems.
Ever install a new device in NT4?
Uh, that was NOT flamebait, it is an outline of a hypothetical situation; one that is not just possible, but also very likely.
If you've ever done ANY reading on battery technologies, you would know that lithium ion is an extremely poor choice for power tools due to the above (fictional) scenario.
Well I use SuSE (retail) at my business (most machines are SuSE, some are CentOS) because we kicked Windows out, by and large. When I evaluated SLE and SLES, I could not stand the default desktop. Sure, you can install and select KDE as the default, but KDE integration was nowhere as polished as SuSE retail was (this was in the 9.0/9.1 timeframe) plus the enterprise packages were fairly outdated; it was too much work to set up the environments I wanted to deploy, and it was too much money (despite the buy once/install everywhere "licensing") considering the amount of work, and that 9.1 was almost where I wanted Linux desktops to be, right out of the box. PLUS, I really don't need tech support from Novell - most of the support I need is for third-party packages (mostly build issues and bugs) and online support resources have thus far been sufficient for those. I could take a look at SLES and SLE again to see if it's where I want our desktops to be out of the box, but why should I bother when SuSE Retail (now SuSE) is EXACTLY what we need and want? We do reevaluate distributions every quarter or so (kubuntu is looking better and better with each release) but until we need to switch, we won't; we have too much "real" work to do to divert attention to scripting deployment for a 20 user shop.
Platform decisions should be based on problem-solving, and picking the best solution for the problem. Sometimes OSS is the best decision, sometimes proprietary is. When moving away from Exchange we compared several alternatives - the last straw that drove the evaluation to execution was when the Info Store went south due to a patch, and M$'s "solution" was R&R, restore the latest backup. My solution was to compare backups to see what patches had modified, roll back, work with ISINTEG until the Info Store would mount, then use IMAP to migrate data to then-proprietary Scalix{now Open Source} on Linux and punt Exchange. This decision was not based on free lunch vs. pay software - the software was paid for long, long ago - but maintainability and vendor lock. While we (at the time) did not have source for Scalix, the data was stored in a very open format, not prone to defragmentation, and all maintenance could be performed live. We decided that this was the best solution despite having a paid-for solution in place already, because when the Info Store does go down, it's a lot of work and downtime to get back up and running. Since Scalix is now OSS, OSS is the best groupware solution for us at this point (at the time it was proprietary, and we chose it when it was propritary vs. OSS).
Oh, I should have pointed out before submitting that "this has not actually happened, but it could, because Li-Ions react poorly to high current loads, deep cycles, and short circuits."
Just pointing this out so that folks don't take my post seriously and falsely believe that the above has occurred. My point is that it could and they should have chosen NiMH, secondary alkaline, or other technologies long before even considering Li-Ion.
The legendary Milwakee, a company up to now renown for high-quality, durable power tools, has issued a recall of every V28 power tool kit, citing potential fire hazards. The V28 series power tools have been identified as the cause of a five-alarm fire in an 18th century apartment complex when their lithium batteries carelessly left loose in toolboxes spontaneously caught fire, presumably when the contents shifted and contacts were shorted by other items in the container. Unfortunately, due to 18th century construction techniques and the well-seasoned wood, and to the lack of fire escapes, 30 tenants died due to burns and smoke inhalation.
Milwaukee's V28 product manager remarked "This was a regretful event, to be sure, and while Sony is the manufacture of the lithium ion cells and they lack appropriate safety features to prevent thermal runaway reactions which lead to explosive fires, ultimately it is our responsibility because we chose lithium ion over environment-friendly secondary alkaline, Ni-MH, and other rechargable technologies. We have also reports of our Li-Ion products bursting into flames while under heavy load. Our engineers advised us that Li-Ion batteries can be hazardous when used in high-load items such as power tools, but I made the decision to choose Li-Ion battery technology over Ni-MH or Alkaline, both of which are designed for high-current applications. This was my decision, and I am announcing my resignation effective immediately after all shipped V28 units we have recalled have been received. I take full responsibility for this decision."
Milwaukee stock tumbled by 78% at closing following the press conference.
That's a perfect reason to download a torrent of XP with service packs and patches slipstreamed in. They're only alienating legitimate customers with their current tactics, and not affecting professional "pirates" in the slightest.
That is precisely why instead of using OpenSUSE or downloading retail SuSE for free, I have been buying the retail boxed version of SuSE. Now that Novell has killed it off and I do not particularly care for SLES or SLE (I prefer a KDE-centric distro, SLES/SLE are too gnome-centric {the "dumb down all dialogs to the point where users are treated like retards" mentality of gnome rubs me the wrong way}) I will no longer be contributing money to Novell's Linux project. Sad too, because retail SuSE is a great distribution and I'd happily continue paying for it.