What's going on is that supposedly white hat 'security' firms are actually writing cracking software for assorted goverments. Meanwhile cracking software is illegal in many countries unless you happen to be the goverment or aforementioned 'security' firms.

Nothing to see here, move along now and so on..

Not this again.. It doesn't matter that it is superior, and I'm not saying it's not, because all current CISC based CPUs translate their instructions into RISC before executing, making them indistinguishable, performance wise, from purely RISC based designs.

Fact is there are no purely CISC based designs anymore, haven't been any for more than a decade now, and perpetuating the myth that x86 is CISC and is slower than RISC helps no one.

You neglect to mention that said standalone 3D cards were physically connected to the 2D card via a pass-through cable which was what sent the video signal from one card to the other, allowing it to appear on your monitor.

This is a software solution of the same effect that will work on any card, even remote cards on different machines. Hardly the same thing.

Meaning a complete re-write of what still is a failure. A re-write that was obviously necessary from the start. Why they're keeping version 1 going is anyone's guess.

Again, not true. You cannot 'just use the xen 4.1 hypervisor'. You seem to be completely ignorant of how much work there is in adding dom0 support in a kernel which is fortunate for you only. And the last opensolaris in august 2010 did not have dom0 and nor does openindiana. [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.illumos.org/boards/1/topics/561
[2] http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/7.+Virtualization
[3] http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=134657

Not true. The xen hypervisor is matched to the xen version running which is matched to the underlying kernel. It is impossible to take the 4.1 hypervisor and use it in Solaris without xen _dom0_ 4.1 support in the Solaris kernel. "It might require some work" is just about the greatest understatement ever uttered. Never mind that you can't even start on said work as Solaris' kernel is not open source and the last opensolaris source code that was released did not in fact have dom0 support. So yeah..

Just had to reply to this.. Sun forked Xen 3.1 something like 4 years ago, yes. That same fork, Xen version 3.1 is what is still being used today in Solaris and Sun had previously (pre-buyout) said they would not merge to any newer versions of xen.

So while Solaris can claim Xen Dom0 support it is no where near the capabilities of current Xen 4.0 and with no plans to update you're stuck on 3.1 with support only coming from, now, Oracle. Yeah, awesome.

I think you misunderstood. If you obtain a copy of the source code that is licensed and distributed as GPLv2, as they claim to make available, and you then make a patch for that code then your patch must also be available under GPLv2. Otherwise there would be a license violation.

On the other hand, if you buy support, they will give you the source code under a non-gpl license which they have every right to do since they own the copyright for the original source. This can not contain any GPLv2 only code (unless under the original GPLv2 license), say from contributors that got the code under GPL. This is mainly for companies wishing to make changes to the code without having to release their changes under the GPL.

That said, requiring a 'support contract' so that they provide you with the code under a different license is pretty low.

Uh not quite. Old mainframes were deliberately given a 'block remote access' switch that gives full control to the console to the person physically at the mainframe. That's a feature, not a cripple-me switch.

In a case of what would be best described as "wtf", I work for a US company in the UK that uses a US based proxy for all web connections. As such I can connect to Pandora which is not available in the "UK" but can not connect to Spotify which is only available in the "UK" in a non-subscription basis.

Obviously the internet cares not about borders so why are companies being forced into ridiculous limitation that are so easily bypassed for the sake of laws invented before human beings even conceived the idea of what eventually became the internet.

Uh not quite. Web servers sure, database? I think not. Having actually tried to do what you're suggesting, all those threads are no good if each of them sucks in terms of performance.

Webservers/fileservers sure but it is too expensive to consider unless there aren't any other viable, cheaper options - which there are plenty of

Have you ever _used_ a coolthreads server? Sure it has lots of hardware threads but that's not going to do you any good if each of those threads runs so very very slowly.

Having run benchmarks, a single Ultrasparc T2 (5120, 32 threads) performed on par with a single core of an Athlon Opteron 2000...

It's not an accident that the Sparc architecture is dying off

I'm sure Intel would like all of that pie and unfortunately for us, they are willing to do anything to get it. Including strong arming Asus when they showed an Arm based chipset running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform (running Android no less). A quick intervention from Intel and Microsoft and Asus was saying that 'the project is on hold' while sharing a stage with a VP from each of Intel and Microsoft.. Story on slashdot a couple days back.

Oh and these arm based devices can run all-day(apparently), nevermind 8 hours.

http://gizmodo.com/5273723/asus-demos-snapdragon+based-eee-pc-with-android

Sadly, in same position as you.
As a case in point, I come from a backwater country of a population of less than a million with broadband speeds of barely over 1Mb (theoretical..) and my current connection with BT is _far_ worse than that.

Take that as you will.

As has already been stated, when developers to make separate code for *one* browser than what they're using for any other browser and are hit with bugs that only happen on that one browser because that browser is not standards compliant then that by itself is opposed to innovation and creation of said standards as well as their continued development.

You are of course entitled to your own opinion but the fact of the matter is this:

Microsoft's business practice in regards to IE and windows is _illegal_.