Comment Re:Barnes & Noble closed the profitable store (Score 1) 330
costs me $5 in tolls
Or you could drive down Rt 7.
costs me $5 in tolls
Or you could drive down Rt 7.
Most of the more distant islands were colonised during small ice ages, when it was possible to walk much of the distance and people had to move a lot because food was scarce. There was thought to be a land bridge from South-East Asia to South America well after homo sapiens came along, and getting from Europe to North America via Iceland and Greenland wasn't such a massive journey for a lost Viking ship aiming for the islands around the north of Scotland.
For a long time, the limiting factor was the amount of food and water that you could carry. The reason that Columbus couldn't get funding for so long was that intelligent people did the calculations of his journey time and worked out that he'd run out of food about half way to India. Fortunately for him, there was a convenient continent a bit less than half way there for him to stop and resupply...
Sailing ships can be becalmed for days or even weeks. This is more of a problem the bigger the ship, as the more wind you need to start it moving again. Even at the best of times, their speed is highly variable, depending on wind speed and direction - if it's a head wind then they need to tack, which can significantly reduce their maximum straight-line speed, if it's a run or a reach then they can go faster. This makes them tricky from an economic perspective, where you need to book dock time well in advance to get goods loaded and unloaded and where your customers typically require things delivered within a fairly narrow window. For low-priority goods, it might be fine, as long as you were willing to wait at the far end for a few days for a free slot in the unloading dock.
There have been some attempts to address this, by flying kits up in the jetstream and using their rotation to drive a screw. This has a lot of potential, but the last demo I saw was only generating 20% of the energy required to propel the craft - the rest came from burning oil.
It's not that clear cut. Sony is actually distributing the binaries, but for a lot of potential contributors the GPL doesn't force anything: they use their derived work internally, never distribute it, so don't need to share any changes. One the other hand, they will often avoid GPL'd code because of the potential for it to affect their ability to turn something into a product later. In this case, they'll either develop their own or, more likely, license a proprietary version.
Without the legal constraint, there are still reasons to push changes upstream. Maintaining a fork is expensive. Bugs get fixed and new features introduced upstream and the more you've diverged, the harder it is to pull the changes. This is why Juniper has recently been pushing a lot of things to FreeBSD - they've realised how much it was costing them for JunOS to be significantly different to a modern FreeBSD.
Even with the GPL's constraint, there are lots of ways around it. Companies ship mobile phones with Linux kernels and binary display drivers, by only using the public kernel interfaces and loading the driver late in the boot process, with most of it running in userspace. At worst, they're required to release the code for their shim that exports the hardware registers directly to userspace. For other code, you can run it in a separate process and the GPL doesn't apply.
True which made porting the FreeBSD userland apps much easier than an NT or Linux based kernel. While the kernel is still Mach based it is close enough that code can be cut and pasted in from FreeBSD with small efforts to compile itl.
Windows 8 can cure cancer and world hunger. Please buy it! We donate money to help save poor old kittens.
You don't hate kittens do you?
Xenix is SCO Openserver. You really want that shit? 12 years ago slashdotters whined that it is the only unix OS that made admins want to switch to Windows. It is a 20 year time warp with it. The Unix haters manual has Xenix xerpets to make thier case why Unix is bad.
I prefer the Windows 8 kernel to that turd thank you very much.
Funny on my Asus board nothing above 12.10 works. I read and found out other Asus boards too can't run a more recent driver. Bumber as I was planning to upgrade to a ATI 7790 later this summer and 13.1 is the recommended driver.
It's an AMD chipset/cpu combo too!!
Sony used NetBSD for PSP according to slashdot. True Sony might have ported some Linux tools over to BSD, but BSD is something they are familiar with. I doubt the OS was linux based but I know you could run it on the PS2 from what I remember reading.
Apple also uses FreeBSD for the same licensing reasons not to mention it does not radically change and is designed rather than grown.
"Been through Hell? Whaddya bring back for me?" -- A. Brilliant