IBM did pretty poorly in the late 80s after their bout with the US. Stock prices slumped pretty seriously. It's just now that they're really recovering.
Jackson does mention Linux and BeOS as competition, but states that they (we) have the same issues of breaking into the market as any other OS vendor. The biggest issue is the "chicken and the egg" problem, where an OS isn't "worthy" until it gets the apps. It doesn't get the apps unless it's "worthy". MS has gone out of their way to perpetuate this view. Yes, it's changing because of Linux and Be, but it's taken 7+ years to get to this point. Any commercial organization spending this much time and money to develop an OS would have been bankrupt long ago. And *that* is the point that Judge Jackson is making.
Having worked in a Solaris shop, you can see the value of having crash dumps to send to your vendor.
Actually, we were the vendor and got crash dumps from customers that was able to pinpoint very quickly what the problem was. Once that was found, it was easy to fix. Without the crash dumps, it could take weeks to find the cause of a nasty bug. Especially intermittent ones.
With Linux having this feature, it'll be easier for driver authors to debug their code, and most likely boost the confidence of customers who want 99.999% uptime.
Maybe, maybe not. It really depends on how the company is broken up. If it's split along OS, application, etc. lines, then each individual company has to make agreements with the others regarding things like APIs, etc. This means (finally!) a standard API that both baby-MS and competitors have to work with.
The reason I use Perl for CGI (though I'm moving towards PHP) is because there are hundreds of modules that already have much of what I need in it. CPAN makes finding these modules easy, and I can install them in just a few minutes. Many of the CGI scripts I wrote tied together a Postgres database, Remedy server, some funky time functions, and CGI. There's a module for each of those. Make my code probably 1/2 the size it would otherwise.
When I was working for the VA, we released all the source code used (except for the encryption ones) on CD-ROM for anyone to use. We were required to sell it for the cost of duplicating the information. This wound up being $10-15, since it was about 5 years ago, and CD duplication was expensive.
Right now outside, it's probably 55 degrees. Nice crisp autumn weather. In a few months we get snow. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, who cares? It's still snow.
Now, the drivers trying to make it through said weather is a different story. The only thing LA has on rt 128is the gun laws (or lack of).
Masspike is leasing land to telcos, who are running fiber along the median the entire distance of the mass pike. I saw this being installed in the berkshires a few weeks ago. Here's hoping the pike gets paid off sometime soon (tho $2.70 isn't a bad price, considering the same distance in NYS). -Mark
I've been playing UT under Win98 for a couple weeks now with my G400. It's a great game, and a nice balance between the "I know where the bad guy is" and the online slaughter I usually find myself in.
Since who are you going to sue? You're not going to get anything out of it (after you take my house, car, and stock portfolio, you probably spent more in lawyers fees than you'll get from me personally).
What this could hurt is some of the collaboration of (big) business and free software. For example, Wine and Corel, or IBM and Apache. A patent getting in the way of those projects won't necessarily kill them, but I'm sure CORL and IBM would be less inclined to continue.
Unfortunately, with the way cable systems are set up, this is next to impossible. There is no picking and choosing of channels (except the premium ones anyway). I am really paying for stuff like ESPN*, MTV*, and PAX, when I never had any interest in their programming. However, I'm required to have those channels to get the ones that I am interested in seeing.
This means that a good portion of my cable bill is spent going to pay for channels I don't want (Golf channel? c'mon!).
All that aside, I'm sure someone spending the enitre day watching ESPN* would say the same thing about A&E, TLC, and SCI-FI.
I'm kinda suprised how the Internet itself is handled. Probably the best example was the first (second?) episode of Sliders (which was what, 95, 96?) where Arcturus says to the TV repairman "You got an Internet connection?" and the answer is yes.
Let's be honest here, how would you turn "The Cuckoo's Egg" into a thrilling movie? It's kinda hard to do. Or even Snow Crash would be hard to do. Cryptonomicon would make a good TBS movie, but they'd have to cut 90% of it. "Pirates of Silicon Valley" had to cut out a good portion of "Fire In the Valley" to do it - and they had to throw in side notes to explain some of the finer points.
I don't think that it's that Hollywood can't make the movies. They can't. It's just the subject matter is very specialized, and hard to create into an interesting movie and be confined to 1 hr 30 min.
The *idea* of insider trading is that an insider (Cowpland in this case) knows something that is going to happen that will seriously affect the stock price, but this isn't public knowledge yet. Before it becomes public knowledge, insider takes advantage of the situation and buys/sells stock. A few days later, the general public finds out, and all hell breaks loose with the stock price, but insider either gains a lot of money, or prevents the loss of a lot of money.
No offense to the XF86 guys, since I've been using their product since..well forever (7 years now? wow.). I have seen recent releases that just don't work with the hardware I had (an S3V/VX and CT69000 come to mind). Earlier releases worked just fine. As the later releases came out, the S3V quit working with the release bundled with RedHat 6.0, and the CT69000 quit working with the 6.1 release. I did get the CT69000 working, but not without tuning off BitBlt, forcing me to modify the XF86config file. Both situations would cause my Linux box to hang hard (requiring me to hit the reset switch). I wound up replacing the S3V with a G400MAX (get one now!).
That being said, Xig is not really playing nice. There are certainly other things that differentiate Xig with the standard XF86 product. Performance, multi-head (now), and bleeding-edge cards.
Sagan died in '96, before the Matrix was made. If you get the Matrix on DVD, you get to see the actor who portrayed Smith chatting (with an Aussie accent IIRC).
Well, see on a scope. He had two paths for the beam to travel: one through the air, one through some material that blocks microwaves. The receivers are hooked into a scope, and you see two peaks of transmission. One was through the air, and the other was through the blocking material. The peak for the blocked material showed up before the peak for the unblocked. IANARS.
IANARS (I Am Not a Rocket Scientist), but NOVA on PBS has a great episode on the nature of time, wormholes, and other really out-there physics. Yes, it's off topic, but it's on this week. Go see it.
Of particular note:
1) A person who says that he's seen microwaves go faster than the speed of light.
2) Wormhole theory (with lots of chats with Hawking)
3) If you've ever seen the light experiment where a light source goes through two slits in a wall, causing the light to split, you'll be curious to see what happens when they let only one photon at a time go to the wall. The result? Same as if you let all the photons through. Bars of light.
Check out XIG's web site (http://www.xig.com/Pages/AGP-BENCHMARKS.html). The G400 rocks many times. I was considering leaving in my Voodoo1 card for doing OpenGL stuff, but it has since been pulled out and will make way for a PCI ethernet card.
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IBM did pretty poorly in the late 80s after their bout with the US. Stock prices slumped pretty seriously. It's just now that they're really recovering.
Jackson does mention Linux and BeOS as competition, but states that they (we) have the same issues of breaking into the market as any other OS vendor. The biggest issue is the "chicken and the egg" problem, where an OS isn't "worthy" until it gets the apps. It doesn't get the apps unless it's "worthy". MS has gone out of their way to perpetuate this view. Yes, it's changing because of Linux and Be, but it's taken 7+ years to get to this point. Any commercial organization spending this much time and money to develop an OS would have been bankrupt long ago. And *that* is the point that Judge Jackson is making.
Having worked in a Solaris shop, you can see the value of having crash dumps to send to your vendor.
Actually, we were the vendor and got crash dumps from customers that was able to pinpoint very quickly what the problem was. Once that was found, it was easy to fix. Without the crash dumps, it could take weeks to find the cause of a nasty bug. Especially intermittent ones.
With Linux having this feature, it'll be easier for driver authors to debug their code, and most likely boost the confidence of customers who want 99.999% uptime.
Maybe, maybe not. It really depends on how the company is broken up. If it's split along OS, application, etc. lines, then each individual company has to make agreements with the others regarding things like APIs, etc. This means (finally!) a standard API that both baby-MS and competitors have to work with.
The reason I use Perl for CGI (though I'm moving towards PHP) is because there are hundreds of modules that already have much of what I need in it. CPAN makes finding these modules easy, and I can install them in just a few minutes. Many of the CGI scripts I wrote tied together a Postgres database, Remedy server, some funky time functions, and CGI. There's a module for each of those. Make my code probably 1/2 the size it would otherwise.
When I was working for the VA, we released all the source code used (except for the encryption ones) on CD-ROM for anyone to use. We were required to sell it for the cost of duplicating the information. This wound up being $10-15, since it was about 5 years ago, and CD duplication was expensive.
JVC 501 is okay as well. -Mark
What? The weather here rocks.
Right now outside, it's probably 55 degrees. Nice crisp autumn weather.
In a few months we get snow. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, who cares? It's still snow.
Now, the drivers trying to make it through said weather is a different story. The only thing LA has on rt 128is the gun laws (or lack of).
Masspike is leasing land to telcos, who are running fiber along the median the entire distance of the mass pike. I saw this being installed in the berkshires a few weeks ago. Here's hoping the pike gets paid off sometime soon (tho $2.70 isn't a bad price, considering the same distance in NYS). -Mark
Err..should have said "yay, but no Mesa *yet*".
It's only for 3Dfx and Glide. *mutter*
I've been playing UT under Win98 for a couple weeks now with my G400. It's a great game, and a nice balance between the "I know where the bad guy is" and the online slaughter I usually find myself in.
Since who are you going to sue? You're not going to get anything out of it (after you take my house, car, and stock portfolio, you probably spent more in lawyers fees than you'll get from me personally).
What this could hurt is some of the collaboration of (big) business and free software. For example, Wine and Corel, or IBM and Apache. A patent getting in the way of those projects won't necessarily kill them, but I'm sure CORL and IBM would be less inclined to continue.
It's $1M CDN, plus up to 3 times the profit. Plus 2 yrs in jail.
Unfortunately, with the way cable systems are set up, this is next to impossible. There is no picking and choosing of channels (except the premium ones anyway). I am really paying for stuff like ESPN*, MTV*, and PAX, when I never had any interest in their programming. However, I'm required to have those channels to get the ones that I am interested in seeing.
This means that a good portion of my cable bill is spent going to pay for channels I don't want (Golf channel? c'mon!).
All that aside, I'm sure someone spending the enitre day watching ESPN* would say the same thing about A&E, TLC, and SCI-FI.
I'm kinda suprised how the Internet itself is handled. Probably the best example was the first (second?) episode of Sliders (which was what, 95, 96?) where Arcturus says to the TV repairman "You got an Internet connection?" and the answer is yes.
Let's be honest here, how would you turn "The Cuckoo's Egg" into a thrilling movie? It's kinda hard to do. Or even Snow Crash would be hard to do. Cryptonomicon would make a good TBS movie, but they'd have to cut 90% of it. "Pirates of Silicon Valley" had to cut out a good portion of "Fire In the Valley" to do it - and they had to throw in side notes to explain some of the finer points.
I don't think that it's that Hollywood can't make the movies. They can't. It's just the subject matter is very specialized, and hard to create into an interesting movie and be confined to 1 hr 30 min.
The *idea* of insider trading is that an insider (Cowpland in this case) knows something that is going to happen that will seriously affect the stock price, but this isn't public knowledge yet. Before it becomes public knowledge, insider takes advantage of the situation and buys/sells stock. A few days later, the general public finds out, and all hell breaks loose with the stock price, but insider either gains a lot of money, or prevents the loss of a lot of money.
No offense to the XF86 guys, since I've been using their product since ..well forever (7 years now? wow.). I have seen recent releases that just don't work with the hardware I had (an S3V/VX and CT69000 come to mind). Earlier releases worked just fine. As the later releases came out, the S3V quit working with the release bundled with RedHat 6.0, and the CT69000 quit working with the 6.1 release. I did get the CT69000 working, but not without tuning off BitBlt, forcing me to modify the XF86config file. Both situations would cause my Linux box to hang hard (requiring me to hit the reset switch). I wound up replacing the S3V with a G400MAX (get one now!).
That being said, Xig is not really playing nice. There are certainly other things that differentiate Xig with the standard XF86 product. Performance, multi-head (now), and bleeding-edge cards.
Sagan died in '96, before the Matrix was made. If you get the Matrix on DVD, you get to see the actor who portrayed Smith chatting (with an Aussie accent IIRC).
Well, see on a scope. He had two paths for the beam to travel: one through the air, one through some material that blocks microwaves. The receivers are hooked into a scope, and you see two peaks of transmission. One was through the air, and the other was through the blocking material. The peak for the blocked material showed up before the peak for the unblocked. IANARS.
Of particular note:
1) A person who says that he's seen microwaves go faster than the speed of light.
2) Wormhole theory (with lots of chats with Hawking)
3) If you've ever seen the light experiment where a light source goes through two slits in a wall, causing the light to split, you'll be curious to see what happens when they let only one photon at a time go to the wall. The result? Same as if you let all the photons through. Bars of light.
-Mark
Check out XIG's web site (http://www.xig.com/Pages/AGP-BENCHMARKS.html). The G400 rocks many times. I was considering leaving in my Voodoo1 card for doing OpenGL stuff, but it has since been pulled out and will make way for a PCI ethernet card.
Reminds me of the Red Dwarf book where stars were going to be blown up at the right times to spell "Coke adds life" in the night sky for years.