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Comment Re:I don't think so (Score 1) 153

HP being a good example. Their hardware is generally solid, but every piece of software they're associated with is crap. This includes drivers, most firmware, and pure software (QTP is overpriced and broken, their diameter api crashes as often as it works). I suspect that the process for building good hardware is so different from the process for good software that companies have trouble doing both.

Comment Re:It's about tactics: GPL helps free software (Score 4, Insightful) 1098

In every software company I've worked at the codebase is roughly 5% critical, complex code that makes the company money, 95% boilerplate utility, ui, boring code that everyone tries to find ways to reduce. For that 5% it's important it be GPL-free since there's no way in hell the company will release it, and GPL violations can be expensive. Anything it links against in the other 95% must also be GPL-free. The rest of it can contain whatever free code reduces work for developers. Fixing a bug in boost may help my competitors, sure, but maintaining a fork just so I can jealously guard a little change in a third party library is a shocking amount of work long-term. The money rests in giving back and getting someone else to maintain as much code as you can, other than your core competence.

Comment Re:What a bunch of liers (Score 1) 479

This is about rural Iowa. The main cost for maintenance is probably getting a person to the area where a problem is. They cherry-picked the date to be in the middle of a recession when they could pay peanuts for someone to drive 3 hours to the middle of nowhere to replace a repeater, versus now when they have to pay 9 peanuts.

Comment Re:Bios code? (Score 1) 533

I would agree, probably some ethernet or ip handling code. Something that has to exist on every device that connects to a network and is run on every single packet. The CRC check on the ethernet frame is a likely candidate. Every router, switch, and networked device is going to run an identical check on every packet before it can even verify that the frame is well-formed. Maximum frame size is around 9kB, and the standard is 1500 bytes. That's a lot of runs on a 10 gb lan.

Comment Not the first (Score 2) 196

This guy talks like this is some new idea, but there are excellent libraries that already provide this stuff. A quick look at the list tells me that boost and openssl cover most of the functionality, and unlike chromium they are made to be libraries, so you can be pretty confident they work under all conditions and the developers won't screw around with the api between versions.

Comment Re:Seems reasonable (Score 5, Informative) 167

The US is about the only country that taxes citizens regardless of where they live and work. Which leads to a fun situation where the kids of US citizens born abroad are considered natural US citizens and expected to file taxes, but may not be eligible to vote depending on which state their parents were from. Taxation without representation.

Comment Why is this news? (Score 1) 417

If McAfee announced that they would continue supplying virus definitions to their antivirus running on XP would that make the front page of slashdot? Because that's all MS announced here. I very much doubt it takes them much extra effort to port virus definitions to a previous version of MSE.

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