http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

Galileo was not granted a patent.

Calling the Community Edition a "Crippled Kids" version shows that you've not used it. We use the Sugar CE, and are quite content with it. The paid version would be nice, but it's too expensive for us. We're a small department at a university, so we're not rich, not poor either, but it's out of out price range. The CE does what it does well, and we're glad to find something this good where we can modify the source, which we need to do for our authentication system here at the university.

I really wish I had mod points now. The Community Edition is still AGPL *from the downloaded source code SugarCE-6.0.0.zip* with no click through agreements or any other license distributed with the source code.
The paid editions are still SPL as they were before, making 90% of this entire discussion a tempest in a teapot. (The web page says it's a CC no derivatives license and says it's for 5.5, but they are distributing 6.0 with an AGPL license, which is what counts.)

They just added the new interface as one of the features under the SPL and paid instead of the GPL. If you have a problem with that, then write your own interface under the GPL and maintain it as a patch to the Community Edition.

Open source has many definitions, and everyone here should know this by now. So Sugar calls their paid license open source. Personally I would agree, and some would not. It's not Software Libre, which is a better term. It's "paid as in beer with a recipe."

The true irony is that the teacher would be perfectly summing up the power (or lack from over use) of profanity, yet has a fair chance of losing their job over it.

Theora was based on one of On2's earliest codecs. VP6 & VP7 have been far more successful and are even used as the Flash video codecs. If Google is acquiring On2, it could mean that they're looking to open up the formats that have defined Flash as the media player of choice.

(Sorry, this is somewhat offtopic, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the comparison between Windows XP and Windows 7.)

I once saw someone here on Slashdot mention that Microsoft should not have shipped a 32-bit version of Vista, opting instead to push only the 64-bit version. While it seemed like an odd statement at the time (despite the fact that my home XP machine was an AMD64 processor), I find myself agreeing with it on Windows 7.

As it stands today, 32-bit Windows is quickly becoming too small for many business and industrial uses, and it's very affordable to build a high-performance home machine with more than 4GB of RAM. (Case in Point.) In fact, with intensive web applications and sophisticated desktop tools (yeah, some of them are bloated) chewing more memory than ever before, it just doesn't make sense to get anything less than 4GB (nay, 3GB if you're running Windows 32-bit!) except for a few edge cases.

Unfortunately, Windows has been kind of lagging on the 64-bit front. By treating it as sort of a bastard child (like they treated all their non-i386 NT versions), Microsoft managed to ensure that hardware manufacturers wouldn't make an effort to support 64-bit windows in a non-server environment. Which is frustrating as I've started bumping up against that once-awesome 4GB barrier.

In an attempt to turn this into a slightly more useful conversation rather than a one-sided rant, I was wondering if I could get some opinions on using virtualization as a solution? With Windows' poor track record as a 64-bit OS, I have been thinking about running a 64-Bit Unix and virtualizing 32-bit windows for backward compatibility. I've already had some success with virtualizing Windows 7 on a MacBook, and have even been able to get desktop integration working. (Quite spiffy that. Though the two interfaces occasionally confuse my wife. She's the primary user of Windows, needing support for some specialized programs with no real alternatives available.)

Does anyone here have experience with setting up a system like this? Do you use Xen, VMWare, Sun VirtualBox/OpenxVM, or some other solution? What do you use as your primary OS? Linux has come a long way, but the upgrade treadmill is still frustrating. Especially with the seemingly regular ABI upgrades. Does anyone use [Open]Solaris x86_64 as a host? Do you have 3D Graphics completely disabled, or have you found a good way to allow all OSes solid and reliable access to the underlying graphics card? Do you bother with mounting virtual shared drives to move data between the OSes, or do you have a home NAS for storing data? (I'm leaning toward a NAS myself.)

Just a few thoughts, anyway. Thanks in advance for experiences & suggestions! :-)

Wasn't Wolfenstein, released in 1992 the first game with 3D graphics?

Not even close. Wolfenstein wasn't even the first raycaster game. It was preceded by Catacombs 3D (also by Id) which itself was preceded by Hovertank (also by Id).

Before those were even a twinkle in Carmack's eye, we had MIDI Maze (1987) and Star Wars Arcade (1983), just to name a few. There were tons of attempts at 3D games before Carmack. He merely popularized the First Person Shooter genre and made 3D Graphics the standard.

The problem here is in trying to patent a trade secret rather than an invention. Patents are intended to cover inventions. Real, working gizmos that operate is a specific fashion. Trade secrets cover processes and information that is of a competitive advantage.

In this case, the two are getting mixed up. The company may have a device to detect certain attributes (which IS patentable) but the fact that the attributes can be measured in order to draw conclusions is inherently unpatentable. If someone else develops a machine for measuring the attributes that works different from your machine... well... tough noodles.

All that can be done is to keep the information a secret. By keeping it secret, it is legally viewed as a "trade secret" which can be contractually protected when sharing with interested parties.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express once. ;-)

I happen to agree with the GP, and I've written tons of games in the past 40 years. Here's my Atari 2600 version of Lunar Lander:

http://www.pdroms.de/files/73/

Run it through an emulator like Stella to play.

I later ported the game to Flash, but it's not quite as fun as the 60Hz 2600 version. However, you can play it on a Wii! (Use S for thrust if you're on a PC.)

http://www.wiicade.com/gameDetail.aspx?gameID=692

Evidence is presented in courtrooms, not to journalists. Saying, "there's no evidence" is basically a fancy way of saying, "the court has not yet heard the case".

For now we have allegations. They will be proven or disproven in court.

FTFA: "The suit alleges white officers post on and moderate the privately operated site, Domelights.com, both on and off the job."

That was one variation of the term "computer". But as my old fashioned flight computer can attest to, slide rules were often referred to as computers as well.

It's interesting listening to some of the vets from WWII. They'll often talk about their "trajectory computers" or their "bombing computers" or their "landing computers". To the modern ear, it sounds like they're talking about early electronic machines. Yet these references are just specialized slide rules used to "compute" results for a set of measurable inputs.