Well, the windows 8 upgrade cost is announced to be $40, so it's not considerably more.
And yes, $29.99 is upgrade since you're only allowed to use it on mac hardware, and such hardware is always sold with a copy of osx.
OG.
This is standard consumer protection stuff. Does the US have a directly equivalent law? No idea, but it doesn't lack laws that are in the same ballpark. Indeed, some, such as the requirement that all electronics be vetted by the FCC and contain shielding to prevent their circuits from accidentally broadcasting something that might cause a little interference on a TV or radio in the same room, seem a tad less understandable than creating a basic standard of merchantability - you have to stand behind your product for two years. Hardly unreasonable.
What gives?
Errr, Europe has the same non-interference/resistance to interference laws that the US have.
OG.
Wow, and here in France for $27/month we get unlimited voice, unlimited text and 3Gb of data. And you can stop whenever you want without cost. You guys are really getting fucked sideways.
OG.
That's what the appeal process and supreme courts are for. There's only one supreme court per state (for state issues) and one federal supreme court so that the final saying is, well, final and non-contradictory.
OG.
That's where it can get interesting... Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, a *way* more efficient one than CO2. If they manage to reduce the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, that is going to reduce the greenhouse effect.
Interesting, 'innit ?
OG.
No it isn't. A full reproduction can be fair use. What you do with it is a large part of the definition.
OG.
The first Ariane 5 exploded on launch because a feedback mechanism for guidance had a sign swapped, again creating positive feedback.
That's incorrect. The first ariane 5 exploded because of correct, reused ariane 4 code becoming incorrect in the new environment. More specifically steering code which results are used at the start of the flight and unused but left running afterwards. The code was still correct in start-of-flight conditions, but in the afterwards condition noticed speeds way over what it was supposed to see and triggered a security abort (ariane 5 is a tad faster than ariane 4).
So no sign errors, no feedback, just correct code running at a time it shouldn't have and untested there.
OG.
The differences are going to come from the memory management, i/o paths, disk i/o speed/scheduling, etc. Which is what the kernel is about, after all.
Too bad Hurd is still so limited that you can't really run it on real hardware, otherwise the benchmark differences would probably be much worse...
OG.
That's called "Alien vs. Predator".
OG.
One of the numerous problems with hydrogen is that you need very high pressures to store any decent amount of it in a container. And anything at very high pressure has the protential to be extremely dangerous. So more dangerous in handling stored than natural gas. As a transfer medium or as buoyancy though, I agree.
OG.
I even happen to know that. Sleep, I need more of.
OG.
Out of the $20, there's approximatively $6-8 for the library (amazon being the worst there, they want $10 iirc), $3-4 for printing, $2-4 for shipping and the distributor if there is one (and in NG's case, I'm sure there is). So that's $4-9 left, i.e. $2-7 for the publisher (and closer to $2 than to $7). The publisher is definitively not ripping him off.
OG.
That's because the high-end server world accepts level of single-core performance the consumer world doesn't. These processors are not something you want on your PC. You want something with better memory management, way faster I/O with ram and GPU, etc. OTOH, you usually don't care about multi-processor.
But faster I/O usually means putting more things on the die (hence amd's integrated memory controllers, now followed by Intel) and having larger busses/more efficient protocols, and acting on that means changing the socket. And the north bridge, if one is left. And the memory, for a faster one. You wouldn't get enough speedup from changing the cpu alone with everything else pin-compatible to make it worth it.
Meanwhile, the itanic spends its time waiting for the ram to answer... but since you put a lot of them in the box, in aggregate they can be useful.
OG.
Niiiiiiice. $19 trillions just for the wind turbines (around 5M each), $100 trillions for the rooftop PV systems (around 60K each), but there is no economic issue. Right.
Only $135 billions for the dams (around 500M each)... if you can find 270 new places in where to put them...
OG.
And fixing that is probably not going to ever happen until X/Mesa is dead under its own weight.
X is a protocol, and a pretty good one at that. There is no reason for it to "die", since nobody has come up with anything better yet. Both the Windows and the OS X graphics architectures are inferior.
The X server software and Mesa should get updated. But it actually works pretty well. Most of the things you list are fairly specific add-ons, and having those access the hardware separately seems like a good thing; why would I want to have all that extra crap in a single project?
People need to do some refactoring, cleanup, and documentation. But, hey, what else is new. But there is nothing really wrong with having those different pieces of functionality factored into seperate projects.
X11 the protocol was very good 20 years ago, but by now shows its age. A new X12 could use some cleanups such as removing colors, palettes and visuals (truecolor is the only relevant one nowadays), adding explicit gamma support, removing every drawing primitive except unaliased points, horizontal/vertical lines and image handling, adding alpha support, adding efficient image transfer mechanisms by mapping video-card accessible buffers in the application (XShmPutImage and glTexSubImage2D are sad jokes, performance-wise), adding blending/compositing support, etc. And that's just graphics, don't get me started about multi-screne handler, internationalization, window management or inter-process communications.
As for the "specific add-ons", I was talking about 2D X rendering, you know, the thing that draws your windows, 3D rendering, which you may have heard about, and video decoding, the thing linux users do in software because less that one "standard" per video card vendor would be unacceptable. Vaapi happens to be intel's (vdpau is nvidia's, xvba is amd's). Nothing obscure there. And if you think they're independant you either haven't looked at the problem and the hardware or your blood level is too high in your coffee stream.
At first sight, the opengl 3 level intel cards have three beautifully separated subsystems, 2D blitter, 3D renderer, media decoder. Then you find out that only one can be used at a given time, and you have to explicitely switch between them. And, in addition, things like glClear are better handled with the 2D blitter, compositing, frame filtering and deinterlacing with the 3D hardware, etc. And in practice you want to unify pixmaps, textures and movie frame buffers, otherwise pain ensues when you want to use the damn things. So the interdependance level is actually high. As a result it is *very* wrong to have these pieces in separate projects, because communication layers and version issues multiply exponentially.
Finally, I don't know about OS X, but the Windows architecture for video drivers is actually superior than the current linux ones. You have one kernel-level driver and one userspace driver, and that's it. The API is not the best possible by far, with way too many functions, communication paths and a somewhat obsolete shader microcode. But the unification of all the hardware functions in two drivers with the kernel boundary in between is the best you can have.
And, the point you missed, is that the refactoring *will* *not* *happen* for political and social reasons. Even before patches, the first step would be to unify all that stuff under one tree, and the pushback against that is demented.
OG.
"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein
