Market cap is not an indication of size at all. It's an indication of, well, present market value.

For size, there are few things you can look at it: there is size based on net worth, total number of employees, total sales in dollars, total unit sales, etc. Most of these are only useful when comparing to companies within the same industry, however. In fact, most useful statistics are really only useful when comparing companies within the same industry. That's why so many people focus on market capitalization, because that is comparable across industries.

Biggest market cap, though, as you point out, doesn't mean that much. A more useful statistic for investors is the earning per share (EPS), which gives you an idea of the economic viability of a company .

The Patriot Act and several other items in control by the US government is working well outside the borders of the US.

By 'working' do you mean the stripping away of people's civil, moral and legal rights?

If so, I concur.

No, but she's got plenty of open ports! You might have to get passed her firewall first, though.

The biggest problem is that once a month there will be some serious buffer overflow issues, though. This doesn't get patched for many years...

Correct. I have a Dropbox account, and that's exactly what it is, although it also has utility as a file-sharing service as well. You can create and designate folders as "shared with other users" and "shared with guest users (for people without an account)". Folders so designated will allow anyone to download files in those folders.

So when I post on Slashdot, my intent is clear -- I'm making what I type available to the public at large. But this is also true for files that I put in my folders that are shared with guest users.

OTOH, this license grant doesn't seem to make such a distinction. Perhaps it should.

On a more serious note, this will require training and labeling of the system

Which, of course, means that the tinfoil hat wearers can stop thinking that this will be useful as some sort of government tracking tool.

So explain to me why anyone would intentionally get into this business? Who is your target audience?

Reclusive, eccentric former dotcom millionaires. Who else lives in Seattle?

Xerox Alto. 1973.

After going through all of the components including the case, the only thing they could identify that was original components that was actually designed by IBM engineers was the sticker label that went on the outside of the case which said "IBM".

100% true, of course. The optional hard disks were made by Seagate (hence the legacy of the ST01 controller), the floppy drives were made by Toshiba or Chinon or somebody like that. The processor came from Intel. The optional printer was made by Epson. The motherboard was basically a reference design from Intel.

The BIOS was original, but the operating system, of course, was a 16-bit CP/M hack from a guy named Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products, who sold it to a tiny little company from Bellvue, Washington, for a few thousand bucks. Tim would go on to become a billionaire, of course, along with the founders of that tiny little computer company.

If I could go back in time, I would convince Tim Patterson that writing operating systems isn't a very good idea and he should do something else with his time.

Actually, I don't think Apple used the term "personal computer" until around the introduction of the Mac and the Apple //c. These would both be introduced well after IBM marketed their "IBM Personal Computer" in 1981.

Now get off of my lawn.

Also, who the fuck is Robert X. Cringely and why should anyone care about his opinion?

Cringely is the new JonKatz.

What, exactly, does this have to with the article? AMD/ATI also provides drivers for the open source community.

The thing is, of the three big graphics vendors, only NVIDIA supports reasonably complete OpenGL support, which makes their cards non-starters for us CAD users. I run SketchUp on Wine

Never been to Madrid, but, yes, it's damn cold in Denver.

Then again, I live in Florida, so my idea of cold and your idea of cold are probably different. ;)

There's a wee bit of water in the way, I think.

A true story, for those scratching their heads. My wife and I are smokers (bad, bad, yes, I know) and we happily tossed our throw-away cigarette lighters into the appropriate bin when boarding a flight a couple of years ago.

What we completely forgot is that in our carry on, left over from a previous camping trip, was a stash of about 4 lighters,10 boxes of "strike anywhere" matches and a camping knife. The thing was, it wasn't the screeners that noticed them, rather they were discovered by ourselves as soon we got to our hotel room and started going through our luggage. The funny thing is that we didn't know about the no-liquids-over-2-ounces rule, which was relatively new when we flew. The screeners completely missed these banned items because they were far too interested in the oversized bottles of Pantene in our luggage, whiich they promptly seized, of course.

My wife, who worked airport security prior to the TSA takeover, and was thoroughly disgusted by the whole affair, said that the knife, for sure, would never have made it past the gate before the TSA took over.