it seems like the core of their argument is that 'windows' is generic and not trademarkable rather than that 'Lindows' is sufficiently different than 'window' to not pose a threat. If they win the first argument, Windows can no longer be a MS trademark but that seems like a pretty big hurdle to leap. Seems like it would be safer to go with the 'Lindows' isn't 'Windows' argument which seems very reasonable.
Using Internet Explorer for a brief interval after steady Mozilla use makes IE look pretty tiresome here. It's amazing that IE still has such a large market share, its major security problems notwithstanding.
The story makes it very clear that there are no real Windows platform strengths while Linux has many that were particularly important to the energy company including better performance and better reliability. Even on the desktop, the only real advantage given for Windows was that it ran MS Office. If Windows is going to survive in the long term, Microsoft will have to develop some compelling technical advantages for Windows. The MS Office support is not going to carry it forever.
Apparently, the Hubble mission is now considered too dangerous because there would be no backup shuttle available to rescue the Astronauts if their shuttle developed a problem. Space travel is inherently dangerous but the margin of safety with only one shuttle seems acceptable given the number of successful shuttle missions that have already been accomplished. It is financially and technically unrealistic to have a backup spacecraft available for every mission. The space station continues to be supported with the Soyuz capsule for which there is also no backup since the backup spacecraft docked at the space station was used by the last occupants to return to earth after the Shuttle crashed. The Hubble mission is far more important to science and mankind than the space station and should be given a very high priority by NASA. If NASA is unable to support a mission like Hubble, they need to ask themselves what their reason for even existing is.
No, the article doesn't say that it takes up less space on a page. The article says: "[Times New Roman 14] takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12..." but what is not said is that the same number of words can be used on the same page with the larger type, which would be a credibility-challenging claim. Generally speaking, the larger the type size used, the fewer the number of words that can be inserted on the page providing that other factors, such as line spacing and margin size, are kept the same. If those other factors are being shrunk to maintain the word count with the larger type, then they should be doing that but staying with the 12pt type to *increase* the word count. Using less rather than more paper would be a good thing.
Using a large font like 14 pt might make the documents easier to read for some but it will waste a lot of paper and create more solid waste. They should switch to a smaller, but still usable size, like 10 pt.
I don't see the connection between 'preventing a nuclear holocaust, at all costs...' and committing the sabotage against their pipeline system. At the time of the incident, the USSR had the ability to launch a massive nuclear attack at us, that we could not have stopped, and that would have devastated the United States and killed a large portion of the population. Of course, we could have retaliated in kind and the devastation would have been mutual. Causing the massive explosion in their pipeline system, though, did not damage their nuclear capability but it could have pissed them off and made a nuclear attack slightly more likely, if they had been led by unstable and unreasonable personalities. Fortunately for us, they were not as fanatical as Osama Bin Laden or we would not be here today. The mere existence of their military weapons did not give us any moral right to sabotage their pipeline anymore than did the existence of our military weapons give them any moral right to sabotage our pipelines. That was true then and it is still true today.
Apparently a major and deliberate act of sabotage was committed against their economy. How is this different than if they had sent a team of trained demolition experts to our country to sabotage a pipeline here and create a large non-nuclear explosion? They were certainly our military rival but we were not at war with them and we did not have any more of a moral right to commit acts of sabotage against their economy than did the Al Quaida terrorists to destroy office buildings in NYC. If everyone resorted to using large explosions when they disagreed with something, there would be a lot less discussion, more explosions, and no resolution of disputes.
When you click on the Secunia test link, Mozilla 1.4.1 brings up a dialog box that states:
The file "ie.{3050f4d8-98B5-11CF-00AA00BDCE0B}Secunia_Inter net_Explorer%2Epdf" is of type text/html(Hyper Text Markup Language), and Mozilla does not know how to handle this file type. this file is located at:
http://secunia.com/internet_explorer_file_downlo ad _spoof/"
So...Mozilla seems to be doing the right thing here.
Microsoft has extended the idea of using paid studies as propaganda to support its corporate goals to a point far beyond what any other large corporation has done. The Microsoft 'freedom to innovate' crap was memorable during the Netscape/DOJ antitrust debacle a few years ago. Does this stuff really work? Sadly, I suppose it must or they wouldn't do it.
Starting a software business is a great idea but what should the first product be? Where is there the greatest need for the canned software that might be produced by a small start-up developer? These would be my hot areas:
a) data visualization tools--i.e. things that helped view and digest large amounts of data such as maybe a multi-dimensional 'spreadsheet' tool b) digital music tools for improved quality c) digital image storage, viewing, and management aids d) tools that allow better integration, correlation, and storage of images, text, and sound.
The account of the shuttle's final minutes is very detailed and has a lot of useful information that makes clear just how complex and dangerous an undertaking that space travel is.
SCO deserves all of the criticism and more because they are using the legal system to abuse other businesses. They have not supported their copyright claims and yet they continue to press their financial claims against Linux users in a manner just short of outright fraud.
I think the point that Cringlely is making is that there has to be method implemented to prevent future SCO-like claims made by other SCO wannabes from threatening the Linux code base. Yes, SCO will lose and go away but the whole SCO legal attack has pointed out the vulnerability of a very large open-source code base to becoming contaminated with proprietary code.
It's a sad comment on the current monopoly state of the computer business that the first desktop Athlon 64 machine is being sold by a company like emachines rather than Dell, HP, or IBM. AMD makes an excellent product for a very good price so you would expect that normal entrepreneurial businesses would have rushed to get their own Athlon 64 products out. Unfortunately, though, the computer business has become like the automobile market in the old Soviet Union where the politics (monopoly politics or communist politics) are more important than value, quality, price, performance, or any of the kinds of things that users care about.
...is that it tends to select the same types of individuals and screen out the 'outliers' on the curve. Government work is no different than any other type of work in that it takes all types of personalities and people to get results. Would Abraham Lincoln have been able to pass the screening? What about Douglas MacArthur? Thomas Jefferson? Teddy Roosevelt? Bill Gates? Bill Clinton? In all of these cases, the answer is 'probably not.' Instead, the process tends to select rather bland and reasonable personalities who are attracted to the idea being a small part of a powerful whole. While these types of people can be helpful to any organization, they are not, by themselves, sufficient to accomplish great things. Hence, we end up with government agencies that are hopelessly outclassed in their collective thinking by foreign elements who are antagonistic to our national goals and eventually, we have to pay in our national blood to recover the situation. This pschological/background/profile screening stuff for employees of sensitive government agencies mostly began around the time of World War II and it has not been a good thing IMO.
There's no need for these rfid devices to be physically implanted subcutaneously, with the attendant possibility for medical complications that could arise in a small percentage of such 'users.' Instead, they could just be permanently attached to a stainless steel collar that is welded around each user's neck.
After looking at the report, it looks more like the GE XA21 SCADA network failure was not the primary cause of the cascading failure but more an effect of the failure. The key failure seems to be a software system callled the "State Estimator" (SE) that is used by the Midwest System Operator (MISO), a NERC reliability coordinator, to develop optimal solutions of for the planned operating level of all of the power generation and transmission equipment in the MISO area covering about 10 midwest states and 1 million square miles. It is not described in much detail but the SE seems to be an optimization tool using a linear programming model that gathers availability data for all of the major system components and load demand every five minutes and then calculates the 'optimal' use of those system components to maintain system reliability at the required level. The 'solution' of the model is then used to plan the operation of the overall system by sending the target operating levels to each facility in the system. So why did it fail? Two reasons. First, the model depends on having accurate availability information from each major system component. Status information is sent to MISO in Indiana by the "ECAR" data netork or by direct links. On the day of the failure, the direct link to a key transmission line was not working and the analyst had turned off the estimator to troubleshoot it. After fixing the problem, he went to lunch and forgot to put the system back in automatic mode where it would develop updated solutions. This situation existed for 2 hours from 12:15 to 14:40. When the estimator was switched back to automatic, it was unable to develop a solution because another key transmission line had overloaded and tripped and *its* new non-operational status was unknown to the model, apparently because the status of that line is assumed to be 'on' until told otherwise. This problem was not corrected until 16:04. The bottom line is that a critical major planning tool was not available for 4 hours for a regional generation and distribution system that absolutely required it's use to be operated successfully when the system power supply was very close to the demand.
The SCADA system itself did not fail, but its alarm function did, which provides alarms to control room operators about system operational problems. The problem with the alarm function seems to be a case of too many alarms for the system to handle as the problems multiplied. The new alarm inputs built up and then overflowed the process input buffers. The alarm system just stalled while processing an alarm event and the alarm function stopped. Then, at 14:41 the primary server hosting the alarm processing application failed due to some combination of the stalling of the alarm application and the queueing to the remote terminals. The hapless backup server then was automatically activated and everything was was transferred to it, even the functional non-alarm stuff. The backup server failed after 13 minutes. Basically, the SCADA alarm system seems to have been massively overloaded (which shouldn't ever happen, of course) beyond the capability of the system design to cope with.
The immediate cause of the failure seems to be the forgetfulness of the analyst who was operating the planning model. The significant underlying contributory cause seems to be a very poor regional operational design in which a critical centralized system planning tool was being used with insufficient backup and oversight. It looks as though both Unix and Windows escape blame. The SCADA system probably was doing far more than it's designers intended and probably performed heroically until it died. 'Aye Captain...I canna do no more.'
I think that AMD is just saying that *they* will stop making 32-bit processors by 2005 but not that 32-bit processors will be dead by then. It is reasonable for AMD to end production of the 32-bit processors because AMD does not have a lot of manufacturing capacity and they will want to make their 64-bit processors rather than 32-bit processors with the capacity that they do have. Also, AMD's 64-bit processors are also better 32-bit processors than many of the 32-bit processors that have been sold in the past.
The 32-bit processors will obviously be around for a long time yet but they just will not be made by AMD. Intel will keep making them and probably other companies such as VIA and that chinese 'red storm' company (can't recall the name of it) will make them for many years to come. The old 16-bit 286 processors are still made today, even though Intel stopped making them years ago.
From the article: "Gates says he isn't aware of Microsoft expanding its relationship with BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies in a deal designed to more closely integrate the basic building blocks of the PC with the Longhorn system, as suggested by ZDNET. Both Microsoft and Phoenix are involved in plans to integrate digital rights management (DRM) technology at the operating system and hardware level, according to sources in the US.
"To be honest, I haven't heard from Phoenix Technologies for over five years," Gates said. "Are they still in business? The BIOS will always be separated from the operating system. Actually, it's gotten out of date. If you run Windows XP, it calls very little of the BIOS."
Gates sound disingenuous, at best, when he asks if Phoenix is still in business.
Businesses are supposed to provide services rather than just set themselves up as toll collectors. In this era of new distribution technology, exactly what services are the record producers providing for us?
a) screening of new talent? We can do this ourselves over the web by popular demand better than they can.
b) producing new recordings? This is a legitimate service but it not worth the $16 per CD that is the going rate.
c) distributing music? Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Xnap, et. al. have proven that they do a much better job of this than the record companies can do.
The record companies need to look in the mirror and ask themselves what is their reason for even existing any longer. If they can't think of some and build a business model on them, they had better make plans to depart the business because they will not be able to collect their tolls for very much longer now that the internet is here.
Slashdot Mirror
it seems like the core of their argument is that 'windows' is generic and not trademarkable rather than that 'Lindows' is sufficiently different than 'window' to not pose a threat. If they win the first argument, Windows can no longer be a MS trademark but that seems like a pretty big hurdle to leap. Seems like it would be safer to go with the 'Lindows' isn't 'Windows' argument which seems very reasonable.
Using Internet Explorer for a brief interval after steady Mozilla use makes IE look pretty tiresome here. It's amazing that IE still has such a large market share, its major security problems notwithstanding.
The story makes it very clear that there are no real Windows platform strengths while Linux has many that were particularly important to the energy company including better performance and better reliability. Even on the desktop, the only real advantage given for Windows was that it ran MS Office. If Windows is going to survive in the long term, Microsoft will have to develop some compelling technical advantages for Windows. The MS Office support is not going to carry it forever.
...and it is amazing that even more exploits have not used them.
Apparently, the Hubble mission is now considered too dangerous because there would be no backup shuttle available to rescue the Astronauts if their shuttle developed a problem. Space travel is inherently dangerous but the margin of safety with only one shuttle seems acceptable given the number of successful shuttle missions that have already been accomplished. It is financially and technically unrealistic to have a backup spacecraft available for every mission. The space station continues to be supported with the Soyuz capsule for which there is also no backup since the backup spacecraft docked at the space station was used by the last occupants to return to earth after the Shuttle crashed. The Hubble mission is far more important to science and mankind than the space station and should be given a very high priority by NASA. If NASA is unable to support a mission like Hubble, they need to ask themselves what their reason for even existing is.
No, the article doesn't say that it takes up less space on a page. The article says: "[Times New Roman 14] takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12..." but what is not said is that the same number of words can be used on the same page with the larger type, which would be a credibility-challenging claim. Generally speaking, the larger the type size used, the fewer the number of words that can be inserted on the page providing that other factors, such as line spacing and margin size, are kept the same. If those other factors are being shrunk to maintain the word count with the larger type, then they should be doing that but staying with the 12pt type to *increase* the word count. Using less rather than more paper would be a good thing.
Using a large font like 14 pt might make the documents easier to read for some but it will waste a lot of paper and create more solid waste. They should switch to a smaller, but still usable size, like 10 pt.
I don't see the connection between 'preventing a nuclear holocaust, at all costs...' and committing the sabotage against their pipeline system. At the time of the incident, the USSR had the ability to launch a massive nuclear attack at us, that we could not have stopped, and that would have devastated the United States and killed a large portion of the population. Of course, we could have retaliated in kind and the devastation would have been mutual. Causing the massive explosion in their pipeline system, though, did not damage their nuclear capability but it could have pissed them off and made a nuclear attack slightly more likely, if they had been led by unstable and unreasonable personalities. Fortunately for us, they were not as fanatical as Osama Bin Laden or we would not be here today. The mere existence of their military weapons did not give us any moral right to sabotage their pipeline anymore than did the existence of our military weapons give them any moral right to sabotage our pipelines. That was true then and it is still true today.
Apparently a major and deliberate act of sabotage was committed against their economy. How is this different than if they had sent a team of trained demolition experts to our country to sabotage a pipeline here and create a large non-nuclear explosion? They were certainly our military rival but we were not at war with them and we did not have any more of a moral right to commit acts of sabotage against their economy than did the Al Quaida terrorists to destroy office buildings in NYC. If everyone resorted to using large explosions when they disagreed with something, there would be a lot less discussion, more explosions, and no resolution of disputes.
When you click on the Secunia test link, Mozilla 1.4.1 brings up a dialog box that states:
r net_Explorer%2Epdf" is of type text/html(Hyper Text Markup Language), and Mozilla does not know how to handle this file type. this file is located at:
o ad _spoof/"
The file "ie.{3050f4d8-98B5-11CF-00AA00BDCE0B}Secunia_Inte
http://secunia.com/internet_explorer_file_downl
So...Mozilla seems to be doing the right thing here.
is that it only runs on Windows.
Microsoft has extended the idea of using paid studies as propaganda to support its corporate goals to a point far beyond what any other large corporation has done. The Microsoft 'freedom to innovate' crap was memorable during the Netscape/DOJ antitrust debacle a few years ago. Does this stuff really work? Sadly, I suppose it must or they wouldn't do it.
Starting a software business is a great idea but what should the first product be? Where is there the greatest need for the canned software that might be produced by a small start-up developer? These would be my hot areas:
a) data visualization tools--i.e. things that helped view and digest large amounts of data such as maybe a multi-dimensional 'spreadsheet' tool
b) digital music tools for improved quality
c) digital image storage, viewing, and management aids
d) tools that allow better integration, correlation, and storage of images, text, and sound.
The account of the shuttle's final minutes is very detailed and has a lot of useful information that makes clear just how complex and dangerous an undertaking that space travel is.
SCO deserves all of the criticism and more because they are using the legal system to abuse other businesses. They have not supported their copyright claims and yet they continue to press their financial claims against Linux users in a manner just short of outright fraud.
It would be better if that was '...no radiation.'
I think the point that Cringlely is making is that there has to be method implemented to prevent future SCO-like claims made by other SCO wannabes from threatening the Linux code base. Yes, SCO will lose and go away but the whole SCO legal attack has pointed out the vulnerability of a very large open-source code base to becoming contaminated with proprietary code.
It's a sad comment on the current monopoly state of the computer business that the first desktop Athlon 64 machine is being sold by a company like emachines rather than Dell, HP, or IBM. AMD makes an excellent product for a very good price so you would expect that normal entrepreneurial businesses would have rushed to get their own Athlon 64 products out. Unfortunately, though, the computer business has become like the automobile market in the old Soviet Union where the politics (monopoly politics or communist politics) are more important than value, quality, price, performance, or any of the kinds of things that users care about.
...is that it tends to select the same types of individuals and screen out the 'outliers' on the curve. Government work is no different than any other type of work in that it takes all types of personalities and people to get results. Would Abraham Lincoln have been able to pass the screening? What about Douglas MacArthur? Thomas Jefferson? Teddy Roosevelt? Bill Gates? Bill Clinton? In all of these cases, the answer is 'probably not.' Instead, the process tends to select rather bland and reasonable personalities who are attracted to the idea being a small part of a powerful whole. While these types of people can be helpful to any organization, they are not, by themselves, sufficient to accomplish great things. Hence, we end up with government agencies that are hopelessly outclassed in their collective thinking by foreign elements who are antagonistic to our national goals and eventually, we have to pay in our national blood to recover the situation. This pschological/background/profile screening stuff for employees of sensitive government agencies mostly began around the time of World War II and it has not been a good thing IMO.
There's no need for these rfid devices to be physically implanted subcutaneously, with the attendant possibility for medical complications that could arise in a small percentage of such 'users.' Instead, they could just be permanently attached to a stainless steel collar that is welded around each user's neck.
After looking at the report, it looks more like the GE XA21 SCADA network failure was not the primary cause of the cascading failure but more an effect of the failure. The key failure seems to be a software system callled the "State Estimator" (SE) that is used by the Midwest System Operator (MISO), a NERC reliability coordinator, to develop optimal solutions of for the planned operating level of all of the power generation and transmission equipment in the MISO area covering about 10 midwest states and 1 million square miles. It is not described in much detail but the SE seems to be an optimization tool using a linear programming model that gathers availability data for all of the major system components and load demand every five minutes and then calculates the 'optimal' use of those system components to maintain system reliability at the required level. The 'solution' of the model is then used to plan the operation of the overall system by sending the target operating levels to each facility in the system. So why did it fail? Two reasons. First, the model depends on having accurate availability information from each major system component. Status information is sent to MISO in Indiana by the "ECAR" data netork or by direct links. On the day of the failure, the direct link to a key transmission line was not working and the analyst had turned off the estimator to troubleshoot it. After fixing the problem, he went to lunch and forgot to put the system back in automatic mode where it would develop updated solutions. This situation existed for 2 hours from 12:15 to 14:40. When the estimator was switched back to automatic, it was unable to develop a solution because another key transmission line had overloaded and tripped and *its* new non-operational status was unknown to the model, apparently because the status of that line is assumed to be 'on' until told otherwise. This problem was not corrected until 16:04. The bottom line is that a critical major planning tool was not available for 4 hours for a regional generation and distribution system that absolutely required it's use to be operated successfully when the system power supply was very close to the demand.
The SCADA system itself did not fail, but its alarm function did, which provides alarms to control room operators about system operational problems. The problem with the alarm function seems to be a case of too many alarms for the system to handle as the problems multiplied. The new alarm inputs built up and then overflowed the process input buffers. The alarm system just stalled while processing an alarm event and the alarm function stopped. Then, at 14:41 the primary server hosting the alarm processing application failed due to some combination of the stalling of the alarm application and the queueing to the remote terminals. The hapless backup server then was automatically activated and everything was was transferred to it, even the functional non-alarm stuff. The backup server failed after 13 minutes. Basically, the SCADA alarm system seems to have been massively overloaded (which shouldn't ever happen, of course) beyond the capability of the system design to cope with.
The immediate cause of the failure seems to be the forgetfulness of the analyst who was operating the planning model. The significant underlying contributory cause seems to be a very poor regional operational design in which a critical centralized system planning tool was being used with insufficient backup and oversight. It looks as though both Unix and Windows escape blame. The SCADA system probably was doing far more than it's designers intended and probably performed heroically until it died. 'Aye Captain...I canna do no more.'
I think that AMD is just saying that *they* will stop making 32-bit processors by 2005 but not that 32-bit processors will be dead by then. It is reasonable for AMD to end production of the 32-bit processors because AMD does not have a lot of manufacturing capacity and they will want to make their 64-bit processors rather than 32-bit processors with the capacity that they do have. Also, AMD's 64-bit processors are also better 32-bit processors than many of the 32-bit processors that have been sold in the past.
The 32-bit processors will obviously be around for a long time yet but they just will not be made by AMD. Intel will keep making them and probably other companies such as VIA and that chinese 'red storm' company (can't recall the name of it) will make them for many years to come. The old 16-bit 286 processors are still made today, even though Intel stopped making them years ago.
Okay, for those of us in the northern hemisphere, anyway. You southern hemisphere people...well, too bad.
From the article:
"Gates says he isn't aware of Microsoft expanding its relationship with BIOS maker Phoenix Technologies in a deal designed to more closely integrate the basic building blocks of the PC with the Longhorn system, as suggested by ZDNET. Both Microsoft and Phoenix are involved in plans to integrate digital rights management (DRM) technology at the operating system and hardware level, according to sources in the US.
"To be honest, I haven't heard from Phoenix Technologies for over five years," Gates said. "Are they still in business? The BIOS will always be separated from the operating system. Actually, it's gotten out of date. If you run Windows XP, it calls very little of the BIOS."
Gates sound disingenuous, at best, when he asks if Phoenix is still in business.
Businesses are supposed to provide services rather than just set themselves up as toll collectors. In this era of new distribution technology, exactly what services are the record producers providing for us?
a) screening of new talent? We can do this ourselves over the web by popular demand better than they can.
b) producing new recordings? This is a legitimate service but it not worth the $16 per CD that is the going rate.
c) distributing music? Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Xnap, et. al. have proven that they do a much better job of this than the record companies can do.
The record companies need to look in the mirror and ask themselves what is their reason for even existing any longer. If they can't think of some and build a business model on them, they had better make plans to depart the business because they will not be able to collect their tolls for very much longer now that the internet is here.