No, that is a secondary goal. The first priority for Microsoft is control, technology ownership and monopolization. Even at a financial loss.

See IE, XBOX, dotnet, Silverlight, etc, etc

Ah, Linux gets disk level clustering?

It is interesting to compare with what VMS offered 25 years ago:
- VMS could have multiple nodes (can DRBD? It is not obvious from the web site.)
- All VMS nodes have read and write access to the file systems
- The distributed lock manager helps with file locking in this case.
- VMS has the concept of quorum to avoid the "split brain" syndrom mentioned on the web page.

Yeah? So how come they work at Microsoft?

Use BSD.

Really, if your company wants to do "open source" and is completely uninterested in free software (GPL licensed code), why not build something around a BSD kernel?

The company should analyze WHY it wants to do "open source". Do they want to build a community and/or developer participation? Or do they want gratis software?

I don't understand why companies who DON'T want to share their source code don't consider alternatives to Linux. I would love if they went the Linux route, but then they should get with the program...

So FAT has ceased to be proprietary now?

The cool thing about it is that except for the modem, the device is mechanical, not electronic. You could connect a RS-232 (serial) cable and send/receive 110 baud data. And the teletype would encode/decode the signals purely mechanically, using rotating wheels. Amazing!

This also included the paper tape punch/reader. You could write your entire program off-line to a paper tape. The you would connect and run the tape through the reader. This would allow you to enter the entire program fast, minimizing your expensive on-line time.

If you pressed a key on the keyboard all other keys would lock until the character was sent. If you typed too fast, you could hurt your fingers!

I'd like to have one. They were noisy though...

How is that recursive?

I developed a program on a PDP-11. It was a 16-bit computer and had 64kB memory. It didn't have virtual memory so in order to fit a large program you had to build an overlay tree.

Consider if function a() called b0() and b1(). And b0() called c0() and c1().

By knowing the call tree in your program and some other stuff about the dynamics of your program you could arrange so that b0() and b1() shared the same space in memory. Likewise for c0() and c1().

By studying linker maps you could create an overlay description file to make your program fit into 64kB. The OS would use this to automatically bring pieces of code in and out.

You can only imagine the consequences when you start to change the program and the pieces grow in size or new calls are added (b1() now calls c0()). You'd often have to manually do a new overlay tree.

No wonder VAX/VMS was such a hit in the late seventies with 32-bit computing and virtual memory support.

Maybe here?
Or here?

Hmmm
According to the technical details you linked to it doesn't play standard DRM-free AAC files but it does play proprietary WMA files. And it requires Windows which I don't use.

Also, there is no mention on how it connects to my iTunes library? Can it sync automatically and update the smart playlists I use to load it with music I haven't listened to yet? Or do I have to go back to fully manual syncing/management?

I'm not so sure the Sansa player is superior...

Yes they store dates in mixed endian format.

Not to mention football which Americans think is a sport where you don't have a proper ball and you very seldom play it using a foot. :)