From what I can remember, it was also management issues at the top.

Not to mention that the Amiga was tightly bound to the custom chips they did in-house (Paula/Agnus, etc). Commodore didn't spend (or didn't have?) enough resources on R&D to keep up with the PC, and was also too slow in changing the platform so that it could use PC components instead.

But is this unhealthy to the commercial result of Apple corp and the satisfaction of most Apple customers? Being closed also means that Apple has vertical control of everything from their online services to operating system to hardware, and Apple has generally been very good at using that control to deliver products that work very well if you stay inside Apple's garden.

I suspect most of us on /. (me included) would be pleased if Apple opened up more, but how much would Apple gain by doing that and risk alienating those that are perfectly happy in Apple's garden?

It could be something as simple as the network card in the server autoconfiguring to 100Mbps, 11MBps sounds like a saturated 100Mbps link. Check with ethtool on the server and in the management interface on the switch. Bad performance like this can also be caused by mismatched duplex on the server network card and the switch it is connected to.

Half Duplex is part of the GigE spec as far as I know, but I've never seen a GigE hub. WJSmythe, could you share the manufacturer and model number on this oddity?

I seem to recall that some Linux drivers try to handle this automatically (Intel gigabit chips?). They do interrupts when the traffic is below some threshold and switch to polling when things get busy. The main reason, as you say, is to avoid interrupt storms; polling becomes cheaper on CPU time than interrupts when there is a higher than x% chance of there being packets waiting. It is also more resilient to DoS or server overload - if f.ex. an Apache server receives more requests than it can handle, throttling the polling speed makes more CPU available for handling requests instead of wasting it in interrupts receiving packets that the web server is too overloaded to handle anyway.

Avi is container, not codec.

Is it really zero cost? While the cost is going down, and will go further down in the future with better/faster/larger/cheaper storage devices and transmission networks there is always going to be some cost in maintaining the distribution network, cataloging, indexing, making sure metadata is correct, making sure the content is malware free, updates/fixes. As such, people might find that an all-you-can-eat DRM-free subscription to a music label or software company might be preferable even if the same content is available for free on P2P.

Information goods also don't exist in a vacuum, communities form around many of them. Downloading an album from piratebay does not give the same experience as being a member of a fan club / community and interacting with the rock band. Downloading a software program from P2P is of less value than being part of a community around the author of the software. For information goods where you have a large and/or very faithful fanbase/community, it might be possible for the creator to extract sufficient income from them. (I think I once saw a paper showing that a book author or a band could get a fairly decent living out of a surprisingly small number of faithful fans)

There is also the fact that IP creators are in a rather privileged position compared to other workers. For example, the need for farmers dropped because the work they did were replaced by machines; the same thing has happened time and again, human labor replaced by machines. I don't really see how machines can replace the need for human creativity. Unless we create true AI, we will always need IP creators. We will always want music, books, better medicines, software.. If the market can't find solutions for how to compensate them, government will have to step in.

From the complaint, it looks like it is only consumer-grade products that they got when they bought Linksys. Even if they included some IOS software in some of the products, the absolute worst case scenario for Cisco would be that they would have to dual-license those particular files as GPL. It would not force Cisco to GPL the entire IOS.

My guess is that Cisco has been dragging their feet because (1) it would be expensive to get into full compliance (they would have to dig up the build environment / source code repositories for old Linksys products, some of which they might not even have anymore) (2) by providing full source to the consumer-grade products, 3rd party firmware for those could be developed that would compete with Cisco's more expensive gear, and (3) they never expected the FSF to sue.

I was more under the impression that Cisco's business model was more like a software company that happens to sell expensive hardware dongles.

According to the complaint: "in
the Firmware for Linksysâ(TM) models EFG120, EFG250, NAS200, SPA400, WAG300N, WAP4400N,
WIP300, WMA11B, WRT54GL, WRV200, WRV54G, and WVC54GC, and in the program Quick-
VPN."

BSD and the like are more "free" for the developer / manufacturer while GPL is more "free" for the user / recipient of the software.

Which license that is more free depends on whose freedom one is concerned about.

Very interesting. Yes, that does help a lot in understanding why the US has such an attachment to their flag.

Combine that with what history has taught Europeans about obedience to flags, and there is no wonder why misunderstandings happen all the time.

Most AMERICANS would. But this is the Internet, with people from lots of different countries and cultures.

When an American says "defending the flag" as short-hand for what he really means by that statement, it creates opportunities for misunderstanding and confusion when people that are not American read it. This entire thread started because a non-american wanted to understand better what meaning Americans applies to their flag.

Discussions like this unfortunately tend to devolve into flamewars, and it seems other comments on this article has already gone that way. That is sad, because it would be really interesting to get to the bottom of why there is this cultural difference in how the flag is perceived in EU and US.

I think we might be on to something here.

In America, the flag is culturally bound to the military as a whole and personal military service, right? So "disrespecting the flag" is seen as the same as disrespecting the sacrifice and service of both current and past members of the military?

In Europe, the flag does not hold that kind of position culturally, and I think it has to do with WWII. Imagine being born in Germany after 1945. Imagine what coming to terms with what your country did would do to post-war culture and the attitudes it would create towards the kind of imagery used by Germany leading up to, and during WWII. The flag was an important part of that imagery.

I think that is the reason why we see the flag so differently, but I would appreciate comments or corrections.

So, for someone with a US culture the flag is something to be proud of and a symbol of military service and personal sacrifice for the country. For someone with an EU culture, a flag is a symbol for one's country but it is also a symbol of something horrible that happened in Europe's recent past.

Heh, no wonder this leads to flamewars.