The FOSS side has patents as well. It isn't just a matter of debunking MS patents. OIN and others can do to MS as they propose to do to us. If it were just a simple matter of MS waving their patent stick around in court uncontested they would have done it already. If MS shut down say Samba with an injunction, they might get equally damaging injunctions leveled against them for little things like Active Directory or Exchange. If MS does more than just run Ballmer's mouth then they risk Global Patentuclear War.
Any Amiga 3000 or 4000 with the appropriate monitor could do it. Perhaps some earlier models could as well, I'm not an Amiga fanboy. The Amiga 500 was an early model Amiga. The Amiga product line had churn for seven or eight years (as a Commodore owned venture. I don't speak of how Amiga is the IT landscape's equivalent of a zombie lurching across the landscape......) A review of the then new Amiga 4000 is here:
The last generation Amiga's could also accept third-party graphics cards based on some PC chipsets common at the time. An Amiga so equipped couldn't use the card to play games that touch the hardware directly but they could display graphics and productivity apps at any resolution and color depth PCs of the time could. This means 1024x768x24 (at least). But even without such help, the last Amigas could reach your 800x600 target.
So, most likely, there's going to be a (serious) race to get to the next uberfuel for the nation by privateers and small corporations. The big guys seem to already be smelling the change in the air and are doing a bit of research there, but who knows how much they're really working towards it right now. They may just end up following the pack.
They'll let others do all the research and take all the risk and then buy whatever technologies look like feasible winners, kinda like Microsoft.
It isn't just what we personally spend on gasoline. I've noticed prices on fresh produce and other things in the grocery store are up too. High fuel prices affect the price of everything. Almost everything in the store came by ship, truck, or train. That takes fuel and higher fuel costs are passed on to consumers. High fuel prices are costing you more than a 0.15% household budget increase. Some families have to do more driving than you do so the direct costs for others is higher as well. That means many people stay home more and spend less when they are out. That will ripple through the economy as well.
This is a much larger issue than your monthly gasoline bill.
Because that is what WE are doing. Mars and Venus are the closest things to "Earthlike" in our solar system apart from Earth itself. Well, there is Europa but that could be a little hard to pick out from Jupiter. Any putative civilization doing what we are doing and viewing OUR solar system using the techniques we are using will pick out our gas giants and maybe Earth and Venus. Assuming they don't pick up our radio, Venus and Earth are going to be "possible Zukelike worlds". If their processes are a bit more sensitive maybe they'll get Mars too. If their exobiology is in the state ours is in then all three will look about as good from interstellar distances.
Earthlike mass implies Earthlike gravity. A planet with a gravity well of that intensity at the range of temperatures encountered in the "habitable band" will hold on to most of the gases that accompany its formation as well as being able to capture some of the gases it enounters as it orbits (which will pile up a bit over the eons) as well as some fraction of ejecta from asteroid and comet hits. Note well, I didn't specify what sort of atmosphere. In the absence of life as we know it, we're talking things like CO2, N2, Methane, and whole other slew of things with similar molecular weights.
Look at our own solar system. Mars and Venus and a whole slew of gas giant moons have atmospheres. Given the gravity and energy input from it's star, you really have to stand this on it's head. You'd have to justify why it wouldn't have an atmosphere.
A planet of Earthlike mass in the habitable band would almost certainly have to have an atmosphere of some kind. Whether or not that atmosphere is breathable or not is another question altogether. From that distance, Venus or Mars would look pretty good to extraterrestial terran planet hunters. Masswise Venus is a near twin of earth but the surface conditions are straight out of Dante's Inferno. Mars is a shade too light to hold on to a thick O2 atmosphere and is basically a cold rusty desert. My guess is this place is apt to be more like Venus or Mars than Earth. Any chance we could talk Goldilocks into planet hunting?
2 has properties in common with 1 and 3. All three are integers, positive, and multiples of one. A real mathematician can point out others. All three being successive multiples of one suffices to place them on a spectrum, multiple spectrums actually. They all fall on real number lines too.
I sure as heck wouldn't endorse free will, being a Reformed Baptist, and neither would most of my fellow seminarians. Interestingly enough this is something we would share in common with many consistent naturalists, including the likes of Albert Einstein. Hard determinism makes sense scientifically and theologically. I like how Einstein put it: "God does not play dice with the universe."
Einstein was surely one of the most important physicists of the 20th century; maybe he was THE most important. Nonetheless, physics left him behind when he couldn't bring himself to accept quantum physics. Indeed, some of his objections and thought experiments inadvertently strengthened it (he pointed out that uncertainty in the timing of subatomics would necessarily create uncertainty in the amount of energy involved. This was theoretically and experimentally proved correct. He thought it an example of absurdity.) This philosophical leaning of Einstein that you find encouraging pretty much put an end to his importance in physics. Einstein continued to have significance as a humanitarian and public figure; the wizened kindly Einstein that most of us know was after this period and there can't be any doubting the influence he had on a wartime Roosevelt.
It may well be the case that ultimately God doesn't play dice with the universe; I wouldn't put poker past Him though........
1. Identify the code you own and release it.
2. Release any register specs not clearly indentified in #1.
3. Leave it to the community to replace the non-owned code.
Also, $115,000 is chump change to a company like AMD. If that was all it cost, then doing this is a no brainer. The potential Linux market for their cards is bigger than that. Intel is certainly poised to cost them much more than that in market share loss due to their more Linux friendly stance. In all fairness, I think producing even a redacted code dump will cost them more than that in lawyer and developer time but the final number would still be closer to 100k than a million.
I have a "Screen Size" widget on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Just click and shoot the resolution I want. I can even rotate the screen if I want.
How can anyone think that there's anything except for pure opportunistic price-gouging in this?
I expect that by default from anyone trying to sell me anything. They no doubt had some accountants, marketing psychologists, and some very good software to model marketing and pricing scenarios with. The entire purpose of the exercise is to determine the price point that maximizes long term profits. All big businesses do this. Smaller businesses do it to but that is more of a cut and try sorta deal.
From Nintendo's point of view they had a very good reason to raise the price. It could be profitable.
A program compiled under a 2.2 kernel often wouldn't run under a 2.4 kernel, ditto for the 2.4-2.6 transition. Worse, the actual toolsets and configuration keep changing.
The Linux kernel interfaces to userland are kept pretty static. That isn't the problem. It is glibc and other libraries that have changed over the past ten years that make old binaries not work. If you want to run an old binary badly enough, you can use a chroot, jail, or virtual machine with libraries it depends on. You could even just chuck those old libraries into your modern system (though I wouldn't....)
There is a tradeoff between fast progress and backwards compatibility. Happily, in today's market you can choose that balance by choosing between a fast or slow developed Linux variants (think Debian Stable versus Fedora Core), an xBSD release, and lately open sourced Solaris.
In all silly seriousness, that much low atomic weight matter is either going to ignite into a star of some kind or it is going to explode (what you said....more or less). It wouldn't look like any sort of candy or confection long before that sheer mass of candyball is complete. Once planetary mass is achieved, the core will heat (undoubtedly a tasty caramel layer will form and move outward toward the crust...) and you'll have one hot ball of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and a few other things. Large tracts of the surface may remain lickable although it is going to have one nasty atmosphere. At some point it will resemble a Jupiter and as mass increases get downright starlike. With masses like this we just aren't going to have most of these sugars, starches, and carbohydrates staying intact. 1 AU diameter's worth of mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon? Sheeyeeet! This thing would be one tasty blue white supergiant.....assuming it just doesn't blow up at some point in formation.
In this universe, if you put that much shit in one place SOMETHING is going to happen be it Cadbury Creme filling or horseflops.
Adding a SenderID or making your e-mail less spammy doesn't do a damn thing if your ISP's mail server was used by someone -- at some point in the distant past -- to send something MS decided was spam. And the only recourse is to pay something like $1,400 to some magical e-mail certification service.
Tried that too! In fact, I did everything the unhelpful Hotmail guy suggested except the $1400 magical service. Lo and behold, we are still blacklisted by them. I woulda just said "aw screw it" except for the fact that a board member has a Hotmail account...... Had lotsa fun explaining that one........
What's really cute is that they arbitarily decide certain domains harbor spammers when they do not. Hotmail accounts can not be reliably mailed to from our workplace. If a Hotmail user emails one of us then we can reply but we cannot cold send mail to Hotmail. I tried to resolve it with Hotmail and the only solution they offered me was to let a whitelist provider they use to crawl around our network then we'd have to pay them to get on the whitelist. Then MAYBE we could send to Hotmail inboxes again. I simply advised our staff not to rely on Hotmail and I explain "this is Microsoft's fault" whenever Hotmail issues come up.
I've often thought Sun could do worse than take a year or so and add nothing to OOo. Instead, take that year to modularize the project, deeply document the codebase, and make the build system dev friendly. At the end of this, they'd have something that is easier to find contributors for. It would also be easier to extend and create plugins for. The biggest lack OOo has vs MS Office IMHO is that MS Office is also a fairly easy to use development platform for business. A more modular OOO could develop it's own ecosystem of business logic.
Well, you'd want to at least make differential backups once a month or so. Just buy a new drive every few years. As long as either your live set or the backup is intact then you're in the sun. At the very least, you dilute the risk of losing all that data.
Lossless codecs cut that 650/700 MB down to 350MB or less. Also many albums don't use the full capacity of disc. If one buys tracks ala carte then the numbers look even more reasonable.
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The FOSS side has patents as well. It isn't just a matter of debunking MS patents. OIN and others can do to MS as they propose to do to us. If it were just a simple matter of MS waving their patent stick around in court uncontested they would have done it already. If MS shut down say Samba with an injunction, they might get equally damaging injunctions leveled against them for little things like Active Directory or Exchange. If MS does more than just run Ballmer's mouth then they risk Global Patentuclear War.
Any Amiga 3000 or 4000 with the appropriate monitor could do it. Perhaps some earlier models could as well, I'm not an Amiga fanboy. The Amiga 500 was an early model Amiga. The Amiga product line had churn for seven or eight years (as a Commodore owned venture. I don't speak of how Amiga is the IT landscape's equivalent of a zombie lurching across the landscape......) A review of the then new Amiga 4000 is here:
8 _Previewing_the_Amiga.php
http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue146/A1
The last generation Amiga's could also accept third-party graphics cards based on some PC chipsets common at the time. An Amiga so equipped couldn't use the card to play games that touch the hardware directly but they could display graphics and productivity apps at any resolution and color depth PCs of the time could. This means 1024x768x24 (at least). But even without such help, the last Amigas could reach your 800x600 target.
So, most likely, there's going to be a (serious) race to get to the next uberfuel for the nation by privateers and small corporations. The big guys seem to already be smelling the change in the air and are doing a bit of research there, but who knows how much they're really working towards it right now. They may just end up following the pack.
They'll let others do all the research and take all the risk and then buy whatever technologies look like feasible winners, kinda like Microsoft.It isn't just what we personally spend on gasoline. I've noticed prices on fresh produce and other things in the grocery store are up too. High fuel prices affect the price of everything. Almost everything in the store came by ship, truck, or train. That takes fuel and higher fuel costs are passed on to consumers. High fuel prices are costing you more than a 0.15% household budget increase. Some families have to do more driving than you do so the direct costs for others is higher as well. That means many people stay home more and spend less when they are out. That will ripple through the economy as well.
This is a much larger issue than your monthly gasoline bill.
How do you know this?
Because that is what WE are doing. Mars and Venus are the closest things to "Earthlike" in our solar system apart from Earth itself. Well, there is Europa but that could be a little hard to pick out from Jupiter. Any putative civilization doing what we are doing and viewing OUR solar system using the techniques we are using will pick out our gas giants and maybe Earth and Venus. Assuming they don't pick up our radio, Venus and Earth are going to be "possible Zukelike worlds". If their processes are a bit more sensitive maybe they'll get Mars too. If their exobiology is in the state ours is in then all three will look about as good from interstellar distances.Earthlike mass implies Earthlike gravity. A planet with a gravity well of that intensity at the range of temperatures encountered in the "habitable band" will hold on to most of the gases that accompany its formation as well as being able to capture some of the gases it enounters as it orbits (which will pile up a bit over the eons) as well as some fraction of ejecta from asteroid and comet hits. Note well, I didn't specify what sort of atmosphere. In the absence of life as we know it, we're talking things like CO2, N2, Methane, and whole other slew of things with similar molecular weights.
Look at our own solar system. Mars and Venus and a whole slew of gas giant moons have atmospheres. Given the gravity and energy input from it's star, you really have to stand this on it's head. You'd have to justify why it wouldn't have an atmosphere.
A planet of Earthlike mass in the habitable band would almost certainly have to have an atmosphere of some kind. Whether or not that atmosphere is breathable or not is another question altogether. From that distance, Venus or Mars would look pretty good to extraterrestial terran planet hunters. Masswise Venus is a near twin of earth but the surface conditions are straight out of Dante's Inferno. Mars is a shade too light to hold on to a thick O2 atmosphere and is basically a cold rusty desert. My guess is this place is apt to be more like Venus or Mars than Earth. Any chance we could talk Goldilocks into planet hunting?
Seal it up and slap in a diode and fuse. That takes care of accidental touching and hooking it up the wrong way.
2 has properties in common with 1 and 3. All three are integers, positive, and multiples of one. A real mathematician can point out others. All three being successive multiples of one suffices to place them on a spectrum, multiple spectrums actually. They all fall on real number lines too.
I sure as heck wouldn't endorse free will, being a Reformed Baptist, and neither would most of my fellow seminarians. Interestingly enough this is something we would share in common with many consistent naturalists, including the likes of Albert Einstein. Hard determinism makes sense scientifically and theologically. I like how Einstein put it: "God does not play dice with the universe."
Einstein was surely one of the most important physicists of the 20th century; maybe he was THE most important. Nonetheless, physics left him behind when he couldn't bring himself to accept quantum physics. Indeed, some of his objections and thought experiments inadvertently strengthened it (he pointed out that uncertainty in the timing of subatomics would necessarily create uncertainty in the amount of energy involved. This was theoretically and experimentally proved correct. He thought it an example of absurdity.) This philosophical leaning of Einstein that you find encouraging pretty much put an end to his importance in physics. Einstein continued to have significance as a humanitarian and public figure; the wizened kindly Einstein that most of us know was after this period and there can't be any doubting the influence he had on a wartime Roosevelt.It may well be the case that ultimately God doesn't play dice with the universe; I wouldn't put poker past Him though........
Are you talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat?
There is also:
1. Identify the code you own and release it. 2. Release any register specs not clearly indentified in #1. 3. Leave it to the community to replace the non-owned code.
Also, $115,000 is chump change to a company like AMD. If that was all it cost, then doing this is a no brainer. The potential Linux market for their cards is bigger than that. Intel is certainly poised to cost them much more than that in market share loss due to their more Linux friendly stance. In all fairness, I think producing even a redacted code dump will cost them more than that in lawyer and developer time but the final number would still be closer to 100k than a million.
I have a "Screen Size" widget on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Just click and shoot the resolution I want. I can even rotate the screen if I want.
Unless IBM is able to construe MS' Linux threats as a violation of those agreements......
How can anyone think that there's anything except for pure opportunistic price-gouging in this?
I expect that by default from anyone trying to sell me anything. They no doubt had some accountants, marketing psychologists, and some very good software to model marketing and pricing scenarios with. The entire purpose of the exercise is to determine the price point that maximizes long term profits. All big businesses do this. Smaller businesses do it to but that is more of a cut and try sorta deal.From Nintendo's point of view they had a very good reason to raise the price. It could be profitable.
Only when it comes to the premium movie channels I'm already paying for.......
A program compiled under a 2.2 kernel often wouldn't run under a 2.4 kernel, ditto for the 2.4-2.6 transition. Worse, the actual toolsets and configuration keep changing.
The Linux kernel interfaces to userland are kept pretty static. That isn't the problem. It is glibc and other libraries that have changed over the past ten years that make old binaries not work. If you want to run an old binary badly enough, you can use a chroot, jail, or virtual machine with libraries it depends on. You could even just chuck those old libraries into your modern system (though I wouldn't....)There is a tradeoff between fast progress and backwards compatibility. Happily, in today's market you can choose that balance by choosing between a fast or slow developed Linux variants (think Debian Stable versus Fedora Core), an xBSD release, and lately open sourced Solaris.
In all silly seriousness, that much low atomic weight matter is either going to ignite into a star of some kind or it is going to explode (what you said....more or less). It wouldn't look like any sort of candy or confection long before that sheer mass of candyball is complete. Once planetary mass is achieved, the core will heat (undoubtedly a tasty caramel layer will form and move outward toward the crust...) and you'll have one hot ball of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and a few other things. Large tracts of the surface may remain lickable although it is going to have one nasty atmosphere. At some point it will resemble a Jupiter and as mass increases get downright starlike. With masses like this we just aren't going to have most of these sugars, starches, and carbohydrates staying intact. 1 AU diameter's worth of mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon? Sheeyeeet! This thing would be one tasty blue white supergiant.....assuming it just doesn't blow up at some point in formation.
In this universe, if you put that much shit in one place SOMETHING is going to happen be it Cadbury Creme filling or horseflops.
Adding a SenderID or making your e-mail less spammy doesn't do a damn thing if your ISP's mail server was used by someone -- at some point in the distant past -- to send something MS decided was spam. And the only recourse is to pay something like $1,400 to some magical e-mail certification service.
Tried that too! In fact, I did everything the unhelpful Hotmail guy suggested except the $1400 magical service. Lo and behold, we are still blacklisted by them. I woulda just said "aw screw it" except for the fact that a board member has a Hotmail account...... Had lotsa fun explaining that one........What's really cute is that they arbitarily decide certain domains harbor spammers when they do not. Hotmail accounts can not be reliably mailed to from our workplace. If a Hotmail user emails one of us then we can reply but we cannot cold send mail to Hotmail. I tried to resolve it with Hotmail and the only solution they offered me was to let a whitelist provider they use to crawl around our network then we'd have to pay them to get on the whitelist. Then MAYBE we could send to Hotmail inboxes again. I simply advised our staff not to rely on Hotmail and I explain "this is Microsoft's fault" whenever Hotmail issues come up.
I've often thought Sun could do worse than take a year or so and add nothing to OOo. Instead, take that year to modularize the project, deeply document the codebase, and make the build system dev friendly. At the end of this, they'd have something that is easier to find contributors for. It would also be easier to extend and create plugins for. The biggest lack OOo has vs MS Office IMHO is that MS Office is also a fairly easy to use development platform for business. A more modular OOO could develop it's own ecosystem of business logic.
And BlackJack! On second thought just send the hookers!
Well, you'd want to at least make differential backups once a month or so. Just buy a new drive every few years. As long as either your live set or the backup is intact then you're in the sun. At the very least, you dilute the risk of losing all that data.
I've seen two- and three-hundred gig external USB hard drives for less than $200. Looks like a good insurance policy to me.
Lossless codecs cut that 650/700 MB down to 350MB or less. Also many albums don't use the full capacity of disc. If one buys tracks ala carte then the numbers look even more reasonable.