Comment Frankenstein (Score 1) 127
... inventing a new battery, taming hurricanes, defeating disease... attracting lightning, tunneling it into the autoclave... Frankenstein! Just like he did when he managed the Windows codebase.
Comment In Europe, this is the law (Score 4, Interesting) 177
This is already European Law (which must be implemented in local laws in al member states). Once sold whithin the EU, you're free to resell your license.
The problem is in the details: if you buy software (i.e. a license to use it), you normally also get a bunch of other rights, like access to updates, maybe even the right to call someone. The law doesn't say that these rights are also transferrable (or transferred). So in most licenses, there's still plenty of "you cannot do this and that (resell, for example), or you will loose the right to such and so".
But the resale of the license to plainly use the software cannot be forbidden by contract in the EU.
Comment 1 error = 1TB rebuild (Score 1) 444
The real problem with "classic" RAID is that 1 single error means a total rebuild of the array.
Comment US medical system (Score 3, Interesting) 419
As the Obama healthcare reform is also international news, I read an analysis of the US medical system here in the local newspaper in The Netherlands. The US as a country spends twice as much for it's healthcare as Germany and France, while only 83% of the US Americans have an insurance.
This is because US healthcare is not about health; it is about the caring industry. There's no room for prevention (as there's no profit from prevention), there's only room for Care.
TFA seems just like another example of it.
Submission + - The Microsoft OOXML Contradictions Revealed
Andy Updegrove writes: "Someone was kind enough to send me the package of materials distributed by ISO/IEC JTC 1 earlier today to its members.The package contains each of the responses filed during the ISO Fast Track Contradictions period for Ecma 376, the specification based upon Microsoft's OOXML formats, as well as the responses prepared by Ecma to those responses. Earlier, Microsoft had downplayed reports by myself and others that the great majority of the responses were negative, suggesting that most or many were either neutral, or in fact "laudatory." In fact, the actual responses demonstrate that 14 of 20 responses — more than 2/3s — were clearly negative, two indicated divisions of opinion among the members of the national bodies submitting them, three were inconclusive or neutral, and one offered no objections.What happens next? The transmittal note from JTC1 indicates that after internal consultation, next steps will be communicated to the National Bodies "in the very near future." But given the degree of opposition and concern expressed by a significant percentage of those national bodies entitled to vote up or down on adoption, it's fair to say that Microsoft has its work cut out for it, if it wants to see OOXML achieve the same degree of international standards status as ODF.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/articl e.php?story=2007022819130536"
